But I am giving Twitter a chance… 7 days

Last time I decided to leave a community where I was highly active was actually 2 years ago when I left Sphinn over moderation issues – at the time I was in the top 3 users. I haven’t been actively involved there since.
(note: I will be releasing the premium content I was discussing for free sometime in the next few weeks as those I told have had a nice 2 year window to exploit it – I never charged for the info)

2 years ago Sphinn was pretty much my default “misc” feed reader – in some ways Twitter has replaced it – you know… that place you go to read cool stuff you wouldn’t have otherwise seen because you can’t cope with reading everything.

The Final Straw For Twitter

Twitter have been progressively screwing up their SEO for a few years, but sometime early this morning they took it one stage too far.
It was first noted by Jeff Bentley
who is a dodgy search marketer so obviously I trust linking to him a lot more than linking to Twitter where you can’t trust the links.

It was also spotted by Malcolm before I published a few other tweeters – he wasn’t going mad, but I probably am.

What Twitter are saying in this most recent change is that the people I associate with and have regular conversations with on Twitter are not to be trusted, and that all juice should go to their blogroll icons in the sidebar which are the people I most recently followed – really funny with accounts that autofollow people back is that most of the blogroll links on their accounts are to spammers.

There are people I follow purely for competitive intelligence or communication – some of them I would never link to from this blog or would nofollow, but on Twitter it is just too inconvenient to use other methods.

I realise Twitter content when syndicated can result in followed links, after all I have been pimping my Tweetglide blog (which has 6x as many tweets indexed in Google as my Twitter account) and if I was to feed tweets to my account on Google Buzz, they would be clean links there as well (though maybe they don’t pass juice)

I also realise now content is being piped directly to Google from Twitter, that whether it has nofollows in public might not have any negative effect on the ranking benefit of any links to content, because Google is gaining clean data.

However I find Twitter favouring the links in the sidebar over the links to people I talk to insulting.

The thing is now Twitter are giving data to Google, Google have no interest at all in crawling Twitter in a traditional manner.

A cache date of over 10 days ago for a PR6 site is quite frankly laughable.
You can see very clearly that in that screenshot the links between people I am talking to don’t have a nofollow.

Every time I look at the Twitter website all the nofollow links make me want to vomit.

Deletion?

I have thought about it for the last 8 hours and it is the only viable solution – if I maintain the account then people will use it to contact me, it is prominently in the SERPs and I have close to 8000 organic followers (I never autofollowed, offered incentives etc)
I will probably leave the account live, but I will delete all the people I am following and all the tweets and then post something generic pointing people to appropriate pages such as my contact page.

All Or Nothing Twitter

If Twitter want to nofollow, it should be all the links or none of them – yes all those “blogroll” links and links to lists need to be nofollowed as well. They could go all the way and nofollow everything with nofollow in the header, but that would be extreme.

The alternative is to remove nofollow completely and let Google sort it out by themselves… they are good at that.

2 very simple acceptable options

Most likely you may want to follow me on Google Buzz, as I expect my Twtter account to become an empty corpse in 7 days

Twitter Nofollow conversation on Buzz

Testing

Here is a link to a public Buzz indexing test I am running – I have others running in private

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When they decided to close all loopholes in creating an active link within the bio area, it prevented me linking to my disclosure policy – that annoyed me as well, especially with all the terrible attempts of providing adequate disclosure within paid tweets that are currently being used/proposed.
There was a huge outcry from the SEO community.

Rae ripped both @MattCutts & @ev apart
Andy Beal asked “Was this Twitter bending over for Google?”

Matt Cutts came back with a decent response on how his interchange with @ev went that might have influenced Twitter’s decision to nofollow bio links.

But that really didn’t satisfy anyone, for instance there was this comment by Danny Sullivan.

Here is an excerpt

Forget the bio link, I think the web site link should be regular. Actually, I think all the links should carry weight. Twitter is my microblog. Why can’t I point at what I want to with authority, just like I do with a regular blog. If my twitter home page has earned a good PR score because people point at me, then I’ve done what Google wants — provided good content that earned that value, just like with a real blog.

Then of course there are the Twitter “blogrolls” which used to link unfairly to the early Twitter adopters by default, and now list the most recent people someone is following.
That PageRank score for many was because they were early adopters followed by other early adopter. In many cases people didn’t truely “earn” the PageRank passing links they were receiving.
The new system to be quite honest isn’t very good either, though I suppose Twitter could claim they optimize the system for those who follow 30 others.

Even so Twitter ranks highly for vanity searches due to the internal linking, but the content you create just disappears into a black hole of terrible navigational structure.

Apparently I have tweeted 4656 times over the last few years, and whilst I had an account very early, it probably took a year before I was tweeting on a regular basis.

I haven’t gamed followers, just handled things quite naturally following people who I found interesting and engaged me in conversation.

Despite ranking highly for vanity searches like [Andy Beard], Twitter SEO really sucks.

Google has only picked up 1320 of my historical tweets

Even worse only 8 or 9 pages depending on whether you use /* or AOL are likely to be in Google’s primary index.

You also can’t rely on Twitter’s own internal search to find your historical tweets.

One option taken by many is to use a WordPress blog to archive their tweets, which is a fairly good solution. There are also tons of other microblogging platforms which can be used for syndication of Tweets, or even the origination point, but many have various problems similar to Twitter, or have limited financial resources to stay alive unless they heavily monetize your content.

The option I have taken is to use Tweetglide as I wrote about recently in my initial Tweetglide review

My interest with Tweetglide isn’t the AIR application, though I did pay for an upgrade and I will be doing a lot of testing of the advertising potential in the future – my initial testing was interesting but a little biased due to the topics and Tweetglide was a “new shiny object” thus had tons of new users, and very few had worked out how to use the advertising yet.
I was seeing unrealistic traffic, effectively $0.015 per visitor.

Not that the AIR application isn’t pretty good – it is, and also has some geeky aspects that are quite exciting for developers with an upcoming API that allows you to create addon features.
However on a day-to-day basis I am more inclined to just open a web browser. I have never run any Twitter AIR application extensively.

Tweetglide SEO – Pumper Or Index Engine

Anyone who is in Stompernet will know about pumper sites, but I am sure it will be covered extensively in Link Liberation / SEO Brain Trust, and Howie Schwartz covers this kind of thing with interlinking of Web 2.0 sites and other content in Link Wheels.
Lots of courses cover similar topics though often with slightly different strategies, levels of automation etc.

Whilst not everything I have suggested to the Tweetglide development team has been implemented yet, they have done a huge amount of work in quite a short amount of time.

I am not going to go into all of the details of what has been done and the reasons why, or elaborate too much on what will hopefully be done in the future.

The most important things for SEO, especially for any Google engineers listening in

• Isolation – each Tweetglide blog is on a subdomain now rather than a page on the parent domain. This for me was important from a trust perspective. Any link on a Tweetglide blog is effectively there because the author added it editorially.
  Maybe you will get situations where some people are selling sponsored tweets and there may need to be some detection of known hashtags to add nofollows, but give the devs a chance – no one else syndicating tweets would even think about the need to do that.
  My Tweetglide blog is isolated from other Tweetglide blogs unless I am interlinking through conversation, citation etc.

  This is something that was vital to have Tweetglide behave like Blogspot or wordpress.com – Twitter stupidly didn’t use subdomains from the start, I suppose they could switch and do tons of 301 redirects.

• Pancake – I love pancakes here in Poland, normally with cottage cream cheese and a sauce made from blended frozen strawberries – I also SEO websites to have a flat linking structure to encourage crawling of as much content as possible.
  Tweetglide is pretty flat – flatter than most blogs and it shows in the way it is already being indexed.

What difference does this make?

Tweetglide has only been running for just over a month, and they haven’t pulled in backdated tweets, so the total number of pages on my Tweetglide Blog is 252 – actually that indexation has only really happened in the last 2-3 weeks due to the switch to subdomains.

The number of pages in the primary index varies a lot more between /* (50) and AOL (21-22) but is still already significantly more than achieved on Twitter, and it is early days yet.

My results are probably not typical at this stage, because I wanted to compare with my Twitter account I poured a lot of juice from my sidebar into my Tweetglide blog for the last few weeks.

Search traffic at this stage has been almost zero, but that is what I expected – there are some things that will improve that for the long-term, but a Tweetglide blog needs to be treated as any other index driver / pumper and given some love.

The important part is that pages are being indexed and hopefully that will continue.

There are bugs – I actually just noticed one more with the RSS feeds – the title for each item in the feed needs to be taken from the tweet, otherwise when syndicated the anchor text will always be Item #1 for the newest tweet.
Other stuff the team are already aware of such as the need for feed discovery.

When you sign up, if you say you are an online marketer you will be offered various advertising options – if you take up the offer I get an affiliate commission. If you say you are not interested in marketing, you won’t get the offers on signup and just get to use both the AIR application and Tweetglide blog for free.

But that isn’t why I am promoting Tweetglide

Currently when a blog post gets tweeted, there is a ton of link activity, but most of it is pointless – sure there is some link equity passed between Twitter profiles, but I have already demonstrated how worthless that is.

Most sites syndicating Twitter content have messed up SEO from an author’s perspective – there isn’t a strong symbiotic relationship.

With Tweetglide the links have value… every single damn one of them. You have links between profiles that actually help with Tweetglide blog indexation, links directly to content from multiple subdomains that are real editorial votes, and once that minor bug with the RSS feeds gets fixed those RSS feeds will be great for further syndication.
The RSS feeds have the links in as well. Perfect for your link wheels, juicers, pumpers or however else you are mixing your content.

Google is free to take every Tweetglide blog based upon it’s own merit, just like a subdomain of blogspot.com or wordpress.com

My primary motivation promoting Tweetglide (and helping them with some SEO tips) is to help people but in so doing help myself as it sure doesn’t hurt having a few hundred readers signed up to Tweetglide who subsequently tweet the occasional one of my posts, or just strike up a conversation with me, as all those links count.

Disclaimer: Only Google decide which links count and even if they appear in webmaster tools that doesn’t really mean anything – I haven’t done statistical testing of the links – my personal understanding and intention is that they will be solid “whitehat” editorial links and nothing I suggested as far as SEO tweaks, or that Tweetglide are doing to my knowledge could be looked on as “naughty”

Marketers:- If you do upgrade, it is best to drive traffic to pages that contain some kind of specific desired action/goal, and it isn’t hard to tag any links from Tweetglide advertising with a tracking code.

SEOs:- Tweetglide Blogs just like other pages won’t be indexed by Google if you don’t link to them

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Most disturbing of all though are the SEO consultants and agencies who I have caught commenting on behalf of their clients, or as themselves with a link through to a client’s site. Some of them are totally dumb about it.

I now have a new comments policy in force though most of it is just a clearer interpretation of what has been in place for the last 3+ years.

Comment Policy Update: Nov 13th 2009 Keywords Etc

Looks like Friday 13th is a very bad day for comment spammers…

• No more keywords within anchor text in the comment fields
• No sig links under comments
• Highly relevant links in the body of a comment can contain anchor text such as the blog title but they will be judged on a case by case basis.
• Even after these changes, I still expect to delete 90% of human comments as the vast majority are just an attempt to get a link rather than adding real value to the conversation.
• SEO Consultants/Agencies – If I catch you commenting but linking to a client’s site, your online reputation, your firm’s and that of your client are being put at severe risk.

My full comment policy

I should really do an update about Disqus, but we can save that for another day – I still haven’t found enough time to fully clean up the mess they left my comments in, and some things will never be recovered.

This is part of my cleanup for when the new FTC rules come into effect at the beginning of December, though effectively the new US rules aren’t any stricter than rules currently in Europe & UK.

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WordPress Comment Solutions

Shaun almost a month ago released a modified version of Lucia’s Linky Love that removes links from comments rather than nofollow them as a partial solution to Google’s changes to PageRank distribution in regards nofollow.

Dave Naylor is also doing something similar

I also now need to take you back to a comment I left over on SEOmoz

Vladomir Prelovac has come up with what I would regard as a partial solution to this problem

I am glad someone has done this as I have been dropping hints about taking this approach for the last year in various places, back to the old Webbbs days, though it needs taking a few steps further to be truly effective.

There are however some big monster bugbears that need to be considered with this approach, just like with tag pages.
The benefits you will see on his site, with a huge amount of PageRank to play with from the release of WordPress Themes are potentially significant, whereas with a smaller site it can lead to complications, and you might for instance want to noindex the newly created comment pages ;) Vladomir doesn’t use tag pages extensively, more selectively.

For the last six months or so, my understanding of how Google ranks pages has changed significantly, in part due to studying the way Google handles huge sites such as Blogcatalog & Technorati, but it would be wrong for me to publish details without clearance from Tony at Blogcatalog because I had access to their analytics.

Whilst a lot of it would be speculative… almost like a fairy story, for some it might be more akin to a lightening strike than a light bulb moment.

Imagine you have a choice between having a tag page or a comment page in Google’s index

• A tag page you can specify the exact title tag
• A page created with SEO Super Comments you can’t, in many ways the comment is about as optimized as a Tweet on twitter.

Twitter’s upstream based on Alexa is only 10% Google.com, so maybe 20% overall – a large proportion would be navigational queries & Twitter account holder names.I am not 100% confident about Alexa upstream numbers, but they might be more accurate for Twitter than many sites.

You would get an occasional tweet ranking for very long tail terms, but it is not significant.

So if you are creating new pages for comments, you would want them in the index only under specific circumstances.

• Existing flat site architecture with all original content in primary index
• Your categories are indexed and viable landing pages
• You have your tag pages sufficiently indexed which may require various techniques to make the content more unique and useful.
• Have ways to use comment data on tag pages
• Have ways to create tag pages based purely on comments and 3rd party content ;)
• The permalink for a comment from comment feeds points to the new pages, not to an anchor/fragment/”#name” – this has been something that needed fixing anyway, because permalinks on WordPress posts with lots of comments are currently broken, because comments can move from page1 to page2 – there are lots of ways to then use this RSS feed pointing to unique URLs on your site ;)
• Rewrite rules for comment URLs
• Link to a comment should use anchor text based on the title
• Link from a name should provide all comments from that user on a single page
• Extensive use of Ajax – this gets a bit complicated, and it would be experimental, but why have the whole comment on the post permalink at all? At least from a spider perspective. A representation of the comments can be pulled in as pre-cached page fragments. Comments could also be pulled into member profiles if a person commenting is also in some way a site member, and maybe in that situation an individual commenter page should be totally replaced by a member page.
• Integration with social media – if you are pulling in tweets, friendfeed etc, give those a page as well, and then allow people to even comment on those directly from your blog, and push the data back out to whichever service.
• Pull more data from trackbacks/pingbacks – grab an excerpt and host it on your site on a unique page. If someone comments on it from your site, send a pingback

The Future Of Commenting And Aggregation

An even more radical approach would be to totally get rid of “comments” as a unique entity, and many other social sites for that matter, and have only unique personal streams of media, long or short form, video, pictures, text or a mixture, and what appears on other sites, whether on a blog as a comment, or on Twitter, Youtube or an social site would just be a syndicated copy of your original content. Just one permalink for the original content, with full ownership and privacy controls over who could see it.

In many ways Youtube is just a video feed reader where you syndicate your unique video, and you should link back to the original source, and get the original source ranking :)

What I am suggesting is a somewhat reverse approach to “Echo” recently launched in private beta or the Friendfeed aggregation.

A single source that you push out to other sites, rather than a multitude of aggregators. More like Tumblr or Posterous, but with much more control.

As a marketer however, it makes it difficult to reward comment participation without some kind of additional registration process.

The Complexities Of Syndicated Comments & Social Mentions

What really turns your mind upside-down is when you have a situation where you have a private blog post in a members area, and someone leaves a comment which is specific to the private content.

The commenter needs to maintain access controls, but at the same time the owner of the site with private content needs control as well, which can possibly be overridden. Who gets priority and ultimate control?

Who would have moderation rights? If moderated, would it be only the syndicated copy on a publishers site, or the canonical version maintained by the commenter.

Do you really want to mention in an “echo” on your blog that you cross-posted the same content to 100 social media sites?

Disqus?

I recently highlighted Disqus as a solution, it still is, but my reservations are increasing after using the service for a month – whilst the WordPress integration is clearly stated as being beta, I am going to call it a very raw beta – there are tons of problems with synchronization and comment moderation leaves a lot to be desired. My last support ticket to them was 6 days ago, with a second full comment export to try to get sync sorted out remains unanswered.

I have informed them already that I am pulling the plug – the synchronization attempts are hopefully to fix problems that might prevent others having problems in the future.

There are other issues that I don’t feel should be aired here on the blog. I am giving them some time to hopefully get them fixed.

Other WordPress Plugins?

A big shout out to 4 other plugins I have been using recently

Autooptimize – so far it is the best CSS / Javascript optimization plugin I have used (and I have used quite a few) and the author has been highly responsive with fixes to various plugins and widgets. It sets expires and gzip correctly too.

What I have also done is hacked things so Disqus uses local CSS and images, that I will eventually be able to migrate to a CDN, though the Disqus CSS brings up all kinds of horrible warnings in Yslow and Page Speed Firefox Plugins.

Wp Supercache Plus – I am currently using it with Eaccelerator – I am using the “bleeding edge” version from SVN, and am in the process of implementing fragments with thematic – I had a few problems using it with memcached WP Supercache combined with Memcached object-cache.php.
Fragment caching with comments especially will reduce server load each time a new comment is added to a blog under heavy load, such as a product launch.

Probably also long overdue is a mention of Tim’s WordPress Membership Plugin. On the surface most plugin offerings look the same, it is only when you look at the code and how they have overcome hurdles that some solutions shine – I was involved a little with the early stages over a year ago and many features have since been copied, and other offerings have leapfrogged Your Members in more obvious ways, but at its core I still believe Your Members to be the most flexible solution (oh and you can see the support in public). There are lots of useful hooks and ways you can extend the platform, relatively easily, though a little PHP knowledge goes a long way. It is also pretty secure.
The full reasons deserve a lot longer post, but other solutions get promoted extensively without extensive research into alternatives – I need to spend another $500 on alternative solutions before I can realistically write a comprehensive review.
With Your Members it is possible to control access level to comments as well as the posts themselves. If you have a private post, you also want to selectively keep the comments private.

FAQ-Tastic – Zain now has both a free light version (that is very flexible) and a pro version – it is a serious solution for anyone looking to leverage their audience to create new product or content offerings. I am frequently asked to add an “Ask Andy” section here on the blog, but I will most likely do it in a more private area.
Comments on custom areas of WordPress is something I don’t think 3rd party systems will ever handle effectively.

This post has been a little bit of a mixed bag, but hopefully you find something useful & worth sharing with others.

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In many ways he is right:-

• You get increased automated comment spam
• You get increased spam from outsourced commenting
• You get increased spam from people using commenting efficiency tools (Comment Kahuna, Comment Hut etc)
• You get increased spam from people using dofollow search engines
• You get increased spam from people using lists of dofollow blogs
• You get Internet Marketing Gurus encouraging their interns to comment on their behalf

It takes additional time to manage comments on your blog even when you set up Spam Karma effectively, but that is something you could outsource to compensate, or have managed by a more junior member of staff.

You also leak a little bit of extra juice, how much depends on your site structure, and how many comments you get. Some people prefer to have huge blogrolls of the people who buy them drinks at seminars.

What Do You Gain?

I think the biggest gain is in community

• I don’t have to write all the content myself, my readers contribute and gain a small reward
• What happens when you engage a community of linkerati? They link to you more often
• If you gain more links, you are just sharing part of a bigger pie
• The tools are keyword based – people with websites covering a specific topic visit your site – maybe initially to just drop links, but it is amazing how many can be converted to regular visitors who leave constructive comments, and link to you from their own sites.

Google doesn’t give penalties just because you decide to let those providing user generated content have a little link love.

I should know, my blog due to paid reviews has been on Google’s radar for a long time – I was one of the first to be hit with a PageRank penalty back in October 2007, and as soon as I blocked those review pages with robots.txt, my Google pagerank penalty was at least partially lifted, and I think in a more recent update they lifted it totally.

It does take a little effort, but if you haven’t got time to

• Read the comments left by your visitors
• Check out their sites
• Give them feedback
• Communicate

Why the hell have you got a blog in the first place?

I would be much more worried about comments on your blog which have been left with commercial intent with the upcoming changes to the consumer protection act on 26th May

Update

Whilst this isn’t in any way conclusive proof, it is just a little fun to add this

I have topical authority on my side to compensate for the fact I linked to Dave who posted first, though Google probably can’t factor those into its ranking that quickly.

Thus this result might just be domain authority… it doesn’t look like I have some kind of authority problem, despite having 1000s of dofollow links from comments.

Update

Dave has inched ahead of me in the SERPs – I think the link Jane gave him from SEOmoz swayed the standing fairly heavily.

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It runs something like this (though I haven’t signed up to one to get exact details)

• You sign up to the mentorship program
• One of the tasks is backlink building from Dofollow blogs
• The new internet marketer runs around leaving comments on Dofollow blogs, but uses backlinks to the blog or salespage of the internet marketing guru
• After dropping a certain number of backlinks, the new internet marketer qualifies for a bonus

The backlinks are sometimes the link reserved for the comment author, or sometimes product mentions within the comments.

I Regard This As Comment Spam

My normal reaction is to hit the spam button, which will eventually prevent me seeing future comments by the people on the mentorship program, even if they eventually start leaving comments on their own behalf.

I haven’t got time to edit links even if the comments contain some legitimate content.

The mentorship program is effectively burning legitimate link sources for the people taking the “course”.

Great job..

In addition, the chances of me giving an editorial link at some time to the “guru” or promoting one of their products as a JV partner are hugely reduced.

Legitimate Employees And VAs

As a blogger, I want to know who is leaving a comment.

I don’t mind anchor text used in comments, if my blog passes juice it might as well pass anchor text as well, but anyone following the link needs to be able to determine who left the comment.
This is a lot easier with personal blogs, or blogs run by a single person.

If my friend Michel Fortin left a comment with the anchor text “Copywriting” I am not going to worry about it. You go to his blog, it is clearly his blog.

Joy Gustilo works for Russell Brunson – that is a link to her profile on DotComSecrets and Joy often uses “Internet Marketing Joy” as anchor text – that is great, I know it is Joy and not Russell leaving the comment.

I have a few other readers also competing for that SERP so I should probably balance that out a little

If Courtney used “Internet Marketing” when leaving a comment, I wouldn’t have a problem – his blog is personal

You have probably seen Dwain Jeworski on various social networks. He used to work with Rich Schefren, and now is with the Internet Marketing Center as their Affiliate Manager. If Dwain used “Internet Marketing Dwain as anchor text in a comment, that would be appropriate. Just using Internet Marketing wouldn’t, because it would be impossible to tell if the comment was written by Dwain or maybe Derek Gehl.
The IMC have over 100 employees – can you imagine if a few of them all had a conversation in my comment area each signing their name as Internet Marketing?

One thing I would love to see on the IMC site is staff profiles which could be used as landing pages for social media link building. It would be possible to funnel juice from those landing pages through to pages where it is needed, which is much harder to do with links directly to a home page.

That is something Joy should think about with her comment links as well.

I am not quite sure how I would deal with comments from Jim Boykin if he was using anchor text such as “Internet Marketing” – I think anchor text would be appropriate for a link to his blog, as the blog is clearly his, whereas a link to the company site I would want some kind of identifier in the anchor text as to who left the comment.
Then again Jim’s ninja’s would probably use some kind of landing page method.

Of course Josh could link through to his Internet Marketing Blog as much as he likes. Again it is his personal blog. (some more on Josh’s blog coming up soon)

So ends my “SERPs Neutral” overview of acceptable linking practice, though there is a good chance I have missed a few people out from my readers.

I am Not Going To Name & Shame

At least not yet…

I left a comment on one blog regarding this practice, and it seemed to stop, at least on my blog, but the comment didn’t appear on the blog, and was not acknowledged directly.

Another “guru” when contacted about this last year offered to chat about it, but didn’t apologise.

I have noticed it starting again over the last few weeks, not just spammy linkbuilders, but quite obviously new internet marketers under some kind of mentorship.

Come on guys, behave… I’m serious

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

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

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

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

Inclusive PageRank Sculpting

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

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

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

Pages blocked by Robots.txt still accumulate Google Juice.

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

Less Important Pages Can Be Your Quarterbacks

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

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

Simple Site Structure

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

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

I should point out the following:-

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

Keep Them Out Of The Index

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

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

Not So Important Pages

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

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

When You Have Multiple Levels Of Importance

In this example we have 3 tiers of importance

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

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

Our low priority pages are gaining links from the HTML sitemap

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

Nofollow Is Not Required

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

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

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

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

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

No Robots.txt

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

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

So Which Method is Best?

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

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

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

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I am not going to call this a perfect example of a reconsideration request, but I decided that it was better to be 100% honest about my thought process for both now and in the future, because whilst I am now blocking paid reviews with robots.txt, there are so many things still not specified within the webmaster guidelines that it is a potential minefield, especially for someone who has previously been the target of a manual penalty.

Here is exactly what I sent to the Google webmaster team.

I honestly still believe I didn’t break the spirit of the webmaster guidelines, the webmaster guidelines as most frequently described by Google employees on official duties in regards to paid links and reviews, and even the “letter of the law”.

I have a very high rejection rate on paid reviews, approaching 80% – that shows editorial discretion far beyond many if not all paid directories.
Content was always highly targeted to my audience

I retained editorial control of links – in all my blogging I give good search engine friendly links that are descriptive of the target – such practice is effectively law in the UK and Europe, though who is responsible for regulation isn’t certain.

Almost a year ago, when Google first made it possible to report a site for paid links, I reported myself with a request for clarification – at that time how my reviews were regarded by Google was not clearly specified, in many ways it still isn’t.

Adam Lasnik previously suggested multiple times that sites which were predominately high quality content were not your target for penalties – paid reviews content currently represents less than 3% of my original content – just 9 reviews

I strive to provide an example of paid review content that is benefiting readers in general, and has a reason to be indexed and counted as editorial content.
The compensation I receive is more a token gesture, like a box of chocolates to say thanks, as the time I spend on them means I would earn more flipping burgers in McDs – how could that class as paid links? It doesn’t even cover my time.

Penalties have not been handed out evenly, I know Googlers read blogs that have written paid reviews where the links were not blocked in any way, and have even commented on the specific reviews. Those sites remain unpunished.

Googlers continually promote Google services from their private blogs, and certainly gain financial compensation from increased stock prices. Just today Matt wrote the following post without a specific disclaimer that he is a Google employee.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/adding-new-features-to-google/
Surely such posts should have a nofollow to Google – it has purely promotional (though helpful) intent.

All that being said, I had no intention to break the Google guidelines, and if what is required for the Google Toolbar to truthfully depict the authority of my website is for my editorial links in paid reviews to be blocked from Google in some way, I am going to comply.

All permalinks to my paid reviews are now blocked using robots.txt – I have checked that this is the case within webmaster tools

Where excerpts of my articles appear on duplicate content pages, all links are nofollowed, such as on tags pages http://andybeard.eu/tag/volusion_review

Ultimately the Google search results will be poorer quality, because a good paid review is a better result than an article based upon a press release, or a SEO optimized press release itself. I would argue that the links are of higher value as well.

There are still going to be cases where what I write will be within the grey area not defined by your webmaster guidelines.

I earn money from Google through Adsense – should I nofollow every link to Google and Google services now?

I have paid advertisers, many are purchased by my regular readers or services I frequently write about in an editorial manner. Do I now need to nofollow every past current and future link to them because I have accepted a small amount of money for display advertising?

Do I need to nofollow affiliate links? I can’t see an automatic way that Google can tell the difference between an affiliate link, and a paid link that has a tracking parameter.
It is somewhat strange that Google has provided help for merchants in cleaning up search results with affiliate links using redirects, and thus gaining an SEO benefit from them. Affiliate links very frequently are not editorial endorsements.

My content gets syndicated often on authority sites such as Webpronews and Searchnewz, and many lesser sites – I trust that if they choose to publish my syndicated content as an editorial decision, that the fact that content was originally a paid review is no longer a problem.

Best regards

Andy Beard

Before filing it I checked that the changes I previously made had taken effect and the pages were actually blocked.

I also made changes to my disclosure policy to make sure that it was 100% clear to anyone from Google performing a manual inspection that all links in paid reviews from my domain will not affect search results.

This was important based on the discussion regarding Donna’s reconsideration request.

Something For The Naysayers

There were people who for some reason thought that blocking my paid reviews using robots.txt would for some reason be extremely harmful to my search traffic.
It is true that a document that can’t be indexed cannot rank for long-tail phrases within it, but pages blocked with robots.txt can still rank in Google.

That is just a snapshot of a SERP, it is certainly bouncing around a little and the position is changing daily.

That being said, that page was previously ranking 12th, and whilst it isn’t a high traffic term, it is quite competitive with lots of theme and plugin authors also attracting lots of links.
I haven’t done as much as I could do to promote the page because it is a paid review.

In addition I have flattened my internal linking structure over the last week – frequent detractors obviously wouldn’t look on that as a major search ranking factor.

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3 years ago Google introduced rel=”nofollow”, very similar to rel=”me” , rel=”friend” and other XFN and FOAF standards.
Today Google are championing their new API with the slogan “URLs Are People Too”

3 years ago that was true, now URLs on many (most) places where people congregate on the web are no longer “people” because in a supposed attempt to combat comment spam, Google encouraged major sites to use rel=”nofollow” making the links null and void.

I did some initial testing with the example tools Google provides, and the results were less than encouraging, because lots of the data they probably need has nofollow links. There is data out there that is usable, but maybe I need to give Google more help.

Fairly poor results considering how interconnected I am.

People who have better results have them primarily for 2 reasons

1. They gave Google a lot more data to work with on the form – I only gave this blog URL
2. They have extensive blogroll links to their social media profiles, and use a blogging platform that uses XFN extensively (as Jordan demonstrated on Marketing Pilgrim)

The Google system currently doesn’t seem to make good use of dispersed information, even when it can be used because there isn’t nofollow, and it includes rel=”me”

As an example take a look at my MyBlogLog profile

If you look at the source code on my MyBlogLog profile, you will notice that it uses rel=”me” on all the profile links, so lets see what happens if we use my MyblogLog profile as the source.

Lots more results – but they certainly didn’t pick up all my associations from my Technorati profile as I would expect to see a few more of my public blogs, and Twitter.

Lets see what happens if I just use my Stumbleupon profile, which is connected from both my Technorati profile and my MyBlogLog profile.

Here is a direct link to the search with the API

Just one Degree of Separation

Google currently is taking data you give it, and finding profiles it can associate with that data, but they don’t then extrapolate out to further connections. With the Stumbleupon test they did find my MyBlogLog profile, but then didn’t use the extensive data on that page to find more results.
To use the API extensively, it will be necessary to perform multiple recursive calls to find useful data, and some connections won’t be found because some of the hops won’t have rel=”me” associations.

It is interesting to note that they are picking up Technorati claim code in some of the searches, rather than actual profiles that link to the pages in reverse in many instances.
Nofollow is probably why they could pick up my MyBlogLog profile from Stumbleupon data, but couldn’t find it declared in Technorati.

Ultimate Proof That Nofollow Kills This Dead?

The most marked up pages regarding XFN and Microformats that I know of are Technorati, who have been champions of microformats for as long as I can remember.

Almost every single link on my Technorati page has some form of microformat data, but the page also has meta index nofollow in the header.

Now take a look at a very empty page when you use your technorati profile as your source data.

Google Scraper API

Ultimately this isn’t far removed from simple scraping scripts easily created by your average Blackhat SEO, or an averge PHP programmer familiar with using CURL and regular expressions.

Such a programmer could easily create something similar in a couple of days, though it would probably be much easier using Yahoo search results rather than Google’s – Yahoo have an Open API and report links whether they have follow or not.

In fact it is quite likely that such a 3rd party tool would give you much better results than Google currently provide.

Currently I don’t intend to help Google by providing them with more direct links to my social profiles with specific XFN – it can help with reputation management, but at the same time that would push all the great things readers have said about me further down the SERP. That isn’t necessarily an advantage.

I would also be interested if data starts showing up which could only be derived from links that are nofollowed which has numerous SEO implications if the data ever makes it into Google’s main search algorithms.

I would be more excited if Google announced support for additional XFN alternatives (maybe extended from XPN proposals), as an alternative to using nofollow, although the majority of people wouldn’t use them – I am sure paid review services would encourage support.

Currently Google shouldn’t be winning any prizes for this one, why is everyone talking about it?

Update

In this article I linked through to my Technorati profile. Technorati extensively uses meta nofollow, thus Technorati profile pages are not being naturally indexed – you have to link through to them for Google to index them, and whilst I have linked through to various aspects of my technorati profiles in the past, such as the opml of my favorites, I hadn’t linked through to my specific profile.
Since this article was published, Google has indexed it, followed the links, and indexed my Technorati profile as well – the cache data for my profile page is 2nd February.
If you now check my connections using Technorati as a source, you get a massive amount of data from multiple services.

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This was previously written about by Ted Murphy of Izea, and vehemently defended by Techcrunch, so it is surprising that they have made a significant change in their stance without also making a public statement about it.

I also wrote about this situation in a previous article on paid links and the PageRank update (round 5).

Here is their previous links to sponsors post from back in November 2007

Here is Techcrunch’s most recent post thanking their sponsors in December 2007

Precautionary Or Suggested By Google?

Techcrunch was frequently being highlighted as a site that might be abusing Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, but somehow immune from a penalty, and also had a reputation for being critical of paid links in content (though one of their advertisers is Text Link Ads, and I believe they have also had advertising from sister service ReviewMe)

I can think of 3 reasons Techcrunch have made this change:-

• They have made a unilateral decision that linking to sponsors without nofollow was in some way hypocritical and frowned upon by their readers
• Precautionary based upon analysis of the Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Suggested or advised by Google

The reason Techcrunch has made a change is extremely important, because hundreds, maybe 1000s of bloggers currently link through to their sponsors on a weekly or monthly basis, effectively copying the Techcrunch model, and most do not include nofollow on the links.

I think it is also important to point out that Techcrunch hasn’t made this change retroactively. To have a clean slate they should go through all previous content and add nofollow to all links to sponsors, possibly even in editorial content.

I honestly don’t think it is the first option – Techcrunch after all are still accepting advertising dollars from Text Link Ads who offer various in-post advertising, not just sidebar linking, and unlike Izea (PayPerPost), have given no indication of supporting nofollow on the advertising links they sell.

If Google did contact Techcrunch, shouldn’t they also make an official statement on the webmaster central blog giving advice to all bloggers that this practice is looked on as paid links, and could be subject to a penalty?

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