I was just looking through some BlogRush links and came upon this post. Now, if you read the post it sounds great, W3C supporters get extra SE juice from a PR9 page, right?

Um… no.

And a commentator was 100% correct:

Unfortunately this wouldn’t work because the page has a NOFOLLOW meta tag attribute set.

The admin of the blog came back with this comment:

We appreciate your comment however that is incorrect!

I have links back from the W3C Supporters pages to various sites and they do indeed count and are NOT “nofollow” links. This can be verified with any SEO or backlink software.

All I can say is, “Heh”.

Right at the top of the W3C supporters page is a meta tag for robots:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW" />

Let alone the W3C says:

6. Will the link from the Supporters page improve my ranking by search engines?
W3C makes no assurances that sites linked from the Supporters program will see improved ranking in search engine results. W3C instructs search engines to ignore links from the Supporters page.

And that is also something the correct commentator said.

While the link counts as a raw backlink for the total link count (nofollows are shown in Google Webmaster Tools and on Yahoo), they pass zero link juice and do not positively affect your rankings.

My guess is their SEO software shows nofollowed links as passing link juice - regardless of the fact they don’t do that. A bit like SEO for Firefox, perhaps. It doesn’t show links as being nofollowed if they are nofollowed in the robots meta tag. And that is one of the biggest problems with modern-day SEOs. They rely on software more than their own head, and if there is something I’ve learned in the past 18 years of using computers (have had them since I was born) it is that software sucks.

If the blogger from that blog happens to read this, I would love to chat with you about why you think the links are being followed, because quite obviously they aren’t. I would love to hear the logic behind it, because this isn’t the first time I’ve seen an “SEO” give bad advice and tell people to buy a $1,000 a year link for SEO that gives no link juice. Let alone you’d think with all the anti-link purchasing stuff going around people wouldn’t even touch paid-links with a 10-foot pole.

Oh yeah, and by the way Urgent SEO. You use GET variables for your permalink URLs. End of argument.

I just changed a few little things here and there.

Social Bookmarks

Yep, Nusuni Dot Com is finally in the 21st century. Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon links are now at the bottom of the posts (on the permalink page) next to the Related Posts section. As far as I can tell they are functioning perfectly. Although if someone wants to test them out for real that’d be great

Fixed A Bug With The Search Field

For some odd reason on IE 7 the search button wasn’t aligned correctly with the search field. I fixed that up with some good CSS magic.

Disabled All-In-One-SEO

You know… everyone says how great the plugin was but it was causing issue after issue for me. So screw it, I disabled it, gonna go back to doing it manually.

As always if you find any little bugs, want to guest post, or even if you have a webmaster tool idea simply contact me or leave a comment.

Here are 8 must-have WordPress plugins:

1. Akismet - By far one of the best spam filters around. My only problem with it’s rate of false negatives is quite high, and it is quite a pain to go looking for a single legit comment in a spam bucket filled with hundreds. Despite that, it hardly ever misses a spam comment.

2. Code Auto Escape - If you’re planning on posting any sort of source code on your WordPress blog, you need this plugin. By default, WordPress likes to escape everything itself, which can cause source code to mess up. This plugin avoids that, by properly handling any code inside the code tag.

3. Digital Fingerprint - A useful plugin for adding a signature at the end of your posts for your RSS feed. This is what I use to add the nice “hit the splogger over the head with a shovel” message on the Nusuni Dot Com feed. You can even add in a unique fingerprint for your blog posts and search on Google with it - a great way of tracking down sploggers.

4. FeedBurner FeedSmith - A plugin that automatically forwards all users who access your WordPress RSS feed to your FeedBurner Feed. Don’t have one? It isn’t that hard to set up. With FeedBurner you can track statistics like how many people are subscribed to your blog, which feed readers they use, etc.

5. Google Sitemap Generator - Google Sitemaps are an excellent way of informing the Google Bot about all the pages on your website. As an added bonus, other search engines like Ask.com use it as well. This plugin will automatically generate the sitemap and ping Google to inform it of any changes. More info on Sitemaps later on in this series.

6. Subscribe To Comments - Adds a nice e-mail subscription option when you leave a comment on your blog. A great way of letting your users stay up to date on comments.

7. WP-Cache - Takes a lot of the load off of your server by caching your WordPress data. This will keep WordPress from having to do dozens of MySQL queries every time someone loads a page on your blog. A good way to prevent your site from getting taken down by a Digg.com front-page.

8. WP-Grins - Makes it easier to add in little smiley faces like this into your post. Adds the icons on the Write Post page and it can be added above the comments field.

Stay tuned for even more Back To The Basics posts.

Well, its official. Netscape’s Digg clone is gone.

We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.

It’s been expected for a long time, and it doesn’t surprise me one bit. For starters the thing didn’t seem to get very popular (probably because it was advertised as well… a Digg-killer), and it seemed to be much easier to game than the other social media sites.

So, that’s it. Good riddance. Maybe Netscape will focus on becoming popular again instead of focusing on trying to kill other websites? Hah.

I’ve been having some issues lately with keeping a Google ranking. I think I may have found the problem: Duplicate Content.

In a nutshell I found a flaw with the All In One SEO plugin that causes it to not do noindex for /page/ archives, even if you have it set to noindex archives. I’ll send a bug report in.

So basically my categories were being noindexed (but followed) correctly, but the /page/ pages were still being indexed, thus causing duplicate content issues with the permalink pages.

I can fix this by manually adding in the tags for now, but I think to prevent it in the future I’m going to switch over to displaying quotes from the posts instead of the entire posts on all pages other than the permalink page.