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.

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.

But any niche website is relevant to this blog

1. I can quite happily rip apart the SEO and offer some improvements
2. I can also comment on the monetisation, sales page etc.

In fact ReviewMe might be an easy way for me to find Victims.

Who would class as one of the best possible “victims” for a paid review?

Maybe a specialist in Search Engine Optimization? The author of what many refer to as the SEO Bible?
If he was also the founder of ReviewMe it would be ideal.

So today I received a review request through ReviewMe for Aaron Wall’s Search Engine Marketing Glossary. He is also author of the top selling SEO Book.

I sometimes wonder whether the guys behind the sceens at ReviewMe have some interesting backend statistics, monitoring the increase in Alexa, Technorati and Bloglines ratings. My Alexa averages around 30K rather than the 180K shown in the ReviewMe description, and Technorati rating is increasing daily. Bloglines doesn’t go up very fast, most new subscribers are for email, Pageflakes and Google Reader.

Ok enough preamble

Search Engine Glossary

Despite the fact that this site is totally relevant to my audience, I was actually in 2 minds whether to write this review, because in writing it, in some ways I am giving away one of my plans for a niche affiliate site. I actually mentioned my plans over on Copyblogger in the comments recently, but I didn’t mention which material I was going to leverage.

I am going to break this review down into 2 parts, content and seo/navigation.

Search Engine Glossary – Content

I have been impressed with the SEO Glossary for some time. When I first saw it, I gave it a Digg and that was a couple of months ago.

For a newbie webmaster, some of the terms are a little complex, but to give Aaron credit he has explained them in as close to “layman’s terms” as is reasonably possible, with extensive linking to further reference documentation.

I honestly didn’t find any material I disagree with, and Aaron has far better understanding of many SEO concepts than I do.

SEO Definitions Which I Felt Should Be Included

Dynamic Linking
Folksonomy
Blog Search
Mininet
Trademarks
Google Juice (linked to TLA but didn’t have a definition on its own)
Article Marketing (linked from Link Building)
Press Release (Linked from Link Building)
Google Webmaster Central
Tracking / Statistics
Ping
VRE

SEO Terms That Needed Expansion

Tag, Tagging, Tag Clouds
Microsoft > MSN
MSN > Microsoft
Toolbar – links to useful ones such as Search Status, Google etc.
Snippets – misspelling (something I have noticed is headings rarely appear in snippets)
RSS – I actually agree with your description, though most bloggers seem to think that RSS means sharing content everywhere, regardless of copyright.
Sitemap and recent events on conformance

Splogs/linkfarms – you gave a very clinical definition

SSI – I would actually include a PHP example there as well

SEO References Needing Updating

Danny Sullivan – Search Engine Land
Text Link Ads (add an affiliate link)
Link-farm or link-farms (broken jump)

Search Engine Glossary – SEO and User Navigation

It is my opinion that the content would be better presented as a massively hyperlinked and interrelated blog using tagging. That would provide a better user interface to navigate the content, and probably better SEO possibilities in general.

I am not going to go into it too deeply, as that is what I plan on compiling sometime soon as the licensing of the material is quite relaxed, mainly because Aaron has made use of a some content from Wikipedia to start with.

Overall

I honestly spent a lot more time reading this glossary than would justify a few dollars in compensation. That wasn’t just to pick holes in it or find a few bugs, I was learning at the same time as my knowledge of search engine optimization is far from complete.
The Search Engine Glossary is a very comprehensive list of search engine optimization definitions.

Categories are for storing your documents into nice managable chucks on related topics.

Tagging can and should go far beyond categories in relating content to specific keywords.

Here is a good example:-

WordPress Training
Wordpress Tutorials
Wordpress Tuition

I would suggest you wouldn’t want to have all 3 phrases as a category in your sidebar. You could however be quite justified in tagging a related article with all 3 phrases, if they were appropriate.

There are several reasons for this:-

1. Tag searches do not use LSI. They do however quite often display related tags. The more data you provide related to your article, the more accurately it can be classified, and later found. In many ways your tags should be very tightly related LSI keywords.

2. MYSQL Search – lets face it, it isn’t highly effective. If someone is searching your site, the chances of them finding what they are looking for are remote unless you provide a lot of keywords on a page.

3. Folksonomy provides a better way to search when you use tag clouds to provide visual suggestions for what a reader may be looking for. In my example above, “training”, “tuition” and “tutorials” actually provide different stimulai

4. Better references to related content

Lets say you have a niche blog on dogs.

You might have categories on dog training, dog health, dog accessories etc

You might use tags to interrelate articles on dog training at feeding time, dog food, and dog bowl.

5. Making your website wider – making a better mouse-trap

Does Google really give penalties for duplicate content, or duplicate content that doesn’t have a specific purpose?

It is my belief that Google doesn’t give duplicate content penalties for content that has a specific purpose, that they can easily identify.

Technorati is all duplicate content, but it has a purpose, helping people find what they are looking for. I noted recently that tag pages at WordPress.com which are also full of duplicate content, give great backlinks for the blogs hosted there.

Google Likes Tag Pages

I think Google in some way within their algorithms are allowing duplicate content if it is on a page that is clearly a tag page, whether on an authority site, or on individual websites.

It is easy for people to spot such a page, they normally use tag or tags in the URL. If they wanted to algorithmically wipe out all that duplicate content they could with a wave of their hand.

But they haven’t… in fact pages that Google identifies as a tag page, it might be argued, are sometimes given a boost in search engine results.

I am sure you want some proof

I can’t give you total proof.

This is based upon my observations on multiple domains I own or monitor closely. I am not going to openly reveal all my niche sites (people try all kinds of ways to search for them every day, and they find old sites that have been allowed to be found).

I will give you one example though, which I noticed today.

This example is based upon the following:-

This is quite a new domain, but I do have an existing domain andybeard.name redirecting here with a global 301. I also have an existing blog on blogspot redirecting here with a meta refresh.
I have a few “exposed” niche sites linking back to this site.

That being said, Google doesn’t seem to be showing any backlinks (there are quite a few of them), though other search engines are.
It has been reported recently that Google are giving enhanced results to blog search within their main listings, especially in Europe which is a frequent test location. This isn’t related, because those results were appearing at the bottom of the Google listings.

I am located in Poland, and my IP address is Polish. Someone located in the US might see something different, using the same search URLs.

Here is a screenshot of a search result I noticed today. This one is on Google.com, but I have also tried Google.co.uk, Google.at, Google.pl, Google.de and a few more.
The results were similar. On the foreign language sites I generally held the position for the first English language result.

Google Search for WordPress Training

It isn’t a highly competitive keyword, and the results for “WordPress Tutorials” which is more competitive are different.

Now I do have to admit the tag page that is gaining the result is fairly junky looking. It is a result of the way my content is laid out, and I do need to get it fixed.
I include tags at the start of my content, and those tags appear at the start of any excerpt. This is true for excerpts, whether created by WordPress or by Ultimate Tag Warrior.
As standard there isn’t an easy way to adjust excerpt length unless you create a custom excerpt for every post.

In my defense it is not deliberate keyword spamming, it is something I am aware of, and it will be fixed. I am not a programmer, I just tinker with PHP, and the tag pages and archive pages on this blog are currently “out-of-the-box” configurations.

Specific to Google

This weighting of tag pages seems to be specific to Google.

For instance for the same search on MSN my original content is ranked around 26th position, but they still have lots of tag pages showing, and it is obvious the search is not very LSI based, as lots of dog and horse training pages appear.
Yahoo has fairly similar results to MSN, I have a result in 23rd place, but it is a totally different page.

Folksonomy and LSI

Folksonomy is in many ways the same as LSI.

With folksonomy the relationship between keywords is created by humans.
LSI is meant to be based upon algorithms, but is a lot more complicated. It is however based on words, and it is much easier to start with a list of human word relationships and to then apply additional relationships.

It is my belief that Google is in some way using folksonomy as part of its LSI calculations. It is even possible that they have recently increased the relevance of that part of their calculation.

Going Forward

Tagging is important for folksonomy based search. Tag pages on your own domain seem to be gaining a lot of relevance in Google.

Over the coming weeks I am going to be working to improve the quality of my tag pages, so that they provide unique content, and enhanced value for my readers.

Using tags for all keyword links might add enhanced relevance.
If you were buying textlinks, paid posts etc, would the value of the textlinks be enhanced if they had rel=”tag” ?

I have heard bloggers argue that creating links with relevant keywords is keyword spamming. In my opinion it is actually “best practice” if you are linking to someone to use a relevant keyword to the content you are linking to. It isn’t Google bombing, it is helping the search engines relate different content. If you then include rel=”tag” in the link, you are also helping folksonomy search.

You should maybe think carefully about your tagging strategy for 2007

Bookmark or Subscribe to this post

Download Revenge of the Mininet for free (It is honestly worth signing up to Michaels list)

Read Revenge of the Mininet

Log into the Leslie Rohde Dynamic Linking Bonus (for some reason the site asks for the password twice, you didn’t make a mistake, just use the username and password twice)
Read Dynamic Linking through at least twice

Come back to reading this post…

Stop Reading if you haven’t done all of the above!

So a blog is generally a ball linking structure. (if you read the books you would know about this term)
But lets think about other sites, and how you can cheat a little when using 3rd party articles (duplicate content).

Using 3rd party articles, you are forced to have an external link.

There are 2 ways of doing this, and it is not really discussed in either ebook.

1. Limit the amount of PR that is given to the pages, thus you might have the link to the articles sitemap on your main sitemap.

This strategy is ok if you mainly want the articles to sacrifice PR, but they still have quite a PR leak.

2. Use ball linking from any 3rd party article page, minimising the value of any external link from the page

Thus have lots of links to related content that doesn’t have PR leaks, minimising the amount of PR that is “wasted”.

Apply it back to blogs

If you use “no follow” for all your comments (or not allow comments), and “no follow” on all external links, then you can do some great optimization, but would probably be unpopular. It would still be quite complicated to achieve various “spider” or “pyramid” solutions.
If you use “no follow” in comments, and not for external links, and optimize your site carefully, you might end up giving too much PR away to the other site.

If you don’t use “no follow” at all, that is a lot of leaks. PR however flows equally, thus if a page has a lot of comments on it, and has a lot of links, you need to have as many leaks to your own pages as possible. It is better to give PR to pages without too many leaks.

Even using a Blog as a CMS with no comments – you are going to need at the very least lots of special custom templates.

Short term solution

Popular blogs are better off having at least a partial ball structure, with so many internal links on a page that it doesn’t matter about the external links.

Think about your average number of comments and external links per post. Then decide how much PR you want to give away. If you have 10 external links on your page and want to give away only 10% of the page PR to them, you need to have 100 internal links of your own on the page.
Tagging and categories can help a lot if used correctly. Blogrolls on every page can be extremely bad. It is much better to “share the juice” by posting about your friends from an SEO point of view, than having them on your sitewide blogroll all the time.

The implementations for widgets for any theme I have seen so far really don’t help you very much.
PLR (private label rights) is the best content for sacrificial mininet sites, as it is easy to sacrifice with no 3rd party outbound links.

Post your most important content as pages rather than posts using modified templates.

Long term solution

;)

Update August 2010

For the last year Google have been suggesting PageRank evaporates from Nofollow links – so you will just have to use javascript, or test what Google claim.