The “Nofollow” Attribute

The “Nofollow” Attribute
Author: Eileen Maravillas

The nofollow attribute was created by Google's Matt Cutts and Blogger.com's Jason Shellen mainly to stop spam comments on blogs. However, some people still believes that this is a TAG used to restrict search engine spiders to index a webpage.

In search engine optimization, the “nofollow” attribute is placed on an outgoing link (a link that points to another website). By placing this attribute, you are telling search engine spiders “not to score” or “don't pass my page rank juice” to this website. You cannot block access to a content or prevent that content to be indexed.

Example:


In another sense, this attribute is used to control the flow of page rank (PR) from one website to another. You don't want to pass on your hard earned PR to some untrusted (and oftentimes illegal) sites. That's why bloggers are using this to prevent such sites from hurting them.

Other search engines like Yahoo, Bing (former MSN) and Ask respects the rel=nofollow but only Google honours this attribute completely.

Controlling the Flow of Page Rank

Since it works on outgoing links, many search engine optimizers (SEOs) believed that this can also be used on internal links. The ability to pass on PR juice to the most important pages of your website using the nofollow attribute gave SEOs another method called PageRank Sculpting.

Several SEOs have suggested that pages such as "About Us", "Terms of Service", "Contact Us", and "Privacy Policy" pages are not important enough to earn PageRank, and so should have nofollow on internal links pointing to them. Google employee Matt Cutts has provided indirect responses on the subject, but has never publicly endorsed this point of view. From Wikipedia

There are many BPO companies that offers SEO Services, no matter the cost, that would suggest to use the nofollow attribute on not-so-important pages and focus mainly on the high valued pages like the homepage. Even so, there's this contradiction: instead of having just one page appear (or rank) in SERP, you can have two or even more pages appear by making them rank high as well. So instead of just focusing on boosting one page of your site up to the first page in SERP, you can have two or more thus gaining you more traffic and sales.

If you're wondering which of this two strategies you're going to use, my advice is focus on your target goal. If your client wants to rank his homepage only then you may use the nofollow attribute on low-valued pages. Just remember this, always INFORM your client of the additions and/or changes you're about to make and make the decision TOGETHER to avoid any conflict in the long run. Your strategy may get his website on top but once your ranking fluctuates and drops the website way down, you'll be having a hard time explaining it to him! (Especially if the client knows nothing about SEO).

Other Purpose

Aside from human and automated spam comments on blogs, the nofollow attribute is also advised to be used on paid links so that these links do not get credit in search engine results page (SERP).

Abuse of Using the Nofollow Attribute

While this attribute greatly helps blog owners to sweep away spam comments, there are also bloggers who uses the nofollow when referring or quoting to a quality content from another website. There may be a link to follow but as long as there's a rel=“nofollow” included, these links are deprived of their well deserved PR juice.

Another abuse I see is mostly at the sidebar of any blog (or in a dedicated link partners' page of any website). Yes, I'm talking about their link exchange partners! Though link trading is not highly recommended in search engine optimization, they too have a value. There are many webmasters and SEO specialist who practices this scheme to fool their link partners. It is not nice to receive quality PR juice from your link partners while you use rel=“nofollow” on their links. Seriously, it's like stealing on daylight!

The NOFOLLOW attribute is created to help combat spammers and not to provide another way for evil geniuses (bad webmasters and SEO specialists) to cause more problems on the web.

Blogosphere Marketing

Offshoring in the Philippines
Author: Karen Michelle Gatdula

Blogging of Flogging? Which is better? Although Flogging have a very unpleasant connotation amongst the Internet geeks because it was oftenly used by viral marketers to continuously ballyhooing products A and B everywhere, we can't deny the fact that there is no bad publicity – all is good publicity. Because of this, many bloggers or rather I say, “floggers” make money than them bloggers.

But, I must say that although we see a big potential in flogging, I still adhere to blogging using subconscious marketing. This marketing strategy is not really that sophisticated rather a classic. Film producers often do this to gain sponsors. The perfect example of this is Steven Spielberg's E.T in 1982. Although we didn't see the brand's name, Reeses Pieces' packaging is not that infamous as a matter of fact, their sales skyrockets right after the movie was publicly shown.

This is where blogging comes in. Through blogging, we need not to shamelessly praise the product to market it. We just need to write something that's related (but no so related) to what we plan to advertise. For example, if we want to advertise a corned beef brand, then we start writing a blog that's full of corned beef recipes and put our corned beef's name in the ingredients. Also, we make use of the color that's similar to what our brand's uses.

Another example is this article. This was made to give info about blogging and flogging and to let you know that we lease writers to make awesome blogs for you.

Thinking about hiring writers to do the job for you? Don't forget that you can always ask for a free quotation first.

Offshoring in the Philippines

Offshoring in the Philippines
Author: Karen Michelle Gatdula

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo continues to give scholarship to those who are aspiring to work in BPO companies in the Philippines. Many graduates aspire to work in BPO companies but they lack the basic knowledge to do so because they were enrolled in degrees in which is far related to being a worker on BPOs.

This project of the government helped many unemployed professionals to make a living. Although this became unpopular to some local companies because BPO oftenly gets the best graduates and professionals rather than them. This is because BPO companies give higher compensation and decent benefits compared to what local companies give their minimum-wage-earners.

Home-based projects are now familiar among the Filipino vocabulary. Some of them learned that writing blogs, essays, reviews, medical transcriptions and everything under the sun on the Internet can give them more than that of what they could earn if they work in the office thus giving them ample time to spend with their loved ones and families. Retirees and other unemployed professionals try their luck by applying in call centers and gained themselves a decent-paying-job rather than staying home and doing nothing.

Offshoring also opened a new scheme to IT professionals who oftenly just decided to study IT to get a high paying job abroad. Now, because of the high demand on low cost IT labors from the western countries, graduates need not to apply for a visa to get the job they want, they just have to walk or take a bus ride to the nearest BPO hub in their place and apply in the position that will guarantee them security and better life.

Creating Sitemaps: What Are Sitemaps?

Creating Sitemaps: What Are Sitemaps?
Author: Eileen Maravillas

A sitemap is one way of organizing your links in a hierarchical manner to identify in which group/category a URL belongs, because a sitemap is primarily created for the purpose of proving users/visitors with clear navigation to all the pages within a website.

Importance of Sitemaps

In search engine optimization (SEO), aside from providing an easier way of navigating a website, sitemaps are used for faster indexing of webpages, proper flow of page rank (PR) from the index page to its inner pages and as a means of communication to search engines. What type of communication you ask? Well for example, in your robots.txt file, you can tell search engine spiders which pages of your website to crawl and index or which pages to restrict indexing.

Sitemaps are also useful when newly created pages or when updates are made, you can quickly tell search engine spiders to visit and crawl those pages. However, don't expect for them to get indexed right away, but it's much faster compared to when you don't have a sitemap at all.

Two Types of Sitemaps

1. HTML Sitemap
   A basic html sitemap used for website visitors.
   
   As simple as HTML! All you need to do is collect all links, arrange in a hierarchical order and save it as “.html”


2. XML Sitemap
   A xml sitemap is used to inform search engines of pages that are available for crawling in a website. When a xml sitemap is submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, it provides detailed report on your webpages' visibility on Google.
   
   Since this sitemap is for search engines use only, you don't need to place a link to it from your website. Just simply save it exactly as “sitemap.xml” and upload it in your root folder.

Steps in Creating a HTML Sitemap
Step 1: Gather all URLs
Step 2: Code it in plain HTML
Step 3: Save it as “sitemap.html”
Step 4: Upload it in the root folder

For the code:


The best place to place a link to your HTML sitemap is on the footer, or if you have a menu bar you can place it right under your website's banner/logo (top-center of your site). This way visitors can easily have access to all the pages within your website.

Here's a neat HTML sitemap of Google


Steps in Creating a XML Sitemap

Step 1: Use a free online XML sitemap generator
Step 2: Editing the elements you want like the "priority"
Step 3: Save it exactly as “sitemap.xml”

Step 4: Upload it in the root folder Step 5: Submit to major search engines

For the code: Using a free online XML sitemap generator

• loc : Location : Contains the URL of the page you want to be crawled.
• lastmod : Last Modified : The date the page was last modified.
• changefreq : Frequency : How frequently you change/update a certain page (options are: "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", "yearly" or "never").
• priority : Priority : This represents the priority of a page to be indexed. From 0.1 to 1.0, where 1.0 being the most important.

Submit XML sitemap to major search engines:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
http://www.bing.com/webmaster (former MSN)

If you want to ping your sitemap to the three major search engines, you can use this (just don't forget to edit it):

For Google
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml

For Yahoo
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http://www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml

For Bing
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml