Hi Christina, it’s great to have you here for a virtual interview! For those who don’t know, Christina is one of the top contributors to the Google Webmaster Help forums. Just this month she managed to post over 1’000 replies (as a comparison, slightly over 7’400 postings were made this month in total, giving her more than 13% of all postings for the month). She is also a moderator in several other forums, runs her own hosting and web design company and has a family. Oh, and a day job. Wow.

So Christina, what drives you to post so much in the Google groups?

Hi John, hehe, glad to be here. This format looks interesting. [I sent her the questions in a shared Google Doc] So this is what you can do with this gadget….. Oh yes, interview. Hummm… did I really make that many posts? Oh, dear, I do tend to get carried away …

Why do I do it? Well it’s mainly because I have a compulsive nature to share what bits I know, on one hand, and on the other hand I seem to have grown into a troubleshooter. Which isn’t that much different from being a troublemaker LOL. Forums and groups like this are about solving problems, sharing knowledge, experience and helping each other. And mindless chit-chat too ;)
Continue reading ‘An interview with Christina / webado’ »

The next step after adding CSS to highlight links with rel=nofollow is to give the user some information about what the symbol and the dashed line mean. Since CSS will not allow you to add tooltips and links, we have to resort to some javascript trickery. The up-side to this is that it will also display the markup on older browsers like IE 6.

Adding this kind of markup to your site is pretty easy to do.
Continue reading ‘Adding user-friendly rel=nofollow markup (for IE too!)’ »

In order to display the Google Reader ‘shared items’ on your site – using straight (X)HTML and not just the javascript widget supplied by Google – you need a tool that can read RSS feeds and display them (the shared items are an Atom feed, but that is similar enough). Using straight links instead of javascript you will be able to pass “link-value” to the items that you are linking to – your links will be seen as recommendations (as in my opinion they should be, if you tagged those items to be shared). I opted to use the Magpie RSS PHP parser. However, you will have to do a slight modification of one of the files in order to process and display the feed properly.
Continue reading ‘Adding your Google Reader ‘shared items’ to your site’ »

I support the “rel=nofollow” HTML microformat as a way to mark links which might be problematic, whether they’re clearly spammy, just not checked or even just sites that I don’t really want to link to (but still want to provide a link for others to use – you know, “don’t look, but that guy’s got a giant nose!”). I understand that it is important for search engines to recognize these kinds of links and to treat them differently. This of course implies that sites use the rel=nofollow properly and do not just apply it to all outbound links (or at least to all links that do not go to their own network)…

That said, I believe that all users should be able to recognize these links as being problematic (or untrusted) at first glance. The more advanced, web-savvy users will sometimes have tools installed or special settings which highlight links with “rel=nofollow”, the normal user does not. If a link is marked as being problematic / untrusted for search engines, the user should see that as well — it’s nothing more than the Google Webmaster Guideline “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users (…)“. It is deceiving to show users a normal link and at the same time tell search engines that you really don’t want to link there! In my opinion, if the link is not good enough, the user should be informed. There are two ways to do that.
Continue reading ‘Adding “rel=nofollow” markup to your site’ »