To Share Or Not To Share Your Green Widgets?
In building this blog I have become a much more voracious reader. Especially on what to do and not to do, in regards to building a following of readers to my blog. Kind of an oxymoron really, read to get readers. Well anyway this post might not be of much interest to you, my intended audience. And just who is my intended audience you ask? Men who want to learn a little something about, well what men like. Namely the opposite sex, sports, finance, humor and what to wear and how to wear it.
But I also have demographic software that provides me with all kinds of incredible data that tells me, that along with my intended audience, I also have a large following of other bloggers. (You see we bloggers tend to keep track of each other to see what’s new and interesting that we might come up with.)
So far I hope I haven’t lost anyone. I read quite a bit today on the reasons of why we share posts with social media sites, such has Digg, Stumble Upon, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc.
Most of the casual reader I am sure have heard and might even have an account with Facebook and Twitter, but the first two (Digg and Stumble) are more for people who blog a lot and try and get their posts published on these sites, with the intent of maybe striking a nerve, whether from a catchy title, or great new content.
The reason bloggers do this is simple, to gain more readership. You see if you have a post that goes viral, then your readership can go through the roof over night. It is akin to watching a video from You Tube that a friend sent you a link to. Overnight that video is seen by literally thousands of people and by the end of the first week, hundreds of thousands. This dear reader is like gold to us lowly bloggers. It means getting recognized and hopefully from there on you can keep your targeted audience enthralled with your daily rants and musings.
OK now the reason for this post. As I go along and learn I like to share it with you, now whether or not you care to read it, that is fine to, I make sure I have as much content on as many subjects, as I can. To hopefully grab your interest on something.
Daily on this blog something changes, yesterday you might have saw it easily. The title in the header up top, went from black to red and now has a different font. Whoopy do. Today all the changes came from behind the scene except for one. At the bottom of each post I use to have all of the major social media icons lined up all nice and pretty, just in case a reader said to him or herself, “well let me share this with “insert name” and all they had to do was click on their favorite icon to send and boom it took you there. Easy right? I mean this is the age of sharing everything and anything. Well for the most part that is still true, except in this particular case.
This company called Google is the CIA, FBI, FORD and MICROSOFT, all rolled into one, of webmasters. Just in case you don’t know a webmaster is, he or she is the one who builds the blog/site and maintains it. In this case that would be yours truly.
Everyday our friends at Google send these invisible things called bots, to every site/blog in the US and the world. Come rain or shine. To visit every site/blog and they crawl it. By crawling, it absorbs all the content stored on the pages and looks especially hard for the new content, so it can be updated. They eventually use this info to determine where to list our sites/blogs in their search engine. They call it ranking. We also get visited by other creepy crawlies from Yahoo, MSN, and even our friends from China, Russia etc. They send their bots to crawl our sites to see what we have been up to.
So now when you type into your search box, green widgets, anyone who has something to do with green widgets gets listed somewhere on their search pages. The goal for every webmaster is to get their information on green widgets on the first couple of pages, preferably on the first page within the first five entries. This way, you the searcher are much more liable to click on the results and viola, you get to our take on green widgets.
OK the reason you no longer see the social network icons all lined up in a row, neatly at the bottom of this post. Is because one of the many articles I read today stated that by having all these social bookmarks, causes our friends at GOOGLE to look unkindly at the sites that have them.
You see they represent an external link, basically a worthless external link, because very rarely are they ever used. Now we wouldn’t want the guys and girls over at Google to be mad at us, so I did as the article suggested and removed them all. I still think I will use two. One for Facebook and Twitter, because I do use them quite a bit, to let my friends and family know I posted an article, that they just HAVE to read. But that is cutting way back from what I use to have.
Lets see, I have usually 25 posts or more on the front page alone here. Say I used 10 social bookmarks on each post, then that would give us here at MOB, 250 external bookmarks just on the front page alone. My My, I do hope I will be forgiven, for such a egregious sin.
Now I am scratching my head yet again. You see, I thought we were suppose to make it easier to spread our words of wisdom, thus the term Social Networking and Social Bookmarking have become so widely used.
Of course this all could change tomorrow or another SEO guru will interpret external linking and bookmarks differently. There is really, no one manual that you can refer to.
Lastly, I am sure there are a few errors in this post. For instance maybe some bots only crawl Monday through Friday and take the weekend off. But for the most part I think I got it right. If not I am sure I will see it in the comments of this post, which I welcome always. Because I am a Dofollow blog.
Not to worry guys, schools out, we can go over dofollow on another day, here’s a picture of a half naked lady instead. Hope your having a good day, where ever you are…… Glenn
For those of you who would like to know more on the article I read you can find it by going here at Andy Beards great SEO Blog
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I read what you wrote, but I’m guessing that most of the guys don’t have a clue what you said. They are busy looking at that horse. Bwahahahahaha.
Have a terrific day. Big hug.
Good stuff. I had never heard the googlebots considered social bookmarks as external links…Geesh. It makes sense though. Oh boy. You know how I hate changing stuff! Oh BTW…pretty horsey!
Yes the horsey is very pretty
And folks those who don’t know Roschelle you need to stop by her site as she tends to change EVERYTHING at least once a week , lol
you’re a bad boy!!!
I started blogging to practice my writing, I’m writing a novel and I write short stories, originally i thought the SEO stuff well wouldn’t be all that hard..But holy shit it’s a pain in the ass, frankly. But if you want people to read what you write then you have to..
That’s awesome Mega (the novel part), as far as the SEO part, I am with you, what a pain in the ass
Great Post! I know most of your readers won’t have a clue what you just babbled on about but for us bloggers, this was a very helpful post. I had no idea that the bots looked at those icons as links. I guess it does makes sense though. Now I have to go back and try to figure out how to remove those icons from my blog.
Thanks for posting this! I really appreciate this information and the picture of the beautiful horse!!
Good article, lots of depth and obvious a lot of research. A good primer on some worthy SEO hows and whys. The girl – hmm… maybe you should have inserted her about halfway down to keep the slacker types reading on, in hopes there might be more. lol (did you get my email?)
Thank for this blogpost,It’s will make me see something and I will love to keep reading more post on this blog.
Duh, I meant to leave a little tip to your readers about removing their social bookmarking links. You don’t have to really, all you have to do is add the nofollow tag to your links and Google (and all search engines) will not bother with them. Read more here
To Share Or Not To Share Your Green Widgets? | Man Over Board: Namely the opposite sex, sports, finance, humor .. http://bit.ly/rl7Pi
To Share Or Not To Share Your Green Widgets? | Man Over Board: Namely the opposite sex, sports, finance, humor .. http://bit.ly/rl7Pi
Hi Glenn,
I was taking a look at my template earlier and came across the html code for my “sharing is sexy” social bookmarking widget. I was about to delete it when I noticed that the links are set as “nofollow” and so was my blog.
Googlebots and other bots don’t count nofollow links against you. Or in other words…when they’re determining the importance of your page and all the links that are included the nofollow links don’t weigh adversely against your ranking.
I’m not sure if this is the case for all social bookmarking widgets but it’s good to know.
Nofollow was established by google back in 05 to cut down on link spamming. Every link on your blog pulls a little juice from that particular site in an effort to increase their own ranking. Just a little something I stumbled on. Later….
BTW..I set my blog as a dofollow!
I was going to say something to you about your blog not being dofollow, because , well I never get a link back from you
, but hell for all I know maybe I was and just couldn’t find them. So now you truly are a dofollow blog.
My plugins don’t allow for me to change my dofollow to no follow on certain areas of posts, like comments or social bookmarks. So it was either go all nofollow or get rid of the bookmarks and keep all dofollow. I choose the later. I am still trying to figure something else out, as I not that great with changing coding on PHP.
I have no knowledge of PHP whatsoever. I guess that’s one reason I’m so lost when it comes to WordPress. Hope you find a linkback from me soon
DoFollow, NoFollow…it can be a prime cause for a spinning head, yes?
I added some stuff to robots.txt upon launching my main site, for all the unnecessary stuff to be blocked from being crawled. Still, some things fly way over my head and I need to poke the SEO much more than I do. I have to admit a bit of me doesn’t care about it since I’m back to leaning towards working on the outside for a few years to pay for my three babies (ticking clocks, one I am working on now, and future unnamed site).
I’m going to go back some care coffee, so I work at it more. Damn it Glenn! Stop making me want to do things to improve the situation =P
Widgets are interactive virtual tools that provide single-purpose services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather, the time, a calendar, a dictionary, a map program, a calculator, desktop notes, photo viewers, or even a language translator, among other things.
Just when I think I have things all figured out, I read your post which contradicts everything I thought I was doing right. Thanks for the explanation and I have bookmarked your blog for further reference.