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

Visible.net is a new provider of state-of-the-art ecommerce and online marketing services.

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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?

Greg Marlin here blogging live at the WordPress WordCamp 2006 gathering in San Francisco that Really Big Networks was happy to sponsor.

Some useful tips from the SEO and WordPress session. Still no answers for the problem of getting your backlinks tracked quicker, sorry everyone. Here are the key tips:

1. Add Head Meta Description Plugin

2. Don’t worry about no-follow links for comments on other blogs. Google doesn’t count the link but Yahoo! and MSN do.

3. To get valuable in-bound links give first to sites that are relevant to you.

4. Submit to sites like Del.icio.us and Digg.

5. Check out Yahoo! Site Explorer for measuring your in-bound links.

6. Check out Reporters without Borders

7. Like always, create good content that is updated regularly.

8. Add tags / categories that are relevant to your content.

9. Use the Google Sitemaps plugin for WordPress to ensure “spiderability”.

Online store owners are finding that they may have been able to save extra time and energy had they put more thought and effort into certain search engine optimization tasks and techniques BEFORE having a site developed by a ‘not-so’ search engine friendly designer, script or content management system.

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