I now feel that 95% of bloggers should switch to using Disqus, though I have some reservations.

These are some of the reasons why:-

• Matt Cutts today confirmed that nofollow links can reduce the amount of PageRank that flow to internal pages. The easiest current solution to solve this problem is to use Javascript for comments.
  It is an external javascript file, which Google can’t really handle currently, and even if they did, the chances are it might only count as a single link to your disqus discussion.
  Blogstorm has gone into the problems facing comment links in more detail, something I highlighted when Matt first mentioned this clarification at SMX.
• Matt Cutts in the same post highlighted again who you link to matters, and I think Google is going to place more and more emphasis on this. It is a lot of work for the average blogger to keep control of user generated content, and even the best comments sometimes come with spammy links. I have always maintained that “dofollow” isn’t for everyone because of the time commitment.
• Disqus is universal – it can be installed on every major blogging platform – many SEO solutions won’t be universal or easy to implement
• Can Spam & Email Deliverability – this is 50/50 – I have highlighted in the past that emails being sent from your own domain can be a significant liability
  

  It is your choice based on your own research and the legal advice you have received whether you think emails being sent from your domain which are not totally under your control could represent a problem.
  I honestly don’t know if Safe Harbour rules might apply to email delivery. I don’t know of any blog owner who has had problems either from a legal perspective, or with their hosting or domain registrars, but then I personally only know a few people who have been killed in car accidents – I know a lot more people who drive cars than publish business blogs.

• Invalidated Cache – this is a major consideration for high traffic blogs, and potentially product launches. The javascript doesn’t change on each new page load, thus your cached content also doesn’t change (if you just use their javascript on your page) – this can represent a major reduction in server load, even if you are using some kind of Op Cache (eaccelerator APC Xcache), RAM based page cache (Memcached) or more advanced techniques using page chunking. Forget conventional WP Cache / Supercache for product launches, it just can’t cope on its own.
• Social Media Viral Effect – the social media viral effect of using Discus is significant. Not many people are exposed to services such as backtype, but tons of people use Facebook – implementation of Facebook, Twitter and other logins for commenting whilst possible with WordPress isn’t trivial, and that is more plugins to deal with, more server load etc.
• Get to visit Disqus more often – I sometimes leave comments on other blogs that are using Disqus, and sometimes the comment notifications don’t get to me (deliverability issues) – I just noticed on my Andy Beard Disqus profile that Scott Rafer responded to something important 2 months ago, and I didn’t see it.

Negative Side of Disqus

• The SEO of the site needs some major work – it is almost insulting that the link to Twitter on my Disqus profile is followed, yet the link to my blog isn’t. The anchor text from a conversation on Disqus back to a blog isn’t exactly ideal. This is how Google sees my Discus Profile
• Google is very bad at indexing content on Disqus – this is partially due to the Disqus SEO problems – certainly a conversation I took part in 4 days ago isn’t indexed.
• I have heard reports that managing spam can be an issue, though I haven’t tested it, I rarely see spam on highly popular blogs
• It isn’t suitable for private content – you would have to use alternative commenting on private posts if you are running your blog as a membership site. That is something that can be worked around.
• It is hard, maybe impossible to market to people after they have left a comment. With standard WordPress comments, after someone has left an email, you could present a page offering site membership, a one time offer, or an affiliate product – even suggest related content of interest.
• If you have lots of niche blogs, you will hardly want to include all of them on a single Disqus profile if you want to stay under the radar of your competitors. How would a blog network cope? Retain ownership? I can’t see B5 Network with a profile of 300+ blogs in Disqus and managing who can moderate comments.

The SEO problems with Disqus are fixable, and in the current Google climate could offer significant advantages – plus Disqus could conservatively gain at least 400% traffic even without new adoption.
It is possible even if they also gave much more SEO friendly links throughout the whole site.

I am recommending Disqus above competitors JSKit and Intense Debate because both of these services the email subscriptions don’t stack in Gmail – a nightmare if you subscribe to comments on a popular blog, plus I believe there is more chance of Disqus fixing problems for a win/win solution.

Who knows, we might even get Twitter to remove nofollows too… eventually

Disclosure:- I am recommending Disqus even though part of my startup plans would have involved an SEO, product launch and membership friendly system with refined marketing funnel. If I ever get it off the ground, there are ways to migrate back from Disqus.

Link to updates from Matt Cutts plus tips on how to continue PageRank sculpting effectively.

Has Google in one quick swipe removed all benefit of Dynamic Linking (old school term) or PageRank sculpting (when it became “trendy”), and potentially caused massive penalties for sites nofollowing links for user generated content and comments?

I have left a few comments on various blog posts over the last few days, especially on SEOmoz and Twitter, but though it important to solidify some thoughts here, and potentially add a little more perspective.

PageRank Sculpting Formerly Known As Dynamic Linking

The idea of controlling the flow of “Google Juice” around a website to pages that matter, or to other sites that matter has been around for a long time, at least as early as 2003 when Leslie Rohde (Stompernet Faculty) was calling it “Dynamic Linking”.

Those were the days before “nofollow” and you had to use Javascript to accomplish the internal linking control.

In the past I have linked to Michael Campbell’s Revenge of the Mininet which also provides access to Leslie’s original Dynamic Linking membership site. They are both now free, (Michael used to charge $79.95 for his ebook)

I am sure I have sent 1000s of people to Michael’s newsletter signup page over the years, but I am equally confident that 90% of the visitors didn’t sign up. I don’t receive any kind of payment recommending Michael’s work, or Leslie’s dynamic linking.

In many ways I look on at least a passing understanding of these groundbreaking ebooks as required reading for any of my SEO articles

From the comments I see on most SEO blogs, and even many of the articles, I am quietly confident that these seminal works haven’t been truly understood, and of course the content rarely gets referenced.

So I am going to do something unprecedented, and I hope Michael won’t mind – the page does appear in the SERPs

Here is a direct download link for Revenge of the Mininet

Once you get there, you can pick up a password to access Leslie’s Dynamic Linking site

Leslie has always had this great disclaimer

DISCLAIMER!

Some of the techniques and technologies described in the foregoing are not without their pitfalls and potential unintended consequences. If you are new to web business, inexperienced at search engine optimization, or do not feel comfortable with HTML and Javascript (at least at a rudimentary level), you should not attempt to employ the advanced techniques shown here!

Access The Source of SEO Knowledge

Michael Campbell

I have just given you access to 4 or 5 year old information that in all likelihood is more advanced than you will find discussed on 95% of SEO blogs and forums, and whilst I don’t from principle/ethics join any private SEO content area to avoid conflict with what I blog about, I am quietly confident that it would still be looked on as advanced content for members only, or not even covered in such depth.

But that is just a trickle of knowledge compared to direct access

Michael has had an internet marketing newsletter for years.
He also now runs a private membership site which is very affordable, and you can follow him on Twitter @dmcorp

Leslie Rohde

I am still eagerly awaiting an update to Leslie’s Dynamic Linking suggested on his SEO Software site.

A major update to this material is currently in process owing to some recently discovered changes in the way Google is processing links. Look for an announcement early next year (2009) — the changes will likely revolutionize on-site linking techniques … again!

Leslie also has an SEO Strategy blog, which he actually updates once in a while. I am going to have to explore the blogging platform he uses, Pebble. You can also follow Leslie on Twitter @leslierohde

There are 2 other ways to learn more from Leslie

1. Just before the New Year Leslie put together a new site “Optimize Recession” where he introduced the idea of “Zone Based SEO” – I mentioned it on Twitter.
   Zone based SEO might seem obvious at first, but it allows you to systematize and possibly even automate specific SEO campaigns, especially now it is possible to extract ranking positions from Google referrer data.
2. Stompernet – Leslie is one of the faculty at Stompernet, who now offer very progressive SEO and marketing training. Start off just by joining their newsletter and the 7 Deadly SEO Sins course plus free videos, and possibly get their “Stomping The Search Engines 2″ course for $1 (plus a trial to their Net Effect magazine)

The Death Of Dynamic Linking With Javascript?

Of everything that has been discussed about Google making changes to which links they will follow and count going forward, how they handle javascript is probably the one that is worth the most consideration.

The first I read about it was on Search Engine Land in an article by Vanessa Fox (who used to work for Google as a member of their webmaster team) covering Google Javascript Links.
(Note: I know that anchor text is very contrived, but SEO is about helping people find what they are searching for, not snake oil or gaming Google)

Having given a great link, I can justify grabbing a small code example

Some examples of code that Googlebot can now execute include:

• <div onclick="document.location.href='http://foo.com/'">

• <tr onclick="myfunction('index.html')"><a href="#"
  onclick="myfunction()">new page</a>

• <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open
  ('welcome.html')">open new window</a>

Javascript That Is Still Dynamic?

This will probably work

onclick=”myfunction(‘jkhhjstdysd’)

Have myfunction() within a file loaded in the header, or preferably in the footer for faster page loading. You would still want to use the CSS that Michael and Leslie suggest for usability.
Somehow define which destination ‘jkhhjstdysd’ refers to, and that could potentially be broken down into components.

If Google somehow cope with that, and possibly easier would be to just use pure external javascript that pulls in some XML, but that then complicates things if you want to mix real links with dynamic ones.

But this is moot if nofollow actually still works.

Does Nofollow Still Work For Dynamic Linking or PageRank Sculpting?

I am going to lead with the freshest insight I have read, Dan Thies (also Stompernet Faculty) thinks things are being blown out of proportion.

Here are the primary opinion pieces and coverage I have seen, though I am sure there were plenty more

Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting

Didn’t comment, was too busy looking for other coverage

Google (Maybe) Changes How the PageRank Algorithm Handles Nofollow

My comment on the post

I can only think that Google have been misinterpreted.

If I have a blog post with 300 comments, and have the links nofollowed (my blog is dofollow but example), then there would effectively be juice lost due to the comment links.

Links are valuable, because they add to the relevance of a comment made, because a reader can follow them to find out more about the person.
However they also form part of disclosure.

If this is only for internal links, there are major problems because often a link will be nofollowed because it points to a tracking link that is also blocked by robots.txt

Any sensible knowledgeable webmaster is going to nofollow those links, because they serve no purpose for Google in their current state, and who wants to turn them into hanging pages.

That may also be a workaround, if Google handles links blocked with Robots.txt differently

No Clarification Forthcoming from Google on Nofollow & PageRank Flow
My comment on the post

I can’t see any evidence that this is affecting external links.

Wikipedia is still a black hole of link equity. If this affected Wikipedia external links, we would see some effect, because due to recursive calculations through internal linking, it could potentially reduce their juice pool by as much as 30%

It would also affect the Ebay group with sites such as epinions.

If it has any effect, it will be internal links only.

The amount of juice lost could be similar to dangling or hanging pages, and due to many poor SEO articles suggesting robots.txt for duplicate content, Google Webmaster guidelines suggesting robots.txt for search results, and just ignoring obvious signals such as TBPR.

Yes, any smart SEO could spot the toolbar showing some green on pages blocked by robots.txt and work things out for themselves.

But the juice goes into the internet ether, and due to macro PageRank calculations, comes back.

If anything, this will help Google surface more long-tail content, and sites with lots of pages will benefit.

Live Blogging Of Matt Cutts @ SMX

You & A With Matt Cutts

Is What’s Good For Google, Good For SEO
Important to read both articles because it gives a clearer insight to the exact wording on lots of different issues.

Alternative Reactions

PageRank Sculpting is Dead? Good Riddance

PageRank Sculpting – Recent Matt Cutts Video

I have to strongly point out that this video was recorded before SMX, and maybe even a week or 2 before. It is on the official Google webmasters channel on YouTube, thus has probably been vetted in some way for accuracy.

Full Transcript

Matt Cutts on PageRank Sculpting

Rand, In Brighton, and that might be Rand Fishkin, I don’t know asks:-

What are your views on ‘PageRank Sculpting’?
Useful and recommended if implemented right, or unethical?

Well I wouldn’t say it is unethical because it is stuff on your website – you are allowed to control how the PageRank flows around withing your site.
Erm, I would say that it is not the first thing that I would work on.
I would work on:-

• Getting more links
• Having higher quality content

Those are always the sort of things that you want to do first.

But then if you have a certain amount of budget of PageRank, erm… you certainly can sculpt your PageRank.
I wouldn’t necessarily do it with the nofollow tag, although you can put a nofollow on a login page, or something that is customized where a robot will never log in for example, but a better more effective form of PageRank sculpting is choosing for example which things to link to from your homepage.

So imagine you have got two different pages.
You have got one product that earns you a lot of money every time someone buys, and you’ve got another product where you make… you know 10 cents.

You probably want to highlight this page. You want to make sure it gets enough PageRank that it can rank well.

So this is more likely to be a page that you want to link to from your home page.

So when people talk about PageRank sculpting, they tend to think nofollow and all that sort of stuff, but in some sense the ways that you choose to create your site, your site architecture, and how you link between your pages is a type of PageRank sculpting.
So it is certainly not unethical to have all the links come into your site, and you decide how to link within your site, and how to make the pages within your site.
Erm, I do think that having more links because you have great content is a better way to rank well because it is a second order effect to be sculpting your PageRank.

It can be useful, but it wouldn’t be the first thing that I would do.

Commentary on Matt’s video I will leave to my good mate Dave
PageRank Sculpting; its all old school baby

Response From Google After SMX About PageRank Sculpting

None…. yet – regard this as a placeholder

I do have some thoughts though:-

1. I think we need a strong statement that external links with nofollow would not cause PageRank to evaporate.
2. Nofollow is a simple solution for user generated content and comments, but if it has any effect of PageRank disappearing, we are going to lose the links on tons of blogs totally.
   It would be a sad day that an action by Google reduced the interlinking of the web.
3. I don’t want to encourage use of javascript for PageRank sculpting – it is not really very good for accessibility
4. Noscript – Nested embedded object items, containing links or thumbnails to source that may well be descriptive of content? This is needed if RSS Readers and web based email clients are going to continue to strip out video embeds.
5. Links that lead to pages blocked with robots.txt and other hanging pages really need to be nofollowed. I think we need to know that in that situation PageRank wouldn’t normally evaporate, but I can understand why that might not be confirmed.
6. I would love a much clearer indication of page size that Google will index as there are just vague notions that it can be more than 100 links per page.
   If a size is specified, is that gzipped?

Matt Cutts On PageRank Sculpting

Matt Cutts today (June 16th 2009) wrote a post confirming that Google now treats PageRank significantly differently than the original PageRank patent, and that links with nofollow, whilst they don’t pass PageRank to the linked page, also can reduce the amount of PageRank that flows to other links on a page.

Rank Fishkin has already responded with analysis
Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow

I also missed this commentary from Matt Leonard on why this could potentially make life harder for niche sites

There are bound to be more posts appearing on Techmeme today

PageRank Sculpting Isn’t Dead – It Has Evolved

Lets take a look at my WordPress SEO Masterclass

Those Red links in the Sandcastle structure are not nofollow, they are oneway linkage.

It can be achieved with fairly simple coding, I even posted part of it over 2 years ago though the code needs to be updated for WordPress tagging rather than UTW.

This linking structure still works extremely effectively, but with one major caveat – internal & external links on the tag pages being used to channel juice back to the home page can’t be nofollowed.

If you are using default WordPress “ugly excerpts” they don’t contain any HTML content, no links to worry about other than the links to the posts.
Tag pages should thus be restuctured to highlight your best content, otherwise you end up with 3rd level push. 3rd level push in most cases isn’t a bad thing, if you don’t have a lot of comment links.

Rather than remove links that you previously nofollowed, the key is to add additional internal links to useful pages.

There are ways to handle the comment links, retain the benefit of having the comment content on your blog, and even keep giving your visitors a little link equity (dofollow links), though that solution will require significant programming effort.

Blogspot bloggers are now totally messed up, as even adding nofollow to their tag links isn’t going to retain juice.

Those who based their internal linking on my advice are not significantly affected by this change, and as this actually happened over a year ago, it is one of the reasons they have benefited.

The new PageRank sculpting could be looked on as advance information architecture, which was always the advanced PageRank sculpting

Expect a new WordPress SEO Masterclass soon, but it is unlikely to be free, and I would avoid following the advice of anyone who suggests conning your community using Iframes and Javascript for comments.

Update: Additional coverage worth a read @ Search Engine Land, Future Now & Search Engine Watch

It seems Google want all links within content that “wouldn’t exist without payment” to use nofollow, but seems to be focusing on services like PayPerPost, and not other forms of links which wouldn’t exist without compensation.

• Matt Cutts frequently links to Google from his personal blog – if he wasn’t employed by Google, those links would likely not appear as frequently.
• Google employees link to outside sites all the time, and they are frequently sites that are “flying the Google flag” in some way, prominent Adsense partners, large corporate partners etc.
• Shareholders frequently link through to the companies they invested in (I wonder what Fred Wilson might think about not being allowed to link to Twitter)
• I know Robert Scoble is leaving Podtech on 14th January, but Podtech have always had SEO friendly links to their sponsors, both on Podtech and on Robert’s own blog
• Google themselves sponsor events such as Leweb3 recently, and for as long as I remember, links have always been part of event sponsorship packages, even before Google. Even attending an event or being an exhibitor, one of the “perks” is often some kind of profile online along with a link.
• On many business directories, you get a free listing, but if you want a link to your website, you have to have a paid entry, whether the links are followed or not. Yahoo wouldn’t give me a free listing as this is a commercial blog – I wouldn’t honestly buy a Yahoo entry for $300 for the traffic
• Techcrunch and many other sites still get away with thanking their advertisers with links that are followed, and many still have graphical advertising without nofollow
• Search Engine Land and the SMX Events (and even Sphinn) wouldn’t probably exist in the same way without corporate sponsorship, very often by the large search engines. Should Danny nofollow every link in every post he mentions Google, Yahoo or Microsoft?
• Rand has mentioned the occasional client within posts, and SEOmoz does have a clients page – should all links be nofollowed to clients? Should there be a difference between a $10, $100 and $10,000 client?
• Carsten Cumbrowski when writing on Search Engine Journal has frequently tried to get clarification from Google regarding affiliate links that pass juice, to no avail.
• Shoemoney has a great disclosure policy (blanket coverage like this is honest), stating that “You should assume I have motivation for linking to everything on this page and will benefit from it somehow.” – maybe he should now nofollow every external link?
• In the past I have received income from both Google Adsense and PayPerPost – that means there is a certain amount of earned goodwill.

Should I now nofollow every link in this post because it is in some way previously compensated?

Just before Christmas I received a “Postie Pack”, with a few small trinkets that Tamar Weinberg would be proud to add to her collection of Schwag, so I am “double cursed” – lots of people earn similar (much more expensive) trinkets from Google every year.

Even worse, as I have hinted in the past I am looking at creating a startup that is affected at least partially by this issue, falling in the grey area of employees, stock holders, semi-automated contextual linking, affiliate links etc – I am triple cursed.

I couldn’t possibly include followable links in this post, so why bother linking to anyone?

A Review Is A Resource

When I write a review, I try to make it valuable content, often 3000 words or more, and I ensure I have editorial discretion on who I link to, not just to someone ordering a review, but also to other sites, whether they are competitors, or useful resources that are related to the review I am writing.
I also like to have the option of linking internally to related content.

Who you link to is likely looked on as part of ranking calculations used by search engines because it helps define the topical authority of a resource.

The compensation I receive from writing a review doesn’t cover the time I spend on them, so for a review to bring in search traffic and potential subscribers is important.

Technical Hurdles

This site being created using WordPress also offers a technical challenge that currently there isn’t a solution for. If I reference another WordPress blog post, it is most likely to receive a pingback. However spam detection software is likely to spot that I have nofollow on a link, and flag me as a pingback spammer.

Thus Google is forcing me not to link to blog posts from compensated reviews just in case I might get myself blacklisted as a spammer.

WordPress does not have granular control of pingbacks, and I doubt Google are going to fund the development of such control.

There is another problem of course, both Technorati and Google Blogsearch ignore links with nofollow, so even if I give someone an editorial link from a compensated post or paid review, they might not find out about it unless they set up specific Google alerts for their domain name being mentioned.

(note to Lucia: Don’t solve this one unless Google pays you)

Paid Content or Paid Links Are the Devil?

The next thing Google will dictate is that all compensated content should use Yahoo’s robots-nocontent class so that it doesn’t appear in the search engines at all.

This really is looking less and less about the quality of search results, and more about the failings of Google’s algorithms.

If Google paid me for a review of Google Reader, I should be able to link (without nofollow) to specific features of their terms of service, their faq, the Google Reader blog etc at my own editorial discretion.
I should also be able to link to other quality reviews of Google Reader, useful Greasemonkey scripts, Howtos etc, and above all competitors.

Those people didn’t pay for the review, I should be able to link to them without nofollow

I should also be able to link in an editorial manner to the site purchasing a review, as many don’t even request a link… seriously – but it appears Google have problems with the quality of links from anyone not in corporate employment.

This Is Different To The Webmaster Guidelines

Time to rewrite the Google webmaster guidelines yet again, and make everything abundantly clear exactly what classes as compensation and what is allowed – no fuzzy grey area that is biased against the self-employed, the small business owner or the less well off.

There is absolutely no way I can comply with these current new demands, I would have to stick nofollow on every link within some of my most popular and highly rated content.

So far the best estimate for having a landline for internet access provided by the Polish national carrier is 10 months, so I am using a GSM solution which in my remote part of Poland seems to clock in slightly faster than what I would expect from UMTS so might be giving me a slow HSDPA signal.

I really wish I had been able to respond sooner, because I am actually quite disappointed in the way “facts” were portrayed, and because from what I can see no SEOs actually did any in depth research of what Matt was presenting.

I Did Some Homework

Two weeks ago, I think on the Sunday after Matt posted I read the post and the first 400 or so comments, plus all the stories related to it that appeared on Sphinn. I am going to try to cover a few different angles that I haven’t seen elsewhere, though that doesn’t mean these opinions haven’t been already been voiced by someone. There is only so much catching up you can do after 2 weeks out of the trenches.

Was This Really Cleared By Legal?

Maybe Google have run out of PHDs to hire in the legal department, but it seems there is a real grammatical clanger here.

Now I’m going to ask you to put on your regular user hat. If you’ve just learned that you or a family member have a tumor, would you prefer that radiosurgery overview article from the Mayo Clinic, or from a site which appears to be promoting a specific manufacturer of medical equipment via paid posts? My guess is that you’d prefer the Mayo Clinic.

The site in Matt’s screenshot isn’t the one that might appear in the search results as a result of the “paid” links. The site that would appear is the one being linked to. This one which has been around just as long as the paid reviews when checking on archive.org

The oldest version of the site even seems to have a link to investor information, though that is not in the archive, so it seems very strongly to suggest that the domain was intended for use by the manufacturers of the Gamma Knife in some way.

I notice Matt didn’t link through to the final site so people could do a fair evaluation. Matt was certainly suggesting Google’s line was that the site in some way was junk that didn’t deserve to be in the search results and that the other sites linked to had more reason to appear.

Another site that also seems to be by the manufacturer is this one on GammaKnife.org

It seems to me the manufacturer, Elekta, the registered trademark and patent holder were trying to do some understandable reputation management and SEO work, or someone was doing it on their behalf, because at least from my location if you search in Google for “Gamma Knife” Elekta’s corporate website doesn’t appear.

That is about the same as John Chow not ranking for John Chow.

Maybe they have some problems with their website design they might want to fix first, and maybe they should have done that before thinking about paid reviews, but to suggest any of their sites don’t deserve some kind of placement is misleading.

They are not “just one manufacturer” – they hold the trademark for what they wanted a satellite site to rank for.

Language

Lets face it, the people who generally need money enough to write reviews for $10 are not normally PHDs, though many people who write for PayPerPost are highly qualified, certainly more than I am.

Then again my wife just finished her Masters, and though in Europe it is not looked on as politically correct to brag about how well you pass a masters, she averages over 4.5/5 so walked away with an A or 5/5 overall grade.

Most people look on her being fluent in English, though she doesn’t write English as much as she should and thus makes stupid mistakes.

If she was under pressure to write 200 words in 15 minutes she would struggle without my help to write flawless English.

Payment

There is no way to prove whether the person writing the paid posts actually received payment. The posts might have been rejected for all kinds of reasons, such as the number of reviews that seem to be paid posted one after the other, and the general low quality.

Disclosure

I checked 2 of the posts depicted in Matt’s screenshots. The first had a very clear disclosure in the sidebar, and the 4th had a disclosure policy badge that links to a clear disclosure policy.

As far as humans are concerned I would class that as better disclosure than Matt personally uses for posts such as his recent recap of everything Google and how often do you see Matt openly criticize his employer.

There are lots of posts on Matt’s blog, if you were wearing a “regular user hat” and just appeared on a permalink page from a search result, where you wouldn’t realise that Matt is writing as an employee and shareholder.

In fact, if you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts.

Matt has a disclaimer, but it is not in the content of every post (yes I am also guilty that my disclosure policy plugin is currently switched off due to a bug I haven’t had time to fix, but I have in post disclosure of some kind regardless for every paid post/review)

A Blacker Than Black Example Flawed, How About Grey?

I might be biased, but I think the gamma knife example whilst at first glance was a travesty, when you delve into it a little you realise that Google’s argument in that particular case was just as equally flawed.

What would happen if they tried to explain the links their own media buyers bought from the recent Leweb3 site, or various SEO conferences without nofollow.

Those are clearly advertising links, and if you take either the spirit or the letter of “Google’s Paid Links Law”, they are guilty. If Google doesn’t set a good clear example, how can they expect the rest of the internet to understand what exactly is or isn’t allowed?

I do agree in the case of the gamma knife that the posts were most likely ordered for SEO reasons, just like many press releases about mundane events get published, or junk articles get syndicated.

The saddest thing is that none of the trusted resources Matt listed actually link through to the manufacturer of Gamma Knife, Elekta other than Wikipedia… with a nofollow link.

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.

• 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)

The Most Personal Searches

Whilst I was tempted to demonstrate this with a specific piece of content, there are too many other known or unknown factors involved.

In the end the best demonstration of this strange phenomena, some might look on it as a bug, was perhaps the most personal of all searches, and ego search.

Ego Search For Andy

Lots of bloggers know that Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) outranks Matt Harding (the Dancer) & Matt Cutts (Google) for a search for Matt.

That order has changed fairly recently, because Matt the Dancer is topical

Unfortunately for me, even Andy which is an abbreviated form of Andrew has almost as many results in Google as Matt, and of course there is also a WordPress developer called Andy Skelton.

Then of course there are all the “notable” Andy’s who have a Wikipedia page dedicated to them.

I also read a lot of blogs written by people called Andy, and I have visited a few other sites from searching for Andy in the past.

Personalized Search Results For Andy

Google now state in the search results window that you are looking at Personalized Search Results. I haven’t seen anyone mention this, but I haven’t been reading quite as many feeds for the last few weeks as normal.

16th for a personalized search for Andy – – I don’t mind being listed slightly further down the page than my very notable colleagues, at least for now.

Then I noticed the text about this being a personalized result, and thought it would be a good idea to test this without personalized results switched on.

Normal Search Results For Andy

This could be datacenter related – I am gaining in ranking for ego searches at a reasonable rate, and personalized search could use a newer or older dataset compared to the main index.

I believe since I first started using personalized search I have clicked through on more search results containing the word “andy” to my own site than I have clicked through to Andy Beal or Andy Hagans.
I also spend a lot more time on my own site, and click through on general results to my own site more than I have to Andy Beal or Andy Hagans.

Why do I rank higher for “Andy” in the non-personalized results? (13th place)

p.s. I noted that Andy Skelton for some reason now has both his blogs set to noindex nofollow though it is still showing in the main Google index, but not the personal results. Matt Harding’s blog on typepad is also showing noindex, nofollow

• You have messed up – maybe blocked the page by accident in robots.txt
• Google have made a major algorithm change
• You have some kind of general penalty or your site has been hacked

It could also be argued that it can be caused by duplicate content, and enter the supplemental results through lack of pagerank. Honest duplicate content could be on your own site, or due to poor syndication (lack of links back to the original document).

There are however other very real scenarios that could cause a web page to drop in rankings overnight.

A Major Bug in Google Algorithms

Google have stated, officially, that if you are syndicating content, you should ensure that in the syndicated content, there is a link back to the original. I achieve this by requesting sites like WebProNews.com to include a link back to my original article rather than just a link back to my domain.
If splogs pick up my full content, they normally also grab the link in my author box at the bottom of each article.

For a number of weeks Google link attribution has been, to put it bluntly, royally screwed.

Google’s Adam Lasnik stated on the Webmaster Central Blog:-

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we’ll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.

Google… it isn’t working

For a couple of months my list of dofollow plugins was ranking 3rd for the fairly innocent uncompetitive search phrase “dofollow”. With more blogs talking about dofollow, it does become more competitive, but a large number are linking through to the page, in fact Google’s main index reports 58 links, Google Blogsearch reports 185 individual blogs have linked through.
All of those links were topically relevant, but a fair number were from various lists of supporters, thus maybe given a low weighting.

For over 1 month the syndicated copy of the story on WebProNews which linked back to the original, replaced it in the SERPs at #5 – by replaced, I mean Google decided that was the original article, and the original disappeared

Yahoo site explorer reports that the syndicated copy only has 6 links pointing to it from other pages, and my original has over 1000.

In the last couple of days, even the syndicated copy has disappeared from Google results.

There is no “Google Bombing” activity on the page, all the links were editorial, relevant, and in fact a huge number (for the lists circulated) of the links used my name as anchor text.

Google doesn’t get it wrong all the time

In fact this scenario is the exception rather than the rule. A good example (though slightly contrived) is the charity link meme that so many SEOs are taking part in. I have seen great improvement in search position for my selected listings that have now appeared on a few SEO sites.

A search in Google for the term also is a fairly good demonstration that my “trust” with Google isn’t doing too badly (no global penalty), because I outrank Andy Beal for the term, though there are lots of factors such as additional internal linking.

Maybe there is a penalty for too many editorial links to good content?

My dofollow plugins list isn’t gaining as many new links per day as it was, but the number and quality of many of the links shouldn’t give a penalty.

Google is meant to support high quality content that encourages people to link to it

Selective Page Filtering & Web Spam

Google want you to report paid links.

When Matt Cutts most recently caused an uproar it was actually a different form. The instructions were clear, include “paidlink”.

So what did I do?

I reported myself to Google for Paid Links

It should be noted that the intent of the report to the web spam team was intended to provide them with data to test their algorithms.

I provided them with details of 3 reviews I had written that I regarded at the time as good paid reviews. The reviews were not being written for search engine benefit.
The amount of time I could afford to spend on each review was commensurate with how much I was earning, but still exceeded what would be regarded as a good hourly rate for the time invested.

The reviews were

Search Engine Glossary
Volusion Shopping Cart
Sponsored Reviews

I am biased certainly, but it is my belief that none of those reviews, whether I was compensated or not, should be classed as web spam.

They are consultation generally for sites that don’t even need the links. All the links were editorial, though as I am SEO aware, I give SEO friendly links to things.

As I chose to link to the site, and I was linking to highly related content, I didn’t use nofollow – I wasn’t being paid for links, though I am not sure how an algorithm is meant to determine that.

My Volusion Review Has Been Kicked Out Of Google

It might well have been manually removed by a monkey who wasn’t trained enough to determine the quality and value of the content he/she was looking at.

The monkey was probably programmed a little like this…

• Receive web spam report
• Check for word “paidlink”

Now at this stage there is either going to be an AND or an OR operator in the logic, and that might be where some kind of error took place with individual URLs, although I submitted 3 at once.

Before writing this article, I have waited a fair amount of time observing what was happening.

Google had a mess with their toolbar pagerank export April 30th. Toolbar pagerank is even more inaccurate these days because a grey bar can mean multiple things.

1. The page is new
2. The page is regarded as duplicate content – even if a page is PR3 or PR4, enough to keep it out of the supplemental index normally, if it is detected as being duplicate it will have a grey bar – this is both a good and a bad thing – it might mean that such pages are also not draining Google Juice from your original content for those that aren’t careful about external links on such pages.
3. The page is banned or deindexed – what might be looked on as a bad neighbourhood

Fairly confusing for the average webmaster to know what is going on

The Volusion review was giving a grey bar, as were the tag pages leading from it because they were duplicate content.

This didn’t concern me, the page was still ranking high for the single term “volusion”, and first for “volusion review” (without quotes), despite having a little competition from other blogs who reviewed Volusion at the same time, under similar terms.
I was still seeing traffic to the review.

Syndication of the Volusion Review

One website requested permission to syndicate my review for their new shopping cart review site. I publish my content under GPL, but look on correct attribution as a link back to my original content.
They complied completely with my wishes, and their CMS pinged me. I did think about deleting the trackback, but my review had already been published and index for over 1 month, had already received some links, and was featured prominently in my linking structure 2 clicks from the front page on a page that eventually will receive lots of links, even if it is just from me.

In addition, they didn’t have the comments on their review that made my own permalink page unique from the syndicated copy.

The website owner requested syndicating the content because it was a high quality review.

My ultimate decision to leave the trackback was that he asked permission for syndication. I get splogged a fair amount, and I wanted to give Google a signal that that content was legitimate.
As I use a dofollow plugin, my trackback links hopefully give a little bit of juice after my editorial decision to leave the link on the page.

His syndicated copy has also been kicked out of Google SERPS.

Just that one specific article, that is linked from his sidebar on a PR3 site – possibly the page would be looked at as having some purpose.

That site isn’t the only one that syndicates my content, some of my best articles are also picked up by WebProNews.

On WebProNews I have 2 author profiles

Andy Beard – Static Profile – yes that is a nice PR5 backlink, sometimes it is worth being syndicated on high profile sites.
Andy Beard – Articles – As far as I can see, WPN intend this to be indexed, but it has been kicked out of Google.
The page might be looked on as a search result, but on the domain there aren’t any similar, the page is very much unique compared to what is on my site, and I would suggest it is useful content.

Lets look at individual entries:-

I have 30 articles syndicated on WebProNews
26 of those articles are in Google’s index
4 of those articles are not indexed

The 4 articles not indexed is because they haven’t got any links, and they haven’t got any links because the search engines are not indexing the “category like” search pages.

It should be noted I don’t have to give Google a positive indication of any kind to have my articles indexed on their site.

Conclusion:- In normal situations Google Indexes and ranks syndicated content.

The syndicated copy of my Volusion Review (with permission) should be in Google’s index even if it is in some ways duplicate content – it isn’t 100% duplicate content because it doesn’t have the comments, just like WebProNews.

Duplicate Tag Content

My Volusion review was given 4 tags that were on topic

Volusion – Indexed in Google
Volusion Review – Not Indexed / Banned
Volusion Shopping Cart – Not Indexed / Banned
Shopping Cart Review – Not Indexed / Banned

At this time I haven’t gone to a lot of effort to make those pages unique, and until today those pages had links from a single article so would be quite low on pagerank.
In the future I intend to use some of those tags multiple times, for instance I will probably tag this post with “volusion”, but not with the other tags. I would also like to spend some time looking at other shopping carts because it is relevant to my niche, and I find most of the reviews on the internet quite poor, or overlook many things.

I quite expect pages like that to go into the Google Supplemental index until such time as as they have been made more unique, though I would look on it as a little harsh to have them totally removed from the index.

Google have stated in the past that when they have duplicate content, they will choose which one they think is most relevant to display. I have read nothing stating they will choose one copy, and de-index all the others.

Other sites use indexed tags, and even have such “orphan” single item tag pages, as an example Techcrunch on 1000tags

Google Pigeons

Google joked about their pigeon rank back in 2002 for April fools day

• The category like pages on WebProWorld need to be indexed, or their content that doesn’t have other subject based links just drops out of the indexes of all search engines.
  The fact that most of it is indexed suggests that content that is duplicate isn’t meant to be kicked out.
• There is something clearly wrong with their current handling of link attribution
• It seems like the pigeons are kicking random pages that have been reported to contain paid links out of the index, contrary to what has previously been stated by Google (well actually Matt Cutts)

Here is what I have written in a fresh report to Google:-

Volusion were not buying links, they were buying reviews from experts, so does that mean consultants aren’t allowed to link to their clients, and shareholders can’t link to their stock holdings?

All the links were editorial.

If you can find a better review covering the same topics on the web for Volusion I would love to see it.
I was working to some time constraints, and didn’t have access to the full version of the software.

The review was also syndicated with permission on another site a month after it was originally published – that review has also been kicked out of the index.

Google need to fix their algorithms or we are going to see a lot of good content disappearing from the SERPs

$180 Payola – Isn’t The Standard Term Prize or Competition?

A little while ago Blogcatalog awarded a free “premium listing” for 6 months. I should note that Blogcatalog is a highly reputable directory and social network, and every member’s blog is vetted by a human before inclusion, yet they still have free listings, unlike Yahoo.
Matt Cuts has already stated in the same paid links thread that it is ok to purchase links in reputable directories, thus buying a premium listing at Blogcatalog in theory is ok, unless the job description for the pigeons changes at short notice.

I turned down the opportunity for the paid listing suggesting one of my readers would like it instead. I already have high listings in my selected categories.

Tony from Blogcatalog loved the idea so much that he doubled the prize

Win A 12 Month Premium Listing On Blogcatalog

I want to make this as educational as possible, both for some of my readers and Google’s algorithms.

I was thinking about closing the comments on this post so that it could only be responded to with a link and trackback, but I am a community blogger and thus switching off comments would be a little evil.

What I want people to do is to write a post on their blog discussing what I have talked about here. Speedlinking posts won’t count.

The premium listing will be awarded to a random reader and the number of tickets will be awarded based upon trackbacks.

• One ticket will be awarded for linking through to this post from your article
• One ticket will be awarded for linking through to my Volusion review
• You can link through to both from the same post and receive 2 tickets

You can use rel=”nofollow” for one or both of the links should you choose, if you truly believe that my Volusion review is web spam (and state that in your review), or that my offering a prize for linking through and making your readers aware of the issues is web spam.

I am not offering the prize for links, I am offering it for real opinion, and I am going to count the number of links, and which ones were followed or nofollowed.

I know many readers are using Blogger and Blogger by default doesn’t provide trackbacks. Recently I wrote 2 tutorials on how to use trackback with blogger. The first uses Greasemonkey in Firebox, and is the best way to add trackback for blogger.
The second option is to use Haloscan but please read the instructions carefully, and don’t convert to using their commenting system. Haloscan as far as I am aware cannot be made Dofollow.

• Entries will close on 7th July
• One entry per blogger
• No anonymous bloggers (so I can ensure only one entry per blogger)
• No entries from multi-author blogs of which you are not the primary editor/owner

Also, if you want to combine it and are not a member of PayPerPost, you can combine this with their “Review My Post” offer and make $7.50 for your praise or criticism. See link in comments section for details.

You also might find this article on payola interesting if you missed it when first published.

First of all a short video from SMX Seattle on various things regarding duplicate content and paid links. I am not sure if there is anything new, but it certainly emphasises how you should handle syndication of your content with links back to the original.

Delving back into my archives I have written fairly extensively about link attribution and links over time.
It had a few bumps but was never Dugg or stumbled, but still ranks first for terms like link attribution. Write quality timeless content from day one with your blog, you can always highlight it again at a later date when you have a larger audience, and at the same time reinforce it with new internal links with different keywords in the anchor text.

I should also note that I make sure I get links back to my original articles when they are syndicated on WebProNews (with permission), and with lots of links in feed items, I get links from sploggers daily too.
Thus whilst they are syndicating my content, those are some of the best links I get on a regular basis, because Google knows where it originated, and that it must be good content to also be syndicated on an authority site. Hmm they link to me, I link to them.

I should also note that I like their videos because they play so well on lower bandwidth connections (though mine should have finally been upgraded to something 20x faster over the weekend) – I am much more inclined to syndicate their content than anything on Youtube, Podtech etc, because I can watch it easily.

There is some good coverage at SEO Round Table, and I link to them because… well all kinds of reasons as listed before in my 32 Kinds of Blogging Payola and I am not ashamed to admit it.

Of note so far is the duplicate content summit, more with Matt Cutts, and the SEO Meets SMM/SMO session (though that was deliberately fairly basic)

Jason Calacanis Interview With Loïc Le Meur

This is actually very interesting and has some great tips halfway through about “how to game the hell out of bloggers who lie about everything such as Valleywag”.

That isn’t a specific quote, but Jason did make that abundantly clear. Jason actually comes across a lot more “reasonable” in this Podcast compared to his own, maybe because he was the one being questioned, and not asking the questions.

I do wish Loïc Le Meur had asked some tougher questions, but I gather from the interview that Jason put him up overnight before hand in the pool-house which used to be the Mahalo office for 3 months.

Loïc Le Meur is an investor or on the board of a lot of technology companies – I couldn’t find any direct financial connection but it certainly was a friendly conversation.

Credit where credit is due, I found out about this video on Bumpzee from a message by Bobosse.
You shouldn’t be worried about Bumpzee picking up your content snippets, because there is so much smart interlinking happening on Bumpzee, and so much link love being given back from all kinds of related pages that you honestly can’t lose.

This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Disclaimers are strange things…

Matt can basically discuss anything he likes, whether true, false or possibly true in the future, without his parent company being held liable for anti-competitive practices. It would be very interesting to see if that disclaimer would hold up in court, with Matt being head of the Webspam department.
On his unofficial blog he is in the position to cause an awful lot of financial damage to a lot of very well funded startups, and a fair number of massive internet corporations.

Google is in a Monopoly Position

Whilst everyone has a choice about which search engine they use, they have a significant market share of search traffic, and also a significant market share of the website monetization market, recently increased by the acquisition of DoubleClick (there is an agreement in place, but paperwork isn’t finalised)

What is a Paid Link?

We shouldn’t really think about whether a specific link is paid for, but whether there is a monetary benefit in making the link to another site.

Matt Cutts is an employee and probably has a lot of stock options in Google, yet constantly links through to his employer, from which Google benefit.
Microsoft bloggers frequently blog about Microsoft launches, and even have a mailing list set up.
Yahoo employees blog about Yahoo sites.

If you are a large corporation there are a number of ways to get millions of inbound links.

• Have an affiliate program – use clever redirects on the affiliate links – Google and specifically Matt Cutts has never suggested people report sites that contain affiliate links that are not blocked from being crawled by search engines.
• Buy websites with massive link equity – how much is The Internet Movie Database worth to Amazon from an SEO perspective? Shopping.com and Epinions.com were Ebay purchases. When you go to these sites there isn’t a nofollow link in sight.
• Create Widgets – there are tons of widgets that pass on link equity

Once a large corporation has a lot of existing link equity, it is easy for them to pass this on to money generating sites and services.

Companies are allowed to buy links from the Yahoo directory, which is well known to confer a large amount of trust to a domain, and has been propping up Google’s algorithms for years.
Will we soon see Google state that the Yahoo directory should be made nofollow for all paid inclusions? Matt Cutts has previously stated that the Yahoo directory is OK because there is editorial review.

Matt Cutts has been speaking out saying he agrees with Matt Mullenweg on Sponsored Themes.
A company is paying a theme author as a subcontractor to create and maintain a WordPress theme, and there is attribution to the designer, and the company paying for the work.
Maybe it is a charitable contribution and the designer chose to include a link as a thank you.

How many consultants provide links through to the companies they work for?

How many software firms provide links through to their major corporate clients?

If you make a donation to someone, and they decide to give you a link back, is that a paid link?

If you are a consultant, and are paid to analyse a company, but to make the findings known publicly, are you supposed to stick nofollow on all the links?

If you are a VC or Angel investor, should you have to use NoFollow linking through to companies in your investment portfolio?

Are developers working on an open-source project allowed a link back to their sites (cough WordPress), and then use that link equity to dominate search engines on whatever topic they please?

If you are a blog network, or large internet content producer, is it gaming Google to have links to your sister sites, whether there is a direct financial connection or not?
An interesting twist on this is the WPNI Blogroll. They are providing link equity to the members who are then showing adverts – even if the adverts weren’t converting, would you carry them for the links and traffic?

Should a not for profit organisation link through to their paid members with a live link? One of the benefits is always being included in the members directory, and not just for traffic. These are often high quality credible relevant links, and easy to buy.

A large number of WordPress developers have paid links on their personal sites, as do theme and plugin developers.

If you write a blog post, thanking your sponsors, should you use nofollow?

Some people give away prizes for links, or offer some kind of reciprocation. Links have value, and Google invented the value of a followable link, not webmasters.

If you are a expert in a particular field, and someone asks you to write a review of their site, and the type of review you write means that writing that content might take 10 hours of your time to do due diligence, is it wrong to accept some kind of monetary contribution?
In such a situation, why would you be forced to use nofollow on all links to the site being reviewed?
I guarantee I spend a lot more time on a paid review than someone working for Yahoo for their paid directory.

Imagine someone created a commercial Wikipedia, and paid $5 for every link made to it.
You might think that is crazy, but 100,000,000 links with good anchortext would create a website that would rank for almost any term imaginable, and the company would be worth far more than $1bn, and would certainly bring in more than $100,000,000 revenue each year.
There is another evil twist you could add to the mix as well…

Sickened

I have read through the comments on Matts blog from where this is being orchestrated.

Why is it coming from Matt’s blog and not the Google Webmaster blog?

Why the focus on the effect of paid links and reviews for small webmasters rather than on the major corporations?

This is like a witch hunt with a disclaimer attached

Where is the precise definition of a paid link?

Biting The Bullet

I am actually proud of the paid reviews I have written, and I am so confident that they are not webspam, I am going to “bite the bullet”.

I have already submitted The Matt Cutts blog as webspam, because he is frequently linking through to his employer with undisclosed links.

Now I am doing what many would think of as being unthinkable, I am submitting my own content to Google’s Webspam form

Here is what I have just submitted to Google

paidlink

I am submitting my own content, because it is my own strong belief that there is nothing “webspam” related to the paid reviews I write, and am willing to submit them for scrutiny.

http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/sponsored-reviews-now-live-in-depth-review.html
http://andybeard.eu/2006/12/search-engine-glossary.html
http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/volusion-review-and-suggestions.html

I should also note I also give away half my earning from those reviews to WordPress plugin developers.

I would love an official response that I can publish stating whether Google has any problems with the quality of work I have done for my clients, or the fact that I include live followable links in the reviews I write.

Do you think I am going to get an official response?

Do Google employees have the balls to decide whether something is spam, or will they just blame it on their algorithms?