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.
It’s been a couple of weeks now since I’ve been making approximately 2 posts a day. I was excited to get noticed by Google and Bing. But, each time I went to find out if I was indexed, I couldn’t see any pages. Then, one day, there were 2 pages indexed on Google. I wasn’t too excited because, after all, I’ve been consistent and I’ve posted a lot of unique content. So, what was the problem. Well, I figured it out.
I was relying on running the Google search by using: “site:www.parttimewebmaster.com” (without the quotes). This wasn’t working. On a hunch, I used the search “site:parttimewebmaster.com” (without the quotes) and voila, all of my pages were there.
Bing was a different story. I went to run a search on Bing, then clicked on the advanced option to choose my site. But, when I clicked the “Site/Domain” link, nothing happened. I then tried it in Firefox just in case, same thing. I guess it’s a bug. In fact, none of the filter links seemed to work, Country/Region, or Language. So, I figured I’d try the Google shortcut “site:parttimewebmaster.com” and it worked. All of my pages were indexed. Just for curiosity, I tried “site:www.parttimewebmaster.com” and nothing showed up.
So, what’s the moral of this story? If you want to see if you’re pages are indexed, use the domain name to search.
Example: site:[yoursitename].[suffix]
Ok, it might sound cheesy, but, we’re curious to see what questions are out there. We can always search and believe we want to know what you want to know, but we’re slightly bias.
So, feel free to ask us any questions about the internet. We’re here to help. Please keep in mind all of your information is confidential. We’ll paraphrase and repost the questions for simplicity.
To submit a question, please click here: “Ask a webmaster”
Thanks!
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.
