Well, I have to admit, I had no idea what the real meaning of dofollow and nofollow meant. So, with a little research, here’s what I found.
When you are coding, you add a link, simple right. Well, you can add a parameter to your link to state whether or not you want search engines to follow the link and crawl the page on the other end. In order to do so, you would add rel=nofollow. If this parameter is at the end of the link, then the search engine would not follow the link. If you want the search engine to crawl the page referenced in the link, you would just leave it alone.
So, what’s the problem. Well, it became an issue a while ago due to sites taking advantage of this linking. So, applications such as WordPress started automatically adding the rel=nofollow to the dynamic links such as comments. Who would know this right?
So, how does it affect you? Well, if you’re using WordPress, your links may have the nofollow attribute on it’s links. So, if someone adds a reference to another site, Google won’t crawl it. This might not be so bad considering the amount of spam that’s out there. But, what if someone posted a link or comment on your site that is valid. Wouldn’t you want to reward them? Of course you would want to reward them. And, as it turns out, people pay attention to this. It’s a matter of time and efficiency. If you want to post a comment to a site, you want some perks. So, those that are knowledgeable will look at your site to see if you “dofollow” exists. If they see this exists, they’ll post to your site. Therefore, you’ll get more links.
In order to make this a dofollow site, we installed the plugin DoFollow.
I figured this out this evening thanks to http://www.awpcp.com/. If you are using this plugin and each time you click on a link to do the following:
- Place an add
- Edit an existing ad
- Browse ads
- Search ads
Or, you are just trying to click on a category and nothing happens. All you have to do is go into The WordPress | Settings | Perma-Links and click “Save Changes” This will refresh the links and everything will work well. Apparently, you have to do this when you install a new version. On the save side, it’s not a bad idea to check this once you add a new plugin. It’s not a good feeling when you find out it hasn’t been working for a while.
One of the number one things you can do to get your site noticed is to have links from other relative sites to yours. Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s almost too easy, but you want to be smart about it.
So far, I’ve placed some links on some other sites through discussion group postings, question and answer sites, and some social networks. But, if I run a Google search for links to my site (Google Search phrase: link:www.parttimewebmaster.com) nothing is showing up? Why, what’s wrong with those links? Well, I haven’t figured it out yet. The first link I see, I’ll let you know. After all, there must be a secret.
So, here I am, still thinking “Where do I put links to my website?” After some initial thought, I realized, I could put links to my site in hundreds of places. Thing is, I like doing this, but I can’t do it all day, so I should be smart about it.
Therefore, I figured, what would be the smartest plan? From what I understand, you want links from relative sites to your site. Because of their relativity, it would increase my rank. Great, which site do I choose? So, I figured I’d come up with a ranking system and try it out. Here is a list of priority sites I should choose based on their characteristics:
- Which sites have a high page rank? These sites are always listed as highly qualified sites and should definitely help.
- Which sites have the most amount of visitor? After all, even if the site isn’t relative, more people may see my site.
- Is this site a competitor?
- Does this site show up high in search engine results?
- If I post my link to this site, will it help me in other ways/ For example, are they a revenue ad sharing website?
For now, those are my top choices. I believe that by narrowing down my link sharing with those sites, I will not only get better rankings, but get better rankings quicker.
Well, we ran into the same issue, our site was running slow. Because of this, people were not even waiting to visit the site, so we did some investigating.
Here’s some background.
- We’re on a shared server, we’re growing though
- We have a lot of Word Press plugins installed
- It was taking the page approximately 3-5 seconds to load, way too much time
After some reviews from other sites, we started off by investigating what we had installed. We found that we had some redundant plugins and honestly plugins we were not using. We removed all of those miscellaneous plugins.
Next, we investigated 2 different plugins to help speed up the site, namely WP Super Cache and WP Cache.
We first installed WP Super Cache, after many tries, we were not able to get it to work. It might have been the fact we had to edit our .htaccess files manually and may not have done it correctly. So, after an hour we gave up.
Next installation was WP Cache. We installed this, turned it on, and we were up and running. So, if you’re looking to speed up your site, we definitely recommend WP Cache for it’s ease of use and simplicity. Thanks!
