I wrote recently about why the worst thing about nofollow is its name. My response to Maxpower’s thought-provoking comment grew too long for the comments section, so here’s a slightly longer exposition of what’s wrong and right with nofollow. Continue reading “Nofollow is not as bad as you think” →

I have never understood the furore that greeted Google’s introduction of the rel=”nofollow” attribute. It seemed to me to be a perfectly sensible way of specifying the provenance of hyperlinks on a Web page. However, many people took it to be Google’s way of penalising contributors to blogs and other interactive websites. Some even thought that Google was guilty of a blanket attack on all blogs. These accusations aren’t true, but the reasons they came up are interesting: Google gave a spurious justification for nofollow; and the name “nofollow” itself is misleading. Actually there are good reasons to use nofollow, and if it had a better name it would be more widely used and less controversial. Continue reading “Nofollow: good idea, bad name” →

It’s not always easy finding the best web hosting provider for your websites, so I thought I would recommend the web host company I use. I set up my first website in 1996, and since then I have used several website hosting companies. Initially, I evaluated them based only on features and price. However, a couple of years ago my old web host had a system crash, and incredibly had no recent backups. I had my own local backups, fortunately, but I did lose some email. I immediately started searching around for a new web host, and settled on Lunarpages because they had everything I needed at a reasonable price. I thought I should write a little Lunarpages review to help you evaluate the many options for web hosting. Continue reading “Web hosting” →

The Search box on your blog is a valuable source of information to you as a blogger. If you keep track of what your readers are searching for and what results they get, you’ll know what your visitors want to read. Then you can make sure they find it on your blog, and turn casual searchers into regular readers. In this article, I describe a few ways you can keep track of this essential information. I also introduce a WordPress plugin that does it automatically. Continue reading “Read your readers’ minds” →

Google introduced the rel="nofollow" attribute earlier this year; most blogging platforms now support it. Its initial promise of ridding the web of blog comment spam has not happened, and there has been a lot of conspiracy theory about the “real” reasons Google would do this. But it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about. This issue came up in the IO Error blog — I started to write a comment on it, but the logorrhoea set in, as it often does. Continue reading “Nofollow considered harmless” →

Google Sitemaps seemed like a moderately good idea at first. A standard format for information is always good for interoperability. But it’s hard to see Google Sitemaps ever really being useful to web search engines. Some features seem to add little to what Google already does, and others seem entirely useless. Continue reading “Google Sitemaps Deconstructed” →