Sugarcaned

Before I crack on with the site analysis of James's site I just wanted to write a little about the "NoFollow" link tag. For those unfamiliar with it, it's an invention from Google, designed to give webmasters the option of not leaking PR to every person that comments on their blog. The reason was to try and tackle comment spam and automatic commenting systems. Webmasters just had to add a "NoFollow" tag to links and Google wouldn't pass any PageRank onto the spamming sites.

It really didn't work. What it's done is make people very untrusting, lowered the traffic and commenting on blogs (let's face it, most blog readers are reading and commenting to promote their own site) and unfairly penalised legitimate SEO efforts.

So Google created a "DoFollow" tag to do the opposite. Generous webmasters could use this, and let people comment on their blog for SEO purposes. Any SEOer worth his salt would never spam, so comments from them are normally on topic and relevant to the blog. And it creates an active community of bloggers and commentators. And it goes back to one of the original ideas of the internet - linking.

The current situation with NoFollow has changed a little. Google does count "NoFollow" links. Whether or not they leak any PR is up for debate, but I think they do. I always use Wikipedia as a good example. Wikipedia have a strict NoFollow policy, but I've had pages jump up the rankings upon having a wikipedia entry added.

I think with the devaluing of PageRank that seemed to occur last year, the DoFollow / NoFollow debate matters less and less. Commenting on all blogs is useful and recommended. But if you really want to just stick with blogs that have a DoFollow, how do you find them?

Try this DoFollow blog search engine and type in your keywords and find blogs that have a DoFollow policy.

Happy SEOing!

As Staind said, it's been a while. Great song, lacking only in a decent excuse as to why I haven't posted in a while. Busy at work, usual stuff really...

Quick word on the music side of things: recording is going well and I'm playing around with about 18 songs at the minute, though I expect I'll whittle that down to about 10 or 11 for the release. 1 song is nearly ready and I'm confident about getting it ready by xmas, possibly sooner...

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So progress so far on our company's SEO. WE've long been on page one for the term 'international architects' so I figured it was about time to start to move towards targeting the term 'architects'. Now this is a much more competitive word. The first twenty pages on Google read like a veritable who's who of architecture. This is really a big challenge SEOwise because we're up against companies that have been around longer, have more built projects, have more famous projects, are members of the right associations, and actually have a budget.

First thing I started to do a few weeks ago was to change the anchor text for inbound links from 'international architects' to just 'architects'. At first I was a little worried we'd lose our standing for the international architects term but not at all. So slowly I've been watching 'architects' crawl up the 'What Googlebot Sees' list in Google's webmaster tools. It's now residing just underneath international architects on that list and I'm sure it will soon overtake it. So that was phase one.

Phase two, which I did just last week before our site got crawled, I changed the keywords on our home page. So our page title changed to just 'Diseño Earle | Architects' as did our H1 tag. I checked our keyword density on the homepage and made sure architects was ahead by a nose.

Less than a week later we appeared, for the first time, on page (wait for it...) 95 of google.co.uk!!

That might sound rubbish, but it's a start. We're showing up in the highly competitive term (somewhere around 42,000,000 million pages competiting for this...) and now we can start to track our progress. We're bouncing around a little at the moment, which I'm sure will take a while to settle down. I'll keep you posted on the progress.

Our other site, Blueprint, has just started to show up for our chosen search terms now, popping in on page 8 for 'modern villa'. This shouldn't be too tough to get this onto page 1.

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Ok so so far we've covered some basic points for beginning off page SEO. Now lets delve a little deeper.

Copying is the highest form of flattery
A good place to start when doing any offpage SEO is to look at the websites that rank well for your term and investigate what they're doing. We could start by checking things like their keyword density with any of the online checkers and comparing them to ours and the other top sites. We could also look at their code and check to see if we're doing everything they are in terms of onpage SEO. But most importantly, we can see who's linking to them. This can help us immensely because chances are, the sites linking to the top sites are in a related field , which of course means that a) there's a chance they'll link to us aswell and b) a link coming from a site of relevant content is a good one.

So, start off by searching in Google for your chosen term. In this example, we'll use 'architects'. Ok so on Google.co.uk the first hit is RIBA. Now as this is a huge foundation I would skip this one and the wikipedia entry beneath it and head straight to the first company. In this case, it's 'Make Architects'. So how do we check the links? Well, we could use google and the link:domain name operator, but that would only give us very limited results. So we're going to use yahoo for this one.

Head over to yahoo.co.uk and type the following:

linkdomain:makearchitects.com -site:makearchitects.com

basically the first bit tells yahoo what domain to examine for links and the second part tells yahoo to ignore links contained within the site. This spat out some 368 results. A lot fewer than I imagine there would be for a top ranking site. I'm pretty sure makearchitects.com are involved with some heavy duty google fraud or deception: their site has few inbound links and only a page rank of 5 and yet it's right there at the top. A quick study of the site reveals that something fishy is indeed going on - the site is in flash and split into framesets. I reckon google is seeing something entirely different to the rest of us when it trawls this site. But anyway, thats just speculation. Lets get back to the links.

We can go through the list one site at a time and asses how useful it can be. So on the first page I see the blog inhabitat. Good, we can send a press release to them. Maybe comment on an article or two.

It's a long process but it can really help point you in the right direction links wise and give you plenty of ideas on where to get your links from.

Happy hunting!