Google Speaks
Posted On: 2007-09-03
I love long weekends in the United States! Yep, even though I don't live in the United States I just love those long weekends over there and I love this weekend especially because it'ss Labor Day weekend!
Why do I love it so much? Because on these long weekends in the United States the amount of spam we get to our email accounts drops by something like 80%! Our inboxes look positively empty and that is such a wonderful sight. Even with spam filters in place so much still gets through so I love long weekends ... and there should be a whole lot more of them!
No Follow
I see that Google's mouthpiece - otherwise known as Matt Cutts - has come out and made some interesting statements over on SEOmoz. Perhaps the most interesting of all was about the nofollow tag. When asked if Webmasters could use the nofollow tag on internal links to somehow control the flow of link juice from one page to another Matt agreed.
It seems that it can be used to control the flow of link juice around your site and I know lots of Webmasters are interested in that but I am not sure why you would want to bother with it. To my way of thinking it's something that you would have to be very very careful with otherwise you're going to shoot yourself in the foot and end up with very important pages on the end of nofollow links.
On the other hand though I think it's a great tool ... especially in the hands of those incompetent people who really don't know what they're doing. I've seen more than one web developer add noindex nofollow links to every internal link on sites they were building for clients. It makes our work very easy when those clients come to us and ask us to fix whatever the problem might be that's preventing their sites being indexed by the search engines.
Links on a Page
The number of links you should have on a page is always something that should interest us here in adult. While most of us are never going to have more than a few links on any of our pages most of us should be thinking about how the number of links on a page is going to affect our listings in Link Lists.
According to Matt Cutts there was a time when Google would only index the first 100kb of a web page and so the idea of only having 100 links seems to have sprung up. These days though Google now appears to dig deeper into a page and so the idea of 100 links has little relevancy as far as the search engines are concerned.
Of course, if you're site is listed on a Link List page that includes 100 links the chances of surfers actually seeing your link and following it are greatly diminished.
Directories
Here in adult we call them Link Lists and the value of directories is something that I've been wondering about for a while. (Directories are always of interest to me because I begin to get a little bored I go out and start another Link List or directory.)
According to Matt Cutts if a directory is built solely for search engine optimisation purposes then Google tends to consider them to be of lesser importance than directories that are built to help human beings find what they're looking for. Reading between the lines there I would suggest that perhaps our Link Lists here in adult would fall into the category of helpful directories so there's a good chance that there's still plenty of benefit to be derived from building a Link List that's obviously helpful and not so obviously all about SEO.
So that's it for a Monday from me. This week is going to be a crazy one for us with a lot of work already lined up from our regulars, three new mainstream websites to start this week for clients plus two sites that we desperately need to launch for ourselves. At least with our sites the basic design work is done, now all we need to do is to write some text, find some appropriate images and pull it all together into a cohesive unit that clients and search engines will find irresistible.
Yes, I'm sure we're going to get all that done by Friday so, even though it's only Monday morning perhaps it's time to go to Plan B and go and have a coffee.