I can’t remember ever linking to it, but it might have happened – a quick search of my archives doesn’t reveal anything.

However delving into indexation issues webmaster tools can provide some interesting results.

What I had at the time was a custom design based on my site, created automatically, including all my side bar navigation.

Most of my sidebar navigation from that time doesn’t exist any more, but a few pages do including my contact form.

My Tradepub subdomain does not show up as backlinks in Yahoo, so might go unnoticed…. well actually it did.

Killing it off may have an effect on other metrics but without doubt this isn’t adding any value to the search engines and has never generated any revenue.

I am sure something like this works well for maybe Arstechnica, but it doesn’t work well for me.

How To Kill Off Tradepub

There might be an option to delete the pages, but that is actually suboptimal

The solution I have used for now is also suboptimal because it is quite possible that Google will only delist one page, or only the pages I link to – this one http://andybeard.tradepub.com/

What I have done is use a meta redirect in the header with zero delay which is meant to act like a 301 redirect.

That doesn’t necessariliy mean that Google and other search engines will redirect all the pages but we can see how quickly it occurs.
I have also included a noindex on all the pages as well as Sebastian suggests.

Even with a 301 redirect in .htaccess or php it can take months for the URLs to drop out of the index.

I used the beta RevResponse interface to add the redirects.

The optimal version? Just noindex, drive Googlebot to actually crawl the pages, then 301 redirect/meta redirect once they are all out of the search results, possibly with a temporary sitemap file to encourage crawling the 100s of pages (maybe 1000s).

I don’t know the answer as to whether RevResponse & Tradepub could harm your search results, but there are enough forgotten wastelands on the web full of duplicate content and worthless links – just doing my bit to clean up the rubbish.

However yesterday I read a post ranking cloud computing vendors based on mind share using a points system based on Google ranking for the term [cloud computing]

The winner was Rackspace, but we have some idea how they achieved that

But I was more interested in the result for Dell

First off they are doing some funny redirects so the displyed URL in the snippet
www.dell.com/cloudcomputing
Redirects to their cloud computing page on a subdomain which I assume is some kind of CDN

http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Notice that there is only a URL displayed in the snippet and not an excerpt from the page or meta description. Google is just displaying the page as a reference, but for some reason couldn’t crawl the page.

Now before I show you what they have done wrong I did try to contact Dell about this yesterday. I sent a tweet to the guy who maintains at least one of their social media profiles, and since this tweet he has been tweeting on his account so I assume he has had a chance to read the tweet I sent.

I didn’t receive a response, and as this is a significant problem I am blogging about it, mainly because Google seemed to be doing something contrary to what I previously understood (they weren’t if you read more) and have seen written by authoritative sources such as Vanessa Fox.

Here is the robots.txt of that Dell subdomain

The page concerned us under /us/en/enterprise/ so should be controlled by this directive.
Allow: /us/en/enterprise/

As Vanessa states

If conflicts exist in the file, the robot obeys the longest (and therefore generally more specific) line.

So somthing is going wrong in between the URL displayed in the search results, and the final landing page.

Server Header Analysis

Search result
>> [302] http://www.dell.com/cloudcomputing
>> [302] http://content.dell.com/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
>> [301] /us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Problem – Robots.txt Disallow Match

The inbetween URL redirect is blocked by robots.txt

http://content.dell.com/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

It is actually matched by
Allow: http://content.dell.com/
Disallow: /

Google has decided to take the most restrictive version, to disallow the URL.

I haven’t checked how many links are pointing to that URL both from internal and external sources, but I would guess it is a fair amount and I am assuming at this time that is a page they would want to rank as in their line of business it is probably quite a competitive term.

At a guess without that one URL blocked by robots.txt, they would have been much higher on the comparison charts and ranking higher for cloud computing – most likely that is a 1st page result thrown away by robots.txt

I haven’t checked how many other key landing pages are blocked in a similar manner – I bet it is quite a few

This is just chalking up one more reason why robots.txt should be avoided as it is so easy to mess things up.

p.s. My niece is 18 in 2 months & I am sure she would love a Dell

Helpful resources

Alex recently launched a DVD course on WordPress security that is available for FREE + shipping
Stop – I know what you are thinking – FREE + Shipping these days normally comes with lots of strings attached, forced continuity often hidden etc. Whilst Alex does cross-sell a few related products, the main offer is genuinely free.

Michael VanDeMar has a useful plugin to lock down your login process

SEO Egg Head offers a WordPress firewall

Donna has a useful script for monitoring your files

Of course you should also keep backups which you have total control over – this includes both database and files and you shouldn’t rely on claims that your webhost has a backup. With a VPS I find being able to “roll back” to a previous version useful, but backup with shared hosting plans supposedly made by admins isn’t a solution when you need to fix things in minutes.

Keep WordPress up to date, plugins up to date etc

Part of security is controlling what bots can crawl and index on your site, so some pamphlets would be useful as well

Getting URLs outta Google – the good, the popular, and the definitive way
Handling Google’s neat X-Robots-Tag – Sending REP header tags with PHP

Nasty Bots & Users

A lot of security relies on identifying nasty bots, detecting rogue activity such as failed logins or preventing access to all but approved users using an additional layer of password protection, or only allowing access to a server from a specific IP or range of IP addresses.

Also it is important to realise that different WordPress implementations require different levels of access control. With WordPress frequently being used for membership sites, you need to allow access to members. This reduces the number of security options available.

SEO Benefits

Lots of the pages you want to block from being crawled for security purposes also need to somehow be blocked or removed from indexation for SEO purposes, so tightening up security using the right methods will have natural SEO benefits.

Robots.txt isn’t the best option because you end up with lots of blocked pages appearing in search results and potentially indexed instead of pages you want in the index. As Sebastian explained, you have to let the bots in to crawl a URL before you can redirect them.
Not all bots can be identified, and not all bots obey robots.txt, though you can trap the naughty ones. If you are serious about your bot control you might also consider Fantomasters Searchbot Database.

User Agent Access Control For Total Lockdown

Lots of security and SEO methods rely on identifying various bots and kicking them somewhere else with 301 redirects, or denying them access to areas they are not wanted.

Far better would be to only allow access to one specific user agent, and globally kick out anything that doesn’t match – this is the user agent equivalent to restricting access to only a single IP address.

But how could this be achieved?

Many SEOs would already be familiar with User Agent Switcher for Firefox. This allows you to wander around the web pretending to be someone else, or something else such as Googlebot.

Unfortunately User Agent Switcher has a nasty problem – you often forget you have it switched to something different and then suddenly realise when a website starts misbehaving, refusing you entry, redirecting you to funny places etc.

If you created a custom user agent for security purposes, it wouldn’t be very secure if there was a chance you could broadcast it to lots of other webmasters by mistake. It is bad enough that user agent is broadcast “in the clear” unless you use SSL connections.

Then I came across an article discussing how to fake your user agent specifically for itunes but not other sites.

The Header Control Firefox plugin allows you to set your User Agent specific to a domain.

This would allow you to set a specific unique or relatively obscure user agent, and for it to only be used when accessing your own websites.

Even more useful this can be set up in multiple locations, work with variable IPs etc.

Experimental

This is something I am still experimenting with – I haven’t decided whether it is best to use .htaccess, php or a combination of both, and I am convinced the best option is to 301 redirect everything rather than deny access.
The best option might be to use a combination htaccess > php so you can do some enhanced logging.

The user agent doesn’t have to be unique, it could just be an obscure out of date version of Firefox or Chrome.

Example .htaccess to deny access

RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_user_agent} !^RareUserAgent
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
#

Example .htaccess to 301 redirect

RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_user_agent} !^RareUserAgent
RewriteRule ^ http://WhereIWantPagerank.com/MyMoneyPage/ [R=301,L]
#

What I haven’t included are rewrite conditions based on specific paths as I haven’t worked out exactly what paths I need to block whilst using specific WordPress Membership Plugins.

Warning 1 – always have backups
Warning 2 – you can majorly mess up access to your website with htaccess it you get it wrong and can’t restore a working version

Disclaimer/License: GNU FDL – run with it, make it useful

For years I have been reading absurd suggestions that Google’s Blogger / Blogspot service is SEO friendly. At one time this was semi-true, and it is even possible with the current incarnation. However if you use the service “as intended”, without expert knowledge, you might find yourself up a creek without a paddle.

I am writing this on a Sunday, thus I am going to avoid vulgarities, cussing, and even an attention grabbing headline. The Google engineers at Blogger deserve that and more. Blogspot currently stinks for SEO.

Google Webmaster Guidelines Mess Up

This is probably the root cause of the Blogger problems

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Blogspot Doesn’t Have Categories

There was a historical lacking feature in Blogspot, no categories, and users wanted them.

So Blogger introduced labels, but they unfortunately followed the advice from their own Webmaster Guidelines, such as this example from Blogger’s own Blogger Buzz blog.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: http://buzz.blogger.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

That causes label pages such as this one on the Google Webmaster blog not to be crawled

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/search/label/webmaster%20tools

The links to those tag pages don’t have nofollow, but Google can’t crawl them to read what is on the page, but pages blocked using robots.txt still accumulate PageRank.

Blogger blocks labels with Robots.txt

That creates “hanging or dangling pages” and the PageRank gets shared out between all the pages in the internet

There are easy solutions to this:-

Best solution

• Have excerpts on the label pages
• Possibly noindex the label pages with either meta noindex or robots.txt noindex
• Add nofollow to all external links on the label pages, both in the content and sidebar

Stop-gap solution

• Nofollow label links from content – they still wouldn’t give any deep indexing benefit, but at least they wouldn’t throw PageRank away.

Note: Those solutions are for blogger developers to implement instead of using robots.txt disallow, not for Blogger users. Sorry Blogger users, you have been at a significant disadvantage for years unless you can find a smart (viable) alternative to creating categories by hand.

Blogspot Indexing Problems

With labels being blocked by robots.txt, some but not all Blogspot blogs have major indexing problems.

As an example, it doesn’t seem like Google passes any juice through the dropdown menus used on the Webmaster Central blog.

Dropdown Menus On Blogspot Could Cause Indexing Problems

Of couse not every Blogspot publisher displays date based archives, and even the traditional “older posts / newer posts” navigation ends up being blocked by the robots.txt file.

As an example this link from Rick Klau’s blog (A Blogger Product Manager)

http://tins.rklau.com/search?updated-max=2009-05-04T11%3A53%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=7

You can see by the lack of snippet and cache that this is blocked by robots.txt

Blogger Older Posts Navigation Blocked With Robots.txt

Fortunately for Rick he doesn’t allow his labels and pagination links to be the only method for Google to crawl his content, plus he has a huge amount of “Google Juice” to play with.

This is actually the best navigation implementation I have seen on any Blogspot blog, as it has allowed all his content to be indexed, or certainly the vast majority.

Blogger Navigation That Works

This is still “ball linking” rather than a structured appraoch, but for Blogspot it is about all you could hope to achieve.

By having this massive navigation on every page, effectively turning every page into a sitemap, there are so many link on page that a few external or internal label links don’t really matter.

This isn’t the case with the majority of Blogger blogs, and blocking with robots.txt is an abomination.

At the same time Rick has been trying to persuade people to stop using the old, unreliable Blogspot system which allowed you to publish to your own domain, suggesting that there are no problems.

How Hard Is It To Leave Blogger?

Whilst people talk about it being easy to leave Blogger to another platform, the importer has been bugged for a long time – Blogger strips stopwords from generated URLs, WordPress doesn’t.

Then there is only what I would term a “Interstitial Defamation Wall”

Redirects from Blogspot to a custom domain now hosted externally get slapped with an interstitial warning.

See for yourself http://niche-website.blogspot.com

I had already left Blogspot before Google decided to finally provide custom domain support. I had set up a complicated script with meta redirects, and I even regained my rankings and wrote about it.

When custom domains became available, I decided that it would be best to assign andybeard.eu to my blogspot account, and then point it at WordPress so that visitors and search spiders saw an immediate 301 redirect.

Google when you set this up are very reassuring

Blogger Custom Domain Setup

It seems this is only true if you stay with Blogger forever. I should also point out that during my testing I discovered that I could no longer assign andybeard.eu, and I was forced to use www.andybeard.eu

Links & Rankings

The main thing that ties any Blogger to using Blogspot are incoming links and rankings. When I moved I probably had 24,000 links to my old Blogspot, depending on which reporting you believed.

Even a couple of weeks ago Yahoo was reporting ~10K , though it seemed a lot less today. Google in Webmaster tools only reports 100 or so, though they may have removed loads due to the redirects.

I don’t care that much, building up links takes time but isn’t something that can’t be fairly easily replaced over time, at least for me.

However for any potential blogging service provider (and honestly anyone running WordPress might soon be able to offer blog hosting within 3-6 months if WordPress core merges with WPMU) this is a serious barrier to overcome.

If you use Blogspot, but with a custom domain from the beginning, this isn’t a problem, but for everyone else, it might be a deciding factor to stay.

I could switch back to the delayed meta refresh method, but I can’t see why I should have to – Google should never have inserted such a message between me and my visitors.

I am looking to clean up some old articles because there is too much SEO junk on the web, but deciding how to handle my old “How to move from Blogspot to WordPress” articles are a major problem.

• I am adamant that people really should still leave Blogger for their own good, if they value their online business
• I am not in a position to advise on best practice, and the most suitable method is messed up.

As far as I am concerned this interstitial isn’t passing any juice through to Andybeard.eu, though there is a YES/No link, but it uses onclick, but returns false, but the URL is not constructed… ask Sebastian if you want a definitive answer.

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 many forms of viral marketing where you lose control of the content once it is introduced into the wild.

You need to be using tracking links, redirects, subdomains or even registering domain for the special purpose of ensuring that you have full control of where a user ends up when they click a link, whether it is next week, next month, or next year.

The same applies for search engines.

If you use links pointing to the root of your primary domain

• You can’t remove those links if you get hit with a penalty
• You can’t accurately track traffic from those links
• You can’t split test different landing pages for that traffic source
• If you decide to split your assets, or even sell part of them, you might need to change landing pages, even pointing them to a different domain.

It is easy to claim that Technorati should fix their algorithms to discount themes and blogroll links, or that Google should come clean about exactly what they allow with viral linkbait, but a lot of control lies in the hands of the creator of the viral linkbait, if they are smart enough to use it.

It is quite likely that you have been developing other articles on similar topics for months, receiving very little online attention, and even more worrying, if you create follow-on articles providing important updates, they are less likely to be seen.

The majority of traffic will by default enter your site (the landing page) on the page that received the most links, and this traffic might continue for days, weeks, months and even years.

Ways to highlight other important information:-

• Create a new post to inform your subscribers

  This has a tendency of alienating at least some of your readers, especially those who were not totally convinced by your “blog storm” article. It is quite possible that further articles will be looked on as “milking it”, trying to take advantage of a situation.
  Whilst this might be partially true, the process of providing updated information when/if you are the centre of attention is vital. This is how CNN catapulted into the mainstream, being on the scene of major news stories and providing “up to the minute” news updates.

• Related posts

  Useful for the few people who go to the trouble of clicking them though if they are generated automatically, they can be a little hard to control.
  The problem is that very few people tend to use them, and they generally appear after someone has read the “blog storm” article. Initial reaction will be to the first article they read, and not to any updates, unless you can force them to read updates.

• Update the article with links to newer information

  This is quite a time intensive operation because over the period of a few days you might have to make multiple updates to multiple articles, and when the blogstorm has died down, you might need to optimize the links even further.

  • If all you do is create updates to a single post, whilst new visitors receive a relatively clear picture, your subscribers might only read the original article.
  • It is much easier in the flow of content creation to refer back to previous articles than to update previous articles with links to newer information.
  • If updates are drawn out over weeks or months, it can get very messy

The Simple Solution

One simple solution is to think of any news item as a series of posts, and to use a plugin designed to help you create a series of articles around a particular theme.

The In Series Plugin

The plugin is quite well documented, and will allow you to modify the order in which posts in a series are presented, and you can style the content such that it stands out.

The Advanced Solution

The ideal situation in many cases is to create a specific landing page for a series of articles, that can then be optimized for specific terms, and used to channel both humans and search engines towards the most important articles you want them to see.

This is actually fairly easy to achieve in a number of ways, and most of the skills are similar to the various ways you can perform siloing I described in my WordPress SEO Masterclass.

Here are the basic tasks that need to be undertaken:-

• How to create an optimized landing page

  There are a number of ways to create an optimized landing page. The ideal method will really depend on your existing site structure and the ways you currently highlight content.
  An additional concern is certainly your technical ability. It is much easier to create a round-up post or a page with related links than to create landing pages using more automated methods and get the page looking right.

  • Using a dedicated category with optimized template such as category-6.php in WordPress
  • Creating a dedicated page with manually selected links
  • Using a siloing plugin which presents posts from a particular category on a single page
  • Writing an update post with links to each of the previous articles

• Planning Content

  Work out which articles to link to from a landing page, keyword strategy, and linking structure both to the existing content on the topic, and to other pages you want to get a lot of link juice and attention.

• Planning Redirects

  Not all of this can be automated unfortunately. If you have made specific references to any of the articles that you are about to create redirects for, you need to make a note of them, because these might need to be adjusted so that they contain updated URLs.
  It is hard to do this with incoming links from external sources, and not always desired, but I think that internally where you might often have referenced 4 different articles from within an update page, it is best that those links remain pointing to the specific articles referenced, thus will need to be hand edited.

  Create a table of original URLs, and the updated URL which will soon house that article.

• Create Updated .htaccess

  Create… don’t upload yet

  Here is an example .htaccess entry

  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  redirect 301 /2007/01/day-job-killer-review.html http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/day-job-killer-review.html
  </IfModule>
  

  In that particular example I was quite lazy and brought a review quickly to my front page by changing the publish date, but I also added a redirect because Google had indexed the old URL.

  I would suggest that these changes should be made right at the end of your .htaccess file.

  It is possible to manage 301 redirects with plugins, and WordPress 2.3+ is also meant to handle some things automatically, but I haven’t experimented with that yet and I don’t like being locked into using particular plugins for my site to function.

• Create Landing Page

  Depending on the method you will be using this may or may not include updated URLs automatically. If you are crafting the links by hand, you may need to refer to your previously prepared table of changes.
  Until the redirects take place, the new landing page will get very little attention from Search Engines or visitors, and whilst it is not ideal to have currently broken links on a page, it is probably better to have a few links that are broken than have lots of visitors get redirected to a page that doesn’t exist.

• Upload .htaccess or Modify Existing URLs

  This stage speed is of the essence, as it is a bit like a chicken and the egg scenario. If you are working with a large site you might need to work out some way to automate this process.

  If you upload the .htaccess first, then visitors will arrive at your landing page, and either click on links that return a 404 page not found error, or in the case of using categories or silo plugins, they will click on links that redirect to where they currently are on the landing page.
  However this is probably better than changing URLs before the .htaccess is in place.

  Once you have uploaded the .htaccess, it is time to modify existing URLs to those you have planned to use.

  I would suggest that “time is of the essence” at this stage, it is not something you can undertake at the end of a working day, though “more haste, less speed” should also be taken into consideration.

  Even with extensive planning, it is fairly easy to mess something up in your linking structure and 301 redirects.

This isn’t an article for SEO beginners, I leave those for the “experts” to write.

Your mileage may vary – I have written this article mainly as part of my own planning stage to make similar changes on this blog.
I have a number of topics that could benefit from using this method, including WordPress SEO, PageRank, Dofollow, Technorati, and even my “about page” which could take advantage of many of the blogging memes.

How much benefit you might gain from this may be marginal from an SEO point of view, or could make a substantial difference.

Fortunately the primary reason for doing this in many cases is to improve the browsing experience for users, so that they arrive at a landing page that provides them with a current overview of a topic, with possibly additional background articles that you feel are important.

There is a lot more to linking structure on a website or blog than just sticking nofollow on a few links to pages of less importance, or installing a wonder “do everything” SEO plugin.

Power Tip – once you get comfortable with this, you can actually plan your content with this strategy in mind, choosing your page titles and URLs carefully to maximise the benefit of redirects in the future.

In many ways this technique is the opposite to 3rd level push, though the concepts are not mutually exclusive, as whilst you are diverting link juice from a 3rd level document to one on the second tier, that juice then flows evenly (if you want) to your 3rd level.

Optimize your site for users not search engines ;) [cough]

I have been signed up for Feedburner Pro for a while

Feedburner Pro – I don’t use all the features

Here are the settings I currently use for my Feedburner Pro Total stats

You will notice that the setting I don’t use is click stats, and this is for 3 very specific reasons.

With total stats, the links that appear in feeds are converted to tracking links. They have a special SEO option, that passes link juice, but unfortunately (or fortunately in some situations) not all search engines count a 301 redirect as a valid link to your domains, notably Technorati which can be used to your advantage too.

This has an effect on links from the following

Syndicated Content (with or without permission)

Those permalinks to your article are a good way to detect where your content is being used. Some syndication sites are not very smart, and don’t pick up the permalink address within a Feedburner feed correctly, and would use the header link that is a Feedburner redirect.
You wouldn’t be able to do a search for links to your domain, and the link isn’t detected by Technorati.

Social Networds & Bookmarking

Some sites pick up your feeds and display a snippet. It takes additional programming to take into account Feedburner formatting.
Many of these sites the links qualify as links in Technorati to your domain.

Links from your Readers

Someone is reading your feed… great!

They see one of your articles, and decide to link through to you… even better!

They pick up your link from within the Feedburner feed showing in their feed reader… with the redirect – You will get search engine benefit, but no pingback / trackback, and it won’t show up in Technorati or help your authority.

Linking Mistakes

I went into a lot more details about these kinds of problems in my recent linking mistakes article.

Mybrand

Feedburner have had a “Mybrand” service for a while, though I haven’t actually attempted to use it. It allows you to consolidate your feeds on a subdomain of your website.

Now it is a totally free service I am going to give it a try sometime soon to see if it will help prevent reporting errors of subscribers.

Whilst in theory this would also help you retain ownership of your content, I don’t know of another feed tracking service with a similar service, and none so far really compare to Feedburner anyway, although for email subscriptions Zookoda provide more features, but the stats as far as I am aware are not reported back to Feedburner for a consolidated number of subscribers.

Feedburner have a near monopoly of rss feed stats, and whilst I predicted that the pro features would become free soon, and we might also see more integration with other Google services such as Analytics, I am still not 100% it was a good idea.

Conclusion

If you do decide to switch on Total Stats, think carefully about whether complete click tracking is important to you, or whether you would prefer to have more links.

Currently Technorati still return an authority rating for your blog, even if they have determined you are gaming the system, but there is no guarantee that that will remain the case indefinitely.

Many blog monetization systems rely on Technorati authority as an indication of the value of placing a link on that blog, and thus there are quite significant rewards for having a high authority, which results in a lower ranking position, “1″ being the top ranking.

Open Source Publishers

One of the best rewards of publishing Open Source software is you can often include a link back to your site somewhere on the pages of the people using your software. These links in turn are used by various search engines to rate the authority of the site being linked to. With Google one indicator is Pagerank, with Technorati it is their authority.

Even the most prominent Open Source Developers are not immune from being banned by Technorati.

Compare Matt’s blog to the “official” top authority blog, and there is a massive divide.

Widgets

Widget publishers are not immune to the Technorati nerf stick. Even if you are a top rated SEO blog such as SEOmoz, and gaining 100s of editorial links on a daily basis, you might be removed from the top100.

Theme & Plugin Publishers

Theme publishers are not immune from being banned by Technorati if they include live links to the blog from the themes they give away for free.

Blogrolls

There are various ways to exchange blogroll links such that they are counted by Technorati, but don’t provide real links that are seen by other search engines.
Whilst joining such blogrolls might not get you banned (unless you hit the top 100), it is more than likely that Technorati will start discounting those links.

Blog Networks get away with some massive interlinking, but the more legitimate networks are making an effort to make those links more relevant.

Paid Links

In this case I am referring to links which appear to Technorati as a blogroll – if you buy lots of obvious “sponsor links”, it is quite possible Technorati is going to ban you.

I can’t say whether that is why John appears to be banned, but it might be one explanation, though the majority of John’s links have certainly come from other kinds of payola.

Unfortunately it doesn’t take much poison to taint a well.

Paid Reviews

This is a tough question and Technorati are faced with a similar problem to Google. Which links are editorial, and which are purely for pagerank and other factors.

In my opinion, quality reviews are most likely to remain in all indexes, but then I am an open supporter of quality paid reviews which give more value than just links.

All You Care About Is Money?

If all you care about is money, then obviously for as long as Technorati continue to report your authority via their API as being significant, even if you are effectively banned, then gaming the Technorati authority system could be looked on as a good idea to boost your earnings from text links and reviews.

The big problem with many of the ways of gaming the system is that they are permanent. Those links are out there, so if you have some success with a theme you publish, and through your own blogging efforts you start to approach the top100 list, there is no way to fix the problem.

There is no rule saying that Technorati have to continue giving a rating of banned sites by API, thus any “gamed” rating in the future might effectively return a “zero” in the future.

Why Should You Care?

If you are going to publish a theme or create a widget, you need to think carefully whether having a Technorati rating is something you wish to maintain.

I am not referring to whether you are listed in the Top100, but whether you would have a rating being returned at all by the API.

It is easy to say that you don’t care about being listed on Technorati, all you care about is how much you can sell your links for, but what happens if Technorati decide to stop reporting banned sites via their API?

There is a chance you might get reincluded, if Technorati develop technology so that they can discount links from the sidebar and footer totally, but it wouldn’t be so simple to still allow legitimate blogroll links.

How To Avoid Being Banned By Technorati

It is well known that Technorati currently don’t follow 301 redirects, so the solution currently is quite simple.

• Decide on a theme name
• Register a domain name for the theme
• Use the domain name for the link within a theme
• Use a 301 redirect from the domain name to your blog

You could actually just use one domain for all your redirects, or use a 3rd party service that issues a 301 redirect though that is placing your eggs in a basket you have little control over.

Alternatively just use nofollow on the links, but then they will not be seen by other search engines, and that would be throwing away good “Google Juice”.

A 301 Redirect would still be recognised by Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.

If in the future Technorati do support 301 redirects, it would most likely be possible to tell them not to follow certain redirects for your themes. The most likely scenario for the future is an interface in Technorati to allow you to tell them that 2 listings are effectively the same.

Note:-Technorati Authority is not the same as Technorati Favorites.

Technorati to my knowledge haven’t banned anyone from encouraging people to add them to their Technorati Favorites.

Technorati Authority on the other hand is the cornerstone of their search results to determine relevance, and thus they are going to defend it.

Retroactive Action

I have no idea how you could take retroactive action to fix your ratings.

This affects me too, a while ago I created a widget for LinkedIn, and it linked to a static page. As the functionality of the widget was eventually blocked by the service it was intended to promote, I changed the graphic used, and most links have now been removed from sidebars.
In hindsight I would have used a domain name and 301 redirect.

Theoretically any authority gained from that widget will be outside the 6 month rolling window that Technorati use within the next 2 months, and my own situation will be cleared up.
This would be much harder to achieve for theme and plugin authors. Maybe easier for those with paid links.

When I moved the review onto the front page, I didn’t think about the change in the date on the permalink, so all the visitors coming in were going to

http://andybeard.eu/2007/01/day-job-killer-review.html

and not

http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/day-job-killer-review.html

It was easy to correct with a simple change in my .htaccess

redirect 301 /2007/01/day-job-killer-review.html http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/day-job-killer-review.html

It is impossible to say what sales I lost because there wasn’t a review in place until a few minutes ago, but it was still a costly mistake as far as subscribers, and looked very unprofessional.

It should be noted that most page views didn’t go looking for a correct page, they just hit the back button.

Please learn from my stupid mistake – I know I have…

One note, if you can’t use a 301 redirect, a meta redirect can work.