Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable has made a post on a WebmasterWorld thread, the thread is about a site losing its ranking in Google because they used NoFollow attribute for linking some of their internal pages. The site has used NoFollow attribute for their privacy policy, contact us page, user agreement and so on.

The NoFollow is a link attribute value used to instruct the search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. The NoFollow link attribute was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, due to spamming in blog comments.

Reply by a WebmasterWorld member :

Well placing rel=”nofollow” on existing links on a site would impact several things.Only part of which is strictly PR related, depending on how Google looks at things the related link text should be made moot, the page that is doing the link just had an update done to it, and the page linked to should have also lost an IBL. So could this affect ranking etc? Yup.

Barry Schwartz explanation on how Google treats NoFollow:

Google will not crawl a link that has the nofollow attribute on it. Adam Lasnik of Google specifically said that. But of course, Google will crawl the same URL if it is linked to elsewhere, without the nofollow attribute.

So, if Google won’t crawl a link that has the nofollow attribute associated. And if these pages are not linked to from other sources (typically a privacy policy, contact us page, user agreement, terms of service type of page), then they won’t do well in the search results. Plus, those pages (the ones that are linked to using the nofollow tag) will not benefit your other pages on the site.

Aravindhan

Tags : SEO, Search Engine Ranking, NoFollow

When you enter into Google search and move into personalised home page, some themes from Google are pretty good and intresting nowadays. When you add a tab and name it as SEO, the top sites related to SEO are automatically loaded in the tab.

RankQuest SEO Gadget is an online SEO Resource where SEO made easy. It provides you a smart online SEO experience with quick access to SEO Tools,SEO Tips and SEO DIFF for a specified URL. The SEO based search engine SEOlens is another added advantage.

With Google personalised home page, it’s possible to add extra content to your home page. Adding Search Engine Optimization resource to your home page will simplify your SEO activities.

• In “SEO Tips” tab, tip of the day with search engine optimization articles related to the tip is shown.

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Mark

SEO Tags : RankQuest SEO Gadget, SEO, Google Personalised Home Page

With all those features of toolbar, Alexa Rank has also been added to the RankQuest SEO Toolbar. Watch the traffic by just loading your site on the browser.

When your site loads, the Alexa Rank for your site is shown. On mouse over the exact rank is shown in numbers.

Mark

SEO Tags : SEO Toolbar, Alexa Rank, RankQuest, RankQuest SEO Toolbar,

link: command operator is currently offline for the past two days in Live.com. The link: command operator returns a blank page for the past two days (for eg: link:http://www.rankquest.com returns an empty page). All other commands like site: and other commands work as usual.

The discussion from seroundtable, Digital Point and Webmaster forums also states the same.

Mark

SEO Tags : MSN, Live.com, link: command

SearchEngineWatch has published an interesting case study about a site that has remapped all dynamic URLs to static URLs. For example “category.aspx?Cat=991″ was changed to something like “Cat/Bathroom-Faucets/991“. All the dynamic URLs where 301 redirected to the new static URLs.

According to the case study, there was a considerable increase in the number of pages indexed by the search engines after remapping the dynamic URLs to static URLs. This clearly shows that the use of static URLs greatly increases the search engine visibility of a site.

Aravindhan

SEO Tags : SEO, Dynamic URLs, Static URLs

Google has announced in Google Webmaster central about the addition of anchor text phrases in their Webmaster Tools. The description of this feature is present in Search Engine Land. In Webmaster tools go to Statistics tab and click page analysis,

you will find the anchor text phrases in the external links for your sites table,

This anchor text phrases will be useful to find which phrases from our site are most used by other sites for linking.

Mark

SEO Tags : Google Webmaster Tools, External Links, Anchor text Phrases, Link Phrases

We are happy to announce the release of RankQuest WatchSEO - The one stop SEO site.

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is optimizing a site or a webpage to attain better search ranking in search engines. The manual efforts involved in SEO is one of the mundane activites for Webmasters.

WatchSEO is an offering from RankQuest which helps the Webmasters in simplifying their SEO activities. WatchSEO provides a single console from where the user get to know the overview of the various SEO parameters in the form of small gadgets. Analysing the effective keyword(s) of the webpage, various webpage validations (Link Validation, HTML Validation, Image Validation), showing Alexa Rank details are some of the gadgets to highlight.

Right now there are about 10 gadgets and still lot more to come in the near future. WatchSEO is now in its beta and free for a period of upto 90 days.

Check out the cool features of RankQuest WatchSEO and send your valuable feedback to support at rankquest dot com.

Mark

SEO Tags : RankQuest WatchSEO, SEO, SEO tool, Webmaster tool

Many webmasters use site:www.site.com to watch the indexed results in the search engine. It had some problem in displaying the search results from the past weeks. The problem with display is Google does not show pages with same title or description. So on using this command Google shows only less number of results. It was a serious issue discussed in Webmasterworld forums.

So Google has replied two days back in their official blog that the issue will not affect search ranking anyway and also if you click on the link “repeat the search with omitted results included” will show the full list of the results.

Google has also said that they will keep monitoring and make sure the changes happen.

Mark

SEO Tags : Google, Google search, Indexed results, Using site: command

Quality sore of a keyword mainly depends on the key term relavance. How much is your ad relevant to the keyword which is entered as a serch term is more important. In Adwords help center I came accross a question “What is a Quality score and how is it calculated?” from which the main factors influencing Quality score are

Performance variables like keyword clickthrough rate (CTR), ad text relevance, overall historical keyword performance with Google, and even the user experience on the landing page or site associated with an ad. We put all of these factors and more together to create a Quality Score

And the formula used for the calculation of Quality score was also given.

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)*

*Where the interactions between the Quality Score variables change as we continue to refine how to measure and define quality in AdWords.

These factors according to Google affects your Quality score. The quality score is likely to be changed everytime when the relavance factors are affected. Know how your Quality score is used. Eventhough the formula changes often these factors will always have a impact in your Google rankings.
Mark

Tags : Quality Score, Google Adwords, Quality score calculation, Keyword relevance

Google in their official blog has announced about badware notifications. Google already notifies the user by showing warnings on surfing badware sites and Google has planned a better way for badware notifications. Google’s work with stopbadware.org and integration of malware notifications in webmaster tools were the preliminary steps taken. Now steps have been taken to alert webmasters.

Along with informing webmasters about their sites and further steps to be taken, Google has planned to give some examples of badware sites which will be more helpful to diagonize their sites. An example in the webmastercentral blog was

A common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site.

The next is to notify through Emails. When Google flags a site as a badware the webmaster of the site will be intimated. As Google was not able to determine the perfect email addresses, the email will be sent to webmasters@domain or admin@domain and etc.

In future webmasters may provide their preffered email-id’s. So these notifications from Google for webmasters will be more helpful for handling badware sites.

Mark

Tags : Google, Webmasters, Badware notification, Webmaster tool