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It’s come a long way from having to beg Google to come and index the site site. These days, Googlebot visits the site only minutes after a new articles is published, and it’s on the Google SERP first page for many queries within minutes after that.

So what do you like or not like about Digitivity?

What would you like to see in the future?

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The John Chow blog is discussing a new blog automation system called BlogProfitz which adds blog posts automatically after some initial setup. The content is of two kinds:

• YouTube videos and RSS feeds of other sites, and
• Articles from BlogProfitz’ library of 15,000 articles

The first kind of post can be handy in that you’ve performed a service to readers by compiling links to content elsewhere on a single topic. But the second kind seems dubious. Even with the 1,000 users that BlogProfitz says they will limit themselves to, that’s still only 15 unique articles per user.

The system operates remotely. There’s nothing to install on your webserver, but you do have to give BlogProfitz your blog password to allow it to post content. It only works with WordPress blogs, but I think that’s OK since WordPress is the dominant blogging system on the web.

The general consensus at the John Chow blog was that the system runs the risk of running into duplicate content territory, which means that Google will rank you lower for that content. (Why should Google rank your site higher for content which is available in a number of other places?)

BlogProfitz allows you to enter your IDs for ClickJunction, Overstock, eBay, Amazon, and other sites with affiliate marketing programs. The links it creates have your ID information embedded.

One area of concern was that if the BlogProfitz site should happen to get hacked, your blog’s username plus that of your affiliate partners and your payout information would be exposed.

The system costs $19 per month for 3 blogs, and goes up from there.

Conclusion

As long as you stick to links to content elsewhere, and also add your own unique content, BlogProfitz could be a useful tool to get your blog populated with content. If you get too greedy, the system could backfire on you, though.

Other blogs discussing BlogProfitz include Balkhis, Winning the Web, and Lost Ball in High Weeds.

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1. What Is NoFollow?
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Elements and attributes

OK, let’s break that down. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language that web pages are written in. It takes normal English text, and adds additional information (called “markup”) that allows machines (computers) to take an action they otherwise wouldn’t have or display the text in a different manner.

An element is a word in the Hypertext Markup Language. Take a simple one, <i>. The action normally taken by a computer when it encounters text wrapped in an <i> element is to make the text italic. Like so:

<i>Italic text</i> results in: Italic text

An attribute is a property of an element that makes a machine treat that element somewhat differently. (Of course, you can’t really make a machine, other than your own, do anything. For example, a blog reader’s browser might be set to display all text in monospace, non-italic, single font size, regardless of attributes you set. I’m just using shorthand for saying you are requesting a machine to do such-and-such.)

Let’s take the <a> element. “A” is short for “anchor”, which defines a link. One attribute of the <a> element is the URL (address) of the link target. Like so:

<a href=”http://google.com”>Google</a> results in this: Google

The “href” (hypertext reference) is the attribute.

The problem: blog spam

OK, before we get to the nofollow attribute, let’s take a detour into what problem Google was trying to solve. The rise of Google as the number one search engine put a lot of value on a site’s PageRank, a value that reflects the number of other sites that link to your site. Google ranks sites with higher PageRank higher in its search engine page results (SERPs).

Given this, spammers started to post comments on blogs with no other purpose than advertising their spam sites. The more blog sites that had spam comments linking to a spam site, the higher it would rank in Google. This wasn’t as much of a problem before the rise of blogs and blogging because most sites before then were static with no facility for commenting.

This was a problem for bloggers as well as for Google because they had to contend with deleting spam comments.

The solution: the nofollow attribute value

So, in 2005, Google proposed adding a “nofollow” attribute value to HTML links. This works by setting the existing “rel” attribute of <a> elements to “nofollow”:

<a href=”http://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Spam site</a>

The attribute is “rel”, the value is “nofollow”. “Rel” indicates the relation of the link target to the current site. Note: even though “nofollow” is an attribute value, it’s commonly called an attribute or a tag.

The point of nofollow is that links with nofollow will be treated differently than links without it. Google purports to actually not follow the link and put the site it links to in its search index.  So, spammers can forget increasing their PageRank; they won’t even get into Google.

Hence, the theory goes, since they’re not getting any benefit from spam comments, they might as well not spam the blogs.

How to use nofollow

Actually, you probably don’t have to do anything to use nofollow. If you’re using any of the most common blogging or content management systems available, it likely already puts the “nofollow” attribute value in the outgoing linkadded as comments by your readers. Some systems even add “nofollow” to all outgoing links, even ones you add yourself.

To know for sure, you can just view the source of a page with comments and search for “nofollow”. If you find it, you’re using nofollow.

Problems with nofollow

This’ll be covered in a later post. Subscribe to the RSS feed (in the sidebar) for updates.

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1. Update the Original Post.
2. Post an Announcement but Link to the Original and Back Again
3. Post an Announcement With a Link to the Original But Still Update the Original

The blog argues that the best option is 3.  But I think 2 is better choice. To say that blog posts have to be updated with new information is to, I think, confuse the role of a blog vs. a content management system.

To my mind, a blog is chronological diary of posts. The posts are necessary related to a single point in time.  When you find more information, you write a new post. This is similar to a newspaper. When a reporter gets new information on a subject, he doesn’t edit yesterday’s news.

On the other hand, articles in a content management system can be thought of as entries in an encyclopedia. You want each entry or article to always be up to date.  You also wouldn’t write multiple articles on a single subject. And the articles wouldn’t be arranged by date with newest articles first. Rather, they’d be ordered by subject, possibly hierarchically.

So, in conclusion, I think the answer to whether you update posts would be based on what you conceive of your site as.

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The purpose of this post is to see what happens (if anything) when uploading images with the Scribefire Quickblogging toolbar. This is a Firefox toolbar that shows up when you navigate to a post on your blog.

After the image is uploaded, Scribefire shows a dialog, “Confirm Post Appearance,” prompting you to confirm the formatting and location of the image.  The dialog shows buttons for

• aligning the image left, center, and right without wrapping
• aligning the image left, center, and right with wrapping
• and moving the image up and down withing the post

That’s uploading image from your computer. Now I test uploading images from the web:

Problems:

• You have to save all changes to your blog post, if any, before clicking on the image upload button. Otherwise, the changes will be lost.

• There doesn’t seem to be an option for uploading web images to your webserver.

While WordPress doesn’t have such an option either, it would be useful to have one in Scribefire. For web-based images, Scribefire doesn’t actually upload images, notwithstanding the name of the tool button. Rather it inserts an IMG tag that references the remote location of the image:

<img src=”http://www.sxc.hu/pic/m/s/sn/snowman01/756129_yellow_flowers.jpg” alt=”" />

This is called ‘hotlinking’ and it’s frowned upon because it uses the resources of the remote server.

Screenshots

Scribefire Image Upload: API vs FTP

Scribefire Image Upload: Confirm Post Appearance

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