This post was originally posted Nov 7, 2006 – I have added a screenshot as the original subject site is no longer online – it is still just as relevant today as it was over 3 years ago. In places I have added some additional commentary or expanded on original ideas.

References to PageRank should be looked on as synonymous with Google Juice & overall site authority, and not just green pixels in a toolbar, though that can be a good visual indicator at times.

How a Blogroll can kill your PageRank

I followed a link from Digg a few minutes a go, read the story, and as I frequently do on any site I visit, I snooped around a little.

I actually do exactly the same every time someone writes a blog post referring to me and pings my blog. It is the polite thing to do, and maybe I can add something to the conversation. It also allows me to relate any comment to the person who is writing about me, either positively or negatively. Everyone is entitled to opposing views. What is often important is why they have an opposing view, and it isn’t always obvious.

Now about the site in question:

1. I have only read half of one article there, so I don’t know much about the site contents
2. The reason I am linking through to the site is purely from an SEO point of view
3. This is a very common problem, very easy to make, and honestly not too hard to correct.

With that said, here is the site Kerry Fox Live (Archive.org link – the site seems to have been offline for 2 years.)

Initial Site Analysis

So the first thing I notice is that it is a PR3 site.

The internal categories are mainly PR2

The archives are mainly PR2

The individual post pages are generally PR1 or unranked

A large proportion of the content is duplicate syndicated content from services such as Associated Press, without any wrapping

But the site has been around for 16 months

You can make a splog, chuck duplicate content at it, and get a PR4 or PR5 after a few months.

So what is wrong with the site?

Take a look at the sidebar

At a guess (I am seriously not going to count them all), only 20% of the links on any given page point to an internal page. (yes that sidebar is on every page)
There are 2 blogrolls, one of which seems to be websites and blogs he likes, and the other is a whole load of press related sites… news sources.

Every single one of those links is a live external link leaking PageRank to other sites. Those other sites are not reciprocating in any way.

Now I am sure someone is likely to point out that those links provide a service for visitors, and maybe add a little authenticity to the site.

What visitors?

We are looking at a news site with an Alexa rank of close to 2M – not 2k, but 2M

Now there are times you want to sacrifice a little page rank to other sites, especially if they are reciprocating, sharing visitors, or in the case of my blog, I like visitors commenting and joing my “community”. You might also do it in a carefully controlled way from a mininet to one of your own sites.

Solutions

Get rid of the blogroll on all internal pages. It is giving away too much traffic to other sites, not to mention PageRank.

Add nofollow to all the blogroll links that are not reciprocating, or you don’t want to be overly friendly with. (Update August 2010 I would probably tend to use javascript in some way)

Increase internal linking to compensate for all the leakage.

How to Increase Internal Linking

• Recent posts – 10 links
• Top Posts – 10 links
• Recent Comments – 5 – 10 links
• Tagging + Tag Cloud – 50+ links
• There wouldn’t be a need for as much internal ball linking if there wasn’t so many external leaks. The site is gaining very few comments.
• Related posts – 5-10 links
• Related reviews – 5-10 links
• Glossary links

Emphasis should be placed on the links you wish visitors to traverse

External Linking

The site has 2 visible external links to the front page. I am not sure how many to internal pages, but even if it did have external links, any PR given would immediate leak.

Just syndicating one article will generate loads of backlinks, far in excess of what you can achieve with a single blog post (unless you have 100k+ readers). Based on my analysis of “A” list bloggers, their average blog post might normally generate around 10 backlinks (showing in Google).

(update August 2010: – whilst many of the bloggers I analysed in 2006 have 10x as many subscribers by RSS & email now, the number of links they receive, other than from splogs & social media probably hasn’t increased)

Conclusion

It is not rocket science, just simple maths.

If you have 100 external links on every page of your site, you need lot of internal links to retain some (hopefully most) of your PageRank, and it would certain help if those people you give a link to on your sidebar reciprocate in some manner.

(please note that includes me – don’t put a link in your blogroll to my site – sure I appreciate the links, but I would much prefer just an occasional mention in your blog)

If you can’t get a reciprocal link, use nofollow, (August 2010 – blocked external javascript), or stick them on their own seperate page so they don’t suck your own site dry.

And finally… this site structure plagues a huge proportion of blogs. Other blog owners who do not have this problem, quite likely don’t even realise why.

Further reading:

Revenge of the Mininet | 3rd Party content | Blog Comments | No Follow

Update: whilst I am still a fan of article marketing, I no longer recommend any service that doesn’t provide a way to have unique passwords for each distribution site.

When to a huge amount of disbelief I blocked some of my high ranking paid reviews with robots.txt, and hinted that syndication would be a perfect loophole in Google’s penalties, no one fully understood what I meant – many SEO experts thought I was bonkers.

This is what I meant – widespread syndication with editorial control

The Limits of Traditional Article Marketing

Article marketing is all well and good, but is extremely limited

• You can only use a fixed number of links in a post
• Article directories are quite inflexible over affiliate links even if you have created
• HTML formatting is frowned upon because the articles are often intended for email use
• You can’t use pictures
• Most of the articles end up on very low value sites that have no readers
• Whilst they often use categories, tag support is limited

Jonathan Ledger has come up with what at first glance seems to be the perfect service for submission and syndication of quality blog articles.

Article Submission

• You sign up and add your blog – If you are smart, you will create a new user on your blog with username and password with low level privileges – don’t enter your admin username and password – I trust Jonathan, but even large websites get hacked, why take the risk?
• You make sure your blog is posting full content feeds
• You add an entry to your ping list, so that when you update your blog, your article is automatically added to Share-A-Post
• You use Technorati tags as normal, though only the first 5 will be used – that avoids tag spam
• You can add multiple blogs

RSS Article Syndication

When you are short of content for one of your blogs, you can visit Share A Post, search for an appropriate article, and have it posted either as a draft or published article directly to one of your blogs.

The service uses XML-RPC to connect automatically, just like popular blogging software such as Microsoft Windows Live Writer, but that does require a username and password – hence why I suggested precautions when setting up.

The other advantage is that when you are posting a guest article on your blog, because it is posted as a different user, it can be given different emphasis, maybe a different symbol etc.

Duplicate Content

Lots of people will be worried about duplicate content due to syndication

Syndication is a good thing, and Google does a fairly good job of determining the original author, and the link that is being given back to your post will help – it even has good anchor text – at least I think a link is given back to the permalink – to be sure, you should probably use an RSS footer plugin, and maybe even create a smart looking author byline for each article that includes a link.

If you want some assurance that syndication is a good thing, one of the most authoritative I can think of is Vanessa Fox, who until recently was working for Google on Webmaster Central at SEO and Webmaster conferences. If the “book” we follow are Google’s webmaster guidelines… guess what? She helped write it!

Recently on her personal blog she wrote a great article on how to rank as the original source for content you syndicate

With Jonathan’s system you are not going to be able to ensure that content gets blocked with Robots.txt, and that has a negative aspect as well, because the links wouldn’t count… you do want links don’t you?
You are also not going to be able to ensure a different version of your article is published, unless you somehow specify in a license that your articles can be modified, such as a Creative Commons License that allows derivative and Commercial use or better.

Hopefully you will always get a link, but just like with article marketing, that can never be guaranteed

You will find situations if you have a new blog with not much authority that Google makes mistakes – that will most often be when a high authority blog picks up your article.

In a situation like that… just be happy, you will get great links, and your content will be exposed to 100s, or 1000s of new readers, and if enough blogs pick the article up, you will get more authority quicker from all the links, and hopefully lots of traffic and new subscribers.

Proof-reading

Just like article marketing, you are going to have to use just a little bit more care before you post, as any errors you make might not be fixable if your articles get syndicated.

Hopefully anyone syndicating an article will check back with the original blog to ensure the article is up-to-date, and I suggest they do that anyway, as you want to always ensure you are promoting content from what is a reputable blog that is well established.

Competitors?

It is so obvious… but none really

• Well ok, I know Stompernet has some kind of content syndication network
• I know Jack Humphrey used to syndicate his clients article content on a network, but not blog posts
• There are various services which syndicate spun articles, but not blog posts
• There are services that have their own blogs, where you post snippets of articles
• Portal feeder has something similar for articles, I am not sure what is in Traffic Kahuna
• There are plugins which feed articles from article banks to WordPress blogs

So whilst the idea is simple, you have to have confidence in content syndication and how duplicate content works before you think of doing something like this, which is why someone probably didn’t do it before.

Powertip

If you are using standard tagging plugins, they will probably output tags in alphabetical order. That isn’t a huge problem for the 5 tags that will be used to catalogue your post, but it is a factor for your backlink, because the anchortext used will be from your first tag.

The easy answer? Add a manual tag somewhere within your article

If you look closely you will see that I have linked through earlier in this post to my “syndication” tag on my blog, and I have manually added rel=”tag” to the link.

Hopefully when this article is posted, the backlink to my blog will be “syndication”. That is fairly powerful stuff.

OK Andy, How Much?

Jonathan says the following:-

BETA TESTERS WANTED
===================

This service is now up and running, and I’m looking for beta testers
to create free accounts and try it out. I need folks with blogs
who want to syndicate their content to super-charge their link
building, and I need folks who need top-notch content to post to
their own blogs.

As a beta tester, your account will always be 100% free. Syndicating
other folks content will always be free anyway, but I’m working on
a business model that MAY charge a monthly fee for being able to
have your content syndicated in this way. Or it may stay free
for everyone, I haven’t decided. :)

At any rate, as a beta tester, you’ll never pay a dime for the
service.

So why not go give it a try right now?

I hope Jonathan keeps it free

If he doesn’t, I am sure there will be competitors who will do it for free, so it is much better keeping it free and advertising supported. If needed, get some VC money to cover operations, but that is unlikely to be needed.

This is beta, I haven’t yet tested everything, I am going to see if I can find a guest post on Share A Post to try out.

Another Reason To Applaud Jonathan

I think anyone else who would have launched this, other than maybe myself, would have included some kind of spammy “viral” link back to the blog article syndication directory, in the footer of every article.
I have just seen my first article syndicated on a blog, and there is no link to Share A Post – that is a cool move.

Please don’t syndicate posts without minor editing to at least remove all the related posts – whilst I love receiving 10+ links every time one of my articles is syndicated, I am not going to approve 10 pingbacks – I will just flag them as spam to avoid the annoyance in the future.
Single pingbacks are fine (I don’t have nofollow on pingback links), or even to each editorial link within an article – you give me a link, you get a link back.

Sign Up!

If you sign up to Share A Post, you will find this article in their library – an easy way to share Share A Post with your readers is just syndicating this article.

Special note from Andy: To add some additional incentive to try out Share A Post, if you have written a very high quality paid review recently that would be suitable for my readers, I will gladly syndicate it on my primary domain as well – oh, and I won’t be nofollowing any of the links, as it will be an editorial decision to publish it.

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.

Robots.txt

I have spent a long time deciding on a course of action, and have decided that blocking my content using Robots.txt is ultimately better for me, and better for people hiring my services.

It also happens to be worse for Google than currently, but that is the beauty of this strategy.

It might be harder to rank, pages blocked using robots.txt still gather PageRank, and can appear in the index, though they would be looked on as dangling pages.

Ultimately links can always be redirected to a followup review which refers to the first, and that followup isn’t a paid review.

It is a little naughty, some people will sometimes receive editorial links within reviews and receive a trackback, but I don’t know of any spam plugin that checks robots.txt , plus the links will still be valuable in other search engines.

Google’s Achilles Heel With Paid Reviews

The only domain for which a client is paying for a review from is this one. When my content appears on other sites, there is a totally different editorial process, and links can in no way be looked on as paid links.

Content syndication is extensive:-

1. Social Bookmarking

Sites such as BloggingZoom encourage more than just a single line of description and rewritten titles on submissions, and not only deliver traffic from their existing user base, but also search traffic.

2. Hub Pages

Many content sites allow you to use syndicated content in the form of article feeds, and content is even picked up by larger sites such as Topix.

3. Authorized Syndication

You can arrange or organise for your content to be selectively syndicated on authority sites such as Andy Beard on WebProNews and even my WordPress SEO reviews published on SearchNewz.

Whilst I haven’t made it clear recently, I publish all my content under GPL, in fact I am switching to the GFDL with an invarient clause requiring a live hyperlink back to the original without nofollow – I prefer GFDL over creative commons because of this flexibility (for me) to be highly specific.

In future I am going to be actively encouraging syndication

4. Unauthorized Syndication

This is technically the same, but as long as people scraping my content are linking back to me, preferably with a followed link, it is great. I am not even worried about some light spinning of the content, as long as they state that the content has been modified and is only based on my original.

5. Indexed Search Results & Aggregators

This is the likes of Technorati, and feed readers that are indexed – I have no intention of blocking reviews from RSS feeds.

6. Multimedia

I use a lot of pictures and screenshots for my reviews, but this is going to increase – in addition I will also be creating podcasts and screencasts which will be widely distributed in their own right.

Hooray for Universal search!

No Nofollow = Editorial Backlinks

By not using nofollow in my reviews, it is most likely that syndicated copies of my reviews will provide backlinks not just for me, but also for my clients. The backlinks are editorial in many cases, someone has chosen to syndicate my content.

Unfortunately Google use backlinks to attribute content to an original source, but it is a whole lot harder if they can’t index the original. It will be interesting which site syndicating my work will rank highly, or how many.

Linking to Syndicated Content

This is something I haven’t decided on yet, but just like I can link through to my various social profiles, I do have the option to link through to my content on other domains after it has been syndicated.

Worse for Google

My content will still be in the index, filtered through an extra layer of editorial control, but there is going to be a whole lot more of it.

Google have made it clear that they are only worried about the existence of links, and not the time it takes to create content, expertise, and whether links within reviews were specified or given in an editorial capacity.

I honestly don’t like junk reviews written purely for SEO purposes, but as Google seem determined to impose the letter of the law rather than the spirit, throwing the baby out with the bath water, whilst I will comply to the letter of the law, I can’t see a reason why I shouldn’t sidestep the charging bull.

Nofollow is not the answer to Google’s troubles

Update

There seems to be some misunderstandings, and I need to clear them up.

1. The blocking hasn’t happened yet – it is the next thing on the todo list
2. I intend to get more search traffic from Google taking this action, not less.

Update 2

Robots.txt has now been modified

The list is quite short, but now I have a strategy in place, I will be writing a lot more paid reviews

Whilst this might be looked on as insignificant, some of those pages rank quite well for very useful terms, and are probably worth 2000+ visitors per month.

Update 3

Whilst the changes in robots.txt were quite straight forward, before making any reinclusion or reconsideration request, I thought it important to check the robots.txt within the Google webmaster console.

First of all I waited for it to be refreshed by Googlebot, which seems to happen approximately once every 24 hours.

There is an option to just copy and paste that refreshed data by hand, but waiting for it to be fetched is conclusive.

Next I entered in the URLs which need to be blocked by the robots.txt file, and checked them.

In theory Googlebot will now be blocked from crawling the “offending” pages, and I will be able to ask for reconsideration.

Photo credits
Lowering the Flag (modified)
Matador (modified)

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.

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.

Considering how much competition I often have for certain search terms which everyone seems to be writing about because of common interest, I must have been doing a number of things right.

Bill Slawski of SEO By The Sea a few of days ago broke the news of Google’s Patent Application for Ranking Blog Documents.

SEO Round Table posted a synopsis lifted from the Cre8asite Forums that had been posted by Bill, and seems to be the easiest to understand.

I am going to do a little bit of mix and match here, and inject my own commentary but my interpretation of the patent is actually slightly different to those that I have read so far.

It should be noted I am working my way through the patent itself, and not recompiling the summaries of others.

Relevancy & Quality – Blog | Blogpost

It should first of all be noted that in the patent Google doesn’t differentiate between individual blog posts and whole blogs.

The phrase “blog document,” as used hereinafter, is to be broadly interpreted to include a blog, a blog post, or both a blog and a blog post. It will be appreciated that the techniques described herein are equally applicable to blogs and blog posts.

Later on in the patent, they also mention that feeds are also included within the documents that are compared and rated.

two distinct sets of data are used to determine a score of a blog (or blog post) in response to a search query–the topical relevance of the blog (or blog post) to the terms in the search query and the quality of the blog (or blog post), which is independent of the query terms. The quality of the blog (or blog post) may positively or negatively affect the score of the blog (or blog post)

Relevancy – this applies to the search term, thus Google will analyse the blog page, and they will also in some way determine the relevance to the whole blog.
Quality – this is irrespective of the search term, so think about factors from outside your niche

Google Blog Search – Positive Factors Affecting Search Quality | Relevancy

• Popularity of the blog document

A number of news aggregator sites (commonly called “news readers” or “feed readers”) exist where individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such aggregators store information describing how many individuals have subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document

This patent was first of all applied for 13th September 2005, with Google Blog Search launched 13 September 2005. At the time they were logically not basing this on numbers available for Google Reader subscribers. The Google Reader blog was launched October 21, 2005 with a post saying they had been up and running for 2 weeks.
Maybe there is a coincidence between the 2 events.

So which data were Google basing this part of their patent on? Some services such as Technorati and Bloglines do provide readership data, as does Feedburner, though most services report readership data as they are collecting new blog posts to a service like Feedburner, who aggregate the statistics.

It seems there might be some value is collecting Technorati favorites (my reciprocation policy might be well worth it) beyond limited bragging rights. Google of course through Google Reader now have access to lots of usage data, so maybe other sources will eventually be phased out.

• Implied popularity of the blog document

This implied popularity may be identified by, for example, examining the click stream of search results. For example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Click data from search results, possible from Google Toolbar users.

• Existence of the blog document in blogrolls

The existence of the blog document in blogrolls may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. It will be appreciated that blog documents often contain not only recent entries (i.e., posts), but also “blogrolls,” which are a dense collection of links to external sites (usually other blogs) in which the author/blogger is interested. A blogroll link to a blog document is an indication of popularity of that blog document, so aggregated blogroll links to a blog document can be counted and used to infer magnitude of popularity for the blog document.

Everything I have ever read has suggested that for normal search, blogroll links that are site wide carry diminishing value. Just because it is listed here as part of the calculation does not necessarily mean that everyone should start building up huge blogrolls… well unless they want to game Technorati and have a blog network.

• Existence of the blog document in a high quality blogroll

The existence of the blog document in a high quality blogroll may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. A high quality blogroll is a blogroll that links to well-known or trusted bloggers. Therefore, a high quality blogroll that also links to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Another revelation, links on high quality pages are worth more than links on low quality pages.

Remember that “blog document” can mean both blog page and blog site.

Can blogroll just refer to a list of links on what is identified as a blog. Thus a column of links to related pages might also class as a blogroll, whether in the sidebar or below the content.
Thus a list of links to related documents on the same site could be looked on as a blogroll on a blog document.

Related links plugins are very powerful, especially if you also include them in content that gets syndicated by design, or by sploggers.

• Tagging of the blog document

Tagging of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. Some existing sites allow users to add “tags” to (i.e., to “categorize”) a blog document. These custom categorizations are an indicator that an individual has evaluated the content of the blog document and determined that one or more categories appropriately describe its content, and as such are a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Well some sites do allow you to tag in a meaningful way, maybe Google uses shared tags from Del.icio.us and other sites, but many of those use nofollow extensively.
It is my own belief that self tagging content heavily with plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior helps a huge amount. I have given lots of examples before, but more recent examples include

toolbar pagerank
google reader feedburner
feedburner google reader
compete toolbar
duplicate content supplemental results

Yes, I am just going down the inbound traffic results looking for likely candidates that rank well in both blog and normal search and aren’t totally obscure. These are subjects that sites in my niche have also talked about, with the keywords in the title, and which you would expect to rank higher than my own content.

This doesn’t just affect blogsearch, Google have been using it for some time with the main results as well.
Here are my observations regarding tagging from back in November, especially how they could relate to LSI calculations.

• References to the blog document by other sources

Wow revelation again, god links are worth having either to pages or blog.

• Pagerank of the blog document

Pagerank is still relevant, who knows for how long and how much.

It will be appreciated that other indicators may also be used.

What seems to be missing, at least at time of application?

• Domain age?
• Trustrank?
• Page Titles?
• URLs?
• Growth rate of link popularity

Plus lots more that also factor into it, but general search patents probably also cover blog search.

Google Blog Search – Negative Factors Affecting Search Relevancy | Quality

• Frequency of new posts on the blog document

The frequency at which new posts are added to the blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. Feeds typically include only the most recent posts from a blog document. Spammers often generate new posts in spurts (i.e., many new posts appear within a short time period) or at predictable intervals (one post every 10 minutes, or a post every 3 hours at 32 minutes past the hour). Both behaviors are correlated with malicious intent and can be used to identify possible spammers. Therefore, if the frequency at which new posts are added to the blog document matches a predictable pattern, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Make sure there is some variation when you publish your content for the day, especially with future dated posts.
Most spamming tools are actually fairly sophisticated, thus I am not sure this measurement is very accurate. It most likely indicated a blogger who is very organised these days.

• The content of the posts in the blog document

The content of the posts in the blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. A feed typically contains some or all of the content of several posts from a given blog document. The blog document itself also includes the content of the posts. Spammers may put one version of content into a feed to improve their ranking in search results, while putting a different version on their blog document (e.g., links to irrelevant ads). This mismatch (between feed and blog document) can, therefore, be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

This is actually a very significant and interestingly worded item. Google are stating that they are comparing the content of a feed with the content on your pages to ensure it matches.

Based upon this:-

• Don’t use a content spinner on your feeds to avoid duplicate content
• Allow Google to index your feeds
• If you use related links on your blog, make sure you use them in your feeds too
• Duplicate Content, especially in feeds

Also, in some instances, particular content may be duplicated in multiple posts in a blog document, resulting in multiple feeds containing the same content. Such duplication indicates the feed is low quality/spam and, thus, can be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

I can’t say I have noticed a problem having a lot of straggling RSS feeds on categories and tags.
This could also be referring to things like the large footer I have on each post, though I haven’t seen a problem with that either.

After the last toolbar pagerank update I spent some time studying Matt Cutts’ blog, and also looking at how pagerank was being transferred around my own site. Pagerank is only slightly useful as a guide, and only immediately after an update.
Rather than repeat myself, you can read about my organic garden approach to this site.

• Collective Intelligence

The words/phrases used in the posts of a blog document may also be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. For example, from a collection of blog documents and feeds that evaluators rate as spam, a list of words and phrases (bigrams, trigrams, etc.) that appear frequently in spam may be extracted. If a blog document contains a high percentage of words or phrases from the list, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

Google invest a lot of research analysing spam, detecting various word matching patterns, and use that to identify other documents.

• A size of the posts in the blog document

The size of the posts in a blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. Many automated post generators create numerous posts of identical or very similar length. As a result, the distribution of post sizes can be used as a reliable measure of spamminess. When a blog document includes numerous posts of identical or very similar length, this may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

This might be of special interest to those that use out-sourcing for articles, you need to ensure the article length changes.

• A link distribution of the blog document

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.

In some ways this debunks the benefits of blogrolls mentioned as a benefit, but as previously quoted, Google are using blog document in multiple context, and comparing the context, thus it could just refer to multiple spam links always pointing to a single domain within the content.

• The presence of ads in the blog document

The presence of ads in the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. If a blog document contains a large number of ads, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Remember this is just a patent, and Google recently relaxed the rules about having ads from other networks along with Adsense. As long as a page is of a reasonable size to support the adverts, I don’t think there is a problem. If you just have a heading and 5 words, with 10 advertising blocks, you might want to add a few more words.

However they go on to say this

Moreover, blog documents typically contain three types of content: the content of recent posts, a blogroll, and blog metadata (e.g., author profile information and/or other information pertinent to the blog document or its author). Ads, if present, typically appear within the blog metadata section or near the blogroll. The presence of ads in the recent posts part of a blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Thus if you are using blocks in the content for all your ads, you might not rank as well, especially if you use multiple networks. You can probably get away with 3 in the content, or maybe 1 or 2 per post.

• It will be appreciated that other indicators may also be used

Conclusion

The feed stats information is very useful, and looking at the timing, my conclusion is that Google might have been using Bloglines and Technorati Favorites data, with Google Reader in its infancy, or maybe though less likely, when blog search was introduced, they weren’t using that part of the patent

For me the most significant information was tagging, but just linking though to Technorati with your tags isn’t a great idea.

Remember that Google have their own blogging system, and they have archives and labels, and they are not going to create a system to generate duplicate content and then penalise you for it. Google wouldn’t have added such a system unless they intended to benefit from the enhanced data.

You don’t have to build your blogs in a 1990s era tree like structure to rank well.

Subscribers and Technorati Favorites may help you rank.

Is being included among Top Commenters really a benefit?
Does Top Commenters give more benefit to blog owners than the harm it can cause if you are not careful?

Traffic

Andy Beal introduced Top Commenters to his blog on 19th February, and since that time I have been among his top commenters most of the time. I didn’t change my commenting habits, and even argued against including it.

In almost 1 month those links, plus the links from my comments have driven a total of 29 visitors to my site – Google Analytics only picked up 23 of them, so I am sticking with the MBL numbers.
Without exception, the clicks seem to have been on posts where I have made a comment, thus nothing to do with appearing across the whole of Andy’s site on the sidebar.

This might question the value of text link ads for traffic on blogs, I suppose it depends on how much a visitor is worth to you.

SEO

Site wide might be looked on as something desirable from a high ranking blog, but the value is limited.

• It is in the sidebar, thus the value is diminished by the major search engines
• The link isn’t permanent – what effect does a link that appears and then disappears at the start of a new month have
• The link might not be relevant
• The link in many cases points to the root domain rather than laser targeted LSI Related Content.

This to a lesser extent questions the value of paid text links for SEO, but note with paid text links you choose the anchor text, and can choose to advertise for more than 1 month

Effect on The Hosting Blog

On a well designed blog, the negative effect of providing Top Commenters can be mitigated, but the majority of sites where I have seen this plugin implemented will experience a detrimental effect on their internal Google juice.

The problems associated with the Top Commenters Plugin are similar to those that can affect blogs which have long blogrolls.

• Theme design – the theme uses the same template file for for the front page and single pages, and thus plugin output appears across the whole site, including duplicate content pages. Good themes use single.php for individual posts, and also include archive.php and other template files for navigation and search pages
• Widgets – The WordPress Widget plugin is convenient – unfortunately every theme I have seen applies Widgets to every sidebar across a site, and thus the links will again appear everywhere, even if a single.php template exists.

Pouring Liquids

Lets take a situation that you have 10 glass milk bottles in a line, and one of them is filled up with milk.

Your challenge is to consecutively pour the contents of a bottle into its neighbour until you reach the end of the line. You have to do this as quickly as possible.

The smart thing to do would be to use a large funnel, that prevents milk escaping and only allows it to flow in the direction you intend. Without the funnel, lets say you lose 10% of your milk in each transfer, you would only have 39% of your milk in the last bottle.

WordPress Duplicate Content

With WordPress you have multiple navigation and archive pages that contain duplicate content, and on a poorly designed blog theme, would also include blogroll links and Top Commenters links.

• Date Based Archives
• Categories
• Sequential Pages – page1, page2
• Tag Pages

There are plugins available that add noindex nofollow to the meta tags on these duplicate content pages, and if you wanted to have total control, it is possible to ensure that the only links to your content come from your sitemap – in doing so you could potentially reduce other important factors in search engine calculations such as relevance.

I have seen blogs with as much as 90% external links on all their duplicate content pages.

Alternatively with no blogroll, and no Top Commenters plugin, you can reduce the number of external links on duplicate content pages to as little as 5%, even if you are generous with your external links within the content.

Dofollow – Remove Nofollow From Comments

This is my preferred alternative and I use it on all my WordPress blogs that have comments enabled.

• All comments provide permanent links, and you can make that link more relevant by using a deep link to related content on one of your own sites
• All trackbacks provide a followable permanent link between related content
• Comments only appear on the single pages that are gaining from other sites. They don’t appear on most duplicate pages.
• Real comments with related content surround your backlinks giving them enhanced value
• By cultivating and preserving Google Juice, it flows to where it matters, subsequently comment links on those pages are more valuable.

Here is a list of available dofollow plugins, and some alternatives that can be used for other google juice flow control.

Effects on Other Services

Site wide links do have an effect on other services such as Technorati and some meme trackers as I have recently discussed. This can be beneficial for the number of links, but remember that Technorati ranking is based on number of unique sites rather than the number of links.

More Comments

Maybe it influences some, but rewarding 5 or 10 people, when 100s of people take part in your blog isn’t the fairest system in the world. In addition the people who often try to be the top commenter for the link value often should be spending more time on their own blogs than commenting on yours.
I am all for encouraging discussion, but not at the detriment to someone elses real interests. Helping people sometimes isn’t encouraging them to spend hours per day commenting on your blog just to get a temporary site wide link that is of little short term, or long term value.

Whilst they only required me to write 100 words, and they have no requirement to give either a positive or negative review, as always I am going to go into things with as much depth as I can, because that is the kind of content I write, and that will never change whether I am paid to do a review, include an affiliate link or not.

In fact here is the “contract” I just accepted to review their service:-

Ok lets look at what you see here :-

• Rating – I will show you how that works later
• Bid Price – that is the price I decided to set myself for reviews, though as you will see later there are methods to negotiate prices for reviews to have a win/win situation
• You Get $98 – yep that is one of the nice parts, a 65% share of the earnings.
• Min Words 100 – I am ignoring that, and I am pretty sure the advertiser knew I would anyway, so I take that as an indication they want me to write a normal review… go to town as always. If they set a maximum I would actually be upset and would never accept it.
• Status / Date – I get a full 7 days – I decided to write the review immediately because I had a chance to look behind the scenes a couple of days ago. I could probably delay the acceptance by a couple of days to stretch things out beyond a week.

Total Transparency

I think it is important to make things absolutely transparent with this review, so here are the remainder of the instructions I received

Requirements
# Please provide a link to our homepage. We also strongly suggest that you link to your blog profile page in order to notify your readers (and potential buyers) that if they want to buy a review from you they can sign up at SponsoredReviews. You can find the link to your blog profile page by clicking on the blog in your “manage blogs” tab. Here is what a profile page looks like. http://www.sponsoredreviews.com/blog-190.html

Description
# SponsoredReviews is Officially Launched! Monday, 12th

We would love to have you review SponsoredReviews.com.

Here are some facts that separate us from the competition:

We have a low 35% transaction fee. This is the lowest out of all of our competitors.

Our Hybrid system is the only one that allows both advertisers and bloggers to search for each other.

Our bidding system allows bloggers and advertisers to negotiate pricing.

Bi-Weekly payout for bloggers means your hard work pays off quickly.

Accepted Review Information
# You have until 3/19/2007 10:57:55 AM to provide us with the URL to the completed review on your blog. If we do not receive the URL by the due date, the review will be cancelled.

They asked for a link, but technically it wouldn’t I suppose have to be a followable one ;)
I am sure someone would pick holes in them asking for a link, but if someone is looking for buzz and to drive traffic to a website, a link is a logical thing to have on a review.
I doubt I would ever review a site that I wouldn’t link to, and if I did, that is one viable use of nofollow or true dynamic links (but this review isn’t the place for nofollow and links are a pointer not a vote discussions)

They make a suggestion of a way to turn this review into more cash by including a link to my order page – very smart, and something similar could be done with affiliate links. In fact as reviews can be negotiated, the possibility of additional monetization down the road is a good incentive to do cheaper reviews.

Sponsored Reviews In Depth

When submitting a new blog you have to make sure it conforms to the Sponsored Reviews minimal requirements.

Requirements and Important Information:

* Your blog must contain at least 10 posts with 200 words of unique content each.
* Your blog must not be completely automated or appear to be created solely for search engine traffic.
* Your blog must have at least a 3:1 ratio of non-paid to paid content.
* You must complete all accepted reviews within 7 days, or your account will be suspended.
* Foreign Language blogs (non-english) must clearly state in the title which language the blog is written in. i.e. “Jose’s Blog – Spanish”. You must also state (in the description) whether you will write the review in English or another language.
* Blogs with very little traffic and/or links, may be rejected .

They are looking for real blogs, not made for Adsense sites. Blogs that have subscribers
Blogs are not automatically approved, there is a manual check done on each site, and that might take a day or so (at least it did for me though that was during beta)

Information is gathered about your blog when you sign up

I just entered my WordPress Plugins site to grab a screenshot, I won’t be doing any reviews on that site of 3rd party products.
Unfortunately I haven’t found a way of refreshing the stats for a site, which hopefully will be included in the future. Site statistics change over time, and there is no mention of a refresh interval.

After you have waited a few seconds you are presented with the following screen.

When I first signed up I believe the price they suggested for a review was $30 – now if my typical review was just 100-200 words, with the 65% payment that might be almost workable, provided there was an affiliate link available or other way to monetize the content. But I get the choice to set my own price, so I set it to $150, and I will probably increase that to $200 the same as I have promised for ReviewMe.

With paid reviews you aren’t just buying links, buzz and traffic, but some may only be looking for that, and if that is all you are after, then please don’t buy a review from me.

What I hope I can provide is:-

• Expert (?) opinion – or I just fake it extremely well, maybe I should become a Wikipedia editor
• Targeted Highly Qualified Traffic – I have very few tire kickers in my readership
• More than just the typical buzz – if there is something right or wrong with your service, from my perspective, which might relate to the perspective of my audience, you are going to hear about it, and so will my readers.

So $150 it is – bah I am worth it

On the screenshot you will also see “Status: Public” – you can also set that to private, or what I would call “Lurker Mode“.

Lurker mode would allow you to be included with the system, but not have your blog on public display for everyone to grab screenshots and point a finger at you. It would however prevent advertisers finding you. You would have to make approaches to advertisers who have posted a review opportunity.

I prefer being in a strong negotiation position with advertisers, so not having to approach them I believe is of benefit.

Category Selection

Here are the available categories:- (alongside is the current tag list)

Art
Autos
Baby
Books
Business
College
Current Events
Education
Entertainment
Environment
Fashion
Food
Gadgets
Games
Health
House & Home
Humor
Kids
Law
Marketing
Media
Money
Movies & Film
Music
Personal
Photography
Politics
Programming
Real Estate
Religion
Science
Sports
Technology
Travel
Web Design
Women

In bold are the categories I write about among others, yet I can only select one category. My blog is actually fairly well niched on specific topics that tend to branch into other things quite naturally, yet the current category selection system doesn’t allow for that.

A saving grace is that the system also supports tagging, and I included lots of tags. I think I will have to increase the number of tags I used to cover some more of these broader topics.
Tags are used within the blog browsing section heavily, and in fact I think they are merged with the categories, so whilst you can only include one category currently, if you include tags for the categories you can’t select, you effectively get the same.

Already there are a few reviews available with a great variety of prices.

One of those listed was actually for Sponsored Reviews, and it had been there for a couple of days with a lower price than I eventually received, though I didn’t have to haggle for a higher price, which would have been fun and a good test of the system, or it might have highlighted one of the current flaws.

No Messaging

Negotiation is a discussion process, not just firing prices backwards and forwards. There are all kinds of aspects to a deal that might require some additional form of contact, and it would be best to have that on record within the interface.
This would actually be of benefit both to Sponsored Reviews and to myself – for me to ensure things are all in one place, and for Sponsored Reviews to ensure that negotiations take place there, and not off-site where private deals could be negotiated for more favourable terms.

Advertiser Advantages

I love the 2 way negotiation concept, and it allows advertisers to negotiate a review based on other factors. That could just be the advertiser providing a sample of the product you could keep should you wish – yes I know that the blogosphere was up in arms about Microsoft and review units of nice laptops, but that was unwarranted. This system does require true messaging to be viable however.

I would love to be able to offer a showcase to advertisers for reviews I have completed for others in the past – not just for Sponsored Reviews, but also other services. They don’t want to see the general type of blog content, but the type of review you would write for them.
If they are looking for reviews as consultation in some way, rather than just buzz marketing or links, then some idea of what they can expect would be great.

Attention To Detail

I am actually amazed to have found so few bugs or missing features with the system. There are a few things hidden away that are very good touches such as a support ticket system which should be available with all such systems, but aren’t.

Here is something I like, a configuration for notification of new review opportunities hidden in the Account Settings.

Payment

Brand new service, so how can you tell?

They are not unknown however, because they are a sister service to Text Link Brokers who have a good payment reputation.

Billing Cycles are every 2 weeks, which sounds great to me, and payments are made by Paypal which also gets a thumbs up.

Disclosure

You have to disclose, though I think they need to be a little more specific on how, where, why.
As an example I believe my general disclosure might be enough for legal purposes with the FTC, but Sponsored Reviews might prefer a disclosure as I have done here, in the first line.

Comparison To Other Services

PayPerPost – currently only have fixed price opportunities, but a lot more of them. Whilst many would say that PPP have different disclosure terms, I believe the required disclosure for PPP is within the law, and is far beyond what most affiliate networks require, and the disclosure most affiliates use on a day to day basis (I don’t count “(aff)” as full disclosure for casual visitors)
PPP do have higher value gigs, up to $1000 currently, but they are really aimed at buzz marketing and possibly just link acquisition. I believe they have over 15,000 reviewers, so certainly have first mover advantage and economy of scale. I am not sure of the exact percentage of review fee that goes to reviewers, but I seem to remember it was much more than 50%.
Pay Per Post is very much automated, providing reviewers with exact link code – they even handle fine detail such as rotation of anchor text and destination URL, and for those looking for more precise data, they have tracking of review page views and click-through tracking using redirects.
They have some great concepts of their own such as their “Review My Post” affiliate program, which pays out to both the affiliate and the reviewer. (see my comment section and get paid to review this post)

ReviewMe – I believe it is a very similar program in intentions to Sponsored Reviews. They recently introduced a way for reviewers to set their own prices which was desperately needed for sites like mine that do extensive reviews rather than short buzz articles. They take a slightly bigger cut of the pie (50%) and pay on a monthly basis. They do however have an affiliate program for signing up new advertisers, but that is a one-off payment.
They have an advantage over Sponsored Reviews because they have been on the market longer, but whilst this is only a guess, I would think both services have a lot of work cut out to catch Pay Per Post for the mass market.
It wouldn’t require rocket science for ReviewMe to add the features that currently differentiate them from Sponsored Reviews, such as the negotiation of fees, although a pricing change might be harder to stomach. Get Reviewed At ReviewMe!

Choices

If I am promoting someone to buy a review from my site, it has now become a very hard choice.

• Sponsored Reviews offers me a bigger cut
• Sponsored Reviews potentially pays me faster
• Sponsored Reviews provides some level of negotiation
• Sponsored Reviews allows me to look for reviews

It is hard for me to judge the difference in quality of landing page and the “feel” an advertiser would have working with each company.

If I am receiving review requests, it doesn’t matter which service provides them. Both companies have their own existing client relationships from selling text links – it is going to be interesting.

Affiliate Program and Mind Share

A lot will come down to the affiliate program offerings.

Affiliates will want (to make a difference)

• Income from Advertisers
• Income from New Publishers
• Recurring Income

ReviewMe currently offer $25 fixed payment for a signup – that isn’t too bad for a CPA program, but I am a greedy affiliate who likes recurring income.

ReviewMe have a lot more of the pie available to share out if they wanted to. Giving out 15-20% of the income on a recurring basis for new sign ups, either Advertisers or Publishers would be quite painful for Sponsored Reviews, but I have a feeling they could still reciprocate, and with the sums of money involved for the higher priced reviews, it would still be profitable for both.

With potentially more than half my audience having already heard of ReviewMe and signed up, Sponsored Reviews seems like the better program to promote for site reviews currently.

So if you want a product reviewed, here is my Sponsored Reviews page.
Yes I wish it was an affiliate link, but it is more of a win/win thing with the advertisers. Customer satisfaction is important, as long as they know they can’t buy my opinion.

Flexibility and negotiation in pricing owns – give it a try.

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.

This is the page he linked to

With the pages being indexed and monetized, that would make Rojo a splog by many people’s terminology, in fact most.

In many ways Rojo are not even giving correct attribution for content that they might be able to use commercially, because they are not citing sources very well in the eyes of the search engines.
Here is an example link, showing how they are using a redirect:-

http://www.rojo.com/title/Q_PxEfMKb3QYI-Hp/WWg3sx9hbJ4MHCup/1169252114/http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2FOmMalik%2F%7E3%2F78197566%2F

It should be noted that the link points to Feedburner, but I assume GigaOm has a pro account with Feedburner that might do some kind of SEO friendly redirect.

It is possible that the Rojo link is also being followed, but it is a little hard to check. It is certainly not a “clean link”.

As an example here is a Yahoo search

The page itself contains 3 Adsense adverts, so Rojo, owned by Six Apart, are monetizing other people’s full feed content, and not even giving a reliable backlink so that search engines can work out the original source.

From what I remember, at least Bitacle gave you a back link.

I have been monitoring some of my new and old domains, both those on public display and various niche sites. This was especially important to me because of some of the redirecting I had to do to this new domain from andybeard.name and niche-website.blogspot.com. It was also relevant for my WordPress Plugins site because that had previously been PR5, but when I changed the domain over because of the WordPress Trademark, that was lost.

Things I have noticed this time round

It seems the internal pages of Andybeard.eu are starting to gain some toolbar pagerank, such as this page on Nofollow which is showing PR4
My Google Reader post that enjoyed some link love from a number of notable blogs (though most didn’t agree with me) had been showing in the Google Webmaster Console as being the highest PR page on my site for both November and December. That is now PR4 as well.
In theory I should be seeing some PR showing on the WordPress Trademark discussion, but nothing shows.

It is strange that Google thinks this post on Paid Links is my highest pagerank page. Yes it has been linked to, but nowhere near as much internally compared to other pages, and externally it was linked to, but again, not a huge amount.

On the bright side, my WordPress Plugins site has regained its pagerank of PR5. Internal pages are not quite up to date yet. I noticed for instance that my tags page has PR, but categories and individual tags do not. The same is true of most of the admittedly few content pages on the site.

Matt Cutts in the comments regarding the Pagerank Updates has stated it is worth waiting for a few days to see how things develop before blowing alarm whistles. Matt is on holiday for a week, so I will wait at least that long before saying anything.

This site seems to ping-pong out of the SERPs for various terms, one day in the top 3, the next buried down 10 or more pages, for relatively solid content with in-bound links.
I recently talked about meta refresh, and that Google seem to be following them. It almost seems that one day they are giving me benefit, only for it to become some kind of invisible penalty the next. If I could upgrade my blogger account I could probably get a more permanent redirect setup.

Why am I monitoring Pagerank so closely?

Currently this blog is setup for some massive ball linking. Pagerank is dispersed extensively on every page. That being said, I also cultivate my links, rather than hoarding. People leaving comments gain a backlink as do people kind enough to link to some of my content.
I certainly need to improve all my archive and tag pages, and get a real sitemap setup.

I have other linking structure alternatives planned in the near future, hopefully all automated. Hopefully front page pagerank on this blog will start at PR5, one Google have juggled things a little.

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.

In all those 5 years, I haven’t heard anyone suggest that Yahoo should use “nofollow” for all the directory listings. All commercial websites don’t have a free option to get listed.

It is widely believed that a Yahoo directory listing is given a significant search engine weight.

Commercial Internet

Big business has a huge advantage over the little guy on the internet. Lets take Ebay as an example.

Many shoppers wouldn’t realise it, although the relationship is made very clear, that Epinions.com is owned by Shopping.com, which is itself owned by Ebay.com.
There is lots of interlinking between the different sites, though it could be achieved in a much more search engine friendly way. There is certainly no clear notification by every link that money is being made on every purchase.

Whilst reviews are user generated, there is certainly editorial control over which products are positioned prominently to maximise sales.

2006 in Perspective

Bloggers have been victimising PPP and to a lesser extent Reviewme.

Google, who claim to “do no evil” are actively discouraging paid posts and paid links from small services. They are suggesting that “nofollow” should be used to denote paid links, rather than their previous intent, untrusted sites (for various reasons).

Google unfortunately made paid links from Yahoo “saintly” since the beginning of their existence. It is only $300 and Yahoo receive payment even if they don’t include your site.
Google don’t regulate major corporations from cross-linking commercially.

During 2006 I have seen Google likened to God.

2007 A Reality Check?

My hope is that bloggers come down to earth a little, because the ranting and raving about paid posts is really displaying quite clearly how narrow-minded they are.

Paid posts and paid links give the little guy a chance to make some money writing about and linking to relevant content. They give the site linked to a greater chance of competing with the massive corporate machines as well as valuable feedback.

There is recent news that PayPerPost have acquired Performancing metrics. Nick at Performancing can be blunt, crude and highly opinionated. He is also a damn smart and ethical guy.
If you have been listening to his recent podcasts, you would know that he has been looking for someone to take metrics onboard for quite some time, as it was a money sink, and he was also talking to VC Dan Rua.
I have mentioned in the past that I have nothing but respect for the PPP guys. The PPP guys didn’t create any scandal, bloggers did it themselves. PayPerPost didn’t object to the free publicity, but in all the comments I have seen made by PPP guys in response to huge amounts of criticism, they have made some quite compelling counter arguments, and taken any criticism as genuine feedback.

I have seen people suggesting that they are going to be immediately cancelling their Performancing metrics accounts for ethical reasons.
Almost every advertiser and affiliate network you work with on your sites is gathering data. PayPerPost seem to have some smart guys backing them with VC funding.

PayPerPost are a business. With VCs backing them, they are not going to take risks in regard to personal data.

Why should PPP be compelled to enforce disclosure when Yahoo doesn’t proclaim “These are paid links?”

From what I have seen of PPP opportunities, they are in the main not for product reviews. It is quite possible they would be totally unaffected by the recent FTC / WOMMA discussion.

Create Great Content and Links Will Follow?

Give it time… maybe. Most websites don’t attract a lot of natural linkage. You can get a few links from various directories for free, though many more require payment – paid links are evil remember?

You can also gain lots of links from things like article marketing or press releases.

But that isn’t the natural linking Google say you should be looking for, to your great content, though I suppose a few sites pick up articles and press releases manually, most collect them automatically based by category of keyword searches.

# natural links per post = blog readership / 1000

That is a very rough figure because many blogs gain far more links, and many gain far less.

Techcrunch doesn’t gain 140 links for every post they make, and I gain more than one link on average for every 5 posts. Then again a large number of the links I gain are from splogs picking up tags used on Technorati.
There seems to be a critical mass for the number of links a single post can expect to receive unless it is exceptional linkbait.

Pay For Your Traffic

You can pay Google $0.15 for some traffic. If 1 in 1000 visitors decides to link to you then that link cost you $150. Hopefully you can convert some of the traffic into customers or subscribers because otherwise that is a horrendous cost, paid to Google as an alternative to natural search.

Who gains more money if paid links and sponsored content is condemned?

Trust and Duplicate Content

Linking through to someone is most of the time a statement of trust. You are sharing your visitors, subscribers, and maybe your customers with the other site. If you link through to them it should always be a followable link, unless you don’t trust them.

Google recommend always linking through to the original source if you syndicate content so they can determine the origin. The same would be true for any quotations. If you quote anything from a site, you should thus always use a followable link.