I can understand why Matt Cutts might want to change what noindex does, it is not just Koreans making occasional mistakes, for instance I just noticed the whole WebProNews video blog is currently noindex nofollow. I am sure that is a mistake, it is easy to make in WordPress… just one click and save.

All in one plugins are dangerous if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve

Rel-nofollow, meta instructions and robots.txt are just tools.

Just because a tool is available to use in your toolbox, doesn’t mean you should use it. You don’t always need to use a big hammer to repair a TV set though sometimes a big hammer just isn’t big enough ;)

Inclusive PageRank Sculpting

Whilst I agree with Michael that nofollow has a purpose and I use it as a tool to achieve desired results, Shari raises some good points.

The Search Engine Land blog doesn’t use nofollow on links, but the “information architecture” is sculpted with a very flat profile. SEL is an information resource, and all pages are given almost equal emphasis.
That may not be true of a niche website, e-commerce site, etc – this is something that has to be determined on a case by case basis.

If you are looking at WordPress SEO in a competitive niche, for specific keywords, having a specialist toolset available is an advantage.
That page is blocked by robots.txt, but still ranks highly for reasonably competitive terms based upon anchor text within plenty of editorial links, and internal linking structure, domain authority etc.

Pages blocked by Robots.txt still accumulate Google Juice.

But you shouldn’t give a baby razor blades to play with, let alone a chain saw.

Less Important Pages Can Be Your Quarterbacks

My sitelinks are currently a total mess, and haven’t been updated since November. I have so many links on my front page that Google has a hard time to determine which pages are most important, and some internal pages have attracted a fair number of external links.

On many sites, a contact form, privacy policy, advertising page etc might be important to appear on your sitelinks, but less important in standard search results.

Simple Site Structure

Here we have a simple site structure, with 14 landing pages linked to from the front page. Of these pages, we have determined that 6 are unimportant, and 8 we would ideally like to appear in sitelinks.

The following are just a few examples of how we could arrange the linking structure.

I should point out the following:-

• It is much more complex than these simple diagrams because I haven’t included any 3rd tier (or deeper) pages
• I haven’t included any home links or links from a 3rd 4th etc tier to higher tiers
• Iterative calculations need to be thought about
• There are no leaks

Keep Them Out Of The Index

In this example the pages are so unimportant we want to keep them out of the index, and prevent them soaking up any Google Juice.

We nofollow links to them, and use meta noindex follow on the pages – this keeps them out of the index even if someone else links to them, but allows juice from those links to flow to other pages.
In this situation we should also ensure that there are no external links on the page using plugins such as my nofollow those dupes.

Not So Important Pages

Here we are thinking about usability – we still want those unimportant pages appearing in a site search or a more specific long tail search, but they are not key search terms.
Maybe some of these pages have an effect on site quality.

We nofollow links from the homepage, and maybe from the sidebar or footer throughout the site, but have a live link from the HTML sitemap.

When You Have Multiple Levels Of Importance

In this example we have 3 tiers of importance

• Pages we don’t want in the index or receiving any juice
• Pages that are important for navigation, but should receive less juice
• Primary pillar content aimed at competitive keywords

Our least important pages are still linked heavily, but have no juice being passed to them due to nofollow, and have noindex follow to keep them out of the index, but passing juice if they happen to receive a link.

Our low priority pages are gaining links from the HTML sitemap

Our most important pages receive juice from the home page, and possibly site-wide links.

Nofollow Is Not Required

Nofollow is not a requirement to enhance the flow of Google juice around a site, but it certainly helps.

In this particular case, we have some less important pages that are receiving a lot of jucie, maybe with site-wide links, not just from the home page.

However those pages are not as important as other pages on the site, and would not be our preference to appear as sitelinks.

We allow our unimportant pages to receive the blessing of a front page appearance, but the only links from those unimportant pages are to our most important pages. Juice flows straight through like a 100% efficient conduit.

If we only link to those unimportant pages from the front page, the total amount of juice they receive will be greatly reduced.

No Robots.txt

In these examples I didn’t use robots.txt once.

Robots.txt can be used strategically and in many cases is easier to implement than selective nofollow on links, or noindex follow on pages, but that doesn’t make using it “best practice”.

So Which Method is Best?

None of them, all of them (I just know I will get that question)

SEO is art, you can teach someone to hold a paint brush and all about perspective, but a true masterpiece requires creative talent and a lot of practice.

With my SEO articles I try to go a little further than just showing you how to hold a fishing rod or paint brush

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]

• Matt probably earns a salary from Google as head of webspam
• Matt has been with Google since 2000, so probably has a few stock options
• If Matt says something about a new Google service that encourages other bloggers to write about it as well, it probably has an effect on Google’s share price, so there is a specific financial incentive.

We have seen how blog discussions can have both a massive positive and negative influence on large company share value, especially with Apple.

Full Disclosure From Google – No Way?

• Matt doesn’t have a comprehensive disclosure policy – he does have a short disclaimer to hide behind
• Matt doesn’t use nofollow on links to his source of income
• Matt used to post messages on popular SEO forums as “Google Guy”, but there was never any specific disclosure

Now whilst Matt has mentioned the FTC in relation to paid links before, it has always been in the sanctuary of his “private” blog. At SES San Jose I believe he is there in his official capacity.

Here are quotes from 2 live bloggers

Tamar at SEO Round Table

Matt is up first. Are paid links evil? He says that this is the wrong question. But the right question is – Do paid links that pass PR violate search engine quality guidelines? The answer is yes.

The FTC has said that you must disclose whether you are being paid to market.
Disclosure on the web: the web is used by both people (surfers) and machines (search engines)

What is adequate disclosure on the web? It is understood by both machines and people.

Make a clear disclosure: this won’t pass PageRank -
- Redirect URL blocked by robots.txt
- redirect through URL that does 302
- JavaScript
- nofollow
- Meta tag with nofollow

The Lisa at Bruce Clay Internet Business Consultants

Matt says that asking if paid links are evil or not is the wrong question. He says the right question is, “Do paid links that pass PageRank violate search engines’ quality guidelines?” The answer to that is yes.

He adds that the FTC has said that word of mouth marketing is like any other kind of marketing, and if you’re being paid to say something you should disclose that. Adequate disclosure means it is understood by both people and the machines.

How do you disclose a paid link to the search engines?

* Redirect through URL locked by robots.txt
* Redirect through URL t hat does a 302
* JavaScript
* Nofollow the link

Google says you can buy links within search engine guidelines – meaning they can’t pass PR. Google doesn’t care about those links. However, you cannot buy links that pass PageRank.

Examples of PPP links – fundraisers, donate cars, online, credit, super slots, providers, junk yards, online casino, bypass pill, dating advice, USA online poker, etc.

Both people and machines have to be able to understand the disclosure?
Also why does Lisa use the PPP acronym and not that of paid links rather than paid reviews?

Lets Take A Look at… YouTube

There is no requirement for disclosure
Views and ratings are counted whether a video is commercial or not, and commercial content can make it to the top of YouTube rankings.

Lets Take A Look At… Referral Units

Seven months ago I first published an article about how Google’s guidelines for their referral units don’t tally with FTC and WOMM.
3 Months ago I highlighted that specific questions regarding WOMM with referral units in response to articles on the Google Adsense blog were going totally unanswered.

So Many Different Compensated Links

Just the other day I wrote about the need for a level playing field for paid links.

Based upon current logic the WOMMA should be kicked out of the SERPs for having paid links on their site, along with all their members.
Hey guys, it only costs $1000 per year to join WOMMA, but you could probably barter a little SEO help and get them to pay you, with all those member pages being counted as duplicate content and supplemental.

WordPress

Matt is known to be a supporter of WordPress, and Google are going to make a lot of money displaying advertising on their high ranking blogs.

Surely Google should also have had a word with them about their linkfarm – I have also written about their linking structure in the past.

Matt Cutts still retains a link to WordPress.org on his blog.

From the WordPress default theme (hidden in a comment)

If you’d like to support WordPress, having the “powered by” link somewhere on your blog is the best way, it’s our only promotion or advertising.

So you are paying for use of WordPress by giving them a link – it is advertising without a nofollow on millions of blogs, not to mention the default blogroll and half the WordPress developers selling text links – yes Matt Cutts is using blogging software funded in part by text links.

Web2.0 Sites

At least one of the following sites is sponsoring a very popular WordPress plugin that gives them links, lots of them, quite certainly from millions of pages.

Digg, Del.icio.us, Netvouz, Dzone, ThisNext, MisterWong, Wists

The Sneaky Javascript Advertising

Javascript advertising and widgets is never totally innocent

If you want to be standards compliant as well as using script tags, you also use noscript, and include a link.

1000s of top search terms are dominated by people using links hidden in noscript that most users never see, and copy and paste without even realising it.

Some also take a standard link, and then modify it using javascript and CSS to look like an image link.

Do these huge corporations using these tactics have to now include nofollow on the noscript links?

For a light-hearted look, I have to post this video

Rentvine created this video, which isn’t their niche – they are a home rental site.

Ultimately it is Google’s search engine, and they want to provide better search results and encourage ethical SEO practice.

When I write a compensated review of a service, I almost always spend hours on them, far more than your average Yahoo intern working for the directory, and I earn far less.
The reviews are always relevant to my audience, and I am selective having turned down the last 3 offers I was made to review sites, over $400 I could have earned but didn’t because I respect my audience, or didn’t feel qualified. I only review a service when I can offer insight, opinion and feedback.

As I have mentioned in the past, this topic is of specific interest because of my future startup plans, where the links will be as “whitehat” as Matt Cutts linking to Google, or Robert Scoble to Podtech

If 100,000 shareholders, employees and companies for whom I provide a very specific service for link to my site, is it going to be webspam if they are linking through to authoritative and highly relevant content? I have no plans to ask them to nofollow the links.

Update: I just read Rand’s writeup at SEOmoz on this paid links session at SES San Jose and it offers insight into the tone of the session, further clarification and there were also revelations from the Q & A afterwards.

#
To Matt Cutts – can Google remove the ability of individual pages to pass linkjuice
_
Matt says that not only can they remove single page’s ability to pass PR, they can also remove the ability of only certain links on a page from passing PR, and do.
_
#
To Matt Cutts – would Google ever ban a large brand for an extended period of time for engaging in manipulative link practices?
_
Matt says that Google had removed a very big site in the past for 43 days in total from the index, and this was noticed by Ben Edelman (sadly, I haven’t ID’d the site or post and Matt did not mention it)

The Ben Edelman reference seems to be in relation to WhenU 3 years ago and it seems that was mainly to do with cloaking.

Andy Beal sums up this SES session

I encourage you to read the notes and digest the information. Like me, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that buying select links from highly relevant pages isn’t going to get you into trouble with Google. Buying tons of spammy, non-relevant, run of site links, probably will.

On a subject like this I will quite happily link through to Fantomaster who sells cloaking software

Will it work? Will the Google monster, the paragon of Web Apartheid, finally relent?

Dana on the Online Marketing Blog likens this to a Transformers battle between Optimus Prime (Matt Cutts) & Megatron (Michael Gray)
I am sure the Toprank team recommend buying links on Yahoo, why is a paid review worse?

Update 2

Yesterday Duncan Riley on Techcrunch attacked the general WordPress attitude to paid links.
It would be interesting to look at how many WordPress developers, theme designers and plugin developers are heavily funded by the sale of text links.

Duncan also attacked Akismet, and he is quite right to do so. Spam Karma, with or without the addition of AKisment is actually equally or more effective at handling spam, and can be integrated with Akismet as an additional check.
It should also be noted that the Akismet “spam count” widget doesn’t use javascript, but is one of the widgets that produced a search engine followable link back to an Automattic owned domain.

As I mentioned recently, WordPress Sponsored themes still exist in large numbers on the theme database. In the comments on Techcrunch, Matt Mullenweg seems to be claiming that they have been all cleared out, but that is far from the case.

Duncan mentions the oft used phrase “people in glass houses” which does ring home my earlier article – A List Bloggers in Crystal Palaces Shouldn’t Throw Stones

Update 3

Michael Gray has now published his powerpoint presentation on Google Paid links.

I am not a user of Text Link Ads, but it seems emails have gone out about some code changes, and that they will now be using TinyURL for the links
TinyURL in itself is a 301 redirect, which could however then link to a further redirect or tracking script. I am not sure a chain of 301 redirects would be a good idea, and using TinyURL on its own is still passing juice.

Aaron Wall is also binging out the big guns, arguing why linkbaiting (which Google supports) is not suitable for all businesses.
Some of Aaron’s bullet points against linkbaiting include:-

• it is expensive
• it is time consuming
• the results are hard to predict
• it requires social connections
• it provides off topic low value traffic
• it typically creates content of limited commercial value (other than the ability to pull in links to rank other pages for stuff they did not have enough relevancy or authority to merit ranking for)

Today they have written a little about content theft, it isn’t a great article, and doesn’t really go into many of the problems, or link through to any authority sources.

I don’t worry about content theft, I license all my content under GPL, and I gain lots of low quality backlinks, or sometimes great backlinks from authority sites that syndicate my content.

I often include lots of internal linking in every post to maximise the benefit, and it helps to establish ownership of the original article (Google might have fixed some of my previous link attribution worries)

Don’t Link To The People You Are Crying About

The biggest blunder from the article on Download Squad however is they linked through to the offending sites and articles, with a real SE followable link.

Nofollow Has A Purpose

I strongly advocate not using nofollow in comments on actively moderated blogs, but it is the easiest way to tell search engines that you don’t vouch for the content on a site.

Giving a good link to the search engines from the same domain as content has been stolen from is just idiotic. It makes the content more authentic, and if you are worried about someone stealing your SERPs, the worst thing you can do is give the stolen content credibility.

Note to DownloadSquad: Add rel=”nofollow” if you link to people syndicating your content

Nofollow can also be used in many ways to optimize your internal linking structure.

Note to DownloadSquad Part2: Damn the links you use to other people are terrible. Please make my blog linking mistakes article required reading for all your writers.

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.

If you happen to click through to my site from your feedreader (I know it is a huge sacrifice) then you will see I have a new pet in my sidebar.
He is actually quite a smart little guy, because unlike you, he knows which posts on my blog you might have missed over the last 3 months, based on the number of comments that were posted, or in this case, lack of comments.

This is a great way to bring some life back into older content which maybe was missed first time around, and is a nice supplement to the related posts and tag links to increase the internal linking.

It was created by Rob @ YackYack and does include a link back to his site, which is a great example of viral marketing with plugins.

Rob has a great explanation about how his “Tumbleweed Factor” is calculated, based on the number of posts you have which have no comments in the previous 3 months.
My Tumbleweed Factor is 7, signifying that my blog has received no comments on beteen 24% and 36% of posts. Not bad, but could be improved.

To make best use of the link in the sidebar, I suppose I don’t need to link through to him directly in this post, and you will have to click through to see it in action first.

Note: It is a WordPress Plugin – I don’t know of a similar solution for other platforms.

Update -my pet seems to have been scared off by the flash of a camera – I will have to have a chat with Rob about why he is so shy (might have found a bug)
Update2 – I am not sure what I have changed, but it appears to be working again

If you want to share the love from your blog, I compiled an extensive list of “dofollow” and “nofollow” resources covering major platforms such as WordPress (on your own domain), blogger and Drupal. It is also possible on Typepad, and Dawud Miracle and Karen have been discussing ways to present the complicated procedure to remove nofollow on Typepad. Hopefully I will be able to link to a solution soon.

In my review of Blogcatalog recently, I mentioned that one of the key things I would like to see is for the Nofollow link to be removed from the site profiles.

This is how the site profiles used to look when viewed using the Search Status Firefox Plugin which highlights nofollow links on the pages you visit with a pink box.

That link wasn’t just nofollowed. It was also passing through a redirect script to count the number of clicks the link had received, important for their rating system and to help advertisers to evaluate the value of the listings they purchase. Some redirect scripts can pass on link juice, but a clean link is much better.

Blogcatalog Sharing the Link Love (No Nofollow)

The page now looks like this:-

As can be clearly seen, the link no longer has the nofollow extension, and thus passes on juice.

What about the redirect?

<h2>Andy Beard - Niche Marketing</h2>
		<h3><a href="http://andybeard.eu" onclick="return o('andy-beard-niche-marketing');">http://andybeard.eu</a></h3>

You will see here that this is a clean link which uses the onclick parameter to count the number of outbound clicks from the page. From what I can tell from limited testing, pages also load a lot faster with the new linking method.

Not All Links Are The Same

Some would argue that MyBlogLog has provided followable links from the start, and they are certainly to be congratulated for this. They also have a number of useful linking structures that help bring their profiles into prominence.

It is interesting studying the value of links from various services just by doing a quick vanity search on Google for Andy Beard.

The MyblogLog linking structure with the number of links using that term internally really makes them highly relevant.

That doesn’t however help much on relevance for other terms not associated with the name of the blog, or blog owner.

Here is another vanity search, but this time on “Andy Beard – Niche Marketing”

Ok so that link text is being used through to my page profile on Blogcatalog, so it is not really very fair and also is very prominent on Bumpzee for the same reason.

Lets use a term that I use in my description on multiple syndication sites to see which is giving me currently the best relevant link.

“Blog Search Engine Performance”

Blogcatalog is an older domain, but that page with description is much younger than my profule on MyBlogLog.

There are references on Bumpzee for that phrase before MyBlogLog appears.

This isn’t conclusive research, but as of this writing the page that is ranking for Blogcatalog is often based on my old rating within the service – as my registration was quite late, it was fairly well buried on each of the listing pages, often 4 or 5 pages deep.

It takes Google a number of days to recalculate ranking based on links. Thus it is only going to improve.

Blogcatalog Introduces Real Tagging

Please first of all understand that this seems to be the first stage of implementation, but it demonstrates clearly the direction Blogcatalog can take and the speed they are implementing changes.
The removal of nofollow was quite a simple matter, but implementing tagging certainly took a little more work, in just a few short days, on a holiday weekend!

Lets take a little look at Meg’s Blogcatalog profile

Now my geeky readers will no doubt notice that not every site is currently working, and that the tags currently being picked up are Megs categories defined within a feed such as:-

	<category><![CDATA[blogcatalog]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mybloglog]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Australian Blogs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blogsearch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blogging]]></category>

That was taken from Meg’s feed (she has actually got 2, one at WP.com, and one on Feedburner – they really should support redirects)

Blogger blogs do things slightly differently. Here is an example of the code in Johns feed at Finding The Money.

<category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="networking" /><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="promotion" />

Those are generated by using labels on the new blogger, thus it would be worthwhile using lots of them, or creating additional links to a tag space that shares link love back with you.

I don’t think it will take long to have this picking up all forms of tagging such as rel=”tag” anywhere within a feed item.

That is what they would have to cope with on my blog, where a post might only be in 3 defined categories, but be tagged with 10 or 20 tags.

Blogcatalog Tagspace?

The microformat “rel-tag” definition dictates that the end of the URL you use to link through to the pages that form a “tagspace” should end with the word in question.

The destination of a rel=”tag” hyperlink is required to be a tag space (a place that collates or defines tags), where the last segment of the path of the URL is the tag

Blogcatalog now has links such as

http://www.blogcatalog.com/post-tag/blogsearch

As a demonstration they have built a global tag cloud, though this doesn’t yet have a comprehensive data set.

They also have the links to tags as previously highlighted, and the ability to search tags.

Tag Search

This is becoming a little confusing, and I am sure things will become refined over time allowing even more powerful features.

Currently we have a number of search options:-

• In the Blog Directory – this searches the blog directory descriptions only – as an example a search for “SEO” currently doesn’t find my blog listing, even though it is highly rated in the SEO category, and I use SEO for a blog defined tag – SEO is even a term found in one of my reader reviews, but that isn’t picked up. Tag and Category are probably terms that shouldn’t be picked up, but review content probably should.
• In Tags – these allows a search in predefined tags when blog accounts are created. As an example a search for “BlogCatalog” doesn’t come up with any results, because no blog has currently defined that term as one of their core topics. A search for Wordperss in the tags comes up with my blog at the top, because my blog is currently the highest rated blog using that defined tag.
• In Blog Posts – this searches the content of archived blog posts. It should be noted that there is a lot of stored content with some listings going back over 1 year on a search for the term “WordPress” – I wonder if data such as categories or tags is also stored (the raw RSS data) – if they have all of it, that is a lot of content that can now be recategorised with tags and who linked to who within the content.

Popularity is currently based upon blog rating, I am not sure how relevance is counted, but it would also be possible to introduce other metrics such as linkage and add additional authority based searches or options.

• In Blog Post Tags – this is the new form of search previously discussed, that will allow bloggers to define what their post is about using the rel-tag microformat already used by Technorati, and their blogging platforms existing category system.

BlogCatalog vs Technorati

As I have already likened Blogcatalog to MyBlogLog, it is now time to take on an even bigger player, Technorati.

Technorati could roll out a networking feature, but their current size means it isn’t something that can be rolled out fast without also introducing a massive support and spam problem. Technorati autodiscovers sites and feeds, often polluting its index, and is a primary target for junk.

Blogcatalog could easily encroach on Technorati’s space, whilst remaining devoid of spam, and already having a social feature built in.

Blogcatalog is only indexing feeds which it is told about and isn’t scraping the blog itself looking for additional blogroll links which aren’t necessarily a good indication of quality, because it can be easily gamed. Authority with Technorati can easily be established by releasing a few themes or widgets, or having a blog as part of a network, as I have discussed in the past.

Blogcatalog is probably lacking in historical data, but that isn’t honestly hard to get. They could always write a simple “Pick Me Up” plugin that can be installed and provides an RSS feed of all previous posts, and I am sure something similar could be possible for all platforms, maybe something like a dynamic, blog content only sitemap.

Fancy charts and tables are fairly easy to add

Technorati Is Ugly in Pink

Blogs added to Technorati are not added manually – Technorati find them by itself, and only at a later date are they removed from the index if they are found to be “splogs”.
Lots of the feeds Technorati is encouraged to collect aren’t unique blog feeds.

With all the poor quality content being added to the index, there is no wonder Technorati choose to add nofollow on every page, but that is also their undoing.
Many smart bloggers, because Technorati isn’t sharing any link love don’t link to Technorati directly, and use internal tagging. WordPress will have tagging built in with the release of WordPress 2.2.
Wordpress.com has for a long time used its own internal tagging system, and I questioned a while ago that this was potentially an extremely smart SEO move.

Technorati is heavily cross linked, but all the cross linking is nofollow ugly pink links.

Blogcatalog can justify having followable links, because there is a human review process for every blog, and they have also added a voting processs and other quality controls to highlight the highest quality content that readers find valuable.

Conclusion

I have had direct contact at various times with people from MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Bumpzee, and at this time I have no direct financial incentive to promote one particular service over another, and am purely writing about what I observe to be great features, and encouraging more.
I don’t know whether I am the only person directly encouraging Blogcatalog to add what I feel are cool features, and some of these features are also a feature of Bumpzee, who I have also actively encouraged to include them both publicly and in normal user feedback discussions by email.

So far I am only scratching the surface of what is possible…