Loren Baker has asked Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com to explain just what nofollow really means in a comprehensive post at Search Engine Journal, "How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute."

Google is the only one to actually not follow the links, while Ask ignores the attribute, and Yahoo will follow the link but not give attribution to the source. So basically, the anchor text and "link juice" will not pass through a nofollow link in Yahoo, but the linked page will be crawled and indexed.

Microsoft has not yet replied to Baker's request for clarification, but had said when nofollow was introduced 2 years ago, "Any link with this tag will indicate to a crawler it is not necessarily approved by this page and shouldn’t be followed nor contribute weight for ranking."

The attribute, which was originally intended to curb blog comment spam, is now a central part of the paid links debate sparked by Google's Matt Cutts.

Yahoo is reportedly eyeing Right Media, a privately owned advertising company. The company previously bought a 20% stake in the company last October and will shell out some $680 million dollars more to have full control of  the said company.

In a New York Times report, Yahoo’s Chief Executive, Terry S. Semel said:

The acquisition, to us, is a key step toward executing our long-term vision to build the leading advertising and publisher ecosystem both on and off the Yahoo network,

In an official Press release, Semel further said:

This acquisition is an important step in our long-term vision to build the industry’s leading advertising and publisher ecosystem. We believe that Yahoo!’s open approach is a clear differentiator from others in the industry and provides significant benefits to advertisers, publishers and Yahoo! itself.”

The acquisition is  a right move towards competing with  Google advertising campaign which recently acquired Double Click. Well, at least Yahoo,  instead of whining about Google’s rampant acquisition of advertising companies, is doing its own acquisition to compete with Google.

Will Microsoft feel unhappy with this deal like what it felt with the Google-DoubleClick deal?

Google has teamed up with four state governments – Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia – to make public information on their Web sites more searchable. The four states have made their public databases more accessible to Google's crawler by using sitemaps to identify the structure of their sites. They have also used Google's Custom Search Engine service to include the Web sites of various state agencies in a site search.

"Connecting citizens with their government by offering the public better access to public sector information and services is consistent with our broader vision – to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "These partnerships are among many that Google is pursuing with government agencies to better serve the public."

Google has a page on its site dedicated to helping public sector groups to use Google services.

Yahoo is planning to acquire the remaining 80-percent interest in Right Media, according to a New York Times report. The deal, expected to close by the end of July, will cost Yahoo $680 million in stock and cash.

If Google completes its acquisition of DoubleClick, it will also have an ad exchange for buying and selling display ads on remnant inventory.

Back in October, Yahoo announced that it had acquired a 20-percent stake in the auction-based ad marketplace, and would take a seat on the Right Media Exchange to help monetize its non-premium inventory.

“The acquisition, to us, is a key step toward executing our long-term vision to build the leading advertising and publisher ecosystem both on and off the Yahoo network,” Yahoo CEO Terry Semel told the Times.

Incidentally, this acquisition will apparently bring former Did-It CEO Bill Wise to Yahoo, as he recently joined Right Media to head its Remix Media ad network.

Yahoo has also issued a statement regarding its plans.

The New York Times is picking up on the fact that Google's potential DoubleClick acquisition gets more difficult when you consider Performics, DoubleClick's search and affiliate marketing agency. In The Pangs of Two Becoming One, reporter Dan Mitchell notes that the DoubleClick deal is facing antitrust challenges from Microsoft and IBM (oh, the irony), as well as worries from privacy advocates. But the biggest challenge may well be what Google should do with Performics.

There's just no way that a conflict of interest would not arise, or at least the appearance of a conflict, which would be just as bad for Google. Every time a Performics client's site showed up at the top of the SERPs, competitors would cry foul. And every time a Performics client's site did not show up first, it would be assumed that Google is being too tough with those clients, and so those clients would eventually leave to find an agency that actually helped them improve their rank.

As we noted last week, Google appears to already be moving toward the possibility of selling off the division.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In all of our efficient getting to done, we sometimes forget the simple pleasures. Parent Hacks suggests using Google Calendar to help us schedule some relax time:

Earlier this month, it occurred to me that I could use Google Calendar to remind and assign myself to do those little things that I loved to do in my pre-parenthood life. Things like "read a poem today," or "go browse a bookstore this week," or "get a babysitter for next week and go to a movie," etc. I gave myself one assignment a week for the whole year. So far, I'm finding that if I get an event reminder in my work e-mail box, I'll treat it like any other task I need to accomplish and actually do the thing.

I like the emphasis on "things that I loved to do"; this applies not only to pre-parenthood but also pre-adulthood in general. There's a reason why kids are usually happy, y'all. — Wendy Boswell

In the past, I’ve often said that Google Docs and Spreadsheets is not a Microsoft Office competitor, based on the fact that MS Office is expensive, meant for business use and had much more functionality for power users. After checking the price and versions of MS Office whilst shopping yesterday, I take that back.

I’ve now seen that you can buy a copy of “Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007" for around £100. It includes Word (Docs), Excel (Spreadsheets), Powerpoint (Presently) and OneNote (Notebook), and is licensed for use on up to three computers providing they’re not used for commercial purposes.

Since Google is going after the home / student market, how many would choose Google over Microsoft? Personally, I’d rather use these Microsoft products because they’ve got more features. I’ve never got on with Docs (it’s basically just a glorified WYSIWYG HTML editor), Spreadsheets lacks many of the features of Excel (they’ve only just added charts and many of the shortcuts and quick ways of doing things still don’t work) and “Presently” doesn’t even exist... yet! As for OneNote or Notebook, I don’t need either. Furthermore, I’m relying on my Internet connection to work with Google products and I’d rather work offline.

Everyone seems to want free software but sometimes you get what you pay for in my opinion. Are these components of MS Office worth £30-35 per computer? I’d say so. Would I use Google services instead? Not right now. Having said that, I might consider using OpenOffice instead of MS Office but I just don’t feel Google Docs (etc.) is quite up to scratch yet.

To me, the only benefit of Google Docs is that everything is stored in a central storage point online. If Google gave me GDrive (without the 500KB limit like Docs has currently), I’d have no need to use their “Office” services as I could have MS Office / OpenOffice installed on all the computers I use and upload / download files as I need them.

What are other people’s opinions on this? Does Google offer you exactly what you need? Would you rather pay for better products (from either Microsoft or Google)? Would you rather work with files online or offline?

Also see a previous discussion about how much to pay for using Google.

[By Tony Ruscoe | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Most people are surprised to learn that we have more than one source for our imagery. We collect it via airplane and satellite, but also just about any way you can imagine getting a camera above the Earth's surface: hot air balloons, model airplanes – even kites. The traditional aerial survey involves mounting a special gyroscopic, stabilized camera in the belly of an airplane and flying it at an elevation of between 15,000 feet and 30,000 feet, depending on the resolution of imagery you're interested in. As the plane takes a predefined route over the desired area, it forms a series of parallel lines with about 40 percent overlap between lines and 60 percent overlap in the direction of flight. This overlap of images is what provides us with enough detail to remove distortions caused by the varying shape of the Earth's surface.

The next step is processing the imagery. We scan the film using scanners capable of over 1800 DPI (dots per inch) or 14 microns. Then we take the digital imagery through a series of stages such as color balancing and warping to produce the final mosaic for the entire area.

We update the imagery as quickly as we can collect and process it, then add layers of information – things like country and state borders and the names of roads, schools, and parks - to make it more useful. This information comes from multiple sources: commercial providers, local government agencies, public domain collections, private individuals, national and even international governments. Right now, Google Earth has hundreds of terabytes of geographic data, and it's growing larger every day.

Statisfy maps the location of your site’s visitors in real-time... using the Google Maps API. I’ve included this for GamesfortheBrain.com for the time being, and you can see the result at statisfy.net/games. To use the service, all you need to do is provide an email address, your site’s URL, as well as your preferred statisfy.net URL, and then you get an email with the snippet to include in your HTML template. Note that this snippet means you’ll be including an external JavaScript on your page, which brings with it the potential problem of lags, security/ privacy security issues, and so on. [Via Digg.]

Update: And the site’s down already (I removed the code from Games for the Brain). [Thanks Ionut!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Martin says he’s one of the translators for Google and hit upon the following phrase hinting at a potential multi-user chat for Google Chat (as part of Gmail):

<<Phrase in English: NAME has joined (...)
Translation Help: System messages when user joined or left a muc conversation>>

Does “muc” mean “multi-user chat"? It would certainly be a nice feature currently missing from Google Talk/ Chat...

[Thanks Martin!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Need an organizational chart for your company? You might want to check out Forbes' new site aptly named OrgChartWiki, where you can create org.charts for your company or take a looksee at a few publicly listed companies such as Google, Motorola, and Microsoft.

The interface is very simple: all you do is pretty much drag and drop. You can also use this site to search within companies employee databases - you'll be able to pull up their current organizational status. It's simple, yet oh so super nichey functional. — Wendy Boswell

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The “nofollow” attribute value for links means that some search engines won’t pass “linkjuice.” Two things to note here, courtesy of Search Engine Journal, which polled search engine representatives: some engines will still pass linkjuice because they’re not supporting the nofollow initiative (like Ask.com), and also, some engines will still follow the link to index it (like Yahoo, but not Google).

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Google’s CEO says, “We would never trap user data.” Google’s Matt Cutts emphasizes the company philosophy to “send your users away happy and they’ll come back.”

One way for Google to increase the interoperability of their tools would be to open a file-type control center to the world. For example, when you right-click a file of the “offline operating system” Windows, you can select a list of applications from the “Open with...” box. But where’s this box in the online operating system Google is building?

Take Gmail. When someone sends you a *.doc attachment, Google offers you to open this as HTML page, to open it with Google Docs, or to download it to your hard disk. But what if your rich text editor of choice is the non-Google online app Zoho Writer? Then you need to download the file, and upload it again, which isn’t complicated but not as smooth as the Google Docs integration (and it requires you to jump to the “offline OS” again).

A Google File-type Control Center would require two features. First, for other applications to add their own file-type association, approved by you, of course. So Zoho Writer could offer a button reading “Associate rich-text files with Zoho,” and the button would send a post to “google.com/office/file-type/” (or so) with information about the URL with which Google should post documents of this file-type in the future, e.g. “writer.zoho.com/import-rich-text/” (this URL, called without a post, could also return some XML packet containing icon information and the application’s name and such for other applications to spider it). Log in with your Google Account if you aren’t already, and then hit “OK” to approve this association.

Second, this application would offer you a settings dialog where you could view & manage your existing file-type associations (e.g. reset all settings to Google’s default associations, or delete a single entry, or manually adjust one of the associated URLs to which Google should post information). This settings dialog could be linked to from your Google Account homepage, and it could also be linked to from places within the Google Office where you open files, like by the use of an “Open with...” link.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

Google Spreadsheets since recently offers a way to generate charts from your spreadsheet data. Where in the “Google Office” can you export CSV (comma separated values) files, to then turn them into graphics with Google Spreadsheets?

I’ll start with one application: Google Analytics. Click on Visitor Segment Performance -> Geo Location, for instance, select to display 50 results, and then hit the “Excel (CSV)” button in the top right. You can then go to docs.google.com, click “Upload,” and browse for the CSV file on your hard disk. (Google could ease integration by optionally directly sending over the file to Spreadsheets, and potentially other apps.) This won’t work with any Analytics export – importing the 358K “Content by Titles” file caused Google Docs to return the error message “We’re sorry, but we were unable to upload this document” – but it’s a start.

Sample import of this blog’s geolocation info turned into a pie chart (something Analytics already does for you, but just as proof of concept). Note that the export/ import slightly broke the labels.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

[Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more...   [Advertise here]

The always helpful Google Tutor has written up a little-used (at least for me) shortcut when adding events in Google Calendar:

If you're using Google calendar, you don't have to enter the detailed view just to add the basic information on a new entry you're creating. Instead, you can just type it in with one line. Say I wanted to change the time to reflect 12 to 3 p.m. instead of the time I clicked (8 a.m.). Instead of clicking on the edit event details link, I just type in the time along with the event description.

He goes on to say that you can not only edit the time, but location as well - nothing groundbreaking here, but it does save you a few clicks. — Wendy Boswell

So, you're the proud owner of a new PC. You anxiously open the box, dumping out the contents, casting the instructions aside. You feverishly push your old PC off the desk and get the new one set up. On the floor lies a pile of plastic wrap and twist ties. Your brand spanking new PC boots up only to greet you with a plethora of pop up advertisements pestering you to pay for anti-virus software or sign up for a music service. Your desktop is littered with website links for 'special offers.' The system tray is already full of programs that continuously use your internet connection to make sure that you're 'up to date.' (...) All of this stuff is placed on your new PC because the big companies like Dell, HP and others sell advertising space on your PC to put more money in their pockets at the expense of your time and frustration.

Creative Commons-licensed by Google Blogoscoped.

Last December Google introduced the Local Business Center and allowed businesses to provide their address, phone numbers, website, offered services, business hours, accepted payment methods, special coupons and more.

After you provided all the information, is it necessary to get your information active and used by Google. The activiation is done by either Google sending a post card with a pin to the provided address to verify that it exists and in some cases is also a verification over the telephone possible.

Once verified and after the next update of the local database will your business show up in the Google Local search results. A great opportunity to get targeted customers. Throw a special and Google Local exclusive coupon into the mix and you got yourself a very effective new customer acquisition tool.

What is also nice, is the fact that you will also show up for queries that indicate locality in the regular Google search results, such as queries that include the name of a city or region .

Google uses the OneBox or Plus Box feature to show the top three local business that match the location and the other terms that were used by the user. You can see an example of how the OneBox/Plus Box results look like here:

A nice top listing without organic SEO. Okay, all this is nice information, but a bit old you might say. That is correct, but what happened earlier this week was new to me. I received a message on my toll free 24/7 voice mail number which was weird.

A person who did not mention a name or anything else that would have useful as identification left a short message. The message stated roughly “I just drove by your address and can’t find your business. I the address correct or a P.O.Box or what?”.

The only thing that provided a clue was the caller id which was captured by my VM service. The number was not local (area code 559), which made it even more odd.

The number started with 650, the area code of the peninsula south of San Francisco, California (San Mateo county, parts of Santa Clara county). Mhhh….

I called the number and got a recorded message from Google Local Business Center. I left a message that explained things and never heard back from them since. I got the call on Wednesday morning.

Now it’s Friday and my listing at the Google Local Business Center is the same as before. So I guess my message was clarification enough.

I wonder how many locations Google is checking by actually have somebody on their behalf drive by the location of your business to see if it is really there.

They are going through a great length here, just to verify that you are who you are and that you are where you say you are. I don’t know who much addresses Google checks in person, but even if it is only a small percentage, then the cost of doing so still be huge.

This means, that Google must have some very serious plans that involve the Local Business Center for the coming future.

I don’t think that Google does this, just to check that a company is more than just a mailbox and could upset customers who try to visit the business location and are unable to find it.

Did anybody else made a similar experience to mine?

Carsten Cumbrowski

Internet Marketing Resources at Cumbrowski.com, such as resources to local search, geo-targeting and more.

Important  Update My assumptions were incorrect. The incident was clarified. Please see the comments below. The phone number 650-253-4401 is used by Google’s click-to-call service. The caller who called me was an unknown person who did not identify himself. If you see this number in your caller history and call it, it will sound like a Google Local support VM.

One of the peculiarities with Google search in China is the question of domains. Which Google domain censors search results, which does not and does it depend on the location the searcher originates. I have made a quick comparison. Additionally as always an overview of what has been happening in the world of search and related in China in the past week(s).

Google China related domains and search

Since Google launched Guge, the Chinese version of Google, I have been trying to keep track which Chinese Google domains deliver filtered (censored) results and which don’t. I wrote about this phenomenon before.

Domain name wise it’s a confusing situation, result wise it seems to depend on the location of the searcher and the number of times one refreshes the page.

In the overview you can see the most likely situation. I say, most likely, as for the domain Google.com.cn for example I’m sometimes re-directed to Google.cn and sometimes to Google.com. Google.cn will deliver filtered search results while Google.com will be uncensored.

Searches on Google.com/intl/zh-CN/ (Chinese language search on the Google.com domain) from within China seem to be coming from the filtered Google.cn database (probably based on IP, searches performed from elsewhere in the world on google.com/intl/zh-CN/ are unfiltered.

It can well be that my searches, using proxies to see the situation from the “rest of the world” perspective, may not represent the real situation. It may even be that there is a difference in behaviour depending on whether I’m logged in to my Google account or not.

I’d love to hear from searchers outside of China if they are as well re-directed and whether results are filtered or not when searching on a Chinese Google domain. This way the overview can be corrected if needed.

Some other noteworthy articles if you have the time:

• My Space China has opened up shop. They have officially become the next in line to try to get a piece of the Social Media space in China. They’re not alone and many similar websites have already been active for some time. I sometimes wonder how many communities one can have.
• In China’s week of Intellectual Property Protection Yahoo lost a lawsuit about linking to mp3 music files and has been ordered to pay 200,000 Yuan (about 27,200 U.S. dollars) in damages to the suing record companies. Yahoo will appeal this decision saying that in a similar law suit some time ago Baidu wasn’t convicted (This case was appealed and there has yet to become on a ruling here) and that it only provides links in its music search results and can’t be held responsible for the content of third-party websites.
• More Live search opportunities for Lenovo computer owners as Microsoft made a distribution deal with Lenovo.
• Adsense will start to cooperate with Chinese domestic banks for the Google Adsense income earned by Chinese webmasters this year.
• Google has cornered some more real estate in China for their ads. They will be serving Ads on over 400 China Telecom Sites.
• Baidu has launched Search For The Blind. The url is dao.baidu.com. The difference with Baidu’s normal search service is that the homepages for the different channels have been simplified to make it easier for software that reads web pages out loud to read the pages.

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Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai, and owner of the China Directory.

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ThomasNet’s search strategy was well underway when Jill Sampey took over search engine marketing. Having been with the company for several years, she was at an advantage in understanding how to run with things successful and make changes in the direction. ThomasNet is an industrial business directory with millions of pages, one of the key things Jill quickly learned when having to manage millions of pages is that processes and repeatable systems and reports are vital to search success.

Jill’s Advice for someone taking on an existing campaign: Learn as much as possible about the sites history, including partnerships and distribution arrangements because they can cause challenges for the future.

The best take-away: Take the time to think about what you track so that you have everything needed to for what Jill calls “Crisis Analysis” and “What the Heck Happened to My Rankings” Analysis.

On to the Q&A….

Jessica: You joined ThomasNet.com, overseeing search marketing, after the SEO strategy execution was well underway. What made you join a company whose search campaign was so far in its execution? What should someone look for when being interviewed by a company whose campaign is well established?

Jill: I was actually working at ThomasNet prior to taking over the SEO strategy. Taking over an existing SEO strategy has many unique challenges, particularly in a time where the history of the domain has influence on current and perhaps future rankings. One of the most interesting parts of the job is making sense of the site and ranking data collected over the years. When being interviewed by a company whose campaign is well established, I would find out as much as possible about the site’s history, from domain history and search history, to other key structural changes. One of the items that comes back to haunt many large publishing sites are old distribution deals and other partnerships. It is also helpful to understand the motives behind the original campaign. Knowing such things will better prepare you for potential issues with ranking, and more importantly issues with corporate buy-in. If a company’s management does not see the importance of search to their business’s future, it can be extremely difficult to execute an effective strategy.

Jill: Since the search marketing campaign was well underway, how did you get your arms around what had been done and redirect the strategy with your recommendations?

Jill: I first gathered all the intelligence I could surrounding the website, domain, goals, marketing endeavors and company stakeholders as possible. I then sat down with the key players internally to better understand, from their perspective what had been done. After that, it was just a bunch of data analysis.

Jessica: ThomasNet recently went through rebranding of the site and a shift that now keeps everyone running off the same search intelligence. What are some of the secrets you have for handling the internal politics and opposition associated with such a large change?

Jill: The key to an effective “internal” search engine strategy is managing stakeholders’ expectations. I held regular stakeholder meetings to discuss the strategy and bring forward any concerns, as well as sending out benchmark updates to all involved. In a rebranding effort it is particular important to send out a clear and concise message to not only avoid inflated expectations, but also to urge a more widespread use of the new brand in email or offline communications.

Jessica: One thing you have a lot of is process management to keep everyone informed. What types of processes do you have in place?

Jill: I find documentation very important to the effective management of a search strategy, particularly if you have multiple people working on it. We also have a common repository of search intelligence, in which we all pull data from. This makes sure no one is working off of old or faulty information. We chart key changes to our website, to help with what I refer to as “crisis analysis” or in other words, “what the heck happened to my rankings” analysis. Documenting changes also helps in terms of updating intelligence gathering systems, making sure all pages on the website are tagged correctly, etc. We also have regular meetings to go over the status of search related projects.

Jessica: Can you expand on how the SEM process works at ThomasNet?

Jill: This may sound cliché, but our SEM process starts with our user’s needs. We find out what our users are looking for and make sure that we provide the content and access to the content that they need. Our success in SEM directly mirrors our success in serving our user’s needs.

Jessica: You have millions of pages; the only way to scale is by implementing smooth repetitive processes. What have you implemented for the SEO process?

Jill: We run most of our processes off of tools, built on our unique business and crawling needs. We have a wide range of inclusion/exclusion options to help better manage publishing processes. In addition we run regular QC reports to ensure a smooth process.

Jessica: With such a large site, with thousands of pages, a major challenge is data management. What are the key things you have created that make large-scale data management possible for search?

Jill: Well one of the things that has helped us dramatically, is to run reports based upon the reader’s goals, rather than data types. This is most important when sharing data interdepartmentally. In terms of over all data management set up your database with key business rules, or end “want to knows” in mind, then build an intuitive front end to it, that has exporting and charting functionality.

Jessica: You mentioned that one of the things that makes your efforts run smoothly is not only its process management, but how the process management keeps everyone informed. What advice can you pass on for others to implement in their company?

Jill: The best advice I can think of is to pass on information in a clear and consistent way, even when it is not asked for. You need to keep the unique needs of your company in mind when collecting and distributing data. Think ahead of the things that other departments and management would want to know, and give them the data that speaks to their needs.

Jessica: What two questions do you recommend every search marketer ask before taking an in-house job that has the search strategy execution well underway?

Jill: 1. What effect do search engines have on your business?
2. Who is ultimately in charge of what gets published or changed on the website and what relationship would my position have with that person?

-

Jessica Bowman is the Director of SEO for Business.com and an independent consultant. Most known for being an in-house search marketer, Jessica relishes in the human side of SEO - the art of getting things done within an organization, a challenge for most search marketers.

To improve their sales numbers for print media, Google is adding a Print Tab to AdWords accounts. Scheduled for an extended beta beginning Monday April 30th (the first 100 potential advertisers had access late last year), the intent is to provide access and possibly spark more interest in this product that has been slow catching on.

Google Print Ads is a new way to buy newspaper advertising, bringing innovation to the entire process: planning, buying, billing, reporting, and pricing. You use an AdWords-style interface to find newspapers. Then you extend bids to newspapers for the insertions you want. About 75 top U.S. daily newspapers are in the system now, including papers like the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and LA Times. In the next month Google will more than double the number of papers offered. You can specify insertion date, section, and ad size.

"The ads are just like traditional newspaper ads, but much easier to buy," Google explains.

Take a look at the Yahoo! Homepage and the new AOL Beta Homepage. The look like basic clones of one another; placement of the search box, tabbed news and content browsing, advertisement section and easy access for mail and other personalized tools.

So, if this a result of user experience optimization, or lack of imagination?

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There seems to be a common misconception in the webmaster and search engine marketing field that inbound links which use the ‘no follow’ attribute have no value to the site which they point towards.

Earlier in the week, Raj Dash commented in a post on Exposing the Invisible Web to Search Engines that in addition to bookmarking and social news sharing, securing links from authority sites such as Wikipedia can help search engines discover sites which they may not have been able to find.

A reader responded in a comment that this is false:

Links from Wikipedia will not allow you pages to be seen by search engines, because Wikipedia recently added rel=”nofollow” to all of there external links.

Instead of challenging the reader to an argument on No Follow, I thought that for once and for all, the law needs to be laid down as to how search engines treat the no follow attribute in terms of linking and discovery.

What better way to do so than to ask the search engines themselves? So I wrote Google’s Adam Lasnik (Matt’s on vacation), Yahoo’s Director of Search Tim Mayer and the Ask.com Search Team to get the lowdown on No Follow directly from the source.

So, here are the basic No Follow questions and answers, from Google, Ask.com (a surprising response) and Yahoo.

1. How does your search engine treat the No Follow attribute?

• Google : The Googlebot does not follow that link.
• Yahoo : If we find a link we make it available to our algorithms to find new content, whether it has a ‘no follow’ attribute or not. However, if the ‘no follow’ attribute is present, it means that no attribution is given to the target from the source of the link.
• Ask.com : We have never officially supported No Follow, so your questions don’t apply to our crawler/ranking.

2. If a site has no web citations and only has one link pointing to it, and that link is from a Wikipedia entry, would your search engine find that site and index it even though the link uses a No Follow attribute?

• Yahoo : Yes, the link is available to our crawlers for finding the target. Then the target will be crawled and indexed based on our algorithms.
• Google : Assuming that link is still no-followed per Wikipedia’s current practice, we will not find much less index that page (remember, this is page, not site related; if links to other pages on that site are not no-followed, we will see and potentially index those pages).

  On a related note, though, and echoing Matt’s earlier sentiments… we hope and expect that more and more sites — including Wikipedia — will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow… expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on.

3. Is there any quality given to sites which attract No Follow links from authority sites, besides the lack of the passing of PageRank, Link Authority or “Search Juice”?

• Google : Since the Googlebot does not follow no-follow links, this isn’t really an issue.
• Yahoo : As promised in the semantics for the ‘no follow’ tag, the anchor text and attribution will not be carried over to the target of a ‘no follow’ link.

In conclusion, the commenter was correct about links to pages from Wikipedia some search engines, specifically Google, but Yahoo and Ask.com both not only follow No Follow, but also make those sites available to their algorithm. Therefore, even links with the No Follow attribute do have value; especially in the counting, but not always authoritative measurement, of backlinks.

No Follow does not mean that search engines do not see the pages which No Follow attributed links point to, it means in some cases (not Ask.com) link value nor referral attribution is given.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Desktop Blog announces that Google Desktop 5 is now available in 29 languages. Along with the new release are some improvement in the current features such as:

• more useful results,
• improved gadgets,
• improved sidebar,
• add gadgets inteface,

Also, the desktop now has better security features when clicking links. This security feature will prompt users when they click on a malicious link that they are about to access a untrusted sites which might be phising sites or sites which host malicious software.

The Inside Google Desktop Blog has the detailed review of the Google Desktop 5. You can download the new version at the Google Desktop site.

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Myspace China is live. It was already rumoured a couple of days ago that it would be launched soon.

From Shanghaiist:

Remember we told you MySpace China would come online yesterday? Well, we lied. Actually, Sohu IT lied — they got some bad info. Thankfully they weren’t too far off. As of now 1 am on April 27th, a day later, MySpace China is up and running. We’d love to give you a first hand review, but the site just went live 30 minutes ago, we haven’t had much time to explore. One thing we can tell you is that MySpace China is linked to the world database. In other words, if you have a previous account overseas, you can access it on the new site, except all the links are in Chinese, naturally.

This is number “so many” in the Social Media space here in China. It will be interesting to see if they can get as popular as they are in the U.S.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A quirky item for your Thursday afternoon: This YouTube clip (hurry before it's gone) shows Marge Simpson in a variety of search related activities. It pokes fun at everything from online shopping, to Googling oneself, to banner ads, to Google Earth.

Now if Google Maps can only find Springfield and settle the longstanding debate over what state it's in (rumored to be settled in the upcoming Simpsons movie). My money is on Oregon, near Matt Groening's hometown of Portland.

According to Red Herring, YouTube will be rolling out ads within videos as early as this Summer. For now they’re still experimenting with different lengths and placements of the ad. One way to do it, for instance, would be to have “a very quick little intro preceding a video, then the video, then a commercial execution on the backside of the content,” as YouTube’s Suzie Reider says. The YouTube makers seem to be trying to figure out ways to increase revenues while not introducing ads that are so annoying that they’d break up the community, or stop everyone from embedding clips on their site. E.g. a longer, TV-style commercial put before a video “doesn’t work,” as Suzie says.

On another note, I wonder if those who uploaded the videos will get their share of the video ads revenue...

[Via Digg.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Yahoo News is serving shortcuts to Yahoo News Video footage at the top of their News Search results which is a smart move for the most popular online news search site and its video content providers.

Searches on Yahoo News for current events like the Boris Yeltsin Funeral, Attorney General Gonzales, and even Alec Baldwin are serving Yahoo Video results after the Yahoo News Photo results.

A click on the video results opens the Yahoo News Video player with videos from content partners including ABC News, AP, CNN, Reuters, BBC News and Weather.com.

SEO Class, an intimate SEO mini-conference / workshop headlined by Todd Malicoat, Greg Niland, Rae Hoffman, Michael Gray and Brad Geddes will be held at the New York Helmsley Hotel Midtown Manhattan for an ‘information packed’ 2 day seminar on May 17th and 18th.

Registration for this event is currently open at SEOClass.com/register.

More on SEO Class:

Learn from folks experienced in a broad range of SEO topics to create a better action plan for your site. We will be covering both conceptual and tactical topics. Each attendee will get some one on one time in the “SEO bullpen” with one or more of the presenters, to review their most pressing issues with regards to search engine marketing.

Sessions include :

• Intro to SEO by Greg
• Content creation and organization by Rae and Michael
• Brand Management by Greg and Michael
• Usability & Conversion by Brad
• Blogging by Rae
• Link Building, Buying and Management by Rae and Todd
• Social Media & Viral Marketing by Todd and Michael
• Research Techniques by Greg and Rae
• Paid Marketing Campaigns by Brad
• Technical Setup by Michael and Greg
• Internet Marketing Tools by Todd

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Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

The Google Blogoscoped weblog points out a not-entirely-new feature in Gmail that we'd never really noticed before, the Create Event entry under the More actions... menu that lets you create a Gcal event from Gmail.

Hitting Create Event just pops up a Gcal window with no details filled in, which isn't the best. That brings me to the Gmail - GTD Tickler Greasemonkey script, which adds a "Remind Me" button to Gmail messages and is supposed to pop up the Gcal window with the message title as the event title and a direct link to the Gmail message. Unfortunately, I've never been able to get it to work consistently. The point:

Gmail needs to take a tip from this Greasemonkey script and make it easier to integrate any email with Gcal. Setting reminders on Gmail messages is a killer feature I never knew I wanted so badly. If you try out the GTD Tickler, let us know how it works for you in the comments. If you're an adventurous javascripter interested in tackling this problem, the Lifehacker staff would be happy to collectively marry you if you felt like working out the kinks to this one (and you'd be guaranteed a seat in Better Gmail 0.6). — Adam Pash

Search Engine Land recently broke the news that Google will be starting to integrate Google News results right in the middle of web results. The old style is that Google News results sit on top of organic result as so-called onebox, but this change is about to move the news cluster (and a new thumbnail) to other positions on the page: top, middle, bottom, or anywhere else where there’s currently 10 organic results. “This allows us to rank news according to relevance in search results rather than at top of the page,” Search Engine Land quotes Google’s Marissa Mayer. Because many of us can’t see this live yet (myself included), Barry Schwartz posted a couple of screenshots.

What’s noteworthy about this more dynamic Google News onebox integration is that it also further blurs the line between organic and (more or less) fully automated web results, and editorial or semi-editorial results. Google always emphasizes their web results are aggregated in completely algorithmic and objective fashion, but all 10,000-or-so US Google News sources are hand-picked, and manually monitored by Google employees (not the stories themselves, but the publications behind the stories).

If this onebox integration into organic results continues, we might be able to see other special results – like blog results, for instance, which are currently below the traditional web results – move right into the organic results as well.

[Photo Creative Commons-licensed by Barry Schwartz.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Here’s some search engine news you may have missed recently.

Digg Behavior Analyzed
If you didn’t catch it already, New Scientist has a look at the popularity behavior of articles at news sites, including social ones such as Digg. What they found isn’t all that surprising: that interest in an article decays in an exponentially decreasing manner. Specifically, story popularity decreases fast in about 69 minutes. They analyzed 1110 stories from January 2006, but say that this behavior is likely true for other news sites.

Making Your Content Search Engine Friendly
The ad network Chitika has been running a 30 days 30 expert bloggers article series this month, enlisting the advice from some top bloggers. On the search engine side, Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips offers 7 ways to make your content search engine friendly. Here’s the gist:

1. use searched keywords
2. focus on few keywords
3. use keywords on the title
4. use keywords on the right places
5. use the alt and title tags
6. make keywords bold and italic
7. use h2 and h3 headers

Aaron Wall offered Synergy between SEO and traditional marketing, and Neil Patel wrote Driving traffic using Del.icio.us.

Analytics: Engine Ready
Neil Patel has a nice breakdown of the features of a web analytics package called Engine Ready, which apparently rivals Google Analytics and beyond. Personally, I’m always interested in easy “trail analysis” (aka path analysis), which Engine Ready seems to have. I like Google Analytics, but find that the interface they inherited isn’t always the most intuitive, despite my very long experience in web analytics. Maybe it’s just me.

Malfunctioning personalized homepage has users fuming

Updated [This story was updated on April 27 to indicate that Google says it has resolved the problem and was able to restore user settings. Users posting on Google discussion groups would seem to confirm this.]…

Today, I logged on at college and all was fine on my homepage. When I got home, I turned on my laptop and my homepage had reverted to the default, with all of the default gadgets and the default theme. I tried to re-add my gadgets, but it keeps going back to the default style. I've tried clearing my cookies/history and signing in/out.

The personalized homepage is the page I visit most on the internet, it tracks all my news and weather and lets me keep track of my schedule and chat to my friends on Google Talk.

We're now in frantic-chase-down-this-bug mode here at the Googleplex, and I hope to have more info for you soon. For now, we're not entirely sure of this, but it's possible that changing your homepage theme might cause the problem. SO, if you still have your homepage intact, please avoid changing your theme until further notice. The big question I know you'll all want answered is whether you'll get your homepage back once we sort things out... and the really honest answer is that I hope so, but I just don't know yet.

I saw this list of the top 40 English blogs according to Feedburner and then I saw Lee’s list of SEO blogs and I just wanted to check on something.

Cool. Historically I’ve sort of anti-promoted my site (no digg or “add to Google Reader” buttons). I figure that webmasters eventually hear of my blog and if they want to subscribe they will, so I don’t want to jam too many “Read me now!” links in peoples’ faces.

But if you do want to subscribe to my blog in Google Reader, here’s the button:

And here it is for Bloglines:

For other feed readers, use the “RSS 2.0″ or “Atom” links over on the right-hand side in the “Meta” section.

iCrossing recently released a study on the behavior of mobile Internet users. Surprisingly, according to the study only 30 percent of mobile users access the Internet on their mobile devices, 75 percent of those who do also conduct searches.

Key Findings of the Study:

• Frequency distinguishes mobile Web access. 30% of mobile users access the Internet on their mobile devices, with 50% of them doing so several times a week
• Mobile is a search medium. 75% of those who access the mobile Internet conduct searches on their mobile devices.
• Search engines rule over carrier search functionality. Mobile searchers prefer navigating directly to mobile-specific versions of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask to using carrier-supplied search functionality (such as search bar or home page box) by a margin of nearly two to one.
• Mobile search visibility at a premium. Maps/directions, weather and local information are the content categories of greatest interest to mobile searchers, but the finding that around 75% are not willing to browse beyond the second page of search results puts a premium on mobile search visibility.
• Dedicated mobile Web sites a must. An overwhelming 84% of mobile searchers expect the sites they visit frequently to have a dedicated mobile version.

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Several people report they’ve lost their personalized homepage customizations recently, meaning tabs and gadgets they added were gone (or reset to very old customizations). My settings are still intact, so I guess it doesn’t happen to everyone. My settings are now lost too. The Google Personalization Help Group is full of messages like “Personalised Home Page Disappeared,” “All links gone”,” “Lost my personalized page” and so on...

[Thanks Pau Tomàs!]

Join the ongoing comments.

Update: Google now said they’re aware of the problem and trying to hunt down the bug. They can’t guarantee that your old settings will be back but suggest that in the meantime, you ought to “avoid changing your theme.” [Thanks Photoactive!]

Update 2: Google seems to have fixed the issue, and at least some of you are seeing their old personalized homepages restored to normal (and perhaps this is being rolled out for the rest too). [Thanks Roel Fauconnier!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

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