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.

1. Did they just give you an Android phone Google TV, 3 month Dish + installation (Danny has a full history of Google Payola)
2. Have they already linked to you for this topic so you are rewarding them back?
3. Have they linked to you in the past and you are reciprocating?
4. Do they Digg or Stumble your posts? Surely that wouldn’t motivate you to link to a blogger known to be a top Digg, Reddit or Netscape user?
5. Do they leave comments and are an active member of your community?
6. Do you want them to link to you in the future?
7. Do you want them to see your point of view which may be different?
8. Are they on Techmeme and you want to be there too?
9. Do they have trackback enabled and featured prominently?
10. Do they have trackback with followable links that give link juice?
    (if you link to my posts using trackback you get nice backlinks currently they are nofollow but that will eventually be fixed again)
11. Are they a friend you shared beers with last week?
12. Did they speak for free at your last conference?
13. Are you speaking for free at their next conference?
14. Do they invite you to take part in expert surveys within your niche?
15. Did they provide good information and you want to provide good links to demonstrate your own authority?
16. Do you feel obliged to link because you are talking about them, their product or their service?
17. Do you feel it will help your search ranking results to link to authority pages?
18. Do they display referrer information such as
    • Last visitor came from
    • Top Referrers This Week
19. Did they say something nice about your company, product or service?
20. Do you share their views, but don’t want to alienate a segment of your own audience so you voice your opinion by only linking to one point of view
21. Did they provide you with a cool badge that stroked your ego?
22. Did they provide you with a widget with a hidden or visible text link?
23. They are the developer of the blogging platform you use, and you don’t know how to remove the link, or feel they earned it?
24. They are the developer of a plugin or theme you use, and you don’t know how to remove the link, or feel they earned it?
25. Do you want to be included in their linkblog, or their twitter feed?
26. Did they make a large charitable donation to your cause or to fund further development?
27. Are they a member of your:-
    • Blog Network
    • Secret Consortium
    • Joint Venture Network
    • Social Network
    • Trade Association
    • Prayer Group
    • Sect
28. Are they your corporate client?
29. Do you own stock in the company?
30. Do they buy advertising from you?
31. Are you employed by the company?
32. Did they pay you to link to them?
33. Do you earn affiliate commissions?

Many might look on this list as being a little cynical… I feel I am just being truthful.

I openly admit that in the past I have been motivated to link to someone for many of these reasons, and could easily have linked to notable bloggers who link to others for most if not all of these situations.

A lot of the time the linking happens with full disclosure, but even with disclosure, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the motivations would be disclosed.

However your audience isn’t stupid, and if you haven’t attempted to disclose as much as possible, that can have a huge influence on how much they trust your opinions and linking habits in the future.

This post in itself was motivated by a number of other recent posts on notable blogs that I am sure most of my readers read on a daily basis, and I would even happily link to them, if it was not for the fact that many of the motivations above apply to them even if they don’t admit it.

As this post isn’t intended to point the finger at anyone, no out-bound links.

Can you think of any more to add to the list?

First published Jun 2, 2007 – update to honour the Google Zeitgeist 2010

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

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

How a Blogroll can kill your PageRank

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

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

Now about the site in question:

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

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

Initial Site Analysis

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

The internal categories are mainly PR2

The archives are mainly PR2

The individual post pages are generally PR1 or unranked

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

But the site has been around for 16 months

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

So what is wrong with the site?

Take a look at the sidebar

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

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

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

What visitors?

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

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

Solutions

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

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

Increase internal linking to compensate for all the leakage.

How to Increase Internal Linking

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

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

External Linking

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

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

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

Conclusion

It is not rocket science, just simple maths.

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

Update: 28th August 2010 – this article doesn’t take into account changes to the way Google handles nofollow to combat PageRank sculpting.

Also WordPress has moved on a lot in 3 years since it was written – that does invalidate many of the concepts and linking structures presented, but the methods to achieve them might differ significantly.

Having previously written that I don’t typically undertake consulting work, I do look on any paid blog posts as a form of consultancy. In this particular case Tim from eMonetized decided to order a review of his blog, and we negotiated a little to ensure what you read is totally impartial and any links I choose to give are in an editorial context.
The negotiation itself was an interesting process, and I will be writing about that separately.

It should be noted that just because I mention improvements here, that doesn’t mean that Tim the site owner isn’t aware of something, and as also is almost always the case, I haven’t applied many SEO tweaks to this site yet.

That being said, some of the linking structures I talk about in the more geeky sections of this article I have never seen anyone talk about, and it is my belief that the resulting linking structure is highly unique, extremely powerful, whilst remaining flexible.

The Niche

Tim’s blog is one of a host of blogs looking to capitalize on terms such as make money, make money online and making money online, though it is clear that he is quite SEO aware, and from our communication this was made abundantly clear to me.
As an example he has a clear “money page” for promoting his primary affiliate programs using a URL “Making Money Online“.

One of the hardest problems with the “make money” niche is that most of the related search terms that are provided if you use the Google Keyword Suggest tool are very much “long tail” terms, many of which receive only mediocre traffic. Many of the more specific terms receive minimal search volume unless it is related to a specific product, or product launch.

The direction Tim seems to be taking is to target content in the topical community such as Adsense, Adwords and Affiliate Marketing, rather than writing a series of posts based on what Google regard as related topics, such as “How To Make Money [Insert Blank]“, “Making Money [Insert Blank]”

This suggests to me that we might look to optimize the site such that the categories perform well as landing pages, though I believe it is possible to significantly improve site structure to give the site an unfair advantage on a few competitive terms.

SEO Strategy

It is clear that Tim is thinking about his SEO Strategy, and is off to a good start. Here are some of the things he is currently doing that I can see just browsing around the site.

• URLs / Slugs – Tim is using optimized page slugs for every post – there are some plugins that can achieve this automatically, so that just keywords are used without grammatical filler, though I think he is probably doing this manually. URLs are not a major ranking factor, in fact some SEOs would say it is very minor. URLs are a clickthrough factor, and there are limitations for URL length.
• Robots.txt – A lot of things are being blocked off in his Robots.txt file, including date based archives, paged content, images and author pages. He is also blocking off tags – I am not going to dispute that decision, it is something to test and track. There is overlap between categories and tags – it is possible to make that work ok by including additional content and different layouts, and with some SEO linking structures you would block both, others you would enhance both. One good thing he is doing is blocking all his /go/ affiliate links.
  Important:- Robots.txt is a bandaid as it can create hanging or dangling pages.
• Sitemap – he has a clear sitemap, though I worry a little about multi-page sitemaps. If they go multi-page, it is better to make them more of a topical tree, than links between pages… breadcrumb navigation or not. Then it is effectively creating a category listing.
• htaccess – either htaccess or a plugin is being used to ensure all URLs are www
• Related posts – related posts (probably using Wasabi) are being used to increase the internal linking to related content, good for both search engines and human page views.
• Nofollow – Nofollow is being applied to a few links that shouldn’t pass pagerank, such as to forms for email subscription and Technorati favorites
• Excerpts – pages that could potentially be looked on by the search engine spiders as duplicate content are being displayed using the_excerpt() rather than the_content()
• Titles – these seem to be OK, maybe already using SEO Title Tag plugin or similar

Quick Improvements

• WordPress 2.2 – This really is a necessary upgrade for security reasons.
• htaccess trailing slashes – Canonicalization isn’t only to do with “www” or “no www” choices. If you have chosen to use www, then just include the second half of the code from my post about WordPress htaccess to cover the trailing slashes.
• Home / Page Links – some you want to receive lots of juice, others probably shouldn’t receive any at all, and some you might only want a followed link on your home page. The best option is probably to create these links manually, and have one set that is used on your home page, and another for everywhere else.



• Feeds – I find having related posts in feeds very important from an SEO perspective when people syndicate your content with or without permission – they are also useful for readers, though I wish more readers used them.If tag pages are being indexed, it is potentially good to have tags in your feed as well.

  Tim offers a full content feed that is worth subscribing to, though only half of the subscribers will currently be registered by Feedburner. Those that use the auto-discovery link are not currently being redirected to Feedburner. Fix this with the Feedburner Redirect Plugin, now called Feedsmith or think about one of Feedburner’s pro solutions.

• Sociable Plugin – it creates search engine followable links to submission forms on the various bookmarking sites – switch to using a search engine friendly version of sociable.
• Meta Description and Keywords – there are a host of plugins available to do this, though I haven’t actually found one that I regard as ideal. Generally a little trial and error is required, as there can be a few incompatibilities depending on how other plugins interact with your content.
• 404 Error Page – currently this results in the homepage – it might be better to use one of the many 404 plugins available to give some related content to what resulted in an error.

More Time Consuming or Technical

• Stop Using Widgets – until it becomes easy to control which widgets appear on which page, with and without nofollow, if you want to highly optimize your site, it is much easier without using WordPress Widgets. There is an alternative shipped with the K2 theme, sidebar modules (SBM), but I have had difficulty making it work with WordPress 2.2 and other themes
• Multiple Templates & SidebarsYou can do a lot using WordPress logic, but it starts to become very complicated if you use the same template file and sidebar everywhere.
  Single pages are probably the most likely to hit high server loads, so I always use a WordPress theme which has a single.php – in my current one the sidebar is included as part of the single.php file, but it can also be done using a php include for something like sidebar2.php 
• Sitewide Links – only give them when there is a specific reason, even for internal navigation elements. As an example we will look at category listings, but the same applies for all sidebar content.

Category listings

For a home page listing, and category pages, it is normal to list all categories

<br /><?php if ( is_home() || is_category() ) { ?><br /><li id="categories"><br /> <h3>Categories</h3><br /> <ul><br /><?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&hierarchical=1') ?><br /> </ul><br /> </li><br /><?php } ?><br />

For single pages, if you are aiming for a classic tree structure, it is better to list specific categories.

<br /><ul><br /> <li><?php the_category('</li><li>') ?></li><br /></ul><br />

You probably already have links to specific category pages at the bottom of each post, thus maybe sidebar category links should be nofollowed using the add link attribute plugin.

<br /><ul><br /><li><?php add_link_attr('the_category', '</li><li>',
'rel="nofollow"'); ?></li><br /></ul><br />

You could also aim for a “halfway house” and include only your most targeted primary categories on every page in the sidebar, other than on your homepage which would include all categories.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you would have followed links in the sidebar on your front page at all, other than to possibly your sitemap.

• Nofollow From Home – if Google and other search engines are being guided to your sitemap, and you value all your content equally, it makes perfect sense to have nofollow on any links within content that appear on your home page with the nofollow from home plugin This should be avoided if you don’t offer full content feeds because Technorati would probably have great difficulty with many of the links as they typically use the RSS feed, or your homepage to determine linkage.
  Update: I have now developed an advanced version of this plugin which adds nofollow to the links on all pages other than your permalink pages
• Headings – Correct use of headings for SEO and general semantic improvements – as an example for Tim’s current theme, there is no H1 heading, and the author information is given a heading tag. In addition the heading in WordPress sidebars have always been given on most themes the same level of semantic purpose as sub-headings within content, which isn’t ideal for SEO purposes.

Advanced SEO & Presentation

To really optimize WordPress effectively, you need to start looking at optimizing the layout of the homepage, category pages, and tag pages, not just for SEO, but for presentation. Most wordpress blogs by default use index.php for homepage and category pages, and the same is true for tag pages with UTW if you don’t define a tag.php file.

You can either create custom templates, or add lots of complicated WordPress logic.

WordPress handles templates in the following priority

1. category-6.php
2. category.php
3. archive.php
4. index.php

In many SEO linking structures, the categories are intended to be landing pages for their topic, and to concentrate more google juice than individual pages.
There are also linking structures that might be equally viable in many circumstances where categories pass Google juice in a single direction, either from the home page to single pages which subsequently pass juice only to the home page, or the home page passes juice to single pages through a sitemap, and the juice flows back up to the home page through the categories.

If category pages were intended to pass Google juice in 2 directions as would be normal for a simple tree structure, then you would need something like the following:-

Ultimately however if you have ever spent any time playing around with a pagerank calculator, linking structures that feature a spiral, channelling juice around in a circle using one-way links tend to perform better than sites using 2 way links.

There are a number of plugins that try to create “pretty” excerpts for duplicate content pages that contain excerpts, or you can manually create them with HTML and even thumbnail pictures.
One of the best new options seems to be the Excerpts Editor though I haven’t tested it yet.

This should be mixed with custom query string (Note: New Version that includes support for UTW) which would allow you to have a different number of posts on your front page compared to various archive pages. Ideally when siloing you would want to list all pages under a particular category or tag page. The easier alternative is the siloing plugin.

Beyond Geeky SEO

Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell and the bonus Dynamic Linking Ebook by Leslie Rohde have been for many years one of the most advanced tutorials on geeky linking structures to maximise pagerank.

To get any real benefit from this geeky section you really have to read those ebooks, they are available free for those who sign up to Michaels mailing list, and are well worth investing an evening reading, and maybe reading a couple of times more to fully understand how pagerank and linking structures can really help you.

One of my favourite structures was the spider circle

Note: In the following content I frequently link through to Web Workshop and their Pagerank Calculator. The links are nofollowed because I am linking through to form data

Here is the Spider Circle mapped out in the calculator.

The big problem with this linking structure, if you look at blogging in particular, is as soon as you add any external links to the content pages, the benefits turn into a huge hazzard, because this structure is also one of the best for sacrificial sites. Totally forget anything like this if you have removed nofollow from your comments.
Even disproportionate linking to your content from other sites isn’t going to rescue it. In that example there is 4x as many incoming links as those outgoing. The numbers are all relative, and don’t represent toolbar pagerank, but the benefit of good linking structure is lost.

One of the best linking structures for a website that was discussed was called “Stacked Pyramids with Tunnels Home”

The layout was something like this:-

There are a lot more unique pages involved, so you can’t directly compare this with the previous diagram. Here is how this structure looks like in a calculation.
What happens when we add some incoming and outgoing links? Well it doesn’t go quite as pear-shaped as the spider but still stuggles with a more realistic ratio of incoming to outgoing links.

I have played around with most of the other examples within Revenge of the Mininet over the last few months trying to create a “defensible linking structure”, something that performs well under severe abuse, with multiple external links on every page of unique content, as might happen with a blogger generous with link love, or using Dofollow.

In the end I opted for massive ball linking using tagging, with the structure totally organic, but helping Google juice flow away from pages which were gaining a lot of links, and likewise probably a lot of comments as well, so that the juice could enrich other content.
I knew this wasn’t optimal

I also wanted to come up with a better benefit from using internal tagging than my previously mentioned 4.9 > 3.6 ? (Titles > Duplicate Content)

Introducing “Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall”

I have no idea how this will work based upon all the other 100+ or 200+ ranking factors for web pages, but as far as pagerank is concerned it seems to be an extremely defensible structure, in fact you can abuse the hell out of it, and it performs well.

Sandcastle Pagerank Calculation

I should note that in that calculation there are still only 9 pages of 100% unique original article content.
The secret lies in having created additional unique pages that in themselves are useful for humans and even linkworthy, but those pages only link through to the homepage and gather up link juice that might have passed excessively through external links on a popular post.

Here is what it looks link if it is heavily abused like the previous example with lots of external links, and only a few incoming links.

Here is what is happening….

I first of all started off with category siloing, one way links passing juice from the homepage through the categories, and down to the content.
In addition I added a sitemap link from the homepage, that has one way links also through to the content. In addition, if it is being abused on a blog, it performs better with links from the sitemap to the homepage and categories from the sitemap, though the differences are small.

Juice flows from the permalink pages through one way links to one of 5 tag pages for each post, assigned at random in the model, and then again one way link to the homepage.

If you throw in a couple of related posts, even with the external links it performs very well, especially for the home page.

Here is a visualisation of Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall

As I have stated before, I visualise linking structures in 3D, and this one could be much easier visualised on a 3D checkers board (I used to have one as a kid), but effectively it is built of 3 different layers.

I haven’t quite worked out the best way to handle single pages, maybe it would be necessary to add yet another tree link structure for those.

I haven’t got any sites using this new structure yet, but it is something I will be aiming for on a number of sites soon, including this one.

Creating This Linking Structure With WordPress

It is possible (though a little complicated) with what I have listed above, but I will try to have a modified theme available soon, aptly named the “Sandcastle” theme, based upon Sandbox (so it can be easily skinned)

Linkworthy Content

Whilst a good linking structure might give you 5x to 10x the benefit of any incoming links to rank a few specific pages, you still need to have content people will link to.

For me one of the highlights of Tim’s blog are already the case studies.

Whilst I haven’t invested money in Stumbleupon advertising, the conversion rate to subscribers he achieved with $100 worth of visits seems about the same as with free traffic. From what I have seen so far, Top Stumblers are mainly interested in cool pictures and humor as one of Tim’s commenters has already pointed out, and are very much anti-commercial, especially anything to do with StumbleUpon optimization. It is very easy to get post content buried, in fact easier than Digg in many ways.
A post on optimizing for another social news site such as Digg however might not get buried by the sacred protectors of the SU realm, and is more likely to continue bringing traffic (that is what I have experienced anyway). I have also found support a little lacking.

Tim has also been looking at Adsense Arbitrage – I think the safe bet is to convert those low PPC landing pages into affiliate or other forms of CPA income, if the cost of clicks is still quite low.

Tim is a creative thinker, after all he was the one who started using Adsense site targeting on John Chows blog, which gave John the idea of using it on Problogger.net

Whilst Tim’s blog is only a couple of months old, I expect great things and lots of in-depth experimentation in traffic and monetization, so don’t forget to sign up to his RSS feed.

Update – Nofollow Those Dupes Plugin

I have now released a plugin that can be used to help in creating the “Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall linking structure called Nofollow Those Dupes

It is actually of benefit on any blog that doesn’t block duplicate content pages from being indexed.

Linking to Top Level Domains Rather Than Posts

There are multiple benefits for both you and the blog or website you link to if you use deep linking to related content using search engine friendly links, especially for blogs using some method to remove nofollow.

• Anchor Text – If you are linking to good information, you want other people to be able to find it – using a search engine friendly link helps the search engines understand what the content you are linking to is about.
• Related Content – Links between related high quality content are the best form of links for search engine optimization, and for your own readers.
• Use trackback when you link – that provides a clear notification to another blog owner that you are joining in the conversation with them, often with an email notification
• Links Equals Traffic – most blog themes display trackbacks
• Links Equals Juice – on blogs using various forms of dofollow it creates a backlink with your choice of anchor text, which is great for SEO. Reciprocal links between related content are still extremely valuable
• Karma – give other people the kind of quality links you would like to receive – if the link is buried among 20 other links in a list it is almost worthless. If the link is a star in a 10 x 10 grid like a certain meme that is floating around, IT IS USELESS

You will notice that I also use this to my advantage for internal linking, and I even leave trackback for my own posts on rather than using a plugin to switch it off. It is all great related linking, though it helps to have your trackbacks displayed below the comment box to stop things becoming messy.

Note: I am not saying the occasional link to a top level domain is a bad thing, but even then it is good to use some suitable anchor text.
I frequently see things like “Andy Beard wrote a great post on XYZ” and the link would be with my name to the home page. That link might be useful for a couple of days, but then the blog post will be buried in my archives. Permalinks on blogs are there for a reason… use them!

Using A Link From Google Search Results

I always know when someone has made a rushed effort in compiling a collection of links about a subject. Almost always what they have done is performed a search in Google, and rather than clicking through on a link before copying it, they just copy and paste from the Google search results… a huge mistake

I see it all the time, and it is so painfully obvious by how ugly the links look that it is a redirect, I can’t understand how these slip through.

Here is a normal link to my review of PayPerPost Direct

http://andybeard.eu/2007/05/payperpost-direct-review.html

Here is a link to the exact same article from the Google Search Engine Results
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fandybeard.eu%2F2007%2F05%2Fpayperpost-direct-review.html&ei=NPBdRsrzOYTCQYPXzZEF&usg=AFrqEzfoMDGVoATORJTFWxfmcyS4IcpcDw&sig2=dCMcZ0clw883pVtzBv2_mQ

Yes Google are tracking every click within their search results, and so do most search engines. They want to know which results you found interesting.

Tracking Links From Within Feedburner

If you pay for their total stats package, their tracking links are supposed to offer a redirect that search engines can understand, unfortunately, any such link won’t issue a trackback, and won’t register in Technorati.

Multiple times I have seen some of the top blogging and SEO experts use FeedBurner redirect links by accident. In fact because they are more likely to be using a feed reader, they are also more likely to make this mistake than newer bloggers.

Tracking Links From Alexa

I am literally mourning the people who are using Alexa redirects in an attempt to increase their Alexa ratings.

It is believed by many people that using an Alexa redirect to link to your site from various places will improve your Alexa rating. I haven’t tested it, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t but there is absolutely no logical reason to be using Alexa redirects for links which could otherwise be passing some useful link juice.

I have seen people use Alexa redirect links:-

• On their MyBlogLog Profile
• In comments on Dofollow blogs
• For their own internal linking

Seriously, that isn’t a very good idea.
It is fair enough sticking an Alexa badge on your site, or encouraging your users to use useful Firefox plugins such as Search Status which now includes Compete reporting as well.

If you really want to experiment with it, you can use them for comments on other blogs, but then that messes up your tracking data, and knowing where you get good traffic from is highly important.

Note: I do realise Alexa use a 301 Redirect, so in theory the links will pass juice, there is no knowing if the redirect will remain the same link in the future, or if a 301 passes all ranking factors – it is certainly an ugly URL I wouldn’t want to click in places like MyBlogLog or on forums.

Copying A Link From a Comment

I see this one time and time again, and it really sickens me.

Someone posts a great link to related content in a comment, and the author of the post decides to move the item into the main post, or write a new blog post including the link and comment.

Unfortunately the links in their blog in the comments contain nofollow, and the blogging software they use grabs the HTML selected, including the nofollow attribute.

Result… a dead link, totally worthless.

Blogger Profiles

Which page would you like to rank highly in the search engines?

• Your Blogger Profile
• The Pages Of Your Blog

This isn’t a trick question

Unless you have no choice, always use the alternate URL choice when commenting on Blogger blogs, especially on the blogs that have removed nofollow.

Yes it is more complicated and slightly more time consuming, but what is the point of a junk comment link to your Blogger profile.

Even on a blog with nofollow, a comment link is still a link back to your blog, where you want the traffic to go. You can also use a deep link to a particular blog post, and sign your name with appropriate anchor text which wouldn’t be looked on as spammy, especially if you wrote a very good comment, that was related.

As an example I might link to this article using “Andy Beard on Linking Mistakes” or “Andy Beard on SEO Friendly Links”

That kind of link, especially if they know it is to good information, invites people to click and isn’t going to be looked on as spammy if you gave good information.

I quite often delete comments such as

I wrote about it here, this is my link
www.spammy-link-soon-to-be-deleted.com/reallypoorarticle.htm

Give People Good Links

The more times you give people good quality links, with good anchor text, the more times you will get the same high quality links in return.
Sometimes it only takes a couple of high quality links for a particular page to rise to the top of the search results for the phrase used in the anchor text.

As an example I have seen massive improvements for the charity I chose to help in the Charity link meme, which was at the bottom of the 2nd page of results for Polish Charity, and is now in 3rd place, on the 1st page of results in Google.

Picture Credit:Broken Chain

For a long time my blogs have performed amazingly well with Google Blog Search. I always appear in the relevant results quickly, and the results I obtain have some reasonable longevity, even when I am not the original source of a story.

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

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

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

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

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

Relevancy & Quality – Blog | Blogpost

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

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

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

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

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

Google Blog Search – Positive Factors Affecting Search Quality | Relevancy

• Popularity of the blog document

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

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

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

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

• Implied popularity of the blog document

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

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

• Existence of the blog document in blogrolls

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

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

• Existence of the blog document in a high quality blogroll

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

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

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

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

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

• Tagging of the blog document

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

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

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

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

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

• References to the blog document by other sources

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

• Pagerank of the blog document

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

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

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

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

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

Google Blog Search – Negative Factors Affecting Search Relevancy | Quality

• Frequency of new posts on the blog document

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

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

• The content of the posts in the blog document

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

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

Based upon this:-

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

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

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

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

• Collective Intelligence

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

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

• A size of the posts in the blog document

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

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

• A link distribution of the blog document

A link distribution of the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. As disclosed above, some posts are created to increase the pagerank of a particular blog document. In some cases, a high percentage of all links from the posts or from the blog document all point to ether a single web page, or to a single external site. If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

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

• The presence of ads in the blog document

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

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

However they go on to say this

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Subscribers and Technorati Favorites may help you rank.

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.

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

Things I have noticed this time round

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

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

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

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

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

Why am I monitoring Pagerank so closely?

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

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

It is five years, almost to the day that Yahoo started charging $299 per year for a listing in their directory as this article on Pandia clearly illustrates.

The main benefit of being in the Yahoo directory isn’t traffic, it is pagerank / trustrank. Who actually uses the Yahoo directory for anything other than listing their own sites?
It is many years since I went to Yahoo to lookup an entry for anything other than a competitor in a niche.

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

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

Commercial Internet

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

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

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

2006 in Perspective

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

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

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

During 2006 I have seen Google likened to God.

2007 A Reality Check?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Create Great Content and Links Will Follow?

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

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

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

# natural links per post = blog readership / 1000

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

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

Pay For Your Traffic

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

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

Trust and Duplicate Content

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

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

Would I Do Paid Posts?

Yes – but not for the reasons most people would do them.

I value my time, and the $30 I would currently get from ReviewMe to do any justice to a review just wouldn’t cover my time.

But any niche website is relevant to this blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok enough preamble

Search Engine Glossary

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

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

Search Engine Glossary – Content

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

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

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

SEO Definitions Which I Felt Should Be Included

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

SEO Terms That Needed Expansion

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

Splogs/linkfarms – you gave a very clinical definition

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

SEO References Needing Updating

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

Search Engine Glossary – SEO and User Navigation

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

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

Overall

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

There are actually 2 distinct stages in taking action

1. Awareness & Thinking about a Strategy
2. Application of the Strategy

Awareness & Thinking about an SEO Stragegy

Whilst taking action is highly important, at least being aware that SEO exists, and that there are some things you can do to improve your search engine performance is a vital first stage.

Some people will take longer than others in formulating a strategy, and I never look on that as some kind of procrastination.
There is a decision process, and the result of that decision process might result in no action being taken, not because of laziness or lack of technical knowledge, but because after evaluating their own personal circumstances and prioritisation, a need to take action wasn’t determined.

When I see someone like Robert Tsai who is a business development specialist discussing the benefits of seo compared to social marketing factors, in many ways that is more fulfilling for me than if he had just taken action based upon something he read on my blog.

Questioning if an SEO strategy would provide a benefit is as important as taking action if a need is determined.

Is SEO needed?

In a business context, being SEO aware is vital. however many business’s, even multinational companies who I assume have someone on their payroll who is SEO aware, take the decision to concentrate on delivering their business message, whether branding or some kind of sales process conversion.
By making such a decision, they are calculating that they will gain traffic from other sources, or that they will gain a sufficient number of backlinks with related terms in the anchor text to rank for their primary search terms regardless of on page SEO.
Quality of content, linkbait worthiness, and existing subscriber base (either their own or marketing partners) all play a huge role.
Expected longevity of the site, or particular pieces of content also play a factor. A blog created for a short term promotion might never achieve any search engine results before it is already old news.
For a celebrity blog, what Britney Spears did 6 months ago isn’t important.

For a personal blog the author might not care about search engine results. They are writing because they want to, their readers are quite often people they have an existing relationship with offline, and whether anyone else passes by doesn’t really matter.
Also with the massive growth of social networking, there are a huge number of other ways to gain new readers.
If links from related sites drive 95% of existing traffic it might be hard to justify a need.

What is Search Traffic Worth?

Bambi Francisco of Market Watch has some interesting search traffic statistics in the run up to Christmas. Driving Retailer Traffic

According to Bill Tancer at Hitwise, search engines account for 25% of the upstream traffic. That means 25% of the traffic that go to the more than 19,000 online retailers visit search engines first.

What is very interesting to note is the traffic from social networks she has quoted

In fact, Tancer says that 5% of traffic to retailers comes from social networks, with MySpace accounting for 2.5% of that traffic.

One interesting statistic missing from the final list is how much traffic comes from affiliates. Many comparison shopping sites are also affiliates of the big online retailers.

Many of those affiliates gain their traffic from search. At what point do you start measuring the search traffic coming into the sales funnel?

SEO action from my readers

Michel Fortin has been taking action on a number of his sites, partially based on things he read here. He has introduced tagging on his Copywriters blog, although that integration seems to be in a state of flux as I have noticed a change in how the tags are being presented. He has also introduced tagging and a copywriting tag cloud to his central blog.

Some of the other changes he has been making are less obvious, but in a thread on his Copywriters forum he has been going into a lot more detail.

Paul O’Flaherty is one of my more recent readers. We exchanged a couple of emails after I sent him a private message on Mybloglog. He runs a design and SEO business, and I noticed when I visited his personal blog that some aspects of the SEO weren’t optimal.
He explained to me that as the blog was personal, he didn’t let his SEO team near it. He said he would take into consideration what I had pointed out on his next design update sometime in the future.

Do you see a trend? There should always be a decision process before taking action. I am actually quite pleasantly surprised that after just a few days Paul has already made an update to his seo and design.

If you look at Pauls blog, you will notice that his bookmark links are now using nofollow. They were previously accounting for over 50 external links alone on his front page, and sometimes 50% of his links from internal pages.

For tips on how to achieve this, here is how to modify the sociable plugin.

Paula also took some action recently. Another new reader who appreciated what I had to say regarding seo and blogrolls. Paula is using blogger, so it is much harder to seo other factors on the page as there is no way to tweak the backend code or plugins as you can with WordPress. I don’t know how long her blogroll was previously, but she recently decided to remove her blogroll.
I actually find it quite interesting reading Paula’s blog (I try to read as many as I can, especially when readers add me to Technorati favorites). It seems she has become a lot more active with her blogging in the last 2 months, and is making good use of affiliate links in an ethical way. A good example is her Christmas Shopping List.

I also read Eve’s blog. A while back she took some action and added tagging with Ultimate Tag Warrior. There are still some things she could tweak, but because she is retaining so much pagerank internally with her tag cloud on each page it is not a major priority (the 80/20 rule).
Some things she is doing much better than I am currently, such as the presentation of her individual tag pages. She uses a lot of pictures in her posts, especially when talking about her up and coming wedding. As an example, here is a link to her wedding tag page.

SEO Cultivation

I describe what I discuss as pagerank cultivation and not pagerank hoarding.

By being careful how you link your pages together, and what links you have both on your front pages and internal pages, not only are the value of your internal pages retained more effectively, but you can afford to be more generous with linking.

Here is a great post on the benefits of linking to others on Tech-buzz, but if you are using search status with firefox, you would notice that all the comments are still nofollow. That is personal choice, many bloggers believe followable links encourage spammers. I believe it encourages community.
That internal page however is extremely well optimised.

• It has about 18 internal links (only one in the article).
• There are 3 external links to the RSS feed (those are self serving)
• There is one external link to a 3rd party

But they also seem to be carefully cultivating pagerank as you can see on this screenshot.

Techbuzz is less than a year old and PR6. Part of that is from posting great content that encourages links, but equally important is hanging onto some of that pagerank, even though they frequently share their Google Juice with other sites.

How to Share Google Juice?

Throughout the whole of this article, I have been very selective in the terms or keywords I am using to link through to other sites. Not only that, but I have also been placing rel=”tag” in every single one of the links.
I have speculated about the power of tagging in the past, based upon my own testing and tracking. I believe that not only does it help with searches on sites such as Technorati
, it is also used by Google in part of their LSI calculations.

There is something else about linking I need to discuss, but I will save that for another day.