Here is my list in reverse order of difficulty to fix a SEO disaster.

1. Amateurs

   If you have a website that just needs some loving this is by far the easiest to work with. It is almost a clean slate that just needs a bit of polish.

2. Web dev who thinks they are SEOs or that SEO is Bullshit

   There may be a need for a new platform, or platform improvements and the incumbent web-dev doesn’t agree. Often a lack of promotion. I have friends who offer web-dev as part of their SEO business and my honest advice to them is to focus on what they are best at.

3. Startups full of Ex-Googlers

   Twitter and Facebook come to mind, though an earlier example was Vark.com.. an answers service that just couldn’t be crawled naturally. The ex-Googlers are now back at Google.

4. Lazy SEOs who just do directory submits, maybe buy obvious links etc

   Typical SEO cleanup job – remove the crap, build good stuff to compensate. Site quality (lets group that under Panda) issues are of similar complexity.

5. Aggressive Pro SEOs who didn’t warn customer of inherent risk

I am not saying #5 doesn’t work, but you have to be prepared to move house and rebuild rather than just clean up

The difference between each tier is significant but maybe not logarithmic, and the difficulty is often of a different nature. e.g. #3 the difficulty would be in trying to convince ex-googlers they are wrong.

My friend Dave from the SEO Dojo has a great post today on diagnosing and removing Google penalties.

I’ve never considered myself a SEO Pro… when I have helped people (& often it is other SEOs) it has primarily been to satisfy my inner geek.

Oh and don’t forget to check out the new subscription offering in the uQast Chartered Launch

This is all pretty basic technical SEO

Here is a very simple cleaned up Google search query that will bring up some interesting results

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:twitter.com+inurl:andybeard&filter=0

It doesn’t exclude a subdomain such as www.twitter.com or fr.twitter.com or api.twitter.com

Twitter splits their domain authority between lots of different subdomains which have no business being indexed.

It also doesn’t include http and https – typically those should also be canonicalized (think of Highlander “There can be only one!”)

The &filter=0 tells Google not to ignore some of the URLs it might otherwise due to no content, low PageRank etc. It is especially useful for picking up URLs which are blocked by robots.txt

Like these

The first red arrow is what Google sees when it decides not to follow the funky javascript redirects that Twitter does. It is possible Google sees that a lot – it is like having a door slammed in your face.

The second is the bouncers at the door to the nighclub… you get to see all the cool stuff entering into Twitter’s archives. but it won’t let Google through as they aren’t willing to tip the bouncers enough money, or haven’t got the right friends.

That barrier prevents Google crawling deeper into your content, so whilst if they were very observant they may have seen a piece of content once, it may eventually drop out of the index unless other sites in the Twitter ecosystem maintain links directly to that content that Google can follow.

So for instance sites like Topsy & Tweetmeme if crawled by Google and they link directly to a tweet, it is possible for Google to find content… but that is far from perfect.

What controls Google in this way is Twitter’s robots.txt file https://twitter.com/robots.txt

The line of that file in the Google section that is causing a lot of the issues is this one
Disallow: /*?

Effectively any URL on the whole of Twitter that contains a “?” or query parameter Google is not allowed to look at.

Here are 2 more queries for you

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:andybeard.tweetglide.com/blog&filter=0&start=991

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atwitter.com%2FAndyBeard&filter=0&start=991

Those are 991 searches… Google will only list up to 1000 items for a search, so that kind of query will show the end of the search results – if used on huge sites, then you might have to refine things down to a subset of pages where possible, but in this case my Twitter account only has 5100 tweets and Twitter should easily be able to get all of those indexed. I am restricting the search to a folder /andybeard

I haven’t linked directly to either my twitter account or my archived copy on Tweetglide for some time so here they both get a link with a screenshot of current indexation over 2 years… not so many tweets over that time due to a long hiatus.

http://andybeard.tweetglide.com/blog

http://twitter.com/andybeard

341 vs 321

The winner here seems to be Tweetglide, and it seems fairly close until you examine all the URLs for Twitter that google crawls needlessly as duplicate content on different subdomains, and remove all the junk pages (and some good stuff) that are blocked by robots.txt

Such as this

You also have to understand that in the last 2 years due to my hiatus I have only created 280 tweets as archived by Tweetglide (there may be a few early ones missing), and the additional tweets in that deep search result are the archived Tweets of the people I have conversations with.

If we removed that filter parameter things are drastically different

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:andybeard.tweetglide.com/blog&start=991

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atwitter.com%2FAndyBeard&start=991

341 vs 253

That is when Google filter out lots of the duplicate junk from Twitter, and none from Tweetglide.
That filter removal isn’t perfect.. there are still some duplicates – if Twitter retains half the indexation of Tweetglide I would be amazed.

Is there a crawl limit?

It vastly depends on juice.. my Twitter profile at one time had enough juice that if Google had been allowed to crawl, they probably would have picked up 25-50% of the 5100 tweets, but Twitter doesn’t allow you to paginate that far into it’s archive (even if it wasn’t blocked), and even the API is still limited and can only pick up around 3000 historical tweets.

My good online friend Vlad Zablotskyy has more tweets than me achived on Tweetglide.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:vladzablotskyy.tweetglide.com/blog&filter=0&start=990

He actually has less pages indexed than me possibly because of juice, so lets give him some, and see if we can crack the 500 barrier.

This has been a small introduction to Twitter’s SEO woes to demonstrate hopefully to laymen that all is not well with Twitter, and any claims that they can be indexed normally are false. Any competent SEO could have found all of these issues with the site, and fixing them would reduce the load on Twitter’s servers caused by Google, and maybe allow Google to index more content.
I have avoided additional complications with rel=”nofollow”, and potential cloaking issues with their impelentation of #!hashbang URLs, and funny javascript redirects and haven’t touched on some additional nuances with the way they feed juice to list pages.

Disclosure: When Tweetglide launched I offered some SEO tips (pro bono) over a few days to the owner and one of his engineers, and had 100% “buy in” to follow my recommendations for internal linking structure on the site. I would possibly change the structure of the pagination links at the bottom but otherwise I think the site from an SEO perspective is doing great… damn… no difference between with and without filter=0 actually amazes me.

I can’t remember ever linking to it, but it might have happened – a quick search of my archives doesn’t reveal anything.

However delving into indexation issues webmaster tools can provide some interesting results.

What I had at the time was a custom design based on my site, created automatically, including all my side bar navigation.

Most of my sidebar navigation from that time doesn’t exist any more, but a few pages do including my contact form.

My Tradepub subdomain does not show up as backlinks in Yahoo, so might go unnoticed…. well actually it did.

Killing it off may have an effect on other metrics but without doubt this isn’t adding any value to the search engines and has never generated any revenue.

I am sure something like this works well for maybe Arstechnica, but it doesn’t work well for me.

How To Kill Off Tradepub

There might be an option to delete the pages, but that is actually suboptimal

The solution I have used for now is also suboptimal because it is quite possible that Google will only delist one page, or only the pages I link to – this one http://andybeard.tradepub.com/

What I have done is use a meta redirect in the header with zero delay which is meant to act like a 301 redirect.

That doesn’t necessariliy mean that Google and other search engines will redirect all the pages but we can see how quickly it occurs.
I have also included a noindex on all the pages as well as Sebastian suggests.

Even with a 301 redirect in .htaccess or php it can take months for the URLs to drop out of the index.

I used the beta RevResponse interface to add the redirects.

The optimal version? Just noindex, drive Googlebot to actually crawl the pages, then 301 redirect/meta redirect once they are all out of the search results, possibly with a temporary sitemap file to encourage crawling the 100s of pages (maybe 1000s).

I don’t know the answer as to whether RevResponse & Tradepub could harm your search results, but there are enough forgotten wastelands on the web full of duplicate content and worthless links – just doing my bit to clean up the rubbish.

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)

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

<title>Digg - Topsy Search &amp; Twitter Backups</title>

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

<title>Topsy Search &amp; Twitter Backups @ Digg</title>

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.

<meta name="keywords" content="Digg, pictures, breaking news, entertainment, politics, technology, headline news, celebrity news, offbeat, world business, sports, funny videos">

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.

<div class="columns  group">
                <input type="hidden" id="item_id" value="20100826002508:946ca73a-0f8f-4d8f-8493-b4cbffbc9be9">
    <div class="column full group" id="main-column">
        <div id="permalink-story">

             <div class="story-item item-20100826002508_946ca73a-0f8f-4d8f-8493-b4cbffbc9be9 group" ><div class="media group"><div class="digg-btn has-tooltip item-20100826002508_946ca73a-0f8f-4d8f-8493-b4cbffbc9be9"><a href="http://andybeard.eu/3001/topsy-search-twitter-backups.html" target="_blank"><span class="digg-count"><span>1</span></span><span class="digg-count-label">diggs</span></a><a class="digg-it group""><span>digg<span class="digg-btn-icon"></span></span></a><span class="digg-btn-bottom"></span></div>

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

<link rel="canonical" href="http://digg.com//news/technology/topsy_search_twitter_backups/" />

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.

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.

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)

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.

A couple of days ago Darren over at Problogger highlighted why he didn’t feel good about a specific type of Make Money Blogging training product.

Even though it wasn’t mentioned in Darren’s post, it was quite clear from various references in the post that he was referring to Jack’s latest offering Blog Success.

I am going to turn this on its head a little as I spent a few hours browsing around various B5Media blogs. B5Media is being highlighted as Darren was a founder, and his primary role was training the bloggers, though I am not sure about his current involvement or influence on content strategy.

I understand that they have been going through a lot of mass consolidation of their blogs, and there are tons of redirects from one domain to another, and my taste in content may be different to the general public.

Thus I thought the best way to judge overall content quality would be to use retweets, as recorded by Topsy.com

I am using Topsy as from what I have seen they at least handle internal 301 redirects fairly well, although they don’t seem to do the same for when content gets moved between domains – Tweetmeme doesn’t even handle small changes in permalinks.

Everyjoe.com on Topsy
Blisstree.com on Topsy
Splendidcity.com on Topsy
Bizzia seems to have been recently consolidated into Everyjoe

I also went through a number of their celebrity blogs which haven’t been consolidated, but didn’t see anything that suggested a different emphasis, level of quality or audience engagement.

Only BlissTree seems to have really knocked anything “out of the park” since B5 Media had their site consolidation – wait a moment, that was a post from 2006 on the effect of Coke on the body, and there is another great post on what happens to your body after giving up smoking with 3000+ comments which is also old content.

Even with an army of authors, plus the occasional mention in Darren’s twitter stream the overall public reception of the content is a little bit… muffled.

I am not knocking the strategy or the authors. The authors get paid to write content to specific requirements but ultimately the aim of the current content isn’t to get book deals or speaking engagements, though I do realise some of the B5Media writers are already published authors.

There was no attempt to sell an ebook of “Halloween appetizers” despite Alexa showing it was a recent top search term.

Here is a link to the blog Jack created about Environmental News and dog treats

I have nofollowed the links as I don’t want to have too much of a positive effect on their rankings. To be honest I would have done a bit more work in making things unique, adding a point of view and personality.
I am 50/50 as to whether I would allow the links from my comments though that could be easily fixed by making the sites more personal. When Jack comments with links to the sites, he does do so as himself.

The sites are nothing special, mainly built around niched 3rd party articles, press releases etc sourced through Jack’s custom tools, and using Zemanta in some cases to provide links to 3rd party resources including sites such as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

I personally don’t think it is a worse user experience for a search visitor landing on one of Jack’s niche sites compared to landing on a B5 Media blog, though there would probably be less inclination to subscribe.

Can the content Jack uses rank? Probably depending on search queries, linking etc.

With some long tail queries for snippets appearing on his home page he already outranks the original article author, though that isn’t necessarily the goal.

It is too early days to see the full effects of Jack’s linkbuilding efforts, but both sites have 5-10% of content in primary index.

An alternative goal might be to use lots of this kind of site to help rank other higher quality money sites. To be honest when B5Media had 300+ blogs I always assumed they would eventually move to a more solid revenue model such as eCommerce.

B5Media blogs seem to have 5-10% of their indexed content within Google’s primary index, which can easily be achieved with 100% duplicate content.

Blog Success (on the surface) certainly isn’t the authority blogging model Darren is advocating for Problogger readers, but Jack has taught that model in the past with a fair number of his students achieving success, and also teaches that model as a consultant. I would think some of that also carries across into Blog Success.

(highly targetted display advertising)

Update 14/12/2009

Techcrunch had an interesting piece about quality content on Sunday highlighting a post on Wired that descibes the content creation process on sites run by Demand Media.

I am not suggesting filling up the web with junk content – I have always maintained there are ways to aggregate niched content in ways that add value and create a useful end user experience, even if it might not retain long-term subscribers.

Original Title: Speed Linking Slow Linking

First posted Jan 17, 2007 @ 6:55

I don’t like the term speed linking. I like it even less on some blogs that use the “more” tag on a speed linking post, so you don’t even get to click straight through from your feed reader.

I know it helps with traffic numbers, especially if you have a large subscription, but I find it just annoying. Higher traffic that isn’t going to click an advert lowers your CTR.

Another factor to think about is how long people are on your pages. There has been lots of speculation about how long a visitor stays on your site affecting search results. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, maybe it just doesn’t… yet.

Linking

I write a fair amount about linking… hmm so does Jack Humphreys. Actually Jack writes a lot more than me about linking, and has done for years. In fact, come to mention it, if someone was to ask me to name one person as an expert on linking, Jack would be a good choice.

Jack has just written a great article “Give Links to Gain Authority Status

Jack might even agree with this next part.

Speed Linking = Bad Blogging?

• Unique Relevant Content – Quite frequently, a speed link post doesn’t have much unique content on the page, other than a few links. If you want a page to be unique, and have some value, it needs to have content. One piece of content linking through to another adds value and relevance to both.
• The Fire Exit – Linking through to others is great, but a speed link page is like a Fire Exit. I could understand it if it was an affiliate link… call it a minimalist approach, you don’t write anything to persuade the reader to click through, you just present them with a link and a choice, which pill? We are in a world of tabbed browsers now, but do some justice to the links, even if it is only including a few excerpts and links to related posts.
• Create a reference – If you present a document with lots of useful tips that can’t be totally digested in 30 seconds, there is a higher chance for the post to be bookmarked and saved for reference. That isn’t an excuse for not breaking up your writing with paragraphs, bullets etc.
• Add value – if you write something useful related to someone else’s work, there is a high chance they will link back to you either now or in the future. Are you just a fanboy or do you have a brain and a real opinion?
• Advertising – I mentioned near the start of this article about CTR

  Jack wrote:-

  My advertising rates continue to go up because advertising today is based almost completely on page views. I get new visitor page views, but remember the 37% return visitors? My advertising is affected by that greatly.

  Maybe he needed to make this a little clearer. Repeat traffic and repeat views for the same advertising message is more valuable, because consumers need to see an advert multiple times before it even registers as something interesting, or something they might be looking to buy.

Here is an example of a speed linking type post on Jacks site.

Now first off, Jack publishes full feeds – I am not forced to visit his site to use the links. Thus the links are there to be useful, and not to create supplemental traffic that won’t help CTR.
He does include some comments about why they might be useful to me. I would actually prefer him to write a little more, or to interweave the speed links with references to his own writing on similar subjects.

Back Scratching

Speed Linking can be good for back scratching – links are better if they are surrounded with lots of related keywords, not just for the person you link to, but quite possibly also for yourself.

(highly targetted display advertising)

However yesterday I read a post ranking cloud computing vendors based on mind share using a points system based on Google ranking for the term [cloud computing]

The winner was Rackspace, but we have some idea how they achieved that

But I was more interested in the result for Dell

First off they are doing some funny redirects so the displyed URL in the snippet
www.dell.com/cloudcomputing
Redirects to their cloud computing page on a subdomain which I assume is some kind of CDN

http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Notice that there is only a URL displayed in the snippet and not an excerpt from the page or meta description. Google is just displaying the page as a reference, but for some reason couldn’t crawl the page.

Now before I show you what they have done wrong I did try to contact Dell about this yesterday. I sent a tweet to the guy who maintains at least one of their social media profiles, and since this tweet he has been tweeting on his account so I assume he has had a chance to read the tweet I sent.

I didn’t receive a response, and as this is a significant problem I am blogging about it, mainly because Google seemed to be doing something contrary to what I previously understood (they weren’t if you read more) and have seen written by authoritative sources such as Vanessa Fox.

Here is the robots.txt of that Dell subdomain

The page concerned us under /us/en/enterprise/ so should be controlled by this directive.
Allow: /us/en/enterprise/

As Vanessa states

If conflicts exist in the file, the robot obeys the longest (and therefore generally more specific) line.

So somthing is going wrong in between the URL displayed in the search results, and the final landing page.

Server Header Analysis

Search result
>> [302] http://www.dell.com/cloudcomputing
>> [302] http://content.dell.com/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz
>> [301] /us/en/enterprise/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Problem – Robots.txt Disallow Match

The inbetween URL redirect is blocked by robots.txt

http://content.dell.com/cloud-computing.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

It is actually matched by
Allow: http://content.dell.com/
Disallow: /

Google has decided to take the most restrictive version, to disallow the URL.

I haven’t checked how many links are pointing to that URL both from internal and external sources, but I would guess it is a fair amount and I am assuming at this time that is a page they would want to rank as in their line of business it is probably quite a competitive term.

At a guess without that one URL blocked by robots.txt, they would have been much higher on the comparison charts and ranking higher for cloud computing – most likely that is a 1st page result thrown away by robots.txt

I haven’t checked how many other key landing pages are blocked in a similar manner – I bet it is quite a few

This is just chalking up one more reason why robots.txt should be avoided as it is so easy to mess things up.

p.s. My niece is 18 in 2 months & I am sure she would love a Dell

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