This userscript will add Google Insights links to The Top Search Queries page of Google Webmaster Tools.

The Unpleasantry:

Copying and pasting search queries from Google Webmaster Tools over to Google Insights for Search.

The Alleviation:

Once you install the "Google Webmaster Top Search Queries Insight Links" UserScript you will find little Google Insights icons to the right of each search query displayed on the top search queries page of Google Webmaster Tools which will link to Google Insights data on the query.

This userscript will add Google Insights search links to the Google Webmaster Tools keywords page.

The Unpleasantry:

Copying and pasting keywords from Google Webmaster Tools over to Google Insights for Search.

The Alleviation:

Once you install the "Google Webmaster Keyword Insight Links" UserScript you will find little Google Insights icons to the right of each keyword displayed on the keyword page of Google Webmaster Tools which will link to Google Insights data on the keyword.

Today's userscript is one I worked on with seOverflow a couple of weeks ago which was released today. The Insights For Analytics UserScript is a new free tool from seOverflow which adds Google Insights widget to Google Analytics. This new widget makes analyzing keywords that bring real traffic to your site extremely easy!

Watch for a Better Google Analytics update soon to include this userscript and more new features very soon!

The Unpleasantry:

Currently when you want to view keyword trends for keywords in your Google Analytics reports you have to manually open a tab to either Google Insights or a similar tool, paste the keywords, and customize the date before finally hitting submit.

The Alleviation:

Once you install the "Insights For Analytics" UserScript you have a better option, which is to use the new Google Insights widget available to you on every Google Analytics keyword report.

Features

• Check up to 5 keywords in keyword reports with checkboxes, and click search to open a new tab with a Google Insights search ont he checked keywords.
• The date range is automatically fit to match the Google Analytics date range you had set.

Screen Shot

It's a bit of a hassle getting a bookmarklet on my iPhone's Safari browser without drag and drop or copy and paste, but I saw how delicious did it, and how iTransmogrify did it, so I thought I would make a few installation guides myself, at least until we have copy and paste. Sphinn is just the first to come.

In order to install the sphinn bookmarklet follow these instructions.

I just read an interesting comment by one of the fieriest rev=canonical opponents Sam Johnson where he explains his confusion here, by saying:

I'm surprised the rev=canonical guys are still banging on about this... nobody outside of the web developer community has a good word to say about it and it's been universally criticised by the standards community (with good reason).

rev=canonical is saying "I'm the canonical URL and that URL over there points at me". That means it must only ever be used on the canonical URL itself - too bad for an infinite number of potential permutations. Then there's the likes of Matt Cutts pointing out that one should give, not take, canonical-ness but Chris Shiflett (one of the primary promoters) foolishly dismisses this feedback as "irrelevant". Mark Nottingham is more direct in Counting the ways that rev="canonical" hurts the Web but the rev=canonical fanboys cite this as "evidence that those writing the standards are going off track".

I suggest rel="shortlink" as an unambiguous solution to this fiasco - the short[_- ]?ur[il] option has more permutations than can easily be counted and delivers no additional value.

In order to discourage people from supporting many variations I'm now serving up warnings and errors when rev=canonical and rel=short*ur? are discovered at http://rel-shortlink.appspot.com/.

Sam

Well that is wrong and here is my response:

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Well I am very excited to write this post, but I concede if the title did not peak your interest this may be as exciting as watching grass grow. If you are confused at all at this point, I should mention that there has been a lot going on that has lead up to my post, so I'm going to post a bunch of links in chronological order below before getting in to my thoughts, so that we can insure you are on my wavelength.

Timeline

1. 2005-12-??: Link Relationships - Web Authoring Statistics by Google.
2. 2006-01-04: SEO advice: url canonicalization by Matt Cutts.
3. 2006-06-05: [whatwg] Where did the "rev" attribute go? by Ian Hickson.
4. 2008-05-02: Domain Canonicalization by Nathan Buggia.
5. 2008-08-20: The Difference Between REL and REV attributes of the A Tag (or REL vs. REV) by Erik Vold.
6. 2008-11-18: [whatwg] Absent rev? by Ian Hickson.
7. 2008-11-30: URL Referrer Tracking by Nathan Buggia.
8. 2009-02-12: Partnering to help solve duplicate content issues by Nathan Buggia.
9. 2009-02-12: Specify your canonical by Joachim Kupke and Maile Ohye.
10. 2009-02-12: Fighting Duplication: Adding more arrows to your quiver by Priyank Garg.
11. 2009-03-11: The Rev Attribute, Link Types, and Vote Links Explained by Erik Vold.
12. 2009-03-17: How To Use The Rev Attribute by Erik Vold.
13. 2009-04-01: Short URL Auto-Discovery by Robert Spychala.
14. 2009-04-02: DiggBar Launches Today! by Kevin Rose.
15. 2009-04-03: on url shorteners by Joshua Schachter.
16. 2009-04-03: URL Shortening Hinting by Kellan Elliott-McCrea.
17. 2009-04-09: Google Juice & Page Views: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DiggBar by John Quinn.
18. 2009-04-10: Save the Internet with rev="canonical" by Chris Shiflett.
19. 2009-04-11: A rev="canonical" Rebuttal by Ben Ramsey.
20. 2009-04-11: rev="canonical": DiggBar outrage causes bad ideas to come out of the wood work by Dare Obasanjo.
21. 2009-04-11: Summarizing My rev="canonical" Argument by Ben Ramsey.
22. 2009-04-11: A rev="canonical" HTTP Header by Chris Shiflett.
23. 2009-04-11: rev=canonical bookmarklet and designing shorter URLs by Simon Willison.
24. 2009-04-11: Revving up by Jeremy Keith.
25. 2009-04-12: RevCanonial blog turns 10! by Kellan Elliott-McCrea.
26. 2009-04-12: rev=canonical considered harmful (complete with sensible solution) by Sam Johnston.
27. 2009-04-12: Specifying rev="canonical" With HTTP by Ben Ramsey.
28. 2009-04-13: Introducing rel="shortlink" - a better alternative to URL shorteners by Sam Johnston.
29. 2009-04-13/14: I (used to) like rev="canonical" by Leslie Michael.
30. 2009-04-14: rev=canonical by Anne van Kesteren.
31. 2009-04-14: Rev-canonical should be handled with care by Ciaran McNulty.
32. 2009-04-14: Counting the ways that rev="canonical" hurts the Web by Mark Nottingham.
33. 2009-04-15: (Yet) Another DiggBar Update by John Quinn.

My Thoughts

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Rev Attribute

The html rev attribute in my opinion is underused and incredibly useful. In short the rev attribute is the reverse of the rel attribute. Here are the HTML 4.01 specification definitions:

• rel: This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.
• rev: This attribute is used to describe a reverse link from the anchor specified by the href attribute to the current document. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.

A few months ago I wrote about the difference between the rev and rel attribute where I give an example which may help, and there is also a good example here.

Link Types

Link types are the values that can be used in the rel and rev attributes. Some link types are old, some are new, some are microformats, others are used by search engine bots. This is the HTML 4.01 list of link types, and this is the HTML 5 draft list of link types.

Some of the link types added to the HTML 5 specification are: archives, author, external, feed, first, and many others. Some of the link types removed are: start, chapter, section, subsection, and a few others.

The external and nofollow link types were also added to the HTML 5 specification which have been widely used for some time now in the rel attribute for SEO purposes. The tag link type was the better defined rel="tag" microformat before it was added to the HTML spec, however I expect and hope the microformat specification will continue. The tag link type was created at Technorati, which they describe here, and this is how it was created.

Vote Links

The Vote Links microformat are rev attribute values that I hope will become a link type in some future HTML specification. These are three values described by the Vote Links microformat, they are:

• vote-for: Represents approval.
• vote-abstain: Represents abstention or indifference.
• vote-against: Represents disapproval.

Currently I always rel="external nofollow" on any link that I will rev="vote-against", and rel="external" any link that I rev="vote-for" atleast once, which covers 75% of my links. But there are other links which I want to be more specific about, and for me that is where the Vote Links microformat comes in handy, because I can vote-for a link that I also nofollow. For example, I usually nofollow my links to Wikipedia (becuase it has so much Page Rank already) and use the vote-for microformat to show my support.

Conclusions

1. The rev attribute has been widely misunderstood and misued, but it is very useful.
2. There is a dramatic difference in the link types defined in the HTML 4 specification and the HTML 5 specification draft, but even some of the depricated link types appear useful to me.
3. The rev attribute is not in the HTML 5 specification draft, which is like removing the yang from a yin-yang, and I have not found a good reason for it, only a few hints which reinforce my belief that it is not good idea.
4. Vote Links rock!
5. Between the HTML specification chaos and Microformats, this is the time where we all get to decide what we want to embrace, and let the HTML specification follow our lead.

This is just a quick annoucement of some new Ubiquity commands that I have written over the last week.

• backtype: Starts a search of BackType, which allows you to do a search for a person's comments on blogs and other sites.
• charlierose: Starts a search of Charlie Rose's Website, which is a fantastic video archive of interviews and conversations with Charlie Rose.
• inlinks-yahoo.com: Searches Yahoo.com for the number of inlinks to the url provided, which can either be typed out, selected or copied, and otherwise the current page is selected.
• mixx: This command gives you the Mixx (which is a lot like Digg, but better imho, for a lot of reasons I'll get in to one day) count of a provided url, and allows you to submit the page, or go to mixx to vote for or against the page.
• quarkbase: Starts a search of Quarkbase for the domain provided.

I'm still not sure if I'm a fan of all of the microformats that I have come across so far. But I can tell you that I am a huge fan of the VoteLinks microformat, because I think there is a huge need for them in SEO arena.

Currently search engines like Google, Yahoo, and that other search engine (made by the same company that makes that crappy browser) all primary rely on PageRank, which determines the importance of a document by considering the importance of the documents that link to it. In PageRank, every link is valuable, except those links that use the nofollow link type (ie: any link without the nofollow link type is considered an endorsement). PageRank does not consider the possibility that document A might want to have a vote on document B's calculated importance, besides just the option of endorsing document B.

Enter the VoteLinks microformat. With this specification, website masters can now specify links on their web documents as votes for or against other web documents. You can also abstain from voting, ofcourse.

For example, you may have noticed that in my second paragraph I was taking a shots at the Microsoft Corporation (which I love to do) and if you look at the html markup, then you will notice that those links are votes against Live Search and Internet Explorer. So now I'm telling any user agent that visits this document that this document is a vote against those Microsoft products. This document is also a vote for some wikipedia articles, Google, Yahoo, and the VoteLinks microformat. That's a lot of knowledge that spiders can gain because of this markup, hopefully the search engine spiders start considering this microformat as a factor soon..

Anyhow, if you want to start using the VoteLinks microformat now, all you need to do is insert the following values into the rev attribute of your html anchor tags:

• vote-for: This signals that the current document is a vote for the href url of the anchor tag.
• vote-against: This signals that the current document is a vote against the href url of the anchor tag.
• vote-abstain: This signals that the current document is indifferent to the href url of the anchor tag.

Here is a short guide on how to setup Linklint windows machine using cygwin.

Setup Instructions:

1. Install Cygwin, and make sure that you install the perl package.
2. Create a folder for Linklint (mine is c:/apps/linklint/).
3. Download Linklint.
4. Extract the archive of Linklint to the folder you created in step 2.
5. Open Cygwin, and move to the folder you created in step 2.
6. run "$ perl linklint-x-x-x" (this will bring up some instructions & options)