mp4 video H264
Playtime: 5 min 45 seconds
For some reason when I was editing we ended up with a much smaller image than before, but as I have more videos coming uploading and publishing as it is. The sound is a little poppy as well as I boosted it maybe too much.
I have long been a supporter of MyBlogLog and in many ways it was the many articles I wrote about how they could improve their site that led me to doing some limited consulting with Blogcatalog.
Paul had a nasty Christmas present, an email notifying him that his training videos were in breach of Vimeo’s no commercial use policy.
You could believe his shock, with so many popular tech, web design & SEO blogs being allowed to flaunt the rules.
I think Google have got their priorities wrong with Real Time search, though I haven’t seen this on other “ego search” terms. I checked with Danny Sullivan and Michael Arrington to start with.
I first published this post under a different title almost 3 years ago (Jan 17, 2007 @ 6:55), but over the last couple of days it has become specifically relevant.
At the time Jack Humphreys was offering a training program combined with high end blog hosting called “Authority Site Center” which was the successor to his previous offering, “Content Desk”.
First of all I was just going to post it with a quick introductory paragraph, then I decided it really needed some additional examples.
Twitter deciding to nofollow links 2 years ago really annoyed me.
When they decided to close all loopholes in creating an active link within the bio area, it prevented me linking to my disclosure policy – that annoyed me as well, especially with all the terrible attempts of providing adequate disclosure within paid tweets that are currently being used/proposed.
There was a huge outcry from the SEO community.
One of the smartest SEOs I know who doesn’t run some kind of paid membership site now does
Whilst also blogging together on Collective Thoughts (ok so I have been slacking a little) we also have a chat group on Skype that has been running for 2 years.
With Google now providing convenient anchor links as sitelinks within search results for long structured documents I thought it would be prudent to examine current solutions for WordPress and see which of them is most likely to help you obtain anchor links.
Read more on Anchor Sitelinks – WordPress Table Of Contents (Part 1)…
If you asked Howie Schwartz what are the key skills that make his business a success, at least one of the answers would be “outsourcing” and another would be automation with effective tools.
Whilst he employs 80 people, he also has a team of 200+ website creation, content development, link building and social media specialists to call upon (native English speakers).
If you can avoid doing all the work yourself, either with automation or outsourcing it is more scalable.
Just over a week ago, Todd Hogan the founder of Keyword Titan approached me to see if I would be interested in taking a look at their new Keyword research automation tools.
Trust me, I have spent thousands on various keyword research tools in the past, some of them even still get updated by the authors despite changes in the way data can be pulled from the search engines, many of the services are still in business and even booming, and in many ways I am quite happy with what I already have available.
That being said, time is one of my most valuable commodities (though I tend to not use the resource to it's full potential)
Another problem is grouping
It is fairly easy to group keywords if you are generating them from various root keywords.
{specialty} {profession} {location}
Annulment Attorney in Los Angeles
It is far harder, or at least more time consuming on researched keyword lists.
I was already starting to prepare a monetization list to offer as an opt-in bonus, as a companion to Howie's 36 Niche report. I knew he was covering keyword research in his training, along with monetization, but I wanted to help accelerate the success of anyone taking part in his competition, and continuing that into the future.
If you help people achieve results, good things happen.
Photo credit: S@TS
From what I have heard you will be able to listen in without signing up to the VIP list, but then you won't receive a reminder just before the broadcast starts, and you won't be eligible for any of the prizes.
Prizes? Yeah Rich is giving away a boatload of prizes, worth subjectively tens of thousands of dollars including private consultation (which I don't think he really offers these days)
Rich Schefren Live - 12pm EST (midday) Thursday 18th June 2009 - scheduled to last 4 hours, though knowing Rich he might keep it running longer if there are people online.
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The links are visible, nothing is hidden, but all the same it is effectively a paid linking scheme.
Here is what they said in an email sent to customers
Our New "Link-To-Us" Program We're also launching a new "Link-To-Us" program today. In essence, customers who post new links or change their old Mosso links on their websites to our new http://www.rackspacecloud.com site will receive special goodies. The more sites you post a link on, the more great stuff you will get. How cool is that? Please check out all the links here: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/links Thanks so much for being a part of the Rackspace family, and please keep the feedback coming so that we can continue to build the most complete and easy-to-use cloud platform on the web.The sad thing is this would all be unnecessary if you just made some minor changes to your affiliate program.
This isn't your typical scenario - 503 errors are frequently sent when a server becomes overloaded, or there are some backend problems.
A search of the Google Webmaster Help forums doesn't bring up a huge amount of cases, and mostly it is enquiring about what someone should do when they want to do some maintenance on a live server, probably for a short time.
In my case I didn't plan to be in "Maintenance Mode" for an extended period.
Here is the complete timeline:
Here is a little olive branch for the guys at ePerks, an unbiased resource that could be used to present 2 sides of the current Vlad vs ePerks legal kerfuffle.
I am not going to portray Mahalo as some kind of "sacred ground", and I have been a little negative about Mahalo in the past, but it does offer ePerks the opportunity to submit links, hopefully not from anonymous sources, of people happy with their service.
Mahalo I am sure will validate links, and if they seem to be from an anonymous shill blog on WordPress.com, my hope is that they will
Search is only one way to find things. It's the most easily monetizable, so it gets the lion's share of the attention. But take a look at (and report on) what percentage of techcrunch's traffic comes from search. For the O'Reilly Radar blog, it's about 35%. Significant, sure, but hardly a sign of lack of competition. If Google absorbed both Yahoo! and Microsoft, the share of our visits coming from search would still be below 40%. (That tells you what a small share of our search traffic comes from the other guys today.) And that's just the web traffic. Count in RSS (which is much bigger than web for most blogs, including ours) and the Search share of traffic goes down to a much smaller amount. So there's not much worry about people not being able to find information.
After my last post regarding Wide Circles I exchanged emails with one of their support representatives, with their message being…
We definitely do not tolerate any kind of SPAM at all
Unfortunately the evidence available to me at the time not just on my own blog but elsewhere, was in stark contrast.
Any legitimate service, if they wanted to get press coverage from an international news publication, might issue a press release, and contact a newspaper through legitimate channels directly, or maybe through their public relations company.
Wide Circles seem to have a different
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.How many people have old fishing rods in their shed or loft? I bet they even know how to use them, but for some reason a takeaway Chinese, microwave dinner, or eating out is a much more convenient way to eat. Sure, catching fish is satisfying, relaxing and fresh fish on a charcoal grill is extremely appetising. Then of course there is the fun of playing with fishing line...
Photo by John2008
Sadly this isn't possible on Digg, though it would be interesting if they provided a page with the most buried or hated stories. After all, just because you don't like a story doesn't mean it is spam, but it is still news.
Jack Spirko has knocked together an interesting site where your story can appear on the front page because it is "hated" and I feel the idea is worthy of a mention.
You can see that currently the hated stories seem to only appear in the sidebar - I would love them to be integrated with the main results by default
I was honestly wondering when someone would come up with a service like Share-A-Post, because it is one of those "no brainer" ideas that I have thought of doing, but never got around to.
When to a huge amount of disbelief I blocked some of my high ranking paid reviews with robots.txt, and hinted that syndication would be a perfect loophole in Google's penalties, no one fully understood what I meant - many SEO experts thought I was bonkers.
This is what I meant - widespread syndication with editorial control
What follows is an example of the Google search results being devastated by techniques taught by Alex Goad in his Players With Money membership site.
In the run up to the initial launch, and some time afterwards, I was ranking extremely well, with only the primary domain ranking better.
Now things are a little different…
That is an exact match search - the SERPs are a little noisy without quotes, with many sporting references regarding players and money, so in this case I thought an exact match is a better demonstration.
Relative search positions for a broad match are the same, though the
I have actually suffered from Chondromalacia Patella or "Runners Knee" for 25 years, and at one time even ran a niche website / blog on knee pain that took me a few hours to put together, and pulled in a few dollars a day.
Google today have launched Google Health that is supposedly for US use, but I was able to log straight in, and add the ailment I suffer from. I am not worried about the privacy aspects.
The information provided is pretty basic as you would probably expect in a country famous for medical lawsuits.
One useful aspect of Google Health
Today in partnership with Blogcatalog and Amnesty International, bloggers Worldwide are blogging for human rights.
As I usually do for each Bloggers Unite initiative, I am taking part, but as usual I want to at least try to keep on topic, so I can connect with my readers better.
Today's news is that Overstock have decided that they are axing 3400 affiliates in the New York area because of the previously reported "Amazon Tax" - which Amazon are fighting.
I think Janet was the first to break the news of the Overstock changes
This is a story that both Linda at 5 Star Affiliate Programs and Shawn's Affiliate Blog have been covering in depth.
The New York Times also has coverage and been giving out some great links.
Techcrunch has a Scribd copy of the original Overstock posted letter (Shawn posted the email)
The New York Times reports that
I mentioned in my second poll post that the Stompernet guys would be coming out with a new tool soon, and that also they would be limiting availability of some of their goodies to those that subscribe. That will include this new SEO tool.
First off, I have worked out how to get their videos to syndicated correctly, so click through to watch the video showing off this new tool.
The bad news is that the first piece of totally new content, a video on keyword research by Dan Thies.
Now Dan is known by professional SEOs as "The Keyword Guru" - he
Image via WikipediaMy previous post on Ken Evoy of Sitesell attacking blogging created some good discussion, both here and on the Sitesell forums though you need to be a Sitesell owner or affiliate to read the discussion there.
For anyone who hasn't come up with a gift for Mothers Day and you live in a country celebrating it tomorrow, it is still not too late to take advantage of the 2 for 1 special that Sitesell are running.
Mother's day for me is always confusing. In the UK this year it was March 2nd, in Poland it is May 26th.
Globalization and Localization has always interested me in internet marketing
Ken enjoyed the discussion that took place here, obviously because it helps promote his brand, but in addition I am sure it also helps with product positioning and development.
He has consented to an interview with "tough" questions - I have quite a few of my own, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to "open up the mike" and take some reader submissions.
What a difference 24 hours make.
A few days ago I was honestly prepared to rip a product to shreds. It wasn't that it was a bad product, but it wasn't as well prepared as it should have been, and from what I can tell it was due to an honest communication error between a well respected online marketer and his programming team.
But before I talk about the product itself, I am going to give you a little history lesson.
A few years ago I purchased a script called WordPress Elite. It was pretty useful, and allowed you to point the
Over a year ago I questioned the use of tagging on WordPress.com to spread link equity around as "a rising tide".
If you use similar tags to a high profile blogger, it can help with faster indexing and rankings, at least from what I have observed.
In many ways the effect is similar to linkfarms, using the tagging as a central hub. Many commentators complain when they see Technorati tag pages appearing in the Google SERPs, because Technorati doesn't have a huge amount of editorial control over the content of those pages, they are more like search results.
In that situation however
I have learnt a huge amount from Ken Evoy over the years, he provides some of the best free ebooks to learn about affiliate marketing and pre-selling ever written.
His SiteBuildIt system has created many successful online businesses and was doing this long before WordPress became popular.
In his email to affiliates today he announced a new sales page attacking blogging head on.
Blogging has reached lemming status. Without even thinking, many small businesses equate blogging with having a Web site. This is obviously wrong for small businesses with something to sell (ex., services, e-book sellers, etc.).
But it's also the wrong choice for
I would even extend that to buying any form of paid link or sponsored review, and possibly also links from directories, social networks, blog commenting etc.
Last June I provided a very simple guide to avoid being banned from Technorati but the same principle applies to
Lot of blogs, either using plugins or a little custom PHP code publish articles that are intended purely for their subscribers, with the content appearing only in their RSS feeds, or in emails generated from the RSS Feed.
Lets look at this from a number of points of logic
I might actually be more evil than John Chow, but haven't revealed my motives, but Vlad seems to think I am a "Good Person"
Vlad's video was inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk
Vlad or Volodymyr Zablotskyy has been going through some hell over the last couple of week, with some rather nasty attacks on his online reputation, brought about due to some quite explosive discussion about ePerks. I have been helping with some support in the background for the last couple of weeks, though most of the problems Vlad was able to take care of by himself.
In my
Andy Beal today to kicked off his Blog Marketing Tips For Probloggers series with an interesting look at post titles.
What Andy suggests is that you write a title to captivate or grab your readers attention, and then using the SEO Title Tag plugin, (though All in One SEO Plugin or Headspace 2 would equally work) optimize the titles further for best SEO results.
Thus you would add additional keywords and possibly change the keyword order.
This is something I have done a few times, but is not a universal strategy.
For at least a few days after you have
The restoration of my green pixel's didn't last long (just 1 week), and probably wasn't a full restoration anyway.
I had this feeling that PR5 was "Google Probation" as my link growth has been continuing and my Google Directory listing suggested PR6.
All paid reviews on this blog are blocked with robots.txt and I declare that is the case in my disclosure policy.
Thus we need to look at other potential problems (note these are potential problems, but nothing I can really change)
Some regular readers decided to purchase advertising - advertising links unlike many blogs are nofollow. I mentioned
There seems to be a new trend with internet marketers running some kind of mentorship or bonus program.
It runs something like this (though I haven't signed up to one to get exact details)
The backlinks are sometimes the link reserved for the comment author, or sometimes product mentions
If you don't know what you are doing with nofollow, noindex and robots.txt you can royally mess* things up (face to face I would use a stronger term). Even if you do know what you are doing, you can still mess things up.
I can understand why Matt Cutts might want to change what noindex does, it is not just Koreans making occasional mistake, for instance I just noticed the whole WebProNews video blog is currently noindex nofollow. I am sure that is a mistake, it is easy to make in Wordpress… just one click and save.
All in one
There is a negative side to having your PageRank restored, or maybe depending on your niche it can be turned into a positive.
Many of the blog comment tools are based not just on the highest ranking pages for a search term, but resorting pages based on PageRank.
I honestly want to believe that you are a good internet citizen, and your attacks on search engine optimization and now affiliate marketers are honest, and without any form of prejudice.
So while you are attacking affiliate marketing, please ensure you have first of all cleared up all the problems in the paid links debate, such as what seems to be a company, where you are on the board of directors, buying links.
It is widely discussed that buying links in Wordpress themes is something that might be a signal of web spam, and the same should be true for buying links
For the last few days there has been a lot of discussion on places such as Digital Point about a Toolbar PageRank Update that is happening. Barry reported yesterday about links being updated in webmaster tools, but the pagerank fluctuations are quite strange.
Lots of people are reporting strange fluctuations, and PageRank 7 seems to be appearing and disappearing for many sites that really don't deserve it.
I wouldn't have written anything at all, but then I received a message asking for a link exchange with a PR7 site, and knowing what was happening on Digital Point, I thought I
Chris Anderson in his post today on Wired in the run up to his launch of "Free" and freeconomics provided a great discussion point because bloggers face a frequent dilemma.
That revenue stream in my opinion doesn't have to be current, though it is beneficial to at least have long-term plans for revenue.
To quote Fred Wilson:-
If you are building a media oriented business, particularly one that has low marginal costs, meaning you build it once and the cost to serve an additional customer is negligible, then you have the unique opportunity to focus first
After Tim posted his findings regarding the indexing of flash websites, I suggested to him that he should carry out similar research on PDFs, because you can't nofollow a link in a PDF. As it happened he was already running a test, and he has just published the results to his PDF SEO research
Companies already pay for hosted pages, why not pay for hosted white papers or product catalogues?
On the negative side, PDFs when distributed virally might end up pointing to old resources, and it is hard to track them if you use direct links to resources. You should
Yesterday Joost linked through to me from a guest post on Shoemoney about Wordpress SEO.
In direct referral stats it didn't cause a shockwave until I looked at the specific pageviews of the page he chose to link to, my Wordpress category.
My category pages rarely figure highly in the most viewed, so I could actually attribute the majority of the traffic to that specific landing page, even if the traffic originated from an email or RSS subscriber.
This takes me back to one of the discussions I had with Joost regarding his Google Analytics tracking from RSS Plugin
With all the previous discussion of paid reviews and my unwillingness to raise the white flag or bend over, this post is going to come as a bit of a shock.
I am lowering the red flag
Carry on reading to find out why this isn't the same as raising a white flag, and is far from surrendering to Google on paid reviews.
Yes it is time for another controversial SEO post, sit back and enjoy.
Every single time I write a post mentioning PageRank, I get comments about PageRank not being important for ranking.
These comments very rarely differentiate between toolbar PageRank and the PageRank of whatever kind Google stores on their servers and upgrades on an extremely frequent basis for every page. I know from first hand experience that the toolbar PageRank has very little to do with rankings, and is manually manipulated based on Google's commercial goals.
The Ranking Factors article at SEOmoz in many ways skirts around
Lee Odden was kind enough to invite me to the Fast Company beta, I assume he just imported his contacts from LinkedIn or Gmail (I hope he didn't use Gmail because of security risks) so I have had a snoop around, added a profile and this blog to their list of feeds. From what I can tell they have been live for over 1 month now, it is possible I received invites before and didn't respond to them, along with the other 20+ invites I seem to receive to every new social networking platform.
I thought it would be worth writing
The Semmys has just been officially announced, and is a new award site for the best Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing posts of the year, and is the brainchild of Matt at Small Business SEM.
The nominees this year are highly controversial, because they are inspired or originated from Matt's own reading list, and are the posts which he highlighted in his monthly roundup posts as being the most important for his clients and subscribers to read if they missed them.
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will know that one of the things I love to demonstrate is how well an authority blog can rank in the search engines for high profile product launches.
It has been a while since Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon have launched something new, Stompernet in 2005 raked in over $18M in the first 24 hours, with the help of many top name marketers working being the scenes including John Reese, Jeff Walker and Frank Kern, along with their exceptional faculty trainers.
The most important factor - despite a significant monthly fee, I have met many people who have been members since the very beginning, and are delighted to have joined at an early stage.
Stompernet has grown since then, with a relaunch in January 2007 and the introduction of many more faculty members such as Michael Campbell, Sherman Hu, Dan Thies and Leslie Rhode.
I would like to congratulate the Techcrunch team for finally coming to the realization that linking to sponsors within posts, without using nofollow on the links might be in violation of Google's Webmaster guidelines.
This was previously written about by Ted Murphy of Izea, and vehemently defended by Techcrunch, so it is surprising that they have made a significant change in their stance without also making a public statement about it.
I also wrote about this situation in a previous article on paid links and the PageRank update (round 5).
Here is their previous links to sponsors post from
As I had hoped, ( http://community.izea.com/blog/2007/12/an-invitation-t.html ) Ted Murphy had a chance to chat with Google's Matt Cutts at Pubcon
It seems Google want all links within content that "wouldn't exist without payment" to use nofollow, but seems to be focusing on services like PayPerPost, and not other forms of links which wouldn't exist without compensation.
Tamar must have spent a huge amount of time compiling this enormous list of what she feels were the best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007. I gained a few mentions on some key articles which was great.
From what I can see she concentrated on timeless content that is educational, so this isn't just a list of the most popular content on Sphinn, and many of the articles I didn't get to read during the last year.
As Tamar didn't feature videos in her list, I should also mention the high quality website optimization videos that the guys from
Back in August I reviewed Jack's Social Power Linking Home Study Course which he created with Peter Lenkefi
I claim it as a review, even though I hadn't actually seen the product. I had one major problem with it which wouldn't have worried many of my readers, but was a significant problem for me - it was a physical product.
If you read the Google blog or the coverage on Search Engine Land, you might be rejoicing that supplemental results are no more
It has been described as lipstick on a pig and others have just offered tips on site indexing.
Before this change, one of the tools still available to SEO practitioners to give an indication of the depth of site indexing was to add /* to the end on a site: search query.
Thus you would use
site:andybeard.eu/ - this would return the total pages supposedly indexed site:andybeard.eu/* - this would return the
I have had a chance to deal with the odd email over the last 2 weeks whilst moving house, but I knew I should respond to this paid links post by Matt Cutts as soon as I was able to do so with some level of detail.
So far the best estimate for having a landline for internet access provided by the Polish national carrier is 10 months, so I am using a GSM solution which in my remote part of Poland seems to clock in slightly faster than what I would expect from UMTS so might be giving me
I have been receiving emails and comments today about yet another PageRank downturn for multiple sites.
Andrew Ooi has compiled a short list of Malaysian sites, many were previously as much as a PR5 previously, and currently show a PageRank of zero (a white bar)
Examples include:-
Colleen's Simple Kind of Life and 5xmom
The numbers seem to be stable across multiple data centers
There doesn't seen to be any change in prominent Search Marketing sites such as Search Engine Round Table and Search Engine Journal, and other popular bloggers such as Emom and Yaro still seem to
I never thought I would look on being called an old fart as something positive, but I suppose it is just a matter of who calls you an old fart, the manner in which they tell you, and where and to whom they say it.
In this particular case I am flattered, and seem to be in great company.
I am not the biggest fan of blogrolls on my own sites, I much prefer juice to flow via editorial links in content, and moderated links in both comments and trackbacks.
Fortunately I do link to the guys at Search Engine Land quite
Well I thought Google really hated me, but here is some real proof that the Google Toolbar isn't exactly telling the truth.
I personally have never seen sitelinks on a PR5 before, let alone a PR4, but then it isn't something I monitor extensively.
Congratulations to Maki from Doshdosh on also gaining some coveted sitelinks (and also PR6)
An example of a PR6 domain that still doesn't have sitelinks is Sphinn itself
Sphinn based upon MSN Live.com newly reactivated Linkdomain commnd has three times as many links as I do. +linkdomain:sphinn.com compared to +linkdomain:andybeard.eu
Graywolf thinks sitelinks are ephemeral so I
Over the last year I have given a fair amount of coverage to PayPerPost, who now house the service along with other endeavours under the name Izea.
There are multiple reasons why I have supported PayPerPost and similar programs so strongly, and yet at the same time have never reviewed a link buying / selling service.
I have mentioned link buying and selling in passing, and also a couple of Wordpress plugins, but those plugins generally allow you to sell links which have a nofollow.
My emphasis both in editorial about services and in the few reviews I have myself written is to encourage the writing of quality content with editorial links. Compensation in whatever form should be based upon the time involved, expertise, and possibly the size and influence of the audience, and not based upon any SEO benefit to a site or service being reviewed.
I just have to share with you the funny, even hilarious decision process that that guys over at Search Engine Guide are going through, removing links that have been in existence for longer than Google.
I could almost thank Google for destroying so many people's aspirations just for that post.
Almost…
Sometimes I really hate timezones, especially when a company I closely follow (and even take a couple of punches for) makes an announcement.
PayPerPost and now Izea
Fittingly I think Colleen should have the first link, she has been a postie for a long time, is a top earner, and has been taking an equal amount of punches being on the firing line.
Colleen highlights the fact that PayPerPost have been planning to have a new domain for their Argus platform for some time, and it is only logical that Argus is not housed under the PayPerPost moniker, because PayPerPost will only be one of many services provided.
People who actually monitor the PayPerPost blog of course knew this was coming a month ago.
Dan, and investor in PayPerPost... well now the parent company Izea, seems happy about how money is being spent.
That is important, I am sure the Izea.com domain name cost a lot more than $9 from GoDaddy.
Here is a link to the official Izea Press release on the new corporate entity.
Google just walks into reputation management and trademark problems one after the other, and today is no exception.
Not too long ago it was their attempt to force people to give up domains legally registered using the acronym "g.m.a.i.l" or gmail, which Google uses for their email service.
The Polish Poets are still in business, and apparently Google also lost in other countries.
So today news is breaking about Google's new "Open Social" platform for social media web developers. The big problem is that Google don't own the trademark, or even a lot of the concept behind it, and they certainly don't own their own SERPs (search engine results pages)
Courtney stopped by to let me know about what appears to be a real PageRank update that is in progress, if there can ever be a real update again.
Many of the blogs highlighted in the update just a couple of days ago seem to have reverted to their previous position.
Now for anyone who might be thinking otherwise, there are still some obvious penalties on place for a few sites, but it is less obvious for the more vocal networks.
Some sites and networks still have a penalty, as do some sites.
Some of those penalties seem to be a carry over
Andy Greenberg of Forbes got it totally wrong when he wrote Google Scares The Search Crowd
In many ways Google should be a little worried about the blogosphere reaction.
I was the centre of attention more by chance and timing than anything else, as I am sure it wouldn't have taken my worthy SEO colleagues long to make a list of sites that have been hit by PageRank penalties and spot some patterns.
As almost everyone discussing the subject was linking to me, and I was trying to keep up with the Blogstorm, moderating trackbacks and comments, and even trying to respond
For a company such as Google with a stock price based extensively on anticipated growth and public sentiment, it doesn't take a huge swing in goodwill to have a dramatic effect on valuation. Google has just slapped their biggest fans.
After the very controversial hit many sites took just 2 weeks ago for various degrees of selling PageRank or linking to clients, you might have thought Google would take a breather, but Google it seems hadn't even started its crackdown.
A number of sites have been hit yet again, including this one, but there is also a new element that has
Obviously despite some negative commentary, Google still is the fairest of them all, though not all results necessarily make sense.
Vanessa Fox came across something interesting in her vanity search today, and I thought I would add to the mystery and mystique of… the Google SERPs.
I noticed that within my own not quite so vanity searches ;) call it an ego search, that a recent post by Tinu about the paid links problems was ranking highly (#7).
That isn't overly strange, until you look a little deeper in the SERP, and discover a second listing for exactly the same article
Wordpress.com owners Automattic, working in conjunction with Answers.com and former Wordpress core developer Alex King have just released a new plugin which allows Wordpress.com users, and Wordpress.org users to easily link to topics and definitions on Answers.com.
There are literally hundreds of such plugins for linking to various Wikis and shopping sites, but for some strange reason those haven't been included on Wordpress.com
Users on Wordpress.com aren't really very SEO savvy and thus are most likely to be "link happy" and of course with the plugin being so convenient, they are more likely to link to Answers.com now than rival sites.
A
Danny Sullivan has managed to get some feedback from someone at Google confirming there are visible PageRank penalties being applied, as much as a -2 on what is displayed on the Google Toolbar.
This is my follow on from my post yesterday:- Dancing With The Gevil - Defamed By Google?
Fair enough, for those people who have been caught selling links primarily for boosting search engine results.
The funny thing is I have seen so many blogs today that are selling Text Links who have not received a penalty, yet lots of sites that write high quality paid reviews penalized. I am
Blogcatalog Members today are collectively blogging about abuse.
I thought of blogging about all kinds of abuse that affect real people day in, day out, but decided that ultimately that doesn't fit in with my audience, or really add any authority to the words I would be writing.
As it happens, today part of a 2 hour interview with me was published in the Guardian (Digg Story you know you want to). I honestly didn't expect any more words in print from the article, because it was so wide ranging, and such
How does the Stumbleupon algorithm really work.? I have no idea, and I doubt anyone else really does know for sure, other than core programmers at Stumbleupon. I do know one thing though, Tim is probably the person who has spent the most time studying Stumbleupon, analytically.
Whilst I really appreciate facts, where there are a lack of facts I appreciate discussions that at least try to create models based upon extensive research data
You might find this a little geeky, but for those that like delving into how things might work, Tim's modelling of the Stumbleupon algorithm is just pure gold.
On Sunday's I like to provide some entertaining reading, and I have just found out about a free report Alvin Phang has written about the lack of value he received as an advertiser buying a review from John Chow.
I wrote a review for Alvin a couple of months back.
I know I have probably sent him around 30 visitors to his blogging ebook, and maybe 50 or 60 visitors to his blog on making money blogging.
Now if you read recently Maki's article on how to get traffic from popular blogs, Maki's 10th point was donations and
When Blogcatalog was relaunched, the links from the directory were nofollow.
In my initial review I suggested that it would be a popular decision to remove the nofollow from the links, and also use a different method of tracking clicks - Blogcatalog have to track clicks because it is part of their blog rating system, and might also help with advertising sales for premium positioning.
Most blog directories do not provide direct linking.
For better or for worse, Blogcatalog decided to use javascript and "onclick" for their tracking. There is a lot of confusion in the SEO community as to whether "onclick" passes
I haven't mentioned FreeIQ up until now, I actually have some mixed opinions about it, and until I have those sorted out in my own mind, I am not planning to do a full review.
However today actually marks quite a significant landmark, what I believe is a major step forward in their content delivery plans.
FreeIQ provides a digital content delivery platform and affiliate market place, and up until now, everything I have seen available was quite "low end" or small scale products intended for very much a small niche market.
I recently mentioned that I purchased
I was just reading an interesting article on Mahalo about their absolutely amazing plagiarism checker. (yes it is just a Google search and a bit of javascript) If Jason wants something useful he should use iplagiarismcheck.com (I wrote a sponsored review about them recently, I am sure Jason can afford the unlimited package)
Anyway one paragraph interested me
One of the most important parts of the QC and serping process is making sure the sites we link to on Mahalo do not have scraped or stolen content, that is, the sites do not take content from another source without attribution
Lets start with the mosaic, as writing about it has been on my "to do" list for a few days.
Maurizo is a regular reader and talented programmer has come up with a great idea for community appreciation, a community mosaic.
I know this has taken him a great deal of time to accomplish, because he first of all asked me for a high resolution photo over a month ago.
First of all here is a baby version of his amazing mosaic
If you want to see the full size version you will have to click through to see the full community
This could have been a paid review through ReviewMe, it was ordered a few days ago and I just haven't had time to write something that warrants being paid for it, but I decided to write something for free. If any of the Google Spam Team are reading this article, it was not paid for in any way and your bots can't tell the difference because keyword analysis would pick up the specific words suggesting that there is some kind of disclosure for paid links.
My paid reviews are not cheap, but they are often worth it - people are paying me
John Andrews currently has the top rated article on Sphinn with a truly brilliant display of link baiting and social media awareness.
I am not sure I am going to be able to knock him off the top spot, and this very post will probably gain him a few more votes, but I would like to think that one of my older articles could at least be a contender.
There are a number of reasons why my old post on Wordpress SEO and Dynamic Linking might not have
I have spent the morning watching a number of contrasting videos which in some ways suggest that Google may have jumped the shark, and I don't fully agree with any of them. The Seth Godin Video is interesting, because he was telling Google what to do 18 months ago.
In this video Seth Godin is insightful, and explains to a bunch of Googlers all about Purple Cows and Flipping the Funnel on its side and embracing buzz marketing.
The concepts are sage advice, however there is one major pitfall.
If the perfect way to market a product is to flip
How many SEO blogs actually write original content?
I am not talking about original words, but original ideas which can be based either on experience from experimentation or what I would describe as reasoned theory? Experience based on following conventional wisdom just doesn't count - you only need to read one SEO blog for accepted best practice, it doesn't really matter which one of the mainstream SEO blogs you choose. You might choose a few more for industry news with differing opinion.
The kind of blogs I love to read are those with substance, even if I can't fully understand all of them
I don't think so but…
We have seen how blog discussions can have both a massive positive and negative influence on large company share value, especially with Apple.
I have written about this a few times in the past, first of all questioning Google's definition of paid links and more recently with my post on linking payola. OK I have probably mentioned this a few more times than that, but those articles cover the core points quite nicely.
When Ebay purchase a site like StumbleUpon and eventually includes a footer link, and possibly some contextual links to product pages that are search engine followable, are they paid links also?
They only paid… what… $75M for 1.5M blogs (and growing) located on subdomains
There is only one small detail that prevents me from immediately whipping out my credit card in the next 30 seconds and buying Social Power Linking, but for many people that small detail is actually the primary reason they would make a purchase.
I have experienced some of Jacks training in the past, and it is always phenomenal, he gives so much valuable information and presents it in a way that is easy for anyone to understand. I have absolutely no doubt that Social Power Linking will be no exception to the rule.
I have a couple of great things to report regarding my review of the Volusion Shopping Cart. (note I was compensated for that review)
This was one of the problems I had with Volusion as a solution. Their own email system is primarily for sales notices, and once you grow a subscriber list beyond a certain number of users, they recommended moving over to using Intellicontact.
I wasn't very happy with the Intellicontact pricing, but an even bigger concern is that I doubt anyone running their mailing lists with Aweber would even give a second's
Michelle Macphearson just released her Web 2.0 Traffic Generation Blueprint
I got to skim through this a couple of days ago and need to read it again in more depth and do a lot of planning.
It is free, and well worth downloading.
It is totally different to Stampede Secrets which I reviewed a few months back, or the Authority Black Book which I haven't reviewed, but I am sure many people have read anyway.
How can 3 ebooks from highly experienced internet marketers on Web 2.0 marketing and traffic generation be totally different, worthy of your time, and in the
Maybe you are going about things the wrong way and should take some inspiration from Judo…
Literally "the gentle way," this ancient martial art (it’s origin is from jujutsu) makes use of the opponent's strength to overcome him, thereby making it possible for a David to throw a Goliath. Kano Jigoro (the founder of the Kodokan style of judo) developed the art into what is now an international Olympic sport. Cheddar Judo Club
The conventional
News of Twitter adopting rel="nofollow" is disturbing.
Sure links from Twitter can be abused, because Twitter profiles are so heavily interlinked.
What they should have done is stuck nofollow on your "twitter blogroll" links thus making each Twitter account a little more independent and negating the benefit of building up mass friendships for more than traffic generation.
It isn't a minor thing, Twitter has just become another "Wikipedia", a black hole sucking in link juice and only allowing it to flow internally.
I would no longer class Twitter as a microblogging application, because in many ways the content you submit
This is the first release of this modified "classic" WordPress plugin and is based upon the original Custom Query String by Matt Read which has been looking for a permanent home for a while.
It contains some simple modifications extending the operation to include the UTW is_tag() function. The changes made are not unique, as they are the same as have been described on a number of Non-english language blogs such as 082Net - a little hard to find if you don't speak Korean, and as I have found in the past, if hacks are not provided as a
Just one month ago Jason Calacanis invited me and a few bloggers he has crossed swords with in the past onto his Calacanis podcast. During that podcast I highlighted what I believe was one of the fundamental flaws with Mahalo’s long-term success, and Jason very politely rejected my advice.
Read more on Jason Calacanis Mahalo Diggbait – Lies Or Credit?…
I have kept quiet on the Wordpress Sponsored Themes debate… for too long, but it was a decision I took a few months ago. Wait until the dust settles and then look at what specific rules are made, and then how they are enforced.
Read more on Wordpress Sponsored Themes – How To Game The System…
Whilst travelling I missed a blogstorm – “Buy Blog Comments” a controversial service that allows you to pay a fee to have someone promote your website writing comments.
This is probably going to be my most controversial post ever, and lots of people are going to think it is just linkbait, but I sincerely believe that paid comments can be ethical.
Having just come back from a week in Florida, striving to improve not only my own powers of concentration and focus, but how to grab and maintain the attention of readers and customers, for the last few days I have been thinking a little about Sphinn… some of those thoughts haven’t been pleasant, and to be perfectly honest, the good thoughts had very selfish motives.
I frequently use Google to search for results on my own site, so you would expect that when using Google Personalized Search, pages on my own domain would rank higher for very obvious specific search results.
You would be wrong…
Read more on Google Personalized Results – Ego Search Conundrum…
Feedburner have just annonced that 2 of their professional features are now available free of charge.
I have been signed up for Feedburner Pro for a while
Read more on Important Tips On Using Feedburner Pro – Now Free…
When a page on your site totally tanks in Google's search results, normally there is one of several things that have gone wrong to have caused it.
It could also be argued that it can be caused by duplicate content, and enter the supplemental results through lack of pagerank. Honest duplicate content could be on your own site, or due to poor syndication (lack of links back to the original document).
There
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your SERPs down…
But is it all just hot air?
Also vailable as Audio [MP3] video [mp4] iPod [mp4]
Staring
Jason Calacanis (here is a link to all my Jason Calacanis coverage)
This is not the definitive guide to Wordpress SEO, and I highly doubt I am the right person to write one, in fact I am not sure who would be. That being said this partial guide on a couple of aspects of Wordpress SEO might offer a broader perspective on what is possible than I have seen previously published.
Read more on Wordpress SEO – Siloing vs Massive Ball Linking With Tags…
Just 2 weeks ago PayPerPost launched their PayPerPost Direct service and I wrote one of my typical in-depth reviews about why I believe that this new offering really changes the paid review landscape.
Read more on PayPerPost Receives $7M Additional Funding & Launches Direct Marketplace…
I am a long way behind on memes, in some cases a good 3 or 4 weeks, but I have the ones I am interested in bookmarked, and I will come back to them when I have time.
Honestly if you offer a service promoting professional SEO and SEM services, you don’t spam the comments of another blog in the SEO community trying to promote some Wordpress themes of dubious quality.
Everyone is slagging off Guy Kawasaki for his Truemors site (again). I think most of them need to have their head examined because the site is already a raging success and the venture is already profitable, though most of them are Tech bloggers and not SEOs or Niche Marketers.
Read more on Truemors – More Successful Than Most People Realise…
I thought I would mix things up with a few interesting videos I have been watching
First of all a short video from SMX Seattle on various things regarding duplicate content and paid links. I am not sure if there is anything new, but it certainly emphasises how you should handle syndication of your content with links back to the original.
Read more on Video Roundup | SMX Seattle | Duplicate Content | Jason Calacanis…
If you are using Blogger, one of the most annoying missing features is the ability to send a trackback. Fortunately there are a number of ways to send a trackback with Blogger using 3rd Party services or desktop blogging software.
Read more on Haloscan – How To Send a Trackback With Blogger (Part 1)…
What motivates people to link to other people? Listed are some of the reasons people might have for linking to you, and I am sure, some of the reasons you might link to other people.
When reading other people’s blogs, you can encounter a multitude of linking problems that thousands of bloggers are making, either when linking to people within their own posts, or when they are commenting.
Read more on Linking Mistakes Frequently Encountered On Blogs…
I know Jason Calacanis has only just launched Mahalo, but you would have though he would have taken care to ensure that everything was 100% “above board” on the day the site would be under the spotlight.
Read more on Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo – How To Build A Biased Self Propaganda Machine?…
Some time ago I tested the Pay Per Post “Review My Post” links with marginal success.
The success rate was marginal because although lots of people clicked on the links in a fairly short period of time, I had a very poor conversion rate.
The biggest failing was that all they presented to a user after they clicked through was a subscription box, effectively the same as if you clicked “signup” on the PayPerPost site.
A lot of the things I write go completely over the head of many of my readers, and in some ways that is actually a concious decision which certainly costs me a much higher readership.
I am not an SEO consultant, and whilst I am frequently emailed about whether I would be interested in doing some SEO consultancy, speciifically in relation to blogs, I generally turn it down.
This is actually a paid review, but lets look on it as “Paid Blog Tipping”.
Blog tipping is actually a meme that has been going on for some time, at the start of the month, and the general idea is to point out some blogs and say what they are doing right, and maybe offer some kind of tip for improvement.
The moment I heard about the new Robots-Nocontent class that can be added to content, alarm bells started ringing in my ears. Whilst this can be used in a legitimate manner, it is also possible for webmasters to heavily abuse it.
Read more on Robots-Nocontent | How To Spot Abuse By Sneaky Webmasters…
So now people have calmed down a little from their running around like headless chickens leaving comments on every blog they could find that used Dofollow, and then linking through to unrelated content, lets start looking at how to link a little more strategically.
Eric Enge Interviews Adam Lasnik about paid links, duplicate content and crufty pages (lots of code, little content)
I am sorry to say not a lot, it reinforces Google’s position not to really say a lot, though apparently there is no real penalty for duplicate content, and not to worry about how pagerank flows in your site.
Read more on Do Google Hate Paid Links, Duplicate Content and Cruft?…
A month or so back I was attempting to arrange some kind of head-to-head comparison between Portal Feeder 2.0, one of their competitors, and what you can do with Wordpress and some free or relatively cheap plugins.
If you happen to click through to my site from your feedreader (I know it is a huge sacrifice) then you will see I have a new pet in my sidebar.
He is actually quite a smart little guy, because unlike you, he knows which posts on my blog you might have missed over the last 3 months, based on the number of comments that were posted, or in this case, lack of comments.
For those that don’t know, “supplemental results” are the bane of search engine optimization specialists.
Here is a great explanation of supplemental results from Rockyfied
Google Supplemental Results: Google supplemental results take pages on your site that have been indexed and put them into a sub database in Google. Supplemental results do not rank well but rather Google uses its supplemental DB to populate its results when they don’t have enough results to show in a given query. This means pages on your site in Google’s supplemental DB will not help you in the serps.
Read more on The Easiest Way To Pull Yourself Out Of Supplemental Results Hell?…
For quite some time, Technorati has allowed you to find out how many other blogs have linked through to a particular post, they even provide live widgets.
Technorati will also allow you to search a particular blog regarding a keyword and pull up related content.
There are 2 extremely useful features that Technorati has missing, that are vital for quality search results.
I am going to cover this first, because this is a brand new feature introduced sometime yesterday, and I am probably one of the first to notice it, and happen to have convenient screenshots taken just 23 hours apart.
In my last post on Google Blog Search, I used the following screenshot, grabbed just before I published my post.
Now if you look at the result at the bottom of the screenshot, you will see my own listing, which had a fair amount of longevity.
Publishing the post displaced my old blogsearch content from the listings, maybe permanently if Google decides that that listing is more relevant, or maybe until it is no longer given an extra benefit due to freshness.
I only have one listing, and it is my most current or the one with most authority – the balance seems to normally tip around the 4 or 5 day mark.
Here is a new listing for the same search taken 14 hours ago, just 23 hours after my followup post on Google Blogsearch was made.
You will notice there is now an extended results link. That signifies that my site has additional information about this topic.
For a casual searcher things like that are not significant, but for someone like myself who uses Blogsearch as a serious tool to find relevant content, it is extremely useful.
The fact that Google also knows about that additional content on my site, just hours after publishing is also extremely significant, because that can also have a significant blogsearch weighting factor. If someone has mentioned Blogsearch multiple times, they might have more authority on the subject
That additional authority on a particular subject doesn’t seem to have any weighting on Technorati… at all. Technorati authority seems to mainly based on total number of links, and not based on authority of a particular subject.
As an example, Technorati doesn’t think I am much of an authority on [tag]dofollow[/tag] or [tag]tagging[/tag] – it is only recently I have moved up from having “a little authority” to having “some authority”, no matter what the subject.
Also of note is that Dougal Campbell isn’t looked on as an authority on plugins for Wordpress, and his recent post that I linked through to from my Ultimate Guide to DoFollow Plugins isn’t listed in a search for Dofollow as an authority.
Yes I know that Wordpress developers were removed from the Top100 because they dominated the Top10, but that shouldn’t mean they have no authority.
If you want Wordpress news “straight from the horses mouth”, don’t use Technorati, as an example a search for Wordpress 2.2 news with a lot of authority will not bring up recent developments, which I know Dougal has posted about, and so has Matt.
Back to Google Blog Search…
All things being equal (which they never seem to be), I should always outrank Techcrunch or Problogger when discussing something like Blogsearch, but there are other factors, as you can see by the fact that Alister’s blogsearch post on Problogger.net is still outranking my post with an almost identical title (though it does have more words in it)
Did you notice I am outranking the Bruce Clay blog? – The Lisa posted linking through to Alister on Problogger within a few minutes of my post – I am not sure who was actually first to post.
Alister’s article on Darren’s site so far has had 64 references, compared to the 2 references I had from Matt at Globally Local and Dan at The Wrong Advices.
Another thing I noticed for the first time is that Google also have introduced supplemental results for the references. The Lisa was linked by Danny Sullivan in his roundup. If you look at the references you can see one listing, plus supplemental results.
Now for anything to do with RSS, I don’t want to read supplemental results. The feed I am using at the bottom of this page would be useless if it contained supplemental results.
The number of items found on Google are not affected by duplicates, so it is a real number. Technorati’s numbers tend to be inflated by the duplicates.
I would like a listing that includes the additional references that were part of the extended results, so if a site has 10 documents that are looked on as being or suitable authority, all of them will be shown.
If I am trying to mix RSS content, I want the “real deal” and not just the most recent item.
It is a shame so many of the people linking through to Alister’s guest post are attributing it to Darren.
Now the even more worrying thing I have seen from all the people linking through to Alister’s post is that many want to increase the size of their blogroll, and I am sure 95% of them have no clue about linking structures or the fact that blogroll links also appear on all their duplicate content pages.
That is why I originally took the time to write a post in response to Alisters, because in all things there has to be a balance.
The majority of bloggers don’t research what they write, or don’t research using a blog search engine that brings up results based on the authority of the content, and not the historical authority of the blogger.
Read more on Exclusive: Google Blog Search Extended Results | Supplemental Results…
This is actually something quite remarkable, because as far as I know, I haven’t seen anyone else, ever, get to offer their readers a free, premium press release through PRWeb, and it is not like they have an affiliate program (at least that I have heard about), or easy to find promotion codes.
Read more on Do You Want a $200 Press Release Submission With PRWeb? For Free?…
Google Blogsearch (or should it be “Blog Search”? – yeah spaces matter) was recently written about by my friend Alister Cameron as a guest post on Problogger.
His post was entitled:- “How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words!”
Well more to the point, he asked me some damn tough questions that made me think for more than 5 minutes before answering them. Actually I spent quite some time on the reply, and it wasn’t as straight forward as I was expecting.
I missed this a few days ago
At the request of WhiteHat SEO community on April the 1st this year all major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN Live declared their joint support for a newly developed XFN standard.
The new attribute rel=follow is designed to complement the notorious rel=nofollow. However unlike nofollow attribute rel=follow is designed to express not negative but positive relationship between a linking website and a website rel=follow link points to.
I’ll try to explain it in layman’s terms…
Read more on Google | Yahoo | MSN | Cooperatively Introduce rel=”follow” tag…
Canonicalization is a serious problem for webmasters, just read this latest entry by Matt Cutts or this great post from John Andrews. However telling webmasters that they should fix these issues isn't enough, webmasters & bloggers need solutions.
A couple of months ago Alister Cameron posted a simple solution to .htaccess such that you didn't need to use a plugin to convert URLs using www to URLs without.
At the time I suggested a couple of improvements, and also mentioned I would post about it here on my blog, hopefully to help
Not long ago I wrote about how PRWeb can be used to grab some useful backlinks on pages that might experience reasonable qualified traffic, especially from members of the press, or owners of quality websites.
Read more on Are Press Releases More Cost Effective Than PPC Advertising?…
Stampede Secrets 2.0 is unlike any internet marketing report or ebook I have read…
Ok, for the rest of you lets get on with the review…
Salmon Protocol Endpoints & Canonicalization
This blog post mainly comprises of a message I just sent to the Salmon Protocol mailing list, but I have expanded on it a little.
Salmon Protocol is actually one of the most exciting things that will be used by Google Buzz & theoretically could dramatically make huge changes to the way communication flows around all kinds of web content, whether comments on blog posts, votes & likes on Youtube videos, maybe blog posts themselves, video replies etc.
Read more on Salmon Protocol Endpoints & Canonicalization…