Monthly Archives: June 2009

Mobile Site Owners Should Abandon Password Masking

In his latest “Alertbox”, Jakob Nielsen recommends that websites stops masking passwords as users type them. He outlines the drawbacks of password masking and explains that this causes login problems and lost business:

* Users make more errors when they can’t see what they’re typing while filling in a form. They therefore feel less confident. This double degradation of the user experience means that people are more likely to give up and never log in to your site at all, leading to lost business. (Or, in the case of intranets, increased support calls.)
* The more uncertain users feel about typing passwords, the more likely they are to (a) employ overly simple passwords and/or (b) copy-paste passwords from a file on their computer. Both behaviors lead to a true loss of security.

He also explains that password masking was “a particularly nasty usability problem” on mobile devices.

Dennis Bournique raised that issue last year and also felt that password masking was not necessary on mobile sites.

Indeed, with such a small device on your hand and a tiny screen, who is going to see what you are typing? If you’re using password protected sites on your phone, I’m sure you often do many attempts before typing your password correctly (I know I do with Bloglines or Gmail).

Nielsen recommends abondonning this feature on web sites, and also on mobile sites. Personnaly, I’m not sure this is good idea for desktop web sites, Nielsen forgot to mention that you often log in to a web site while many people can look at your screen (think open-space offices, internet cafés, etc).

But for mobile websites, this makes perfect sense and will provide a more enjoyable experience.

Health care is high-priced, that’s why certain patients cannot order the medicines they need. Currently more than quoter of men aged 40 to 70 reported some degree of erectile difficulties. Of course most popular is Viagra. What about sexual dysfunctions and “questo link“? What is the most momentous information you have to study about “”? The very significant point you need look for is “”. A scientific research found that just 14 percent of patients taking Wellbutrin told about sexual dysfunction. If you get any prescription drugs like Viagra, check with a physician that they are healthy to take with your other remedies. Do not give Viagra or any medicament to anyone under 18 years old without medical advice.

PR Sculpting Now Obsolete: So What? Why You Shouldn’t Worry

So Google apparently hasn’t officially confirmed that yet, but now every SEO on the planet is aware of its decision to ignore PageRank sculpting.

If you used nofollow to change how PR flowed within your site, or even Javascript links, that era of easy optimization may be over.

I always knew it would be discounted one day, it was just a matter of time. This technique was so publicized and so abused that Google had to step in.

So the question is: should we start worrying about how we’re going to sculpt PageRank now? Would it be impossible to obtain the same kind of results without PR sculpting (or at least the methods we used to use)?

The answer is a straight NO. In fact, no SEO needs to worry at all.

Remember back in 2005 when every SEO was using link exchange techniques to build links and increase their PageRank? What happened when Google decided to discount these types of links? Did we all give up our optimization campaigns? Nope, we just learned the new rules of the game, we built better links which lead to better SERPs and better websites (at least outgoing links on a page were more useful to the user than reciprocate links).

Back to PR sculpting: you get the point, it’s not the end of the world. If Google really starts to depreciate it, that means that all webmasters are now on an equal footing.

To beat your competitors, you just need to be smarter. Instead of throwing nofollow tags on your “Contact” of “About Us” page links on your 5 page site (which really was useless and could raise flags easily), you’ll now have to organize links in a more clever way.

Based on your keyword research data, add links to your primary pages from your homepage and other important pages in terms of linking value (or link juice, anchor text value, PR, whatever).

At the end it will be the same, but unlike nofollow or Javascript techniques, that technique is not borderline and is perfectly acceptable by Google.

Every webmaster seemed to be using PR sculpting these days, but not all of them are going to be motivated enough to build better internal links, that’s your chance to beat them if you’re smart enough.