“我思故我在” “I think, therefore I am”
White Hat
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.
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.
My Blog Appear In MalaysiaKini!
Feb 14th
About few hours ago, I posted my blog on Google Zeitgeist 2008 and noticed malaysiakini is on the no. 1 listing under Fastest Rising. Being the fan of this site, I decided to run a test to see if I can get my “non-political” blog appear there.
Initially my blog post title was “Google Zeitgeist 2008 (Malaysia)” but I decided to change it to : “Google Zeitgeist 2008 – Malaysiakini on No.1 Fastest Rising!”, afterall, this title can also be a valid claim.
Then after 1 hour, it really shown up there:
Yes, Malaysiakini uses Google’s search engine to trawl blogosphere to pick up any posting which mentions the word ‘Malaysiakini’. If your blog posting has the keyword ‘Malaysiakini’, it is likely to be captured by the search engine and will automatically appear in the ‘Mkini in Blogs’ section.
However, please do not abuse it or else, you will get “MKini Slap”.
Read more on how to get your blog there : How can I get my blog to appear in Malaysiakini?
My Blog Finally Got Indexed!
Feb 4th
After launching for 2 days, my site finally got indexed from Google! Hurray!
In fact, if I would have Digg it earlier, I believed it will get indexed even faster, my mistake for oversighting the power of Digg.
On Monday, when I first launched the site in the afternoon, I read through a thread in a forum stated that if I generate my site’s feed using Feedburner and submit the feed link (which produced by Feedburner) to My Yahoo and Google Reader, my site will get indexed in 24 hours.
As this is something new to me, I decided to give it a test. Formerly I used to Digg and Reddit in order to get indexed, since I’m running a try, I do not want to submit the post to Digg first.
However, seems like the Feedburner method didn’t work on my blog site. Last night, after completing my blog on Google Earth, I just submitted the post to Digg and Reddit.
This morning, voila! It got indexed after 10 hours on Digg.
Google Indexed 13 Posts
I have 13 results and all from the same post that I Digg last night. Digg is the best! Seems like Google didn’t index other posts yet on my site.
I will do more experiments in the future.
Get some revenue from Hubpages
Feb 2nd
HubPages is a great platform for writing articles that the income they earn in an ongoing fashion. Through this site, you will have the opportunity to write about a wide range of different topics that interest you, anyone can start a “hub” and publish a Web page on any topic. HubPages allows you to write articles, and then host for free. The best part is you get a 60% share of advertising revenue.
In order to earn income from HubPages, you need to register with Adsense, Amazon and eBay Kontera directly.HubPages is similar to Squidoo, but is currently a better bet to win money in the long term. HubPages writers must register for an account and choose a username. Each hub will be launched by the choice of a name tag and labeling of keywords based on the content of the hub. HubScore measures the quality of content created. HubPages also gains through the many online content providers.
HubPages is a good starting point for those who love to write and express their views. It is difficult to find people who like to hear your thoughts and opinions. HubPages is a portal for online publication that provides users the content, or find and locate articles of interest to them. While a blog provides a unique platform from which the publication of several articles on various topics are written, HubPages revolves around the creation of a creation of one-off articles or ‘Hubs’. HubPages is similar to Squidoo, but is currently a better bet to win money in the long term.
Besides making money, HubPages is also a great use in creating backlinks for your valuable efforts of SEO.
"The Street finds its own uses for technology."
-- William Gibson
-- William Gibson