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The Lawn Blog – NoFollow Free

Richard Murphy — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 04:01:13 +0000

The Lawn Blog is now a ‘NoFollow Free’ zone. This new implementation is being used to encourage comments to our articles. You can now feel free to post links promoting your website in your comments without google and other search engines thinking your links are spam and not giving you proper indexing.

So please post your comments with confidence.

For people who do not know what the ‘NoFollow’ tag is, here is some background info.

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Concept and specification

The concept for the specification of the attribute value nofollow was designed by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005.[1]

The specification for nofollow is copyrighted 2005-2007 by the authors and subject to a royalty free patent policy, e.g. per the W3C Patent Policy 20040205,[2] and IETF RFC 3667 & RFC 3668. The authors intend to submit this specification to a standards body with a liberal copyright/licensing policy such as the GMPG, IETF, and/or W3C.[1]

What nofollow is not for

The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content or preventing content to be indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking search engine spiders to access content on a website or for preventing them to include the content of a page in their index are the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) for blocking access and on-page Meta Elements that are designed to specify on an individual page level what a search engine spider should or should not do with the content of the crawled page.

Introduction and support

Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute[3] would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, the Yahoo and Windows Live search engines also respect this tag.[4]

How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.”.

Interpretation by the individual search engines

While all engines that support the attribute exclude links that use the attribute from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary from search engine to search engine.[5][6]

* Google states that their engine takes “nofollow” literally and does not “follow” the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google’s index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).[6][7]
* Yahoo! “follows it”, but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
* MSN Search respects “nofollow” as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not MSN follows the link.

Note *** Information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

The Lawn News Launches Website

Richard Murphy — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:13:53 +0000

Hello all,

I would like to extend many thanks to Brian Gardner (www.lawnandgardenwv), Steve Low (www.lawnchat.com) for their increasing support to The Lawn Blog. We would like to announce the launch of a new website called
The Lawn News (www.thelawnnews.com). If it has anything to do with the green industry you will find it there first! From new product releases, new videos, new podcasts, new blog posts and anything else that can be classified as “NEW” The Lawn News will have it for you.

So please bookmark it…add it to your RSS feed…and keep up to date.

Tons of fun with Leo LaPorte

Richard Murphy — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:55:52 +0000

Well yesterday I was a caller on The Lab With Leo (G4 Tech TV) and it was a blast. Thanks for the info Leo and I enjoyed the experience. I’ll post when the show airs and the link to the online video feed when I get the details from the lovely Briana. My questions were about website security and lockdown wordpress. He recommended that I harden my website and visit the boys at www.blogsecurity.net.

Whats Next in SEO

Richard Murphy — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 12:47:41 +0000

The future is friendly…well at least for SEO (search engine optimization). Perhaps I should use that term loosely, however it is now becoming easier for the owner of a website to do their own SEO. SEO has changed dramatically over the years, and the rules seem to change everyday. Back in the day, you needed a degree in gibberish just to make sense of it all. Now days, there are programs and online SEO tools to help you get your site ranking up on top. Many of them for FREE! I’ll list a couple of my favorites at the bottom of this post.

There are still many determining factors behind what will affect the ranking of your site. The largest contributing factors are SEO, links, and site content. To get top ranking in highly competitive industries a site needs lots of “on-topic” pages of content, relevant incoming links from a variety of sources, and, solid site optimization. Refer to Team Gophers post on website optimization here.

Now if you all have read my posts in the past, you will now that I will always say, “SEO and site content go hand in hand”. Your site can have the best content and be the most informative site out there, but without proper SEO that is relative to your content it may go unnoticed. In short…make sure that your content includes your keywords in your SEO. Keywords + Keyword Placement in Content = Happy Site.

If you have heard of people using links, or linking systems to gain higher ranking for their site, you probably think of SPAM sites. Google and Yahoo are now throwing out penalties to sites that are cramming links of no relevance. But, there are good linking practices that can and will help your site. Here is a very basic example of an inbound link coming from The Lawn Blog to Gopher Forums.

The Lawn Blog has a link the Gopher Forums. The Lawn Blog is a blog / article site that has content that is relevant to the green industry. Gopher Forums contains content that is also relevant to the green industry. Both sites are very different from each other, however they share a lot of the same content. Thus, making the link relevant and telling the search engines that it is worth the ranking. Did that make sense? I hope so because at the moment Google uses inbound links as a major factor for their ranking system.

I am sure that the future of SEO will change dramaticly. But, what I have gone over here will still be concidered the most important practices you can do for your site.

What is the point on having a website that nobody can find? That was a rhetorical question.

So where is SEO going? Well it may be hard to say, but more localized searches will be coming down the pipeline. Have you ever used your cell phone to do a web search? A lot of people are and, you will need to modify your SEO with your zip / postal codes, city and state. That way when a mobile device completes a search it will pull up local websites, basically within that mobile devices local calling area. Sounds cool eh? Well that is just around the corner.

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