Use a user stylesheet to tell you more about SEO opportunities
Wednesday October 1, 2008
I found this article today on using a user stylesheet to assist you with SEO. It does two things: it numbers search results in several search engine tools (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask and others), plus it marks links on any page you're on with a pink background if they have the "nofollow" attribute on them. The first is useful for seeing at a glance where a page is ranking in the search engine. And the second is useful to see at a glance whether a link will assist with PageRank or not. (If a link is marked as nofollow, search engines won't follow it and won't include that information in their search engines, thus losing you the backlink.)
Comments
Jennifer, I can usually follow your Blogs but I must confess that I am at a loss here as to how user style sheets ‘number search results’ and why one would care if someone else’s links enhance their page rank. I left the train while it was still running - help me get back on. Thanks, Gerry
Dense I am - “grasshopper” go to the provided link before you open your keyboard. Sorry Jen.
Gerry
Hi Gerry,
Thanks for your comment. You’re right, I think I wrote that post too quickly and didn’t explain it well.
This tool would be used primarily for doing SEO on your own site and determining where you’re ranking in the search engine results. If you’re trying to target a specific search phrase, it can be difficult to figure out how your results are changing. So the numbers tell you exactly where your site is showing up on the page. You do the search, find your page in the results, and you see that it’s #4 on the 4th page. Or #34 in that search engine.
You might also want to see where your competitor’s site is ranking for that search phrase.
The same for the PageRank. However, with that tool, it can also tell you which sites put nofollow tags on all their external links. As then you know that if you ask for a backlink from them, it won’t help you even if you get one, so you can skip them and save some time.
And don’t feel bad about not following the link first. I should have explained it a little better so that everyone might understand how this could be used.
Thanks for the clarification Jennifer, I have not tried the add-in yet but I wonder (hope) ,when ‘counting positions’, it discriminates between paid and organic results. Pretty simple math if it doesn’t but would be more helpful.
Regards,
Gerry
@Gerry - Hi, I wrote the SEO stylesheet (thanks for the link, Jennifer). The stylesheet does count the organic vs. paid results separately. The map results do count as #1, however, even though Google doesn’t include them in the final page count.
You should give it a try; it’s really easy to set up.