Those of you with blogs know what a pain it can be when the spammers send their bots out to muck up your comments with links to their own sites. They know the value of a link in Google and they frankly don't care whether they're messing with the rules or messing with you -- they simply want links from anywhere to raise their search engine placement.

Maybe not anymore -- Google has an idea! A new attribute that stops the Google spiders from following a link. You can place it dynamically every time someone leaves a link in your blog. Google says:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists ... We think any piece of software that allows others to add links to an author's site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists) can use this attribute. We're working primarily with blog software makers for now because blogs are such a common target.

Blog software makers are whole-heartedly jumping on the bandwagon to implement this strategy. If you've created your own blog, you may want to add this attribute in yourself. You can read all the details at The Google Blog.

The google index notification tool lets you keep track of what pages google is indexing on your site. This is a free tool, and anyone can use it. The query tool will show you which pages are being indexed. GIN will even notify you via email when google indexes a page. This is a great feature when adding a new site, and wanting to know when google indexes you. The tool is very easy to setup. All you have to do is include, or require the php script we provide you with below, into your code on your site.

I try to design the code of my pages to be very clean, with little extraneous "stuff." My goal is always to make them as accessible as possible as well as search engine friendly. And I've got it all figured out. Using text instead of images for headings and navigation allows me to be kind to both spiders and people that browse with alternative methods like screen readers. This is one of the main reasons I love sIFR. I can use creative fonts for my headings but still retain the text display in a browser. Yup, I have it all figured out.

When I put images into my pages, I use a descriptive alt attribute if it contains information that a low or non-vision person needs to have. If it's purely decorative, I use the empty alt attribute so that the screen readers will ignore it and not read the name of the file. Yup, all done... good for accessibility... did I mention I have it all figured out?

I belong to a great SEO list, and due to a couple questions going on with a site, I needed to verify some SEO knowledge. While getting into dialogues with the SEO experts there, I'm told that I must put my keywords into my alt attributes. The most important one up to three times in the first few images. NOOOO! Imagine what the people using screen readers will hear -- Blathering keyword ridden yada!

How do I balance the need to be kind to all surfers with the need to be kind to the spiders? Must I choose one or the other? Can I not have a fully accessible to humans site that the spiders also adore? I certainly do not have it all figured out.

Though Search Engine Optimization isn't one of my favorite things to do (gurls just wanna write code!), I do basic optimization for select clients. Of course, this forces me to keep up with the latest news from the Engines to do a good job. Recently, I ran across the Search Visibility Report. SVR is a blog that shows me all the search engine blogs at a glance. So instead of visiting Google, Yahoo! and other blogs one by one, I can simply hit the SVR site (using the Sage extension in Firefox -- my personal favorite), and instantly see what's been said today. Very cool!