With all the previous discussion of paid reviews and my unwillingness to raise the white flag or bend over, this post is going to come as a bit of a shock.
I am lowering the red flag
Carry on reading to find out why this isn't the same as raising a white flag, and is far from surrendering to Google on paid reviews.
Tag Archives: backlinks
Lowering The Google Red Flag – Sidestep The Cash Hungry Bull
With all the previous discussion of paid reviews and my unwillingness to raise the white flag or bend over, this post is going to come as a bit of a shock.
I am lowering the red flag
Carry on reading to find out why this isn't the same as raising a white flag, and is far from surrendering to Google on paid reviews.
Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches
In Depth: Google BlogSearch | Ranking Blog Documents Patent

For a long time my blogs have performed amazingly well with Google Blog Search. I always appear in the relevant results quickly, and the results I obtain have some reasonable longevity, even when I am not the original source of a story.
Read more on In Depth: Google BlogSearch | Ranking Blog Documents Patent…
Multiple Reasons Why I Loathe Top Commenters Plugins
I benefit from being a top commenter on a number of blogs simply because I am consistently active on those sites, and I have gained the benefit without changing my commenting habits.
Some of my blogging friends are aware of the problems, but have opted to use such a plugin anyway – I fully respect that decision, but many make that decision “blindly” without being aware of the possible consequences.
Read more on Multiple Reasons Why I Loathe Top Commenters Plugins…
Sponsored Reviews Now Live – In Depth Review
Yep this is a sponsored review, though it was something I was intending to write about anyway, to announced that Sponsored Reviews is now live and available for both advertisers and bloggers.
Rojo Splogs and Attribution

Om Malik recent was taking a look at Rojo from a traffic perspective. What he didn’t touch on, although he did refer to a previous post, was that the Rojo page was actually a very poor quality splog.
Paid Links | Hindsight gives perspective
Paid Links
It is five years, almost to the day that Yahoo started charging $299 per year for a listing in their directory as this article on Pandia clearly illustrates.
The main benefit of being in the Yahoo directory isn’t traffic, it is pagerank / trustrank. Who actually uses the Yahoo directory for anything other than listing their own sites?
It is many years since I went to Yahoo to lookup an entry for anything other than a competitor in a niche.
Search Engine Glossary (a victim)
In a previous post I stated the following:-
Would I Do Paid Posts?
Yes – but not for the reasons most people would do them.
I value my time, and the $30 I would currently get from ReviewMe to do any justice to a review just wouldn’t cover my time.
Blog SEO | Evaluation | Taking action
One of the most rewarding things about blogging, at least for me, is when you see people taking action based on something you have suggested.
There are actually 2 distinct stages in taking action
Nofollow | SEO & Dynamic Linking | Disclosure
Here are some more links discussing the use of NoFollow for SEO purposes.
Seo Blog has a solid overview of how each search engine treats nofollow.
I am not sure the final conclusion regarding Yahoo and treating nofollow for ranking purposes is correct. I know many people who have done well with blog comments with Yahoo search, even on blogs using nofollow. I haven’t got any recent data.
Stealing Pagerank?
I just noticed a wierd or misinformed post over on ZDNet.
Apparently, this spyware outfit is using ZDNet’s page rank on Google (also known Googjuice) to find some victims in a variation of splogging.
No NoFollow & No-Nofollow.com
The “nofollow” tag prevents (in theory) search engines attributing weight to links for Page Rank. It also in theory prevents them following the link and indexing the content.
Recent proof suggests that this is not necessarily true with Yahoo and as I showed in my original post regarding Google Reader and Splogs, Yahoo can be used to find links to Google Reader Linkblogs.

Exclusive: Share A Post Beta – Blog Post Syndication