This is my last blog post ...

... on blogspot. Farewell Blogger. Sebastian's Pamphlets moved to sebastians-pamphlets.com. Please visit me over there, change the feed URL in your reader to
http://feeds.sebastians-pamphlets.com/SebastiansPamphlets
and update your blogrolls. Thank you!

This site will be kept as an archive for a while, but I'll soon make it uncrawlable and even uglier with blinking links pointing to the new location. You dear readers don't deserve that, so please move with me to sebastians-pamphlets.com! I'm looking forward to seeing you there :)

Sebastian

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Blogger to rule search engine visibility?

Via Google's Webmaster Forum I found this curiosity:
http://www.stockweb.blogspot.com/robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /

A standard robots.txt at *.blogspot.com looks different:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Sitemap: http://*.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

According to the blogger the blog is not private, what would explain the crawler blocking:

It is a public blog. In the past it had a standard robots.txt, but 10 days ago it changed to "Disallow: /"

Copyscape thinks that the blog in question shares a fair amount of content with other Web pages. So does blog search:
http://stockweb.blogspot.com/2007/07/ukraine-stock-index-pfts-gained-97-ytd.html
has a duplicate, posted by the same author, at
http://business-house.net/nokia-nok-gains-from-n-series-smart-phones/,
http://stockweb.blogspot.com/2007/07/prague-energy-exchange-starts-trading.html
is reprinted at
http://business-house.net/prague-energy-exchange-starts-trading-tomorrow/
and so on. Probably a further investigation would reveal more duplicated contents.

It's understandable that Blogger is not interested in wasting Google's resources by letting Ms. Googlebot crawl the same contents from different sources. But why do they block other search engines too? And why do they block the source (the posts reprinted at business-house.net state "Originally posted at [blogspot URL]")?

Is this really censorship, or just a software glitch, or is it all the blogger's fault?


Update 07/26/2007: The robots.txt reverted to standard contents for unknown reasons. However, with a shabby link neigborhood as expressed in the blog's footer I doubt the crawlers will enjoy their visits. At least the indexers will consider this sort of spider fodder nauseous.

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Sphinn rocks

Thanks to Danny's crew we've got a promising search geek community site. Since I've recently started to deal with invites, here is the top secret link where you get your free Sphinn invite. Click it now and join today, as Gorbachev said 'those who are late will be punished by life itself' ;)

Previous experiments revealed that my pamphlets aren't diggworthy, despite the presence of OL/UL lists. Because I mention search and stuff like that every once in a while, I decided to submit a horror story to Sphinn to test the waters over there.

Adding Sphinn-it! widgets to my posts hopefully helps promoting Sphinn, but with Blogger that turned into kinda nightmare. To prevent you from jumping through infinite try-and-error hoops, here is how it works:

Classic templates:

Search for $BlogItemBody$ and below the </div> put

<script type='text/javascript'>submit_url='<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>';</script>
<script src='http://sphinn.com/evb/button.php' type='text/javascript'/></script>

(Blogger freaks out when you omit the non-standard ;</script> after the self-closing second tag, hence stick with the intentional syntax error.)

Newish templates:

Check "Expand Widget Templates"

Search for data:post.body/ and below the </p> put

<b:if cond='data:post.url'>
<p><script type='text/javascript'>submit_url='<data:post.url/>';</script>
<script src='http://sphinn.com/evb/button.php' type='text/javascript'/></p>
</b:if>

(After saving the changes Blogger replaces some single quotes with HTML entities, but it works though. Most probably one could do that in a more elegant way, but once I saw the badges pointing to the correct URL --both in the posts and on the main page-- I gave up.)

Have fun sphinning my posts!

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Blogger abuses rel-nofollow due to ignorance

I had planned a full upgrade of this blog to the newest blogger version this weekend. The one and only reason to do the upgrade was the idea that I perhaps could disable the auto-nofollow functionality in the comments. Well, what I found was a way to dofollow the author's link by editing the <dl id='comments-block'> block, but I couldn't figure out how to disable the auto-nofollow in embedded links.

Considering the hassles of converting all the template hacks into the new format, and the risk of most probably losing the ability to edit code my way, I decided to stick with the old template. It just makes no sense for me to dofollow the author's link, when a comment author's links within the content get nofollow'ed automatically. Andy Beard and others will hate me now, so let me explain why I don't move this blog to my own domain using a not that insane software like WordPress.

• I own respectively author on various WordPress blogs. Google's time to index for posts and updates from this blogspot thingy is 2-3 hours (Web search, not blog search). My Wordpress blogs, even with higher PageRank, suffer from a way longer time to index.
• I can't afford the time to convert and redirect 150 posts to another blog.
• I hope that Google/Blogger can implement reasonable change requests (most probably that's just wishful thinking).

That said, WordPress is a way better software than Blogger. I'll have to move this blog if Blogger is not able to fulfill at least my basic needs. I'll explain below why I think that Blogger lacks any understanding of the rel-nofollow semantics. In fact, they throw nofollow crap on everything they get a hand on. It seems to me that they won't stop jeopardizing the integrity of the Blogosphere (at least where they control the linkage) until they get bashed really hard by a Googler who understands what rel-nofollow is all about. I nominate Matt Cutts, who invented and evolved it, and who does not tolerate BS.

So here is my wishlist. I want (regardless of the template type!)

• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to comment author links"
• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to links within comment text"
• To edit comments, for example to nofollow links myself, or to remove offensive language
• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to links to label/search pages"
• A checkbox "apply a robots meta tag 'noindex,follow' to label/search pages"
• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to links to archive pages"
• A checkbox "apply a robots meta tag 'noindex,follow' to archive pages"
• A checkbox "apply rel=nofollow to backlink listings"

As for the comments functionality, I'd understand when these options get disabled when comment moderation is set to off.

And here are the nofollow-bullshit examples.

• When comment moderation and captchas are activated, why are comment author links as well as links within the comments nofollow'ed? Does blogger think their bloggers are minor retards? I mean, when I approve a comment, then I do vouch for it. But wait! I can't edit the comment, so a low-life link might slip through. Ok, then let me edit the comments.


• When I've submitted a comment, the link to the post is nofollowed. This page belongs to the blog, so why the fudge does Blogger nofollow navigational links? And if it makes sense for a weird reason not understandable by a simple webmaster like me, why is the link to the blog's main page as well as the link to the post one line below not nofollow'ed? Linking to the same URL with and without rel-nofollow on the same page deserves a bullshit award.


• On my dashbord Blogger features a few blogs as "Blogs Of Note", all links nofollow'ed. These are blogs recommended by the Blogger crew. That means they have reviewed them and the links are clearly editorial content. They're proud of it: "we've done a pretty good job of publishing a new one each day". Blogger's very own Blogs Of Note blog does not nofollow the links, and that's correct.
  
  So why the heck are these recommended blogs nofollow'ed on the dashboard?


• Blogger inserted robots meta tags "nofollow,noindex" on each and every blog hosted outside the controlled blogspot.com domain earlier this year.


• Blogger inserted robots meta tags "nofollow,noindex" on Google blogs a few days ago.

If Blogger's recommendation "Check google.com. (Also good for searching.)" is a honest one, why don't they invest a few minutes to educate themselves on rel-nofollow? I mean, it's a Google-block/avoid-indexing/ranking-thingy they use to prevent Google.com users from finding valuable contents hosted on their own domains. And they annoy me. And they insult their users. They shouldn't do that. That's not smart. That's not Google-ish.

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Hassles of submitting a blogspot XML-sitemap

Usually my posts make it into Google's Web index within 2-3 hours, but not yesterday. Since Ms. Googlebot became lazy fetching my pamphlets, I thought she needs a hint. With one of the last updates Blogger's feed URLs have changed, but lazy as I am I've still the ancient ATOM feed in my sitemaps account. So I grabbed the new URL from the LINK element in HEAD and submitted it as sitemap. Bugger me. Not enough tea this morning. I didn't look at the URL, just copied and pasted it, then submitted the feed to no avail. Oups. Here is why it didn't work:

Blogger.com doesn't come with build-in XML sitemaps, but one can use the feeds. That's definitely not a perfect solution, because the feeds list only a few recent posts, but better than nothing.

Here are the standard feed URLS of a blogger blog at blogspot.com (replace "sebastianx" with your subdomain):
http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default (ATOM, posts)
http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss (RSS, posts)
http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default (ATOM, comments)

None of these can be used as a sitemap, because the post-URLs are not located under the sitemap path.

Fortunately, the old feeds still work, although they are served as "text/html" what can confuse things, so I've to stick with http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/atom.xml as "sitemap".

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Categorizing posts with blogger (rant)

Google knows everything about AJAX. Why the heck can't I assign categories to old posts without hassles? "Edit posts - change number of listed posts - scoll down - edit - scoll down - choose/enter categories - publish - repeat" is just 7 full page reloads/actions too much. On a slow DSL connection this archaic procedure drives me nuts.

Dear readers, when you click on "Labels" most probably you won't find related posts :( I'm adding categories when I update an old post, but UI flaws hinder me to categorize the whole archive. Sorry.

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