Barack Obama may have won as the new President of the United States but the clear winner in the 2008 US Elections is no doubt, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate- Gov. Sarah Palin! She came out of nowhere, from this tiny state of Alaska and a few months later emerged to become a household name more famous than most of the seasoned politicians in Washington. More popular even than body builder turned Terminator actor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was elected Governor of California in 2003.

Her name is known not only in the US but throughtout the world; and not only the offline world but the online world of the internet. She is the number one most searched keyword in the election and to this day remains to be at the top list. Almost all political websites and blogs keen on their SEOs have made sure they have enough Sarah Palin articles to draw people to their sites and appear on Google searches. And why not?

Unfortunately, we wouldn’t really want to be in her position as her popularity stem from mostly negative campaign started by the liberals. She has been the brunt and favorite target of jokes ranging from subtle, harsh and plain mean! She’s been called different names and honestly we don’t get it.

We found this post suggesting:

Sarah Palin’s Top Ten Stupidest Moments

The article has at least a twist in the end believing otherwise about Sarah Palin. However in message boards, forums and blog comments, they have branded Sarah Palin countless labels from stupid, idiot, fool, brainless and all the unprintables.

Seriously now. If these people bad-mouthing her think they’re better than Palin, why aren’t they governing Alaska?! The ‘namecallers’ are regular, normal people like you and me, giving labels to a respectable woman who has been in government since 1992 as a City Council first, a Mayor and currently a Governor. Who are they calling idiot?  They should try looking at the mirror sometime, they may be looking at their own reflection…

He pointed out five ways to optimize a website:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.

2. Fill in your “tags.”

3. Get other sites to “link” back to you.

4. Create a blog and post often.

5. Register for free tools.

To read the explanation for each. Visit the site!

What is duplicate content?

Simply it is text content that is shown elsewhere in the internet- either in your other web pages or other people’s web pages. It is a copy of the same article found in another page in the internet.

More exposure of same content=More Traffic?

When we maintain multiple websites, there is the tendency to cross-promote published articles from within these websites- thinking it would promote the articles more and get added exposure. For most, a simple cut and paste of the entire article does the trick. It stems from the idea that “the more places I put it out there, the more people would see it, so my traffic will increase!” That line of thinking comparably, is like reproducing a book for distribution so more people could get to it.

Unfortunately, that only works in actual products or services for distribution offline. What we do online with our published articles has consequential effects in terms of search engine optimization and rankings. For the unaware, the simple syndication of our articles in feeds and aggregators already qualifies as duplicate content. Same goes as say, maintaining a blog in Blogspot and allowing your Multiply or Facebook account to show the same articles in the respective accounts.

Duplicate content matters to Search engines

Although there is no direct duplicate content penalty, you are making it hard for search engines to rank your individual web pages when it is also available from another source, either the same or nearly the same content. They may be considered duplicate even if they are not fully identical. In this case, search engines will only list or show one version of the content in their search results and you better hope it is your website appearing on the search and not some other sites that syndicated your article without a permanent link back to your original article!

When search engines find duplicate contents, their search algorithm will determine which one is the better article to show in the results. That is only understandable as you don’t want to be typing a keyword and finding four articles with the same exact content found on different web pages. Google and others will filter those articles out and pick the best to show in the result. They would base it on the number and quality of the inbound links connected to the content.

How to avoid Duplicate content

• If you must show the same article in your other web pages, choose which one you want Google and others to show in search results. Remember that search engines also see the printer version, mobile version when available on your site on top of your regular content version. Hide the others. How? By Adding a noindex meta tag to your duplicate contents. We showed you how in this previous article:

REP META tag: How Google and Other Search Engines Find Your Website

• Require back links from other sources. If you syndicate your articles, make sure the articles point back to your website so search engines know where the content came from. They may like the other content from another site not your own, then your article will not show up in search at all.

Some tips and more explanation on duplicate content from Google may be found on the Webmaster Help center.

What about snippets or quotations?

It’s all right to get a summary or some quotations and lines from your own original article to place it on another site of your own. We stress original article as copying someone else’s article and claiming it your own is a whole different issue- and a serious one at that. That is called plagiarism and original articles are in fact copyrighted and is protected by law. You can not just copy another else’s work. When you do, that is also a duplicate content and it will show.

Copyscape.com can detect duplicate content!

Make your own original unique content for your websites and avoid getting penalized by Google or by copyright laws.

Here is a tool checker we found to detect duplicate contents from two websites. They give our results in percentage and basically, the lower the percentage- the lower your chances of being penalized by search engines for duplicate content. When checking, you would want a lower percentage result and not higher.

Note: This tool when used will open another browser leading to the host’s website where it can yield the result and interpret it.

Privacy Policy

In standard Terms and Conditions, either we read or not- we need not have to do anything and as long as we’re doing everything in the most proper and legal way, we won’t run into trouble.

However, reading closely the new TOS of Google Adsense, we are in fact required to do something- that is transparency. All web publishers must create a Privacy Policy section on their websites if using Google Adsense. Specifically, we need to tell our readers that third parties like Google Adsense maybe putting cookies or web beacons on their computers without their knowledge while browsing our website.

Part of the Google Terms and Conditions read:

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that complies with applicable privacy and data protection laws and that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

Where to Get Privacy Policy Sample

Good guys of Google didn’t even think that regular bloggers may not be well equipped with technical and legal jargons to formulate its own Privacy Policy. How and where to even begin?! They required it, they should have at least provided everybody with a standard policy in which to copy or become the basis for creating one.

Everyone has until May 25th to accept the TOS and or put up their own Privacy Policy. Not accepting the Terms would mean being banned from using Google Adsense forever!

If you notice, we now have a Privacy Policy page on our blog. Nope, we weren’t creative enough to come up with one but we found a WordPress plugin (Big thank you Eric Giguere!) that did everything for us.

Installation is simple, as with most WordPress plugins. Download the privacy-policy-1.0.zip file and extract its contents into your blog’s wp-content/plugin. Extract and you should be able to find a Privacy Policy folder. Go to your site admin and activate the plugin. Check the details and make changes if necessary on the setting section and you’re done! Visit the plugin creator’s site, Synclastic to learn more.

Not a WordPress user? Don’t fret. you may cut and paste from our Privacy Policy section. Just make sure to change all the details to reflect your own site. OR we found this simple and effective Privacy Policy from JenSense which you may also cut and paste. Remember to fill in the necessary information relating to your site.

Privacy Policy for ____.com

The privacy of our visitors to ____.com is important to us.

At _____.com, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use visit _____.com, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties.

Log Files
As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.

Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums.

We also use third party advertisements on ____.com to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP , the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).

You can chose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.

AdSense Privacy Policy Provided by <a href=”http://www.JenSense.com”>JenSense</a>

OR now that you have examples, you may decide to create your own Privacy Policy and give it your fresh twist. PLEASE don’t forget to give credit where it’s due! Do not remove the backlinks from where you got the information.

Read and know more of Google’s own Privacy Policy here.

Yahoo, Inc. submitted a patent pointing out that search engines may soon be looking at our web page design for consideration in Search rankings. The patent is a method with guidelines determining a usability of a web page.

“It can be important to make web pages easy and pleasing to use, which can be particularly important for web pages it is desired to monetize. This may include, for example, advertisement-containing web pages (of a so-called “web portal,” for example), for which an advertiser pays money when a user views the web page and activates a link of the advertisement. If such web pages are not easy and pleasing to use, the money-making potential of those web pages can be jeopardized. One conventional indication of whether a web page is easy and pleasing to use is called “clutter,” Yahoo further explains on the patent application.

Structural Characteristics of a web page

Here are 51 factors detailed on the patent that search engines may look into for usability of a web page:

* Total number of links
* Total number of words
* Total number of images (non-ad images)
* Image area above the fold (non-ad images)
* Dimensions of page
* Page area (total)
* Page length
* Total number of tables
* Maximum table columns (per table)
* Maximum table rows (per table)
* Total rows
* Total columns
* Total cells
* Average cell padding (per table)
* Average cell spacing (per table)
* Dimensions of fold
* Fold area
* Location of center of fold relative to center of page
* Total number of font sizes used for links
* Total number of font sizes used for headings
* Total number of font sizes used for body text
* Total number of font sizes
* Presence of “tiny” text
* Total number of colors (excluding ads)
* Alignment of page elements
* Average page luminosity
* Fixed vs. relative page width
* Page weight (proxy for load time)
* Total number of ads
* Total ad area
* Area of individual ads
* Area of largest ad above the fold
* Largest ad area
* Total area of ads above the fold
* Page space allocated to ads
* Total number of external ads above the fold
* Total number of external ads below the fold
* Total number of external ads
* Total number of internal ads above the fold
* Total number of internal ads below the fold
* Total number of internal ads
* Number of sponsored link ads above the fold
* Number of sponsored link ads below the fold
* Total number of sponsored link ads
* Number of image ads above the fold
* Number of image ads below the fold
* Total number of image ads
* Number of text ads above the fold
* Number of text ads below the fold
* Total number of text ads
* Position of ads on page

Can’t tell if your site is messy for comfort? Not sure how your website fares compared with others? We at Blogs That Follow follow a site that showcases all the worst websites in the internet. Check it out! Get rid of the clutter and be user and search engine friendly.

Three Types of Links

One way link

This is a basic link wherein you cite a website in your post and the site doesn’t link back to you. For example, we are linking wikipedia for an article on hyperlinks. Wikipedia doesn’t link back to us so we created a one way link.

Two way or Reciprocal link

This refers to mutual linking of sites. This type of link help each other out in terms of traffic. Most often, bloggers of the same niche or category request each other to exchange links thus gaining more exposure. For example, blogrolls found on personal blogs are almost always placed there with an exchanged link from the other bloggers featured on the roll.

Three way Link

This is believed to be the most effective of all links if we are to listen to webmasters. Most webmasters think that one way link isn’t any good but so is the reciprocal link so they formulated the three way link concept.

This means that website 1 links to website 2, website 2 links to website 3 and website 3 links to website 1- completing the three way linking.

What do we think?

We don ‘t believe that three way linking is the best strategy in yielding higher search engine rankings. Sure it helps but so are the other types of link. We think all are equal and that reciprocal linking is only slightly better.

The most important thing to consider is that good inbound links are the links that will definitely help in getting higher search engine results. The bottomline is that careful consideration should be exercised when linking with other sites. Let us not be in the habit of exchanging links to anybody who asks or to any website we come across just to get a link. Links to our website should be related or within the same topic, niche or category to get better ranking.

If a reciprocal link is linked to a forgettable page then ‘forget’ about it. A one way or three way link that is linked to a low quality content is just as forgettable and would do us no good. Simply remember, links from high quality websites will greatly help in search engine rankings and links from trashy or low quality sites won’t. © 2007

You’ve probably been asked many times or you’ve probably asked the question yourself to friends. Admittedly, “googling” is among our most favorite past time when in the internet! We may have been using the phrases “to google,” “googled her,” “googling someone” for years but in case you have not heard, Google is officially a verb in the English-language dictionaries only since 2006; prior to that, it is only a noun and we were using the verb as slang.

So what, right? Well since its inclusion in the English dictionaries as a verb, Google has been concerned that the common usage in phrases like “to google someone” or our use of the above line, “googling” is among our most favorite past time… poses a threat to the branding of Google as a company. They are pleading and showing us in their blog how to use Google in the right context and are really telling the media not to use Google to refer to a general search, rather use Google in its context- that is to search using the Google search engine as described in the dictionary.

They have good reason to be worried. We’ve seen it happen to so many brand names when its wide generic usage eventually lead to losing the brand name and given for public use forgetting the company who owns it. Bayer had to give away aspirin as a brand name in the United States (although in some countries, Bayer still keeps Aspirin as a brand). The term elevator, thermos, escalator, walkman, q-tips, chapstick, cellophane, dry ice, brassiere, frisbee, xerox, fedex, kleenex, band-aid, lycra, jell-o, scotch tape, kool-aid are just some of the names we use commonly and interchangeably with any other related product.

Examples:

• Can you xerox this book by the end of the day? (should be, can you photocopy this book…?)
• Wipe your nose with a Kleenex. (Kimberly-clark Corp. aren’t really happy every time we use kleenex to refer to other competing brands so it should have been: Wipe your nose with a tissue.)
• Please buy the cheapest scotch tape you could find. (Huh? Scoth tape is a brand owned by 3M but we never say, Please buy the cheapest adhesive tape you could find.)
• You can take the elevator or the escalator. (Very few would say: You can take the lift or the electric powered stairs)
• I always carry a band-aid with me. (even if what I actually carry is a store brand adhesive strip)
• I bring a thermos to work. (even if my thermal flask is from Farberware)
• I carry my iPod everyday! (even if I have a Zune mp3 player; we’ve added this one because Apple Computer is also defending its iPod usage to strictly refer to the iPod and not any other mp3 players.)

How do you “Google”?

Do you Google on Yahoo or MSN? Of course not! When we say: “I google,” we mean it as searching and using THE Google search engine, nothing more. We’ve heard very minor instances when someone actually said: “can you Google this person in Yahoo! please?”

That is exactly what Google is trying to safeguard. However, we really do not see Google going down the path of say Kleenex or escalator. Far from it. “To google” is very obvious that what we’re referring to is the Google search site. Google is the company name. It is hard to dissociate google the verb to the Google the company. In fact search is widely accepted to be synonymous with the Google search.

Google can not censor and sue just about any Tom, Dick and Harry who uses the phrase: “Google him on Yahoo! ”

Google can not stop people from using the word as a verb more so now that the word is listed in the English dictionaries. The word is spreading and it’s usage getting wider and it is there for the next generations to come.

While Google must still watch out for its trademark- it should loosen up a little bit and enjoy the huge accomplishment of not only becoming a household name but being officially included for use in the English language; for what better measure is there for success than worldwide recognition and acceptance in print and in an official language? © 2007

What happens if we’re not hosting our own site and we don’t have access to the root directory of our domain? Now comes the REP META tag which we can manually place in our HTML files to control crawling, caching and snippets of our pages. The META tag is especially useful when we can get into individual pages of our site via the HTML but not the /robots.txt. Basically, if we don’t keep sensitive files and have no problem with search engines indexing all our pages, we can do away with placing /robots.txt file because the REP META tag works the same as the /robots.txt if not better in other ways because it offers flexibility in how we want our individual pages indexed by search engines thru HTML.

What does “robots” META tag look like and how does it work?

In structure, it is the same as other meta tags we can find when we open our template and view the HTML code. This is our meta tag for our description:

<meta name=”decription” content=”A Blog of Blogs That Follow Directory for Do Follow Bloggers. Link Submit site.” />

For the robots meta tag, it will be something like:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />

where you’re instructing the robots to NOT index the page and NOT follow any links on the page.

This is how you can use the meta tag to suit your need.

Here are some actual examples of the robots META tag based on the above usage:

• This will NOT allow both indexing and following of links by a robot crawling on the page:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />

OR you can also use this to get the same instruction of no indexing and no following of links:

<meta name=”robots” content=”none”>

• This will allow indexing of the page, but instructs the robot to ignore any links within the page:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,nofollow” />

• This will not allow archiving of the page and instructs to ignore found links, but lets the robot find and get snippets of the page and allows indexing of the URL.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive,nofollow,snippets,index” />

• This will not allow indexing of the page, but lets the robot find and follow the links within the page.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />

Where do we put the robots META tag?

We place the meta tag just below the <head> which can be found in the topmost part of our HTML code or place it just before </head> part.

We reiterate as found on robotstxt.org site that:

“There are two important considerations when using the robots <META> tag:

• robots can ignore your <META> tag. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
• the NOFOLLOW directive only applies to links on this page. It’s entirely likely that a robot might find the same links on some other page without a NOFOLLOW (perhaps on some other site), and so still arrives at your undesired page.

Don’t confuse this NOFOLLOW with the rel="nofollow" link attribute.”

The rel=”nofollow” Attribute

The “rel=nofollow” is a Google invention, and is also supported by Yahoo and MSN, that is link specific and more to do with the ranking of a page rather than simply following or not following the links for indexing. It is somewhat confusing but they both have almost the same end result except that the rel=”nofollow”, once placed on a specific link means it will not get a ‘vote’ in the popularity ranking of a page. The search engine will disregard and ignore the link and it will not go to that link to index or follow that page.

That is why, we support the removal of rel=”nofollow” tag in our comments page because we value the readers who leave a comment on our posts. We want to make sure that Google, Yahoo and MSN find their link just as important as the site visited upon.

The rel=”nofollow” and robots meta tag does work in various instances, say we decided to write a story on “Evil Sites” and therefore can not help but include some sites that we find as evil. What we would do is put a robots meta tag for the entire post:
<html>
<head>
<title>Evil Sites</title>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
</head>

which means that the search engines sure can index the post but instructs it to ignore and disregard all links found.

More particularly: we could include a rel=”nofollow” attribute on the HTML code for the specific link we don’t want to be associated with:

<a href=http://www.evilsite.com/ rel=”nofollow“>Evil Site</a>

OR

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.evilsite.com/” >Evil Site</a>

The last thing we want is to tell Google, Yahoo and MSN that we approve this site and give a vote on it; that we want to be associated with the Evil Site!! In this instance, we find the rel=”nofollow” attribute to be helpful and useful.

Nonetheless, do we really want the same thinking to give to our readers leaving us a comment by still keeping the rel=”nofollow” tag on our comments page? That we’re telling them, thanks for commenting but we don’t want to be associated with you and you have no value to us… We don’t think so.

Why not give Do Follow a chance then and become a Do Follow supporter yourself? Please find our helpful topics on Do follow:

What is Do Follow?

How Does rel=”nofollow” Impact My Blog?

© 2007

Everyday hundreds of web robots and search engine crawlers set out to accomplish a huge task- that of visiting billions of pages in the internet, be it Google’s bot indexing all our pages and the rest of the web or the bad robots called spam bots hunting down every email addresses it could find to steal it.

For the most part, we love it when Google pays us a visit to index our content! Knowing what Google and others are getting however means we’re taking an extra step to direct them only to the content we want indexed. Sometimes there are areas in our directory where we don’t want others to see like our temp folder. To save bandwidth, we may want images, stylesheets or other files from being indexed too. For confidential files on our site, like a database of names and addresses of contacts, of course, it is best to just put it offline or onto another machine than risking spreading it on the net.

Comes the term Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). Think of this as a sign to our office where it says, restricted area. That means for employees access only and meant to drive away unwanted visitors. /robots.txt works just like that. There is another REP to place in META tag that works the same way. We will discuss it in our next post. We’ll talk about the former first.

What is /robots.txt?

/robots.txt is a simple text file. It’s not an HTML, just a basic text file that can do wonders! It instructs robots which pages we would NOT want them to visit. It is not required of them to follow so but generally good robots and crawlers are courteous enough to comply with what is asked of them. It is important to note nonetheless that as in the above comparison of a restricted area, it’s just a sign to an unlocked door. It doesn’t mean that the unwanted visitor can’t get in when he wants to! Bad robots like spam bots and malware bots may still get through the door to look for loopholes in your security and those email addresses but the good bots will definitely abide with the sign and will not barge in uninvited.

As mentioned earlier, it is risky to place sensitive files on your directory and hope that robots.txt will protect it from being indexed and appearing in search results. /robots.txt is also public and may be accessed by anyone and it sees exactly what sections you don’t want robots to see so that you don’t want a filename like /mybankaccounts on the /robots.txt included. It just tells them you can’t view mybankaccounts folder but if you know a way to get into it, you can!

What does robots.txt look like and how does it work?

The concept of robots.txt is this: a robot wants to visit the site http://www.myownsite.com/welcome.html. Before it does anything, it first looks for http://www.myownsite.com/robots.txt, to find out which pages it can index or not. If it can’t find the filename, it will go ahead and index everything on that directory.

This is the basic structure of a robots.txt file where * (asterisk) means ALL robots and / (slash) means all pages should not be indexed. As a file it means: ALL robots are NOT allowed to index any of the pages. We don’t want that but just so you know the basic component, Disallow: /thenfilename .

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

On the other hand this below says to allow all robots to index all pages. This is usually the default for all websites unless we manually create robots.txt to include files we don’t want indexed.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

If you don’t have really much yet on your site, it is best to just do the above or simply create a robots.txt file and leave it empty or just not do anything. The /robots.txt works for those who have files in their directories that they don’t want to be indexed; files they don’t want to see appear on searches.

To save bandwidth and there’s really no point in having folders like our images or cgi-bin or other files from being indexed, we create this below which means you’re allowing all robots to index your pages except the one listed on the Disallow.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /privatestuff
Disallow: /temp/

If you want to be specific and only allow google to search your directory, you may do so with this:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /privatedir/

It means you’re allowing Google to index your pages except the cgi-bin and privatedir folders. Note however that if you do this, you’re not allowing MSN, Yahoo or Alexa to index your site. So you might want to reconsider doing so.

The samples above should be used as it is. Be careful with spelling, missing colons and placements. For example, writing Disalow instead of Disallow or User Agent instead of User-agent. Also the filename is robots.txt not Robots.Txt.

Where to place the robots.txt file?

Placement of the robots.txt file is very important since wrong placement means the robots and search crawlers won’t be able to find it, hence will most likely index ALL your pages. They don’t have all day to look for robots.txt file on our files. The only place to put is on the root directory of the site, not on folders, not on sub-directories. To check for your robots.txt file, just place this on the URL tab of the browser: http://myownsite.com/robots.txt

We shared only the basic information on robots.txt. To learn more about robots.txt, visit robotstxt.org. This page will bring you to the Robots Database. A list of over 300 identified robots wandering in the internet everyday.

To create and validate your robots.txt file, Clockwatchers can help! Motoricerca is also a robots.txt checker.