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.

Have You Built Your Google Profile Yet?

Posted by Denise Griffitts on May 5, 2009 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

The latest Google buzz is that they have introduced a feature within Google Profiles that will give you a little more control over search results when you Google your own name. Google profiles are not new — mine has been in place for quite a while now. What is new is that you can now show up in a box on the first page of search results for your name.  If you have uploaded a photo you will see a thumbnail image next to a link to your full profile page. You will likely notice that Google profiles resembles a Facebook profile page which can’t be an accident.

Your Google profile lets you offer up a lot of information about yourself or your business. By including a brief bio, an image (I suggest the one you brand yourself with across the internet), links to your blogs, social networking profiles, websites and just about any place else that you may appear on the internet, you are able to aggregate your online presence and obtain prominent placement in Google results.

Optimize Your Google Adsense Earnings With This Free Tool

Posted by Denise Griffitts on Oct 20, 2008 in Internet Mastery | 0 comments

If like most webmasters and bloggers you use Google Adsense, it is very important to optimize your Adsense earnings by understanding them. You need to understand page impressions, click-through rate, and cost per click as they all work together to affect your income.  I use a free Adsense Calculator that returns estimates of  daily, monthly, and yearly earnings and clicks. This is a very helpful tool in deciding whether you even want to use Adsense or not.

What Is All The Buzz About Podcasting?

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

If you are desirous of marketing on the internet you must be willing to pursue and utilize various methods of promotion and marketing.  One way to drive traffic to your websites is to use podcasting.  If you are not familiar with podcasting, it is basically an audio or video digital media file that can distributed over the internet by syndicated download, through web feeds to your iPod or computer.  Podcasts can be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added which makes it a very viral tool. You can download podcasts about everything from news to food, politics to education, personal logs to sports, music to technology and everything in-between.

Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular for SEO marketing as many internet visitors are increasingly visual.  I always recommend delivering your message in both PDF and audio if possible.

To create podcasts you need:

• A microphone
• Recording and editing software (We recommend Audacity which a free, cross platform sound editor)
• Music clip library (optional)
• A way to publish your podcast

To listen to a podcast you need:

• A device such as an iPod to listen to the podcasts
• Software for playing media (Windows Media Player, iTunes, RealPlayer, or Winamp)
• Podcatching software (optional)

Once you have created your podcast you will need a way to distribute it to your listeners. You can link the files to your web page and will need to give listeners a way to subscribe through an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed.  Using RSS, listeners can subscribe through your podcast through iTunes or another aggregator.

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.