Web 2.0 Stores > Fast, Simple, Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce

There’s a lot of discussion on Techmeme right now about Wikipedia’s decision to add rel=”nofollow” (explanation at the end of this article) to all outbound links on its pages. People seem to be unhappy about the decision because they believe Wikipedia should link to the sources of the article data and provide them (the sources) with the necessary “google juice” in return.

Why wikipedia is right

In my opinion, these people are wrong and Wikipedia did the right thing. Let’s think about it for a while. Wikipedia needs to protect their data in order to remain a credible source of information. Part of that data protection initiative must encompass putting a brake on the spam they get daily - and this is the best way to do it. By adding the nofollow attribute to their links, wikipedia is effectively telling spammers that by adding links to their pages from wikipedia, they get no “juice” (or search engine ranking boost, if you prefer) in return. Which is good because that way there’s no point in them spamming in the first place - wikipedia readers win, and the web in general wins as well, as there’s less garbage being crawled.

But what if I’m an authority on a topic?

The main reason why people are saying this is a bad move by Wikipedia, is because they get no compensation for being a valid information source for something and being linked from wikipedia. And this is right, but Wikipedia isn’t the only page on the web. If you’re a valuable source of information on a subject, you’ll get the necessary links from other people, who’ll boost your search engine position just as much. This is a matter of balancing search engine rating greed and the understanding that wikipedia information needs to be valid, and kept that way.

Nofollow definition

Quick note for those who don’t know what nofollow is: if when defining a link to a page from one of yours, you add the rel=”nofollow” attribute, when engines like google crawl your page, they disregard those links. This is useful to make engines ignore links you can’t control - like those in comments to a blog post. In short, it makes things tidier.

In a new posting on Evhead.com, they talk about the slow demise of something both advertisers and those monitoring a site’s stats will just have to come to grips with - pageviews are obsolete.

Remember when web site traffic was talked about in terms of “hits”? You’d read about how many millions of hits Netscape got per month and other sites bragged about getting 30,000 hits a day. Eventually, we moved away from the term hit because everyone realized it was pretty meaningless. Pageviews replaced hits as the primary traffic metric not just because they’re more meaningful, but because it also determined how many ads could be served. Reach (number of unique visitors) is also important, of course. comScore/Media Metrix uses uniques as its primary metric, because mainstream advertisers want to reach a lot of people, not just the same people over and over. But it’s this pageviews part that I think needs to be more seriously questioned.

They note that their reasoning includes the design of the site, including, but not limited to, the introduction of Ajax page loads inside. Even the lightest Ajax usage can have an effect on the overall stats of your site. Most Ajax functionality is made to replace going off to another page to perform a task, so each load of that is lost - along with any ad dollars that might have come from it. So, the real question he poses is - “what’s a better measurement?” Is there a good way to integrate this new kind of interfacing with our more traditional stats. How do you explain to advertisers that just becaue your page views dropped when putting in this new feature, it’s actually a good thing?

30Boxes, the online calendar service, soft-launched their new people search engine today. The822 helps you to find more about a person by entering their email address - it returns information from social sites including your blog, Flickr account, Webshots photos and buddies, MySpace blog, Digg, EvokeTV and 30 Boxes itself. The name is a play on 411 (411×2=822) and the aim is to bolster 30Boxes’ efforts in the identity space. They also want to encourage outside developers to make use of their web services by building tools that fetch info about your 30Boxes contacts and buddies. I’m always concerned about these tools because you may have separate identities that you don’t want to merge - to use the obvious example, you might not want your employer to see your MySpace page. To give it its due, the822 does let you control the information that appears, but you’ll need to register for 30Boxes to do so. In many ways, this is similar to ClaimID and Naymz, giving you more control over your digital identity. Nonetheless, it’s a nice extension of the brand, and a good way to promote the company’s web services platform. See also Webtop, the ajax startpage from 30Boxes.

If you are a small business owner or interested in unique new ways to market your small business this article by John Jantsch is a must read! Enjoy the Web 2.0 fun!

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