It is interesting to know how much (own) Website is worth. There are several tools on the Internet which can help you to estimate the worth of your page in money ($) but also some tools which does provide some sort of score are interesting to. I’ll will share some interesting tools that can measure the potential of your site or a blog.

Glurk.com

Interesting Web-page worth calculation witch is based on basic SEO-parameters like: Google page-rank, count of back-links, listing in Yahoo directory and so on. You can also say provide some additional or even subjective information, so e.g. count of competitors.
If you like, see saved result for my site.

Snscoop.com

Here you only need to provide your domain name. And other information will be collected and present to you automatically. Nice and handy but do not work well with sub-domains

Websitevalued.com

This Service is truly nice one. Good Information Presentation and the possibility to provide some data (not to much) manually, which leads to more realistic results. Definitely is worth to try it out!

Seitwert.de

Seitwert is an very cool German service. You have to understand basic German to make the information they provide about your site make useful for you. There are six Rating:
Google Rating, Alexa rating, Social bookmarks presence, technical details, Yahoo rating, an other factors.
It show you the problems of your site.

Seomoz.org

Seomoz seemed to be fine SEO company, at least they have very nice free SEO tools. One of them – Trifecta measures so called “Page strength” of your site.
You have to be registered user.

Technorrati based -Blog worth

And of cause the known Blog worth. This rank is based on technorati rank. So you can only apply it on blogs listed on technorati.

Mywebsiteworth.com

Just enter your URL and you will get worth in $ with not much expression. However the worth is realistic one. Where Blog Worth (See above) gets 1000$ here could be worth 50$.

Seekbot.de

Another useful site is german Seekbot. Its not ranking and rating service . But I like to listing it here because it something useful it check your page on the fly like Seitwert.de and gives you hint, how bots do see on your site, what is bad and what is good.

^(.*)$ http://alexander.holbreich.org/$1 [R=301,L]

to the old domain to preserve some humble SEO result of this page. But for some weeks new Blog had no page-rank. Now he is here and the effect of Permanent redirect on google is proved!

There is just one drawback of this method. Uploaded images become automatically description, which say that that picture where uploaded by Folder Monitr (with a link) and a tag “FolderMonitr”. So I don’t like stuff like this. Unfortunately mass edit (or delete i my case) of tags and description is not so comfortable in flickr as it could be.

However I will use FolderMonitr further maybe the description and tag problem cannot outbalance the use of that tool.

P.S. If anybody knows the working way haw too upload pictures to flickr direct out of Lightroom in the version 2.0 is welcome to give me a hint thanks!

DIGG Effect

Eric Enge has wrote very good article about succes on digg. Some of details he presents my be not true at the moment, because DIGG evolves and changes internal algorithms. However some facts are really interesting.

As he says, stories that where able to reach the digg home page receive an average of 129 links, and more than 10,000 visitors in an hour. Some stories have brought even more than 1,000 links and 100,000 visitors. This shows how important DIGG is and why there are so many legend and so much attention from SEOs. So it has happened many times that stories which have made the home page, have brought the server of the story site can’t handle the traffic load. This is well known phenomena is known as the “Digg Effect”.

Of cause the quality of this kind of visitors is “bad”. Don’t expect that they will by your products and click Ads. Do not expect big growth in comments, DIGG users often comment regarding a site on digg itself instead of on the dugg website. Digg users comes to see only that what they would inspect in the story description on DIGG itself.

I don’t wanna be a Digger

So after reading several articles about how to success on DIGG i realized that it would take very very very much time. So as every body know time is money, but moreover time is life! In my opinion the truly success on DIGG starting from null will deserve much to much time in comparison to the revenue.
Personally I don’t have much time and will not spend it to fullish site like DIGG, voting for silly topics of US tanagers So at the moment and I think also in the future will not spend much time on DIGG or other communities.

I mean isn’t it better to spend time to create wonderful content? It would give you personal much more satisfaction than any DIGG effect. But however good content have in any case good chance to achieve one DIGG effect after another!
So by by DIGG, may others vote for my content, I will not spend my life for Digging

P.S. It doesn’t mean i will not continue submitting my articles to it

Currently I’m the number 49 of top users of the Russian DIGG sister called news2.ru, therefore I think to have some experience and some kind of instinctive feeling for mechanisms we have on that page. News2.ru is a typical example of social news-driven page and is quite similar to DIGG. Therefore my experience can be useful also for DIGG users and other similar Web2.0 sites.

Success factors of digging

As I think there a only two main factors your success (success of your submissions) depends on. That are the quality of your stories and friendship. Yes only them two and some sub issues its quite simple. Such an statement my appear as vague for you, therefore I’ll try to be more concrete.

High quality stories

High quality stories are known as:

• unique
• unusual
• very actual
• interesting for everybody

That are primary properties on successful story. Now you may think that the appreciation of these attributes is highly subjective, that is partly true. However everyone can achieve good objectivity by analysing the actuality of post. E.g. U.S. President election is quite actual at the moment, Cold War maybe not. However with some experience thee appraisal of these properties will get better and better. I can say I began to feel what kind of stories can reach the TOP.

To be actual and have many stories to choose, it is recommended to subscribe to RSS feeds of news portal of your wish or several of them. If your social-community portal presents websites statistic , you are well advised to study it and chose some with the best success rate.

So what to do? How to begin? The answer is clear too, you just have to star and play a bit around. If you are non completely new in the field of social news community, then you just can’t leave this step out. However as already mentioned the success factor of your news will grow with experience.

It is difficult to provide some examples of good or bad news, because it’s highly depends on the time context and also other things like presentation! Presentation is one of the sub factors I wanna say some words about:

• Always use pictures! Choose them with care.
• Use headlines that magnify attention (Compare: “Microsoft considers to by some Yahoo shares” vs. “Microsoft takes over Yahoo!”)
• But use headlines that are precisely express what is in the content behind them. Otherwise your messages can be considered as spam or inaccurate.
• Be aware of duplicates
• The content at it self should be good presented and layout carefully. Don’t write to much, but try to make your link sexy. Don’t lie.
• Use the right category!

Doing so you will create solid and high potential submissions, and you has learned this, the second factor comes to a play which helps enormously to use the potential of your submissions.

Friendship

If in the beginning of your “career” maybe non of your messages reach the top, at a master level the rate of your positive submissions can rise up to 50-99 percent (depending on social service and other factors). But this success is only possible with a active circle of friends!

How to get friends on social communities? You should be able to answer this question at your-self, because it is not much different as in the real life. Friendship grounds on mutuality and deserve much time. Decide for yourself whether you are ready for it. However gaining new friends is in any case new experience and enrichment for everyone.

Maybe it’s not so much for a professional blogger but it’s OK for an amateur blogger like me. Important is the overal trend which is positiv.

Compared to last month there where 610 visitors. Why that peak at end of January, I before.

However if we do compare February statistic to December of last year, 730 visitors is quite a good result. In December I had only 158 visitors, of cause my blog was extremely raw at this time.

Most of the users in January and February came from USA, Germany and Russian Federation.

Most popular post in Februar

1. Post about – Wordpress popularity plugin with enabled “Most popular Widget” which you can see e.g. on my sidebar.
2. Considering about
3. And my from December of the last year.

May be you are wondering why my adventures has not become part three. The answer is simple I just had no time to write it down, now it’s too late

Goals for March

First I would say, that 730 visitors is just a beginning so March should result in at least 1000 visitors. I think this is realistic if I find few hours to write good articles, which are already in my head. Maybe a can offer you new series of articles about mobile computing or maybe about Workflows Systems or even one of both. We’ll see.

Furthermore my wish is to adapt the current template of my blog. I would like to make it more comfortable for navigation, reading and more SEO friendly. If you have some hints for me, your comments are welcome!

At last I think it’s time to offer my rss feed through the feedburner, which will help me to have statistic about my feed readers.

At first look on Yahoo Buzz we see several categories of news and voting buttons aside of them with the ability to voting up. Digg principle so far. The difference of the new Yahoo service is that Yahoo Buzz seemed to be intended to work closely with Yahoo’s already existing news providers and services. I don’t see a way appear in for users to interact with the Yahoo Buzz content other than voting it up.

That principle is complete different to to Digg.com concept, where every user can submit the content. So I don’t know whether this can compete to the digg.com popularity. My fear is that people will find it boring to vote up only (except they believe to change the world)!

I think the main advantage of digg.com lies not in the possibility to vote up somebody’s content, but in the ability to share own content! That is maybe not so clear for you, when you are not experienced digger. However web masters and bloggers are highly interested to promote their content, digg.com provide them a good possibility for it. That is natural to vote up other content if you wish that somebody votes for your content too. Therefore the concept of friendship is so important on digg like sites. I don’t know which percentage of digg users has own website? But it think it will be over 80%. Does Yahoo don’t target this auditory???

I think that the Yahoo Buzz in the current version is only first step in this direction. Of cause Yahoo Buzz can’t be a competitor to digg.com at this stage, consequently next step of Yahoo people should be a some concept of allowing every user to submit their favorite content!

But we will see how it comes.

Nearly every Worpdress blog would have something like Meta section in the sidebar, every link there should be marked as nofollow. Unfortunately there are not coded in one widget, they are distributed over two files in the standard wordpress installation.

Yo need also update two files:

1. /wp-includes/widges.php
2. /wp-includes/general-template.php

In the widgets.php you need to ad rel=nofollow inside of the function wp_widget_meta(), so that result of this looks like this:

function wp_widget_meta($args) {
extract($args);
$options = get_option(‘widget_meta’);
$title = empty($options['title']) ? __(‘Meta’) : $options['title'];
?>
<?php echo $before_widget; ?>
<?php echo $before_title . $title . $after_title; ?>
<ul>
<?php wp_register(); ?>
<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>
<li><a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” rel=”nofollow” title=”<?php echo attribute_escape(__(‘Syndicate this site using RSS 2.0′)); ?>”><?php _e(‘Entries <abbr title=”Really Simple Syndication”>RSS</abbr>’); ?></a></li>
<li><a href=”<?php bloginfo(‘comments_rss2_url’); ?>” rel=”nofollow” title=”<?php echo attribute_escape(__(‘The latest comments to all posts in RSS’)); ?>”><?php _e(‘Comments <abbr title=”Really Simple Syndication”>RSS</abbr>’); ?></a></li>
<?php wp_meta(); ?>
</ul>
<?php echo $after_widget; ?>
<?php
}

As you see, wp_register() function is called here, and therefore we need to modify general-template.php file. Excatrly the mentioned method, so that it looks like this:

function wp_register( $before = ‘<li>’, $after = ‘</li>’ ) {

if ( ! is_user_logged_in() ) {
if ( get_option(‘users_can_register’) )
$link = $before . ‘<a href=”‘ . get_option(’siteurl’) . ‘/wp-login.php?action=register” rel=”nofollow”>’ . __(‘Register’) . ‘</a>’ . $after;
else
$link = ”;
} else {
$link = $before . ‘<a href=”‘ . get_option(’siteurl’) . ‘/wp-admin/” rel=”nofollow”>’ . __(‘Site Admin’) . ‘</a>’ . $after;
}

echo apply_filters(‘register’, $link);
}

Notice that I have added only nofollow relation and nothing more.

However that is not the best solution cause, when these files have been changed in new version you have to patch them all manually. unfortunately, there is no mechanism to preserve standard widgets to be not be updated as i think unless of creating own meta-widget plugin, but this is to much for this purpose. What do you think about?

Update: There is already a plugin for it.

One of the Important aspects is properly made page for the search engine optimisation point of view. I don’t wanna cover these point in this article, if interested, you can read Wordpress SEO – The Beginners Guide by Joost de Valk’s, which is good introduction in the theme. I just wanna cover one of the aspects of good page and that is Meta-information.

Every page of your blog has to provide title attribute and meta attribute keywords and maybe even meta description, which helps Search engines to better “understand” what is on that page. Unfortunately there is no adequate support for meta description by default in Wordpress. So we need a Plug-In.

HeadSpace2 – Plugin

The HeasSpace2 PlugIn homepage is one of the popular in that field. The installation is easy, no template hacks are needed, copy and activate as usual. The configuration is done in “options” -menu. It may be helpful to read the description and concepts on the Plug-In homepage, before starting configuration.

There are four main configuration tabs:

• Page Settings (shown on image)
• Modules
• Options
• Import

Page Settings

Crucial are Page Settings, that are default settings for different parts of Wordpress like Archives pages, post pages, main page and so on.

In Page Settings dialog it is possibly to configure default tags for all of them, of cause with support of predefined variables. It is possibly that you have to play a little bit around until you get desired effects.

But before you start check your templates header file. Inspect how title is created. It is crucial because some template authors use wireds things for creating titles. You are well advised to use something like this:

<title>

<?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?> <?php if(wp_title(‘ ‘, false)) { echo ‘ : ‘; } ?><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>

</title>

This, will enable by default right presentation in title, first the title of Post then Blog name separated with “:” like on my blog. Works fine without Headspace2 PlugIn ant with it. By usage with Headspace2 use empty string as separator in the configuration of “page title” in the Modules Dialog.

Modules

Modules has two sections, top and bottom. Top section allows you to define the presentation of meta tag description fields in Post and Pages Editors and also in the Page Settings dialog. And that are so called Page Modules. Here is also “page title” module which is mentioned before.

In the bottom you will find the Site Modules configuration. In the main Site modules could be selfcontaining Plugins. But here they wrapped as modules. Most of them are some Statistic analysers like Google analytics, but what what i found interesting is Google Section Targeting Module. Google targeting allows you to demarcate adsence relevant html>body area of your blog, read more about Google section Targeting (in German).

Warnings

Be careful with the Modules, i have switched something wrong there, and that broke the output of that site, so only admit are worked well. therefore I didn’t notice anything fore more than ten ours. You may be notified strange downtime of my site in the last week?

Conclusion

All in one, Headspace2 seems to be nice Plug-In. use it with care in it will serve you well. Questions are welcome.

Nevertheless i like that people (there were more than 40) found my post good. I’ll try to make more of such in the future

P.S. I’m still think about my new avatar, next idea i had, is to play around with letter “G”.

What Google thinks about subdomains

Michael Wyszomierski answer this question in Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:

“What’s the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories? When it comes to Google, there aren’t major differences between the two, so when you’re making that decision, do what works for you and your visitors. Following PubCon, our very own Matt Cutts … on his personal blog. In addition to those considerations, if you use Webmaster Tools (which we hope you do!), keep in mind that you’ll automatically be verified for deeper subdirectories of any sites you’ve verified, but subdomains need to be verified separately.”

Google say it does not matter what you use for them, gives you only some more headache with using of Webmaster tools, but they refer to Matt Cutts – highly cited CEO Guru.

What Matt Cutts thinks about sub-domains

Mat Cutts says in his Subdomains and Subdirectories article:

“My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you’ll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.”

Even Google lies, we know that also Matt Cuts believe, that it does not matter what you use, but subdirectories are easier to maintain.

Conclusion

So this is a very good situation, when subdirectory and subdomain has no relevance in SEO sense. We can arrange them semantically and forget to consider strange optimisation rules you can find on the world wide web. Therefore i think sub-domains should be used to satisfy the following:

• Separating of Responsibility. E.g simon.zambrovski.org domain is part of zambrovski.org family’s domain. So when Simon does the administration for his subdomain, maybe his Grandpa does it for the zambrovski.org
• Separating of Subject. Subject must be in some own hierarchy. So e.g. Google.com of cause owns their product adsense.google.com witch is good example of separation Subjects.

In other cases i would use subdirectories.

The rel="nofollow" attribute in a-Tags was intitally proposed by google and was supported by MSN and Yahoo! The intial intention was to stem spam-links, that can largely occure in some webpages, especially blog comments. The famious blog engines founded that idea very cool and mosst of them are setting the nofollow attirbut out of the box. WordPress does it by default too. But like many of good-mentione ideas can lead to some not wannted problems.

Analysis

Let’s look closely on noffolow attribute and his purposes. If “nofollow” relation is set within a link, the serachengine (like google) shuld not consider this link in the Pagerank callculations. Basic descriotion of Googles pagerank you will find in Resources below.
But what is when all comment of one blogsystem are marked with “nofollow” by default. What does it means? Does it means taht, all comment on your blog are spam, or irrelevant information. If so why enabling commentig at all? Nofollow probaly does not make really sense in comments or at least in all comment per default. Then comments that are deserve to be marked as “nofollow” are not really comments you wish see on your page. Thay should be deleted by your spamfilter-plugin. So the is not realy any need to have “nofollow” in comment links.

But many of famious blog use it per default. (See german blogs results)
But should we consider nofollow attribute harmfull in any case and forever like No NoFollow intitiative do? Let’s inspect their 11 Reasons agains nofollow:

1. nofollow does not prevent comment spam - There are to meany points in this statment. At one side, of course “noflolow” do not prevent automatic spam. Furhter it can lead to fewer human-made spam (if someone sees that somebodys blog sets nofollows at default, he may not post sensless post, just to have link. Of course in this case, noffolow leads to the fact, that also wanted comments are in absence, becourse authors becomme no “revard” for theyer commenting job.
2. nofollow is confusingly named - i don’t know, i think this is not a point.
3. nofollow harms the connections between web sites – I agree with that, the default and not human evaluated nofollow – harms!
4. nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or a similar technique – Yes, but where is the problem?
5. nofollow could be used to shut web sites out – This is true! And it can be very powerfull. Imagine: all bloggers from now on will sets nofollows on the wikipedia links. Ok you will be never able arganize something like this, but if…!
6. nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers – That’s true. And is one reaaly big problem!
   
7. nofollow heists commentators’ earned attention – This can be true, as already mentioned at number 1.
8. nofollow could be used to further discriminate weblogs – I think that says nothing.
9. nofollow prevents the Web from being a web – That not precise, it contradics to the statement 4. I think web stays web, nofollow does only change the searchengines view of the web and that is something different!
   
10. nofollow eliminates the dissemination of free speech – Oh yea! Say humane rights defenders from “NO noffolow party” Why people allways try to argue that way to get attention ?
    
11. nofollow was developed in privacy with only search engines companies taking part in the discussion - Yes it’s true but also many of other beatifull, well accepted things.

I my oppinion we shold be caryfull with “nofollow” usage. Nofollow can be dangerous (see points: 1,3,5,6). No follow does not change the world in better way, and spam should be fighted before it reach web page. If spame is on page (in comment, forum-post, ..) it already to late, and nofollow do not handle it.

But the can be some usage for noFollow if can be handled by humans and not automaticaly. For example if someone buys adversting on your page. Or probaly you cites someones page that you don’t like, ant you don’t wish this page gain from it – why not “nofollow”?

conclusion

I am shure, future brings more relation-tags, to specify page relations more precisely. “Nofollow”- Tag may be not the perfect one, so use it carefullu or just don’t touch it – disable it!

My blog don’t sets the nofollows per default, so you are wellcome to leave your comments!

Resources

WordPress Plug in that disables rel=”nofollow” in comments – use it!
Three solutions how to visualise rel=”nofollow” in firefox
Some basics about Googles PageRank