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.

Google Flags Entire Internet as “Malware”

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Feb 1, 2009 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

If you were working on the internet yesterday you undoubtedly came across the same issues that had the Twitter world in a panic. It seems that yesterday any search result from Google was getting flagged as malware with a message stating “This site may harm your computer”. In other words, our entire online world was blacklisted for a short time.  The problem apparently affected internet pages across the globe and lasted for about 55 minutes or so before engineers were able to fix the problem.

Twitter went crazy yesterday as people were reporting the problems and just generally commiserating with each other, but I am happy to report today that the Google is explaining this as a “human error” and you can read their explanation here on the Official Google Blog. All is well. Until the the next time.

WebsitesLog: FreeTraffic Analysic Tool

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Jan 19, 2009 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

I came across this new website popularity analysis tool recently called WebsitesLog.  It is so new that it doesn’t have a Google Page Rank yet. Apparently this tool will rank websites according to its own points system.  The points appear to be calculated based on the number of backlinks, indexed pages, blog entries, and Alexa rank. What is not made clear however is is just what percentage each of these point categories carries.

While I admit to not seeing any real value in this tool at this time, it is new and I suspect that it will improve with time. What I did enjoy though was where it referenced Index Pages and told me that I had “very good content”. That is an online version of an “atta girl!” which makes a visit here enjoyable even if there is not particularly useful information about your website generated. I will keep visiting to see how this tool evolves.

If you are aware of this tool, or use it, please comment.

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.

Free Redirect Check Tool

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Apr 13, 2008 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

A lot of us lose out on valuable search engine traffic due to incorrectly configuring our redirects. It is very important that a search engine spider crawling through your website is able to follow any redirects you have set up. When running your online campaign, you can’t be too careful. There are many details that need to be double-checked, and something as important as a redirect deserves special attention.

Make sure that search engines can recognize your redirect by using a Redirect Check tool.

Simply enter a site’s URL, and the tool will let you know if what you’ve set up is search engine friendly.  If it isn’t, there’s advice on how to fix it. And if it is, then search engines will know how to recognize and reward your online campaign. It is a simple step that will benefit your website’s longterm health.