Joe Hayes {dot} Org

As you may already know, placing a re=”nofollow” attribute on a link will tell search engines, like Google, to not follow the link - or give credit as a vote when it comes to search rankings. This is a pretty popular thing to do to control the links in user generated content like forums and blogs - since you are who you link to, so to speak. This also helps to discourage spammers from targetting your web pages, though not always.

I’m all about trying the latest software, beta or not, and usually I keep it and work through the bugs as it reaches the official release. Internet Explorer 8 was no exception, and unlike many other folks in my industry I’ve never caught onto the whole Firefox thing. It’s not that I knock Firefox, it’s a great program (as is the upcoming Chrome), I’m just resistant to change.

Recently, I had a website successfully reincluded back into MSN/Live’s web search. As one of the first websites I built - way back in 2005 - there were several (dare I say more) questionable methods of promotion and link building as I learned the in’s/out’s of being a webmaster. Throughout it’s life, this site has been penalized/banned in all three major search engines at one point or another - in fact it’s still banned in Yahoo.

Where have I been? Well, extremely busy with local projects and folks breathing down my neck to get things done. Eh, good problem to have I guess. Been so busy actually I just now got a chance to read through some of my favorite blogs, namely Matt Cutts (head of the spam team at Google) - and I came accross a post late last month about Google Trends.

You know, for years (literally) I’ve always wanted to be able to exclude certain words when looking at things like “links from an external page” while using Awstats. This especially comes in handy when you have alot of subdomains, as those links are counted as “links” the same way (actually worse, or more often) than links from other (completely different) domains. In my case, I manage free forum and blog hosting services which offer free subdomains… so that’s literally thousands of listings cluttering up what I really want to see (websites passing the most traffic via incoming links) and often eliminated just one word isn’t enough.