Flickr Adds No Follow to Links

Flickr recently added nofollow tags to most of the external links within the website. Flickr has been one of the few social sites that have allowed potential link gain from including links within the profile, comments and other areas.

Is this a surprising move? In my opinion, No. More and more social media sites are adding nofollow tags to lower the amount of spam they get hit with. You can't blame them for trying to provide clean, valuable, relevant content to their visitors / users can you? Keep in mind, you no longer can gain any link popularity from links on Flickr. However it still can generate traffic to your website. There?s a lot more benefits to using Flickr than just for links.

Filtering Internal Traffic - Google Analytics Tip #4

Alright you have set up Google Analytics, but the key is to get the most accurate data possible. Excluding yourself and/or your company, or any one who is working with on or with your site is going to give you a more accurate picture of how your site is performing?

How do you know if you have already filtered internal traffic?

Well if your domain name is something like www.sellbluewidgetstoday.com/ and you have tons of direct traffic to your site, than odds are you have not filtered out internal traffic as not too many visitors are going to be coming from type in traffic.

How do you filter internal traffic from Google Analytics?

Well there are two ways to do this. The first, and broadest, way to filter internal traffic is by setting an exclude filter for your company?s IP address. This will filter out all traffic in Google Analytics from that specific IP address.

The second way, which is a bit more complicated, is to set up a custom user defined filter. There are two steps to setting up a custom user defined filter. The first step is to add a custom segment cookie to any and all computers that you wish to exclude from Google Analytics. This can be done by creating an HTML form that you upload to your server. All employees you want to filter out must then use this form. The second step is to create the custom user defined filter in Google Analytics. You can do this by navigating to the ?Filter Manager? section within Google Analytics and selecting add new filter. Then select a custom filter type in the drop down menu. Continue to set up as defined below. Make sure you use whatever you type in the "filter pattern" field below is the same field you use in your form.

Importance of Proper Re-directs

Search engines are highly sensitive to how you program re-directs of a URL or domain. You must program the re-directs in a search engine friendly way or face the loss of search visibility. This is especially important when you launch a new website with new URLs, have multiple domains pointing to the same website, or change the domain of your website.

301 vs 302 re-directs

These are server-side re-directs. A 301 is a permanent re-direct. It is search engine friendly due to the nature that the search engines will see the 301 and update their indexes with the new destination URL. A 302 re-direct is a temporary re-direct and is not search engine friendly. The search engines will not update their indexes with the new destination URL when using 302 re-directs, thus you end up with old pages remaining in the index. Programming one re-direct or the other is a click away on IIS servers. On Apache servers it is a few lines of code in the mod_rewrite.

Either way takes the same amount of time. So do it right the first time around. It means everything as to whether your website will hold or lose search visibility.

meta-refresh

A meta-refresh redirects is extremely easy to program, however it is not search engine friendly. Search engines will not recognize a meta-refresh as a valid re-direct, so again you will lose search visibility that the original page established.

Meta-refreshes were long used to spam the search engines. If the search engines even think there is the possibility that you are doing the meta-refresh to deliver different content to search engines than to users, the search engines will ban your domain. Google did it to www.BMW.de. After BMW stopped the practice, Google unbanned the domain. If your company does not have the stature of a BMW, don't expect them to easily listen to your plea that you changed your ways.

Javascript

Javascript re-directs again are easy to program. However since search engines are text based, they are unable to read JAVA. Therefore the search engines never see the redirect and begin indexing both URLs. If these 2 different URLs or domains have the same content on them, the search engines are unable to recognize that they are the same website and you simply programmed the re-directs wrong, thus leading to duplicate content penalties.

Conclusion

Re-directs are not all that confusing. When you acknowledge how the search engines crawl and what message you are delivering to them, it does make it easier to understand. Something so simple can cause your online presence to diminish overnight. Please don?t make that mistake.

Will two problematic search portals figure out how to do it right again? MSN and YAHOO!

From about 2001 to 2003 Google, Yahoo and MSN split the search market almost evenly. Since then Google has grabbed the lion's share of search traffic, while Yahoo and MSN lost searchers big time. Market share statistics vary due to whether the measurement is total portal traffic or search traffic. From E-Power's view, Google is somewhere around 70% of search marketing share. Yahoo is in the teens and MSN has single digit market share. How the once mighty have fallen!

E-Power believes Google took market share because it generates the best search results, while Yahoo and MSN delivered too many irrelevant search returns.

Can Yahoo/MSN meet the challenge to improve their search results?

Or will the two join the search engine scrapheap next to Excite, AltaVista, Infoseek and Lycos?

For years Yahoo was the premiere search engine with the best search results. It was King of Search!

Yahoo's search results suffered because it allowed black arts SEO such as IP cloaking ? if the Website was willing to pay fees through the Paid Inclusion Search Submit Pro program. Consequently many questionable search results appeared at the top.

So while Google was tracking searcher behavior to let the searchers determine the most relevant search results, Yahoo was allowing dirty SEO tricks - for a price. This provided short-term monetary gain, while degrading Yahoo's search results, thus causing a long-term drop in search traffic.

Yahoo's cash generator, Yahoo Search Marketing PPC, has become a pain to deal with. The paperwork for large programs is time-consuming and the customer service is lacking when compared with Google AdWords. Plus Google AdWords tools that measure, track and improve your program are far superior to Yahoo's.

MSN's search integrity seemed to wane around the time Daniel Feussner was director of operations for Microsoft US-Speech Engineering Services and Retrieval Technology in 2001-2002. Feussner stole around $9 millions in Microsoft software. He used the money for many luxuries ? a Ferrari 355 Berlinetta, a Jaguar Vanden Plas, a Humvee, diamond rings and a 51-foot yacht named the Brazilian Queen. Feussner posted pictures of his toys on his Website. He committed suicide before being brought to trial.

I always felt that the Feussner case said a lot about Microsoft. Why are its top decision-makers not the best and the brightest, with some common sense? Does being a monopoly make you competitively weak in markets where you are not a monopoly?

MSN went downhill, even abandoning its own search engine to use Yahoo's Inktomi. MSN Live returned with a search engine built on the old. Many times MSN?s search results will return 10 year old web pages. On a better note, it is improving. But it still doesn?t have search results as relevant as Google's.

That is the key.

Can MSN/Yahoo develop a search engine at least as good as Google? They can learn from Google. They can stop the nonsense from SEO black arts that no longer plague Google.

To do so, the MSN/Yahoo decision-makers need to not pursue quick money over long-term excellence. Google did not become this good overnight. MSN/Yahoo's #1 priority must be delivering the most relevant search results. Do that, then market share and revenues will follow.