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.

I’m currently in the process of moving this site to Laughing Squid Cloud Hosting.

Comments will remain closed until the migration is complete.

Have a nice weekend.

Earlier today, during the Q&A session of a live webmaster chat event hosted by Google Italy, a Search Quality Team member explicitly confirmed what Matt Cutts was heard saying at SMX Advanced day 2 about the “rel=nofollow” attribute and PageRank sculpting: nofollowing links won’t affect the amount of PR that flows to the remaining links.

Here’s a relevant excerpt from the chat transcript, followed by its English translation:

Mr. Everfluxx - 18:37
Q: Ho un sito di 3 pagine: la home page (A) linka due pagine, B e C. Se inserisco un attributo rel=nofollow sul link da A a B, il PageRank della pagina C ne beneficerà, oppure no?
Roberto Lattanzio - 19:00
A: Ciao Everfluxx, pagina C beneficiera' di PR a prescindere dal nofollow sul link verso B
Roberto Lattanzio - 19:02
A: beneficera', chiedo scusa
_________________________________________________________________
Mr. Everfluxx - 19:08
Q: Ciao Roberto, grazie. Riformulo meglio la domanda: il PageRank della pagina C (linkata da A senza rel=nofollow) aumenterà in conseguenza dell'inserimento dell'attributo rel=nofollow sul link A->B?
Roberto Lattanzio - 19:12
A: Ciao, non c'e' conseguenza su C per l'inserimento del nofollow sul link da A verso B, spero si capisca ora

Mr. Everfluxx - 19:12
Q: Sì, ora è chiaro. Grazie.

English translation:

Mr. Everfluxx - 6:37pm
Q: [Let's suppose] I have a three-page site: the home page (A) links to two pages, B and C. If I add a rel=nofollow attribute to the link from A to B, will the PageRank of page C benefit from it?
Roberto Lattanzio - 7:00pm
A: Hi Everfluxx, page C will benefit from PR regardless of the nofollow on the link to B
Roberto Lattanzio - 7:02pm
A: [Corrects a spelling error]
_________________________________________________________________
Mr. Everfluxx - 7:08pm
Q: Hi Roberto, thank you. I'll rephrase my question: will the PageRank of page C (linked from page A without rel=nofollow) increase as a consequence of adding the rel=nofollow to the link from A->B?
Roberto Lattanzio - 7:12pm
A: Hi, there is no consequence for C due to adding a nofollow to the link from A to B, hope that is clearer now

Mr. Everfluxx - 7:12pm
Q: Yes, it's clearer now. Thanks.

So, there you have it: an unofficial yet explicit confirmation coming from a trusted source. Hopefully further and more official confirmations will follow soon about a change which has been raising so many doubts in the SEO community. Stay tuned.