seo

I wrote before about the rel nofollow monstrosity. It seems Google guys did finally realize something is terribly wrong with their invention. What Google anti-SPAM engineer Matt Cutts told us the other day is this:

Instead of preventing a “PageRank leak” (read: pathologically saving every drop of the inbound linking credit that a site gets) as can be seen in this “rel NoFollow” article, Google decided to simply exclude the PageRank which is nofollowed from the equation, effectively, reducing the size of PageRank that circulates through the site (and the web). This will, by the way, introduce some global level disturbances in the page-rank matrix, one of the major algorithms in the google rankings (even thought the number of nofollowed links is less than 3 percent, as they mostly come from big sites).

Is this change good or bad?

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Alexa.com toolbar is a web traffic analysis program integrated into your browser. I always knew that services like Alexa keep track of what websites users visit, time they spend there, and similar general statistics. What I didn’t know until today is that they collect very personal information about you, and they also publish some of it. For example, private pages and links that you visit may appear on Google as Alexa may place them in their site analysis section (sites linking to… and similar). Imagine you write a private blog post where you link to some site you want only your friend to know about, and then few days later you find these links on Alexa site and indexed by Google thanks to Alexa not respecting your privacy! Also, did you know that:

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This simplified model is a nice introduction: Vector Space Model.

More food for thought: similarity measures and original Google architecture.