by Jonny | Nov 14, 2011 | Updates
Dofollow and nofollow. These are concepts which are hard to explain to people who have never really been interested in SEO or who are starting to learn about the world of search. These two terms are highly important when it comes to working in a content marketing environment. It’s essentially the do or die in terms of obtaining something that’ll be useful or something that might not be so useful.
I’ll try to explain nofollow as simply as possible as my future role will be explaining what these different SEO initiatives are. Nofollow is essentially an instruction to search engines to tell search bots (Google bot, Yahoo Bot, Bing Bot) that surf the web that a link should not pass value.
This is what a nofollow attribute or instruction would look like in HTML format:
<a href="http://google.co.uk" alt="nofollow"> >Google.co.uk</a>
Google.co.uk
(This link is nofollow’ed)
So what does this mean exactly?
It essentially means that my blog (jargoned.com) is not passing value to Google.co.uk as I’ve included the nofollow attribute or instruction within the HTML code above. Search engines will scan this bit of code and they will read the “nofollow” value and they won’t count this link and you will not rank any higher in search results because the link has been nofollow’d.
So why?
Search engines like Google have to have ways to deal with spam and the nofollow attribute gives the option to web owners to nofollow links that have obviously been paid for and to not get penalised for accepting those paid links. Essentially Google looks at paid links as people trying to change or modify the search results unnaturally. Natural link building would usually only involve onsite content that would be of high quality and that would gain traction around the web with people linking to that content without any further assistance from the people who created that content. The nofollow attribute became mainstream when Google announced in 2005 that they would start using the nofollow attribute. They also announced that the nofollow attribute should be used for paid links and that sites could potentially be penalised if they were not nofollow’ing links that had been paid for. This is why nofollow is so crucial to content marketing, as you’d want to preferably be scoring links that are follow links and that have no “nofollow” attributes attached to them; however you don’t want to make it looks obvious in Google’s eyes that you’ve paid for certain links or that you’ve unnaturally made an action that would create a link. – Google will penalise you and this can be quite detrimental as Google have control of 89% of the search engine market.
Rant (No need to read this bit)
I frequent quite a few forums and there is one forum called Digital Point, and in 2011 the forum owner nofollow’d everyone’s forum signatures unless you paid for “Premium membership”. I’ve posted on Digital Point over 1,000 times and before they made the change I had 1,000 links on Digital Point pointing to my websites. Once they made the change I lost over 1,000 follow back links as they nofollow’d them. Whilst all the 1,000 links were from the same site, it was still unfortunate that I lost that many links to my websites’ back link profiles. However, if I recall, the argument that forum members were making were that people who were genuinely contributing with good quality posts were being negatively affected by this change in policy. In my personal opinion I can’t blame the owner of Digital Point for making that decision as people were just registering up and posting a couple times to get a signature link on Digital Point which is the largest digital marketing forum on the internet.
by Jonny | Nov 8, 2011 | Updates
Today there was a pagerank update, which happened to be pretty awesome, although this blog didn’t see any pagerank update and stayed at pagerank 1. Though to be honest I haven’t exactly advertised or done any marketing on this website so in the end in comes down to doing advertising and getting back link backs which is where you incur higher pagerank.
My armored vehicle website got a great update from pagerank 3 to pagerank 4. I’ll be honest and say that I thought the pagerank would stay the same however it seems it increased. Notably I am trying to rank higher for the keyword term “armored vehicles“, which is failing at the moment, however I haven’t placed full momentum on that yet. However pagerank really has nothing to do with SERPs. I’d rather have a higher SERP ranking or higher visitor count on my armored vehicle website rather than high pagerank. To be honest I look at pagerank and see it as an encourgement for your website and it is Google telling you to keep going in my opinion.
Though I somewhat feel perplexed by the fact that my YouTube page somehow got pagerank 5, yet I haven’t advertised that one bit, however somehow it has recieved a high pagerank for whatever reason. Yet really my military website should rank higher if things are to make any sense. Although I guess that YouTube being one of the largest websites on the internet is the reason for the high pagerank on my YouTube profile page. 🙂
by Jonny | Oct 23, 2011 | Updates
For some reason I cannot sleep. Well I know the reason as I slept most of yesterday in the afternoon which is why I'm having trouble sleeping and which is why I am still awake at 5 am in the morning here. So I figure I won't go to sleep and I'll stay and go on the internet for a few hours until I have to leave for Chinese class.
I've effectively blockaded myself from being able to go on Facebook as per this post. I also feel kind of bad for not going to Nantou with my friends to the Tea Festival, but I don't think that will be much of an issue. – In fact it will be a great talking point. Even though I hardly did anything while they were having fun, though I can ask them how it was there.
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by Jonny | Oct 17, 2011 | Updates
In this entire month I haven't really found time for myself to relax. I have just been studying and trying to improve as I have mentioned in all my other blog posts.
Pretty much my body is at a state where I don't mind showing it to others now. I have toned up with going to gym and doing a lot of cardiovascular exercises. I'm pretty much at the stage where I want to go swimming now at Feng-chia to further tone up every part of my body of which swimming is a very good fitness exercise for this. I just don't know when. I mean I have a lot of free time, while I'll admit, I spend most of that time trying to study, I still have a lot of spare and extra time. I haven't swum in a long time and I feel going swimming will help me relax and chill out a little while also improving my body.
On another note, when I get time… I will be re-designing this website. I have kind of turned it into a journal type blog as opposed to a general blog about my life.
by Jonny | Oct 12, 2011 | Updates
Scratch what I said in this post I actually might be in the Taiwanese military this year.
In that post I mentioned (link) above, my mother wrote a letter to the Mayor of Taichung. She told me that I wouldn't have to join by October of… NEXT YEAR; in accordance to her letter she sent to the mayor. Well apparently that isn't the case or more or so, my mother isn't sure about that anymore. I'm going to be going tomorrow to the register office (I have my Taiwanese ID now, so I am now officially Taiwanese) to obtain my National Health Insurance (NHI) card and my Taiwanese passport.
I guess I will find out tomorrow, when I'll have to actually join. It comes as a surprise really, as I kind of thought and wished I could have enough time to learn Chinese without any worries of any draft requirement coming in anytime soon. It just doesn't look to be the case anymore.
I talked to my dad and I simply said to him: "Whatever happens… happens."
There is nothing I can do to change anything which involves this, other than the excuse of my ADD issue, but I actually do want to join the Taiwanese military purely for the experience and considering I blog about the military on my other website.