100 Top Rated Blog

Top 100 Blog
http://www.huffingtonpost.com
http://www.techcrunch.com
http://mashable.com
http://www.engadget.com
http://www.tmz.com
http://thinkprogress.org
http://www.gawker.com
http://www.gizmodo.com
http://www.thedailybeast.com
http://www.boingboing.net
http://thenextweb.com
http://hotair.com
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com
http://www.mediaite.com
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com
http://www.buzzfeed.com
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com
http://biggovernment.com
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/
http://nymag.com/daily/intel
http://gigaom.com
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment
http://googleblog.blogspot.com
http://www.businessinsider.com
http://www.deadline.com/
http://www.readwriteweb.com
http://jezebel.com
http://www.venturebeat.com
http://www.popeater.com
http://www.kotaku.com
http://www.tuaw.com
http://www.macrumors.com
http://www.joystiq.com
http://www.lifehacker.com
http://www.bgr.com
http://www.physorg.com
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow
http://www.gothamist.com
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com
http://www.zerohedge.com/
http://blog.us.playstation.com
http://9to5mac.com
http://www.dailykos.com
http://bleacherreport.com/
http://appleinsider.com
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/
http://crunchgear.com
http://www.deadspin.com
http://www.eurogamer.net
http://popwatch.ew.com
http://thisisnthappiness.com/
http://justjared.buzznet.com
http://politico.com/blogs/bensmith
http://eurekalert.org
http://www.techdirt.com
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com
http://laughingsquid.com
http://funnyordie.com/
http://www.neatorama.com
http://www.redstate.com
http://www.slashgear.com
http://pajamasmedia.com
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz
http://searchengineland.com
http://theonion.com
http://consumerist.com
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
http://bleedingcool.com
http://volokh.com/
http://www.crooksandliars.com
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com
http://www.autoblog.com
http://blogcritics.org
http://perezhilton.com
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology
http://www.electronista.com
http://www.jalopnik.com
http://politicalwire.com
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com
http://www.androidcentral.com
http://michellemalkin.com
http://rawstory.com/rawreplay
http://www.towleroad.com
http://pocketnow.com
http://bigjournalism.com
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/
http://www.inhabitat.com
http://www.ubergizmo.com
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/
http://www.comicsalliance.com
http://dvice.com
http://flavorwire.com/
http://www.balloon-juice.com/
http://www.hypebeast.com

What is Do-follow and No-follow links, dofollow, nofollow

If you’ve been doing any kind of reading about link building, then you’ve probably seen people mentioning “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. These are very important terms to understand when you are trying to build great links back to your site in order to increase your search engine rankings. But, to the person who is new to all of this, it may be kind of confusing. I am going to help break it down for you.

No-Follow

Nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Example

<a href="http://www.askbangladesh.com/" rel="nofollow">Software list</a>

What nofollow is not for

The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content, or for preventing content to be indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking search engine spiders from accessing content on a website or for preventing them from including the content of a page in their index are the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) for blocking access and on-page Meta Elements that are designed to specify on an individual page level what a search engine spider should or should not do with the content of the crawled page

What are “Do Follow” blogs?

“Do follow” is the opposite of “No-Follow”. Wordpress blogs, by default, use the HTML nofollow attribute on links that point away from the blog. This no follow attribute comes into play with the posting of blog comments. The no-follow tag tells the search engines NOT to follow the link to any other web sites.

The logic behind using no follow is, it’s good for the blog since there will be fewer outgoing links and therefore less “link bleed”, leading to better Google page rank. Sounds good!

Using no follow also makes sense because there are blog spammers out there who will, and have, posted blog spam comments solely for the benefit of getting more incoming links to their site, which helps page rank. That makes sense!

Do Follow blogs are going against the norm and turning the No-Follow tag off, enabling do-follow of out going comment links.

Why Go Do-Follow?

If you’re like me, you want people to comment on your blog posts. You want more of an interactive community. That’s what Web 2.0 is about – community, relationships, and user created content.

But, how do you encourage people to comment on your blog posts? You give them something in return. You give them an outgoing link to their website, when they make a quality comment on your blog. You also allow the search engine to follow that link to their website by using the do follow attribute.

You also need to let people know that you are a Do Follow Blog. Some visitors will have no idea what that means, but those who do know what it means will appreciate it and will often leave a comment.

SEO friendly URLs informations

Your URLs provide an opportunity to let search engines and people know what your page is about. Conversely, if you don't pay attention to your URLs, they may provide no value for your site's SEO (search engine optimization) or for your human visitors, either. Badly designed URLs may even trip up search engines or make them think you're spammy.

• Include a few important keywords in your URLs.
  
  

A keyword-infused URL can:

• Help visitors see that the page they're on is really what they're looking for. Would you rather see example.com/blog/219058 or example.com/blog/cute-puppies? People will see your URL in search results, at the top of their web browser while they're on your page, and any place where they may save the URL for themselves - like in bookmarks, or an email.
  

• Give search engines one more indication of what your page is about, and what queries it should rank for. A URL without keywords won't hurt you, but it's a missed opportunity. A competitor who's placed
  relevant keywords in his URLs may rank higher than you for those keywords.
  
  

• Keep your URLs to fewer than 115 characters.
  

• Research shows that people click on short URLs in search results twice as often as long ones. Shorter URLs are also easier to share on social sites like Twitter and StumbleUpon.
  
• Long URLs can look like spam. As the URL gets longer, the ranking weight given to each word in the URL gets spread thin, and becomes less valuable for any specific word.
  

You can manually check the character count of all your URLs to make sure they're not too long. The AboutUs Site Report can do it automatically, and point out any URLs that are longer than 115 characters.

• Don't use more than a few query parameters in your URLs.
  
  

In a URL, a ? or & indicates that a parameter (like id=1234) will follow.

Here's an example of an okay URL (the kind you use to track your marketing in Google Analytics) with 1 query parameter:

http://www.example.com/page?source=facebook

Bad URL with too many query parameters:

http://www.example.com/product?id=1234567&foo=abc123def&color=yellow&sort=price

Too many query parameters can cause search engine robots to enter a loop and keep crawling the same pages over and over again. You could end up with search engines failing to index some of your most important pages.

• Use hyphens instead of underscores in your URLs.
  

Search engines see underscores as a character. This means that your keywords will be seen as a single long keyword, and you'll lose any SEO benefit they could have incurred. A hyphen, however, is seen as a space that separates words. Hyphens are better for SEO because they allow search engines to interpret your web page as relevant for more keyword phrases. That said, Wikipedia's links have underscores, and they seem to be doing okay in search results :-)

Also, people can't see underscores in a URL when the link is underlined, as many links on the Web are. So hyphens are friendlier for people, and make your site more usable.

So... example.com/adorable-kitten-pics is better than example.com/adorable_kitten_pics

• Keep all of your important content less than 3 subfolders deep.
  

A subfolder is a folder that is visible in a URL between two slashes. For example, in http://www.example.com/articles/name-of-page, articles is a subfolder and name-of-page is an article in that subfolder.

When it comes to subfolders, search engines assume that content living many folders away from the root domain (like example.com) is less important. So it's best to organize all of your important content so each URL has no more than two subfolders.

Here's another way to think about it: Make sure your URLs have 3 or fewer slashes (/) after the domain name. Here is an example URL that is a web page that is two subfolders deep:

http://www.example.com/articles/foo/page-name.htm

Bonus: Using subfolders allows you to use "content drilldown" in Google Analytics to easily view data for all the pages in a given subfolder.

• Don't have too many subdomains.
  
  

A subdomain, or directory, is something that comes before the domain name in a URL. For example: http://blog.example.com Technically speaking, www. is actually a subdomain.

Too many subdomains can cause problems for search engine optimization. For more information, read Multiple Subdomains: Classic SEO Mistake.

How to Change Your URLs

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Ideally, you'd set up a search-friendly URL structure when you first create your website. Then it just works for you without having to lift another finger.

Even if your website is already built, you should be able to change your URL structure - but it could be a pain in the neck. Most content management systems (CMS) allow you to change your default URL structure, or individual URLs for pages. You'll need to find that setting or option in your platform. If you use WordPress, see WordPress: Built for SEO for details on how to enable SEO-friendly URLs, or "permalinks," as WordPress calls them.

Warning! If you change existing URLs on your website, make sure to permanently redirect (using a 301 redirect) the old URL to the new one. You want to send people and search engines to the right place, not to a 404 error page. Keep in mind that while the 301 redirect will get people and search engine spiders to the right page, a small percentage of the PageRank or link juice from the linking page will be lost along the way.
Is it worth the effort to change your URLs? The above best practices for URLs can help your site's SEO, but as with other changes on your website, it's good to consider both the potential costs and benefits of the change. For example, the folks at SEOByTheSea.com know what they're doing, but opted to leave their URL structure as is - without keywords - because it would take a huge amount of work for a 6-year-old website with hundreds or thousands of pages to make the change. The site would also lose some link juice and PageRank due to so many redirects. In other words, there are tradeoffs.
Beyond changing the URLs on your website, you can sometimes change the URLs for your listings on other websites. For example, social sites like Facebook allow you to set a "vanity URL" to change a page with a URL like Facebook.com/pages/Company-Name/123456789 to Facebook.com/CompanyName. See 7 Simple Facebook Tricks for instructions. Keep an eye out for this option on other websites if you want to make it easier for people to find you there.

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Improve Your Site Speed for SEO

Faster Websites Can Rank Better

Having a fast site - or at least a site that's not slower than the average - can help you gain or maintain good search engine rankings and traffic to your website.
Site speed refers to how fast all the elements of a web page - its text, images, video clips, etc. - appear in a web browser window after someone clicks a link to that page, or types its URL into the browser navigation bar.


Early in 2010, Google added site speed to its website ranking algorithm. Now a website's loading speed is one of about 200 factors that help Google determine which websites to rank highest in results for a specific search term. That means site speed has to be considered when you're working on your website's search engine optimization (SEO).
Google added site speed because a faster site is better for people, and Google wants its results to be of high value to searchers.

First: Check How Fast Your Site Loads

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Use any of these free tools to check how long it takes to load your website into a web browser window:

• Speed test is a popular tool for checking website load time. It's easy to use.
  
• Google Webmaster Tools has a section with information on the speed of your website, from the source that may matter the most. Once you've logged in to Webmaster Tools, click "Labs" on the left, and then "Site Performance."
  
• WebPageTest.org website performance test lets you check the speed and performance of your website in different web browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox. It also allows you to test how your site performs in different geographic locations.
  
• GTmetrix.com's combines info from Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow in a nice presentation with a nice list of things you can do.
  
  

What's Considered a "Fast" Website?

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To give you an idea, Alexa says that Facebook.com takes just over 2 seconds to load, and that 70 percent of sites are faster. (See image at right.) Alexa.com (visit) provides traffic statistics for most of the world's top million websites. If your site is in this group, you'll find some good information about your site on Alexa, and you'll be able to compare your site to others in the top million.


In general, a website that loads in 2 seconds or less is doing well. A website that loads in 2 to 5 seconds isn't fast, but it's probably good enough.

A website that takes more than 5 seconds to load is likely to annoy some of its visitors. The longer it takes a website to load, the more likely the site is to be hurting its standing with Google. The search giant considers site speed as a factor when ranking web pages in search results.

How Can I Make My Website Load Faster?

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Here are some relatively simple and quick fixes to speed up your website.

Some of these things you may be able to do yourself. For the rest, your hosting company or the person or company that created your website for you should be able to make these changes pretty easily for you.

#1 Website Compression

Compressing your website's content - using gzip compression, for example - can help reduce the time it takes your webserver to send your website's content to site visitors.
Compression affects the text elements of your website -- HTML, javascript, and CSS -- and speeds up the time it takes them to load. For more information on website compression and how to do it, read our article about compression.
Compression does not affect the images on your website though, so read on.

#2 Optimize Your Images

a) Don't Use Images Any Bigger than Necessary

Don't use a large image. Yes, you can set the width and height in HTML to 100 pixels by 100 pixels, if that's the size you want to display - but your site will still be carrying a large image that loads slowly. If you want to display an image that is 100 pixels by 100 pixels, use an image of that size, or scale down your large image before placing it on a web page.

I asked AboutUs community members to share their experiences with compression tools. Ed Mus of Deals2Save.net recommended a tool he's used to optimize images for load speed: Smush.it, available at Yahoo.

b) Choose the Best File Format

The file format of your images can help you or hurt you. Don't use a JPG file unless you want to include a photograph with a huge range of colors. For most images, using a GIF or PNG file is usually fine, and these types of files load faster.

• GIF is great for images with few colors - for example, most company logos.
  
• PNG is a file format specifically for websites. PNG images have good quality, but sometimes they don't display in Internet Explorer 6.
  
• JPG is a traditional and common file format for photos. It's best to convert a JPG image to a PNG, unless you really want a highly detailed, slow-loading photo for a specific reason.
  

c) Don't Use Images If You Don't Need To

Your logo or a photo must be included as images - there's no other way to convey them to your site visitors. But many websites put things like a phone number, address or other text into an image, even though it's not necessary. And really, it's not a good practice. Images are not only slow to load, they're also essentially invisible to search engines, unless they include descriptive alt text. Search engines can't "see" the information in an image, so use text to convey any information that can be rendered as text.

#3 Put Your Code in Optimum Order

Placing your style sheets near the top and JavaScript near the bottom of the coding for each of your web pages can improve the perceived speed of your website for human visitors.

When someone directs a web browser to a web page, the browser starts from the top of the code and works its way down. The style sheets are one of the more important pieces for human viewers, because they determine how the site will look. After that, your website's actual content will load pretty quickly. It's as if the style sheets set out a framework, and then the content loads into that framework.

The JavaScript - or <script> tags - provide things like interactive features or actions that your viewer won't notice unless they perform an action on a web page. So allowing the JavaScript to load last means your visitors see everything on the page that's visual, even while the JavaScript is still loading. So your visitors see your page as loading faster than it really does.

Why does this matter? Because people are impatient. If a web page seems very slow, they're more likely to leave.

#4 Remove Unnecessary External Code

Many websites have some code whose purpose is to pull something from a service that's out of their control. For example, a website may use:

• A "share" button from a service such as AddThis
  
• An e-commerce shopping cart provided by another company
  
• A widget that displays the company's recent tweets on Twitter
  

The code for Google Analytics can also slow your site down a bit, though the insights you'll gain from using analytics usually outweigh this slight disadvantage. I recommend that you take advantage of other speed improvements, and keep the analytics.

It's wise to check the speed of any external features on your site. If you aren't using a feature, or if it is of minimal value to your business and website, you should remove it.

#5 Get Specific Recommendations for Increasing Site Speed

• If you use Google Webmaster Tools for your site, you can find out how fast your site loads for Google. (See image at right.) You'll also find some general technical suggestions for improving your site's performance, speed or both.
  

• If you browse the web using Firefox and already have the Firebug add-on, you might find Yahoo's YSlow and Google's Page Speed extensions quite helpful. While you're viewing a web page, you can click on these extensions to pull up information about why that web page is slow, and get ideas for improving its speed.
  
  

• Google introduced a new tool on March 31, 2011 called Page Speed Online. It analyzes the speed of web pages -- and the mobile version of pages -- and gives suggestions for improving their load time.
  

#6 Get a Better Website Host

For the majority of websites, many factors that can speed up a website - or slow it down - are in the control of the company that hosts the site. That's why it's important to have a competent host that responds quickly when you have a question or problem.

If your website is loading too slowly, you probably want to look at your hosting company's service first. You may want to consider upgrading to a better hosting package with your current hosting company, if the better package includes a promise of increased speed. Otherwise, shift your site to a hosting company with a better offering, reputation, or both.

Note: Depending on the type of website software you use, not every host or hosting plan will be able to accommodate your site. Before you switch, make sure the company and hosting package you're considering can handle everything on your website.

Some good hosting companies:

• DreamHost (visit)
  
  
• Polur.net (visit)
  
• GoDaddy (visit)
  
• BigWetFish.co.uk (visit)
  
• Network Solutions (visit)
  
  
• Dotster (visit)