Special Update: Google Edition
What motivates people to link to other people? Listed are some of the reasons people might have for linking to you, and I am sure, some of the reasons you might link to other people.
Read more on Top 32 33 Forms of Linking Payola…
I first published this post under a different title almost 3 years ago (Jan 17, 2007 @ 6:55), but over the last couple of days it has become specifically relevant.
At the time Jack Humphreys was offering a training program combined with high end blog hosting called “Authority Site Center” which was the successor to his previous offering, “Content Desk”.
First of all I was just going to post it with a quick introductory paragraph, then I decided it really needed some additional examples.
Read more on Is Quality Content Needed To Make Money?…
Today we are going to face an avalanche of Technology bloggers who can’t help blogging about every intricate detail of Twitter in one way or another claiming that Google has devalued Twitter profiles in the search engine results pages (SERPs) or reduced the PageRank of profiles.
Whilst this is theoretically possible, it is also unlikely.
To understand why the change has happened
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:-
Yesterday Joost linked through to me from a guest post on Shoemoney about Wordpress SEO.
In direct referral stats it didn't cause a shockwave until I looked at the specific pageviews of the page he chose to link to, my Wordpress category.
My category pages rarely figure highly in the most viewed, so I could actually attribute the majority of the traffic to that specific landing page, even if the traffic originated from an email or RSS subscriber.
This takes me back to one of the discussions I had with Joost regarding his Google Analytics tracking from RSS Plugin
There is nothing wrong with having strong, even biased opinion about a product or service, as long as you provide a basis for that judgement, clear disclosure of any conflicts, and where possible links to differing opinion.
Fred disagreed with what was written about 4 services on Techcrunch and VentureBeat, he provided some data to back that up, and clear disclosure.
Techcrunch responded, defending their writers, again fair enough.
Fred Wilson followed up with another post, linking through to the differing opinion, thus giving them equal limelight
Mathew Ingram was following the story closely, and as a professional journalist who I know links out to conflicting opinion on a frequent basis, followed up with “Bloggers Need To Try Harder”
Michael Arrington also linked through to Mathew from his post to give some additional balance.
The only negative in all this is that Fred ends up with a reputation management potential problem with a post headline on Techcrunch “Fred Wilson – Hypocritical, Wrong and Conflicted” – probably a bit uncalled for considering how this all eventually worked out.
With all the previous discussion of paid reviews and my unwillingness to raise the white flag or bend over, this post is going to come as a bit of a shock.
I am lowering the red flag
Carry on reading to find out why this isn’t the same as raising a white flag, and is far from surrendering to Google on paid reviews.
Yes it is time for another controversial SEO post, sit back and enjoy.
Every single time I write a post mentioning PageRank, I get comments about PageRank not being important for ranking.
These comments very rarely differentiate between toolbar PageRank and the PageRank of whatever kind Google stores on their servers and upgrades on an extremely frequent basis for every page. I know from first hand experience that the toolbar PageRank has very little to do with rankings, and is manually manipulated based on Google's commercial goals.
The Ranking Factors article at SEOmoz in many ways skirts around
Blogcatalog Members today are collectively blogging about abuse.
I thought of blogging about all kinds of abuse that affect real people day in, day out, but decided that ultimately that doesn't fit in with my audience, or really add any authority to the words I would be writing.
As it happens, today part of a 2 hour interview with me was published in the Guardian (Digg Story you know you want to). I honestly didn't expect any more words in print from the article, because it was so wide ranging, and such
I know that my short posts such as this one normally send lots of free traffic to whoever I link to, and it is a weapon I use in multiple ways, either to get a point across, or as a clear signal of support for a concept.
In this case it is to highlight a concept I fully endorse, if you want more free traffic, you have to share traffic.
note:seems like Tinu just hit a Wordpress problem, I am sure she will pick it up quickly. It is well worth visiting later
