This mainly covers WordPress – if you are on another platform, find a geek that uses it to try to do the equivalent, but I doubt this is possible on Blogger.

I should point out there are already implementations out in the wild that are significantly better in some ways, though might not meet all the goals of the Twitter developers.

As an example, in my comments on the last post one of the goals of the Twitter button was for it to work even with javascript switched off. Some existing sharing solutions use an empty anchor link href=”#” – from a SEO perspective that is better – for usability maybe not.

Here is some default code generated by the official Twitter button generator – the data-url is optional if you are using canonical tags and don’t have lots of buttons on the home page of a blog, or within archives – otherwise it is best to be specific.

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="http://andybeard.eu/2902/7-reasons-not-to-use-the-new-tweet-buttons.html" data-text="7 Reasons Not To Use The New Tweet Buttons" data-count="vertical" data-via="AndyBeard" data-related="seodojo:SEO Training">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

We are going to try to solve a number of issues

Twitter decided to use “data” attributes that are in the HTML5 spec. On one project I am using data attributes with spans which are not in the spec.
What some share widget developers are using is an empty anchor link with no destination.

If Twitter wanted the link to function as well as a defined button if Javascript is turned off, they should have opted to use their implmentation which uses URL parameters.

In my last post criticising the tweet buttons, I have added some test implementations of what is discussed here. Test the 3rd one “With Nothing Defined” – that is a text link as implemented by Twitter, it doesn’t pick up the title.

I should also note that Google have used HTML5 data for their buttons by default, so they suck just as much.

This is their current static text link for sharing

http://twitter.com/share

It picks up the referring URL, but it doesn’t seem to pick up the page title as it is meant to when using a text link (it works with Javascript), and you would somehow need to work out defining rel=”me” in the header which is something I have never even heard of before.

So that is the page you are sending “link love” or “Google Juice” to – a crappy form on a social network – this is going back to 2006 when I was first moaning about plugins doing this.

I was then compelled to make my own version of the Socialble plugin “Antisocial” as the original author refused to add nofollow, and eventually Yoast took the Sociable project over and one of the first official things he did was add nofollow to the links.

If they want the link, there needs to be some content of value on the page.

However we can do something about the link formatting to ensure it passes some useful data.

http://twitter.com/share?url=http://andybeard.eu/2902/7-reasons-not-to-use-the-new-tweet-buttons.html&text=7%20Reasons%20Not%20To%20Use%20The%20New%20Tweet%20Buttons&count=vertical&via=AndyBeard&related=seodojo:SEO%20Training

All those parameters have been added to the URL, which has a benefit with W3C validation & content syndication, and when someone clicks through to the form, it has the data filled out.

Whoopie!

So lets take that link code and slap it into the original

<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=http://andybeard.eu/2902/7-reasons-not-to-use-the-new-tweet-buttons.html&text=7%20Reasons%20Not%20To%20Use%20The%20New%20Tweet%20Buttons&count=vertical&via=AndyBeard&related=seodojo:SEO%20Training" class="twitter-share-button" rel="nofollow">You should Tweet This Post</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

I also added a nofollow to the link, but even then it still means Google could opt to take juice away from other links on the same page. Sucks doesn’t it.
However Twitter are also gaining nothing of value to them, and even without it they possibly wouldn’t because of how they messed up their Robots.txt

Part of me still wants to believe that Twitter added this Robots.txt just to block indexation of search results, and had no intention of holding my content to ransom by preventing Google crawling it.

http://twitter.com/robots.txt

#Google Search Engine Robot
User-agent: Googlebot
# Crawl-delay: 10 — Googlebot ignores crawl-delay ftl
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

#Yahoo! Search Engine Robot
User-Agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 1
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

#Microsoft Search Engine Robot
User-Agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends

# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends
Disallow: /oauth
Disallow: /1/oauth

The 4th line down blocks any URL which has a parameter in it. It is a side effect of messing it up or being greedy (or incompetent) – various SEOs would describe it different ways.

Sometimes Google allows blocked URLs to accumulate PageRank – sometimes they don’t – in a case where that PageRank might end up somewhere that isn’t a benefit to Google depending on how they handle their “reset vector”, they may discount the juice.
I don’t know the order Google process the link graph – it is quite possible there would be a difference between linking to a page blocked with robots.txt, and linking to the same page using nofollow – that difference could be for both sites – Google has no intention of enlightening us on this.

This is especially so as the page has no unique or relevant content – the static text link does not display any of the information that is available from the widget, and neither does the connected page.

In my opinion the page should be merged with the search results for references to the URL – that would then be a worthwhile page to index especially if it also included all the threaded conversation.
There is no logical reason to have 2 actions from the same button – the destination page should have both the tweet form and the search.
If it was on a real permalink, that is something of value to be indexed.

I actually have no idea whether Twitter even care about SEO – the actions they take seem almost random – search other than on their own brand accounts for less than 2% of their web traffic according to Alexa.

The Javascript

The Next Web have posted some async javascript code. It makes sense to use it, but as you should have the javascript for the Twitter widgets loading at the bottom of all your pages, it doesn’t really make a huge amount of difference.
At this time Twitter are loading the javascript from a CDN, so it shouldn’t be affected by fail whale.
If Akamai dies, you might as well stop browsing as half the internet will die with it.

<script type="text/javascript">
//async script, twitter button fashiolista.com style
(function() {
var s = document.createElement('SCRIPT');
var c = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.type = 'text/javascript';
s.async = true;
s.src = 'http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';
c.parentNode.insertBefore(s, c);
})();
</script >

If you have this code in the footer of every page, then all you need to load a button is a static link, or one created using PHP if you are using WordPress.

I am not going to create a whole WordPress plugin here… so how about a quick WordPress shortcode.

There are tons of Tweet Button plugins appearing, but I haven’t seen any that do a decent link implementation which is essential for a shortcode – after all blog posts get syndicated… and javascript generally gets stripped out.

<?php
// Usage tweet rel="scobleizer:Tech Geek" or tweet rel="mashable:Tech Blog"
function mytweet($atts) {
extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		"rel" => 'seodojo:SEO Training'
	), $atts));
$via = "AndyBeard";
$url = urlencode(get_permalink());
// Different Themes & Plugins implement titles in different ways - find a way to code this that works for you
$tweettitle = urlencode(the_title("", "", false));
$related = urlencode($atts['rel']); // this should maybe be defined in some custom meta

$code = '<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=' . $url . '&text=' . $tweettitle . '&count=vertical&via=' . $via . '&related=' . $related . '" class="twitter-share-button" rel="nofollow">You should Tweet This Post</a>';
return $code;
}
add_shortcode("tweet", "mytweet");
?>

To use this it would be something like

[tweet rel="seodojo:SEO training"]

That comes out like this

Really to be useful it should include a dynamic graphical image so when content gets syndicated there is some social proof with the link… but at least the link will now work when it is syndicated.

I still need to work out what data-counturl that I spotted on techcrunch is for. I am assuming that it can be used to set a canonical URL, while the URL used for each Tweet could be different (based on source, affiliate, membership status etc)

If you click this link, you will be taken to this same page, but residing at a slightly different URL. Tweetmeme makes a mess of URLs like this.
http://andybeard.eu/2907/better-twitter-tweet-button.html?mysource=12345

The new Twitter buttons and Topsy seem to get it right on the landing pages, I need to do more testing on tweeted URLs.

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 with some CSS differentiation, with “reactions” positive or negative to qualify for the front page.

Some things with the site certainly need improvement:-

• Permalinks need to be rewritten with mod_rewrite
• I like the love and hated part of the profiles, because you can add some HTML – I think many people would appreciate a simple HTML editor to be made available, there are plenty of simple javascript ones that can be applied to any text area.
• Blogs – there wasn’t a way to list blogs on the social media profile (my profile is an example) – Jack’s is much more interesting for SEOs ;)
• Tools
  • Bookmarklet – much easier to use than visiting the site
  • Javascript vote counter
  • Inclusion on popular bookmarking plugins such as Sociable (Joost’s version)
  • Feedburner Feedflares (with vote count and comments), maybe based on what Hamlet has done for Sphinn
• More submissions – some submissions are currently fed into the site from feeds
• Very clear rules, especially on things like self-promotion

I don’t intend to write about every new social news site that comes along, but Jack is a regular reader, and I enjoyed the new “twist” that he has added with this one, plus it is more links for your social media starfish, cross-promotion or whatever you wish to call it these days.
I wouldn’t expect a huge amount of traffic, I was member 99, but it does seem to be a site with quite a few dedicated users, and very few abusers.

Jack wrote more about HatedOrLoved.com over on his blog, and you can check it out here for yourself.

Note: Jack plus his other partners are advertisers here on http://AndyBeard.eu with their Marketing Ice site, but I actually had the whole article written before I even thought about that – a visit to Jack’s blog jogged my thoughts that I should add some disclosure.

Here is a challenge: I would love this post to be the most hated ever ;) That would only take 10 haters, compared to 21 “loves”

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.

WordPress Elite

A few years ago I purchased a script called WordPress Elite. It was pretty useful, and allowed you to point the software at a server, and create WordPress blogs based on a default configuration plus you could select various parameters.

I even sold a couple of copies as an affiliate.

It didn’t do everything, you still had to log into the WordPress blog and activate the plugins, configure them etc, and at the time I was an SEO newbie… some would say I still am ;)

The marketer however sold the business, and the new owner didn’t do anything with it. He got some new subscribers. He asked the list once for new features, then nothing was released, and the script never really supported 2.x very well.

WordPress Super Installer

I managed to pick this up really cheap when it was first released, and I soon forgot that WordPress Elite was going through some teething problems.
Unfortunately development pretty much stopped at the beginning of 2007.

First, as with any newly released version of software (including wsi) there are bugs and anomalies that need to be worked out before the version is completely stable. I know one bug in particular reported to WordPress about v2.1 is it’s lack of compliance with the xmlrpc standard. Xmlrpc is what most of the blog content auto-posters use to post content to your blogs via remote methods (as apposed to logging in a posting something manually).

Though the newest version of WordPress may have some advantages over the previous versions, I don’t feel for the sake of building blog farms to achieve back links to your money sites that it makes sense to quickly jump on-board a new version, just for the sake of having a new version.

The last update I received from Randy Rhodes (not Randi from Air America) was at the end of July 2007.

WordPress 2.0.x is still maintained because it needs to be for Debian inclusion, thus if you don’t need all the fancy features of WordPress 2.1 or above, it is still a good choice, especially if you are fed up of things breaking all the time, or have tons of WordPress blogs to maintain.

Other Scripts

There are other scripts out there, plus various services that promise to install WordPress on your behalf. I must admit I am not that keen on forking out more money, changing business processes, and then for another script development to grind to a halt.

I would never trust an automated service to install WordPress packages for me. There are a few cropping up again, there have been a few in the past, but why reveal all your niche sites to a 3rd party hiding behind a website, even if you trusted them to do the installation, and have access to your server.

WordPress Packages

If you are not too reliant on 10s of plugins, you can get by just creating WordPress packages. Include a set of standard plugins and themes that you have tweaked, upload, switch on the plugins, and configure them to your liking.
Or you can create a process, and pay someone else to do it for you.

SEO Optimized WordPress Package

Jeff Johnson has just released a special package for WordPress SEO

The installation is painless

Setup your database as always
Edit your config as always
Upload
Enter your blog name and email address
Log in
Select a theme

So what is done for you?

Permalinks
Plugin Activation
Plugin settings (though I am not sure how much they differ from default)
Ping list

Shall we coin a new phrase… the “4 Ps”

The themes are also relatively well optimized, so you have H1s where they should be

Pretty useful?

WordPress SEO Plugins Installed

All In One SEO Pack
Google XML SiteMaps
Sociable (the new official version with nofollow)

also Akismet and Simple Captcha

Why Was I Going To Slam It?

This problem was exasperated by many of the themes Jeff Johnson decided to include in the package, some optimized themes from MyType.com who basically take fairly average WordPress themes, optimized them a little, and then stick 5 spammy links in the footer to various pages on their domain, many seem to be paid client blogs.

(disclaimer: MyType.com currently rank first for WordPress SEO and I have a post blocked by robots.txt ranking on the same page – it is not exactly a competitive search term, doesn’t bring much traffic, but it probably takes 100s of spammy theme links to rank for it now)

In addition Jeff had included a few links on the default blogroll, and a badge in the sidebar.

When you added up the total number of external links per page, and it came to 14 without the WordPress default links etc, it couldn’t really be looked at as a good recommendation for SEO, especially if people download it who are less experienced.

So I emailed Jeff, and within a few hours I had a reply that it was going to be fixed. I think I may have been the only one who was concerned.

It Is Not Perfect

I don’t like some of the sites on the pinglist they use – lots of .jp sites – my personal pinglist for “quality” blogs consists of just one site, Feedburner, and I let them handle the pings to other places.

sidenote: I keep seeing Pingoat listed on ping lists – last time I checked Pingoat hadn’t been accepting pings for 18 months, maybe that is now closer to 2 years. Web pings only. Maybe John Reese when he purchased the site switched that function back on and didn’t tell anyone (such as update the Pingoat blog) – looking at recently updated blogs on Pingoat, it seems like the Poles might be using a script to spam the hell out of it.

I would use a different plugin selection, though I am sure the version of WordPress Jeff provides to his clients has a more comprehensive feature set. That being said, you really want to minimise plugin use if you are hosting a lot of blogs on a single server.

The themes are better than the originals, though you might want to look for replacements.

As they stand, if lots of people use this WordPress version for blog farms and datafeed sites, they have a bit of a heavy footprint. They still have a lot of nofollow links in the footer, plus 2 blogroll links and a banner

It Is A Time Saver

Even as it stands, for an experienced WordPress users it represents a time saver, and for someone less experienced who has problems with the basic steps of setting up plugins, permalinks etc it is a good resource, especially if the package gets improved over time.

Jeff is providing lots of instructional videos on how to install the package, though effectively it is the same as any WP installation. He does recommend using this only for new blogs, though there is a procedure that can be used for existing sites.

It Is Free

Whilst I started off with some real concerns, what concerns remain can be cured with very simple hacking. I expect this to be well maintained.

Thanks Jeff, great value for money – download it here.

p.s. I am not sure how long Jeff will have this available. It is just one of many things he is providing free of charge as part of a product launch, and these bonuses tend to disappear from public display once a launch has completed.
My advise would be to download it and test it on a few spare domains, tweak it for your own use and feed the blogs you create with some content.

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 in WordPress plugins and gaining millions of links.

Of all the default options within the original Sociable plugin, quite honestly the ThisNext button appearing by default is the least obvious choice, thus most likely to have been paid for.

When approached about making the links nofollow, the developer refused – he seemed to think all those links to forms were a deserved vote.

I took action, encouraging people to add nofollow initially, and then releasing a modified version of the sociable plugin.

That version is relatively unknown – only downloaded 1700 or so times, I am sure the original has been downloaded upwards of 100,000 times.

Recently Joost decided to take over development of Sociable and create a new “official” version

I did make sure that the default options were changed.

Not As Bad As It Used To Be

Fortunately this situation isn’t as bad as it used to be, otherwise I honestly wouldn’t raise it in so open a manner.

ThisNext now has someone on board or was made aware of this issue and has made a specific point to block the URL from search engines

Disallow: /pick/new/submit/

That may not be the case of the other default inclusions

But it is deceptive to users – those are purchased links, and there is no form of disclosure on the page that they are paid advertising.

For a long time those pages were not blocked

Deja Vu

These are really old conversations but highly relevant to the current

There have been extensive discussions regarding the differences in disclosure in various blogging scenarios including with Gordon Gould of ThisNext after the interview between Jason and Ted from Izea (formerly PayPerPost)

Clickbank have required disclosure for more than a year now, though they leave it to the FTC to decide what level of disclosure is required.

Google still prevent disclosure of their referral units.

I have been writing about affiliate disclosure for some time

When Jason asks “Should Google, Yahoo, Mahalo, etc. ban affiliate links? (or “Will the FTC ban undisclosed affiliate links for us all?”)” his first port of call should be companies where he has a say in what they do, then his friends at Google.

Jason should also look into other forms of payola, and his own linking practice

For full coverage of Jason’s presentation at Affiliate Summit read

Sam’s blow by blow live blogging
Reaction to JC on ReveNews
Scott Jangro’s take – he agrees with a lot of Jason’s sentiment
Kieron also agrees with a lot that was said, and looks for long term value.

Linda has a full roundup of all posts, along with a player so you can listen to a recording on Webmaster radio

Zac was under fire over his big checks and responds

Finally Tris has probably the clearest takeaways from the Jason Calacanis keynote at Affiliate Summit

Maybe more coverage on techmeme, but currently most of the above posts have all the links covered.

Update

I found Joel Comm’s views extremely interesting (p.s. Joel – if you had linked to a few more people I would have found your post quicker)

Good overview on Winning The Web

Finally Dan Rua with quite a scathing look at Jason Calacanis’ linking practice, with #1 rankings for Mahalo content being driven purely with links from the Jason Calacanis weblog.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate marketer, I also get classed as an SEO by many – this is a topic I am extremely biased about and have commercial interests in. I have been involved in the disclosure debate for affiliate marketing for over a year.

For those unfamiliar with Antisocial, these are the differences

• All links have nofollow added – this might sound strange coming from someone who strongly supports the removal of nofollow from comments, but there is no logical purpose having a followable link to a social bookmark site that just points to a submission form
• TwitThis Support – for those that like Tweeting
• StumbleUpon Fix – The original has a bug in the StumbleUpon link
• New support for Sphinn – lots of people are going to use it, so I am sure it is a welcome addition

I am aware that Eyefall previously posted a modified version of the original to include Sphinn, but it doesn’t include the other necessary changes, and who really wants to use a plugin that sucks for SEO, especially the primary users of Sphinn, most likely SEOs.

Another valuable note, very few people will actually take action and use patched files, or even files presented as phps which you have to copy and paste.
If you don’t distribute plugins in an idiot proof zip file, very few people will use it.

I learnt this from experience by offering initially instructions on how to patch Sociable, and how many of my readers didn’t take action.

If you are still unsure about why you might want to use my version of Sociable, you might appreciate this “blast from the past” about how many blogs can retain as much as 50% more link juice internally.

For more information on the plugin itself, please visit the main download page.

For those that know all about it, here is a quick download link for Antisocial

Note: As always, no version number change though I have updated the notes within it – I still look on this as not being a branch of the original, just a hack for SEO minded individuals.
It still contains the sociable bug with WordPress 2.2.1 as I recently mentioned

When you save options, the following error is encountered

Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Bad arguments. in /home/andyeu/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sociable/sociable.php on line 659

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/andyeu/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sociable/sociable.php on line 770

The display of all the draggable icons is severely messed up.

From what I can see in the code (as a tinkerer, not a programmer), this does not prevent the options from being saved, and the correct saved settings appear to be reflected when the page is refreshed, and on the blog itself.

The error appears to be in a section of the code that is related to the default icon set, but I haven’t spent too much time trying to fix it, as I would hope this will be fixed in the original.

I don’t look on my version of the plugin as a branch, I have left all default options “as-is”, thus I will await an official fix, and then update my slightly modified version.

Many thanks to Edwin De Jong and Mindy Koch for making me aware of the problem so I could test it out with WP2.2.1

p.s. I did try to coax a website out of Edwin to link too, but he declined

One of the biggest takeaways from Traffic Stampede Secrets that I reviewed a few months ago was how important it was to target the right social bookmarking and networking sites for your own sites, and also to evaluate and test how effective a particular bookmarking button might be.

I have just removed my StumbleUpon graphic that floats on the top right of every post, and the Technorati favorites button that was included in the same place.

StumbleUpon

I love StumbleUpon, I use it daily to find great sites, and my readers love it as well.

So why did I remove it?

I use a lot of tracking, and frequently I saw clicks of the StumbleUpon button, but no corresponding reviews.
Someone will click the button, and decide not to write a review, and then click their stumble button to go somewhere else. People are shy….

In that situation you don’t get a vote even if one was intended!

If someone is using StumbleUpon, they have the toolbar installed. The “Thumbs Up” button is right next to the Stumble Button.

It is possible I will get a few less reviews, but hopefully I will also get a few more positive votes for my content – those people who clicked a graphic and were too shy to write a review.

Thus whilst StumbleUpon traffic is great, the button I was using, because it only links through to a review form, might not have been helping me, in fact it might have been a negative for gaining votes, reducing the amount your best content is shared with others.

Digg

None of my content is written specific to a Digg audience. I try to write good “in-depth” content and generally many of my articles are not appropriate for the mainstream Digg audience.

Those articles that are appropriate appear to hit a well known phenomena, as happened on my article on Digg friends (which wasn’t about gaming Digg) or my in-depth review of PayPerPost Direct.

My recent articles on WordPress SEO, contain far more valuable information than the majority of “SEO Tips” articles that seem to make the front page of Digg.
Digg users often have short attention spans, and seem to prefer Digging shorter articles – I am sorry but I am not going to write short articles just for traffic. If an article needs more words, I am going to use them.

I am going to continue including the Digg button, because eventually I believe some of my content might become more appreciated by a wider Digg audience.

Technorati Favorites

The button was duplicating something I already include in my sidebar. I will still be reciprocating, many people find it valuable and it is my way of adding people to various OPML tools I am playing with.
There wasn’t a need to have the button in quite such a prominent position.

I maintain my Technorati Favorites with EngTech’s Technorati Favorites tool, the version from 23/05/2007 is working currently (see comments) – remember to clean up your favorites.

An example of how I use the OPML from my Technorati Favorites is the meme I created on Megite for the Technorati Favetrain.

The only way to be added to this special meme is to add me to your Technorati Favorites, and I reciprocate automatically.

This is how I get to read so many blogs, and seem to appear on blogs all over the blogosphere that have interesting articles.

PlugIM – New Addition

I have been a member of PlugIM for quite a while, and have always found it to be a good source of quality articles focused primarily on internet marketing.

Whilst many people might look on this as some kind of duplication with Bumpzee and the affiliate marketing community there, there is actually only a partial overlap in readership, especially among the dedicated reader base.

PlugIM is very much a niche community, whereas Bumpzee caters for many different communities, one widget fits all.
There are currently hundreds of niche communities which utilise some form of voting script.

Many might look on them as being Digg clones.

If you are a Digg user, let’s be totally honest – do you want the hottest knitting pattern for this coming season (yeah knitters will be thinking about Winter clothing already) appearing on the front page of Digg?

Until Digg caters for all topic areas, there is room for clones. Knitting is probably a bigger niche than Tech industry news.

Now for me, PlugIM is appropriate for my niche, I think it deserves a spot in prime real estate.

I have been waiting a little while to mention Michelle’s PlugIM plugin

When it was first launched it didn’t have the flexibility I needed to position it in the “prime real estate” that I wanted, but it is there now.

It is also very “light” in coding, just 4kb, and I hope it doesn’t affect load time too heavily. It certainly won’t be a factor on single pages. My front page is probably going to change somewhat as I make a lot of SEO changes.

One great advantage of the PlugIM plugin is that once an article is already submitted (which happens automatically because they pick up your RSS feed), you don’t have to be logged into PlugIM to vote, or even be a member.

I am also a marketer – PlugIM is designed for marketers and isn’t selfish – when someone votes on your content, it doesn’t take them away from your website.

Bumpzee

Bumpzee stays

I get a huge amount of traffic from Bumpzee on a daily basis, many of my readers are active users, and I maintain one of the largest communities on Bumpzee for blogs that have removed nofollow from their comments area.

In many ways Bumpzee is more like a social network than a social news or bookmarking site.

Bumpzee is the most multi-purpose voting widget, because the service caters for any niche.

Del.icio.us

I am going to integrate something for Del.icio.us with my next major overhall. I find myself using it more frequently for content I really want to keep a bookmark of for future reference.
It is most likely going to be using Feedburner’s Feedflares.

Netscape

I know a few readers use Netscape, though I have seen only limited usage of it where it has been provided in Feeds for the last 6 months.

Someone browsing your site from Netscape might be doing it with a sidebar with a voting button, so in many ways providing a button is superfluous.

Other Services

I am always on the lookout for services that would be useful to add, which my readers would actually find useful. I can provide lots of different buttons using the hacked version of Sociable I use, if readers are going to use them.

If there is a social bookmark service that you actually use on a regular basis, and would like me to add, please let me know.

Facebook? Well I have included it in my feed for a long time, it doesn’t seem to be used

Other Optimization

I am going to start adding some additional optimization, such as custom greetings for each source of traffic.

Update: 28th August 2010 – this article doesn’t take into account changes to the way Google handles nofollow to combat PageRank sculpting.

Also WordPress has moved on a lot in 3 years since it was written – that does invalidate many of the concepts and linking structures presented, but the methods to achieve them might differ significantly.

Having previously written that I don’t typically undertake consulting work, I do look on any paid blog posts as a form of consultancy. In this particular case Tim from eMonetized decided to order a review of his blog, and we negotiated a little to ensure what you read is totally impartial and any links I choose to give are in an editorial context.
The negotiation itself was an interesting process, and I will be writing about that separately.

It should be noted that just because I mention improvements here, that doesn’t mean that Tim the site owner isn’t aware of something, and as also is almost always the case, I haven’t applied many SEO tweaks to this site yet.

That being said, some of the linking structures I talk about in the more geeky sections of this article I have never seen anyone talk about, and it is my belief that the resulting linking structure is highly unique, extremely powerful, whilst remaining flexible.

The Niche

Tim’s blog is one of a host of blogs looking to capitalize on terms such as make money, make money online and making money online, though it is clear that he is quite SEO aware, and from our communication this was made abundantly clear to me.
As an example he has a clear “money page” for promoting his primary affiliate programs using a URL “Making Money Online“.

One of the hardest problems with the “make money” niche is that most of the related search terms that are provided if you use the Google Keyword Suggest tool are very much “long tail” terms, many of which receive only mediocre traffic. Many of the more specific terms receive minimal search volume unless it is related to a specific product, or product launch.

The direction Tim seems to be taking is to target content in the topical community such as Adsense, Adwords and Affiliate Marketing, rather than writing a series of posts based on what Google regard as related topics, such as “How To Make Money [Insert Blank]“, “Making Money [Insert Blank]”

This suggests to me that we might look to optimize the site such that the categories perform well as landing pages, though I believe it is possible to significantly improve site structure to give the site an unfair advantage on a few competitive terms.

SEO Strategy

It is clear that Tim is thinking about his SEO Strategy, and is off to a good start. Here are some of the things he is currently doing that I can see just browsing around the site.

• URLs / Slugs – Tim is using optimized page slugs for every post – there are some plugins that can achieve this automatically, so that just keywords are used without grammatical filler, though I think he is probably doing this manually. URLs are not a major ranking factor, in fact some SEOs would say it is very minor. URLs are a clickthrough factor, and there are limitations for URL length.
• Robots.txt – A lot of things are being blocked off in his Robots.txt file, including date based archives, paged content, images and author pages. He is also blocking off tags – I am not going to dispute that decision, it is something to test and track. There is overlap between categories and tags – it is possible to make that work ok by including additional content and different layouts, and with some SEO linking structures you would block both, others you would enhance both. One good thing he is doing is blocking all his /go/ affiliate links.
  Important:- Robots.txt is a bandaid as it can create hanging or dangling pages.
• Sitemap – he has a clear sitemap, though I worry a little about multi-page sitemaps. If they go multi-page, it is better to make them more of a topical tree, than links between pages… breadcrumb navigation or not. Then it is effectively creating a category listing.
• htaccess – either htaccess or a plugin is being used to ensure all URLs are www
• Related posts – related posts (probably using Wasabi) are being used to increase the internal linking to related content, good for both search engines and human page views.
• Nofollow – Nofollow is being applied to a few links that shouldn’t pass pagerank, such as to forms for email subscription and Technorati favorites
• Excerpts – pages that could potentially be looked on by the search engine spiders as duplicate content are being displayed using the_excerpt() rather than the_content()
• Titles – these seem to be OK, maybe already using SEO Title Tag plugin or similar

Quick Improvements

• WordPress 2.2 – This really is a necessary upgrade for security reasons.
• htaccess trailing slashes – Canonicalization isn’t only to do with “www” or “no www” choices. If you have chosen to use www, then just include the second half of the code from my post about WordPress htaccess to cover the trailing slashes.
• Home / Page Links – some you want to receive lots of juice, others probably shouldn’t receive any at all, and some you might only want a followed link on your home page. The best option is probably to create these links manually, and have one set that is used on your home page, and another for everywhere else.



• Feeds – I find having related posts in feeds very important from an SEO perspective when people syndicate your content with or without permission – they are also useful for readers, though I wish more readers used them.If tag pages are being indexed, it is potentially good to have tags in your feed as well.

  Tim offers a full content feed that is worth subscribing to, though only half of the subscribers will currently be registered by Feedburner. Those that use the auto-discovery link are not currently being redirected to Feedburner. Fix this with the Feedburner Redirect Plugin, now called Feedsmith or think about one of Feedburner’s pro solutions.

• Sociable Plugin – it creates search engine followable links to submission forms on the various bookmarking sites – switch to using a search engine friendly version of sociable.
• Meta Description and Keywords – there are a host of plugins available to do this, though I haven’t actually found one that I regard as ideal. Generally a little trial and error is required, as there can be a few incompatibilities depending on how other plugins interact with your content.
• 404 Error Page – currently this results in the homepage – it might be better to use one of the many 404 plugins available to give some related content to what resulted in an error.

More Time Consuming or Technical

• Stop Using Widgets – until it becomes easy to control which widgets appear on which page, with and without nofollow, if you want to highly optimize your site, it is much easier without using WordPress Widgets. There is an alternative shipped with the K2 theme, sidebar modules (SBM), but I have had difficulty making it work with WordPress 2.2 and other themes
• Multiple Templates & SidebarsYou can do a lot using WordPress logic, but it starts to become very complicated if you use the same template file and sidebar everywhere.
  Single pages are probably the most likely to hit high server loads, so I always use a WordPress theme which has a single.php – in my current one the sidebar is included as part of the single.php file, but it can also be done using a php include for something like sidebar2.php 
• Sitewide Links – only give them when there is a specific reason, even for internal navigation elements. As an example we will look at category listings, but the same applies for all sidebar content.

Category listings

For a home page listing, and category pages, it is normal to list all categories

<br /><?php if ( is_home() || is_category() ) { ?><br /><li id="categories"><br /> <h3>Categories</h3><br /> <ul><br /><?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&hierarchical=1') ?><br /> </ul><br /> </li><br /><?php } ?><br />

For single pages, if you are aiming for a classic tree structure, it is better to list specific categories.

<br /><ul><br /> <li><?php the_category('</li><li>') ?></li><br /></ul><br />

You probably already have links to specific category pages at the bottom of each post, thus maybe sidebar category links should be nofollowed using the add link attribute plugin.

<br /><ul><br /><li><?php add_link_attr('the_category', '</li><li>',
'rel="nofollow"'); ?></li><br /></ul><br />

You could also aim for a “halfway house” and include only your most targeted primary categories on every page in the sidebar, other than on your homepage which would include all categories.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you would have followed links in the sidebar on your front page at all, other than to possibly your sitemap.

• Nofollow From Home – if Google and other search engines are being guided to your sitemap, and you value all your content equally, it makes perfect sense to have nofollow on any links within content that appear on your home page with the nofollow from home plugin This should be avoided if you don’t offer full content feeds because Technorati would probably have great difficulty with many of the links as they typically use the RSS feed, or your homepage to determine linkage.
  Update: I have now developed an advanced version of this plugin which adds nofollow to the links on all pages other than your permalink pages
• Headings – Correct use of headings for SEO and general semantic improvements – as an example for Tim’s current theme, there is no H1 heading, and the author information is given a heading tag. In addition the heading in WordPress sidebars have always been given on most themes the same level of semantic purpose as sub-headings within content, which isn’t ideal for SEO purposes.

Advanced SEO & Presentation

To really optimize WordPress effectively, you need to start looking at optimizing the layout of the homepage, category pages, and tag pages, not just for SEO, but for presentation. Most wordpress blogs by default use index.php for homepage and category pages, and the same is true for tag pages with UTW if you don’t define a tag.php file.

You can either create custom templates, or add lots of complicated WordPress logic.

WordPress handles templates in the following priority

1. category-6.php
2. category.php
3. archive.php
4. index.php

In many SEO linking structures, the categories are intended to be landing pages for their topic, and to concentrate more google juice than individual pages.
There are also linking structures that might be equally viable in many circumstances where categories pass Google juice in a single direction, either from the home page to single pages which subsequently pass juice only to the home page, or the home page passes juice to single pages through a sitemap, and the juice flows back up to the home page through the categories.

If category pages were intended to pass Google juice in 2 directions as would be normal for a simple tree structure, then you would need something like the following:-

Ultimately however if you have ever spent any time playing around with a pagerank calculator, linking structures that feature a spiral, channelling juice around in a circle using one-way links tend to perform better than sites using 2 way links.

There are a number of plugins that try to create “pretty” excerpts for duplicate content pages that contain excerpts, or you can manually create them with HTML and even thumbnail pictures.
One of the best new options seems to be the Excerpts Editor though I haven’t tested it yet.

This should be mixed with custom query string (Note: New Version that includes support for UTW) which would allow you to have a different number of posts on your front page compared to various archive pages. Ideally when siloing you would want to list all pages under a particular category or tag page. The easier alternative is the siloing plugin.

Beyond Geeky SEO

Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell and the bonus Dynamic Linking Ebook by Leslie Rohde have been for many years one of the most advanced tutorials on geeky linking structures to maximise pagerank.

To get any real benefit from this geeky section you really have to read those ebooks, they are available free for those who sign up to Michaels mailing list, and are well worth investing an evening reading, and maybe reading a couple of times more to fully understand how pagerank and linking structures can really help you.

One of my favourite structures was the spider circle

Note: In the following content I frequently link through to Web Workshop and their Pagerank Calculator. The links are nofollowed because I am linking through to form data

Here is the Spider Circle mapped out in the calculator.

The big problem with this linking structure, if you look at blogging in particular, is as soon as you add any external links to the content pages, the benefits turn into a huge hazzard, because this structure is also one of the best for sacrificial sites. Totally forget anything like this if you have removed nofollow from your comments.
Even disproportionate linking to your content from other sites isn’t going to rescue it. In that example there is 4x as many incoming links as those outgoing. The numbers are all relative, and don’t represent toolbar pagerank, but the benefit of good linking structure is lost.

One of the best linking structures for a website that was discussed was called “Stacked Pyramids with Tunnels Home”

The layout was something like this:-

There are a lot more unique pages involved, so you can’t directly compare this with the previous diagram. Here is how this structure looks like in a calculation.
What happens when we add some incoming and outgoing links? Well it doesn’t go quite as pear-shaped as the spider but still stuggles with a more realistic ratio of incoming to outgoing links.

I have played around with most of the other examples within Revenge of the Mininet over the last few months trying to create a “defensible linking structure”, something that performs well under severe abuse, with multiple external links on every page of unique content, as might happen with a blogger generous with link love, or using Dofollow.

In the end I opted for massive ball linking using tagging, with the structure totally organic, but helping Google juice flow away from pages which were gaining a lot of links, and likewise probably a lot of comments as well, so that the juice could enrich other content.
I knew this wasn’t optimal

I also wanted to come up with a better benefit from using internal tagging than my previously mentioned 4.9 > 3.6 ? (Titles > Duplicate Content)

Introducing “Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall”

I have no idea how this will work based upon all the other 100+ or 200+ ranking factors for web pages, but as far as pagerank is concerned it seems to be an extremely defensible structure, in fact you can abuse the hell out of it, and it performs well.

Sandcastle Pagerank Calculation

I should note that in that calculation there are still only 9 pages of 100% unique original article content.
The secret lies in having created additional unique pages that in themselves are useful for humans and even linkworthy, but those pages only link through to the homepage and gather up link juice that might have passed excessively through external links on a popular post.

Here is what it looks link if it is heavily abused like the previous example with lots of external links, and only a few incoming links.

Here is what is happening….

I first of all started off with category siloing, one way links passing juice from the homepage through the categories, and down to the content.
In addition I added a sitemap link from the homepage, that has one way links also through to the content. In addition, if it is being abused on a blog, it performs better with links from the sitemap to the homepage and categories from the sitemap, though the differences are small.

Juice flows from the permalink pages through one way links to one of 5 tag pages for each post, assigned at random in the model, and then again one way link to the homepage.

If you throw in a couple of related posts, even with the external links it performs very well, especially for the home page.

Here is a visualisation of Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall

As I have stated before, I visualise linking structures in 3D, and this one could be much easier visualised on a 3D checkers board (I used to have one as a kid), but effectively it is built of 3 different layers.

I haven’t quite worked out the best way to handle single pages, maybe it would be necessary to add yet another tree link structure for those.

I haven’t got any sites using this new structure yet, but it is something I will be aiming for on a number of sites soon, including this one.

Creating This Linking Structure With WordPress

It is possible (though a little complicated) with what I have listed above, but I will try to have a modified theme available soon, aptly named the “Sandcastle” theme, based upon Sandbox (so it can be easily skinned)

Linkworthy Content

Whilst a good linking structure might give you 5x to 10x the benefit of any incoming links to rank a few specific pages, you still need to have content people will link to.

For me one of the highlights of Tim’s blog are already the case studies.

Whilst I haven’t invested money in Stumbleupon advertising, the conversion rate to subscribers he achieved with $100 worth of visits seems about the same as with free traffic. From what I have seen so far, Top Stumblers are mainly interested in cool pictures and humor as one of Tim’s commenters has already pointed out, and are very much anti-commercial, especially anything to do with StumbleUpon optimization. It is very easy to get post content buried, in fact easier than Digg in many ways.
A post on optimizing for another social news site such as Digg however might not get buried by the sacred protectors of the SU realm, and is more likely to continue bringing traffic (that is what I have experienced anyway). I have also found support a little lacking.

Tim has also been looking at Adsense Arbitrage – I think the safe bet is to convert those low PPC landing pages into affiliate or other forms of CPA income, if the cost of clicks is still quite low.

Tim is a creative thinker, after all he was the one who started using Adsense site targeting on John Chows blog, which gave John the idea of using it on Problogger.net

Whilst Tim’s blog is only a couple of months old, I expect great things and lots of in-depth experimentation in traffic and monetization, so don’t forget to sign up to his RSS feed.

Update – Nofollow Those Dupes Plugin

I have now released a plugin that can be used to help in creating the “Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall linking structure called Nofollow Those Dupes

It is actually of benefit on any blog that doesn’t block duplicate content pages from being indexed.

The culprit is TwitThis, that seems to be using Amazon S3 to store images.

Here is the standard TwitThis code:-

<!-- Begin TwitThis (http://twitthis.com/) -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s3.chuug.com/chuug.twitthis.scripts/twitthis.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write('<a href="javascript:;" onclick="TwitThis.pop();"><img src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/twitthis_grey_72x221.gif" alt="TwitThis" style="border:none;" /></a>');
//-->
</script>
<!-- /End -->

What you need to do is host the TwitThis logo on your own server to speed things up.
Here is the image used that you can save to your harddisk and then upload to WordPress or other blogging platform.

Then all you need to do is insert it into the code

In my case this is what I am using

<!-- Begin TwitThis (http://twitthis.com/) -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s3.chuug.com/chuug.twitthis.scripts/twitthis.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
document.write('<a href="javascript:;" onclick="TwitThis.pop();"><img src="http://ndybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/twitthis_grey_72x22.gif" alt="TwitThis" style="border:none;" /></a>');
//-->
</script>
<!-- /End -->

Actually I have listed a broken URL above, I don’t want people just copying the code and trying to use the image from my server.

As an alternative to the TwitThis button, Jemmille has created a modified version of my hacked Sociable plugin Antisocial that includes a “TwitThis” button, and a fix to StumbleUpon.
I will probably update my distribution with Jemmille’s code in a few days, but you can get it directly for now.

Update: This wasn’t a total fix because the Javascript was still being loaded from Amazon S3 and was causing horrendous page load times. TwitThis has been removed until I can hack a version that doesn’t use javascript.

Linking to Wikipedia Technorati and Social Bookmark Sites Could Damage Your Google Search Results!

Here is an excerpt from the Google BlogSearch patent document that I discussed in depth earlier today:-

A link distribution of the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. As disclosed above, some posts are created to increase the pagerank of a particular blog document. In some cases, a high percentage of all links from the posts or from the blog document all point to ether a single web page, or to a single external site. If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

Lets take a look at the type of links that people have on their blogs

Technorati Tag Links

Google in the same patent mentioned that tagging could be beneficial for the quality of your site, but what of the detrimental effects of linking through to Technorati with 10 links on every post? Maybe you are undoing all the good work of tagging your content.

Solution: Use local tagging, or just rely on lots of categories or labels to convey tag data – local tagging can be easily achieved using plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior if you use WordPress.

Wikipedia Links

Some people link through to Wikipedia it seems almost every other post. Despite Wikipedia being looked on by many as an authority site, such linking habits might be looked on as spammy.

Solution: Use nofollow on your links to Wikipedia

Social Bookmarking Links

This one is a biggie – some people have 10 or more social bookmarking links per page, and many of the most popular solutions don’t provide “safe” links. By safe I mean that the links serve no purpose because they go to an empty form, so in no way are they a pointer or vote on a particular piece of content. I am sure search engines probably discount them heavily, but they may still reduce the value of other links on your page, and may incur a ranking penalty due to being spammy.

I don’t use a normal version of the Sociable plugin, I use a hacked version. If you are using the Search Status plugin for Firefox, it is easy to tell, because you can see the pink boxes.

If you want to hack the Sociable plugin I wrote this guide a few months ago or just use my hacked version, now available.

Digg buttons such as “DiggThis” are not a problem, because they are normally Javascript. Some others use true dynamic linking using things like “onclick”.

Subscription Buttons

Yep more pink on this site, how about on yours?

It is ok to use a followable link to your feed, in fact that is recommended, even if you use and external service such as FeedBurner.

These buttons however link through to forms, not content. They should always be nofollowed.

Solution: Add rel=”nofollow” to the links

Conclusion

I am generous with my Google Juice, using Dofollow plugins for my comments, and link out to my readers often, but I hate pouring Google Juice down the drain.