Aji Issac Mathew

I was a little hesitant to the Google’s new web history but after thinking carefully I got converted. Now I am not only a user but a great fan for this great tool. The biggest reason why we should use it :-

Our knowledge comes from what we have learned and many a times we refer back to our old books for solutions as we know we saw it there. Same applies for web history, you search from your own memory (visited sites), can I call it an extension of my memory? Recently I used Google to fix one typical apache/xen related problem. I lost the useful referral website which later I could get it from the history, it was a great time saving for me. We are using to our browser history search, google history search is just an advance version of it.

Why do you worry?

• Is it a privacy concern? They already know it, now it is that you need to know (or accept) that they know :). (Already by now they know too much about everyone) Moreover even if you are logged into your gmail/google account, no one can peek through as it prompts for the password again. Google will anyway anonymize user queries (does it count for web history as well?) after 18-24 months.

If you want to avoid it?

• Use two browsers, one where you are logged in and other where you aren’t (even without google toolbars). At visitlab.com we use to catch fraud clickers using IP but I do not think Google will do it for web history as one IP is share among many in our offices.
• Use a dial up connection and reconnect whenever you want to play safe. Make sure you have cleaned your cookies.

There were many who knew this and were a little cautious from the very beginning:-

• Do you use google toolbar with seo activities?
• Google and Privacy – antonyms? – This was posted much before the web history stuff.

Google uses same cookies across all their products including adsense, analytics – The net can be wider some day, so learn to play safer :).

I had covered Page Rank (PR) topic with some really funny pictures for our Intraoffice SEO book. Page Rank is a very simple concept, A (web page) links to B (web page of same site or different site), A passes a part of its link juice (or PR) to B. Let me take a small example to show how it works. Lets consider A and B to be a pot with Green liquid.

• Bigger PR => More liquid
• Links going out of A => Hole in pot

• If A has less holes and more liquid then you will get a better share of the liquid and thus more liquid.
• If A has less holes but less liquid you will get less liquid (but still a good share).
• If A has more holes and more liquid then you will get lesser share but still may end up getting more liquid.
• If A has more holes and less liquid then you will end up getting very less.

A will give some liquid to B, now if B is connected with more pots say C,D,E…. then it will end up getting more liquid from all these pots. If B gives link (or has holes) then it will lose some of its liquid.

PR of B => how much liquid does B pot has. This is how I explained a lot of new web aspirants (new recruits with no web knowledge). If you want more technical viewpoint you can visit :-

1) http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
2) http://searchengineland.com/070426-011828.php

Wishing you a better PR, I was crazy about the thin green line when I joined the industry, now I hardly care.

I just saw a post by Aaron Wall of SEObook.com saying “People Don’t Look Beyond the Page“. It says, “I once saw a college professor cite a page about caffiene on a low quality site about pornography, gambling, and drugs on his official profile page. Many people never look beyond the page when linking to a story.”

Call it “Good Page on Bad site Problem”

This is generally true as most of the people are not aware of backlashes of linking to bad sites. So my team asked me two questions :-

1. How to handle it in an effective way? (I do not have time to check the whole site whether it is good or not)
2. What happens if I want to use the bad site as a bad example, bad sites are not 100% bad they can still be good examples for bad sites :)? (I liked the question)

Here we go

1. You need some plugins which will help you understand the site quality. You can install site advisor or SEO tool (and browse the homepage). This will let you know what others feel about this site as a whole. Still if you are not sure of what you are linking to then add “NoFollow” Tag.
2. If you want to talk about a bad site, let the world know you are not recommending them with a nofollow tag.

In Short, link to only good sites (that you know as good) and for everything else (even for the sites which may be good but you are not aware and have no time to investigate) use NoFollow tag.

Are you fighting with yourself? This is a sample where site is paying for a free lunch. A search at overture shows that a variation of NaturallySpeaking can cost the company a good amount of money. Can this be avoided? Is there any advantage of doing it?

(Google SERP for NaturallySpeaking)