Archive for February, 2009

To follow or to nofollow…

Posted on February 19, 2009

Sorry if you came here wondering if you should nofollow comments or something else on your site or blog, but I’m looking at it more from a crawler’s perspective. Though if that is why you’re here you have something to add.

Basically the nofollow either in meta tags or as a rel attribute of an a tag is a hint to a crawler telling it, in it’s most basic terms, not to follow the link. But what does that really mean to me, if I run the crawler? More importantly, how is it actually being used? 

On blogs, personal websites and even wikipedia the nofollow policy is pretty clear and transparently aimed at preventing spam – and it works.

But how are they applied? Well, not even the big search engines treat them consistently: Google completely blanks them, Yahoo indexes them but adds no juice, and Ask doesn’t even support them [Granted this article may be somewhat out of date]. 

One interesting thing that came out of the answers though, was the one from Google: 

On a related note, though, and echoing Matt’s earlier sentiments… we hope and expect that more and more sites — including Wikipedia — will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow… expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on.

So within even Google, with the strictest application of a nofollow policy, there is certainly a strong argument and use case for treating this as a hint as opposed to a policy. I’m not even sure why Google needs wikipedia to make a policy change, everything they hope for could be implemented at their end. 

A link on wikipeida, if it’s been there long enough, probably deserves some juice. And that same logic applies to any site, even your blog – nofollow is a hint to a search engine. It’s there to deter spam, but if a link sticks around then by not removing it, to a point, the site is endorsing it. 

For our application we’re working from a slightly different angle – there aren’t a lot of geotagged urls and there isn’t much span so at least initially we want as many as we can get. So we may not index or pass juice on to the site, at least initially, but we do want to follow the link. 

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From freemium to pay to play

Posted on February 13, 2009

Increasing prices, obviously, can help your bottom line – as long as you don’t alienate you users in the process by increasing them too much. But what if you’re running a fremium model, free accounts for users hoping that the features of a paid for account are inticing enough that they’ll give you money, and it becomes too expensive to service them. Can you get away with moving to a paid only model>

The move from 0 to even 0.01 is an infinite jump especially in the eyes of your users, if for no other reason than you’re asking them to do something else; put in credit card details. So I think It’s going to be interesting to watch Zoto who are moving from a fremium model to one with only paid accounts [via mashable]

I think they’ll probably suffer short term, certainly in visitor numbers, but that does it really matter long term as long as they’re acquiring paying customers? Even if the number they’re acquiring on a monthly basis drops off those users aren’t paying the costs of the freeloaders, so Zoto may actually be better off with lower levels. 

Anyway, if I remember I’ll probably check back and see how things go in a few months.

American English vs British English

Posted on February 6, 2009

A question most web companies in the US probably don’t have to worry aboutbut one almost all British ones must is, do we write our pages in British English or American English?

Building applications I’ve had more than a few conversations with @Simon_Chapman about it – we want to appeal to an international audience so the framework for internationalisation is already in place. Java web applications make it pretty easy anyway, we just take the time to build the application, even if we’re starting with a single language version, as a properly internationalised application. 

Jakob Nielsen talks about it here as well and I agree with most of what he says, which basically comes down to the fact that it’s all about the users. If you’re targeting a British audience than you should write for them, if you’re targeting an American audience then you should write for them. If you’re targeting an international audience you should translate – it really isn’t that difficult. 


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