Category: SEO


Stuck on searching for only the “Do Follow” blogs to leave comments? According to Google, all is not lost for those who leave comments on blog posts or web pages using the “No Follow” attribute!

According to Google’s Webmaster Central, you may still benefit by leaving comments on relevant blogs using the no follow attribute, (assuming you are filling in the form with your blog or website url, and that the site links your name to your blog or website, from their comment section). If you don’t believe me, read for yourself the following excerpt below from Google Webmaster Central:

“Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.”

In other words, if your blog or website is already linked to by other reputable sites, and/or you have submitted a Sitemap to Google, then your comments with a link to your site may still be of benefit to you! My research on this topic led me to the above quote from Google’s site after reading an article about the benefits of commenting. In David Koh’s article about the benefits of commenting, he stated,

“It doesn’t really matter whether the blog is a no-follow blog or a do-follow blog, you still get a back-link to your site.”

The other obvious benefit of commenting on sites that use the no follow attribute is the fact that it can also still of course lead to an increase of traffic to your site, providing you leave read-worthy comments, and that your site is relevant to the one you commented on.

To serve as an example, I’ve included some images here to demonstrate the fact that leaving comments on no follow blogs, will still be of benefit to your blog! The image you see below is a comment I recently left on a blog, that is relevant to my Tall Sails Adventure blog. The comment I left is on a Blogger blog, which automatically utilizes the no follow attribute, which you can see in the properties shown in the image including my comment, with my name linked to my Tall Sails Adventure blog.

Regardless of that fact that it was a no follow attribute comment, Yahoo has already picked up on my comment, counting it as a link to my blog! :)

Yes, I realize Yahoo works differently than Google, but the point here is that commenting on blogs with the no follow attribute is still beneficial to you, and this serves as just one example.

Keep in mind though that the more relevant your blog post permalink  topic has with the blog post you’re commenting on, the better it is for you. Don’t always leave comments with just your blog home page. Use relevant blog post permalinks whenever it makes sense to.

The second image below shows an incoming link I discovered while I checked out my links with Yahoo. It didn’t take long for Yahoo to count it as a link for my blog, and I’ll certainly not complain about a link count from Yahoo! Results like this are also now showing up in my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard too!

If you spend your time only looking for blogs with the Do Follow attribute, you will probably spend more time making that determination, when instead you could have spent the time in contributing good comments regardless of which attribute the website or blog applies. If you didn’t already know of this benefit, my hope is that you now understand how commenting on blogs that use the no follow attribute is still beneficial for your blog.

With all that being said…. Care to comment now? :)

Scenario…
1. You moved your Blogger blogspot blog to a new custom domain.

2. You want to check if Blogger implemented a 301 redirect for redirecting your old blogspot url to your new custom domain.

3. You use the Blogger free hosting service, and therefore do not have access to the back-end of your site for full control.

If that scenario fits you, or if you want to double-check your 301 redirect for any other url, here’s a handy 301 redirect checker tool to use! To clarify for those who are not yet familiar with redirect codes, a 301 redirect creates a permanent redirect for your old domain name to your new domain.

To utilize the tool, enter your old url (blogspot.com url if that’s what you had) and the redirect checker tool will determine if indeed the old url is working under the 301 redirect command to go to your domain. It’s that easy!

I checked my old blogspot urls to determine if mine was correctly redirected utilizing the 301 redirect, and here’s the image from using the redirect checker tool so you can see how easy it is to use.

301 Redirect Checker Tool

301 Redirect Checker Tool

Happy blogging on your own domain!

Improve Bounce Rate

For starters, let me clarify what this article is NOT talking about. It’s not about dryer sheets, your kids super ball or how far silly putty might bounce. For those of you perhaps panicking over how much you spent this week it’s also not about bouncing checks. :P

This article IS about what every web or blogmaster would want to understand, but perhaps would prefer to ignore — the bounce rate of your landing page.

Have you checked your site stats bounce rates? It can certainly portray an ugly picture at times and will fluctuate depending on the referring source, your keywords, content, page speed and yata yata yata — a whole lot of other stuff.

On one of my sites my bounce rate had been what I considered to be fair for quite a few months. All that changed earlier this month and I needed to research why. As mentioned above, there are many factors that can affect your bounce rate so it takes some analysis.

In this particular case I attributed it to the fact that I began to receive quite a bit of traffic from a foreign site. Suddenly the bounce rate went to heck in a hell basket (or how ever you say it – lol), and I have determined it is most likely attributed to the fact that the foreign site is sending traffic over from mainly non-English speaking or reading individuals. Sure, I could change that by adding a Google translator, but I prefer to leave it in just English. Enough of that rabbit trail here, but that should serve as an example with how a referring site can affect your bounce rate either way.

Sometimes I think many bloggers just start to blog and blog and blog without ever taking the time to digest some important factors that affect their blogs traffic. I will be the first to admit that I was guilty of that for a long time, and primarily because it can be overwhelming with how much there is to learn. Blogging is far more than a social event and to not lose your interest you need to see an improvement in your traffic.

So, what to do? Start studying your blogs bounce rate, which begins by understanding how to read your site stats. If you would like to identify what to look for and what to do with the information to become proactive with your bounce rate I found several very good articles to refer you to.

This article about improving your bounce rate will give you some great food for thought so you can begin to understand more about what bounce rate is and how to improve your bounce rate, and click-through rate. Hope that is of help to you.

I’ve seen the Apogee name in numerous places in recent times and I finally had the time to take a look at it and find out more about it. Apogee has grown to become one of the 25 largest Search Engine Marketing firms in the world, so I guess that explains why I’ve been seeing their name around much more.

They have their blog as well as their main site for ethical SEO strategies. One of their blog posts I found interesting covers some of the same information I’ve shared here in numerous posts.

You may recall in some of our prior posts here in our Blog Master Tools section we’ve talked about the importance of focusing on your blog post title tags to practice good seo. On Apogee’s blog they shared the importance of the title tags fueling Google’s ranking factors for your blogs. The title tags topped the list!

I know I’ve been guilty myself plenty of times when I’ve forgotten the importance of focusing on my keywords for my title tags. The drawback too if you create poor title tags is that you cannot change them once your blog posts are published, otherwise the page will end up as a dead page online, which is also not good for your blogs seo.

In short, never forget the importance of your title tags, and the keywords or key phrases you use to create them. We as bloggers always have to remember that we write for not only the human reader, but for robots too!

Calling all bloggers! It’s time to register for our interactive blogging community! Here’s the scoop on a few cool features you will have access to as a member of our interactive blogging community:

  • Your Personal Profile Page, which includes Your Own Url to Promote
  • Your Blogs Listed in our Member Blog Directory
  • Your Personal Avatar, Custom Created & Uploaded, or Generic Choice
  • Interactive Fun Forum with Over 40 Blogging Categories to Contribute to
  • The Opportunity to Participate in One-on-One Link & Blog Challenges
  • The Opportunity to Participate in Group Link & Blog Challenges
  • The Ability to Establish Incoming Back Links in an SEO Friendly Way
  • New Post Creation for Your Blogs through Completed Multiple Challenges
  • Perfect for the Wanna-Be Blogger, and for the Most Seasoned Blogger
  • A Scrolling Member Gallery for Extra Click-Through Potential to Your Profile
  • Keyword Search to Target Your Blogs – No Worthless Traffic Exchange
  • Fun, fun and more fun as you build incoming links to your blogs

But wait, it doesn’t stop there! There are even more benefits, which are not listed here, and we are already working on other features to benefit you even further as a blogger! Those will be announced at a future date.

Register now to get started and become a part of history in the making! I’ll see you there! :D

Naturally we have all been raised to write for the human reader. I doubt many parents raise their children remarking, “Now Johnny, be sure to practice writing so the robot can read your story!” As crazy as it sounds, we as bloggers are faced with the task to not only write for humans, but for robots too!

Have you written your blog posts for humans only, or are you also aiming to please the robots appetite for the latest scoop? Although it may be your specialty, robots are not looking to read the latest gossip, but they are looking to read strong keywords and key phrases. Now toss the robots some keyword biscuits and key phrase sandwiches and you will be handsomely rewarded!

Blogging with robots in mind is not the easiest task for a blogger because it means we have to write in a manner that may not be considered very pleasing for the human reader. In fact if you were in an English class and submitted a story you wrote to find favor from a robot, the teacher would probably give you bad marks for being too repetitious with certain words. But, when it comes to search engines and robots, repetition is good to assist your blog posts to reap greater traffic from specific keywords and key phrases.

A blogger has to find a happy medium somewhere between writing for the human reader, and writing for the robots. Hopefully you choose to write for the human reader first, and the robots second. If you are the human reading this post be sure to tell the robot to get behind you in line!

Did I write for the robot here? Hmm, I better throw the robot some biscuits to lure him in to get my keywords higher up in the search engines, so have a blogging, blogging, blogging good time! :)

Developing link popularity still seems to be a mystery to many bloggers, yet it really isn’t that difficult to understand when one realizes that links exchanged within sidebars carry very little weight, and add very little value to a blog.

Many bloggers are still running around on the Internet in hopes to exchange links within their sidebar, and they are overlooking the fact that since they have a blog they have a more superior way to gain links. I’m sure this is due to the fact that many are simply still unaware that linking within relevant content is far more valuable to a blogger. Time goes by quickly, and most of us need to spend it where we gain the most value in return, and that is true with the time we spend developing our link popularity.

One way to express the difference would be to ask a blogger this question, “If there were two bills laying on the ground at your feet, one is a twenty and the other is a one dollar bill, and it is a windy day, which bill are you going to grab first?” It’s no different with developing our link popularity!

Time is flying by so we should be investing our time into developing our link popularity as quickly as we can, but in the manner that will provide the most value to our blogs. That’s the foundation in which Link & Blog Challenge is built upon and it also provides a blogger with fresh inspiration at the same time.

The basis for understanding the foundation in which blogs have the advantage over other websites with building their link popularity within relevant content is revealed to us right off Google’s site in their webmaster center! Google states,

Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable, and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines.

Did you catch that? Google is looking to reward sites whose content provides value to a visitor, which also means Google themselves will pay close attention to your links within content! It does NOT say “when other sites find your sidebar links valuable”, but instead it says, “when other sites find your CONTENT valuable”! Blogs are content rich, and your primary focus for building links should be within your content.

I think this next statement about sums it up when thinking in terms of developing your links, “Nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.” which is stated on Google’s official webmaster blog!If you would like an easy way to establish link popularity from links pointing to your site within relevant content daily, in other words through the natural way, that is my goal to help bloggers establish and the reason I began Link and Blog Challenge!

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