“我思故我在” “I think, therefore I am”
SEO
NoFollow? DoFollow? So, what is that?
Oct 20th
When discussing on the topic of SEO, some of the common terms you might came across are NoFollow and DoFollow. Here, I’m going to give you some explanation on what do they meant.
NoFollow and DoFollow are very important terms when it comes to link building and link building is one of the most important aspect for SEO.
NoFollow mean is to write a line of code to tell the Search Engine spider not to crawl that link. For example, let’s say you want to create a link to this website: NESTLE MALAYSIA website, the coding will look like this:
To add a nofollow to this link, just add a line of code rel=”nofollow”, like this:
So the second link is a nofollow link. In fact, there is no actual dofollow code exist, as long as there is a link, the spider will eventually crawl it unless you add the nofollow code, so we normally classified those without the nofollow code to be dofollow.
One of the famous example is Twitter. Twitter add nofollow to all the links on their site, as such, you won’t get SEO benefit on link building on Twitter. They need to do this to avoid spammers. Lately, they even put up nofollow tag to the user profile section.
As such, if you intent to build links on other websites so that you can increase your search engine ranking (becareful, not all links can help in your ranking), if the site is implementing nofollow, there will be less SEO benefit for external links.
The Importance of Canonical Link Element
Oct 11th
In sometime mid February this year, the three big search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live) gang up to announce a coordinated effort and it is wise for us to take this matter seriously. It is about the canonical page and canonical link element.
Many people might not heard of this canonical page and canonical link element. So I just briefly explain what is it:
Due to the use of dynamic URLs, one single web page can have more than 1 valid urls (address) pointing to it. For example:
www.yoursite.com
yoursite.com
www.yoursite.com/
yoursite.com/
www.yoursite.com/index.html
yoursite.com/index.html
www.yoursite.com/Home.aspx
yoursite.com/Home.aspx
http://www.yoursite.com
http://yoursite.com
http://www.yoursite.com/index.html
http://yoursite.com/index.html
http://www.yoursite.com/Home.aspx
http://yoursite.com/Home.aspx
https://www.yoursite.com
Of which the official one (or your most preferred version) is www.yoursite.com. So the page at www.yoursite.com is call the canonical page. A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.
However, if you don’t tell the search engines which one is your canonical page, they might not know which one it is, as such, they will just select one of the URL and flagged others as DUPLICATE CONTENTS!
That’s why now with the introduction of this canonical link element, you have to add the line of code in all your other non-canonical pages to identify your canonical page. Your problem can be solved by adding a <link> element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the <head> section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Search Engines: “Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results.”
From the above example, this is how you specify your canonical link element in one of the non-canonical page e.g. https://www.yoursite.com:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com”/>
Add this line of code to the <head> section of the non-canonical page.
If you are using CMS, you can just hardcode the canonical URL into the section (please make sure you test and confirm) so that any duplicate variants of that URL should still contain the correct canonical URL inside.
One more important point to take note is Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can specify a canonical page on www.yoursite.com from a set of pages on yoursite.com or help.yoursite.com, but not on yoursite-blog.com.
Take a look at this video from Matt Cutts on the details on Canonical Link Element:
For those of you who use WordPress, there is a plugin by Joost de Valk – Canonical URL’s that you can install, very useful.
Bye Bye Meta Tags
Sep 29th
All this while we have been told to put in meta tags for the search engines to index our sites, but now no more. The old search engines like metacrawler, even Yahoo in the OLD DAYS, used to look at meta tags, and webmasters could get top listings by simply including Keyword and Description meta tags. This doesn’t happen anymore.
Due to the massive spam via meta tags and include hundreds of keywords and descriptions that are not even relevant to the page, the big search engines don’t consider meta tags as a basis for inclusion into their directories. The only tag that is important is the “Title” and “Description” tag.
Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth:
Don’t waste your time. Search engines today do not look at meta tags like they used to. Meta tags are a thing of the past and they don’t help much these days.
Get unlimited USD$100 Adwords voucher from Google
Aug 22nd
Sound cool right? I came across an e-book with the above title and I just verified with my own blog, it is true, I think it works, though is very unethical.
Ok, I guess you must be keen to know this black-hat method:
1. Create a wordpress blog or blogspot blog of your niche.
2. Make sure this blog has unique content on the home page.
3. Create about 11 or 12 blog postings.
4. Sign up to Google webmaster tools.
5. Submit your site to Google webmaster tools and you should verify your site after that.
6. After that, insert the sitemap which is another important point. You will be eligible to get the adwords vouchers only after all your pages are listed on the google sitemap.
7. And most free voucher will come from Google webmaster itself with worth $100 value within 10 days after your site is listed completely.
Here is the proof :
1. Create a wordpress blog or blogspot blog of your niche.
2. Make sure this blog has unique content on the home page.
3. Create about 11 or 12 blog postings.
4. Sign up to Google webmaster tools.
5. Submit your site to Google webmaster tools and you should verify your site after that.
6. After that, insert the sitemap which is another important point. You will be eligible to get the adwords vouchers only after all your pages are listed on the google sitemap.
7. And most free voucher will come from Google webmaster itself with worth $100 value within 10 days after your site is listed completely.
Here is the proof :
Message from Google on Free Adwords
Create as many blogs as you like, as long as every blog must use a different Google Webmaster Tools account. You will then get the Google Adwords vouchers worth USD$100 for each account and you can use it or sell it…
Ok, I think this method is valid for now until the Big Brother G find out..
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How I Use Twitter
May 29th
From my last blog post, I didn’t really mentioned what I use Twitter for. In fact, many people have wrong perception about Twitter, they think they need to update their friends (followers) on what they are doing every now and then, though this can be one of the purpose, I don’t think many people are so interested in learning what you are doing every hour… or about your personal life, unless you are a celebrity.
I use Twitter mainly for sharing and bookmarking at the same time. For example, sharing some interesting videos or articles. It is also very much depends on my interest. I believed my followers are mainly people who are interested in Internet Marketing, so whenever I have read articles or news about SEO, SEM, etc, I would then shared them on Twitter. After sometimes, I can refer the links that I’ve shared in my updates box, so it become a bookmarking site for me as well.
Another purpose I use Twitter is to pull some traffics to my websites. But using Twitter for “link juice” is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology. Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines (Yahoo, MSN, except Ask.com), to ignore the link.
So Twitter is not a good place for creating backlinks to achieve higher Page Rank. However, it do have offsite SEO value where your followers will see your tweets and click on the links, thus it brings some traffics back to the site hence improve the Alexa ranking. The more followers you have, the better traffics you will get.
A little bit of update on Social Media
Mar 30th
Everyone want to tap into Social Media and we basically have too many choices now. The perception is “Social Media is what you should go into in order to be successful online.”
So, let’s take a look some figures from comScore:
Top Social Media Sites (unique visitors as of November 2008; comScore):
Blogger (222 million)
Facebook (200 million)
MySpace (126 million)
Wordpress (114 million)
Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
Flickr (64 million)
hi5 (58 million)
Orkut (46 million)
Six Apart (46 million)
Baidu Space (40 million)
Friendster (31 million)
56.com (29 million)
Webs.com (24 million)
Bebo (24 million)
Scribd (23 million)
Lycos Tripod (23 million)
Tagged (22 million)
imeem (22 million)
Netlog (21 million)
In Malaysia, while some people still think Friendster is the most popular Social Networking site, ranking in Alexa has shown the ranking dropped from Position 2 to Position 7. Looks like Facebook overtakes Friendster now where it ranking has raised to Position 5.
Take a look at the top 10 Alexa Ranking for Malaysia as at today:
1. Yahoo!
2. Google.com.my
3. YouTube
4. Google
5. Facebook
6. Blogger.com
7. Friendster
8. Windows Live
9. Microsoft Network (MSN)
10. Myspace
That’s a little update for today.
Search Engine Marketing: 12 Campaign Mistakes to Avoid
Mar 22nd
http://www.fathomseo.com/products/search-engine-optimization/ – Fathom SEO’s Mike Murray presents the top 12 SEO campaign killers. 12 campaign mistakes to avoid to ensure your search engine marketing yields the best results. Learn the mistakes to avoid making when planning your own search campaign for your business. To learn more about Fathom SEO’s search engine optimization services, visit http://www.fathomseo.com/products/search-engine-optimization/ …
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.