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)

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…

I use Google for a lot of searching every day, I am sure more than 95% of casual users. I am not talking about checking ranking, as things like that can be automated with Google’s APis and various tools. When I need to find information, I use Google Search.
I have seen Google suggest other related terms to try such as this, which appears at the bottom of a page when I search for “insurance”.
The Google Related terms normally look something like this:-

But I have never seen this search result configuration before.

Maybe I have been searching with my eyes closed, or not keeping up with the news

It seems Google is taking the top results for the search term entered, and then using some kind of LSI or related term to provide alternative results.

Here is a longer view, showing the 3 + 3 + X layout

Better Search Results?

In this particular search, the related results were probably equal to the results for the specific term. I am sure this will help casual searchers a lot in finding things they need.

The Long Tail: Low Hanging Fruit

This could be a disaster for niche marketing targeting low hanging fruit and niche terms with low competition. If you are not in the top 3 results for the long-tail search term, you are relegated to 7th place or lower.

Adwords – Give Me More Money

On this particular search, I didn’t see any advertising, but then I am in Poland not the US, and there is so much information on terms like this there isn’t much money to be made selling things.

However, if Google are going to be showing SERPs for more popular LSI related terms, it seems only logical that they are going to also add the advertising inventory.

This might affect 2 things

• Prices on niche terms increasing
• A need to pay even more attention to negative terms in Adwords

Hmm is this exclusive content, or am I a year out of date and need to take my blinkers off?