Free Search Engine Simulator – Test Your Site!

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Apr 2, 2010 in Internet Mastery, Web Development | 0 comments

Weekly Recommended Resource

This free search engine simulator tool from To the Web.com shows you just how the search engines “see” your web page. I recommend you test your site(s) right away. I tested all of mine and found that one of them had the following meta tag incorrectly installed which means that Google DOES NOT FOLLOW that link.

<meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ />

I am a web developer and know better, but these things do happen and you need to be sure that you are building and testing your pages correctly. Find the best tools for the job at hand and use them!

Here are the basic No Follow question and answers from Google, Ask.com and Yahoo.

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.

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.

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.

Stay On Top Of Google

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Oct 17, 2008 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

Even the smallest changes in results for a key word or phrase can affect your Google ranking so it is best to know when changes are taking place as Google updates its algorithms.

The Google Search for Multiple Datacenter tool can help you do this. Just enter a key word, and it’ll search up to 12 datacenters at a time; compare the results, and if they’re different, an update is taking place.

Use this information to stay informed and maintain search engine success.

Are You Being Penalized For Duplicate Content?

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Jul 14, 2008 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

Make sure you’re not being penalized for duplicate content! People don’t like repetitive things, and neither do search engines.  Even if you’ve differentiated all your pages from the rest of the web, the search engines may decide that they look like each other. You definitely do not want this to happen!

Similar Page Checker lets you determine the exact percentage of similarity between any two web pages. Simply enter both URLs and you’ll be well on your way to eliminating overlap and getting the best possible search ranking.

Free Spider Viewer SEO Tool

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Feb 24, 2008 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

Whether the subject is life or online campaigns, adopting a different perspective on things can prove valuable. In terms of online campaigns, adopting a search engine spider’s perspective can be especially fruitful. 

Just enter a URL, and the Spider Viewer will list details relating to the page’s title, description, keywords, size, text, links, and HTML. Use this information to mold your campaign and you should see a very real improvement in your search engine rankings.

Free Search Engine Saturation Tool

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Feb 17, 2008 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

There’s a lot to say for carefully targeted campaigns, but another strategy involves saturation. After all, in just about any drawing or contest, the person with the most entries has the best shot at winning, and online campaigns can work in a similar fashion.

The Search Engine Saturation Tool will let you know how many pages you (and your competitors) have indexed with the leading search engines. Just input the URLs, and you’ll be on your way to understanding the odds and achieving /search engine success.