image(Flickr/Les Chatfield)

Matt Cutts recently made another of the videos in which he answers questions from the webmaster and SEO communities. This video specifically dealt with the subject of whether “rel=nofollow” should be used with widgets and infographic links.

If one were to judge by the number of questions and confused statements on the subject of nofollow links, it would be a safe bet that Google’s message about what exactly should or should not be passing link juice is not clear to the vast majority of people. Continue reading →

image(Flickr/Andrew Stawarz)

Since the release of Penguin 2.0, many sites have taken a dive in the SERPs. One of the causes of poor SERP performance is an excess of anchor text containing specific keywords.

Back in the old days, one of the main goals of link building was to cultivate as many incoming links as possible with anchor text that included keywords and key phrases relevant to a site’s SEO strategy. In recent years, Google has started paying a great deal of attention to the features of a naturally accrued link graph and penalizing sites with backlink profiles that show signs of being engineered by SEOs.

High quality sites tend to gather links with a diverse range of anchor text. Most linkers aren’t interested in contributing towards a site’s SEO strategy and won’t choose to include keywords in anchor text, instead using site, brand, or author names, topics, and a collection of generic nouns (“article”), verbs (“said”), adverbs (“here”), and so on. Continue reading →

Let’s be honest with ourselves: pop-ups, pop-unders, intrusive Flash advertising, and content-obscuring modal dialogues all suck, both from an aesthetic perspective and for site users.

In modern web design, the trend is towards elegance and simplicity; providing awesome content that’s pleasant to consume is the order of the day. But, we have to make money, and that’s what intrusive advertising is supposed to achieve. The web is growing up, and part of its developing maturity is that serious sites that want to make money from content – particularly bloggers – are tying to look less like the flyers we find under our windshield wipers advertising quack remedies in garish colors and fonts, and more like credible publications.

A key driver in this trend is the growing prevalence of mobile. What’s annoying on full-size screens is a deal-killer on the small screens of mobile devices. Mobile first design is largely responsible for motivating the move to simpler pages. Because screen real-estate is scarce, subtle integration of promotional material that doesn’t detract from the overall experience is essential.

When aesthetic requirements and technological trends clash with opportunities for revenue generation, a fertile ground for innovation is opened up. One of the solutions that has arisen to maintain both elegance and the prominent display of calls-to-action takes the form of minimalist, non-intrusive, but very noticeable message bars. Continue reading →