Life + Web » Google

Ask Egg Bird: follow, nofollow, index, noindex

swimturtle — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:59:50 +0000

My friend Mario from Heerlen in the Netherlands asked me this question:

I know that the meta tag “nofollow” tells a search robot not to follow a link and prevents outgoing link juice to other sites. I also know that the tag “index” means that a page must be indexed by the robot. What’s a little confusing are the different combinations and the fact that you can seemingly use them separately for posts, comments and/or pages. There must be a way to explain these combinations in plain English so that it is once and for all understandable for everyone. Here they are:
index, follow
noindex, follow
index, nofollow
noindex, nofollow
What are the different consequences?

This is an excellent question, and I myself find it difficult to wade through all the documentation on the web that explains the uses of these different tags and their combinations. In my research I have found some very useful concrete examples that have given me some insight into the matter. I will try to lay it all out in English as plain as I can manage.
The situation is more complex than I first thought, because there are other tags to consider besides follow and index.
Google invented the nofollow tag as a measure to contain link spam. When this tag is used by itself, it tells the Googlebot that the link in question will not change the page rank of the website the link leads to. If the nofollow tag is used alone, the search engine will still physically follow the link, in order to index the website it leads to, but the link will not raise the rank of the site. A link spammer is someone who adds comments indiscriminately to all sorts of sites in order to induce search engines to count the links leading back to his websites and therefore raise his rankings (which in layman’s terms means that when someone is searching for sites similar to theirs, theirs comes up higher on the page of the search results). If you know the links are useless for raising your rank, there is little point in spamming.
So, let us try to look at the consequences of each combination of tags and try to look at some practical examples.

First, here is what these tags look like, and where to put them. They must be located in the portion of the html code of the page in question.

Index, Follow

This is the default setting, so you never see this tag. In other words, if you do nothing, the Googlebot will index the page and follow the links it contains to go and index the pages they lead to.

Noindex, Follow

An excellent example of when to use this meta tag is for a contact form page. There are many pages in the site that link to this page, but the page does not have valuable content. It is a useful page for readers of the site but only as a contact form, not for the purpose of reading and absorbing interesting information. But because many pages in the site link to this page, it has a lot of “link juice” and looks like it should rank highly. Therefore we can decide to NOT index this page, but to still allow the Googlebot to follow the outgoing links from this page to other pages.

Index, Nofollow

A perfect example of when to use this meta tag is when the pages that the current page links to have time-sensitive content. I found one article in a Google blog that used a very good example. Let’s say that the page in which this tag appears talks about celebrities. In this page there are links to stories that are “breaking news.” After a few hours the breaking news is replaced by new breaking news, and the “old” breaking news stories are put into a longer lasting articles section of the site. With the “index, nofollow” tag we obtain the perfect result. The celebrities page is indexed and the Googlebot does NOT follow the links to the breaking news which will soon be replaced.

Noindex, Nofollow

Another reason not to index or follow certain pages and links is when there is duplicative content in a site, which is something that at times is unavoidable. If possible it is always best to keep the indexing and ranking of our sites as clean as possible and to try to avoid duplication of content showing up with separate rankings. So, if there are pages that duplicate the content of other pages, with links to yet other duplicative pages, we can use “noindex, nofollow” and avoid adding unnecessarily to their ranking. Other examples I found for “noindex, no follow” are “About” pages, which often have artificially high rankings because many other pages link to them, and “login” pages, which also get a lot of “link juice.”

I hope this answers your question, Mario! And if you would like to add anything, clarify, or add something to your question, feel free to do so in the comments!

See you next time!

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Ask Egg Bird: Adding Feedburner to a Free Blogger Blog

swimturtle — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:10:47 +0000

I am very excited to post the first answer to an Ask Egg Bird question. Kloe from the lovely blog kloeamongtheturks has asked me the following question (really it’s two or three bundled into one, but we’ll do our best here, ok?):

I would like to know if Feedburner can be used by Blogspot blogs. As the creator of a long-standing blog, I have no idea how many people read Kloe (I’ve actually been scared to know…)
Also, what’s your opinion of Blogspot? Should I be concerned that I don’t own my site? (I don’t need to make money from my blog.)

So, let’s address these questions in order and find out the best way to answer. I must first say that I had some private email exchanges with Kloe because there are step-by-step guides on the Feedburner site that tell you how to put Feedburner on your site, but Kloe had trouble following the steps. And I must say I don’t blame her. I’m fairly savvy and I had to go through the steps a couple of times before I completely understood them myself. I think I’ve got it down now, though, so here goes.

First of all, what is Feedburner? In plain English, Feedburner is a service (now owned by Google) that manages the RSS feeds for people’s websites and blogs. You don’t HAVE to have Feedburner to generate RSS feeds. All blogs and websites with content that is renewed regularly, like newspaper sites or magazines and so on, automatically generate RSS feeds. If you pay attention, you will notice that in the far right-hand corner of the url bar (the address bar) at the top of your screen, when you go to a website, there will be a small orange RSS button right there, and if you click on it, you get the feed. So why have Feedburner at all? Why do you need it? The answer is: TO TRACK YOUR STATISTICS, and, ANALYZE YOUR TRAFFIC. In simple terms this means you will be able to see:

how many subscribers you have (and Feedburner will count both RSS and email subscribers)
where subscribers came from
how many visitors came (not subscribers, new visitors)
how long each visitor stayed
and many other things of this nature.

The benefits of being able to track and measure the quantity and quality of the traffic your blog or website is getting are immeasurable. When you see that one particular page or series of articles is popular, you know that you should write more like them. Being able to see your statistics will help you improve your site in many ways. Let’s leave it at that for now and tackle the practical solution to the question at hand.

When we say “get Feedburner on our site” we mean use Feedburner as a filter through which our RSS feeds pass to get counted and measured. That’s all it means. You know when you see those people standing at the beginning of a bridge or something with that little counter in their hand, and every time a car goes by the press the clicker? Well, that’s what Feedburner is: it’s that person with the clicker in their hand. So the feeds go through Feedburner and they get counted. Now let’s move on to the actual “getting” of Feedburner on our site.

First, go to the Feedburner site at: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home and click on the button toward the top left of the screen that says “Blogs.” This will take you to the first page where you have to do something. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see this:

Type in your blog address

Do not click on the box that asks you if you are a podcaster, because you are not, so this does not apply to you. And then click on NEXT. You will be taken to a screen where you simply have to choose between Atom feeds and RSS feeds. Atom is simply another format. We will choose RSS, as you can see below:

Choose RSS feeds

Once you have chosen, simply click on NEXT. You will be taken to a screen that shows you your new Feedburner feed address. This is important, please copy and paste this address separately from what you are doing on the screen. If you have two monitors, great, just paste it into any Word or Notebook file on the other screen. You can also just write it on a piece of paper. Let me make another little note. You see the red arrow that points at the FEED TITLE? Well, that is what the world will see as the name of your feed in their Google Reader or whatever other feed reader they use, so write it the way you want people to see it, with the right use of capitalization and all that.

See your Feedburner feed address

Once you have copied the feed address, the one I highlighted in yellow, you can click on ACTIVATE FEED. Now, I am not going to click on this button because I don’t want to activate your feed for you, since I don’t have access to the administrator page of your blog. I will switch to a fake test blog that I started this afternoon and continue the process on that blog.

So once you activate the feed, you will be taken to a page where you are asked to set up a Google account. I know that Kloe already has one, so it will be easy for her. Incidentally, Google owns both Feedburner and Blogger (her blogging platform), so they will all “play well together.” Nice to know, right?

Here is what will happen next. When you click on ACTIVATE you will be asked to open an account or, if you have one, to sign in. If you are not Kloe and you don’t have a Google account, you can create one. If you don’t know how, just read the post on how to creat a Google account right here on Tech*Tips. If you are Kloe, then sign in, and you will be taken to the Feedburner page that displays all your feeds. Since this is your first one, it will only have Kloe Among the Turks. But it will look just like this:

Your New Feed

A small RSS gray button on the left, the name you chose in blue and the number of subscribers you have. Of course it is zero at first because we have just started.

Now comes a very important step! Feedburner will measure all the new subscriptions you get from this moment forward, but you want it also to go back and get all the subscribers you already have. To do that you have to access your administrator page, where you write new posts, and plop that string of text that I had you write down in a certain box. Let’s do that now with eggbirdtest and then you will know how to do it in your own blog. So here goes:

Open your administrator page, and click on the tab that says SETTINGS and then on the one that says SITE FEED. You will see the following screen: [IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO THIS STEP]

Remember the FEED ADDRESS that I told you to write down separately? Well, you have to paste it or type it into the window with all the arrows, the POST FEED REDIRECT URL. Read the paragraph I highlighted. This is where Feedburner catches all the feeds that are already going out to your loyal readers, the ones who, like me, have been following you from the beginning, and makes them cross the famous bridge so the little man with the clicker can count them too.

Also, in the upper portion of the screen, where you see ALLOW BLOG FEEDS and the little box currently is set to FULL, it’s up to you. If you want the entire article you post to be in the feed reader of the recipients, then leave it set to Full, otherwise change it to SHORT. That will cut off the feed after about 255 characters. Your posts are generally short, so I would stick with Full, but the advantage of using Short is that people who want to read the rest click on the “more” or “continue reading” that appears at the end of the short post and are taken directly to your site, where they will read other posts and look around. In the case of a commercial website this is advantageous. But in any case, if your goal is to be read, you want people to visit the site itself and not limit themselves to reading the feeds.

I hope this answers the first question, of how to actually “get” Feedburner. And now for the other two:

1. What do I think of Blogger? Well, I think that for a free site Blogger is fine. It belongs to Google and so does Feedburner so they will work very well together. I had a very successful blog on Blogger a couple of years ago and I found it very easy to use. Now it has been enhanced in many ways, I see, and it seems to work even better.

2. Am I afraid that you might lose your content? Well, not really. Your site is not violent or full of sexually explicit content or politically inflammatory rants or anything that could offend anybody, really, so I can’t imagine that Google would ever have any reason to suddenly drop the site altogether. Also, I know that you back up your content, and that is the key thing. If ever something “technical” should happen to the blog, you can simply reinstate it from your backup. As for not “owning” the site, here’s the deal: EVERYTHING YOU WRITE ONLINE IS YOURS. In other words, the copyright of your original images and artwork, even the photos you take of other artists’ work, is yours and no one can take it away. What you don’t own is the actual DOMAIN. the xxx.xxx.xxx.com/kloeamongtheturks part of it. The shell of the house that your content lives in. In other words, Blogger is like a hotel that lets you stay there for free. But if they ask you to leave, you take all your belongings with you.

Kloe dear, I hope this answers all your questions. And for all you other readers, please add your comments and ask any questions you wish to ask. You can ask in the comments, you can click on the Ask Egg Bird button, or you can click on the Contact tab of the site. And if you have a website or blog of your own, then run off and “get” Feedburner on it, right away!

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