If you are new to the idea of nofollow, I have provided a brief definition from its Wikipedia article, which elaborates its purpose:

“Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.”

An example of how to use nofollow in HTML has been provided below:

Webmasters can benefit from using the nofollow attribute when exercising the following steps.

• Linking to a secure page or website that asks for sensitive information.
• Linking to a Feedburner (or other) RSS feed.
• Linking to internal pages that you do not want to count towards PageRank.

WebProNews (a sister site to MySEOBlog) recently interviewed Matt Cutts, who is an engineer at the search giant Google, where Cutts discussed the latest happenings regarding nofollow. This interview can be seen here.

Do you use nofollow in your content? If so, please feel free to leave your experience with nofollow in this post’s comment, and how it has helped improve your presence in the SERPs, or how it has affected your content overall.

Splicd is a website that is owned by the iEntry Network (which also owns MySEOBlog, and is starting to gain a lot of popularity, because a lot more bloggers and webmasters are encorporating YouTube clips in their site(s) to convey an idea or message.

A scenario where Splicd can be a valuable tool is if you are wanting to embed a long clip into your website, and you do not want your website viewers/users to watch the entire clip, where you only want them to see a specific part of the clip. This service allows you to embed a YouTube clip, and have it start and finish at a specific point in the clip that you are wanting to use.

All that you have to do is to visit Splicd, enter the URL, and the times in the clip that you want the viewers/users to see. A separate page will then appear that allows you to see a preview of what you will put on your blog, with the embed HTML code below for you to insert into your blog/website. I have provided a few examples below:

• popSiren
• Star Wars Kid

This is really a great tool that you can utilize if you include a lot of YouTube clips on your website or are an avid video blogger!

Please be sure to comment below on how Splicd can be useful on your blog/website.

For most Google search users, their SERPs will look similar to the image below.

Although, some users are experiencing their SERPs having the appearance below.

With the cosmetic changes shown above in mind, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land says that since November 19th of 2009, a small group of Google users will see the new search options look, and if testing is successful, Google will roll it out this year. More on the article from Sullivan can be viewed here..

The test that Google is currently performing has the same process and feel
that Facebook used during its most recent new layout update…

Sullivan also quotes Melissa Mayer of Google with the following statement:

“We’re basically looking at a new look and feel for Google. It’s an overall cleaning up of the search engine results page.”

In a way, the look of the new SERPs resemble a similar look to Bing, Google’s search engine competitor. This will give the search engine giant an edge, and will help it to compete with the “decision” on a more cosmetic level.

Have you encountered the new SERP look yet? If so, what is your opinion of it? Please feel free to leave any comments or feedback regarding this leap from Google below in our comments section. It would be great to see what different users have to say about this possible change.

Many people think that with a free blogging service that you cannot (or think its very complicated to) make its design unique and outgoing enough as the paid blogging sites/platforms. For those that think so, it is not true! You can create and design your free Blogger.com site to look as professional and artistic as other blogs.

With this in mind, I would like to bring your attention to a site called BloggerThemes. This site will allow you to download pre-made themes that you can download and implement into your Blogger designer area, which makes the design painless and less of a hassle for you.

This theme site’s categories include:

• Art
• Fashion
• For Kids
• Tech

…and many more!

The theme download files from BloggerThemes are completely free, and are easy to integrate onto your Blogger.com account.

Please feel free to leave any feedback regarding this theme site in our comment section. We would love to read how these themes have worked for you and your blog!

Google Buzz has been released as Google’s social network within their popular web-based e-mail service of Gmail. It is made to compete with other big services within the social networking industry (such as Facebook and Twitter) and that allows you to share/publish web content for other people in a user’s Gmail contact lists to see and comment on.

The content for your buzz feeds are organized in a tab-like arrangement, making it better to see the content and happenings of your contacts that you are wanting to view–much like the style of how your incoming mail has been arranged. You are also able to integrate your Facebook updates and Twitter feeds so that you can have all of your content in one place within Google Buzz.

For a visual tour of how Google Buzz works and how you can interact with your friends on it, I have provided the YouTube video below:

What are your thoughts on Google Buzz, and how do you think it will benefit content on
Google’s SERPs? Please feel free to leave your feedback regarding this new social network below in our comments section.

TweetMeme acts as a social bookmarking-related site, but instead of having the voting system (as seen on Digg and Delicio.us), various users retweet a specific article on Twitter to increase the blog post’s popularity and push its location further toward the top.

Retweeting using TweetMeme will help build and increase the amount of backlinks pointing towards your site, because every retweet will contain the shortened URL of your site, and the more that users’ tweet points to your blog post, the more it will appear in search engines, especially the ones that have real-time searching enabled like Google and Bing.

TweetMeme is a completely free service to add to your blog and can work under any blog platform, even the most common WordPress software. To install this on your blog, installation tutorials have been provided below:

• W3CGallery - For custom-made blog platforms.
• WordPress Plugin Directory - To add TweetMeme as a plugin and how to implement this feature into your WordPress blog.

To see TweetMeme in action and see how it can be used in conjunction with your blog, I have provided the video below for your convenience.

Please feel free to leave any comments/feedback below regarding TweetMeme and how you have used it as a link-building resource for your blog.

Google started to get its name associated with social networks when it released Google Wave back in 2009; however, this service still is an invite-only service that helps keep the high demand and curiosity for the service.

Another way that many have seen the search engine giant take the social path is by seeing real-time Twitter updates relating to a specific search term (especially relating to pop culture people or events). For example, if you were to search for “Michael Jackson” on Google, an area of the SERPs will be sectioned off for the most recently tweeted posts in real time on Twitter from people who are discussing “Michael Jackson” in their tweets.

Even though these social-related ideas were introduced by Google last year, the search giant has implemented a social-like arrangement into their image searching service of Google Images. When searching for images using this service, you may start to see images from your contacts who have published images on various photo sharing sites around the web in an area on your image SERPs called “your social circle.” This function on Google Images is currently in its beta stage, and can only be seen if you are logged onto Google and have your profile set up to make search results more relevant to your information.

I have provided a video below from Google that will visually elaborate this premise in greater detail:

This is just a taste of how searching will be made from a social standpoint and how SEO can be utilized to make results more relevant to various social networking aspects. How do you think search will adapt to today’s social networking-centric future?

With the premise mentioned above in mind, I would like to direct your attention to a nifty and convenient tool called Xenu’s Link Sleuth that helps make this process easier, especially if you have a large, robust website with tons of links that would take a long time to manually check on your own.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a great tool if you are doing your business’ website by yourself; it will load the code of your website and automatically skim through your links to make certain everything is satisfactory. If this program finds any erroneous links, a report will display the links that were found as non-functional and their location in your website’s code.

Other features of this handy tool include:

• Simple, no-frills interface.
• Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors).
• Simple report format that can also be sent as an e-mail.
• Executable file smaller than 1MB.
• Supports SSL websites.
• Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites.
• Detects and reports redirected URLs.
• Includes site map.

This is a great and useful tool that will benefit the SEO of your website and other websites that you are linking to as well. You can download this tool here.

David Drummond, the chief legal officer for Google responded to this incident with the statement provided below:

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered — have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.”

With the above information in mind, Google’s blogs later stated that they are no longer going to censor search results on Google.cn. More information concerning their response is to this attack can be found on their blog post titled “A New Approach to China.”

A lot of talk about this controversy has started reaction from all over the world on Twitter, which can be seen below.

Since Google may quit China, this may severely affect how SEO is perceived and how many Chinese sites appear in SERPs all over the world.

Google is still attempting to further resolve this issue, as stated in the concluding paragraph of their blog post:

“The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.”

What is your standpoint on this incident? Is Google in the wrong, or should China’s search results be uncensored?

The developer staff at Adobe have developed various video discussions and tutorials to make your Flash content more SEO friendly, and I have specified the main premises of these videos below:

• Overview of SEO Issues - Discussion of what issues developers and designers need to know when building rich media or dynamic content for websites, devices, and web video delivery.
• Demystifying SEO - Explanation of how search engines view dynamic content within a web page, and highlighting the importance of tags, descriptions, and links.
• Flash Player for Search Engines - The introduction of the Adobe Flash Player for Search Engines Project with Google, emphasizing how the partnership offers crawlability for interactive and dynamic content on a website.
• Deep Links and Dynamic Content - Exploring the challenges of search engine optimization regarding deep links and dynamic content, citing that indexing results are directly tied to HTML-based URL searches.
• SEO Strategy Tips - Tips to create your SEO strategy, such as optimizing keyword research and metrics results and incorporating intelligent mapping to your URL(s).

These video tutorials are great for someone who is just starting to learn Flash, or even someone that has been developing with Flash for a long time to help understand how Flash and SEO can finally work together in a hand-in-hand process.