The Search box on your blog is a valuable source of information to you as a blogger. If you keep track of what your readers are searching for and what results they get, you’ll know what your visitors want to read. Then you can make sure they find it on your blog, and turn casual searchers into regular readers. In this article, I describe a few ways you can keep track of this essential information. I also introduce a WordPress plugin that does it automatically. Continue reading “Read your readers’ minds” →

Google introduced the rel="nofollow" attribute earlier this year; most blogging platforms now support it. Its initial promise of ridding the web of blog comment spam has not happened, and there has been a lot of conspiracy theory about the “real” reasons Google would do this. But it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about. This issue came up in the IO Error blog — I started to write a comment on it, but the logorrhoea set in, as it often does. Continue reading “Nofollow considered harmless” →

Google Sitemaps seemed like a moderately good idea at first. A standard format for information is always good for interoperability. But it’s hard to see Google Sitemaps ever really being useful to web search engines. Some features seem to add little to what Google already does, and others seem entirely useless. Continue reading “Google Sitemaps Deconstructed” →

Google Sitemaps is a good idea — it’s a standard XML format for site maps. Google (and anybody else) can use such a sitemap to get information about site structure without having to crawl the entire site. The sitemap can contain information about the URLs in your site, including how often they are updated and how important they are relative to the other pages in your site. Continue reading “Google Sitemaps” →