I just realized I haven’t done a new post in two months, so here’s a quick and easy one: the complete list of WordPress plugins I use on this blog. It’s a nicely structured definition list with links in alphabetical order, you see. I’ll do my best to forget to update it if I add or delete any.

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Adds the “share/save/email/whatever this” button you see at the bottom of this post. Turns out nobody clicks it.

Akismet

Checks new comments for spam, and most of the time finds it.

Cookies for Comments

Used to be an effective anti-spam mechanism, but it looks like spammers have got their way around it after Matt Cutts publicized it. Nice move, Matt.

Core Control

Not really using it on this blog; just makes me feel like I have complete, low-level control. Also helped me solve auto-upgrade issues on some servers.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

The maker of this nice HTML site map.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

302 redirects your feed URL to FeedBurner, except when FeedBurner itself wants to grab the RSS (legit cloaking).

Follow My Links

Brings authority back to the author by removing the idiotic default nofollow from links in authorial comments. I shall also note this plugin was authored by the undersigned.

GZippy

Helps you save some bandwidth by re-enabling gzip compression, which is disabled in WordPress (dunno why).

Limit Login Attempts

A security plugin which will kick you in the butt after the Nth failed login attempt.

Subscribe To Comments

Lets your commenters opt-in to be notified by e-mail when someone else posts a comment. Don’t know why this isn’t built-in in WordPress, either.

TweetMeme Retweet Button

The little green button you’ll click after reading this post.

Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Tool

Since noindex is already taken care of by Thesis (albeit with a nasty default nofollow issue), I’m really just using this plugin for noindexing the WP login page.

Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger

Lets you control which services your blog should ping, and when. Sweet.

WordPress.com Stats

Because we all like some charts and graphs with our morning coffee.

WP FancyZoom

Smooth and sexy AJAX JavaScript image zooming. Bonus point: it doesn’t require any additional styling on your <img> <a> tags.

WP Security Scan

A nice checklist that will help you automate 90% of WordPress security administration. ‘Cause you’re better safe than spammed to death.

That’s it. Hope you find this list helpful. If you have any questions about my use of the above plugins, don’t be shy.

Oh, and happy 2010 to you too.

This post is for those using the (otherwise great) Thesis WordPress theme. If you don’t run WordPress + Thesis, then this post may not apply to you personally, but it might make for an interesting read nonetheless, especially if you’re into WordPress and SEO (yes, this is going to get a bit technical along the way, but I did my best to keep things simple).

As you might have noticed, this WordPress blog uses the Thesis theme from DIY Themes (no, I’m not an affiliate). Thesis is really an awesome theme: robust, well-thought out, loaded with cool features and easy-to-use design options, and good built-in search engine optimization that makes it a first choice if you’re into SEO, or you just want to be able to customize your blog’s appearance without having to dive into someone else’s code. For example, when writing a new post, with Thesis it’s really easy to control what goes into the <h1> heading tag, what appears in the page <title> tag, and what on the post URL (this post is a nice example): very neat. Such features are in fact so sweet that the Thesis theme fame spread like wildfire throughout the SEO blogging community, especially since SEO superstars such as Graywolf endorsed it (no offense, Michael, but I’m nofollowing that link since you are an affiliate), and after Matt Cutts switched his WordPress blog to Thesis after years of using a boring greenish theme, thus becoming its number one testimonial.

Being an SEO consultant (and spare-time blogger), the choice was easy for me: around the end of May this year I purchased a Thesis Developer’s License and have since then deployed Thesis on three different sites, including this one, to my great satisfaction.

The issue

Soon after installing and configuring Thesis on this blog, I discovered what I would call a bug: if you check the checkboxes under “Thesis Options > Add Noindex to Archive Pages” (that’s one of the two cool admin panels that come built-in with Thesis), the following meta tag is added to archive pages (such as tag, category, or date-based archive pages):

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

From an SEO point of view, a robots meta tag with “noindex, nofollow” equals three things:

1. noindex = “I don’t want this page to appear in search results”;
2. nofollow = “I don’t want search engines to follow (crawl) the links on this page”;
3. nofollow = “I don’t want any link juice to flow from this page to the other pages it links to”.

Why is that bad?

It’s bad for two main reasons: first of all, by not letting any “link juice” (i.e., the PageRank and anchor text awesomeness that come with every crawlable link) flow through your archive pages, your posts will not benefit from the links on those pages: regular users will still be able to reach your posts through those links, but search engines won’t. The second reason is that the internal PageRank distribution of your blog as a whole will suffer from the fact that the nofollow attribute prevents archive pages from flowing back the link juice they get from the rest of your site –and that’s quite a lot of juice, since archive pages typically have site-wide links on WordPress blogs! That leads to a worst-case scenario in which large blogs (with a large number of posts) might see older posts lose their rankings over time, or even disappear from the search engines’ indexes (yes, you read that right: I don’t want to sound too alarmistic, but that is one of the possible long-term consequences of using “nofollow” in the wrong places).

The funny thing is that Graywolf, and even Matt Cutts himself, (maybe unknowingly?) have a “nofollow” on their blog archive pages! (Don’t believe my word? Go check for yourself.)

Why is that a bug?

It’s a bug because the Thesis Options panel doesn’t tell you that by selecting the “Add Noindex to Archive Pages” options you’ll also get a “nofollow”. Take a look:

See? “Nofollow” isn’t even mentioned, but if you look into the Thesis source code, you’ll see that it’s actually hardcoded: very sneaky! If it’s not a bug, it’s bad design. (Oh, by the way. “Noindex” is not a “tag”; it’s one of the possible values for the “content” attribute of the robots meta tag –just to get some basic terminology straight.)

Shouldn’t DIY Themes fix it?

You bet they should! In fact, I think they should have fixed it already: I reported the issue to the folks at DIY back in mid-June, providing lots of detail on why it should be fixed ASAP (here’s a link to my original post). A DIY Themes staff member replied telling me that Chris Pearson (the author of Thesis) had said “not a bug”, and my report was filed as a “feature request” [sic]. That was at the time of Thesis 1.5.1. Today I upgraded my blog to Thesis 1.6 (released on October 27), and noticing the bug was still there feature was still missing, I decided to do this post.

Now, I really hope Chris reads this post and thinks twice. In the meantime, here’s what you can do to get your link juices flowing again.

How do I fix it?

I provided instructions on how to fix the issue in this comment on Matt Cutts’ blog on June 16. Here’s my “quick’n'dirty” fix again:

In file \lib\classes\head.php, find the following code (occurring twice, at lines 35 and 38):

$meta['robots'] = '<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />';

and replace it with:

$meta['robots'] = '<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />';

or simply with the shorter and 100%-equivalent:

$meta['robots'] = '<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />';

Pretty easy, wasn’t it? The bad part is that the aforementioned hack is not future-proof: the next time you upgrade your Thesis, that file will get overwritten by the new theme file, so you’ll have to (remember to) edit it again. And again. Forever. Or until Chris Pearson decides to fix it.

A final word to fellow Thesis developers/hackers: if you can think of a Better Way To Do It that does not require editing the theme files (e.g., via WP hooks, I dunno), please drop it in the comments. Thanks

Update! The World’s greatest SEO picked up my call and showed The Right Way to set custom robots meta tags on your Thesis blog with just a few lines of code in your custom_functions.php file: check out his badass purple van!

Congratulations! You have been randomly selected to…
Feeling lucky? No, I didn’t win the lottery today <sigh>. I just happened to be randomly selected –along with other users– to take a sneak peek at the new design that Google appears to be currently testing for its results pages.

Check out this SERP screen-shot, showing non-underlined blue links (click on the image to see the whole page at full size):

Here's what the new SERP looks like: notice how the only underlined links are the (organic and paid) result titles, and the related search suggestions at the bottom.

Now compare the above with the regular look of the same SERP, shown in the following screen-shot (which I took after deleting cookies from the google.it domain in my browser):

...and here's your regular good ol' Google SERP: all links are underlined (looks familiar?)

Could you spot all the differences? In the test version of the SERP, all links are blue, but only some are underlined. But that’s not all: the vertical space between the anchor text and the underlying blue line has doubled (from 2 to 4 pixels, in my Firefox).

This results in less visual clutter (especially noticeable with local results, as shown in my screen-shots), and more legible links to organic and sponsored results.

As a side effect, the screen real estate occupied by each result is slightly increased: in the new SERP layout, each organic result takes an additional 4 pixels vertically. This, in turn, makes your standard 10-result page taller by about 3% (2052 vs. 1985 vertical pixels in the above examples), granting even more visibility to the top results (and pushing further down the less lucky followers).

Do you like the new SERP style? Looks good to you? Will it stick?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. I’ll take care of forwarding them to Google (just kiddin’).

I’m seeing an added “nofollow” attribute on links to client applications on Twitter right now, as shown in the screen-shot below. At first, the attribute seemed to come and go (it disappeared and reappeared by reloading the page), and even on the same page, sometimes it was not present on every link, as documented by this other screen-shot. Weird.

A screen-shot showing nofollowed links on Twitter

Before today, registering your own app and tweeting through that was a nice way to add a personalized, search engine-friendly “from {Your site name here}” link to your tweets and get some PageRank from Twitter. For WordPress users, the Tweetable plugin did the trick, while non-bloggers could use a PHP script or roll their own. But those efforts will be vain if Twitter decides to nofollow all outgoing links to client apps.

Experiment, glitch, or spam-prevention tactic (what else)?

After reading the details of the deal Microsoft struck with Yahoo! today, it looks pretty clear to me that the only real winner is going to be Google in the long run. Here’s why.

First of all, I’m not at all convinced that advertisers will be more motivated to put their money into AdCenter, contrary to what some predicted. To be a leader in the search and search advertising market today is not just a matter of “technology”, “scale” and “salesforce”, as Steve Ballmer seems to think; it takes innovative ideas and a company full of brilliant and motivated people to deliver the most relevant results to searchers and the highest possible return on investment to advertisers. And there’s no way that Microsoft can become that company: search has never been (and will never be) their core business, and despite their late efforts and mammoth investments in human resources, technology and R&D over the years, they have failed to come up with a decent search product so far.

I also believe this partnership will not lead to a stronger player in the search engine scenario, because Yahoo! will soon stop innovating —which means death. Today is indeed a very sad day for Yahoo! Search (RIP), and for Yahoo! as a company as well. To license give away their core technology to Microsoft for ten years is not just a very bad deal for Yahoo!’s investors (which didn’t like today’s news very much); it’s mainly a colossal strategic mistake: it means to give up on search, excising the company’s cultural roots. Over the next two and a half years “many Yahoo! Search employees”, said Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, “will be asked to take jobs at Microsoft”, while others will simply become “redundant”. Well, if I were a Yahoo! Search engineer today, confronted by the perspective of having to choose between getting nuked and surrendering to assimilation by Microsoft, I would already be exploring my alternatives.

To Google’s ears, Yahoo!’s backdown from the search battlefield must sound like excellent news, essentially because there’s going to be one less competitor in that arena. They won’t have to ditch any plan or alter their strategy. In fact, they don’t have much to worry about, except staying focused on their true mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and monetizable.

The search battle is over, true. But Google won a long time ago.

Q.:

How can the same people who stuff the meta description tag with comma-separated keywords and hide links on clients sites call themselves SEOs (in 2009)?

A.:

Because that’s what they get paid for.

(No, this is not a joke).

Follow My Links is a very simple plugin that prevents WordPress from automatically adding a “rel=nofollow” attribute to the following two categories of authorial links:

1. links in the post author’s comments;
2. links to the post author’s URL (usually linked to from the comment author’s username).

New in version 1.2: Now also allows the post author to selectively remove nofollow from links in user comments by editing them.

The default behaviour of WordPress (as of version 2.8) is to add a “rel=nofollow” attribute to all links in the comments section, including links in comments made by the post author and links to the post author’s website. The nofollow attribute prevents search engines like Google from following (indexing) such links, and passing “link juice” (including PageRank™) to the linked pages. In fact, nofollow was originally introduced by the major search engines as a deterrent or counter-measure to link spam in blog comments. For that reason, it doesn’t make much sense to have nofollow on your own links, when you’re the post author or blog owner, since those links are supposed to be “editorially given” (and therefore spam-free): that’s where this plugin comes at hand.

Please note that Follow My Links will not remove nofollow from links in existing authorial comments: that’s because, since WordPress adds the nofollow attribute to all links in comments at database level, there’s no way to determine whether an existing nofollow was introduced by WordPress, or explicitly by the comment author him/herself. So, if you want to strip nofollow from links in existing authorial comments, you’ll have to do it manually.

The nice part is that you’re still free to add “rel=nofollow” to any link in your own comments for whatever reason on a case-by-case basis, and if you do choose to do so, Follow My Links will leave the nofollow intact. Finally, as the post author, you can also remove nofollow from any link in a user comment by editing or quick-editing that comment’s HTML via the WordPress admin interface. Pretty neat, huh?

Download

You can download Follow My Links from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Installation

1. Unzip, upload the ‘follow-my-links’ folder to your WordPress plugin directory (usually ‘/wp-content/plugins/’);
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress;
3. You’re done (no configuration needed)!

Changelog

1.2

• FIXED: Now allows the post author to remove nofollow from links in user comments by editing (07/10/2009)

1.1

• FIXED: Bug preventing the correct detection of authorial comments (06/25/2009)

1.0

• First public release (06/24/2009)

Donations

If you like this plugin, feel free to donate a link to this post or buy me a slice of pizza.

Bug reports, feature requests, questions, and feedback

Follow My Links is my very first WordPress plugin. Please do send me your feedback in the comments below. Thanks!

After Matt Cutts’ long-awaited post on PageRank sculpting, there’s obviously plenty of (controversial) discussion going on about the subject right now, both in the comments to Matt’s post, and on nearly all major SEO blogs and discussion boards. While a good 90% of it is pure crap, there are a few articles and commentaries that do make for an interesting read. If you’re in a hurry and still behind with your reading schedule, make sure you don’t miss these:

• a good summary by Andy Beal;
• Danny Sullivan’s comments on the news and the way it was disclosed to the SEO community;
• Rand Fishkin’s disappointment about, and analysis of, the change;
• Aaron Wall’s rant;
• the inevitable WebmasterWorld thread (well, not exactly a must-read; just some stuff the old-skool SEOs and BBS fans out there will appreciate).

Me, I decided to skip past all the speculation and borderline-paranoid theories that have always arisen (“always” meaning “in the last 200 years or so”) whenever Google decided to change things around (SEO is a universe in perpetual change: deal with it), and give some practical advice on when and how, in my opinion, you should or should not use the “rel=nofollow” attribute. Nothing really new here; just my own little cheat sheet for the do’s and don’ts of nofollow, covering its most common uses and misuses.

Do not use nofollow

On internal links:

• For sculpting your PageRank (i.e., to “save” PR for your other links): ’nuff said.
• For siloing your theme: “theme siloing” is so 2005 a technique (and a couple of things have changed on the Web in the last four years, you know), although I agree it can still prove effective in a few cases; if that’s your case, however, you’ll want to go for a well-designed site structure in the first place.
• To link to pages whose contents you don’t want to show up in the SERPs: there’s robots.txt (or the robots <meta> tag) for that, sonny.
• When linking to non-canonical URLs that are only slightly different from the canonical form (e.g., HTTPS vs. HTTP, additional querystring parameters, and so on): rel=canonical + an XML sitemap + Google’s über-intelligent canonicalization algos will do the trick.
• For “crawl prioritization”: I’m sure lots of high-profile folks will disagree on this one, but I believe there are just too many better/faster/stronger ways to do it than using nofollow. To name but a few: XML sitemaps, HTML sitemaps, RSS feeds, server headers, and maybe the single two most important factors: site architecture (a.k.a. “classic” PR sculpting ) and content freshness.

On external links:

• When linking to relevant, on-topic content from authoritative sources: that’s the single case when linking out is only going to do you good (notice the links in this post?), so please, stop being afraid of “losing” your ridiculous PageRank and just fishin’ Do It. You’ll thank me later.
• To make a reciprocal link appear uni-directional, or to “hide” a network from Google: come on, they’re supposed to be a bit smarter than that in Mountain View.
• When linking to Google: ’cause they won’t dig that (just kidding).

Do use nofollow

On internal links:

• On links to login/registration/shopping cart/terms&conditions/privacy policy pages: yes, it’s an Officially Accepted Google-Approved Best Practice™ –even if, to further mess things up, Engineer Matt added that he would try not to nofollow the links to TOS and privacy pages, just to get some filler traffic from long-tail queries. Go figure!
• When linking to non-canonical URLs that are radically different from their canonical form and when rel=canonical is not an option (e.g., different domain name): the best choice would obviously be not to link at all or do a 301, but alas, we all know how nasty some CMSs can be, and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is our first motto.
• When linking to pages with substantially duplicate content, or no substantial content at all: (see above).

On external links:

• On links in user-generated contents (e.g., blog comments), if you just don’t have the time to pass every single link under the microscope, and whenever preemptive censorship moderation is practically impossible: anti-spam plugins like Akismet only catch the more blatant forms of comment spam, and you never know the sneaky shit some people will try to link to from your blog, so go for the nofollow!
• When you don’t completely trust or appreciate the website you’re linking to: whenever you can’t or don’t want to “vouch for” (and lend link juice to) the external page you’re linking to, maybe because you don’t like its “neighbourhood”, or you don’t want your site to be associated with it.
• When linking to spammy pages: I know, rule #2 of white-hat SEO is that you shall never link to spam, ever (guess what rule #1 is?). But you might just happen to want or need to show off on your blog, for all the white-hat SEO world to see, some very negative example: that’s where nofollow comes in really handy.
• On paid links (if you do sell links from your site, that is): better play it safe than risk having your site’s “voting power” nuked forever. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
• On affiliate links: because nobody wants to see that shit in the SERPs, except the affiliate link spammers that we all despise (especially Google).

On any link:

• Don’t abstain from using nofollow just because you fear that, by doing so, you will end up being profiled as an SEO by Google: too late, pal. If you’re reading this blog, chances are that Google has already “profiled” you (D’OH!), so stop whining and grab your badge.

After last week’s turmoil following Matt Cutts’ announcement at SMX Advanced of an important change in how Google handles the rel=nofollow attribute as far as the distribution of internal PageRank is concerned (I think that’s the longest anchor I’ve ever written ), things in the SEOsphere have calmed down quiet-before-the-storm-like, as everyone is probably waiting for an official follow-up from Google and/or Matt himself at this point.

Fortunately, it seems that Engineer Cutts won’t keep us waiting too long for what is likely to be regarded as his most anticipated post ever, as he recently confirmed via SEOmoz and Twitter that he’s been working on a “PR sculpting blog post”, expected to appear on his blog within the next few days.

The DNS transfer seems complete (if you’re reading this, you’re looking at the site on the new host). I have re-enabled comments.

The transition went super-smooth, and I’m really happy with my new host so far. I decided to move to Laughing Squid Web Hosting, which provide affordable cloud hosting services on Rackspace clustered servers, more reliable and scalable than traditional hosting on stand-alone servers.

Laughing Squid is also (or, should I say, primarily) a long-standing online community: in the words of its founder, Scott Beale, an online resource for art, culture and technology from San Francisco and beyond that has been around since the pre-Google era. You’ve probably seen their über-famous logo about a million times. Their mission is:

[...] promoting art, culture and technology, with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area. A secondary goal of ours is to help connect the art community with the tech community, by letting artists know what tools and resources are available to promote their work and in turn get the geeks out from behind their computer and experience more art.

The Laughing Squid have been actively supporting and promoting local events in the SF Bay Area through their Squid List for more than 10 years now.

I think The Laughing Squid is one of those things that make the Internet a nice place, and I’m so happy to host my blog with them that I decided to make this post and give them a site-wide “powered by Laughing Squid” link from my footer.