I realised that not many of the websites I use really actually use the title attribute in links. And considering most the sites I use are blogs that's really not so good, especially for interlinking. Title's really are just as important as the anchor when it comes to 'key phrases' (like 'key words', but... longer).

Go use them and see how much more search engine referrals you get!

We hadn't done much work on our simple blog lately, so I figured I'd put in an hour or so and have added new features. First, to the front end, I've made it so only ten posts are shown at a time. You can't see it at the moment, since there are only a few posts, but I've tested it on nemo-serv and it works all fine and dandy. At the bottom of the page, just like any typical blog, you'll see a link to previous posts, that'll take you back another ten posts, of course you can manually change the link to whatever amount to skip you like.

I've also added the "read more" tag. I simply type <!-- Stop reading!!! --> and when you're on a page with multiple posts, you only get to see the first section. Of course, that comment is still in the single post view, if you look at the source. Maybe it'll leave it in for if someone wants to create a crawler. Of course, I've not added a way to actually tell the user that not all of the post is showing, so the "read more" function is a bit retarded at the moment.

I've also set the auto-number in the database to start numbering from 1000. If you're running your own blog with the unique ID in the URL for a perma-link to the post I recommend you do the same. Why? Because Google says so. I'm not going to change the links I've already made for indexing purposes.

Also, I've changed the "Read comments" link to "Read # comments", so you know if someone has commented since you last looked.

The back end is coming along nicely too. Admin's can now log in, post and delete posts. Still lacking the ability to update posts, but that's at the top of my to-do list.

Look forwards to more updates soon!

As I mentioned in my last post, I've had to add nofollow to all the links in user comments in an effort to try and stop spam. However, if a blog has good anti-spam facilities, like most blogs do now thanks to WordPress having lots of plugins for it, then it really shouldn't use the nofollow tag.

Google was the one to start the nofollow tag and then following their recommendation, others joined the initiative too. Basically, the nofollow tag is written like so: <a href="http://www.allroundnews.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">. This tells search engines to not give that link any "credit" towards how it's ranked in the search results page. It's supposed to be used to make sure that comments don't allow spammers to get any advantage by flooding your blog, whilst still letting users click the link just as normal.

This is a great idea in theory. However, in the page I link to above, Google said that every comment, traceback, guest book or just any user generated content should have it's links parsed with the nofollow attribute. I don't think that's nice at all. The user's comment is great content added to the article or page and they shouldn't all be treated as spammers; the link to their website is the only pay back that a web master can offer to say "thanks for the unique content" without actually giving them money.

If the user generated content is moderated before it's shown publicly, then the nofollow tag shouldn't even be added at all. If comments aren't moderated at all, for any reason, then I propose that the nofollow tag be added, but only for a week or so. After that time, any spam should have been deleted anyway so the nofollow tag should be removed. That's the way I'm intending comments here are going to be handled.

So, give back to your users if they give you content that others would pay for; give them a link!