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

A couple of days ago Darren over at Problogger highlighted why he didn’t feel good about a specific type of Make Money Blogging training product.

Even though it wasn’t mentioned in Darren’s post, it was quite clear from various references in the post that he was referring to Jack’s latest offering Blog Success.

I am going to turn this on its head a little as I spent a few hours browsing around various B5Media blogs. B5Media is being highlighted as Darren was a founder, and his primary role was training the bloggers, though I am not sure about his current involvement or influence on content strategy.

I understand that they have been going through a lot of mass consolidation of their blogs, and there are tons of redirects from one domain to another, and my taste in content may be different to the general public.

Thus I thought the best way to judge overall content quality would be to use retweets, as recorded by Topsy.com

I am using Topsy as from what I have seen they at least handle internal 301 redirects fairly well, although they don’t seem to do the same for when content gets moved between domains – Tweetmeme doesn’t even handle small changes in permalinks.

Everyjoe.com on Topsy
Blisstree.com on Topsy
Splendidcity.com on Topsy
Bizzia seems to have been recently consolidated into Everyjoe

I also went through a number of their celebrity blogs which haven’t been consolidated, but didn’t see anything that suggested a different emphasis, level of quality or audience engagement.

Only BlissTree seems to have really knocked anything “out of the park” since B5 Media had their site consolidation – wait a moment, that was a post from 2006 on the effect of Coke on the body, and there is another great post on what happens to your body after giving up smoking with 3000+ comments which is also old content.

Even with an army of authors, plus the occasional mention in Darren’s twitter stream the overall public reception of the content is a little bit… muffled.

I am not knocking the strategy or the authors. The authors get paid to write content to specific requirements but ultimately the aim of the current content isn’t to get book deals or speaking engagements, though I do realise some of the B5Media writers are already published authors.

There was no attempt to sell an ebook of “Halloween appetizers” despite Alexa showing it was a recent top search term.

Here is a link to the blog Jack created about Environmental News and dog treats

I have nofollowed the links as I don’t want to have too much of a positive effect on their rankings. To be honest I would have done a bit more work in making things unique, adding a point of view and personality.
I am 50/50 as to whether I would allow the links from my comments though that could be easily fixed by making the sites more personal. When Jack comments with links to the sites, he does do so as himself.

The sites are nothing special, mainly built around niched 3rd party articles, press releases etc sourced through Jack’s custom tools, and using Zemanta in some cases to provide links to 3rd party resources including sites such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

I personally don’t think it is a worse user experience for a search visitor landing on one of Jack’s niche sites compared to landing on a B5 Media blog, though there would probably be less inclination to subscribe.

Can the content Jack uses rank? Probably depending on search queries, linking etc.

With some long tail queries for snippets appearing on his home page he already outranks the original article author, though that isn’t necessarily the goal.

It is too early days to see the full effects of Jack’s linkbuilding efforts, but both sites have 5-10% of content in primary index.

An alternative goal might be to use lots of this kind of site to help rank other higher quality money sites. To be honest when B5Media had 300+ blogs I always assumed they would eventually move to a more solid revenue model such as eCommerce.

B5Media blogs seem to have 5-10% of their indexed content within Google’s primary index, which can easily be achieved with 100% duplicate content.

Blog Success (on the surface) certainly isn’t the authority blogging model Darren is advocating for Problogger readers, but Jack has taught that model in the past with a fair number of his students achieving success, and also teaches that model as a consultant. I would think some of that also carries across into Blog Success.

(highly targetted display advertising)

Update 14/12/2009

Techcrunch had an interesting piece about quality content on Sunday highlighting a post on Wired that descibes the content creation process on sites run by Demand Media.

I am not suggesting filling up the web with junk content – I have always maintained there are ways to aggregate niched content in ways that add value and create a useful end user experience, even if it might not retain long-term subscribers.

Original Title: Speed Linking Slow Linking

First posted Jan 17, 2007 @ 6:55

I don’t like the term speed linking. I like it even less on some blogs that use the “more” tag on a speed linking post, so you don’t even get to click straight through from your feed reader.

I know it helps with traffic numbers, especially if you have a large subscription, but I find it just annoying. Higher traffic that isn’t going to click an advert lowers your CTR.

Another factor to think about is how long people are on your pages. There has been lots of speculation about how long a visitor stays on your site affecting search results. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, maybe it just doesn’t… yet.

Linking

I write a fair amount about linking… hmm so does Jack Humphreys. Actually Jack writes a lot more than me about linking, and has done for years. In fact, come to mention it, if someone was to ask me to name one person as an expert on linking, Jack would be a good choice.

Jack has just written a great article “Give Links to Gain Authority Status

Jack might even agree with this next part.

Speed Linking = Bad Blogging?

• Unique Relevant Content – Quite frequently, a speed link post doesn’t have much unique content on the page, other than a few links. If you want a page to be unique, and have some value, it needs to have content. One piece of content linking through to another adds value and relevance to both.
• The Fire Exit – Linking through to others is great, but a speed link page is like a Fire Exit. I could understand it if it was an affiliate link… call it a minimalist approach, you don’t write anything to persuade the reader to click through, you just present them with a link and a choice, which pill? We are in a world of tabbed browsers now, but do some justice to the links, even if it is only including a few excerpts and links to related posts.
• Create a reference – If you present a document with lots of useful tips that can’t be totally digested in 30 seconds, there is a higher chance for the post to be bookmarked and saved for reference. That isn’t an excuse for not breaking up your writing with paragraphs, bullets etc.
• Add value – if you write something useful related to someone else’s work, there is a high chance they will link back to you either now or in the future. Are you just a fanboy or do you have a brain and a real opinion?
• Advertising – I mentioned near the start of this article about CTR

  Jack wrote:-

  My advertising rates continue to go up because advertising today is based almost completely on page views. I get new visitor page views, but remember the 37% return visitors? My advertising is affected by that greatly.

  Maybe he needed to make this a little clearer. Repeat traffic and repeat views for the same advertising message is more valuable, because consumers need to see an advert multiple times before it even registers as something interesting, or something they might be looking to buy.

Here is an example of a speed linking type post on Jacks site.

Now first off, Jack publishes full feeds – I am not forced to visit his site to use the links. Thus the links are there to be useful, and not to create supplemental traffic that won’t help CTR.
He does include some comments about why they might be useful to me. I would actually prefer him to write a little more, or to interweave the speed links with references to his own writing on similar subjects.

Back Scratching

Speed Linking can be good for back scratching – links are better if they are surrounded with lots of related keywords, not just for the person you link to, but quite possibly also for yourself.

(highly targetted display advertising)

Whilst this is theoretically possible, it is also unlikely.

To understand why the change has happened

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

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

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

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

Changing account name and retaining some of your link juice

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

AndyBeard

A little basic SEO training

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

AndyBeard

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

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

AndyBeard

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

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

AndyBeard

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

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

AndyBeard

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

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

AndyBeard

So What Changed At Twitter?

Quite simply, the default blogroll links

Previously they were based on 2 criteria

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

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

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

How Is The Twitter Blogroll Calculated Now?

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

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

About PageRank

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

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

What appears on the Google Toolbar (Toolbar PageRank) is

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

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

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

In direct referral stats it didn’t cause a shockwave until I looked at the specific pageviews of the page he chose to link to, my WordPress category.

My category pages rarely figure highly in the most viewed, so I could actually attribute the majority of the traffic to that specific landing page, even if the traffic originated from an email or RSS subscriber.

This takes me back to one of the discussions I had with Joost regarding his Google Analytics tracking from RSS Plugin – I am sure there must be some way to modify it so that when you link to someone, they can actually see the traffic you sent them, not just click-throughs from a blog page, but from subscribers.

This actually relates to link and traffic reciprocation, quite an important blogging concept.

People Need To See The Traffic

With an affiliate program it is easy for the affiliate program owner to see the traffic you send them. Everything is tracked. With blogging in general it isn’t so easy.

Search Engine Land for instance frequently link to me in their Search Cap which goes out to email subscribers.

From the posts that appear on the Search Engine Land blog, I rarely see more than 10 visitors – but that doesn’t account for the traffic sent from the email newsletter which is totally invisible.

Frequently I see posts receive a flood of traffic where I don’t have a referrer, because it is coming from various email clients.

Danny actually faces a similar problem, as he has raised the question of cross promotion of conferences in a discussion on Sphinn.

The big problem? The email edition of Search Cap is invisible traffic.

If people see that a link made a significant difference to traffic and conversions of whatever kind, they are much more likely to reciprocate.

In many ways, measurable traffic is the only traffic that counts and where you are promoting someone else, they have to see it too.

Links provide balance

Fred disagreed with what was written about 4 services on Techcrunch and VentureBeat, he provided some data to back that up, and clear disclosure.

Techcrunch responded, defending their writers, again fair enough.

Fred Wilson followed up with another post, linking through to the differing opinion, thus giving them equal limelight

Mathew Ingram was following the story closely, and as a professional journalist who I know links out to conflicting opinion on a frequent basis, followed up with “Bloggers Need To Try Harder”

Michael Arrington also linked through to Mathew from his post to give some additional balance.

The only negative in all this is that Fred ends up with a reputation management potential problem with a post headline on Techcrunch “Fred Wilson – Hypocritical, Wrong and Conflicted” – probably a bit uncalled for considering how this all eventually worked out.

Sadly This Isn’t Typical

I am going to start with a few choice quotes from Michael Arrington

In reference to Matt Marshall’s Like.com post on VentureBeat

that’s because he’s an old MSM, and sometimes still worries about “balanced” stories. I don’t aim for balance, I just want to be right.
Michael Arrington

Controversy in blogging pays

Joe – we’ve found that the “hits” – the blog posts that generate a lot of discussion – are the ones that drive all stats, including, indirectly, monetization. The problem is knowing what’s a hit and what isn’t before it actually happens. Given that we are all rushing into new territory, I think a little leeway is appropriate.
Michael Arrington

Some key points

• There is a financial incentive to be controversial
• There is equally a financial incentive for a story to remain controversial – linking to a differing opinion in an update? (extremely rare) or new post that links through to a strongly differing opinion (almost unheard of)

It is my belief as a blogger, the stronger opinion you have on a topic, or the more conflicts you have, the more you should try to highlight differing opinion.

One of the safety nets for a blogger are pingbacks or trackbacks – if you display them, and moderate them without concern for conflicting opinion.

Maybe it is a technical problem with Akismet, that pingbacks and trackbacks on Techcrunch rarely appear from valid blogs.
Maybe Techcrunch aren’t overly concerned with recovering pingbacks and trackbacks from the Akismet sin bin, but I have noticed trackbacks and pingbacks rarely appear on Techcrunch.
I would certainly hope that opinions the Techcrunch editors don’t agree with are in a worse case scenario just being deleted, and not actively flagged as being spam.

Techcrunch Has Pingback Code

The following code is included in each page

<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.techcrunch.com/xmlrpc.php" />

That means there is no need to include a Trackback link if you are using WordPress and sending ping notifications

So why are so few trackbacks appearing on Techcrunch, especially from what I would look on as trusted commentators such as Mathew Ingram?

Akismet relies on collective intelligence, you have to take an active role in removing legitimate trackbacks that have been wrongly detected as spam, otherwise you can silence the voice of other bloggers, not just on your own blog, but on other blogs as well.
Even if you subsequently intend to delete a pingback or trackback, you should still remove it from the spam list.

Why are people having to leave comments to say they have responded in some way to a Techcrunch post?

Cut The Ropes On Your Safety Net

Trackbacks and Pingbacks on a blog are your safety net, allowing others to find differences in opinion.

They are especially important on sites which have a very fast paced editorial process, and a reduced amount of time to followup on commentary elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t expect Techcrunch to link through to every conflicting blog post, that would be an extreme burden on resources better spent chasing down the next great startup – I even think they are over generous placing trackbacks above the comment area.

However if Techcrunch is to provide strong opinions on various topics, which have significant influence on the opinions of their 600k+ subscribers, and where they have admitted that controversial content has a financial benefit, they should ensure pingbacks and trackbacks are appearing, if only for some level of oversight.

Unfortunately in this regard Fred’s blog has also lost a few points – he has now replaced his comment system with Disqus.

Whilst that shows comments, he no longer has those comments hosted as part of his blog, they are on a separate domain, and the process of adding Discus comments has also removed the ability to display trackbacks.

Hyde Park Corner or a Conversation?

A blog without functioning pingbacks, trackbacks and comments is a bit like shouting your head off on Hyde Park corner. Whilst there is the potential of some limited 2 way conversation, your audience loses a lot of perspective.

Update

Tony Hung’s take on this is a worthwhile read, and I do practice what I preach. Is it all just about controversy?

Engage your community. Don’t be afraid to get physical (in a metaphorical kind of way), and call people out. Don’t afraid to be negative. But be prepared to fight for your opinion.

I am lowering the red flag

Carry on reading to find out why this isn’t the same as raising a white flag, and is far from surrendering to Google on paid reviews.

Robots.txt

I have spent a long time deciding on a course of action, and have decided that blocking my content using Robots.txt is ultimately better for me, and better for people hiring my services.

It also happens to be worse for Google than currently, but that is the beauty of this strategy.

It might be harder to rank, pages blocked using robots.txt still gather PageRank, and can appear in the index, though they would be looked on as dangling pages.

Ultimately links can always be redirected to a followup review which refers to the first, and that followup isn’t a paid review.

It is a little naughty, some people will sometimes receive editorial links within reviews and receive a trackback, but I don’t know of any spam plugin that checks robots.txt , plus the links will still be valuable in other search engines.

Google’s Achilles Heel With Paid Reviews

The only domain for which a client is paying for a review from is this one. When my content appears on other sites, there is a totally different editorial process, and links can in no way be looked on as paid links.

Content syndication is extensive:-

1. Social Bookmarking

Sites such as BloggingZoom encourage more than just a single line of description and rewritten titles on submissions, and not only deliver traffic from their existing user base, but also search traffic.

2. Hub Pages

Many content sites allow you to use syndicated content in the form of article feeds, and content is even picked up by larger sites such as Topix.

3. Authorized Syndication

You can arrange or organise for your content to be selectively syndicated on authority sites such as Andy Beard on WebProNews and even my WordPress SEO reviews published on SearchNewz.

Whilst I haven’t made it clear recently, I publish all my content under GPL, in fact I am switching to the GFDL with an invarient clause requiring a live hyperlink back to the original without nofollow – I prefer GFDL over creative commons because of this flexibility (for me) to be highly specific.

In future I am going to be actively encouraging syndication

4. Unauthorized Syndication

This is technically the same, but as long as people scraping my content are linking back to me, preferably with a followed link, it is great. I am not even worried about some light spinning of the content, as long as they state that the content has been modified and is only based on my original.

5. Indexed Search Results & Aggregators

This is the likes of Technorati, and feed readers that are indexed – I have no intention of blocking reviews from RSS feeds.

6. Multimedia

I use a lot of pictures and screenshots for my reviews, but this is going to increase – in addition I will also be creating podcasts and screencasts which will be widely distributed in their own right.

Hooray for Universal search!

No Nofollow = Editorial Backlinks

By not using nofollow in my reviews, it is most likely that syndicated copies of my reviews will provide backlinks not just for me, but also for my clients. The backlinks are editorial in many cases, someone has chosen to syndicate my content.

Unfortunately Google use backlinks to attribute content to an original source, but it is a whole lot harder if they can’t index the original. It will be interesting which site syndicating my work will rank highly, or how many.

Linking to Syndicated Content

This is something I haven’t decided on yet, but just like I can link through to my various social profiles, I do have the option to link through to my content on other domains after it has been syndicated.

Worse for Google

My content will still be in the index, filtered through an extra layer of editorial control, but there is going to be a whole lot more of it.

Google have made it clear that they are only worried about the existence of links, and not the time it takes to create content, expertise, and whether links within reviews were specified or given in an editorial capacity.

I honestly don’t like junk reviews written purely for SEO purposes, but as Google seem determined to impose the letter of the law rather than the spirit, throwing the baby out with the bath water, whilst I will comply to the letter of the law, I can’t see a reason why I shouldn’t sidestep the charging bull.

Nofollow is not the answer to Google’s troubles

Update

There seems to be some misunderstandings, and I need to clear them up.

1. The blocking hasn’t happened yet – it is the next thing on the todo list
2. I intend to get more search traffic from Google taking this action, not less.

Update 2

Robots.txt has now been modified

The list is quite short, but now I have a strategy in place, I will be writing a lot more paid reviews

Whilst this might be looked on as insignificant, some of those pages rank quite well for very useful terms, and are probably worth 2000+ visitors per month.

Update 3

Whilst the changes in robots.txt were quite straight forward, before making any reinclusion or reconsideration request, I thought it important to check the robots.txt within the Google webmaster console.

First of all I waited for it to be refreshed by Googlebot, which seems to happen approximately once every 24 hours.

There is an option to just copy and paste that refreshed data by hand, but waiting for it to be fetched is conclusive.

Next I entered in the URLs which need to be blocked by the robots.txt file, and checked them.

In theory Googlebot will now be blocked from crawling the “offending” pages, and I will be able to ask for reconsideration.

Photo credits
Lowering the Flag (modified)
Matador (modified)

Every single time I write a post mentioning PageRank, I get comments about PageRank not being important for ranking.

These comments very rarely differentiate between toolbar PageRank and the PageRank of whatever kind Google stores on their servers and upgrades on an extremely frequent basis for every page. I know from first hand experience that the toolbar PageRank has very little to do with rankings, and is manually manipulated based on Google’s commercial goals.

PageRank By Any Other Name…

The Ranking Factors article at SEOmoz in many ways skirts around the issue, referring to Toolbar Pagerank, and then ignoring the concept of what is real PageRank by splitting things down into multiple related items.

• Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
• Global Link Popularity of Site
• Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
• Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
• Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
• Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
• Topical Relationship of Linking Site
• Internal Link Popularity of Linking Page within Host Site/Domain

The only direct question specific to PageRank was:-

• PageRank (as measured by the GG Toolbar) of Linking Page

Aaron Wall in answering this question actually gave a response hinting at the real importance of PageRank

The toolbar is perpetually outdated, but Google uses PageRank values to help set crawling priorities and to determine if a document should go in the regular or supplmental index.

Some Simple Questions

• Can a page rank without a Title tag?
• Can a page rank without any internal linking?
• Can a page rank even on a new domain?
• Can a page rank without direct external links?

Ultimately with almost all the ranking factors, it is a balancing act, but with PageRank or however you wish to describe “Google Juice”, it becomes a little more fundamental.

No PageRank, No Google Juice = No Index

I realise if you take a purely theoretical stance, that if you created a 1000 page site full of original content, and then point Google to the sitemap for that site, that Google might index the whole site, and if you remove that link, some of the pages might remain indexed for a short or long period of time.
I haven’t done the test, but a random surfer in theory could land on one of the isolated pages, if Google chose to keep the unconnected pages in the index.

PageRank Flow & Real World Indexing

I need a real world example to demonstrate how important juice flow around a website or blog is important, and I decided that Michael Martinez effectively was asking for this by saying:-

I do absolutely nothing to make SEO Theory “SEO friendly”. It is better indexed in Google than most SEO blogs.

Take that for what it’s worth.

I am always up for a challenge, especially when Michael went on to say

My complaints about the poor quality of Google’s search results stem from Google’s willful, deliberate segregation of the Web into two categories: Preferred Pages (Main Web Index) and Supplemental Pages. Preferred Pages are always shown first in search results regardless of how much more relevant the Supplemental Pages may be to queries.

Actually Google seems to have 3 types of pages

1. Main Index
2. Supplemental – apparently being phased out, but it could be all FUD, on that I agree with Michael on
3. Not Indexed

Michael forgot about the pages that are receiving so little juice, Google doesn’t even bother indexing them, even on sites that are “better indexed than most SEO blogs”.

It is possible that Michael is doing some kind of indexing test, or he could also have selectively decided that he doesn’t want his old content in Google’s index.
Thus I am not going to link directly to the following pages which would damage his test results.

That being said, Michael did ask to be quoted on it, and to quote him I am sure he would want the person doing the quoting to provide good, if not conclusive evidence for or against his stance. I am not going to claim conclusive evidence, but at least I have spent a little time on this reply.

Michael links to his date based archive pages from every page in his sidebar, thus they should be receiving a fair amount of juice. However that juice doesn’t flow very deeply and he only has 5 posts on each page of his archives.

If you go just 3 pages deep, Michael starts to have indexing problems.

http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/02/page/3/

Every article listed on that page is not in Google’s index… at all!

http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/02/14/5-ways-to-launch-new-multiproduct/

Not Indexed By Google

http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/02/13/yesterydays-seo-advice-at-todays-prices/

Not Indexed By Google

http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/02/09/how-to-end-search-engine-slavery/

Not Indexed By Google

http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/02/08/how-to-build-long-lasting-trusted-value/

Not Indexed By Google

http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/02/07/best-kept-secrets-in-seo/

Not Indexed By Google

It seems the content on Michael’s SEO Theory blog isn’t as well indexed currently as you might expect, but as I mentioned earlier, that might be due to experimentation

I Have Pages Not Indexed As Well

I decided a while back it would be hard to write a post like this without having some pages of my own to point out, so I did a number of things.

• I didn’t make extensive structure changes to improve things based on my WordPress SEO articles
• I switched off translation plugins
• I don’t include unique article descriptions
• When I upgraded to WP2.3, I didn’t include Custom Query String, so my archives are not as flat as they used to be – I should note there are a few versions of CQS now available for WP2.3+ including Custom Query String Reloaded
• I have been using underscores with my tag_pages rather-than-dashes

I had a tough choice back in October, after being hit with a sizeable fake Toolbar PageRank penalty (currently -3) – continue making changes to my site structure to improve search engine performance, or keep the site relatively unchanged.

It is hard to say whether the penalties are/were material unless you bite the bullet and not make changes required by Google.

The only change I decided to make was to not include CQS when I upgraded to WP2.3+ – I decided that this would allow me to eventually provide some examples of pages falling out of the index, and then I would be able to demonstrate how I improve site structure to fix the problem.

With the changes Google made to the reporting of supplemental results, or if you believe them removing supplemental results altogether, it did take a little while for things to settle down.

I was waiting for a little deeper indexing activity to be visible, and then to wait a week or so for that activity to show in results. I did point out a few months ago that Google Webmaster tools provides these indexing charts, but the scales are still broken.

http://andybeard.eu/2007/01/mybloglog-social-networking-opportunity.html

Not In Google Index

The big difference is that I had to go back 7 pages in my January archives from last year to find a page that was no longer in the index, and my date based indexes are not on my sidebar on every page of this domain.

http://andybeard.eu/2007/01/page/7

Related Links Are Transitory

Related links certainly help passing juice to older related content, but eventually even if you list 10 related pages, and use very specific control of related pages using a plugin such as Simple Tags, the related posts become superseded.
I will probably end up tagging this post seo, wordpress, linking, linking structures, pagerank, ranking factors

I have used most of those tags in the past, thus it is most likely that I will get 10 related posts, but also that some previously related posts will become displaced on the list, and that change will not just happen on this page, but all pages on this domain that are related.

Deep Linking to Older Content

Deep linking to older core content always brings a little fresh life back to them, and gives them a fresh injection of Google juice. Once you get to 500+ pages of content, it becomes harder and harder to give life back to all of them, and thus only what you class as “pillar” content gets a much needed burst of life.
There is a constant ebb and flow, 2 steps forward, one step back.

Temporal Factors

Maybe there are temporal factors taken into account by search engines, and some kind of temporary PageRank assigned to new content.
What I do know is that if content is buried deep in your archives, so deep that it doesn’t receive any juice and isn’t indexed, then a link from that page is totally worthless.
An old link on a TBPR PR10 domain that is buried deep in the archives might still have some value, whereas being 30 pages deep on a blog that receives very little link love, or maybe an archived forum post, isn’t going to be worth much, if anything.

Google may remember old links that have lost juice for a period of time after they have been removed. Donna has spent some time looking into this.

To Be A Contender, You Have To Be In The Game

If your pages aren’t in Google’s index, they can’t rank for anything, even long tail queries.

To be in Google’s index, pages really have to have a certain undefined amount of juice, no matter what other factors you gain merit for.

Thus PageRank is the primary Google Search Ranking Factor, because it is the only factor you 100% have to fulfil to have a chance for your pages to rank in Google’s search results.

To give you a good parting analogy, all plants need water – different plants thrive with different amounts of water, and you can give a plant too much water – I don’t know if you can have too much Google juice, but you might have too much over a short period of time… a downpour which washes away the soil.

I was the first person to mention that the code used by Widgetbucks included a hidden link just a few hours after they launched, but the problem only really got noticed when Shoemoney wrote about this 2 weeks later.

Widgetbucks emailed their publishers today reporting an update in their code which you can include on your sites.

First of all they state:-

One of the concerns we’ve heard from many of you has been the slow loading times of our widgets. We really appreciate your feedback and comments in helping us improve in this area. So, today we addressed this issue by rolling out new code that ultimately delivers faster loading widgets.

They go on to say:-

Another option for updating code is to utilize the new categories and ad sizes we’ve incorporated over the last few weeks. Modifying a widget’s size or category — or creating an entirely new widget for that matter — will generate the new code that can then be re-copied to your site or blog.

They forgot to mention in the email that they had removed their enforced links which you weren’t allowed to modify. They could have left them in, as long as you were allowed to stick a nofollow on them, should you desire and were aware of it.

It still might be a bit spammy, but the problem was the “no modify” clause in the terms.

Here is the original code

<!-- START CUSTOM WIDGETBUCKS CODE --><script src="http://www.widgetbucks.com/script/widgetMagic.js" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="container_TiVAnRMsyRoS1hSy" class="wbtw300x250"><a href="http://www.widgetbucks.com" target="_blank">WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com</a></div><script type="text/javascript">writeWBStyles("www.widgetbucks.com");setTimeout(function(){var day = "" + new Date().getMonth() + new Date().getDate() + new Date().getYear();var widget = new mpireWidget("http://www.widgetbucks.com/widgets/wbtw300x250.swf?uid=TiVAnRMsyRoS1hSy&apiURL=http://www.widgetbucks.com&day="+day,"TiVAnRMsyRoS1hSy");widget.write("container_TiVAnRMsyRoS1hSy");},Math.floor((Math.random() * 150) - (-(Math.random() * 150))) - (-200))</script><!-- END CUSTOM WIDGETBUCKS CODE -->

Here is the new code to compare

<!-- START CUSTOM WIDGETBUCKS CODE --><script src="http://images.widgetbucks.com/script/widgetMagic.js" type="text/javascript"></script><div id="container_TiVAnRMsyRoS1hSy" class="wbtw300x250">WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com</div><script type="text/javascript">writeWBStyles("images.widgetbucks.com");setTimeout(function(){var day = "" + new Date().getMonth() + new Date().getDate() + new Date().getYear();var widget = new mpireWidget("http://images.widgetbucks.com/widgets/wbtw300x250.swf?uid=TiVAnRMsyRoS1hSy&apiURL=http://www.widgetbucks.com&day="+day,"TiVAnRMsyRoS1hSy");widget.write("container_TiVAnRMsyRoS1hSy");},Math.floor((Math.random() * 150) - (-(Math.random() * 150))) - (-200))</script><!-- END CUSTOM WIDGETBUCKS CODE -->

I still have problems with some of the terms

• 5. Client’s Obligations Upon execution of this Agreement Client agrees to:
  (e) not collect trends or data or information from the Paid Listings without prior written consent for Mpire.

  This effectively means you are not allowed to track the effectiveness of particular keywords

• 10.Confidentiality
  (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to by Mpire

  If anyone reports data for clicks and earnings, they are liable to lose their account.

Even Google allow you to report earnings data, but not clicks

Sorry Widgetbucks, still no banana

They should also fix their SERPs and the dodgy redirects

I thought of blogging about all kinds of abuse that affect real people day in, day out, but decided that ultimately that doesn’t fit in with my audience, or really add any authority to the words I would be writing.

As it happens, today part of a 2 hour interview with me was published in the Guardian (Digg Story you know you want to). I honestly didn’t expect any more words in print from the article, because it was so wide ranging, and such an article gains authority by citing multiple sources.

Some things were however a little disappointing, and I thought I would cover that initially, and then add to the end some points.

The Press Doesn’t Handle Linking Well

This comes down to 3 different situations which I will cover briefly

1. Linking To Sources Where Possible

This is for a situation where someone actively played a role and was mentioned in the story. As an example they gave a short or long interview.
In the Guardian article for some reason I didn’t get a link. I am not a blackhat or bad neighbourhood, and I think I made a large contribution to the story. The few paragraphs on paper is the result of a 2 hour telephone conversation.

I know there isn’t really a legal obligation to link to me, but the contact came about because of my online presence and blogging in various ways, and how can I prove that the Andy Beard in the article was in fact me without the link? (yes I might one day like to be in Wikipedia)

2. Linking To Junk Without Nofollow

The tone of the article suggests that Danny Bradbury didn’t really approve of some of the worst MFA sites, yet they received links as a pointer so readers could see for themselves. Unfortunately, the links did not use rel=”nofollow” (known in SEO circles as a “link condom) which was introduced 2 1/2 years ago to fight comment spam, but since then is recommended by Google to use on links to untrusted sources, spam sites etc.

Those sites linked to could most likely rank better in search results now, compared to other content – it is not for me to judge whether in the eyes of the author that was his intent, but that is the effect.

3. Reusing Other People’s Content Without Link Attribution

The press sometimes also regurgitate other people’s quality content without any useful attribution, though they might rewrite the content by hand. I am not a lawyer, but in my opinion that is still stealing traffic and search results by repurposing and replacing an original work with their own.

In this particular case with the Museum of Hoaxes the museum missed out on a massive front page story on Digg, which can lead to lots of links. Social media sites want to vote on the original article, and not something which is a cut down rewritten version, but without a link, who is to know.

Invisible Links in Plain Sight

This is really a separate section of the article, but is still regarding linking. I don’t regard this as in any way abusive, it is strategic.

Whilst Matt Cutts worries about hidden links the same as or very similar to the background colour, such that they can’t actually be seen by a human, there is another kind of hidden link, or invisible link.

Here is an example taken from Dana’s excellent rules of social media, which she learnt in kindergarten.

Could you see the links? Didn’t think so… well here they are a little more visible.

The links are now underlined, but they are not hidden, so they might receive some clicks. It should be noted that many people are reading your content, especially on large blogs, in an RSS reader.
That does however depend on the source of the traffic – if traffic is from a social media site such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Propeller, or Sphinn, then the visitors will see the content on the page.
You need to determine why you have the links on the page, and how you want your readers to interact with the links.

Here are some more “click happy” alternatives

The classic blue encourages readers to click, which is why it is also so highly recommended for blending Adsense to increase CTR.

Red links are becoming a lot more popular in blogging circles, popularised by Copyblogger and Problogger.

There Is No Quick Fix

The press and bloggers really need to be aware of how they link and attribute. If you are giving a link to someone, think about how that link can best benefit them.

Take another look at the article on the Guardian (and possibly give it a Digg), I have emailed them hoping they will adjust the article so that is is more link friendly and unfriendly where a link might have to have a “link condom“.

Linking Awareness is what is required to avoid linking mistakes

Update

We are not quite sure where the problem is, and Tinu kindly offered for me to post her article her for you all to read.
But I am not going to do that…

Here is a link to her feed where you can read her article on free traffic and lots of other great content – don’t forget to subscribe