Dito's Google Apps Customer Success Story - Annadale Express

Dito, LLC provides setup, integration, & support services for businesses and organizations using Google Apps. Dito, LLC is a Google Apps Authorized Reseller.

Annandale Express is an Under-16 girls travel soccer team who has won four consecutive league championships and competes in the highly competitive Washington Area Girls Soccer League.

Challenge

The Express team parents needed a better way to communicate with each other to coordinate practices, games, & other team events as well as the ability to showcase Express players to prospective college coaches.

Solution

Dito consulted with the team management and recommended using Google Apps to solve the teams challenges. Dito setup Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Gmail, & the Groups feature to allow for full team collaboration.

Result

Annandale Express are now using a single email address to communicate with all of the parents. No more outdated email lists. Everyone gets the message. The entire team has embraced the internal website built using Google Apps. The site includes team news, roster, stats, photos, schedule, & contact information. Parents or players can visit the site to find out if practice has been canceled or if a player can't make it this week. The site is their central communication hub which has daily updates from the coach.

"Google Apps has proved to be an invaluable tool in all aspects of operations for our soccer team. The team at Dito provided us the top notch collaboration solution that we were looking for in Google Apps. I will be encouraging all of my other soccer teams in the future to use Google Apps for all of their team needs as well, " said Annandale Express head coach Shomit Mukherjee.

Google Sites should remove "nofollow" from internal links

We just moved our website over to Google Sites. It is not the perfect web solution, but it works well for our business.

I've known all along that Google Sites nofollows pretty much every link you place on a Google Site, but I didn't think about my internal linking having nofollow until Andy Beard sent me a tweet on the matter.

Most of the links to our domain (www.ditoweb.com) point to our naked URL, so we rely on the home page to pass some pagerank down to the internal pages. I wonder if now we will have problems getting our internal pages to rank well for related terms?

Despite the nofollow, Google has been indexing our new pages (duh), so it is good to see them in the index.

I don't expect to see this change anytime soon, but I am curious to see how Google Sites evolves over the next couple years, and if Google will allow Site's users enough trust to give them real links to internal pages on their own website?