Gary Eckstein

I, as do millions of others, use Wikipedia very often. The default Wikipedia Search however lets down this great Online encyclopedia.The default Wikipedia Search is good at returning results where the search term is identical to the Page however is not all that great where the name of the page is not known or is incorrectly spelt.

For example, suppose we search, using the default Wikipedia Search, for bush turkey. As per the results shown below, there is no page called ‘Bush Turkey‘ so Wikipedia offers us the choice of three pages which may be related. No context is given how the three pages relate to ‘Bush Turkey’ so I’m really not sure which of the three results is most likely to be related to my requirements for information about ‘Bush Turkey’ (my search term).

Enter Google Custom Search for Wikipedia. The good folks at Google decided to offer all of us a far better Wikipedia Search experience. Now when we search for terms which don’t have a dedicated Wikipedia Page, the familiar and powerful Google Search Results are returned showing all Wikipedia results related to my search term. So, for our bush turkey search term we now get the far better search results as below (notice that a few contextual words are returned from the Wikipedia Page which relates to my search term):

So, how can you realise the far better Google Custom Search results for Wikipedia? Simple, just go to the Google Custom Search for Wikipedia Page and follow the instructions. The default Wikipedia Search will be relpaced with Google Search.

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Nofollow is an HTML instruction to Search Engines not to consider the link destination as endorsed by the link originator. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other high quality Search Engines use links as one factor in considering the importance of a Webpage. So, very simplistically, if two WebPages are identical except that one has more incoming links (sometimes called backlinks) than another then the Page with more incoming links will generally appear higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). If the originating Page includes the HTML rel=”nofollow” then the target of the link won’t benefit from the link (in terms of Search Engine ranking).

Why use nofollow?

There are valid uses for the nofollow attribute; say a Blog post refers to spam sites and links to the sites then the Blog won’t want to effectively endorse the spam site and so will include rel=”nofollow” on the link. Wikipedia, for example, includes the nofollow attribute on all external links so that people don’t add a link to Wiki pages purely to attain a link from a high ranked site such as Wikipedia. Blog software such as WordPress by default included the nofollow attribute in all comments so as to avoid blog spamming.

Of course there are two sides to the nofollow story; by Wikipedia, for example, defaulting to nofollow this means that valid links are not given credit (in terms of Search Engine ranking). The nofollow attribute was introduced by Google to assist in determining which were ‘important’ links and which weren’t. Therefore by including nofollow on all links the original objective of nofollow is lost.

Harrys Travel is now dofollow

As part of my SEO experiment I have decided to reverse the WordPress default of nofollow on comments on the Travel Information Website. I have activated the Dofollow WordPress Plugin and included the ‘U Comment I Follow’ image at the end of each post. The idea behind this is that it will be interesting to see if a higher proportion of visitors comment when they are aware that it is a ‘dofollow’ site.

So, as Shakespeare didn’t say ‘to dofollow or to nofollow, that is the question’.

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One of the Sites I manage sells Blu-ray Movies and Blu-ray Players. There is a lot of competition for the search term ‘Blu-ray’ with tens of millions of results being returned on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). I have started doing some SEO on the site to try to improve where the site appears in the SERPs. Whilst analyzing where the site appears in the SERPs I came across http://bluraysucks.com/ which features as result number 19 on Google for the search term ‘Blu-ray’.

Considering that Google returns 142 million results for a ‘Blu-ray’ search, appearing at number 19 is a very good result. I therefore decided to look at what SEO is being performed to get such a fantastic SERP result. Here are a few items I discovered about http://bluraysucks.com/ in relation to SEO:

-                      Description and Keyword meta tags exist and are descriptive.

-                      Robots.txt allows all bots.

-                      No Sitemap.xml file evident.

-                      No ‘nofollow’ on hyperlinks (very nice!).

-                      There’s no ‘title’ text for the hyperlinks.

-                      There are 1001 comments relating to the home page.

-                      Home page last updated November 2006.

-                      916 external Websites/Pages linking to http://bluraysucks.com/ (some high and some low PageRank links).

-                      Google PageRank = 0 (WTF!!!).

-                      Alex Rank = 2,773,598.

-                      An Archived German Wikipedia page links to the site.

O.k, so some SEO basics are being done well however many of what would generally be considered basics in order to get a good SERP placement are non-existent; A Google PageRank of ‘0’ is the lowest PageRank possible, the home page hasn’t been updated in nearly three years, there isn’t a Sitemap.xml or sitemap available etc.

So, SEO isn’t everything (although all the other high ranking sites for the Search term ‘Blu-ray’ that I analyzed have done some hefty SEO work). Well done to ‘Some Guy’ from http://bluraysucks.com/. Your SERP result is outstanding!

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Sun Microsystems has been acquired by Oracle Corporation (after it looked like Sun would be part of the IBM stable). Of particular interest to many bloggers and corporate Internet Application developers is what will happen with MySQL, the GNU General Public License (GPL) database engine.

MySQL was acquired by Sun in February 2008 which basically gave the rights of MySQL intellectual property (e.g. documentation) to Sun (which has now been procured by Oracle). MySQL is distribute under GPL therefore is available to download, install and use without financial cost.

MySQL is very widely used particularly for Internet Applications including search engines, content management systems and blogging platforms. High-traffic sites such as WordPress, Google, Wikipedia and Read the rest of this entry »

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