Google have introduced a new tag management service that allows website owners to streamline the process of managing analytics, advertising, and conversion tags on their site.

Anyone working in online marketing knows the challenges of managing code snippets needed for site performance tracking. These tags often require frequent tweaks or changes, and coordination between marketers and webmasters is not always smooth.

With Google’s new tag manager

Web developers can add a single code snippet to a page, allowing marketers to manage the rest from a dashboard. Google Tag Manager enhances the flexibility and responsiveness of tracking site analytics. It includes features like easy tag testing, version control for rolling back changes, and multi-account/user permission provisions. This makes it ideal for marketing agencies managing client sites’ analytics and conversion tracking.
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PageRank-hi-res-2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s been a fair bit of chatter in recent months about the value of nofollow links for SEO. Google considers nofollow links a naturalness signal when evaluating backlink profiles. Truth aside, every SEO should understand nofollow links. The key question: Are nofollow backlinks actually worth pursuing?

Nofollow Explained

On occasion, sites would rather that Google did not follow particular links or allow them to affect the target’s PageRank. There are various reasons, but one of the main reasons is to avoid spam. For example, a common SEO tactic for gaining backlinks was to put thousands of links into the comment sections of blogs and on forums.

Many blogs now choose to have all links in comments marked “nofollow” as a way of discouraging such spam. Spammers no longer have an incentive to place their links on these pages because nofollow links are ignored for PageRank purposes. Sites like Wikipedia have all their outgoing links marked nofollow for exactly this reason, it discourages people from using Wikipedia’s authority to get PageRank, as Matt Cutts discusses in the video below.

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Attribution: Thomas Shahan

A couple of weeks ago we looked at negative SEO and what you can do to protect your site. One of the techniques we mentioned was hacking. Competitors, upon gaining access to a site, may alter the content or add malware to pages in the hope that Google will delist or penalize a site. Hackers may also simply attempt to use a site to spread their malware without any particular intentions regarding SEO.

We gave a number of suggestions for dealing such an intrusion, but often, after having received a warning from Google, it can be difficult to determine exactly what the Googlebot crawler is seeing. Hackers are adept at making a site appear perfectly normal to those who go directly to a page, while serving malware or undesirable keywords and hidden links to search engine crawlers and those who arrive at a site from a search engine. What you see when you visit a site is not necessarily what Googlebot is seeing.

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As a clever addition, Google’s Inside Search blog announced last week that the search engine would now function like a graphing calculator when entering functions like you would on your old TI.

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