Your recent decision to invoke a manual penalty on the download page for Google Chrome will have lasting ramifications for the whole of online marketing, whether display advertising, affiliate marketing, and other performance marketing such as CPA models, making many such business models unworkable.

Policing every piece of content produced by marketing partners (affiliates etc) on the offchance that they inadvertantly linked directly to the traffic or buzz benifitiary without using a nofollow or otherwise blocking the direct link is commercially untenable.

In the following video I have outlined what has led to this unreasonable decision being made, and elaborated a little on some of the commercial implications not just for competitors in the online advertising space, but even for Google services such as Google Publisher Network, Google Affiliate Network & Doubleclick.

Here is a 720p 1280×720 mp4 of the above video (looking forward to supporting this in a player real soon now)

Sincerely

Andy Beard

Here is a specific example

This is an Amazon widget

Wow it is promoting a really cool Google phone!

Here is another iframe creative

Here is a text only link

T-Mobile G2 with Google Android Phone (T-Mobile)

So far I haven’t broken Google’s new interpretation of the webmaster guidelines

I love Amazon

Oops… sorry Amazon that wasn’t an affiliate link, but an editorial link… Google will now feel that they have to remove the Amazon home page from the search engine results and Amazon won’t sell 20M Kindle Fires this year… Just 19.8M – or maybe 21M if they replace the Amazon home page with the Kindle Fire product page. (yes I realise they are very similar)

Whilst pureists might argue that this wasn’t a video CPA advert but an affiliate link, a huge amount of the sites that Google filtered this year as poor quality thin affiliates were using Amazon and other affiliate networks for monetization. The purpose quite often for the content was to drive traffic to the ads in small quantities.
At scale the revenue from 1000s of websites earning just a few dollars a month above the hosting and domain costs add up.

Another comparrison is Google’s own Adsense program and the vast numbers of poor quality sites that have arisen because of it. The good often (in search visibility) outweigh the junk MFA (made for adsense) sites, but it really is a chicken & egg situation. The webmasters target specific topics and even optimize content not just for SEO, but to pull up the highest paying and possibly even specific advertising creatives for products, maybe even video content, and they get paid for clicks on that content.
If I write a blog about Android phones and included an Adsense advert at the bottom of each post, allowed video and display ads, the situation wouldn’t be vastly different to some junk content followed by a video embed of a Google commercial I was being paid for on a CPA basis.

People in the past made complete websites dedicated to the promotion of Google pack, their Adsense program etc, and even offered incentives such as training in online marketing, or included the Adsense registration links as part of the course material… of course without disclosure as that wasn’t allowed.

Google… Please Reinstate Chrome

Here are the links referenced in the video

Matt’s post on Google+
Aaron’s's post Sponsored By Google that started this huge mess.
Danny’s post on all the thin content
Unruly Media is clearly CPA (grats on $25M funding guys)
Wikipedia on CPA (will Wikipedia be the only independent content site soon?)
Wikipedia on Online Marketing advertising models
Andrew Girdwood proving Google has used this form of CPA before
Danny with Google’s statement throwing their agency and Unruly under a bus
Google’s staement and effect (from Danny) – Statement saying this was a violation of their guidelines, possibly from someone who hasn’t read them recently.
My post on Google pack and word of mouth marketing
Google’s policy statement for their Google pack CPA campaign No mention of not giving editorial links etc
The CPA video embed (the iframe contents) – I am not going to drag an individual blogger who may have given a quite nice editorial link to Google Chrome through the coals
The Unruly Media terms of service which have now been enhanced – the nofollow statement is a new bullet point – it shouldn’t be needed as payment is not for the content of the blog post, or links, but based on CPA actions with the video.
Webmaster help forums on Affiliate links Google repeatedly avoids answering questions regarding the use of nofollow with affiliate links and other forms of display advertising.
How to report paid links and selling links that pass pagerank

Disclosure: I work for an online video & affiliate marketing startup called uQast but I am posting this on my personal blog and the words and opions expressed here are my own and my volition and not of my employer (does that remind anyone of Matt’s disclaimer?) – I have been involved in affiliate marketing for 7 years and the issues discussed here have been a topic of this blog since I started publishing it in 2005.

Small update: just added a download link for the MP4 version in HD 720p

The Twitter retweet code places a link to Twitter on every page you include it, and they didn’t add a nofollow to the link. It is quite possible Google will decide to ignore all these links in the future, especially as it is effectively hidden and not a “vote” for a particular page. The destination of the link doesn’t show similar information to what is in the button.

2. History

The button has no historical count of tweets as is clearly evident if you search for tweets on something “historical” such as an individual domain. If I added a Tweet button to my home page the link through to search for Tweets would be something like this.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=http://andybeard.eu

3. Count Accuracy

If I glance back at Shaun’s post, the tweet button currently says 23 Tweets – clicking the button to see those tweets results in only 17 tweets showing.

Here are just the influential Tweets counted by Topsy, half of which Twitter hasn’t found even though they actually use the button to submit their Tweet.

Here is a link for the Twitter search results to see if they ever catch up with Topsy.

4. Longevity

Lets look at those links for a second

http://topsy.com/www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/new-twitter-button-conveniently-without-nofollow-attribute/?infonly=1&sort_method=influence

http://twitter.com/#search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hobo-web.co.uk%2Fseo-blog%2Findex.php%2Fnew-twitter-button-conveniently-without-nofollow-attribute%2F

Topsy uses a permalink – there will be a permanent record of all of those Tweets, and their history goes back a long way, and even copes with 301 redirects to some extent if you change your permalink structure. I haven’t experimented with this extensively, but that has some useful potential for marketers adding parameters to links.

For Twitter the link is one of their funky search URLs which uses a # named ancor that is ignored by search engines – Twitter search is totally unreliable, and only has a 7 day history – do you think you are going to have a record 1 month, or 1 year down the line?

5. Broken Retweets

The new “expanded” links on the web interface get truncated – if you retweet using copy/paste links will quite often end up being broken.
This is a subtle way of enforcing retweets using their “new” official retweet method which still isn’t as popular as Twitter would like people to believe.
It also defeats the purpose… you can’t see the whole URL, sneaky redirects or affiliate tracking parameters, and for many URLs might even hide what the URL is actually about, or where you might end up.

6. Validation

Shaun is pretty hot on W3C validation of websites though maintaining it on content that is being published in response to news is a challenge.
One of the problems with the original Tweetmeme button was validation so I am hardly being a validation nazi here.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hobo-web.co.uk%2Fse o-blog%2Findex.php%2Fnew-twitter-button-conveniently-without-nofollow- attribute%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Twitter decided to invent their own link attribute – that sucks – they will never manage to get that accepted as valid code, as it is proprietary to them and doesn’t serve any purpose. This was one of the major complaints against rel=”nofollow” which took 4 years to get any kind of official acceptance.

7. Data

He who has most data in online marketing often has a huge advantage. By adding the official Twitter button they suddenly gain a whole load more information about who visits which sites, which can be tied into their member profiles.
I can’t currently see a reciprocal benefit in Twitter having access to that data.

I gave Twitter a 7 day Ultimatium – now 6 months ago
I strongly criticized their search and the ability to find my own content
I ripped apart their SEO efforts

I left Twitter 6 months ago because I felt they were holding my own content hostage and demanding a ransom from other search engines to access the data.

As a concrete example, when Matt Cutts first mentioned evaporating PageRank and the “reset vector”, there was a fair amount of chatter on Twitter, including some tweets from me. You won’t find those conversations now.

So why would I give them more data directly?

They have no respect over your content, my content… anyone’s content

Conclusion

Use Topsy – they have much more accurate tracking of tweets, handle 301 redirects pretty well and even give you some really useful historical Twitter data for a whole domain.
Here is Andy Beard on Topsy – that is a vote.

I am not saying everything is perfect with Topsy – they are not doing silly stuff with Robots.txt but their nofollow of links is inconsistent and might benefit from a threshold based on authority and an understanding of first link priority.

There is only one significant benefit of the new official retweet button, you can now define retweet text, which is something I wanted Tweetmeme to include a year ago.
Combined with custom URLs in theory you can use that for split testing – in practice I don’t think it is going to work as there is no way to define a canonical URL, plus a URL that gets tweeted with a URL decorated with tracking parameters.

Thus the new Tweet button sucks for marketers even 1 year on.

More on Mediagazer… this seems to have rolled off of Techmeme in less than 24 hours.

Update

Just adding a test new button that has been modified manually

You should Tweet This Post

As text link: You should Tweet This Post

Test without defining the title

You should Tweet This Post

As text link: You should Tweet This Post

With Nothing Defined

You should Tweet This Post

As text link: You should Tweet This Post

A Shortcode Test

This post was originally posted Nov 7, 2006 – I have added a screenshot as the original subject site is no longer online – it is still just as relevant today as it was over 3 years ago. In places I have added some additional commentary or expanded on original ideas.

References to PageRank should be looked on as synonymous with Google Juice & overall site authority, and not just green pixels in a toolbar, though that can be a good visual indicator at times.

How a Blogroll can kill your PageRank

I followed a link from Digg a few minutes a go, read the story, and as I frequently do on any site I visit, I snooped around a little.

I actually do exactly the same every time someone writes a blog post referring to me and pings my blog. It is the polite thing to do, and maybe I can add something to the conversation. It also allows me to relate any comment to the person who is writing about me, either positively or negatively. Everyone is entitled to opposing views. What is often important is why they have an opposing view, and it isn’t always obvious.

Now about the site in question:

1. I have only read half of one article there, so I don’t know much about the site contents
2. The reason I am linking through to the site is purely from an SEO point of view
3. This is a very common problem, very easy to make, and honestly not too hard to correct.

With that said, here is the site Kerry Fox Live (Archive.org link – the site seems to have been offline for 2 years.)

Initial Site Analysis

So the first thing I notice is that it is a PR3 site.

The internal categories are mainly PR2

The archives are mainly PR2

The individual post pages are generally PR1 or unranked

A large proportion of the content is duplicate syndicated content from services such as Associated Press, without any wrapping

But the site has been around for 16 months

You can make a splog, chuck duplicate content at it, and get a PR4 or PR5 after a few months.

So what is wrong with the site?

Take a look at the sidebar

At a guess (I am seriously not going to count them all), only 20% of the links on any given page point to an internal page. (yes that sidebar is on every page)
There are 2 blogrolls, one of which seems to be websites and blogs he likes, and the other is a whole load of press related sites… news sources.

Every single one of those links is a live external link leaking PageRank to other sites. Those other sites are not reciprocating in any way.

Now I am sure someone is likely to point out that those links provide a service for visitors, and maybe add a little authenticity to the site.

What visitors?

We are looking at a news site with an Alexa rank of close to 2M – not 2k, but 2M

Now there are times you want to sacrifice a little page rank to other sites, especially if they are reciprocating, sharing visitors, or in the case of my blog, I like visitors commenting and joing my “community”. You might also do it in a carefully controlled way from a mininet to one of your own sites.

Solutions

Get rid of the blogroll on all internal pages. It is giving away too much traffic to other sites, not to mention PageRank.

Add nofollow to all the blogroll links that are not reciprocating, or you don’t want to be overly friendly with. (Update August 2010 I would probably tend to use javascript in some way)

Increase internal linking to compensate for all the leakage.

How to Increase Internal Linking

• Recent posts – 10 links
• Top Posts – 10 links
• Recent Comments – 5 – 10 links
• Tagging + Tag Cloud – 50+ links
• There wouldn’t be a need for as much internal ball linking if there wasn’t so many external leaks. The site is gaining very few comments.
• Related posts – 5-10 links
• Related reviews – 5-10 links
• Glossary links

Emphasis should be placed on the links you wish visitors to traverse

External Linking

The site has 2 visible external links to the front page. I am not sure how many to internal pages, but even if it did have external links, any PR given would immediate leak.

Just syndicating one article will generate loads of backlinks, far in excess of what you can achieve with a single blog post (unless you have 100k+ readers). Based on my analysis of “A” list bloggers, their average blog post might normally generate around 10 backlinks (showing in Google).

(update August 2010: – whilst many of the bloggers I analysed in 2006 have 10x as many subscribers by RSS & email now, the number of links they receive, other than from splogs & social media probably hasn’t increased)

Conclusion

It is not rocket science, just simple maths.

If you have 100 external links on every page of your site, you need lot of internal links to retain some (hopefully most) of your PageRank, and it would certain help if those people you give a link to on your sidebar reciprocate in some manner.

(please note that includes me – don’t put a link in your blogroll to my site – sure I appreciate the links, but I would much prefer just an occasional mention in your blog)

If you can’t get a reciprocal link, use nofollow, (August 2010 – blocked external javascript), or stick them on their own seperate page so they don’t suck your own site dry.

And finally… this site structure plagues a huge proportion of blogs. Other blog owners who do not have this problem, quite likely don’t even realise why.

Further reading:

Revenge of the Mininet | 3rd Party content | Blog Comments | No Follow

Update: whilst I am still a fan of article marketing, I no longer recommend any service that doesn’t provide a way to have unique passwords for each distribution site.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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