Internet Business & Marketing Strategy - Andy Beard » search engine optimization

WordPress SEO – Deep Link Engine Spam

Andy Beard — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:04:03 +0000

The Deep Link Engine WordPress plugin was released back in March as part of the launch for a product “Auto Content Cash” by Brian G Johnson, Jared Croslow and Alex Goad.

I quite like some of Alex’s products, I have been critical of most of Jared’s and I suppose I am neutral on Brian’s as I have never bought any.

Hyper lazy affiliate banner

In theory it is like a simplified version of Zemanta with an additional option to check to see if a reciprocal pingback link has been published.

There are lots of options to get rid of most footprints the problem is people are lazy and leave the defaults.

Thus you get nice footprints like this

Related Blogs

The other problem is people are greedy.

Rather than choosing the most related posts they add as many as they can – a numbers game, and may or may not keep the links.

I am referring to extreme greed.

Is the plugin legit? It is just a tool
Can it be abused? Most certainly
Are idiots abusing it? Without a doubt
Is it blackhat? Not necessarily

If you want to test the plugin you get it as a free download from an exit pop sequence if you visit the site via the banner above.
I don’t think as a tool for finding relevant links it is a bad thing, and if you are automating content aggregation in some legitimate way then those receiving (genuine) (relevant) (followed) links aren’t going to complain too much.
With a lot of creative thought something like this could be turned into a very crude Techmeme clone built on WordPress.

Tags: autoblogging, blogging, Linkbuilding, search engine optimization, wordpress, WordPress SEO

Google Experimenting With 20 Search Results Per Page?

Andy Beard — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 09:10:59 +0000

You have always (well for as long as I can remember) been able to select the number of search results shown by Google.

The default is 10
Then they add in various other things like news, video, images, local results etc.

Those additions are generally known as universal search

Then you might have results included from your social circle – I have quite a large social circle because I follow lots of people on different social networks, so I almost always see them in the search results.

Google 20 Results Per Page

This isn’t unusual in itself, you could select 20 results before, but now even if I go into advanced search and select 10 results, or manually add &num=10 Google is still giving me 20 search results.

Pseudo Site Search 20 Search Results

A couple of weeks ago Google rolled out what I coined pseudo site search. I spent so long trying to gather data, work out exactly why it was happening and come up with a name for it that Malcolm got the drop on me writing about it.

I should point out pseudo site search isn’t brand – there are more prerequisites – there has to be a very specific indication in the search query that the intent might have been to perform a search query for a specific domain, but either the searcher was unaware of syntax or just lazy.

Commercial Reason For Google To Make Change

A week or so back Dan Taylor of Destination 360 mentioned in a comment on the travel technology blog Tnooz that for the search query [bellagio las vegas] he was seeing 7 out of 10 results from Bellagio.com – travel is a competitive even for hotels as a specific destination and Dan happens to have a page that might rank even higher for Bellagio Las Vegas now (thanks for the great example search result)

I was an idiot and didn’t grab a screenshot then… sigh.

So here is a current 20 page result of which bits were being pushed around. It isn’t now showing a pseudo site search.

Everything below the current #5 result for Trip Advisor was being pushed onto the 2nd page of results, and trip advisor itself was at #10 with Vegas.com 8 & 9

Now imagine that everyone was forced to have 20 search results like I currently am for US searches… I still get 10 in the UK & Poland.
Whilst those results for hotel review sites would be pushed down, they would still be on the page, and a reader might be more tempted to scroll down a 20 result page.

Significance

For some search queries I think this would be useful, though it might cost Google revenue as there are no ads at the bottom half of the search results if people did start scrolling.
It may also result in the 2nd page of results being totally worthless, rather than just very low traffic, for all search queries.

This doesn’t mean you should ever be happy with a page #1 search result – the fold line – the part of the page immediately visible when opened gets most clicks, thus unless someone is using a very high resolution monitor anything below result #3 is frequently severely hampered.

Also with personalization and region there are significant variations in what is seen in the results.

You will also tend to have a lot more double search results in Google.

I would assume this is just a test for now, though Google did roll out the pseudo site search to everyone at once.

Update

There is speculation that Google will announce something regarding this tomorrow 8th September 2010 (more on Techmeme)

Tags: 20 results, 20 search results, google serps, pseudo site search, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, serps

New Digg 4 (Basic) SEO Score 30/100

Andy Beard — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 04:04:13 +0000

This is just a quick look at basic SEO factors and how Digg screwed them up.

I am not going to get into complicated internal linking sturctures, or even discuss things like nofollow and robots.txt

This will be just SEO 101 that any webmaster should know.

1. Title Tag

Used on Digg

Digg - Topsy Search & Twitter Backups

Most SEOs think that keyword prominence is important for both ranking and click-through rate thus this title would be much better as:-

Topsy Search & Twitter Backups @ Digg

5/10 but no banana

2. Meta Keywords

The keywords meta tag is only used by Yahoo of the major search engines currently, but should be specific to a page.

Having the same keywords for every page of the site is spammy and pointless thus 0/10

3. Meta Description

The description is not used as a ranking factor by major search engine, but might be used on other websites such as Digg so can be a secondary ranking factor.
Lots of sites these days don’t set a description because they concentrate on Google, and often just decide to let Google decide on which words to use as a description within the search results for each article.

The primary benefit of having an enticing description is to boost click-through rate.

Grabbing the whole article content and slapping it into the description is not cool – 0/10

4. RDFa

RDFa is geeky SEO stuff – I don’t even really want to discuss it as most sites aren’t using it, but damn.. I can’t ignore this junk.

It looks like we have a problem – they got the title much better here (no mention of Digg) but they have taken the whole article contents and included it a second time.

RDFa if it wasn’t there wouldn’t be an issue, but as it is there, and buggered up, they get 0/10

5. URLs

Digg have always rewritten their URLs so they are nice for humans rather than a bunch of parameters, but they should really fix the word seperators. Google does not treat an underscore as a space.

http://digg.com/news/technology/topsy_search_twitter_backups

No improvement thus 5/10

6. Links

Google like links – links are what powers the relevance in their search engines. If Google can trust the links then having them on a page is often a good thing. Linking to good resources has been mentioned by Google Engineer Matt Cutts as a positive ranking factor.
Some websites don’t trust their users to post good links so they stick rel=”nofollow” attributes in the code to tell Google and other search engines that the links can’t be trusted.

It seems that Digg now trust their users to post good links… or that they trust me to post good links, or they have decided my domain is trusted and this link was generatd from my official feed import. This could also be oversight.

The link itself uses the anchor text “diggs” and gets rewritten as a voting widget. That isn’t so good both for the site receiving the link, and for Digg themselves because it is hidden… though the anchor text is relevant to the widget.

It would be nice if it stays like this but don’t hold your breath. 7/10 for now

7. Canonical Part 1

Digg does not use canonical tags or 301 redirects to clean up messy URLs with extra parameters
This is an example:-

http://digg.com//news/technology/topsy_search_twitter_backups?link=12345

To fix this issue in the header Digg should use

That can cause lots of issues 3/10

8. WWW – Canonical Part 2

There is a difference between these 2 URLs

http://digg.com

http://www.digg.com

They might serve the same page, but it can cause the “Gogle Juice” to be split between pages.

For years this is an issue Digg didn’t fix, but I am happy to see it has now.

Finally! 10/10 despite how long it took to fix.

9. Email Sharing Link

We seem to have another copy of my article.

This causes two problems:-

It is more junk repeated content on the page
Someone is going to receive an article without the images – that is a very poor reader experience

For hiding my article in code at every opportinity 0/10

10. Related Links

I am a big fan of linking to related content, either the latest on the specific story or similar topics. Whilst I am not going to pick Digg up on their internal linking structure too much, I am thinking of this from a general perspective that it is good for users and search engines. Related posts plugins and widgets are hugely popular with readers, and the equivalent on Digg would be great for content discovery.

They don’t have it at all, so no points 0/10

Total

Going into this I didn’t realise I would find so many basic issues – I am sure the Digg engineers are aware of many of them so this is just adding them to the bug reports.

Digg (Basic) SEO Score 30/100

I am sure someone is going to chime in about relative importance as I have valued each item the same. If I took importance into account I would probably be rating this more like 20/10

Updates

Apparently there is a lot of unrest amongst Digg users. Do check out the podcast by the Drill Down 42:30 onwards. More on Techmeme.

Tags: digg, search engine optimization, SEO Blog

Pseudo Site Search (More From This Domain – Extended)

Andy Beard — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:38:39 +0000

For want of a better name…

I have been trying to come up with a suitable name for this since Tuesday night when I first spotted it in some queries I was using to find some old posts I had written.

The first name I came up with was “HyperPersonal” because I was seeing it in more personal search results and I mentioned it in Dojo chat to get some feedback.
Then the chat switched to the evils of hosting WordPress on windows servers and the death of Search Monkey and other Yahoo APIs.

24 hours later I came up with another name “Hyper Exact Match” though that is terrible English but by this time I had decided that the matching was very specific to domain queries as some purely name or brand associations just didn’t work the way I expected them to.

I came up with this explanation for this:-

If a query can be determined to be specific to a particular domain, and the domain has multiple results for the query, Google instead of showing a link “More from this domain” will show up to 6 results.

Actually it can be more than 6, but that is as many as I had seen at the time for the limited queries I was testing on.

Dave later suggeted the following

@Andy, brand task search? Not really a ‘site search’
[2010-08-18 23:28:20] David Harry: Domain query search?
[2010-08-18 23:28:43] David Harry: the lack of a ‘site’ command kinda takes it out of a ‘site search’ imo

But I am going to stick to calling this Pseudo Site Search.

As far as I am concerned this is a site search for mortals who haven’t fully mastered Google query syntax but are showing intent to retreive information from a particular resource.

Meanwhile Malcolm got the jump on me and posted something before me.

Google treating brand names in search terms as site: searches?

Bill Slawski chimed in in Malcolm’s comments with this

This looks like the process described in Google’s patent “Query rewriting with entity detection” (US Patent 7,536,382). which was granted in May of last year.

For example, the process might identify Apple as a specific entity that is associated with a specific web site, and rewrite the original query to provide results from the Apple site. From the patent:

Some entity names are unambiguous and uniquely identify particular entities. A large number of names, however, are somewhat ambiguous or generic, making it more difficult to identify the entities to which they are intended to correspond when included in users’ search queries.

Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention provide mechanisms for determining the entities to which entity names correspond and selectively rewriting users’ search queries based on the entity names. Accordingly, a user’s search query may be restricted to a search of document(s) associated with the entity that the user intended in the search.

Bill has now followed up with a blog post of his own based around a number of Google (and Yahoo) patents on Entities.

Not Brands but Entities: The Influence of Named Entities on Google and Yahoo Search Results

So I spent 36 hours working out what to call it and whilst I have been pipped at the post (literally) I thought I would still write something and include some of the examples I dug up.

More From this Domain

This is how things used to be

Some domains you would get more than one additional link – I have seen 4… maybe 5 links in the past for huge sites, plus a suggestion for more content from the same domain.

Hyperpersonal

This is what made me call this hyperpersonal – the search I performed as I was just deciding what to respond to a review request (that I turned down).

Sidenote: I am close to deleting my profile on all the paid review sites – the requests are most often a waste of time, and those that are interesting are on sites that now by default state you have to give followed links – if they think the links are more valuable than the feedback they know where to shove it.

This also shows how useful this is… [site:andybeard.eu pagerank] is a much more complicated query that you could get wrong
There are lots of popular sites that are .net (Slideshare, Problogger) or .org (SEOmoz)

How many times have you used a site query for the wrong domain due to this?

Michael Arrington

Michael as one of the biggest brands in blogging would be an obvious choice, especially as he tends to write only for his own blog Techcrunch.

It didn’t work for Michael…

It does work with Techcrunch… hmm

So this is what got me thinking that it isn’t so much “personal”… the “entity” needs a strong association with the domain name possibly, and not just with the website and contents.

If you have read Bill’s post then just try [bill slawski patent] and [seo by the sea patent]

Whilst Bill has written in other places frequently, I only associate him with one domain for patents.

News Query Space

[Chicago Tribune Obama] didn’t bring up the new results, so I stuck a .com on it to bring up something interesting

Shopping Space

Nine results for Amazon in the UK for this query, but look at the subdomain switching between www and astore.

I thought I would grab a pretty one from the US

Entities, People & Exact Match Domains

There is nothing clear cut with this…

For instance you would expect Aaron Wall of SEObook to be a strong enough brand associated to a single domain for this to work.

[aaron wall pagerank]
[seobook pagerank]
[aaron wall google] (Google knol does exist still!)
[seobook google]

If you slap a .com on, it works
[seobook.com google]

Interestingly searches for a domain like that in the past would bring up references to the domain, not lots of results from the domain itself.

Google’s job is to provide relevant search results for a query (and make money doing it) – this does not mean that you will necessarily gain search traffic by having a strong brand associated to an exact match search query.

I have lots of weird and wacky things regarding search that I have discussed in various places (mainly private communities) that I still haven’t discussed here on the blog that I refer to as “Pinocchio SEO” that freaks highly competent SEOs out a bit, and I have no idea how this will relate to that.

I prefer “Pseudo Site Search” over “Query rewriting with entity detection” as I think that is the kind of query that is being returned… maybe a combination “Entity Search” would be better, but that doesn’t quite make the domain relevance/reliance strong enough.

Update

Matt has an update on this as well with a quote from Google

Postscript: A Google spokesperson has confirmed that the search results discussed above are part of a ranking/user interface change related to domain-based intent:

“We periodically reassess our ranking and UI choices, and today we made a change to allow a larger number of pages from the same site to appear for a given query. This happens for searches that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain.”

Hmm “related to domain based intent” just means that is the catchment for this… but I am sticking with my pseudo site search.

Update 2

Google now have an official update (via SEL) (more Techmeme)

Tags: branded domains, branded search, domain based intent, entities, exact match domains, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, site search

Demand Media Traffic Takes A Hammering?

Andy Beard — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:27:22 +0000

Contemplating an investment in Demand Media? Got the jitters about the effect Google might have on the stock price? Your concerns might be justified.

Whilst this could well be a false alarm, it will give you at least some idea of why there might be a concern.

PE Hub spotted that traffic as reported by Quantcast to the Demand Media group had taken a dive.
There is also extensive commentary about this on Slate.

For the record, I took all these screenshots today…

Quantcast data is normally highly reliable for Quantified publishers, and I have never seen a drop like this that wasn’t due to a real decrease… or someone accidentally or deliberately leaving the code off a page.

Finding this data on the Quantcast site isn’t as easy as it used to be, so I am not linking to it directly.

Demand Media Group Traffic

These stats certainly look like they were hammered in some way, lets look at individual sites.

Ehow.com

Ehow.com is by far Demand Media’s most popular web property, so is possibly the most important indicator.

Those stats suggest that Quantcast code was removed from Ehow.com sometime around July 27th-28th 2010, but they are still showing as a Quantified publisher. That seems normal to me… they are not going to pull stats totally if for some reason a developer slipped up and removed stats by accident.

We should look at Alexa data for Ehow.com

That looks healthy… though Alexa have been known to fudge numbers a little.

But is that all the story?

Lets look at some more sites.

Answerbag.com

That looks possibly a little drop in traffic around the “MayDay” update but nothing too serious, or just seasonal… websites get less traffic in the Summer… and then there was the World Cup.

Cracked.com

Cracked serves a younger demographic, so you would expect the traffic to drop more in the summer.

If anything that looks like some growth during the summer even just looking at US traffic. Very well positioned for the colder seasons. I wouldn’t look on Cracked as a site that depends on search traffic – they have tons of social media & viral traffic due to the nature of the content.

So far all signs are rosey.

Livestrong.com

This one looks like a traffic hit, or a change in which pages are being measured. If the code was taken off some of the pages it would look just like this too.

Lets look at Alexa for Livestrong.com

That looks relatively healthy though with some seasonal reduction, maybe less promotion or content being produced after July but there is a decline.

Demand Media SEO Risks

Danny covered the SEO risks with Demand Media admirably when the IPO was first announced.

I think one of the biggest risks might be their syndicated content strategy, even though that in some ways gives them some stability on traffic sources.

More On Demand Media

I found this video quite insightful, as you get to learn the internal workings and some of the thoughts leading up to the IPO.

All Things D (the WSJ) have some problems with their video embeds looking really sucky (320×181) as standard to encourage you to click through and try to navigate their site, or maybe just a bug, so I hacked the embed code a little. Permalinks to videos (e.g. the permalink for this one) are all messed up as well which must be great for SEO.

Not a Start Page

I think the important aspect in this isn’t that a major change has happened… I don’t think it has, but that Demand Media don’t really own a “start page” in a similar way to Yahoo, MSN, AOL or Google might be looked at as the first page that an internet user would start their online session with. They don’t have any captive audience.

They also don’t own any real news destinations, though they do provide content to news destinations.

At this time I am not worried about the traffic decline being shown, and part of what I do is help large websites fix major problems… sometimes they listen to me, sometimes they don’t.

This does however highlight a need to either fully hide traffic data, or make it reliable. Demand Media is the first major IPO in recent times I can think of that is so tied to Google both for traffic and income for their long-term income.

In some ways it is the equivalent to Apple being tied to the health of Steve Jobs.

There can be big positive and negative gains almost overnight which may or may not be permanent.

Tags: Content Farms, Demand Media, Ehow, Google, search engine optimization

Anchor Sitelinks – WordPress Table Of Contents (Part 1)

Andy Beard — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:08:42 +0000

With Google now providing convenient anchor links as sitelinks within search results for long structured documents I thought it would be prudent to examine current solutions for WordPress and see which of them is most likely to help you obtain anchor links.

Read carefully – there is a competition at the end to get my bonus for Stompernet without buying anything

These anchor links have been around for a few weeks now, first reported on Google Blogscoped, but it was announced on the official Google blog.

Benefit Of Sitelink Anchor Links In Search Results

For users, quicker access to the information they are looking for avoiding the need to scroll through a long article (initially)
For site owners… I have no eye-tracking screenshots to show you, and I have only seen them on the first result so far, but at a guess if the first position gets you 40% of the clicks, this could bump that to 50%, a 25% increase in traffic for a top listing.

Would this result in higher conversions? Possibly, but bare in mind the visitors might never see what you prepared for them above the fold, so you need to include a marketing message at the bottom of a page as well.

Lets take a look first at the examples Google provide

Trans Fats

The first example Google provide is for trans fats

The top results is for a Wikipedia page

Google link through to the anchor for nutritional supplements from a horizontal line of sitelinks

Lets take a look at the structure of the elements on the page.

The Table Of Contents

This is what it looks like

Here is the code





Contents
 [hide]

1 History
2 Chemistry

3 Presence in food
4 Nutritional guidelines
5 Health risks

5.1 Coronary heart disease

5.2 Other effects


6 Public response and regulation

6.1 International
6.2 Australia

6.3 Canada
6.4 Denmark
6.5 Switzerland
6.6 European Union
6.7 United Kingdom

6.8 United States

6.8.1 Local regulation in the United States




7 Food industry response


7.1 Manufacturer response
7.2 Major users' response


8 See also
9 References

10 Further reading
11 External links

The links to the named anchors:-

Used relative named anchors – that may or may not be suitable for a blog post depending on what level of interaction you want to provide for someone viewing from an RSS reader.
Use human understandable names
Wikipedia use underscores as a separator – a hyphen would probably make this easier for Google
The anchors contain no unique reference which could potentially cause problems in an RSS feed or on a blog.
Are arranged in an unordered list

The Named Anchors

Lets dive straight into the code

[edit] Nutritional guidelines

It is nested within an H2 element on the page
The anchor doesn’t use a name construct which was deprecated in xhtml 1.1, but an ID id=”Nutritional_guidelines”
It could be considered suboptimal, because there isn’t an easy way to grab a link to that section of the page
The ID is applied to the span within the H2

Good Cholesterol Level

This is the Google search result pointing to this page as the first result.

Google provide a siltelink to a named anchor or ID from within the snippet

American Heart have a double listing even without the exact search term in the Title Tag and URL
The anchor link is placed immediately below the snippet title in the search results listing, and is almost like an ancillary title.
Either Wikipedia are slacking and don’t have a suitable page, or Google might have decided they are not a reliable source for medical information – their highest position is an article on HDL that references the 2nd article from American Heart – of course with a nofollow

The Table Of Contents

Here is what the TOC looks like on the American Heart Association site

Here is the code

A complete fasting lipoprotein profile will show:


Your total blood (or serum) cholesterol level

Your HDL (good) cholesterol level

Your LDL (bad) cholesterol level

Your triglyceride level

The links to the named anchors:-

Used relative named anchors – that may or may not be suitable for a blog post depending on what level of interaction you want to provide for someone viewing from an RSS reader.
Use human understandable names (though short)
Only a single word so no idea of separators
The anchors contain no unique reference which could potentially cause problems in an RSS feed or on a blog.
Are arranged in an unordered list
Whilst the anchors were short, a saving grace is that the link text matches the title

The Named Anchors

Lets dive straight into the code

Your HDL (Good) Cholesterol Level

Uses both named anchor and ID – named anchors were deprecated in xhtml 1.1 and replaced with the id tag
A link is provided which can be copied to link to that section of the page
Both the ID and Named anchor are applied to the link
Both the ID and named anchors use a keyword that appears within the link, but notably it is not the search query
The anchor link contains the search query that was used within the rich snippet

Anchor Links In Search – Requirements

On the Google Webmaster blog they have gone into further detail on the requirements for the additional listing

We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.

WordPress TOC (Table Of Contents Plugins)

First of all I am going to explore common attributes, desired features and required features to achieve rich snippets and anchor sitelinks, and we will look at how many each of the current offerings fulfil.

I am not giving points for supporting the latest WP2.8.4
A plugin gets no additional point for being in active development – if it works it works
My ranking criteria may be totally different to a typical WordPress designer or user – ultimately I want something that works first, has fancy features second.
In compiling the lst of features I had glanced briefly at some of the existing plugins and noticed some failings, but all judging was carried out after requirements were specified. (I am not picking on anyone)
I might well overlook something especially on plugins that don’t seem to meet a number of requirements – this is a work in progress to help me make decisions as much as anything, and possibly some motivation for plugin authors to improve their offering.

Required Features

5 points – Automatic mode – it should be possible to create a TOC just by placing a shortcode, or having a widget with no specific editing
5 points – Ability to place TOC after a few paragraphs of content as an introduction. This might be a factor when creating excerpts, which in theory may or may not have the TOC, but certainly shouldn’t have it mangled.

10 points total

Anchors

2 points – IDs (Not Named Anchors) – To satisfy the validation nazis, we shouldn’t be using deprecated XHTML where possible, and we want something that is universal
2 points – Keyword Rich IDs – Google has specified this as a factor, though it appears it may not be universally necessary as long as the keyword is within the element
2 points – Unique IDs – I could list this under desired, but many blogs have full content appearing on their home pages or categories, and would frequently have something such as a download link or preface – IDs on a single page have to be unique.
2 points – Anchored elements contain keywords/section title – there are ways to do anchors that might create an invisible link or span first, and then a separate element would contain the actual title – this isn’t appropriate as the ID can’t be assigned to the text
2 points – ID is applied to a link that can be copied easily at he place in the text where the content is (no scrolling to TOC)

10 points total

Desired Features

1 point – Widgets
1 point – PHP Code for manual placement
1 point – Shortcodes
1 point – Ability to prevent placement on home page if desired
1 point – Both Ordered and Unordered Lists for TOC
1 point – Support for WYSIWYG editor buttons
1 point – Support for non-WYSIWYG buttons
1 point – good styling of TOC
1 point – appropriate styling of anchors
1 point – can it cope with code within a post that might contain headings

10 points total

GRAND TOTAL 30 POINTS

Reader Competition – Almost End Of Part 1

This article is already quite long, so I am breaking things into 2 parts, with the “review” of the existing plugins in part 2.

However I want to leave you with some example code from one WordPress plugin just to analyse here in the comments and to see who gets closest to my final score though if you find more problems I miss, those would be added to my “final score” (moving goal posts).
Whoever gets the closest will get the same bonus package as I have offered to those people purchasing Stompernet through my link.

WP-ToC

WP-ToC (blank page) but can download on WP.org

Chosen as the first on the list if you search from within WordPress – a ToC is placed just using a shortcode

The Table Of Contents

This is what the “broken” Table of contents looks like

The Table Of Contents (Code)

Note: I manually removed the code for the edit link shown in the screenshot


Benefit Of Sitelink Anchor Links In Search Results
Trans Fats
The Table Of Contents


Contents
The Named Anchors


Nutritional guidelines
Good Cholesterol Level
The Table Of Contents
The Named Anchors


Anchor Links In Search - Requirements
WordPress TOC (Table Of Contents Plugins)

Required Features

Table Of Contents
Anchors


Desired Features


Reader Competition - Almost End Of Part 1

WP-ToC

The Table Of Contents
The Table Of Contents (Code)
The Anchor Links (code)


Competition Rules

The Anchor Links (code)

Reader Competition – Almost End Of Part 1

Competition Rules

No Purchase Required
If you have already purchased Stompernet through my link, I will double the time I spend with you
All Countries Eligible
No need to sign up to an email list to enter, but use a real email address for comments/entries so you can be contacted
Leave a comment with the total score, and just to prove you thought about your answer, list at least 3 of the reasons why you gave that score (no random guesses)
I will delete comments that link to junk websites, don’t include a name in the name field etc Just because you make a pseudo entry doesn’t mean you can get away with spam.
Judges decision is final
First correct/nearest entry wins based upon date/time entered
All entries shoulld be a new comment, not a reply
Minimum of 10 correct entries before I publish part 2 with the results for all plugins
Anyone who charges their clients more than $100/hr or has what I would determine an established business can join in for fun, but will not be eligible for the prize – I won’t help with 3rd party “client” sites
No linking, tweeting, Stumbling etc required to enter – Google doesn’t like that but I do
Provided I have received enough qualifying entries, part 2 should be published within 48 hours

Enjoy… I now have to go and fix someone’s website that Google has maimed in the search results

You don’t need to place an entry to comment – let me know what you think

Tags: anchor links, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, site links, sitlelinks, stompernet, table of contents, toc, wordpress plugins

Google SideWiki SEO

Andy Beard — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:57:20 +0000

Danny Sullivan has a comprehensive look at Google’s new SideWiki feature to Google toolbar and site reviews.

He has also been using it to add some commentary on various sites as you can see from his Google profile.

This Google search query shows pages being indexed

They are not blocked in Google’s robots.txt currently

Google Sidewiki in Google Search Results

Just a bunch of questions off the top of my head to research

Will this prove useful for parasite SEO?
How will shill comments be policed?
There is an API, that seems like it is calling out to allow comments to be imported as content
Who owns the license to comments left on your site in this way?
Can you use comments for content elsewhere?
Does Google join the dots of your Social Graph for other trust factors?
Do links to your own Google profile count such as mine for Andy Beard though note that it is the 11th result, and at least for me only appears on US listings.
Does Google Friend Connect play a factor in your profile authority with Google Sidewiki?
If we click on more Adsense ads do we get a boost? How about more Adwords spend? Surely at least the existence of a credit card attached to an account shows that it is a real person

What do you think, have you tried it? Working on a WordPress plugin?

Tags: google sidewiki, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, sidewiki

Google Come Between Me & My Loved Ones

Andy Beard — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:38:01 +0000

Have Google changed the way they handle Double or Indented Listings, removing them from some SERPs from some datacenters?

I love my double or indented listings, but it was not to be.

We have been together for a long time, but fate has determined that at least for the present, we must separate.

The Google giveth, and The Google taketh away

For my site, on a search term such as “Andy Beard” the second listing doesn’t make a huge amount of sense unless it is a fresh post, as most people would be just doing a navigational query.
Maybe in the future Google would add a most recent post as a replacement.

I am not sure this is new or normal, I don’t spend a huge amount of time studying US SERPs recently, and in Poland I still have an indent.

I highlighted the paid results because I have also recently noticed the linked page appearing higher in my SERPs for Andy Beard. IMReportCard at least attempt to write something useful, though I am not sure their writers have enough specialist knowledge to delve into SEO topics and I have noticed that the financial incentive to post one fo the first 3 reviews often encourages people who haven’t got a clue to write really flimsy reviews.
All the reviews are intended to be factual, without expressing a specific opinion, and are written by their staff. They say they are not going to use affiliate links for the products, and have added some Adsense to cover the cost of paying for reviews, comments and other participation. Interestingly enough, you also earn credits for all your referral’s activities.
I have seen a few negative comments, so it might not be heavily moderated, though it is hard to determine the ownership of the site which I think should be more transparent.

It would be great if I could use a referral link to link through to my review on IMReportCard – they would get a lot more deep links with anchor text that way.

Tags: google double listings, google indented listings, internet marketing, reviews, search engine optimization, serps

PageRank Sculpting Isn’t Dead But Comments Can Kill Your PageRank

Andy Beard — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:32:56 +0000

This post was originally titled “Is PageRank Sculpting Dead & Can Comments Kill Your PageRank”
Following a confirmation post from Google’s Matt Cutts today, it seems PageRank Sculpting as practiced by many SEOs is effectively dead, and comments, even using links with nofollow CAN have a negative effect on the amount of PageRank that can be passed on to your internal pages.

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

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

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

PageRank Sculpting Formerly Known As Dynamic Linking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a direct download link for Revenge of the Mininet

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

Leslie has always had this great disclaimer

DISCLAIMER!

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

Access The Source of SEO Knowledge

Michael Campbell

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

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

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

Leslie Rohde

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

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

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

There are 2 other ways to learn more from Leslie

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

The Death Of Dynamic Linking With Javascript?

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

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

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

Some examples of code that Googlebot can now execute include:

Javascript That Is Still Dynamic?

This will probably work

onclick=”myfunction(‘jkhhjstdysd’)

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

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

But this is moot if nofollow actually still works.

Does Nofollow Still Work For Dynamic Linking or PageRank Sculpting?

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

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

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

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

Google (Maybe) Changes How the PageRank Algorithm Handles Nofollow

My comment on the post

I can only think that Google have been misinterpreted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live Blogging Of Matt Cutts @ SMX

You & A With Matt Cutts

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

Alternative Reactions

PageRank Sculpting is Dead? Good Riddance

PageRank Sculpting – Recent Matt Cutts Video

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

Full Transcript

Matt Cutts on PageRank Sculpting

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

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

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

Getting more links

Having higher quality content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Response From Google After SMX About PageRank Sculpting

None…. yet – regard this as a placeholder

I do have some thoughts though:-

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

Matt Cutts On PageRank Sculpting

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

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

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

There are bound to be more posts appearing on Techmeme today

PageRank Sculpting Isn’t Dead – It Has Evolved

Lets take a look at my WordPress SEO Masterclass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Google PageRank, matt cutts, pagerank, PageRank Sculpting, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, WordPress SEO

Exclusive: Share A Post Beta – Blog Post Syndication

Andy Beard — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:25:51 +0000

I was honestly wondering when someone would come up with a service like Share-A-Post, because it is one of those “no brainer” ideas that I have thought of doing, but never got around to.

When to a huge amount of disbelief I blocked some of my high ranking paid reviews with robots.txt, and hinted that syndication would be a perfect loophole in Google’s penalties, no one fully understood what I meant – many SEO experts thought I was bonkers.

This is what I meant – widespread syndication with editorial control

The Limits of Traditional Article Marketing

Article marketing is all well and good, but is extremely limited

You can only use a fixed number of links in a post
Article directories are quite inflexible over affiliate links even if you have created
HTML formatting is frowned upon because the articles are often intended for email use
You can’t use pictures
Most of the articles end up on very low value sites that have no readers
Whilst they often use categories, tag support is limited

Jonathan Ledger has come up with what at first glance seems to be the perfect service for submission and syndication of quality blog articles.

Article Submission

You sign up and add your blog – If you are smart, you will create a new user on your blog with username and password with low level privileges – don’t enter your admin username and password – I trust Jonathan, but even large websites get hacked, why take the risk?
You make sure your blog is posting full content feeds
You add an entry to your ping list, so that when you update your blog, your article is automatically added to Share-A-Post
You use Technorati tags as normal, though only the first 5 will be used – that avoids tag spam
You can add multiple blogs

RSS Article Syndication

When you are short of content for one of your blogs, you can visit Share A Post, search for an appropriate article, and have it posted either as a draft or published article directly to one of your blogs.

The service uses XML-RPC to connect automatically, just like popular blogging software such as Microsoft Windows Live Writer, but that does require a username and password – hence why I suggested precautions when setting up.

The other advantage is that when you are posting a guest article on your blog, because it is posted as a different user, it can be given different emphasis, maybe a different symbol etc.

Duplicate Content

Lots of people will be worried about duplicate content due to syndication

Syndication is a good thing, and Google does a fairly good job of determining the original author, and the link that is being given back to your post will help – it even has good anchor text – at least I think a link is given back to the permalink – to be sure, you should probably use an RSS footer plugin, and maybe even create a smart looking author byline for each article that includes a link.

If you want some assurance that syndication is a good thing, one of the most authoritative I can think of is Vanessa Fox, who until recently was working for Google on Webmaster Central at SEO and Webmaster conferences. If the “book” we follow are Google’s webmaster guidelines… guess what? She helped write it!

Recently on her personal blog she wrote a great article on how to rank as the original source for content you syndicate

With Jonathan’s system you are not going to be able to ensure that content gets blocked with Robots.txt, and that has a negative aspect as well, because the links wouldn’t count… you do want links don’t you?
You are also not going to be able to ensure a different version of your article is published, unless you somehow specify in a license that your articles can be modified, such as a Creative Commons License that allows derivative and Commercial use or better.

Hopefully you will always get a link, but just like with article marketing, that can never be guaranteed

You will find situations if you have a new blog with not much authority that Google makes mistakes – that will most often be when a high authority blog picks up your article.

In a situation like that… just be happy, you will get great links, and your content will be exposed to 100s, or 1000s of new readers, and if enough blogs pick the article up, you will get more authority quicker from all the links, and hopefully lots of traffic and new subscribers.

Proof-reading

Just like article marketing, you are going to have to use just a little bit more care before you post, as any errors you make might not be fixable if your articles get syndicated.

Hopefully anyone syndicating an article will check back with the original blog to ensure the article is up-to-date, and I suggest they do that anyway, as you want to always ensure you are promoting content from what is a reputable blog that is well established.

Competitors?

It is so obvious… but none really

Well ok, I know Stompernet has some kind of content syndication network
I know Jack Humphrey used to syndicate his clients article content on a network, but not blog posts
There are various services which syndicate spun articles, but not blog posts
There are services that have their own blogs, where you post snippets of articles
Portal feeder has something similar for articles, I am not sure what is in Traffic Kahuna
There are plugins which feed articles from article banks to WordPress blogs

So whilst the idea is simple, you have to have confidence in content syndication and how duplicate content works before you think of doing something like this, which is why someone probably didn’t do it before.

Powertip

If you are using standard tagging plugins, they will probably output tags in alphabetical order. That isn’t a huge problem for the 5 tags that will be used to catalogue your post, but it is a factor for your backlink, because the anchortext used will be from your first tag.

The easy answer? Add a manual tag somewhere within your article

If you look closely you will see that I have linked through earlier in this post to my “syndication” tag on my blog, and I have manually added rel=”tag” to the link.

Hopefully when this article is posted, the backlink to my blog will be “syndication”. That is fairly powerful stuff.

OK Andy, How Much?

Jonathan says the following:-

BETA TESTERS WANTED
===================

This service is now up and running, and I’m looking for beta testers
to create free accounts and try it out. I need folks with blogs
who want to syndicate their content to super-charge their link
building, and I need folks who need top-notch content to post to
their own blogs.

As a beta tester, your account will always be 100% free. Syndicating
other folks content will always be free anyway, but I’m working on
a business model that MAY charge a monthly fee for being able to
have your content syndicated in this way. Or it may stay free
for everyone, I haven’t decided. :)

At any rate, as a beta tester, you’ll never pay a dime for the
service.

So why not go give it a try right now?

I hope Jonathan keeps it free

If he doesn’t, I am sure there will be competitors who will do it for free, so it is much better keeping it free and advertising supported. If needed, get some VC money to cover operations, but that is unlikely to be needed.

This is beta, I haven’t yet tested everything, I am going to see if I can find a guest post on Share A Post to try out.

Another Reason To Applaud Jonathan

I think anyone else who would have launched this, other than maybe myself, would have included some kind of spammy “viral” link back to the blog article syndication directory, in the footer of every article.
I have just seen my first article syndicated on a blog, and there is no link to Share A Post – that is a cool move.

Please don’t syndicate posts without minor editing to at least remove all the related posts – whilst I love receiving 10+ links every time one of my articles is syndicated, I am not going to approve 10 pingbacks – I will just flag them as spam to avoid the annoyance in the future.
Single pingbacks are fine (I don’t have nofollow on pingback links), or even to each editorial link within an article – you give me a link, you get a link back.

Sign Up!

If you sign up to Share A Post, you will find this article in their library – an easy way to share Share A Post with your readers is just syndicating this article.

Special note from Andy: To add some additional incentive to try out Share A Post, if you have written a very high quality paid review recently that would be suitable for my readers, I will gladly syndicate it on my primary domain as well – oh, and I won’t be nofollowing any of the links, as it will be an editorial decision to publish it.

Tags: backlinks, blogging, search engine optimization, SEO Blog, syndication