Sebastian’s Pamphlets

Recently I’ve bitched a lot, especially tearing utterly useles microformats that the InterWeb really doesn’t need (rel-nofollow, common tag …). Naturally, those pamplets get noticed as Google search engine bashing. Wait. Of course not everything a search engine company launches is crap. Actually, I do love -and use daily- lots of awesome services provided by Google, Yahoo & Co.

Whilst some SE engineers -probably due to my endless rants- have unsubscribed from my various you-porn social media streams, others have noticed that there’s also laudatory stuff in a grumpy old fart’s Twitter output, and asked for input. Thank you! Dear Johannes Müller, bypassing your WebForm, here is my greedy Google Chrome wish list (you do know the goodies yourself, hence I skip the cute stuff I should praise).

I’ll focus on functionality that I like or miss as a plain user, but I can’t resist to mention a few geeky thingies upfront. As a developer I do love that Chrome doesn’t die on faulty scripts (or on .htpasswd protected pages during startup with session restore like the current FF … on evaling perfectly valid JavaScript code from a server’s response to an AJAX request that exceeds 50 or 65k like IE …). Also, the debugging facilities are awesome (although I still can’t throw away Firebug and a few more FireFox plug-ins). I very much appreciate Chrome’s partial HTML-5 support, but besides neat video controls I’d love to see it render plain HTML-5 stuff like CITE attributes in Q elements correctly (4.7.3. User agents should allow users to follow such citation links), even when DOCTYPE says HTML 4.x or XHTML.

WebKit is great, but it comes with disadvantages. Try to put radio buttons in a SPAN or DIV element with CSS controlling horizontal/vertical appearance as well as special label formats -instead of a RADIO-GROUP- and you’re toast. FF can handle that. Or set the MULTIPLE attribute of a SELECT element to FALSE (instead of ommitting it for combo-boxes) and you’ll suffer from select lists that you just can’t handle as a user, because WebKit (as well as other layout engines!) doesn’t render the element as a drop down list any more. Of course that’s non-standard coding, but stuff like that isn’t really uncommon on the Web. Just because other layout engines handle crap like this equally wrong, that doesn’t mean that the WebKit version used by Google Chrome must come with the same maladies, right?

What totally annoys me is that on the WordPress /wp-admin/post.php page the plus icons of “Post Slug” or “Post Status” just don’t work with Chrome. That means I’ve to fire up FF only to type in a value in a form field that Google Chrome sneakily hides from me. Nasty. Really nasty. Don’t tell me that I’m using an outdated WordPress version. I do know that, but I won’t upgrade because WP 0.87 (beta) perfectly fits my needs.

Ok, what do I like as a user? Google Chrome is lean and very easy to use, it eats less memory than any other browser I allow on my machines, and it executes JavaScript as well as nifty rounded corners amazingly fast. Because -at least with the naked version- I can’t install a gazillion of add-ons, I usually see complete landing pages rendered — instead of just the H1, an advertisement, and the very first P element along with an 1/6 clip of an image or video, because all the FF toolbars occupy nearly 3/4 of the browser window’s height. Try FireFox with a few plug-ins vs. Chrome on a machine running 1024*768 (not that unusual when traveling) and you’re convinced in a fraction of a nanosecond.

Now that I’ve completely switched to Chrome, at least at home (at work I have to test my stuff with everything except IE because that’s a not supportable user agent), I preferably sooner than later do want the FireFox nuggets. Dear Google Chrome developers, please find a way to extract the most wanted stuff from FF plug-ins. You can implement those as right-click popup menus, as well as an one-line toolbar (not stealing too much screen real estate), or both, or otherwise. It’s not too hard to detect that a user has a delicious or stumble-upon account (you read the cookies anyway …). You easily could show icons for the core functionality of such services, along with context sensitive menus enabling the whole functionality of a particular service as provided with overcrowded toolbars in other browsers. Examples:

  An icon “Remember this” to submit a page to delicious is enough, when “my delicious” and so on is available via context menu.

  The same goes for StumbleUpon. Two icons, thumbs-up and thumbs-down, would provide 99% of the functionality I need quite often. Ok, my thumbs-down votes are rare, so you can even dump the second one.

  How cool would it be to create a tiny URI for the current tab with just one click?

  Next up, please feel somewhat challenged by PrefBar, an instrument I really can’t miss on the long haul. 
Switching user agent strings, faking referrers, checking out Web pages without cookies, JavaScript and so on is a must have. Ok, I admit that’s geek stuff, so take it as an example transferable to some girlish stuff I refuse to recognize in my monster’s Web browsers.

  Also, let’s not forget Twitter, blogstuff and whatnot.

Imagine your preferred services, iconized in a one-line toolbar configurable compiled from single items of various 3rd party toolbars available on the InterWeb (of course you should enable Google Toolbar icons too). How cool would that be, in comparisation to the bookmarklets I must live with now?

Context-menu stuff like “image properties” et cetera -as well known from other browsers- would be very helpful too. “Inspect element” is really neat and informative (for geeks), but way too complicated for the average user.

Another issue is Chrome’s lack of “Babylon functionality”. I want to configure my native language as well as a preferred language (read that as “at least one“). Say I’ve set native language to de-DE and preferred language to en-US, then when hovering a word or phrase on any Web object, I want to see a tooltip displaying the english translation from whatever gibberish the Web page is written in (of course for english text I’d expect the german translation); and when I select a piece of text I want to read the german (english) translation on right-click:translate in a popup dialog that allows copying to the clipboard as well as changing languages. I know you’ve the technology at your hands.

Oh, and please disable the defaulted DNS caching, that’s a royal PITA when you mostly consume dynamic contents because lots of previously visited URIs get displayed as error messages. Also, “reload” should pull images again, replacing their cached copies; right-click:reload should reposition to the current viewpoint.

I’d like to have “project windows”, that is on-demand Chrome windows loaded with particular tabs with URIs I’ve previouisly saved from a window under a project name. Those shouldn’t come up when I’ve set “load previous session at start-up”, but only when I want to restore such a window.

After a quite longish test phase I’d say that Google Chrome’s advantages beat the lack of functionality with ease. Pretty often the snipping of a particular commonly supplied feature (like search boxes in toolbars) dramatically enhances Chrome’s usability. Chrome’s KISS approach kicks ass. And I see it evolve.

Now that you’ve read my appraisal and suggestions, please consider picking a few items from my t-shirt wish list. You know, I’ve promised to link out to everybody sending me a (geeky|pornographic|funny|…) XX(X)L t-shirt that I really like. Just in case you’re not the type of reader who buys the author of a pamphlet a t-shirt, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks.

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When you’re familiar with my various rants on the ever morphing rel-nofollow microformat infectious link disease, don’t read further. This post is not polemic, ironic, insulting, or otherwise meant to entertain you. I’m just raving about a way to delay the downfall of the InterWeb.

If you, dear reader, are a Googler, then please don’t feel too annoyed. You may have thought that you didn’t do evil, but the above said reflects what webmasters outside the ‘Plex got from your actions. Don’t ignore it, please think about it from our point of view. Thanks.

Still here and attentive? Great. Now lets talk about scenarios in WebDev where you still can’t avoid rel-nofollow. If there are any — We’ll see.

PageRank™ sculpting

Dude, PageRank™ sculpting with rel-nofollow doesn’t work for the average webmaster. It might even fail when applied as high sophisticated SEO tactic. So don’t even think about it. Simply remove the rel=nofollow from links to your TOS, imprint, and contact page. Cloak away your links to signup pages, login pages, shopping carts and stuff like that.

Link monkey business

I leave this paragraph empty, because when you know what you do, you don’t need advice.

Affiliate links

There’s no point in serving A elements to Googlebot at all. If you haven’t cloaked your aff links yet, go see a SEO doctor.

Advanced SEO purposes

See above.

So what’s left? User generated content. Lets concentrate our extremely superfluous condomizing efforts on the one and only occasion that might allow to apply rel-nofollow to a hyperlink on request of a major search engine, if there’s any good reason to paint shit brown at all.

Blogging

If you link out in a blog post, then you vouch for the link’s destination. In case you disagree with the link destination’s content, just put the link as

<strong class="blue_underlined" title="http://myworstenemy.org/" onclick="window.location=this.title;">My Worst Enemy</strong>

or so. The surfer can click the link and lands at the estimated URI, but search engines don’t pass reputation. Also, they don’t evaporate link juice, because they don’t interpret the markup as hyperlink.

Blog comments

My rule of thumb is: Moderate, DoFollow quality, DoDelete crap. Install a conditional do-follow plug-in, set everything on moderation, use captchas or something similar, then let the comment’s link juice flow. You can maintain a white list that allows instant appearance of comments from your buddies.

Forums, guestbooks and unmoderated stuff like that

Separate all Web site areas that handle user generated content. Serve “index,nofollow” meta tags or x-robots-headers for all those pages, and link them from a site map or so. If you gather index-worthy content from users, then feed crawlers the content in a parallel -crawlable- structure, without submit buttons, perhaps with links from trusted users, and redirect human visitors to the interactive pages. Vice versa redirect crawlers requesting live pages to the spider fodder. All those redirects go with a 301 HTTP response code.

If you lack the technical skills to accomplish that, then edit your /robots.txt file as follows:

User-agent: Googlebot
# Dear Googlebot, drop me a line when you can handle forum pages
# w/o rel-nofollow crap. Then I'll allow crawling.
# Treat that as conditional disallow:
Disallow: /forum

As soon as Google can handle your user generated content naturally, they might send you a message in their Webmaster console.

Anything else

Judge yourself. Most probably you’ll find a way to avoid rel-nofollow.

Conclusion

Absolutely nobody needs the rel-nofollow microformat. Not even search engines for the sake of their index. Hence webmasters as well as search engines can stop wasting resources. Farewell rel="nofollow", rest in peace. We won’t miss you.

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I couldn’t care less about PageRank™ sculpting, because a well thought out link architecture does the job with all search engines, not just Google. That’s where Google is right on the money.

They own PageRank™, hence they can burn, evaporate, nillify, and even divide by zero or multiply by -1 as much PageRank™ as they like; of course as long as they rank my stuff nicely above my competitors.

Picture 1 shows Google’s PageRank™ factory as of 2007 or so. Actually, it’s a pretty simplified model, but since they’ve changed the PageRank™ algo anyway, you don’t need to bother with all the geeky details.

As a side note: you might ask why I don’t link to Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan discussing the whole mess on their blogs? Well, probably Matt can’t afford my advertising rates, and the whole SEO industry has linked to Danny anyway. If you’re nosy, check out my source code to learn more about state of the art linkage very compliant to Google’s newest guidelines for advanced SEOs (summary: “Don’t trust underlined blue text on Web pages any longer!”).

What really matters is picture 2, revealing Google’s new PageRank™ facilities, silently launched in 2008. Again, geeky details are of minor interest. If you really want to know everything, then search for [operation bendover] at !Yahoo (it’s still top secret, and therefore not searchable at Google).

Unfortunately, advanced SEO folks (whatever that means, I use this term just because it seems to be an essential property assigned to the participants of the current PageRank™ uprising discussion) always try to confuse you with overcomplicated graphics and formulas when it comes to PageRank™. Instead, I ask you to focus on the (important) hard core stuff. So go grab a magnifier, and work out the differences:

• PageRank™ 2009 in comparision to PageRank™ 2007 comes with a pipeline supplying unlimited fuel. Also, it seems they’ve implemented the green new deal, switching from gas to natural gas. That means they can vaporize way more link juice than ever before.
• PageRank™ 2009 produces more steam, and the clouds look slightly different. Whilst PageRank™ 2007 ignored nofollow crap as well as links put with client sided scripting, PageRank™ 2009 evaporates not only juice covered with link condoms, but also tons of other permutations of the standard A element.
• To compensate the huge overall loss of PageRank™ caused by those changes, Google has decided to pass link juice from condomized links to their target URI hidden to Googlebot with JavaScript. Of course Google formerly has recommended the use of JavaScript-links to prevent the webmasters from penalties for so-called “questionable” outgoing links. Just as they’ve not only invented rel-nofollow, but heavily recommended the use of this microformat with all links disliked by Google, and now they take that back as if a gazillion links on the Web could magically change just because Google tweeks their algos. Doh! I really hope that the WebSpam-team checks the age of such links before they penalize everything implemented according to their guidelines before mid-2009 or the InterWeb’s downfall, whatever comes last.

I guess in the meantime you’ve figured out that I’m somewhat pissed. Not that the secretly changed flow of PageRank™ a year ago in 2008 had any impact on my rankings, or SERP traffic. I’ve always designed my stuff with PageRank™ flow in mind, but without any misuses of rel=”nofollow”, so I’m still fine with Google.

What I can’t stand is when a search engine tries to tell me how I’ve to link (out). Google engineers are really smart folks, they’re perfectly able to develop a PageRank™ algo that can decide how much Google-juice a particular link should pass. So dear Googlers, please -WRT to the implementation of hyperlinks- leave us webmasters alone, dump the rel-nofollow crap and rank our stuff in the best interest of your searchers. No longer bother us with linking guidelines that change yearly. It’s not our job nor responsibility to act as your cannon fodder slavish code monkeys when you spot a loophole in your ranking- or spam-detection-algos.

Of course the above said is based on common sense, so Google won’t listen (remember: I’m really upset, hence polemic statements are absolutely appropriate). To prevent webmasters from irrational actions by misleaded search engines, I hereby introduce the

Webmaster guidelines for search engine friendly links

What follows is pseudo-code, implement it with your preferred server sided scripting language.

if (getAttribute($link, 'rel') matches '*nofollow*' &&
    $userAgent matches '*Googlebot*') {
    print '<strong rev="' + getAttribute(link, 'href') + '"'
    + ' style="color:blue; text-decoration:underlined;"'
    + ' onmousedown="window.location=document.getElementById(this.id).rev; "'
    + '>' + getAnchorText($link) + '</strong>';
}
else {
    print $link;
}

Probably it’s a good idea to snip both the onmousedown trigger code as well as the rev attribute, when the script gets executed by Googlebot. Just because today Google states that they’re going to pass link juice to URIs grabbed from the onclick trigger, that doesn’t mean they’ll never look at the onmousedown event or misused (X)HTML attributes.

This way you can deliver Googlebot exactly the same stuff that the punter surfer gets. You’re perfectly compliant to Google’s cloaking restrictions. There’s no need to bother with complicated stuff like iFrames or even disabled blog comments, forums or guestbooks.

Just feed the crawlers with all the crap the search engines require, then concentrate all your efforts on your UI for human vistors. Web robots (bots, crawlers, spiders, …) don’t supply your signup-forms w/ credit card details. Humans do. If you find the time to upsell them while search engines keep you busy with thoughtless change requests all day long.

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