Friendfeed Now Counted In Feedburner

It can make quite a striking difference with Feedburner if you have a few followers there.

But even this doesn’t really account for the shifting sands in online attention.

The latter half of this post was originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

Since then Twitter has for many people emerged as the primary way they read RSS feeds, combined with various forms of lifestreaming.

The first time I see tweets and blog posts often is also on services such as Blogcatalog’s dashboard or even Mybloglog (though that can sometimes lag a little on updates these days)

Current Calculation Problems

• Blogcatalog & Mybloglog numbers are just as relevant as Friendfeed
• Twitter numbers are probably more relevant than any Lifestreaming service
• Facebook subscribers are still not counted
• Aweber & Feedblitz, along with Feedburners own RSS to Email service are included, but they are the only ones I know about. Where is the Getresponse support Simon? Infusionsoft should really offer something as well, though they don’t offer RSS to email – I am not sure about Mailchimp

The onus really is on the developers of these other platforms to report numbers to Feedburner, but I have no idea how that can be managed with Facebook and Twitter.

With both Facebook and Twitter there are 2 significant problems

• The data doesn’t always come from an RSS feed – individual Facebook apps programmers use various methods to pull data, and often Facebook items come from other sources. The source on Twitter could be any one of the many RSS to Twitter services, but equally could be a WordPress plugin.
• Items get shared – shared items in Google reader have often affected Feedburner data in the past, how does this work with retweets?

It is good to see services like Postrank now feature within Feedburner stats, as they provide various ways to filter RSS content on multiple topics, and then include only the best items for you to read.
(Niche marketers will probably find a way to make best use of that)

Note: I do have specific strategic reasons why I don’t currently display any RSS subscription options, or even an email subscription box.
This post used to have lots of comments, but Disqus hasn’t managed to sync them after 2 days.

It is amazing how long it takes for things to catch up, the following was written over 15 months ago, and the numbers are really still totally inaccurate

Originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

I have been digging around in my Feedburner stats to see how various social streaming and life streaming applications I use are reporting data to Feedburner.

Friendfeed

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feedreader & Aggregator
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +http://friendfeed.com/about/bot)

5 subscribers

Blogcatalog

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Bot
Blogcatalog bot

1 hit

MyBlogLog

I am not sure which Yahoo service they are reporting as, so I am listing a few possibilities

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feed Readers and Aggregators
My Yahoo
A web-based newsreader that allows you to select and manage RSS headlines within a My Yahoo! account.
42 subscribers

There is also Yahoo! Slurp and Yahoo Test Bot – both listed as bots

Is Lifestreaming Subscribing?

Here are some reasons Lifestreaming should count as a subscription

• Personal – with most applications views can be attributed to individual users
• Selected – unlike meme trackers, someone has made a specific choice to read your content
• Trackable – if necessary it would be possible to identify only active users
• Traffic – traffic from lifestreaming is quite visible, though it is hard to determine if it comes from a RSS subscription link, or when someone tweets about you, or maybe from being Stumbled or dugg
• Email – Friendfeed sends subscriptions by email too – does that make it 2 subscriptions?
• Active – people are actually using these services more and more, and subscription data would thus be a useful representation

There are some aspects I am not sure should be counted, but are probably more valuable data than from many feedreaders

• Profile views – MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Friendfeed all allow visitors to view content before deciding to subscribe to it in some way – whist no long term commitment is made, a lot of this activity can be attributed to individual unique users, thus could be counted as a subscriber in some way.
• Shared Social Media Links – as mentioned before, when links to your site appear having been dugg, stumbled or shared in Google Reader – whilst this can result in traffic, it might not be something that can be counted as it is not necessarily related to the RSS feed, but to the permalink.
• MyBlogLog Topics – this is based upon their tagging system (I have wanted it to link to content for ages – make sure you update and cleanup your tags) – I don’t think it would be appropriate for this data to end up in RSS subscription stats
• BlogCatalog Social Search – also recently introduced and whilst it doesn’t have RSS yet (nudge Daniel) I can see this happening in the future – again this is a search much like you would have on Technorati or Google Blogsearch

RSS Bankruptcy

Depending on how you use these sites, they can add or subtract to the total information overload you are subjecting yourself to. I am not sure whether my own usage patterns are typical, but I find I am using Social and lifestreaming more than RSS Readers.

I have 1000s of unread items in my RSS readers, though on a lifestreaming service I am not reading every item either.

If the conversation is moving away from blogs there needs to be a way to measure it, track it and possibly respond to it.

I still am not sure how to react to the new item sharing feature introduced today on Blogcatalog, where someone can share items to people following them on the Dashboard, and to their Shared widget, and leave a comment.
When I first heard that this was going to be coming just a few days ago, I immediately thought that I would be vocally against it, but it is like a Stumbleupon review or a Delicious bookmark – it is not trying to start a new conversation, just tell someone why you are sharing the link.

The problem is that people will only share content using a certain number of different methods. Isn’t it best to use the one that is most likely to be seen across multiple networks?

Disclaimer: I consult a little with Blogcatalog

Update

After a little exploring it appears Friendfeed posted about this earlier on their blog and there is further coverage on Louis Gray

Firstly I like linking to people who link to me, whether on the post they first wrote, or on the syndicated copy that now appears on SEOmoz, even when the name referenced is “Andy Beal”.

Google is going to have a hard time deciding which is duplicate content, and will probably pick the SEOmoz article because it is the domain with the most authority.

If you syndicate articles or blog posts, make sure they link back to the original version, whichever you consider original. I am not going to help Google, as I have linked to both.

Android vs Blackberry Smartphones

I probably know as much about smartphones as Matt Cutts does about… poodles (he is a cat lover)

I have a SIMM card with a 7 mbps connection, but purely as a backup or for when I am travelling around Poland and am somewhere I can’t get good wifi. The SIMM works in one of my wife’s cast off mobile phones in an emergency.

As detailed in the linked posts, Google gave away lots of Android mobile phones to developers. That is something I am very familiar with – I used to work in the games industry and among other things handled relationships with all the PC Manufacturers. AMD, Intel, Creative Labs, Nvidia, Matrox,  etc etc.

Even though NDAs have now expired (I think the longest was Intel’s at 5 years) I am not going to go into specific details but here are the challenges.

• Developers had to create custom code to support specific features – this could take days, weeks even months.
• The testing teams would have to text code in a matrix, combining various processors with graphics and sound cards
• The support teams would have to create documentation for each possible platform and potential conflicts

In those days we were working with multiple standards, processors had lots of proprietary 3D functions, graphics cards not only had different features, but also different graphics libraries to access them, 3DFX, OpenGL and DirectX, and even sound cards had different features and sound libraries.

Some might look on it as a lot of back scratching, but it was a symbiotic relationship – it probably still is.

Developers had early access to hardware, sometimes months, even a whole year in advance. Different terms were subject to negotiation, status etc.

In exchange there were lots of cross-marketing possibilities, certainly linking happened, but also branding on boxes, adverts, possible lucrative OEM deals etc.

Whilst this might seem to favor the larger development studios, and it did in some ways, ultimately small development studios, if they got on board could certainly gain a “leg up” from the hardware guys, and this is something I was very active to encourage.

Thus Google giving away a few hundred, even a few 1000 mobile phones is barely a grain of sand compared to what is given out behind the scenes.

Google I/O Was Press

From what I can see, there were tons of press representitives at Google I/O, they received tons of coverage from notable tech blogs.

Press have always received free samples of hardware, or at least most have, though many publications have rules about keeping the “gear”, auction it off for charity, give it away as prizes etc.

In doing so that can help them remain impartial because they are not keeping the item.

Paid Links

The paid links saga of 2007 didn’t really clear anything up and effectively swept issues under the table, with the untouchables remaining untouchable. Michael Gray is forced to nofollow advertiser links.

Payola or Blogola, whatever you wish to call it still exists, and is practiced by Google.

Affect on Search Results?

When Matt Cutts defends Google’s actions because Google doesn’t need links, that isn’t quite the whole truth.

It is quite true that Google doesn’t need to rank for “search engine” in Google

Here in Poland, a search for “Android” which used to be a very generic term, the first 4 results point to sites about Google’s Android operating system.

But Google doesn’t rank for Mobile Phone, and even their partner, HTC who made both the G1 and G2 handsets only rank 3rd for smartphone, using US Geolocation and personalized search off (not that I search for this topic… ever), with Blackberry in 2nd.
Actually that was yesterday, looks like HTC now rank 2nd, and Blackberry has been pushed down the results.

Here are the current results for various terms:-

Smartphone

http://www.google.com/search?q=smartphone&pws=0&gl=US

Smartphones

http://www.google.com/search?q=smartphones&pws=0&gl=US

Smart Phone

http://www.google.com/search?q=smart+phone&pws=0&gl=US

Smart Phones

http://www.google.com/search?q=smart+phones&pws=0&gl=US

HTC Cloaking

Just try accessing this link which is the one that appears in search results – certainly from Poland I end up on different pages, based upon IP.

http://www.htc.com/ (I nofollowed the link – I am not going to link to a Blackhat site that is cloaking)

It is cloaking – users see different pages compared to search engines, though I am sure their SEO team hate the flash.

I see an English language snippet, and land on their Polish language site /pl/

The only way to see the root domain is in the Google cache.

With Google buying them links all over the blogosphere, they don’t need to worry, they don’t even need to buy PPC advertising, unlike Blackberry.

In a battle where HTC have only 180K links and Blackberry have 300K+, visitor data suggests Blackberry is still killing HTC, and other factors, the notion that Google’s partner doesn’t need more links is harder to excuse.

Btw Blackberry sell Smartphones -and don’t cloak their Smartphone website

Palm also sell Smartphones, but aren’t going to get links such as Smartphone or Smartphones unless they fix their funny redirects as well.

Then of course there is the IPhone – it would make a great TV gadget using Boxee, but all the plans in Poland offer at most 5GB of data – not interested. At least when I seach for Apple or Iphone in Google, I get given a link in the search results which is the page I end up on (in Polish). When I search with US geolocation, I get the US result for Iphone, which I click on and get the appropriate landing page.

p.s. Google no longer remembering my search preferences such as &pws=0&gl=US in both Firefox and Chrome is annoying me severely, and almost seems to be a deliberate change in implimentation.

p.p.s. This post does not contain any links for which I have received financial compensation. I haven’t received any compensation for this post from HTC (for the SEO review), Palm and Blackberry (for the nice rich anchor text) – if any of them decide to send me a free phone that won’t influence me to write about them again, and the test period due to infrequent usage might last a few years… but I am a “software developer” and “technology blogger”.
SEOmoz, Michael Gray and Fantomaster have linked to me and tweeted about my posts from time to time.

p.p.p.s Disclaimer:- I don’t class myself as an SEO consultant, this post is my personal opinion, and Google is the final decision maker over whether their commercial partner (HTC) is cloaking or not, and defines what is or isn’t a paid link. Maybe a expert on search engine cloaking could offer some advice.

Update

Just so we are totally clear over what is or isn’t allowed under the Google Webmaster guidelines, here is what Google stated in their official blogpost on the webmaster blog.

Geolocation: Serving targeted/different content to users based on their location. As a webmaster, you may be able to determine a user’s location from preferences you’ve stored in their cookie, information pertaining to their login, or their IP address. For example, if your site is about baseball, you may use geolocation techniques to highlight the Yankees to your users in New York.

The key is to treat Googlebot as you would a typical user from a similar location, IP range, etc. (i.e. don’t treat Googlebot as if it came from its own separate country—that’s cloaking).

Here is the video they also included:-

The only way I could get to the page Googlebot sees was looking at a cache on Google

UK Smartphone SERPS

Lots of SEOs seem to think brands have been pushed to the front of the SERPs, but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case in the UK with the #1 manufacterer of Smartphones pushed to the 4th page of the SERPs potentially because they use “legitimate” SEO practices (there are a few things that need to be cleared up, hope their SEO team are working on it)

IP delivery can have significant benefits – if a UK user is forced to visit the UK site, even when clicking through from a US search result, the default link they will use will be to the page for the UK.

It is something that can be done without breaking Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Update 2

More from Michael on Google Being Biased, plus a followup from Lisa on Google Profiling SEOs As Criminals

Silly me, I should have also linked to Rae’s Blackberry News site

Seems both of them overlooked HTC’s cloaking

With SmartPhones now being looked on as a necessity (at least in the US among Tech bloggers) there is obviously a huge competitive market, thus any search spam should be heavily monitored by Google.

Last August Dan Thies revealed the amazing story about how Brad Fallon, Stompernet founder and owner of MyWeddingFavors.com was kicked out of Google, because of people exploiting bugs in Google.

For many people the “proxy hacking” explanation was extremely complicated to understand (I struggled), but what wasn’t revealed was how Brad’s company survived (and grew) without his top Google listings.

It is now revealed, in a 54 minute video with typical (extraordinary) Stompernet style.

Note: I just checked in on the proxy hacking post and it seems Google might be taking action on this particular issue

I love the free videos and tools that Stompernet produce for their product launches, you can learn so much and there is no pressure selling – you can also pick up some great tips on how to improve the production quality of your own videos.

Get the free video here

p.s. you don’t have to give your email address to watch all of this 54 minute video, but I do suggest you sign up to get notifications for when they release future segments.

I am someone who loves using RSS, but at the same time as a business owner I find RSS is not living up to its current billing.

Whilst I haven’t mentioned RSS day before on this blog, I have known about Daniel’s plans for a month, and I might have been the first one to suggest using a dedicated site to promote RSS Day. This avoids what might be looked on as purely an attempt at linkbait.

Premium RSS Content

• I want to be able to provide premium content delivered by RSS
• I also want to consume premium content delivered by RSS.
• I am honestly sick of paying for access to content, but having to visit each site in turn to actually read it.

The premium content is currently served behind pay walls, as web content, PDFs, sometimes even video. All of this content could easily be delivered by RSS.
It is even often the case that Google is allowed to index this content, and serve advertising on it, but if I want to read it, I have to actually visit the site.

Against Google Business Model

Google makes money serving advertising along side or within content, thus in many ways it serves Google’s long term goals if “all information is free”

Unfortunately some content isn’t “mass market” and takes a huge amount of time in preparation – CPC, CPA & CPM monetization solutions are not sufficient compensation.

In addition, using authentication, it is possible to deliver different content to different users. For Google that would mean that the open rate of individual RSS feeds would be less valuable within their search algorithms.

But That Is What Email Is For

I know people will argue that if you want private delivery of information, email is the perfect choice. There are huge drawbacks.

• Spam filters block content we want to receive – sometimes I even get my contact form messages arriving in Gmail’s spam bin
• Opt-In Mechanisms are confusing for many readers – only 60% of the people who initially requested to receive my blog content by Feedburner’s RSS to Email service actually confirmed their subscription
• CAN SPAM – there are lots of hoops to jump through for commercial email, and these are increasing
• Multimedia – why can’t I watch a YouTube video in Gmail yet?
• Privacy – some people are scared to give out their primary email address

Reading email seems to be a very selective process with significant restraints for security

• You can’t read a “river of email” even though that would be a huge time saver
• I don’t know of an email client that allows you to quickly share emails using a single hotkey combination – it is possible to apply filters for forwarding, but that is less liable to human error when tired, drunk, or when you have a 1 year old on your lap

Suggestions For Google Reader

• Google Reader needs to support some kind of HTTP Authentication for access to secure personal content
• Support for controls that restrict sharing of content to shared public accessible feeds – not just the primary shared feeds, but also label shared feeds

This isn’t the first time I have written about this, in many ways this is a pet topic as it is very much a core feature I want to be able to use for my business both as a provider of premium content, and a consumer.

Corporate Solutions

I know there are corporate solutions available which feature quite extensive control, after all for internal adoption of RSS for company intranets, this level of control is essential.

Many existing consumer RSS Readers support authentication – it isn’t a major programming hurdle, though might consume additional storage resources – I can’t beleive Google lack the resources to make this possible.

Premium content is something that needs to be accessible by consumers, thus I hope that any future solution provided by Google isn’t planned for their premium business solutions.

The Future Of RSS (at least on this blog)

In the near future I plan to deliver premium content by RSS – much of it will still be free of charge – if at that time Google Reader doesn’t support various access controls, I will restrict access and block Google Reader

This might be looked on as extreme, but I first discussed these problems in October 2006

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)

I just spotted a story on Sphinn that will likely get deleted because it is all in Russian – the Google Directory has apparently been updated from DMOZ data from 08/01/2008 (European date notation)

That wouldn’t be significant other than Google lists pagerank alongside the listings in their version of DMOZ

I have highlighted a few sites that as far as I am aware still have a manual PageRank penalty for what Google might consider selling PageRank Passing Links, including this one.

If you look carefully you will notice that the values shown in the Google Directory are considerably higher than those shown on the Google Toolbar.

It seems Google used their real dataset for PageRank for the Google Directory export, forgetting that they are telling their millions of users lies on their toolbar with manual penalties, which until now had no visible proof.

Google have the right to do whatever they like with their search engine, but this is another major demonstration of how Google are manipulating public and advertiser opinion. They still state that the toolbar PageRank displayed is:-

Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar’s PageRankâ„¢ display to tell you how Google assesses the importance of the page you’re viewing.

It seems my listing which was previously as a PR5 has moved up a number of places, so there is a good chance I am now on the bottom of the PR6 sites listed.

Lets be clear, even though I am most likely a PR6 site, I am not selling PageRank when I write reviews, they are editorial links.

Lets take a little look at why they might have done this.

Google Is A Business

It is actually quite a large business, and each division within a division is probably accountable for their own earnings. The Adsense referral program for new business is probably individually accountable.

Current (Old) System Earnings

Based upon quarterly and yearly reports, Google on average pay publishers only 29% of advertising revenue. Larger publishers probably get a larger piece of the action, so it is quite possible a new publisher only receives 25%

For every dollar earned, Google receive $4

Referrals Changes the Math

For the first $5 of earnings in 6 months, they pay a referral fee of $5, thus Google only make 50%

If a publisher earns $100 in 6 months, Google pay a referral fee of $250, thus of the $400 they receive in advertising revenues, they pay out $350… plus there is a bonus

For 25 people who make $100 within a 180 day period you get a bonus payment of $2000, that is $80 per person

In theory, Google could pay out $430 for every $400 received

This is potentially a loss leader…

In practice only a small number of people make it even to $5, and even less to $100 within 180 days. Darren mentioned in his article that he has never achieved the bonus, though if he comes close, those $250 fees for the ones that do make $100 must be reasonably lucrative.

The New System

The Adsense Team are reverting back to $100 for $100 earned in 180 days with no bonuses
Also the countries are now restricted to North America, Latin America, or Japan – for the referrer

What Darren and Shoemoney didn’t pick up on is that is existing referrals don’t qualify by the time this is introduced, it seems like you will only receive compensation based upon the new structure, not the old. That is significant if you were in some way paying for advertising based on anticipated earnings over 6 months based upon prior statistics.

Gaming Adsense With Referral Hydras

For me the obvious reason why they would restrict this to only partners in certain counties is fraud, or gaming the system. Google is made up of regional offices, so it would be hard to separate Eastern Europe from the rest of Europe, or Australia from others in the Pacific region.

If you look at this from the point of view of a person in a low income country, there is a potential $430 that could be earned instead of $100 for the clicks you might receive on a website you own that has reasonable traffic, all you need is new Adsense accounts.

Here is how such a system could work

1. Find 25 people who would be interested in earning $100 from Google just for providing their personal details

I can’t honestly imagine this wouldn’t be hard in many developing countries

2. Place the advertising units from those referrals on your own websites such that they will earn $100 within a month
3. The person referred gets $100 in Adsense earnings
4. You get to cash $330 instead of $100

Rinse and repeat

If you don’t want to give $100 away, you could always set up shell companies., but I don’t think it is really worth the effort, it would be easy to find people willing to earn $100 for doing nothing.

If you are just doing blackhat stuff this provides an unlimited supply of fresh Adsense accounts, and you earn everything 100% “legitimately” as just the referrer.

Can It Really Be That Many People Doing This?

If you were a slightly shady blackhat, wouldn’t you like to keep your Adsense earnings 100% clean, and earn 3x as much?

Especially if you were living in a slightly poorer country, or had contacts in one… China, Russia..

Would This Hurt Google Financially

Certainly if it got out of hand. Most of these referrals would earn their $100 and then drop off the face of the earth after they cached their checks.

Could It Be Another Reason?

I am sure growth rates outside 1st World countries are fast enough without the financial incentive for referrals, and there is always a question of scaling up support costs, and the lack of competitive advertising.
With low paying clicks outside the English speaking world, those that are active Adsense publishers are often more inclined to experiment with more grey or blackhat methods, because they don’t necessarily have to create their own content to make money.

Too Good To Be True

I always looked on the referral program to be full of holes

• You don’t know who you referred so you can’t help them, unless it is by arrangement
• You can’t honestly declare you make money by referring people, it is against the referral program terms, though they encourage word of mouth marketing.
• The reporting was always a little on the basic side
• The time period for qualification was far too long and it seems that has come back to bite people

For a negative change such as this, you would expect a full 6 months notice, or for referrals who qualify within 6 months to be paid at the old rate.
For referring publishers outside North & South America, and Japan, they are effectively being told that all those referrals they have made that haven’t quite earned $100 by the end of January will not be paid.

I am glad I haven’t promoted Google Adsense for 2 years.

Update

The vocal reaction to the changes encouraged a change of heart for Google Adsense Referrals, though it still isn’t perfect. I can understand the decreases, but they shouldn’t affect existing referrals, at all.
With the Adsense referral program, your task is to get people to sign up, you have no influence on their performance and how quickly that is achieved. All existing referrals should be under the original terms, as many affiliates may have to pay advertising costs which they assumed, based upon expected earnings.

Google should have to bite the bullet and assume the cost of maintaining the referral payouts the same for 6 months from date of sign up. It is not like they are going to face financial hardship.

It seems Google want all links within content that “wouldn’t exist without payment” to use nofollow, but seems to be focusing on services like PayPerPost, and not other forms of links which wouldn’t exist without compensation.

• Matt Cutts frequently links to Google from his personal blog – if he wasn’t employed by Google, those links would likely not appear as frequently.
• Google employees link to outside sites all the time, and they are frequently sites that are “flying the Google flag” in some way, prominent Adsense partners, large corporate partners etc.
• Shareholders frequently link through to the companies they invested in (I wonder what Fred Wilson might think about not being allowed to link to Twitter)
• I know Robert Scoble is leaving Podtech on 14th January, but Podtech have always had SEO friendly links to their sponsors, both on Podtech and on Robert’s own blog
• Google themselves sponsor events such as Leweb3 recently, and for as long as I remember, links have always been part of event sponsorship packages, even before Google. Even attending an event or being an exhibitor, one of the “perks” is often some kind of profile online along with a link.
• On many business directories, you get a free listing, but if you want a link to your website, you have to have a paid entry, whether the links are followed or not. Yahoo wouldn’t give me a free listing as this is a commercial blog – I wouldn’t honestly buy a Yahoo entry for $300 for the traffic
• Techcrunch and many other sites still get away with thanking their advertisers with links that are followed, and many still have graphical advertising without nofollow
• Search Engine Land and the SMX Events (and even Sphinn) wouldn’t probably exist in the same way without corporate sponsorship, very often by the large search engines. Should Danny nofollow every link in every post he mentions Google, Yahoo or Microsoft?
• Rand has mentioned the occasional client within posts, and SEOmoz does have a clients page – should all links be nofollowed to clients? Should there be a difference between a $10, $100 and $10,000 client?
• Carsten Cumbrowski when writing on Search Engine Journal has frequently tried to get clarification from Google regarding affiliate links that pass juice, to no avail.
• Shoemoney has a great disclosure policy (blanket coverage like this is honest), stating that “You should assume I have motivation for linking to everything on this page and will benefit from it somehow.” – maybe he should now nofollow every external link?
• In the past I have received income from both Google Adsense and PayPerPost – that means there is a certain amount of earned goodwill.

Should I now nofollow every link in this post because it is in some way previously compensated?

Just before Christmas I received a “Postie Pack”, with a few small trinkets that Tamar Weinberg would be proud to add to her collection of Schwag, so I am “double cursed” – lots of people earn similar (much more expensive) trinkets from Google every year.

Even worse, as I have hinted in the past I am looking at creating a startup that is affected at least partially by this issue, falling in the grey area of employees, stock holders, semi-automated contextual linking, affiliate links etc – I am triple cursed.

I couldn’t possibly include followable links in this post, so why bother linking to anyone?

A Review Is A Resource

When I write a review, I try to make it valuable content, often 3000 words or more, and I ensure I have editorial discretion on who I link to, not just to someone ordering a review, but also to other sites, whether they are competitors, or useful resources that are related to the review I am writing.
I also like to have the option of linking internally to related content.

Who you link to is likely looked on as part of ranking calculations used by search engines because it helps define the topical authority of a resource.

The compensation I receive from writing a review doesn’t cover the time I spend on them, so for a review to bring in search traffic and potential subscribers is important.

Technical Hurdles

This site being created using WordPress also offers a technical challenge that currently there isn’t a solution for. If I reference another WordPress blog post, it is most likely to receive a pingback. However spam detection software is likely to spot that I have nofollow on a link, and flag me as a pingback spammer.

Thus Google is forcing me not to link to blog posts from compensated reviews just in case I might get myself blacklisted as a spammer.

WordPress does not have granular control of pingbacks, and I doubt Google are going to fund the development of such control.

There is another problem of course, both Technorati and Google Blogsearch ignore links with nofollow, so even if I give someone an editorial link from a compensated post or paid review, they might not find out about it unless they set up specific Google alerts for their domain name being mentioned.

(note to Lucia: Don’t solve this one unless Google pays you)

Paid Content or Paid Links Are the Devil?

The next thing Google will dictate is that all compensated content should use Yahoo’s robots-nocontent class so that it doesn’t appear in the search engines at all.

This really is looking less and less about the quality of search results, and more about the failings of Google’s algorithms.

If Google paid me for a review of Google Reader, I should be able to link (without nofollow) to specific features of their terms of service, their faq, the Google Reader blog etc at my own editorial discretion.
I should also be able to link to other quality reviews of Google Reader, useful Greasemonkey scripts, Howtos etc, and above all competitors.

Those people didn’t pay for the review, I should be able to link to them without nofollow

I should also be able to link in an editorial manner to the site purchasing a review, as many don’t even request a link… seriously – but it appears Google have problems with the quality of links from anyone not in corporate employment.

This Is Different To The Webmaster Guidelines

Time to rewrite the Google webmaster guidelines yet again, and make everything abundantly clear exactly what classes as compensation and what is allowed – no fuzzy grey area that is biased against the self-employed, the small business owner or the less well off.

There is absolutely no way I can comply with these current new demands, I would have to stick nofollow on every link within some of my most popular and highly rated content.

So far the best estimate for having a landline for internet access provided by the Polish national carrier is 10 months, so I am using a GSM solution which in my remote part of Poland seems to clock in slightly faster than what I would expect from UMTS so might be giving me a slow HSDPA signal.

I really wish I had been able to respond sooner, because I am actually quite disappointed in the way “facts” were portrayed, and because from what I can see no SEOs actually did any in depth research of what Matt was presenting.

I Did Some Homework

Two weeks ago, I think on the Sunday after Matt posted I read the post and the first 400 or so comments, plus all the stories related to it that appeared on Sphinn. I am going to try to cover a few different angles that I haven’t seen elsewhere, though that doesn’t mean these opinions haven’t been already been voiced by someone. There is only so much catching up you can do after 2 weeks out of the trenches.

Was This Really Cleared By Legal?

Maybe Google have run out of PHDs to hire in the legal department, but it seems there is a real grammatical clanger here.

Now I’m going to ask you to put on your regular user hat. If you’ve just learned that you or a family member have a tumor, would you prefer that radiosurgery overview article from the Mayo Clinic, or from a site which appears to be promoting a specific manufacturer of medical equipment via paid posts? My guess is that you’d prefer the Mayo Clinic.

The site in Matt’s screenshot isn’t the one that might appear in the search results as a result of the “paid” links. The site that would appear is the one being linked to. This one which has been around just as long as the paid reviews when checking on archive.org

The oldest version of the site even seems to have a link to investor information, though that is not in the archive, so it seems very strongly to suggest that the domain was intended for use by the manufacturers of the Gamma Knife in some way.

I notice Matt didn’t link through to the final site so people could do a fair evaluation. Matt was certainly suggesting Google’s line was that the site in some way was junk that didn’t deserve to be in the search results and that the other sites linked to had more reason to appear.

Another site that also seems to be by the manufacturer is this one on GammaKnife.org

It seems to me the manufacturer, Elekta, the registered trademark and patent holder were trying to do some understandable reputation management and SEO work, or someone was doing it on their behalf, because at least from my location if you search in Google for “Gamma Knife” Elekta’s corporate website doesn’t appear.

That is about the same as John Chow not ranking for John Chow.

Maybe they have some problems with their website design they might want to fix first, and maybe they should have done that before thinking about paid reviews, but to suggest any of their sites don’t deserve some kind of placement is misleading.

They are not “just one manufacturer” – they hold the trademark for what they wanted a satellite site to rank for.

Language

Lets face it, the people who generally need money enough to write reviews for $10 are not normally PHDs, though many people who write for PayPerPost are highly qualified, certainly more than I am.

Then again my wife just finished her Masters, and though in Europe it is not looked on as politically correct to brag about how well you pass a masters, she averages over 4.5/5 so walked away with an A or 5/5 overall grade.

Most people look on her being fluent in English, though she doesn’t write English as much as she should and thus makes stupid mistakes.

If she was under pressure to write 200 words in 15 minutes she would struggle without my help to write flawless English.

Payment

There is no way to prove whether the person writing the paid posts actually received payment. The posts might have been rejected for all kinds of reasons, such as the number of reviews that seem to be paid posted one after the other, and the general low quality.

Disclosure

I checked 2 of the posts depicted in Matt’s screenshots. The first had a very clear disclosure in the sidebar, and the 4th had a disclosure policy badge that links to a clear disclosure policy.

As far as humans are concerned I would class that as better disclosure than Matt personally uses for posts such as his recent recap of everything Google and how often do you see Matt openly criticize his employer.

There are lots of posts on Matt’s blog, if you were wearing a “regular user hat” and just appeared on a permalink page from a search result, where you wouldn’t realise that Matt is writing as an employee and shareholder.

In fact, if you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts.

Matt has a disclaimer, but it is not in the content of every post (yes I am also guilty that my disclosure policy plugin is currently switched off due to a bug I haven’t had time to fix, but I have in post disclosure of some kind regardless for every paid post/review)

A Blacker Than Black Example Flawed, How About Grey?

I might be biased, but I think the gamma knife example whilst at first glance was a travesty, when you delve into it a little you realise that Google’s argument in that particular case was just as equally flawed.

What would happen if they tried to explain the links their own media buyers bought from the recent Leweb3 site, or various SEO conferences without nofollow.

Those are clearly advertising links, and if you take either the spirit or the letter of “Google’s Paid Links Law”, they are guilty. If Google doesn’t set a good clear example, how can they expect the rest of the internet to understand what exactly is or isn’t allowed?

I do agree in the case of the gamma knife that the posts were most likely ordered for SEO reasons, just like many press releases about mundane events get published, or junk articles get syndicated.

The saddest thing is that none of the trusted resources Matt listed actually link through to the manufacturer of Gamma Knife, Elekta other than Wikipedia… with a nofollow link.

This article does not reference Google Toolbar PageRank in any way

First of all you are going to need to do a little homework.

Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts

The Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts was truly exceptional and revealed a number of gotchas that for some reason continue to be circulated.

Key takeaways

Matt Cutts: … Now, robots.txt says you are not allowed to crawl a page, and Google therefore does not crawl pages that are forbidden in robots.txt. However, they can accrue PageRank, and they can be returned in our search results.

Matt Cutts: … So, with robots.txt for good reasons we’ve shown the reference even if we can’t crawl it, whereas if we crawl a page and find a Meta tag that says NoIndex, we won’t even return that page. For better or for worse that’s the decision that we’ve made. I believe Yahoo and Microsoft might handle NoIndex slightly differently which is little unfortunate, but everybody gets to choose how they want to handle different tags.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won’t be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn’t make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

I have just provided a couple of highlights, I am not attempting to replace a need for visiting the site I am citing. This is something I hate seeing, when people take other people’s content and repurpose it, thus making the original article worthless.
There are a few other gotchas in there, I suggest you read it 2 or 3 times to really understand what was said, and what wasn’t said.

Dangling Pages

One of the best descriptions of dangling pages is on the Webworkshop site, though they are assuming that links are totally taken out of the equation based on what they quote from the PageRank paper.

“Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.” – extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Alternate interpretation

This is just an aside, as the amount of juice lost to dangling pages currently is hard to determine, and could be handled differently

They are assuming that if page A links to 6 other pages, 5 of them being dangling links, then the website will be treated as only having 2 pages until the end of the calculation.

Whilst I haven’t delved into the maths (and probably couldn’t through lack of information and lack of knowledge), it also seems to me that at the time the pages are taken out of the cyclic calculation, a percentage of the link value can still be taken with them.

Thus though the site for cyclic calculations will be just 2 pages, the link from A to B might only transfer 1/6 of the juice on each cycle.

At the time the original paper was written, Google only had a small proportion of the web indexed due to hardware and operating system restraints.
In modern times they have a lot more indexed, thus a more complex way of handling dangling pages could be possible.

More food for thought, a link to a page that is considered supplemental could be treated as a full link or as a link to a dangling page, or some other variant.

Even more food for thought, a site with multiple interlinked pages with no external links at all could be looked on as a “dangling site”.

Ultimately what is important is that dangling pages are a juice leak, though it is difficult to determine exactly how much

Additional Research On Link Juice Flow

I have referenced these works before, and I am just going to keep on referring people to them.

• SEOFastStart by Dan Thies – a good introduction to SEO, and also introduces the ideas of controlling juice around a website – no email signup required
• Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell – a timeless classic as long as PageRank continues to be important – the download page isn’t hidden if you really don’t want to sign up to Michael’s mailing list, but I have been on his list for years.
• Dynamic Linking by Leslie Rhode – A bonus that comes with Revenge of the Mininet

I mentioned these is a comment on SEOmoz recently in a discussion on PageRank, and for some reason my comment received just 2 up votes and one down vote.

I don’t gain in any material way from promoting these free ebooks, though I might gain some goodwill. The main reason I link to them is because they are a superb resource, and it saves me countless hours writing beginners material.

OK, On to some debunking

Blocking Pages With Robots.txt Creates Dangling Pages On The First Tier

In the quoted paragraph above, Matt clearly states that pages blocked with Robots.txt still accumulate juice from the links they receive.

Those pages don’t have any external 2nd tier links that are visible to a ‘bot, thus they are dangling pages.

How much juice they leak depends on how Google currently factor in dangling pages, but Matt himself suggests not to create dangling pages.

If you read any SEO Guide that suggests that the ultimate cure for duplicate content is to block it with robots.txt, I suggest you might want to question the author about dangling pages.

Meta NoIndex Follow Duplicate Content

This is a better solution than using Robots.txt, because it doesn’t create dangling pages. Links on a duplicate content page are still followed, however both internal and external links are followed and thus are leaks, often multiple leaks for the same piece of content when using CMS systems such as WordPress which create site-wide links in the sidebar when using poorly designed themes, plugins, and especially WordPress Widgets.

If you read an article suggesting using Meta Noindex Follow, ask the author how they are controlling external links on duplicate content pages.

Meta NoIndex Nofollow Duplicate Content

If you use Meta Noindex Nofollow, whilst this is handled slightly differently by Google to Robots.txt, as the page won’t appear in search results, it is still a page accumulating Google Juice if you link to it, another dangling page or node.
Second tier leaks from the page won’t leak, but the page as a whole will leak depending on how Google are currently handling dangling pages.

I don’t see people recommending this frequently, but as with Robots.txt, ask the author about dangling pages.

Dynamic Linking & rel=”nofollow”

Extensive use of Nofollow and other forms of dynamic linking are the only way to effectively prevent duplicate content pages in some way having a effect on your internal linking structure and juice flow. The Wikipedia page on Nofollow really isn’t correct.

The Dangling Sales Page

To finish I want to give you an example of how a sales page that previously might have benefited from lots of links can easily be turned into a dangling page and effectively discounted from cyclic PageRank calculations.

Sales pages started off just as a single page with no links:-

Despite all the links coming to the site from external sources, this website is a dangling page, thus excluded from iterative PageRank calculations. It might still benefit from anchor text and other factors, but it effectively is not part of Google’s global mesh and passes on no influence.

Add Legal Paperwork And Reciprocal Links Directory:-

A much more structured site, and whilst it gains some benefit from reciprocating links there are 2 factors that are almost universally overlooked.

1. No Longer A Dangling Page – because the site now has external links, it is valid as part of the global ranking calculations. Other pages as mentioned above were previously stating that the amount of juice passed to dangling pages was minimal, so this could be potentially a huge boost.
2. More Pages Indexed – it is only a few pages, but with PageRank it is often not just how much juice you have flowing into a site, but what you do with it.

The reciprocal low quality links might not have had a huge amount of value compared to the benefit of being a member of the “iteration club” and having a few more pages indexed.

Add a link to the designer

Some early single page sales letters were not dangling pages, but didn’t benefit from any internal iterations, and acted as a conduit of juice to their web design firm.

The Danger of Using Nofollow or Robots.txt on Unimportant Pages

I have actually seen this on a few sites:-

• Reciprocal Link Directory Removed
• Link to web designer removed
• Nofollow added to legal papers that are looked on as being unimportant

Such a website is now out of the iteration club, it is a dangling page as it is no longer voting on other pages.

My Own Gotcha

I mentioned that this catches me out as well.

A while ago I wrote an article about linking to Technorati being a problem. It might still be true, but the amount of juice lost through such links might also be lower than I thought, due to Technorati using meta nofollow on every page. Technorati tag pages are themselves dangling pages with no external links.

Wikipedia and Digg on the other hand are not dangling pages. They still have external links to other sites, and thus any links to them are part of iterative calculations.

I would still say it is best to have tags pointing to your own domain tag pages, and to use nofollow on links to Wikipedia and Digg, though with Digg I suggest that is only on links to submission pages which contain no content.

Stumbleupon is also tricky – there are no external links from individual pages, but there is extensive internal linking.

With Digg and Stumbleupon, profiles rank extremely well, so you can use them for reputation management even if you get no juice direct from the profile.

I think I was the first to describe Wikipedia as a black hole of link equity, explained why you should nofollow Wikipedia extensively, and was one of the first to promote Ken’s Nofollow Wikipedia plugin.

You would have thought in 10 months they would have come up with an alternative to using nofollow on all those out-bound links.

They do however link out to a few trusted sites without nofollow, from just a few pages. I suppose Google does still allow them to be part of their iterative calculations.

Another Own Gotcha

This isn’t 100% something I can fix. I have suggested people use robots.txt on certain sites knowing it wasn’t the perfect solution.

You might notice on this site I don’t use an extensive robots.txt, and the design of my site structure is deliberate, but then at the same time I use nofollow with lots of custom theme modifications, and should use it a lot more.

Eventually I will come up with solutions to make things a little easier.

Tools In The Wrong Hands Can Be Dangerous

Using Robots.txt and Meta Noindex, Follow as a cure for duplicate content is a SEO bodge job or SEO bandaid. It may offer some benefits depending on how dangling pages are being handled, but is certainly not an ideal solution due to the amount of leaks that typically remain or dangling pages that are created.