Successful Blog

Google Page Ranks Underway

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Google Blog logo

This Just In

Duncan has announced at the Blog Herald that the Google Page Rank is underway.

Why is page rank important
to your blog and your business?

Page rank is Google’s system for ranking pages for its search tool. Page rank determines how relevant your blog is by using linking as a vote system. Google has developed an algorithm that weighs links between blogs A to B to C to A, and also looking also at the importance of the blogs making the links. Quality blogs that are well connected to other quality blogs are considered highly relevant to Google users. Relevant, quality, important blogs receive higher page ranks. Higher page ranks can mean higher advertising payments for blogs that monetize.

Darren offers more on page rank at Problogger.

The checker given by Duncan and Darren is considered the standard and is really all you need. However, there are others. These have varying degrees of accuracy. Here is one page rank checker.
PageRank: Search Engine Optimization

These are page rank predictors not checkers.
Medpan Page Rank Predictor
IWebTool

–ME “Liz” Strauss

MSN and Microsoft Joint Research Venture

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MSN search

For my tech friends and my friends on campus . . .

MSN and Microsoft Research have launched a joint venture called Live Labs. The purpose of the venture is to create new Internet research opportunities and new academic funding Internet research. A companion organization, called Search Labs, will be creating innovative products from prototypes developed at Live Labs. The project is located in Silicon Valley, and they’re hiring.

The information goes deep and wide below the Live Labs announcement post if you’re interested in finding out more about it.

The project sounds more than interesting, particularly the part about academic funding.

It never hurts to know what MSN and Microsoft are up to.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Google Blogger–403 Forbidden–How Could You Let that Happen!

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Powered by Blogger b-75

Dear Dr. Eric Schmidt and Larry Paige,

I realized last night that, as a Blogger blogger, I am a guest in your home or should I say a captive visitor. Darn, I thought I was a welcomed customer. What made this clear was when you locked me in my room and forbade me access to my stuff. My own parents didn’t use the word FORBIDDEN, nor have I ever used it with my child.

Yes, I realize that you at Google did not actually write the script for the 403 error code that uses the word FORBIDDEN, but you’ve been in business long enough to know how it works. You’re at the top. You get all three of the big Ps–the Big Press, the Big Paychecks, and the Big Pain when things go wrong.

Blogger has put on a show of the worst customer service and total random inefficiency I’ve seen in ages. It started about 2 days ago with outages. Then random inability to access Blogger blogs. Last night I was able to reach the dashboard of my Blogger writing blog, but not my blog itself–even from its own dashboard. I received a 403 Forbidden access error, because I was being read as a directory. It told me to contact myself and give me permission!

This was an opportunity for Google to show some care for its customer. Instead here’s the current Google Blog post still up.

Googleblog_blogspot.com

Google has an informative, how-to blog for everything, except for it’s Advertising cashcow Blogger.

Google Blog List

You might say, “What about Blogger Buzz?” The Blogger Blog is fun to read and chatty, but it offers little information about how to use Blogger. A post here too might have made me think that Google cared. It also might have made me know for sure that it was a Blogger problem and not a problem with my computer. This is the current post Blogger Buzz.

buzzblogger_com

The email abyss Blogger Help offers a return reply that says go search the help database. Then write again. Of course, then it never answers. Been there. Done that many times. It’s been that way for every email I’ve ever sent.

Google makes products, such as sitemaps, that don’t work on Blogger. To use them people have written scripts on Greasemonkey that go through Firefox to rewrite your software. Blogger customers are forced to get help from other Blogger users. That’s not customer service. That’s leaving customers to fend for themselves.

When I look at your corporate structure, it’s very telling. I don’t find the word customer anywhere.

Google Corporate Executives

Larry, you write ten points that you call the Google Philosophy. You explain each one carefully. I bet most users (that’s what you call us isn’t it?) have never read about them and will be surprised to see them.

Let me remind you what they are.

  1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
  2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
  3. Fast is better than slow.
  4. Democracy on the web works.
  5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
  6. You can make money without doing evil.
  7. There’s always more information out there.
  8. The need for information crosses all borders.
  9. You can be serious without a suit.
  10. Great just isn’t good enough.

My answer: Get a Blogger blog, and you’ll see that where Blogger is concerned NUMBER 10 IS REALLY NOT A WORRY.

Why not try what Technorati has done recently . . . decide that customers are people who deserve support, not users who will always be there. Hire a full time Blogger Customer Service Team. Don’t make your customers do your work for you. That’s not nice.

How could I possibly, tell a new blogger that Blogger is the platform he or she should use to be successful?

I’m the nice one.

Sincerely,

ME “Liz” Strauss

PS. I forgot to mention. I could not get to Blogger Status. I didn’t remember the address. Why don’t you have a link to it under Blogger Help on the Dashboard? There was no notice to go there.

UPDTATE—If you came to this page because you got a 403 Forbidden Error, the URL to find out what’s going on is

http://status.blogger.com/

That’s where you can get up-to-minute information about what is going on.

Google for some reason can’t see to get that information where people can find it. So they send you to Successful-Blog, because they know that I have it. Bookmark this page because, as we all know Blogger and Blogspot go down A LOT

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Google–Do You Have Something to Tell Me?
Check Google Backlinks Through Yahoo
Google Site Maps–Looking for Lancelot or Guinevere
Google Zeitgeist–Will Make ME Millions

SEE ALSO:
Blogspot Status Link Page

Great Find: SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide

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seomoz_org logo

Great Find: SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Type of Article: A Series of Articles on SEO
Permalink: Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Target Audience: Any blogger who is curious about SEO and how it works
Content: SEOmoz, a Seatlle-based Search-engine organization has put together this series to help individuals, organizations, and companies who have little to no experience with search engine optimization and want to learn the basics of how search engines work. The organization states their goal as to improve your ability to drive search traffic to your site and debunk major myths about SEO. We share this knowledge to help businesses, government, educational, and non-profit organizations benefit from being listed in the major search engines.

From this list it appears that they take their goals very seriously. The first four (in purple) give you a quick look at what you might be interested in further down the line. All of the articles are short and written in clear, plain English, so they’re easy to follow and, well, interesting to read. Take a peek.

This is one fine reference to add to your library. It’s nice to bump into an SEO org that wants to share what it knows in such an organized fashion. Thanks SEOmoz.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
Blog Review Checklist
Blog Basics 1: Comments and Comment Policies
Great Find: Tlog Blogging Tips Series

No More NoFollow

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I asked Sumeet Jain if I could republish this post of his here, because though I had heard of the issue, I didn’t fully understand it. He was more than happy to agree. I thought it best to include all parts of his article including comments. I encourage you to check out the links along the way for more information and an additional tutorial should you decide remove nofollow yourself. –ME “Liz” Strauss

no more nofollow
by Sumeet Jain

Monday, December 19th

If you’re a blog owner, please pay attention. Early this year, Google announced the nofollow value for the rel attribute. This made it possible for blog owners to stop Google from crediting sites comments link to. This was mostly received positively and most blogging platforms picked it up. WordPress, the most popular blogging platform, includes nofollow by default. The logic behind the move is to shut out comment spammers by not rewarding them. Whether or not that’s an effective way to shut them out is not what I care to discuss. I dislike nofollow because it’s antithetical to the web.

So I’ve removed it from my installation of WordPress, and I encourage you to do the same.

Removing nofollow yourself:

Open wp-includes/comment-functions.php.

Find “function get_comment_author_link”
Replace “return = “$author”
with “return = “$author“.
Save and close.

Removing nofollow via plugin:
I haven’t tested any of these, but they’re available nonetheless.

DoFollow

Follow URL

For an detailed explanation of why nofollow is bad, check out NoNoFollow.

COMMENTS

a little birdie named Jem told me,
There’s more to getting rid of nofollow that editing wp-includes/comment-functions.php – I wrote a tutorial on it AGES ago. 🙂 You can find it here: nofollow removal tutorial

i thought about it and responded,
Hi Jem, thanks for the link to the tutorial – nofollow certainly has been around long enough that many tutorials were written. I wanted to wait a bit and see what kind of reception it got and impact it had on the community. It’s sad that the way it was used was simply to stick it in all the comments – like a blanket solution to a very intricate problem.

It might have been nicer if platforms like WordPress were strategic in their use of nofollow. For example, if a blog has moderation enabled, then all comments can at least be shown initially but have nofollow included. I can definitely see a couple uses for it, but it really is unfortunate that the only prolific use of nofollow was to kill linking.

As a side note to others reading this, Jem’s tutorial will remove nofollow for links within the comment as well. For example, the link to her tutorial in her comment above would not have the nofollow value. Some of you may like to maintain that value while others may not.

a little birdie named Jem told me,
“like a blanket solution to a very intricate problemâ€? – I couldn’t have put it better myself.

I don’t have anything against those who choose to use nofollow, although I don’t believe in it myself.. my major problem with it when I used WordPress was that it was forced upon people. Why not have it as an optional feature? Of course, it’s not a problem for me since I coded my own weblog, heh.

i thought about it and responded,
I do have something against those who choose to use nofollow. It’s likely my own ignorance, because I can’t think of why they would use it.

a little birdie named Tauquil told me,
I’m all with you on this one.

i thought about it and responded,
Glad to have your support, Tauquil. I noticed that your blog is one of the few that does follow links. Props to you.

You’ll find this post and the follow-up post here:

This article: no more nofollow

The follow-up post: nofollow advocacy

–Sumeet and Liz

Related articles:
How to Code Accessible Links–Part 1
Blogger/ Firefox–Editing Trap
Blog Construction–What’s Your Function?
Use Bloglines OPML to Find Interesting Blogs

Great Find: Developers Digest Web Design Tips

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Every Successful and Outstanding Blogger should know about this. The find is both the article from a programmer’s resource wiki.

Great Find: Developers Digest Web Design Tips
Type of Article: A Wealth of Wiki Articles on Web Design Advice
Permalink: Developers Digest Web Design Tips
Target Audience: Any blogger who wants a blog design that works for reachers (and search engines)

Content: As a publisher, not a programmer, I found this design advice to be totally on target. It’s clear, straightforward, and without a wasted word. If the screenshot below were the entire article, it would be superior to most of what I’ve found compacted in any one place–either in print or on the web. However the screenshot is just the Table of Contents. Each line is a link to a paragraph. You need more information. You’ve got it.

www.developersdigest.org/wiki design tips article

I love programmers. They’re so organized. Isn’t that beautiful?

Thank you, Developers Digest[dot]org.

This one is so good that I’m filing it with my checklists too.

. . . you know how much I like those checklists.

–ME “Liz” Strauss