Link to updates from Matt Cutts plus tips on how to continue PageRank sculpting effectively.

Has Google in one quick swipe removed all benefit of Dynamic Linking (old school term) or PageRank sculpting (when it became “trendy”), and potentially caused massive penalties for sites nofollowing links for user generated content and comments?

I have left a few comments on various blog posts over the last few days, especially on SEOmoz and Twitter, but though it important to solidify some thoughts here, and potentially add a little more perspective.

PageRank Sculpting Formerly Known As Dynamic Linking

The idea of controlling the flow of “Google Juice” around a website to pages that matter, or to other sites that matter has been around for a long time, at least as early as 2003 when Leslie Rohde (Stompernet Faculty) was calling it “Dynamic Linking”.

Those were the days before “nofollow” and you had to use Javascript to accomplish the internal linking control.

In the past I have linked to Michael Campbell’s Revenge of the Mininet which also provides access to Leslie’s original Dynamic Linking membership site. They are both now free, (Michael used to charge $79.95 for his ebook)

I am sure I have sent 1000s of people to Michael’s newsletter signup page over the years, but I am equally confident that 90% of the visitors didn’t sign up. I don’t receive any kind of payment recommending Michael’s work, or Leslie’s dynamic linking.

In many ways I look on at least a passing understanding of these groundbreaking ebooks as required reading for any of my SEO articles

From the comments I see on most SEO blogs, and even many of the articles, I am quietly confident that these seminal works haven’t been truly understood, and of course the content rarely gets referenced.

So I am going to do something unprecedented, and I hope Michael won’t mind – the page does appear in the SERPs

Here is a direct download link for Revenge of the Mininet

Once you get there, you can pick up a password to access Leslie’s Dynamic Linking site

Leslie has always had this great disclaimer

DISCLAIMER!

Some of the techniques and technologies described in the foregoing are not without their pitfalls and potential unintended consequences. If you are new to web business, inexperienced at search engine optimization, or do not feel comfortable with HTML and Javascript (at least at a rudimentary level), you should not attempt to employ the advanced techniques shown here!

Access The Source of SEO Knowledge

Michael Campbell

I have just given you access to 4 or 5 year old information that in all likelihood is more advanced than you will find discussed on 95% of SEO blogs and forums, and whilst I don’t from principle/ethics join any private SEO content area to avoid conflict with what I blog about, I am quietly confident that it would still be looked on as advanced content for members only, or not even covered in such depth.

But that is just a trickle of knowledge compared to direct access

Michael has had an internet marketing newsletter for years.
He also now runs a private membership site which is very affordable, and you can follow him on Twitter @dmcorp

Leslie Rohde

I am still eagerly awaiting an update to Leslie’s Dynamic Linking suggested on his SEO Software site.

A major update to this material is currently in process owing to some recently discovered changes in the way Google is processing links. Look for an announcement early next year (2009) — the changes will likely revolutionize on-site linking techniques … again!

Leslie also has an SEO Strategy blog, which he actually updates once in a while. I am going to have to explore the blogging platform he uses, Pebble. You can also follow Leslie on Twitter @leslierohde

There are 2 other ways to learn more from Leslie

1. Just before the New Year Leslie put together a new site “Optimize Recession” where he introduced the idea of “Zone Based SEO” – I mentioned it on Twitter.
   Zone based SEO might seem obvious at first, but it allows you to systematize and possibly even automate specific SEO campaigns, especially now it is possible to extract ranking positions from Google referrer data.
2. Stompernet – Leslie is one of the faculty at Stompernet, who now offer very progressive SEO and marketing training. Start off just by joining their newsletter and the 7 Deadly SEO Sins course plus free videos, and possibly get their “Stomping The Search Engines 2″ course for $1 (plus a trial to their Net Effect magazine)

The Death Of Dynamic Linking With Javascript?

Of everything that has been discussed about Google making changes to which links they will follow and count going forward, how they handle javascript is probably the one that is worth the most consideration.

The first I read about it was on Search Engine Land in an article by Vanessa Fox (who used to work for Google as a member of their webmaster team) covering Google Javascript Links.
(Note: I know that anchor text is very contrived, but SEO is about helping people find what they are searching for, not snake oil or gaming Google)

Having given a great link, I can justify grabbing a small code example

Some examples of code that Googlebot can now execute include:

• <div onclick="document.location.href='http://foo.com/'">

• <tr onclick="myfunction('index.html')"><a href="#"
  onclick="myfunction()">new page</a>

• <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open
  ('welcome.html')">open new window</a>

Javascript That Is Still Dynamic?

This will probably work

onclick=”myfunction(‘jkhhjstdysd’)

Have myfunction() within a file loaded in the header, or preferably in the footer for faster page loading. You would still want to use the CSS that Michael and Leslie suggest for usability.
Somehow define which destination ‘jkhhjstdysd’ refers to, and that could potentially be broken down into components.

If Google somehow cope with that, and possibly easier would be to just use pure external javascript that pulls in some XML, but that then complicates things if you want to mix real links with dynamic ones.

But this is moot if nofollow actually still works.

Does Nofollow Still Work For Dynamic Linking or PageRank Sculpting?

I am going to lead with the freshest insight I have read, Dan Thies (also Stompernet Faculty) thinks things are being blown out of proportion.

Here are the primary opinion pieces and coverage I have seen, though I am sure there were plenty more

Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting

Didn’t comment, was too busy looking for other coverage

Google (Maybe) Changes How the PageRank Algorithm Handles Nofollow

My comment on the post

I can only think that Google have been misinterpreted.

If I have a blog post with 300 comments, and have the links nofollowed (my blog is dofollow but example), then there would effectively be juice lost due to the comment links.

Links are valuable, because they add to the relevance of a comment made, because a reader can follow them to find out more about the person.
However they also form part of disclosure.

If this is only for internal links, there are major problems because often a link will be nofollowed because it points to a tracking link that is also blocked by robots.txt

Any sensible knowledgeable webmaster is going to nofollow those links, because they serve no purpose for Google in their current state, and who wants to turn them into hanging pages.

That may also be a workaround, if Google handles links blocked with Robots.txt differently

No Clarification Forthcoming from Google on Nofollow & PageRank Flow
My comment on the post

I can’t see any evidence that this is affecting external links.

Wikipedia is still a black hole of link equity. If this affected Wikipedia external links, we would see some effect, because due to recursive calculations through internal linking, it could potentially reduce their juice pool by as much as 30%

It would also affect the Ebay group with sites such as epinions.

If it has any effect, it will be internal links only.

The amount of juice lost could be similar to dangling or hanging pages, and due to many poor SEO articles suggesting robots.txt for duplicate content, Google Webmaster guidelines suggesting robots.txt for search results, and just ignoring obvious signals such as TBPR.

Yes, any smart SEO could spot the toolbar showing some green on pages blocked by robots.txt and work things out for themselves.

But the juice goes into the internet ether, and due to macro PageRank calculations, comes back.

If anything, this will help Google surface more long-tail content, and sites with lots of pages will benefit.

Live Blogging Of Matt Cutts @ SMX

You & A With Matt Cutts

Is What’s Good For Google, Good For SEO
Important to read both articles because it gives a clearer insight to the exact wording on lots of different issues.

Alternative Reactions

PageRank Sculpting is Dead? Good Riddance

PageRank Sculpting – Recent Matt Cutts Video

I have to strongly point out that this video was recorded before SMX, and maybe even a week or 2 before. It is on the official Google webmasters channel on YouTube, thus has probably been vetted in some way for accuracy.

Full Transcript

Matt Cutts on PageRank Sculpting

Rand, In Brighton, and that might be Rand Fishkin, I don’t know asks:-

What are your views on ‘PageRank Sculpting’?
Useful and recommended if implemented right, or unethical?

Well I wouldn’t say it is unethical because it is stuff on your website – you are allowed to control how the PageRank flows around withing your site.
Erm, I would say that it is not the first thing that I would work on.
I would work on:-

• Getting more links
• Having higher quality content

Those are always the sort of things that you want to do first.

But then if you have a certain amount of budget of PageRank, erm… you certainly can sculpt your PageRank.
I wouldn’t necessarily do it with the nofollow tag, although you can put a nofollow on a login page, or something that is customized where a robot will never log in for example, but a better more effective form of PageRank sculpting is choosing for example which things to link to from your homepage.

So imagine you have got two different pages.
You have got one product that earns you a lot of money every time someone buys, and you’ve got another product where you make… you know 10 cents.

You probably want to highlight this page. You want to make sure it gets enough PageRank that it can rank well.

So this is more likely to be a page that you want to link to from your home page.

So when people talk about PageRank sculpting, they tend to think nofollow and all that sort of stuff, but in some sense the ways that you choose to create your site, your site architecture, and how you link between your pages is a type of PageRank sculpting.
So it is certainly not unethical to have all the links come into your site, and you decide how to link within your site, and how to make the pages within your site.
Erm, I do think that having more links because you have great content is a better way to rank well because it is a second order effect to be sculpting your PageRank.

It can be useful, but it wouldn’t be the first thing that I would do.

Commentary on Matt’s video I will leave to my good mate Dave
PageRank Sculpting; its all old school baby

Response From Google After SMX About PageRank Sculpting

None…. yet – regard this as a placeholder

I do have some thoughts though:-

1. I think we need a strong statement that external links with nofollow would not cause PageRank to evaporate.
2. Nofollow is a simple solution for user generated content and comments, but if it has any effect of PageRank disappearing, we are going to lose the links on tons of blogs totally.
   It would be a sad day that an action by Google reduced the interlinking of the web.
3. I don’t want to encourage use of javascript for PageRank sculpting – it is not really very good for accessibility
4. Noscript – Nested embedded object items, containing links or thumbnails to source that may well be descriptive of content? This is needed if RSS Readers and web based email clients are going to continue to strip out video embeds.
5. Links that lead to pages blocked with robots.txt and other hanging pages really need to be nofollowed. I think we need to know that in that situation PageRank wouldn’t normally evaporate, but I can understand why that might not be confirmed.
6. I would love a much clearer indication of page size that Google will index as there are just vague notions that it can be more than 100 links per page.
   If a size is specified, is that gzipped?

Matt Cutts On PageRank Sculpting

Matt Cutts today (June 16th 2009) wrote a post confirming that Google now treats PageRank significantly differently than the original PageRank patent, and that links with nofollow, whilst they don’t pass PageRank to the linked page, also can reduce the amount of PageRank that flows to other links on a page.

Rank Fishkin has already responded with analysis
Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow

I also missed this commentary from Matt Leonard on why this could potentially make life harder for niche sites

There are bound to be more posts appearing on Techmeme today

PageRank Sculpting Isn’t Dead – It Has Evolved

Lets take a look at my WordPress SEO Masterclass

Those Red links in the Sandcastle structure are not nofollow, they are oneway linkage.

It can be achieved with fairly simple coding, I even posted part of it over 2 years ago though the code needs to be updated for WordPress tagging rather than UTW.

This linking structure still works extremely effectively, but with one major caveat – internal & external links on the tag pages being used to channel juice back to the home page can’t be nofollowed.

If you are using default WordPress “ugly excerpts” they don’t contain any HTML content, no links to worry about other than the links to the posts.
Tag pages should thus be restuctured to highlight your best content, otherwise you end up with 3rd level push. 3rd level push in most cases isn’t a bad thing, if you don’t have a lot of comment links.

Rather than remove links that you previously nofollowed, the key is to add additional internal links to useful pages.

There are ways to handle the comment links, retain the benefit of having the comment content on your blog, and even keep giving your visitors a little link equity (dofollow links), though that solution will require significant programming effort.

Blogspot bloggers are now totally messed up, as even adding nofollow to their tag links isn’t going to retain juice.

Those who based their internal linking on my advice are not significantly affected by this change, and as this actually happened over a year ago, it is one of the reasons they have benefited.

The new PageRank sculpting could be looked on as advance information architecture, which was always the advanced PageRank sculpting

Expect a new WordPress SEO Masterclass soon, but it is unlikely to be free, and I would avoid following the advice of anyone who suggests conning your community using Iframes and Javascript for comments.

Update: Additional coverage worth a read @ Search Engine Land, Future Now & Search Engine Watch

Whilst this is theoretically possible, it is also unlikely.

To understand why the change has happened

• You have to understand SEO, external and internal linking, and have an advanced knowledge of how PageRank works. This gives me another chance to drop a very blatant affiliate link to Stomping The Search Engines 2 which is probably the best value (just a measly $1) high quality SEO training online. (http://andybeard.eu/Recommends/SEO-Training.html)
• You need to study Twitter Linking structure over a period of time – snapshot SEO is for cowboys – even what I am writing here isn’t going to be highly accurate, because I don’t have access to analytics, server logs etc, and telling a script to analyse every page of Twitter just isn’t viable

I am not writing this just for another opportunity to pimp an affiliate link, but I am sick of poor SEO information out there among bloggers. I have suggested SEOs need to clean up old information, but to be honest, this is about as fundamental as it gets.

I do have a fair understanding of SEO and linking structures, and I do monitor changes, not just the pretty toolbar PageRank Google updates every 3 months or so, or the ranking of my Twitter profile in the SERPs.

Here are a few of my more recent tweets on the topic:-

Changing account name and retaining some of your link juice

@ed Good to see the move accomplished – you might do well to fill up a page of tweets to yourself from Next Instinct (best of ed) = links10:26 AM Jan 10th from Power Twitter in reply to Ed

AndyBeard

A little basic SEO training

In case SEOs are forgetting something, external links+indexed pages = PageRank – content quality irrelevant7:40 PM Mar 25th from web

AndyBeard

The president would not be happy if I could game an indented listing

It should be very easy to make any twitter account appear as an indented listing of a high profile twitter user e.g. Barak Obama8:21 AM Mar 25th from web

AndyBeard

Twitter making changes to Meta Titles was not an April Fool’s joke, but the titles for individual tweets is far from optimal

If you add your twitter profile to every place you get links for your blog, of course it is going to rank high9:51 AM Apr 1st from web

AndyBeard

Whilst I might have followed people, that isn’t necessarily a vote

Dear @ev @mattcutts The people on my Twitter “Following” blogroll are not recommendations – pls nofollow/discount5:58 AM Apr 4th from web

AndyBeard

Little minor details affecting individual tweets, and maybe overall profile rankings due to the recent “replies” changes

@BradWest unfortunately that solution isn’t, as you lose the “in reply to” links10:31 AM May 13th from Power Twitter in reply to BradWest

AndyBeard

So What Changed At Twitter?

Quite simply, the default blogroll links

Previously they were based on 2 criteria

• You had to be following the person
• They were displayed in account creation order

Thus popular tech bloggers who had early beta access to Twitter, plus Twitter founders always made up a high percentage of the default blogroll links across the whole Twitter network.

Even accounts with just a few thousand followers would have a high pagerank if they were created early enough, because they most likely followed a few high profile Twitter users such as Robert Scoble, and Twitter founders, so they gained the benefit of very powerful links.

How Is The Twitter Blogroll Calculated Now?

I wish I knew so I could work out how to take the best advantage of it – seems almost random, other than you have  to be following the person.

What I do know is that is still doesn’t represent my personal choice of the best people to follow, and all the links should be nofollow unless I can determine who can be included.

About PageRank

The PageRank formula isn’t complicated math, but it gets applied recursively for the global internet, which is one of the reasons why Google needs huge banks of servers.

Google calculates PageRank constantly – rankings based on it and 200+ other factors change constantly

What appears on the Google Toolbar (Toolbar PageRank) is

• Just a rough approximation
• Can be manually overridden by Google in the case of a penalty
• Is only updated every 3 months
• Looks to be linear progression, whereas the real numbers are logarithmic in nature

Posts like this one on The Next Web or this one on So Web are correct that there has been a change in visible ToolBar PageRank, but the analysis of why it happened is certainly lacking.

Have you noticed how PageRank updates frequently happen around the same time as Google Engineers are at conferences?

Techmeme Sell Links

Techmeme has very clear advertising with sponsored posts

The links they use are redirects

http://www.techmeme.com/goto/onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI

If you check the Http Status Codes

SEO Consultants Directory Check Server Headers – Single URI Results
Current Date and Time: 2008-01-31T03:10:07-0700
User IP Address: 213.158.xxx.xx

#1 Server Response: http://www.techmeme.com/goto/onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:10:06 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Location: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI
Content-Length: 388
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Redirect Target: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI

#2 Server Response: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/2008/01/30/businessweek-on-air-applications-at-demo/?sdid=BQUCI
HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:09:22 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch7
X-Pingback: http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/onair/xmlrpc.php
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

You discover that it is a 301 redirect used for tracking, and in theory could pass “Google Juice” – the link could be counted as a real link by search engines.

However you then need to look at the Techmeme robots.txt file

User-Agent: MSIECrawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /goto/

Traditional SEO thinking is that robots.txt blocks the passing of Google Juice and PageRank

That however isn’t how it has been confirmed by Matt Cutts to operate.

As I discussed in my SEO Linking Gotcha’s post, Robots.txt does not prevent a page from accumulating PageRank, it purely stops a page from being crawled most of the time, though that is fallible (There was further discussion on Sphinn).

Confused? So Am I

I can remember seeing Techmeme as a PR6, maybe even as high as a PR7. Robert Scoble seems to have removed his blogroll link to them, but they don’t honestly need the juice any more. Techmeme honestly has tons of links.

I can’t believe as some might suggest that there is less PageRank in the technology sector, as has been suggested about the SEO sector in the past.

Techmeme hasn’t really changed its internal linking structure. From an SEO perspective it isn’t exactly ideal in my way of thinking, but that again would be highly contested as many people believe you can’t benefit from controlling internal linking.

So Why A Penalty?

If those redirects were actually links to a static page, they would still accumulate PageRank, even if blocked with robots.txt, and could still appear in search results based upon whatever data Google derives from the pages linking to it.

Linking again to my SEO linking Gotchas just in case you ignored the first link.

It is possible that for a period of time Techmeme didn’t have a robots.txt file, mistakes happen, though when I last checked back in October the robots.txt was exactly the same as it is now.

The page is blocked with robots.txt, so the Googlebot shouldn’t crawl the page, unless for some reason it did.

It seems to me, relying on robots.txt for paid links isn’t safe

2 safe options

1. Nofollow all links
2. Use meta nofollow on the redirect page

The only people who can confirm that Techmeme has some kind of penalty one way or the other are Google

If Techmeme has been given a penalty, they are not the only ones to have been given a PageRank penalty unfairly.

Update

It seems that whatever caused this has been fixed by Google or maybe hand edited. I wonder whether we will ever find out the cause.

I am not yet seeing the change on my Search Status toolbar, but a quick check on DigPagerank reveals that Techmeme is back to PR7

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.

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.

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

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

Ways to highlight other important information:-

• Create a new post to inform your subscribers

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

• Related posts

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

• Update the article with links to newer information

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

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

The Simple Solution

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

The In Series Plugin

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

The Advanced Solution

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

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

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

• How to create an optimized landing page

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

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

• Planning Content

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

• Planning Redirects

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

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

• Create Updated .htaccess

  Create… don’t upload yet

  Here is an example .htaccess entry

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

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

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

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

• Create Landing Page

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

• Upload .htaccess or Modify Existing URLs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first notification I received by email earlier today, hinting that at least one reader was seeing my own TBPR increasing. Thanks Dave, maybe you should send some of your Omega 3 Fish Oils To The Google Plex.

So I spent the day refreshing Digpagerank.

Why was I refreshing… well it appears that all the tools for monitoring PageRank across multiple data centers malfunctioned today.

I have seen further reports.

Courtney Tuttle mentioned in an earlier blogpost seeing his PageRank recover after taking action to remove paid links from his blog and filing a reinclusion request.

More Penalties & More Than A Month Of PageRank Updates

There are now multiple threads on the Izea/PayPerPost forum reporting members in the main are having a downgrade. Some actually didn’t receive an additional penalty in the 3rd round.

Round One was at the start of October when I first wrote about being defamed
Danny Sullivan was given confirmation that visible PageRank penalties were being applied and I explained why I don’t sell PageRank but still received a penalty.
Round Two was when many blog networks, Digg favorites and even major periodicals were hit with a pagerank penalty.
At that time Matt Cutts confirmed to Loren at Search Engine Journal that this was a penalty for paid links

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

Round Three saw many site regain their previous rankings, and was looked on as a complete update, though many sites remained with a penalty, some were not as harsh.
Darren Rowse reported that blog networks returned back to normal

As I explained more recently, Izea (PayPerPost) are not an SEO company, they are a marketing company providing marketing and public relations services to large corporations.
Just check their domains for canonical URLs for proof.

In that same article I discussed Izea’s new Argus platform, that should be launching in less than 24 hours, that may put an end for a need to use visible PageRank for rating the authority or influence of a blog.

Update

I should link through to Dan Theis who earlier explained why PageRank isn’t dead.

Search Engine Guide has returned to a PR6 after removing their advertising links on the front page. (hattip Jill from High Rankings)

Update 2

More humour from Mike, but how do you decide whose responsibility it is to think about link condoms (they are ribbed of their pleasure).

We have a working PageRank data center tool, Oyoy that suggests I remain stable at the degraded PR4. Many thanks to John for pointing this out (he knows which sites Google really should give a penalty)

Many of the blogs highlighted in the update just a couple of days ago seem to have reverted to their previous position.

Now for anyone who might be thinking otherwise, there are still some obvious penalties in place for a few sites, but it is less obvious for the more vocal networks.

Some sites and networks still have a penalty, as do some sites.

Some of those penalties seem to be a carry over from the first Google slap 2 weeks ago, and some seem to be much newer.

The changes could easily be written off as changes in total linkage compared to the remainder of the blogosphere, but it seems like Google have given a penalty to those they could get away with.

I have made it easier this time around for people to copy my data (everything I publish is free for syndication and commercial use licensed under GPL)

<table bgcolor="#f6f7f8">
<tr><th>Domain</th><th>Starting PR</th><th>First PR Update</th><th>Second PR Update</th><th>Today's PR</th></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.autoblog.com/">www.autoblog.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>4 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.engadget.com">www.engadget.com</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>5</td><td>5 or 7</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.problogger.net/">www.problogger.net</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.copyblogger.com/">www.copyblogger.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>6 or 7</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.joystiq.com/">www.joystiq.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>4 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.tuaw.com/">www.tuaw.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>4 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.searchengineguide.com/">www.searchengineguide.com</a></td><td>7</td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>4 or 5</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/">www.searchenginejournal.com</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>4</td><td>4 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.johnchow.com">www.johnchow.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>5</td><td>4</td><td>4 or 5</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.quickonlinetips.com/">www.quickonlinetips.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>3</td><td>3 or 5</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.seroundtable.com/">www.seroundtable.com</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>4</td><td>4 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://weblogtoolscollection.com/">weblogtoolscollection.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>4 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://andybeard.eu/">andybeard.eu</a></td><td>5</td><td>4</td><td>3</td><td>3 4 or 5</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.blogherald.com/">www.blogherald.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>4 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.Forbes.com">www.Forbes.com</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>5</td><td>4 5 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.sfgate.com/">www.sfgate.com</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>5</td><td>5 or 7</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/">www.washingtonpost.com</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>5</td><td>5 or 7</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.technosailor.com/">www.technosailor.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>3</td><td>3 or 5</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.9rules.com/">www.9rules.com</a></td><td>8</td><td>8</td><td>5</td><td>4 5 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://blog.nafurai.com/">blog.nafurai.com</a></td><td>3</td><td>3</td><td>2</td><td>1 or 2</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://courtneytuttle.com/">courtneytuttle.com</a></td><td>3</td><td>2</td><td>1</td><td>1 2 3 or 4</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.SunTimes.com/">www.SunTimes.com</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>5</td><td>5 or 7</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://TheGadgetBlog.com/">TheGadgetBlog.com</a></td><td>5</td><td>5</td><td>3</td><td>3 or 5</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://Space.com/">Space.com/</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>5</td><td>5 7 or 8</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://OneMansBlog.com">OneMansBlog.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>4</td><td>5 4 or 6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/">entrepreneurs-journey.com</a></td><td>6</td><td>5</td><td>3</td><td>3 or 5</td></tr>
<tr><td align="center" colspan="5"><small>The following are site updates which were not hit by a penalty previously for comparison purposes</small></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/">www.hobo-web.co.uk</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>5</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.doshdosh.com/">www.doshdosh.com</a></td><td>4</td><td>4</td><td>4</td><td>6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://searchengineland.com/">www.searchengineland.com</a></td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>7</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog">www.seomoz.org/blog</a></td><td>5</td><td>5</td><td>5</td><td>6</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/">www.connectedinternet.co.uk</a></td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>6</td><td>3 or 5</td></tr>

<tr><td align="center" colspan="5"><small>More news and updates available from source <a href="http://andybeard.eu/2007/10/pagerank-update-2.html">Andy Beard - Niche Marketing</a></small></td></tr>
</table>

The “Googleflux” for many is in total confusion, just take a look at what is happening to Courtney Tuttle.

Thats PR1 PR2 PR3 & PR4 across multiple data centres

With my own PageRank things are just as confusing, and I could end up with PR3 PR4 or PR5

Do I still feel that I have been defamed?

Well it seems I do have some kind of search penalty now because a syndicated excerpt of an article now outranks me unless you use quotes for a search.

Compare this search without quotes to this search with quotes

I will be updating the list with more sites, and for any changes in data centres over the next few hours.

After the very controversial hit many sites took just 2 weeks ago for various degrees of selling PageRank or linking to clients, you might have thought Google would take a breather, but Google it seems hadn’t even started its crackdown.

A number of sites have been hit yet again, including this one, but there is also a new element that has been introduced.

Here are some unusual penalties for trusted sources of good content

http://www.autoblog.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.engadget.com/ PR7 PR5
http://www.problogger.net/ PR6 PR4
http://www.copyblogger.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.joystiq.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.tuaw.com/ PR6 PR4

A few search and money related sites as examples

http://www.searchengineguide.com PR7 PR4
http://www.searchenginejournal.com PR7 PR4
http://www.johnchow.com PR6 PR4
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/ PR6 PR3
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/ PR6 PR4
http://andybeard.eu PR5 PR3
Vlad PR4 PR2

So Why A Penalty?

Most people today will be speculating that it is all about paid links, or that it is a massive reshuffle in the PageRank algorithm. Some of the hits were certainly paid link or advertising without nofollow related.

However many of these sites do not fit that pattern, but they do fit another…

Here are the Google guidelines

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Many of the reputable sources that have received a penalty are part of extensive blog networks, and they have one factor in common. They have massive interlinking between their network sites.

They may also sell links or advertising that passes PageRank on some of their less visible properties, but those properties benefit from the high pagerank sites that link to them, with sitewide links.

Some of these sites have been known to add or knock millions off of the price of Apple shares in the past, what do you think it is going to do to Google?

Update

Daniel is also compiling a list of notable sites hit and includes

http://www.seroundtable.com/ PR7 PR4
http://www.blogherald.com/ PR6 PR4

Updates From Comments
www.Forbes.com PR7 PR5 (thanks Wiep)
http://www.sfgate.com PR7 PR5 (via IM from Daniel Daily Blog Tips)
www.washingtonpost.com PR7 PR5 (thanks Wiep)

Update 2

The most relevant update I can give you is that Aaron the Technical Director at B5 tends to agree with the idea that this might be related to blog network interlinking, but obviously doesn’t agree with Google’s conclusions that they are doing something wrong.

At b5media, we are weighing how we want to respond to this. Either we give in to Google and let them dictate what we do and have the unenviable position of losing pagerank and possibly advertising dollars, or we take the stand that quality content is quality content regardless of Google and that our content will speak for itself. We still produce millions of pages of content per month. We still have respect in the community. We still have advertisers recognizing that these sites are valuable assets to leverage to get their campaigns out on.

I certainly don’t intend to be whipped by Google for 9 reviews or “public consultation” pieces I have written over the last 12 months, and as I gave the links in an editorial matter of my choosing, I didn’t use Nofollow.

• Not all networks have been given a penalty for interlinking.
• There are splogs and scraper sites out there that are PR5 or higher, monetized with Google Adsense, with traffic coming from Google Adwords
• Gloating “innocent” tech blogs who thank their sponsors each month with free followed links
• Major corporations such as Yahoo who are allowed to sell links
• Other corporations who practice massive internal linking among their network to unrelated sites.

Update 3

It seems 9rules got bitch-slapped too, or as Paul Scrivens describes it, Google Took My Balls and Went Home and dropped from a PR8 to a PR5

This will be interesting because members typically have a single sitewide link to 9rules, and 9rules links back to members via various categorized tag feeds.

It will be interesting to see if any 9 Rules members spot a drop in search traffic as a result.

This isn’t site-wide interlinking, though blog networks by their very nature tent to encourage a little inbreeding, just like any social group.

Scrivs wrote that the one voice of reason was Scoble, but Robyn has already caught him out for not having read the other sites he linked to.

Robert is learning to speak like an SEO, explaining that PageRank is meaningless on a site wide level, and it is all down to individual pages.

Now as Robert is a big fan of Techmeme, and I have benefited from a fair amount of traffic from Techmeme today, I put this into a Robert Scoble and Techmeme context.

Robert, is PageRank part of Techmeme’s calculation? It could be.

Whilst I have had a lot of airtime today on Techmeme (good job too because most stories about this were buried on Digg), it is very rare for me to show up, even with significant links as part of the story.
Even then I am quickly displaced by people saying almost nothing with far fewer overall links on sites like Techmeme.

On Podtech today you have a “Commissioned” video by Oracle. You have a link without nofollow. That is a paid link.

There are 20x, maybe 100x more paid links on Podtech.net than on my site.
I have written a total of 9 paid reviews, all well received by my audience, most received editorial links sometimes even from the person who purchased the review EVEN THOUGH I OFFERED CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM.

Google themselves tell their users that TBPR (toolbar page rank) is an indication of quality.

Thus Google are now telling visitors to my site, and 100s, maybe 100s of others, that when they visit a site, it is a load of crock.

Those are lies… FUD

Maybe they have changed the meaning of PageRank. If they have done they need to inform every single one of their toolbar users that Google PageRank as displayed in the toolbar is meaningless.

It has to come from Google, not you.

I don’t look on this as outing Podtech for selling links. Robert entered the conversation and seems to think that any PageRank is meaningless anyway. It is very clear to me that taking a camera crew to someone’s office to video someone costs a great deal of money, and there is a lot of expertise needed to both perform the interview, and from the crew. There needs to be money coming from somewhere.

Unfortunately the Google bot can’t read that “intent”, and just like the 9 pages on my site that contain content that I have received compensation for which I seem to have received a penalty, the same could be true of Podtech.

Remember also Podtech is (or should I saw was) a content network with many of the video publishers with their own blogs that link to Podtech all the time… that is a little like the 9Rules Network.

Update 4

J. Angelo Racoma of Splashpress Media has written about their situation, with a number of sites gaining a penalty, not just Blog Herald.

Fact is that around the behemoth search and advertising company Google is built a secondary economy. Blogs and websites use PageRank as one primary metric for reputation and trustworthiness. Many site owners bank on their sites’ or domains’ PageRank, and use these to command or negotiate advertising rates.

It’s like the gold standard applied online. And with this mass PR drop, Google has just devalued the webmasters’ gold. In effect, Google has just caused the value of this thriving industry to fall in a single day. What was a thriving economy is being rendered worth less (while not worthless, of course).

But then again, we can argue that this economy is artificial in the first place–with people putting too much premium on PageRank, and especially with people putting a price tag on PR. But in that case, wouldn’t Google still be morally (and legally?) liable for killing off its competition? Do keep in mind that Google runs its own advertising program and is at the top of its game.

The suggestion seems to be a change in strategy on their part.

Aaron From B5 has had time to contemplate what this means to B5 going forward, and specifically his own blog. I should point out before you read this that this is his personal choice as many blogs within B5 are privately owned. No final decision has come from collective management discussions.
This is well worth a read:-

Here are some “Tweets” from Jeremy Wright for more on B5′s Stance

#Weird thing about today’s google smack of blog networks? We don’t actually cross-link all our sites, just per vertical. To avoid this! #
# Wow, 23 emails related to this google pr thing. Will have an official response later tonight. #
# Short version: we were playing nice. We weren’t engaged in massive cross-linking. We believe in content over pr. #
# Oh,n and this isn’t a shot at blog networks. It’s at all kinds of coontent sites, including forbes, washington post, etc. #
# Ps: b5′ll be taking a “watch and see” approach, monitoring our omniture data very closely, to see if this is a real thing or just temp. #
# More quick facts on this google update: more’n half the sites were major content and news sources. Less’n half were sellling links. #

Update 5

I just joined the tail end of a Postcast with Jim Turner and Tris Hussey from One By One Media

The first half includes Aaron from B5 Media and Steve Fisher (not sure which one)

I discuss public perception of PageRank and how it affects authority, plus some general perception of Google, Facebook etc.

Update 6

From some of the individual site mention there have also been a number of responses.

Brian Clough of Search Engine Guide has given his response to what strategy he will be taking in the future.

In case it also here is Loren Baker’s initial response, and also 8 things we have learned.

John Chow doesn’t think this will have any effect on his business, though he has removed mention of pagerank from his advertising sales page.

Brian at Copyblogger after thanking Google (very funny) has now launched Teaching Sells.

Darren emphasises not getting depressed about this, leverage the opportunity, and network with other bloggers.

As I have discussed in the past, when discussing blog internal linking, for this blog I am doing “massive ball linking”.

Links come into the blog from various places and to specific content. By using tagging and related posts on each page (maybe a few too many now), whatever pagerank, trust and relevance that a page is given, get passed onto other relevant content.

It also gets passed onto people who leave comments or trackback. When you link to me from your blog posts, the juice flows back – sometimes more, sometimes less, but it is all relevant links – just what the web is all about.

I suppose you could look on this as a “organic garden” approach. Just let things grow wild, and only interfere if something needs drastic change.

I haven’t been overly worried about the multiple forms of duplicate content that are typical on a WordPress blog.

Exactly Why I Don’t Worry About Duplicate Content

First of all I discussed this a little not so long ago, in particular about duplicate content and supplemental results.

Matt Cutts isn’t worried about honest duplicate content

Proof – Matt Really isn’t worried

First of all lets take at look at Matt’s robots.txt file

User-agent: *
Allow:

Then you can look at the metadata on all Matts duplicate content pages

Category archives – I am going to link to his seo glossary, I am sure it doesn’t get many links.
Date Archives
Sequential pages – lets go back in time a few pages

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO &raquo; Movies/Videos</title>
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.0.7" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->
<meta name="robots" content="noodp">

Basically he lets the search engines work out what is going on.

There are simple plugins out there to prevent these pages being indexed and followed in various ways, but Matt Cutts doesn’t worry about it.

The Wayback Machine

Yep, more duplicate content – Matt doesn’t block them

Matt Doesn’t even block the login page to his WordPress installation – that same page appears over 2 million times on the web.

Let it Flow

OMG I am wasting all that Google Juice that I worked so hard for!

Or maybe not…

Google Juice is liquid… it flows, it you give it a direction to flow in.

Whilst you may give a page with duplicate content some juice, that juice flows back out to other pages. Just because that page might end up in the supplemental results, doesn’t mean the Google juice is being wasted.

Some blog designs unfortunately place too much emphasis on the most current content. They don’t use tags, their date archives are accessed by a silly calendar widget on the front page, and they don’t have any other routes for pagerank to flow.

Structured Linking

It is possible to use only a very structured linking system for a blog, but it is important to think about relevance. In Revenge of the Mininet there are some great linking structures defined. They would be ideal for highly “niched” sites.

Many blogs, including this one, cover a wide multitude of subjects. A carefully constructed linking structure would be much harder to define and you might lose the benefit of giving relevance to specific pages.

Structured Relevance?

Some duplicate content pages give great, maybe even enhanced relevance to content.
Date archives in many blog designs are not very helpful. If date archives and previous pages are used as the primary navigation to previous content, and path for search engines to take, you really aren’t giving your content any justice or longevity.

Content Longevity

Lets look at some of my internal pages for longevity

How a Blogroll can kill your Pagerank – 2 month old post, linked to a few times in posts, but it appears a lot on pages due to tagging and using related posts – currently PR4

NoFollow and Pink Boxes – also PR4

Some posts on UTW Tips – both PR3

Ultimate Tag Warrior SEO Tricks (pt 1)
UTW – Tagging SEO Tricks (pt 2)

From browsing around, I have discovered that the Google Toolbar Pagerank isn’t completely comprehensive, as I have posts that should have PR4 that don’t. One of them was my highest ranking page in November and December.

It was hard to find a post that hadn’t been later referred to in a more recent post but this is a good example:-

No NoFollow & No-Nofollow.com

That post is again PR3, and didn’t receive any specific direct love from outside links or internal links in posts. It did benefit from tagging, and related posts.

This time around I didn’t tag and categorize my old content from my blogspot domain. Almost all of that content didn’t receive much pagerank love unless it had been linked to directly.
I am going to see if for the next update it can be revitalized.

How much of your old content retains visible pagerank?

It is actually still difficult to compare, because so many pages still haven’t received pagerank they probably deserve. Even Matt has some pages that are linked to from PR6 categories that show a toolbar pagerank of zero such as http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/starving-to-death-review/

I would link to it directly with a live link, but I don’t want to ruin the example

For one of Matts posts that one probably received a lot less inbound links

Yes that is a Yahoo link – wouldn’t it be nice to have a “-all” flag on Google searches to list everything below Google’s threshold as well, even if it is just an aid for webmasters to find splogs.

Conclusion

Matt is a busy man, maybe he hasn’t had time to optimize and avoid all these duplicate content issues but I really believe it is nothing to worry about, and Matt might just be demonstrating this with his own blog.

You can aim for a more focused structure on a blog, using various forms of dynamic linking but it is not something easy to achieve yet with any platform.