SEO

The NoFollow tag is used to prevent search engine robots from transferring pagerank to a link. While the most common use of the Nofollow tag is to prevent spam in user generated content, it can also be used to "focus" pagerank within your website.

Allow me to elaborate: imagine your homepage as a flat board with a dozen or so holes drilled in it. You hold a pitcher in one hand which is filled with a magical juice called “pagerank”. The more holes you drill in the board, the less pagerank which will seep through each hole.

Now substitute “holes” for “links”. The more links you have leaving from a page, the less pagerank each of those links transfer. Therefore, using the “nofollow” tag is akin to plugging the holes; it forces more page rank at the links which are left open.

Begin by adding the nofollow attribute to non-important pages on your website: Privacy Policy, Terms of Service page, etc… Next, plug any external links which appear on every page, such as those of 3rd party authentication services (trust-e/better business bureau/ etc…).

Pretty neat, eh?

I found this neat little Java application for building search-engine compliant (XML) site maps for large websites - http://www.auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp.

Make sure to limit the number of threads you allow the software to use, as otherwise you may hammer your web server into oblivion. Also make sure your robots.txt file is setup properly, as otherwise the sitemap may contain links to pages you don't want the search engine to index.

I recently switched my hosting to NetFirms, as they are one of the few Canadian web hosting companies which allow you to host a number of domains on a single shared hosting account for free.

Netfirms does have its weaknesses though. Specifically, their mod_rewrite implementation is somewhat funky, resulting in almost every script needing a rewritten .htaccess file to get search engine friendly URLs working properly.

One script which has problems with Netfirms is Wordpress. If you are a Netfirms customer and can not get your Wordpress search engine friendly URLs to work properly, give the following .htaccess file a try

# BEGIN WordPress Netfirms HTAccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

#Forward domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

#Setup Wordpress Rewriting
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.php
RewriteRule (.*) index.php/$1 [L]

# END WordPress

One weakness in the above .htaccess is domain.com/index.php is not automatically forwarded to domain.com/, which is important to make sure all pagerank is focused at a single location. I will be addressing this in some future post :)

As previously mentioned, I'm currently working on search engine optimizing a Simple Machines Forum (AKA SMF).

I recieved some emails asking for more information about the specific steps one can take to make their forums more search engine accessible. Specifically, their forums have the common of problem of content being thrown into Google's supplemental index.

Here are a few SEO suggestions which may help (in no particular order of importance):

- Implement search engine friendly URLs (Instead of forum.com/index.php?thread=23423234%post=2343, forum.com/title-of-thread). Luckily, you don't have to implement this manually on SMF: It can be achieved via the use of a .htaccess modification and the SEO4SMF plugins.

- Prevent duplicate and non-useful content from being indexed by using a robots.txt file and/or Meta tags (meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"). Common examples of duplicate and non-useful content are printer-friendly versions of pages and user profile pages.

- Add a sitemap, both spider-readable (.xml) and human readable (.html) versions. This task can be automated as well with the SMF Sitemap Mod.

- If you use an image for a logo, add alt tags to it with your forum's name and a one sentance explanation of the topics it covers.

- Ensure meta description and keyword tags are being properly generated for each page. (Although most search engines do not take the meta description tag into significant consideration when determining your place in search results, a more descriptive meta description will result in more humans clicking your link, which in return is thought to improve your search rankings).

- Make title tags more descriptive - not appropriate for all forums, but if you have a number of very specific boards you can append the board name to each posts title tag, increasing its keyword relevancy.

- Add dynamic content to forum homepage - A list of links to yesterday's most popular threads works well.

- Allow users to add descriptive alt="" tags when uploading images, or tags when creating new messages

As more ideas pop into my head I will post them here -