Archive for June, 2009

Bing’s Blatant Censorship In Germany

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

Microsoft’s new search (decision) engine decides too much in Germany with very blatant and in my opinion stupid censorship despite no obvious reason for it. Of course Google doesn’t have these problems in Germany, so with Google in Germany you may actually search for a new pantyhose with Bing it’s impossible (this link only shows the message if accessed from Germany):

bingcensorship_1

The text says (in German):

The search pantyhose may return sexually explicit content.
To get results, change your search terms.

This censorship was already in use sometime on the MSN Live Search before. So does Microsoft really think this kind of censorship makes sense and will lead to more use than Google in Germany sometime in the future?

The problem I see is that the restrictions seem to be based only on specific words, so it is very easy to circumvent it. Sometimes it is even sufficient just to add an additional word. The most simple solution would be to change the country in the top right corner on the Bing website. Even if you are in Germany - just by switching the country to e.g. the United States there are no restrictions anymore whatsoever.

This kind of censorship also happens in other countries like India.

I have compiled a list of terms here that shows some of the words that are blocked and their corresponding translation. Ambiguity of words does not seem to matter at Bing. Very explicit terms have been excluded - anyways viewer discretion is advised:

bing-censored-search

It is amazing that even such terms like “handcuffs” and “pantyhose” are blocked by Bing.

Doublethink? Advertisers Are Allowed To Use These Terms

Interestingly there does not seem to be such a restrictions for advertisers. Although the ads are not shown if the search has been blocked by Bing searching for related words shows ads containing words that you can’t even search for. There are even some more explicit terms in the ads than I have used in the sample above.

bing-censored-ads

Do advertisers know that these words have been blocked? If I would be a website owner trying to sell pantyhose I would like to have my ad shown when someone searches for the word.

Good For Microsoft?

I highly doubt that this kind of censorship will be beneficial for Microsoft in Germany given the current discussions on internet censorship in Germany. But it shows what may be used in the future anyways not only on Bing.com.

If you want to protect your child from potentially harmful content on the internet (in a way that cannot be circumvented by two clicks as with Bing currently) there are other ways like talking with your child about it or in the worst case install a filter software on your PC. But if someone is trying to find websites on syringes (blocked in Germany) on Bing please let him find results.

My personal conclusion: I do not like censorship therefore I do not like Bing. I’ll stick with Google although it is being censored as well but not to such a degree based on single results not on search queries.

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Posted in Free Speech & Censorship, Search Engines | 5 Comments »

How To Hide Links To Avoid NoFollow PageRank Sculpting Issues

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

Just recently Google’s Matt Cutts announced a change in how Google handles NoFollow attributes in links thus making a “rel=nofollow” useless on your JavaScript-enabled onClick event handlers. The best method in this case would be to hide links on your page that you would normally have used “nofollow” on so you could only show them via JavaScript.

Instead of using “rel=nofollow” on your links as you did previously you may want to hide the links completely and only make them appear when JavaScript is enabled. You should also show a user which does not have JavaScript enabled that there is a link but it is not enabled. So I decided to create a small JavaScript which converts <span> elements with a specific class name to links when the user has JavaScript enabled. If there is no Ja

vaScript the “links” will look like this:
followlink_1

If JavaScript is enabled and the page has finished loading the links will look like this:
followlink_2

This is the HTML code for the <span> tag which will be converted into a link which needs to be given as the title attribute of the element:

<span class="hiddenJSLink" title="http://www.saschakimmel.com/">Hidden Link</span>

This is how the link will look after the script has been executed:

<a href="http://www.saschakimmel.com/">Hidden Link</a>

You can also add both an id and additional classes to the source <span> - they will be copied to the final link.

The script requires the prototype.js JavaScript framework - I am using this because I know that many websites are already using it on their pages.

This is some code of an example HTML page - you can download it and the JavaScript file in a package below.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="de" lang="de">
<head>
<title>Hidden Links</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="hiddenLinks.css" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="prototype-1.6.0.3.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="hiddenLinks.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.saschakimmel.com/">Normal Link</a></li>
<li><span class="hiddenJSLink" title="http://www.saschakimmel.com/">Hidden Link</span></li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

So in essence the only thing you need to do is to add these three lines of code to the <head> section of your HTML file after you have downloaded the JavaScript/HTML/CSS package below:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="hiddenLinks.css" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="prototype-1.6.0.3.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="hiddenLinks.js"></script>

Acessibility Notice!

Please note that from an accessibility standpoint using JavaScript is not recommended as it renders the links useless on screen readers. But currently there seems to be no other way to hide links from Google for legitimate PageRank sculpting.

License

Creative Commons License
This code by Sascha Kimmel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. This means that if you are using it on your site (personal and commercial sites are ok) you need to add a link somewhere (only on one page)  as provided here:

HiddenLinksJS by <a href="http://www.saschakimmel.com/" target="_blank">Sascha Kimmel</a>

If you don’t want to add a link to your site you can donate any amount to my PayPal account which will entitle you to use the HiddenLinkJS on any page without any requirement for adding a link:


View hiddenLinks.js
View hiddenLinks.css
View hiddenLinks.html demo page

dlnow

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Posted in HowTos, JavaScript, Prototype.js, SEO | 8 Comments »

6 Free Nature Wallpapers For Your Desktop

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

From time to time as a way of saying thank you for reading my blog I’m releasing some free graphics as well. Here are 6 free exclusive wallpapers for your desktop with a resolution of 1280×1024 pixels so best suitable for 19″ although they can of course be used on lower or higher resolutions as well.

I have take these photos myself so I hope that you like them.




Please be advised that I retain copyright and you are only allowed to use these photos as a desktop background.

Tags:
Posted in Free Stuff | No Comments »

How To Use The Bing Webmaster Tools To Get Info On Your Site

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Just today bing.com, Microsoft’s new search engine, has launched. Surely you have already checked out the search results and checked positions of your favorite keywords. But have you also checked out all the tools Microsoft now offers webmasters to analyze their websites?

Verify Ownership Of Your Website

Just go to the Bing Webmaster Center and click on the “Add a site” button to add your website. In the form that is shown enter the URL of the website you wish to add. Bing even allows you to provide an email address ” to contact you if [they] encounter specific issues with your site” which sounds very interesting because Google does not provide that feature. Only the following weeks and months will show what the result of using that email feature will be.

bing-scr01

After submitting the form you have to add some verification code to your site (or your server). In contrast to Google which only requires you to create an empty file with a specific name Microsoft wants you to add an XML file to your server which a specific content. You can also choose to add a META tag to your site but I recommend using the XML file because it’s much simpler - you only need to upload it once to your server whereas you’d have to add the META information to the homepage template.

bing-scr02

After you have added the META tag to your homepage or uploaded the XML file click on the “Return to list” button. You’ll see your website in the list. Just click on the domain name.

Bing will access your website immediately and check for both the META tag or the XML file. If you have done everything correctly you will be taken to the site summary page which provides a wealth of information on your site as seen by Bing.

bing-scr03

Site Summary And Domain Score

The site summary shows you when your site was last crawled by the Bing crawler, the number of indexed pages, whether Bing has been blocked from accessing your site (if you have blocked it via the robots.txt file for example) and a domain score which is shown as five boxes. Microsoft writes here:

“Domain Score provides a measurement of how authoritative Bing views your domain to be, with five green boxes being the highest rating and five empty boxes being the lowest. This is based on many of the same factors Bing uses to determine static rank, but isn’t directly comparable.”

Luckily this blog has a domain score of 5/5 at the time of writing.

Bing also shows you the top 5 pages of your site.

Your Profile

When selecting “Profile” from the top navigation you can change the settings you have already seen when you added your site. You can also see the current verification method Bing is using to verify your site ownership.

Crawl Issues

This section shows you crawling issues that may have occurred on your site such as pages that Bing could not find (404 error) or pages blocked by the robots.txt file.

It also shows you a list of long dynamic URLs Bing has flagged because they think it might lead the crawler into an infinite loop trying to crawl the dynamic URLs and may also lead to duplicate content.

The Crawl Issues page also tells you whether the crawler found pages on your site which it believes to be infected with malware or using unsupported content types.

bing-scr05

Backlinks

The backlinks page shows you all of the backlinks Bing has found to your domain together with the page score, language and region of the page linking to your content. I really like the inclusion of the page score because it may be used to find “bad neighborhoods” linking to your site although Microsoft says that the score isn’t directly comparable.

The page will only show the first 20 backlinks but you can download the complete list as a CSV file to your system.

bing-scr04

Outbound Links

This page will show you all of the links on your site Bing has found that are leading to other websites. Just like on the backlinks page it shows you the page score, language and region as well and even allows you to show your outbound links to malware sites - let’s hope you don’t have any on your site.

Just like before you can also download the complete list as a CSV file.

Interestingly all of the links on my page leading to Twitter (the source of which is a Twitter plugin for Wordpress which shows the latest tweets on my blog) have a page score of 5/5. Does that mean that Bing sees Twitter as an authoritative site?

bing-scr06

Keywords

This page allows you to see “how your site performs in search results for searches using specific keywords” although I don’t quite understand the results. You can enter a keyword in the text field provided and it will show you the page on your site, the page score of that page and once again the language, region, last crawl date and whether the Bing crawler was prevented from accessing the page.

bing-scr07

It is interesting but I had expected to see SERP positions for the given keyword which would be a great feature. Entering “wolframalpha” shows a page score of 5 for my article on WolframAlpha yet when searching for “wolframalpha” on bing.com that page is not listed in the first 100 results.

More (Not So) Interesting Stuff

You can also add your sitemap directly by clicking on the Sitemaps tab.

The “Related Tools” section in the navigation on the left side lists some links that sound interesting at first but in my opinion they are a bit disappointing. If you thought that by clicking on the Robots.txt validator link you would be able to analyze the robots.txt file for your current site you’re wrong. You can copy the contents of any robots.txt file there to check it for incompatibilites with the MSNBot but that’s all. Slightly disappointing.

Likewise the HTTP Verifier and Keyword Research Tool links lead you directly to the default pages on the Microsoft website.

Bottom Line…

I recommend that you add your site(s) to the Bing Webmaster Center so that you can access the interesting statistics they provide - I’m sure many more tools will be provided in the future.

You should also check out the forum for many interesting discussions.

I’m amazed that Microsoft provides these features just from the launch day on.

We’ll see what else will be provided in the future.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in HowTos, SEO, Search Engines | 10 Comments »