This post covers the more technical changes to Technorati – I have also now posted about the changes to Technorati from a users perspective

1. Since I started advising Blogcatalog a little in private, writing about Technorati, Mybloglog or any other blog directory or search engine in some ways would be like writing about the competition. Celebrating the great things a competitor does would probably be acceptable, whereas writing something negative would be “dissing the competition”
2. This blog has always had in-depth coverage of blog search, blog social networks and blog related SEO, especially in regards to things like the benefits of semantic markup and tagging. Not writing something would leave a huge whole in my content and a disservice to my audience.

My choice is to write something, but understand that some might look on what I write as being a little biased. In my own mind I am a Technorati fan, so hopefully that will temper my reactions to some features.

I need to qualify the title of this post – I have spent countless days over the last 2-3 years studying changes the user interface, plus the internal and external SEO factors of all the large blogging platforms, social networks and search engines. Whilst my email exchanges with Blogcatalog are extremely infrequent, I am constantly monitoring for changes.

Technorati Relaunched Site

I first read about the upcoming Technorati changes on Venture Beat in an interview with Richard Jalichandra 10 days ago, and Richard also made the announcement on his blog.
There is an announcement on the Technorati blog as well – by the date of the post (8th Oct) they might have been almost ready to go live a week ago, but pulled the plug due to a hitch.

Techcrunch have coverage today and Technorati have also received an additional round of funding (well technically an extension of a previous round).

New Technorati Home Page

Technorati Rankings Changed

Technorati have a new ratings system which is based on factors I haven’t worked out yet – I am sure there is a lot of Twitter data in there as people don’t link very often these days in many niches, especially the SEO community (hint)
They are probably also pulling in 3rd party traffic data.

Techcrunch mention:-

Now they are focusing much more on recent data within the last month and giving blogs an authority rank between 1 – 1,000. Scoring factors include posting frequency, context, linking behavior and “other inputs.”

It will be interesting how ranking tables such as Adage Power 150 or the Top IM Blogs include this data going forward.

Technorati Tag Pages

This is now approaching the nuts and bolts of Technorati

Lets first of all take a look at the tag page for SEO

The first immediate impression is that this is only a single page of results, there is no pagination and there is a comment box at the bottom of the page provided by JS Kit. That has just bumped the JS Kit installed based by several million pages. Technorati last had around 30 million indexed pages, though I am sure that will soon change.

If you look at your Google toolbar, Search Status or other SEO plugin, you might notice a TBPR (Toolbar Page Rank) for this page of 2. You would think with all the millions of times Technorati have no doubt been linked to for this term by people using Technorati as a default tag space (rel=”tag”) that it would be more than that – Google does seem to be discounting those links and has been for some time.

Almost all of the results are around 150 in the new Technorati Authority scale, and there are no recent SEO posts listed such as Powazek slamming SEO in general, and Danny Sullivan responding… twice.
For those wondering, I nofollowed Powazek because I don’t trust the source. Ranking for stuff due to the benefits of WordPress theme publishing really doesn’t count as SEO.

There is a short article at the top of the page from Blog Critics that has some great links for Michael Grey and SEOmoz.

The least obvious factor is that the tag pages no longer seem to be made up of editorially assigned tags from blog publishers, but is based upon a content search and possible relevance based upon keyword density. I suspect technorati are now using something like Sphinx to power their tag pages. They won’t be the first, and I am not saying this is the wrong approach, but it is a significant change that Technorati, effectively the king of rel=”tag” doesn’t really use it much any more.

As evidence there was a listing to this page virtualdownload.net/?p=59834 – it was not specifically tagged SEO, just used the term a lot promoting what seems to be a warez download.

No SEO tag used (click for more)

Technorati Search

If you just type in a search for a particular topic in Technorati now, it defaults to a search of Blogs on the topic, not recent content.

Rankings Based Upon Old technorati Authority?

I have a funny feeling these rankings are based upon the old Technorati scales in some way as can be seen in the numbers on the left hand side – it is not exactly the same, but there is a lot of similarity in the results.

The default blog post search again seems to to be keyword density based, so if you want to rank for SEO on Technorati, just mention SEO a lot.

If you then refine your search based upon high authority, the results actually seem pretty good, lots of web designers saying SEO is a load of crock, plus Danny defending SEO.

Then you delve into the results and discover:-

• Just a snippet from the lead developer of Tumblr – a crap result
• A paid post on Venture Beat that doesn’t use nofollows – a smart SEO company would actually want those links nofollowed, so I don’t feel like I am snitching.
• Regurgitated Powazek
• More regurgitated Powazek on Boing Boing

I don’t trust those results either, all nofollowed

What is wrong with SEO is search engine reliance on website authority to give meanings to results – these results are in my opinion crap, but search engines have to somehow unravel how bad quality all those referring sites are, as they are not topical authorities and just joining in on a web designer circle jerk. It will take a little time for Google to work that out, and I doubt the “fresh” result for Derek’s post will remain long on the front page of Google.

It should be noted that a large chunk of Derek Powazek’s “good code” has probably just been scrapped by Technorati.

I think the new Technorati shows some promise in its scaled down capacity – it is pretty and fairly functional though a number of the new components need a little work. I hope a chunk of Technorati’s new funding will be invested in hiring an SEO expert.

Disclaimer: I am not an SEO consultant – you can’t hire me on an hourly rate and those I advise almost always benefited from free advise long before there was any kind material compensation. I just study things intensely and rip them apart. I certainly couldn’t create many of the great web applications I write about without a lot of help from great web developers.

If you use similar tags to a high profile blogger, it can help with faster indexing and rankings, at least from what I have observed.

In many ways the effect is similar to linkfarms, using the tagging as a central hub. Many commentators complain when they see Technorati tag pages appearing in the Google SERPs, because Technorati doesn’t have a huge amount of editorial control over the content of those pages, they are more like search results.

In that situation however for any specific query, you are unlikely to have more than one or possibly 2 results appear.

Subdomains

In theory Google are meant to have changed the way subdomains appear in the SERPs, limiting how many subdomains can occur from a single TLD.

Matt Cutts addressed this in more detail

As mentioned on Search Engine Round Table, there would likely be exceptions to the rule for things like the large blog hosts, and Matt pointed out IBM as a likely search that should give more results.

So it would be perfectly natural for WordPress.com to be one of the exceptions, because multiple unique blogs might talk about the same topic, and give a good user experience, which is what Google strive for.

Tags As Subdomains

I notice on a query I used to receive occasional traffic from but for some stupid reason people are competing for it now – it rarely brought more than one query a day when I was ranking first, though it was targeted.

WordPress training in Google (note:- US geolocation non personalized)

The initial results are great.

One of the results is the tag page on WordPress for training – that is covered in my previous article which was questioning whether this is allowed – it is a tactic I would be keen to use if it was officially sanctioned, as would many blog networks.
Actually at least one blog network does do it.

Currently I use internal tagging and I know many of those get discounted as being poor quality, whilst others that are used more frequently are actually better results than any individual permalink page.

However further down the long-tail things get extremely messy.

When you study the pages, you discover that these subdomains were in some way intended for localized tags, so if your blog is in Polish, it would appear on a Polish tag page. Unfortunately the content on the pages is identical.

The English tag page for Training Resource could be looked on as a useful page, though it is still user generated content and easily abused, and a small webmaster doing the same might be looked on as a linkfarm.

The problem is that the Brazillian Portuguese subdomain contains identical content.

If that happens across for example 200+ different languages, then it represents a problem, especially seeing as WordPress.com is a commercial interest.

Whilst I think the original tag pages have merit, I am going to take a harder line with these subdomains.

If they had gone to the trouble of using a translation plugin to make the pages useful for discovery, they would have been useful, even though the translation wouldn’t be perfect. The title and headline being translated would make a significant difference on English search results, even if the URL remained the same.

But Automattic didn’t translate the pages, and they didn’t restrict these subdomains to only blogs written on that specific language.

As they might both read this, Matt & Matt, this in my personal opinion is search engine spam.

These are worse than your typical scraper site.

It has been described as lipstick on a pig and others have just offered tips on site indexing.

What Happened To My /* Search Query?

Before this change, one of the tools still available to SEO practitioners to give an indication of the depth of site indexing was to add /* to the end on a site: search query.

Thus you would use

site:andybeard.eu/ – this would return the total pages supposedly indexed
site:andybeard.eu/* – this would return the number of pages in the primary index

By subtracting one from the other, you get some indication of the number of pages that might be in the supplemental results.

The numbers changed on a daily basis, and by datacenter, and were a little unpredictable, but it at least gave some indication.

Some sites I routinely checked for comparison were seo book, Michael Gray, Seomoz, Sphinn, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Bumpzee, Blogcatalog, Mybloglog and a number of others.

Typically Seo Book and Michael Gray had very deep index penetration, with above 90% of their pages in the primary index as indicated by /*

Many of the higher output SEO blogs faired far worse, with sometimes less than 50% primary index penetration, but far more total pages in the primary index.

Site structure makes a huge difference – if you have lots of duplicate content pages such as extensive use of tagging, you might end up with a fair number of those pages in the Supplemental Index because they do not receive a huge amount of links from external sources, and many receive a very small percentage of internal linking.
They would however still rank well for long tail search queries because of the different title tag, and combinations of content presented.

A wider net sometimes has bigger holes…

/* Now Returns Significantly Fewer Results

SEO Book now returns less than 50% of pages with /*
Michael manages 50%
SEOmoz has less than 20%
Search Engine Land seems to be fairing well with close to 75%, actually more than previously (I seem to remember less than 50%)
Search Engine Journal also manages close to 75%, again more than previously (again it was less than 50%)

I have dropped down to around 30% what was previously 85%, though my site structure isn’t quite the same as I had it before WordPress 2.3.1 (I still need to get some plugins modified)
Site structure might have had as much as a 10 or 20% difference, but not more.

I still see very little difference in Search traffic or positioning

I Don’t Know What It Means…

• It could be some datacenter issues that mean that only a small percentage of sites have so far been updated
• I am currently discounting this being some kind of penalty
• Rather than reducing the size of the supplemental index, Google might now be storing the majority of pages in Supplemental, and effectively have a “super primary” index instead.
• The tool could just be broken or set to give random results

I can understand the removal of supplemental results from the primary SERPs, but /* was actually quite useful. If supplemental results have disappeared, you would expect it to return the same number of pages as the search query without /*

Why do we have a useful tool fubarred?

Sandcastles Theme

I am still playing around with my Sandcastles Theme on a test site (based upon Sandbox) – it will be released fairly soon, but not until I have this site moved over onto new servers.

I thought I would release this now so that those who don’t want to work with a modified Sandbox theme are free to use it, and most people can probably gain some benefit from it anyway, as it will reduce external links on duplicate content pages without having to block them.

Pagerank is based upon pages and relevant links – if you can make all those duplicate content pages unique, and prevent them from leaking too much Google Juice, they are actually useful content for your readers, and you can benefit from having them indexed.

Here are the full release notes for NoFollow Those Dupes, and a direct download link for those chomping at the bit.

I will leave the community of anyone who uses the mass broadcast feature

A few people have played around with it, fair enough, but this is going to be abused to hell.

What I should really do is mass mail links to promote Rich Schefren’s Ebok, but I would look on that as spam, even if technically you might have subscribed to my “mailing list” when you clicked the button to join my community… not!

The mass mail feature is sending emails by default, and thus is subject to CAN-SPAM – if you send commercial messages you really should include your physical address or a P.O. box.

As Robyn says

Of course, some members may get a little message happy, but again, any spam moderation on this feature is up to you. Spam is in the eye of the beholder, or something like that, so if you are receiving spam, just leave the person’s community by clicking Leave Community on their community’s page.

The spammers will end up with a community of spammers not reading the messages. With spam being delivered by email, it is not in the eye of the beholder, but in the eye of the law.

I repeat
I will leave the community of anyone who uses the mass broadcast feature

Why isn’t there an option to turn off broadcast messages? (only)

Tagging of Content

Great… MyBlogLog now pick up all the tags from my content and display it along with a snippet.

So where would a click on “blogging tips” lead me?

There is some kind of weird cross-over happening where clicking on a tag in the content leads to a tag that represent bloggers, just like the tags in the section above.
If you haven’t tagged yourself for every topic your blog represents, you would effectively be driving traffic away from your blog.

I liked the idea (other than schmoe and the spam) that community members to tell other visitors what my blog was about, and it was interesting watching how people were using tagging to classify my site.

Tags from my content should lead to aggregated content from my blog, or possibly other blogs in my community – or even MyBlogLog as a whole.

Currently using tagging extensively in MyBlogLog drives traffic away with no reciprocal return of traffic, not even a trickle, unless you manually tag yourself.

There could at least have been some buttons added next to the tags in the content snippets to suggest adding them for the blog as well.

More on the MyBlogLog new features such as tagging and the messaging.

MyBlogLog have now introduced a suggestion board where people can suggest features. I am sorry but I have tried using the same suggestion board for Yahoo Pipes, and found it next to useless as there is no way to reach a consensus suggested by Wendy before the content just disappears. It is also almost impossible to monitor conversations, or discover if something is already suggested.
I made one suggestion for Yahoo Pipes and it was almost impossible to find my own suggestion a week later. That was among a geeky knowledgeable user base.

Now some people think I am full of crap talking about how insanely well a massive amount of tagging works, but please take a look at the number of indexed pages on Bumpzee, a network with 3000 members, and over 300,000 pages in the main Google index, and almost no supplemental results.

I love the fact that MyBlogLog is providing a listing of my content to improve the value of my MyBlogLog community page, but I would also like them to be storing an index of my content, and linking through to it with the tags, so that just like on my blog, the links help people find information (either on my blog or someone elses), and not just a link to a blogger profile, and their home page.

Update: Posts On the Issue

Meg slammed MBL and is also looking to leave the communities of spammers. It must be a real nightmare for people who don’t use an email client that stacks emails.

Rob thinks it sucks

When active supports who normally give constructive feedback are so vocal about something, you know something isn’t quite right.
The MBL team are going to be busy sorting this out Monday onwards

More MyBlogLog discussion on Avinash and he is compiling a list of all posts discussing the situation for the next few days so worth returning to.

Specific Disclosure: I have been providing a lot of free ideas and feedback both publicly and in private to the 3 main (imho) competitors in this niche, MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and Blogcatalog, and all 3 would probably look on me as one of their largest supporters, in spirit if not in traffic (I can’t compete with Techcrunch).
With Blogcatalog I have to note that the arrangements are now slightly more formal in a consultancy capacity from which I may receive financial compensation

Update: 28th August 2010 – this article doesn’t take into account changes to the way Google handles nofollow to combat PageRank sculpting.

Also WordPress has moved on a lot in 3 years since it was written – that does invalidate many of the concepts and linking structures presented, but the methods to achieve them might differ significantly.

Having previously written that I don’t typically undertake consulting work, I do look on any paid blog posts as a form of consultancy. In this particular case Tim from eMonetized decided to order a review of his blog, and we negotiated a little to ensure what you read is totally impartial and any links I choose to give are in an editorial context.
The negotiation itself was an interesting process, and I will be writing about that separately.

It should be noted that just because I mention improvements here, that doesn’t mean that Tim the site owner isn’t aware of something, and as also is almost always the case, I haven’t applied many SEO tweaks to this site yet.

That being said, some of the linking structures I talk about in the more geeky sections of this article I have never seen anyone talk about, and it is my belief that the resulting linking structure is highly unique, extremely powerful, whilst remaining flexible.

The Niche

Tim’s blog is one of a host of blogs looking to capitalize on terms such as make money, make money online and making money online, though it is clear that he is quite SEO aware, and from our communication this was made abundantly clear to me.
As an example he has a clear “money page” for promoting his primary affiliate programs using a URL “Making Money Online“.

One of the hardest problems with the “make money” niche is that most of the related search terms that are provided if you use the Google Keyword Suggest tool are very much “long tail” terms, many of which receive only mediocre traffic. Many of the more specific terms receive minimal search volume unless it is related to a specific product, or product launch.

The direction Tim seems to be taking is to target content in the topical community such as Adsense, Adwords and Affiliate Marketing, rather than writing a series of posts based on what Google regard as related topics, such as “How To Make Money [Insert Blank]“, “Making Money [Insert Blank]”

This suggests to me that we might look to optimize the site such that the categories perform well as landing pages, though I believe it is possible to significantly improve site structure to give the site an unfair advantage on a few competitive terms.

SEO Strategy

It is clear that Tim is thinking about his SEO Strategy, and is off to a good start. Here are some of the things he is currently doing that I can see just browsing around the site.

• URLs / Slugs – Tim is using optimized page slugs for every post – there are some plugins that can achieve this automatically, so that just keywords are used without grammatical filler, though I think he is probably doing this manually. URLs are not a major ranking factor, in fact some SEOs would say it is very minor. URLs are a clickthrough factor, and there are limitations for URL length.
• Robots.txt – A lot of things are being blocked off in his Robots.txt file, including date based archives, paged content, images and author pages. He is also blocking off tags – I am not going to dispute that decision, it is something to test and track. There is overlap between categories and tags – it is possible to make that work ok by including additional content and different layouts, and with some SEO linking structures you would block both, others you would enhance both. One good thing he is doing is blocking all his /go/ affiliate links.
  Important:- Robots.txt is a bandaid as it can create hanging or dangling pages.
• Sitemap – he has a clear sitemap, though I worry a little about multi-page sitemaps. If they go multi-page, it is better to make them more of a topical tree, than links between pages… breadcrumb navigation or not. Then it is effectively creating a category listing.
• htaccess – either htaccess or a plugin is being used to ensure all URLs are www
• Related posts – related posts (probably using Wasabi) are being used to increase the internal linking to related content, good for both search engines and human page views.
• Nofollow – Nofollow is being applied to a few links that shouldn’t pass pagerank, such as to forms for email subscription and Technorati favorites
• Excerpts – pages that could potentially be looked on by the search engine spiders as duplicate content are being displayed using the_excerpt() rather than the_content()
• Titles – these seem to be OK, maybe already using SEO Title Tag plugin or similar

Quick Improvements

• WordPress 2.2 – This really is a necessary upgrade for security reasons.
• htaccess trailing slashes – Canonicalization isn’t only to do with “www” or “no www” choices. If you have chosen to use www, then just include the second half of the code from my post about WordPress htaccess to cover the trailing slashes.
• Home / Page Links – some you want to receive lots of juice, others probably shouldn’t receive any at all, and some you might only want a followed link on your home page. The best option is probably to create these links manually, and have one set that is used on your home page, and another for everywhere else.



• Feeds – I find having related posts in feeds very important from an SEO perspective when people syndicate your content with or without permission – they are also useful for readers, though I wish more readers used them.If tag pages are being indexed, it is potentially good to have tags in your feed as well.

  Tim offers a full content feed that is worth subscribing to, though only half of the subscribers will currently be registered by Feedburner. Those that use the auto-discovery link are not currently being redirected to Feedburner. Fix this with the Feedburner Redirect Plugin, now called Feedsmith or think about one of Feedburner’s pro solutions.

• Sociable Plugin – it creates search engine followable links to submission forms on the various bookmarking sites – switch to using a search engine friendly version of sociable.
• Meta Description and Keywords – there are a host of plugins available to do this, though I haven’t actually found one that I regard as ideal. Generally a little trial and error is required, as there can be a few incompatibilities depending on how other plugins interact with your content.
• 404 Error Page – currently this results in the homepage – it might be better to use one of the many 404 plugins available to give some related content to what resulted in an error.

More Time Consuming or Technical

• Stop Using Widgets – until it becomes easy to control which widgets appear on which page, with and without nofollow, if you want to highly optimize your site, it is much easier without using WordPress Widgets. There is an alternative shipped with the K2 theme, sidebar modules (SBM), but I have had difficulty making it work with WordPress 2.2 and other themes
• Multiple Templates & SidebarsYou can do a lot using WordPress logic, but it starts to become very complicated if you use the same template file and sidebar everywhere.
  Single pages are probably the most likely to hit high server loads, so I always use a WordPress theme which has a single.php – in my current one the sidebar is included as part of the single.php file, but it can also be done using a php include for something like sidebar2.php 
• Sitewide Links – only give them when there is a specific reason, even for internal navigation elements. As an example we will look at category listings, but the same applies for all sidebar content.

Category listings

For a home page listing, and category pages, it is normal to list all categories

<br /><?php if ( is_home() || is_category() ) { ?><br /><li id="categories"><br /> <h3>Categories</h3><br /> <ul><br /><?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&hierarchical=1') ?><br /> </ul><br /> </li><br /><?php } ?><br />

For single pages, if you are aiming for a classic tree structure, it is better to list specific categories.

<br /><ul><br /> <li><?php the_category('</li><li>') ?></li><br /></ul><br />

You probably already have links to specific category pages at the bottom of each post, thus maybe sidebar category links should be nofollowed using the add link attribute plugin.

<br /><ul><br /><li><?php add_link_attr('the_category', '</li><li>',
'rel="nofollow"'); ?></li><br /></ul><br />

You could also aim for a “halfway house” and include only your most targeted primary categories on every page in the sidebar, other than on your homepage which would include all categories.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you would have followed links in the sidebar on your front page at all, other than to possibly your sitemap.

• Nofollow From Home – if Google and other search engines are being guided to your sitemap, and you value all your content equally, it makes perfect sense to have nofollow on any links within content that appear on your home page with the nofollow from home plugin This should be avoided if you don’t offer full content feeds because Technorati would probably have great difficulty with many of the links as they typically use the RSS feed, or your homepage to determine linkage.
  Update: I have now developed an advanced version of this plugin which adds nofollow to the links on all pages other than your permalink pages
• Headings – Correct use of headings for SEO and general semantic improvements – as an example for Tim’s current theme, there is no H1 heading, and the author information is given a heading tag. In addition the heading in WordPress sidebars have always been given on most themes the same level of semantic purpose as sub-headings within content, which isn’t ideal for SEO purposes.

Advanced SEO & Presentation

To really optimize WordPress effectively, you need to start looking at optimizing the layout of the homepage, category pages, and tag pages, not just for SEO, but for presentation. Most wordpress blogs by default use index.php for homepage and category pages, and the same is true for tag pages with UTW if you don’t define a tag.php file.

You can either create custom templates, or add lots of complicated WordPress logic.

WordPress handles templates in the following priority

1. category-6.php
2. category.php
3. archive.php
4. index.php

In many SEO linking structures, the categories are intended to be landing pages for their topic, and to concentrate more google juice than individual pages.
There are also linking structures that might be equally viable in many circumstances where categories pass Google juice in a single direction, either from the home page to single pages which subsequently pass juice only to the home page, or the home page passes juice to single pages through a sitemap, and the juice flows back up to the home page through the categories.

If category pages were intended to pass Google juice in 2 directions as would be normal for a simple tree structure, then you would need something like the following:-

Ultimately however if you have ever spent any time playing around with a pagerank calculator, linking structures that feature a spiral, channelling juice around in a circle using one-way links tend to perform better than sites using 2 way links.

There are a number of plugins that try to create “pretty” excerpts for duplicate content pages that contain excerpts, or you can manually create them with HTML and even thumbnail pictures.
One of the best new options seems to be the Excerpts Editor though I haven’t tested it yet.

This should be mixed with custom query string (Note: New Version that includes support for UTW) which would allow you to have a different number of posts on your front page compared to various archive pages. Ideally when siloing you would want to list all pages under a particular category or tag page. The easier alternative is the siloing plugin.

Beyond Geeky SEO

Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell and the bonus Dynamic Linking Ebook by Leslie Rohde have been for many years one of the most advanced tutorials on geeky linking structures to maximise pagerank.

To get any real benefit from this geeky section you really have to read those ebooks, they are available free for those who sign up to Michaels mailing list, and are well worth investing an evening reading, and maybe reading a couple of times more to fully understand how pagerank and linking structures can really help you.

One of my favourite structures was the spider circle

Note: In the following content I frequently link through to Web Workshop and their Pagerank Calculator. The links are nofollowed because I am linking through to form data

Here is the Spider Circle mapped out in the calculator.

The big problem with this linking structure, if you look at blogging in particular, is as soon as you add any external links to the content pages, the benefits turn into a huge hazzard, because this structure is also one of the best for sacrificial sites. Totally forget anything like this if you have removed nofollow from your comments.
Even disproportionate linking to your content from other sites isn’t going to rescue it. In that example there is 4x as many incoming links as those outgoing. The numbers are all relative, and don’t represent toolbar pagerank, but the benefit of good linking structure is lost.

One of the best linking structures for a website that was discussed was called “Stacked Pyramids with Tunnels Home”

The layout was something like this:-

There are a lot more unique pages involved, so you can’t directly compare this with the previous diagram. Here is how this structure looks like in a calculation.
What happens when we add some incoming and outgoing links? Well it doesn’t go quite as pear-shaped as the spider but still stuggles with a more realistic ratio of incoming to outgoing links.

I have played around with most of the other examples within Revenge of the Mininet over the last few months trying to create a “defensible linking structure”, something that performs well under severe abuse, with multiple external links on every page of unique content, as might happen with a blogger generous with link love, or using Dofollow.

In the end I opted for massive ball linking using tagging, with the structure totally organic, but helping Google juice flow away from pages which were gaining a lot of links, and likewise probably a lot of comments as well, so that the juice could enrich other content.
I knew this wasn’t optimal

I also wanted to come up with a better benefit from using internal tagging than my previously mentioned 4.9 > 3.6 ? (Titles > Duplicate Content)

Introducing “Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall”

I have no idea how this will work based upon all the other 100+ or 200+ ranking factors for web pages, but as far as pagerank is concerned it seems to be an extremely defensible structure, in fact you can abuse the hell out of it, and it performs well.

Sandcastle Pagerank Calculation

I should note that in that calculation there are still only 9 pages of 100% unique original article content.
The secret lies in having created additional unique pages that in themselves are useful for humans and even linkworthy, but those pages only link through to the homepage and gather up link juice that might have passed excessively through external links on a popular post.

Here is what it looks link if it is heavily abused like the previous example with lots of external links, and only a few incoming links.

Here is what is happening….

I first of all started off with category siloing, one way links passing juice from the homepage through the categories, and down to the content.
In addition I added a sitemap link from the homepage, that has one way links also through to the content. In addition, if it is being abused on a blog, it performs better with links from the sitemap to the homepage and categories from the sitemap, though the differences are small.

Juice flows from the permalink pages through one way links to one of 5 tag pages for each post, assigned at random in the model, and then again one way link to the homepage.

If you throw in a couple of related posts, even with the external links it performs very well, especially for the home page.

Here is a visualisation of Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall

As I have stated before, I visualise linking structures in 3D, and this one could be much easier visualised on a 3D checkers board (I used to have one as a kid), but effectively it is built of 3 different layers.

I haven’t quite worked out the best way to handle single pages, maybe it would be necessary to add yet another tree link structure for those.

I haven’t got any sites using this new structure yet, but it is something I will be aiming for on a number of sites soon, including this one.

Creating This Linking Structure With WordPress

It is possible (though a little complicated) with what I have listed above, but I will try to have a modified theme available soon, aptly named the “Sandcastle” theme, based upon Sandbox (so it can be easily skinned)

Linkworthy Content

Whilst a good linking structure might give you 5x to 10x the benefit of any incoming links to rank a few specific pages, you still need to have content people will link to.

For me one of the highlights of Tim’s blog are already the case studies.

Whilst I haven’t invested money in Stumbleupon advertising, the conversion rate to subscribers he achieved with $100 worth of visits seems about the same as with free traffic. From what I have seen so far, Top Stumblers are mainly interested in cool pictures and humor as one of Tim’s commenters has already pointed out, and are very much anti-commercial, especially anything to do with StumbleUpon optimization. It is very easy to get post content buried, in fact easier than Digg in many ways.
A post on optimizing for another social news site such as Digg however might not get buried by the sacred protectors of the SU realm, and is more likely to continue bringing traffic (that is what I have experienced anyway). I have also found support a little lacking.

Tim has also been looking at Adsense Arbitrage – I think the safe bet is to convert those low PPC landing pages into affiliate or other forms of CPA income, if the cost of clicks is still quite low.

Tim is a creative thinker, after all he was the one who started using Adsense site targeting on John Chows blog, which gave John the idea of using it on Problogger.net

Whilst Tim’s blog is only a couple of months old, I expect great things and lots of in-depth experimentation in traffic and monetization, so don’t forget to sign up to his RSS feed.

Update – Nofollow Those Dupes Plugin

I have now released a plugin that can be used to help in creating the “Sandcastles With Perimeter Wall linking structure called Nofollow Those Dupes

It is actually of benefit on any blog that doesn’t block duplicate content pages from being indexed.

I just test things out and track, and I expect my readers to do the same.

I am not an SEO Consultant, in fact if I was I would probably set all my public blogs up in some uniform manner that I would preach to my clients because it would conform to the accepted norms that the rest of the SEO community adhere to – if I create a site that meets accepted norms for my clients, no one could point the finger and say I did a bad job with on-page optimization.
Other SEO Consultants also like to link through to posts that suggest to their clients that everything they have been saying for years is 100% true, so anything that agrees with accepted SEO principles gets more links, and gets read by more professional SEOs.

For you gamblers out there

1+6=7
3+4=7 as well

You get to the same or similar result by taking a different path.

Vicious circle, or benevolent circle… take your pick.

I am not a SEO Geek – I am technical, and extremely creative in thinking up solutions and linking structures, but ultimately I don’t know my way around PHP and .HTAccess enough to be truly one of the “geeks” able to take on any SEO task.

Then again, most of the best Copywriters that I know believe that a lack of a formal education gives them an advantage and can mean enhanced creativity. I can be extremely creative when applying SEO knowledge.

Warning

Apologies in advance, this is going to get fairly “geeky” and I encourage you to bookmark it for future reference, or ask questions in the comments. I will include lots of references where appropriate, and even if this stuff is beyond your current level of understanding, it is a good reference for the future.

I should also warn that this post is quite long and “meandering” – there are 100, 200, maybe more ranking factors and somehow other SEOs are able to place them in a tabular form.
I don’t think tabular, I think in 3D – what could represent some kind of negative factor could also provide positive factors.

Testing

I use multiple techniques, and I test things gradually.

I also haven’t done all the optimization on Andybeard.eu that I would like, partially because Google was reporting bad data that was extremely hard to work with regarding supplemental results – that bad data is also currently still being shown by the Google Toolbar, and doesn’t seem to have been universally fixed for all sites.
I like to write about the changes I make, and like to have some conclusive results to demonstrate both why I might make a change, and also a way of demonstrating the effect.

The aim of this blog was a “work-in-progress” – as I make changes I write about them, or write about the results from testing at a later date.

If you make lots of changes at once, it is very hard to track which one was significant.

Unlike a Sales page, where you can just throw traffic at it using PPC to test conversion rates, with SEO it can take time for things to change.

Questions about SEO?

John Reese has some questions about WordPress SEO

This ties in fairly well with some material I have written in the past, and also the results of a lot of the experimentation I have been doing on this site that I haven’t yet discussed.

I also receive recurring emails on the same subjects, especially when I have hinted at solutions but not yet written about them extensively on this blog. Some of the information in this post I am pulling almost totally from replies I have sent to readers.

SEO Ranking Factors

SEOmoz has a great compiled list of ranking factors, based on the opinions of 37 SEO Experts.

I largely agree with the final conclusions… except… the idea that you should optimize for all of these factors, and avoid all the potential penalties in every situation

Top 10 SEO Ranking Factors

All good stuff…

Top 5 Negative SEO Ranking Factors

It should be noted that there was a huge amount of dispute over some of the following, and only an “average” level of acceptance for the highest items in the list.

A Handful of SEO Questions

John asked a handful of SEO questions and I am going to try to address them

I am not going to claim any of my answers are conclusive, though I have more experience in answering some of them than others.

1. Permalink Post Structure

/name-of-the-post/ or /name-of-the-post.html

I have absolutely no idea. I haven’t tested it, either for click-through or SEO performance.

I chose to use .html on this blog, and in fact on a few more, when I moved content over from Blogspot. At the time blogspot wasn’t providing 301 Redirects so I was using a meta and javascript refresh.

With there only being a change in domain name, and not site structure, I believe there might have been better signals to the search and ranking bots that the meta and javascript redirects were legitimate.

I have seen many experts suggest that making multiple changes in permalink structure is not a good idea.

What I might do sometime in the future purely as a suicidal experiment is switch off the redirects. Most of the links going to my previous domains came from article marketing, so it would drastically reduce my number of incoming links, but conversely change the whole link profile into lots more authoritive links in balance.
One negative aspect of doing that would be the benefit I might be gaining from domain age, and I am sure it would affect specific keywords.

2. Permalink Post Structure Directory ‘Depth’

www.domain.com/name-of-the-post/(or .html) VS. www.domain.com/archives/some/other/folders/name-of-the-post/(or. html)

This gets a little bit complex, because there are lots of issues involved

Using a date in a URL can be an indication that content is “dated” so if you are creating a niche website you might not want to give that visual indicator – conversely, it could be looked on as a positive indicator of how fresh content is – URLs with dates are longer (there are positive and negative issues) – I think this might come down to personal choice.

Even if you don’t use dates in URLs, you will still have date based archives unless you don’t link to them, and block them anyway with robots.txt or a plugin that adds noindex to the pages.

Some SEO experts such as Graywolf would suggest only having an article appear in one category, and only use excerpts in those categories. This is effectively creating a classic tree like structure.

Date based archives are one way a search engine bot can identify your site as being a blog or news site – I am not sure whether that has a positive, negative or neutral ranking benefit.
Article Directories also have RSS feeds, but generally don’t have date based navigation.

If you are publishing a multiple-author blog, there is a chance you might be included eventually in Google News or on Yahoo. I have read (though I can’t remember where) that to be included on Google News there is a requirement to have a unique 4 digit numerical reference within each URL.

3. Tags: Hype Or Reality?

John is looking to know if tag pages on your site can really make a difference.

I have written a lot about tagging with UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior) – yes that is a tag page.

Michael Arrington from Techcrunch was recently writing negatively about tagging, speculating that Google might block Technorati from search results, because the content they display is in effect a search result based on a particular keyword.
It should also be noted that until extremely recently, Techcrunch was a heavy user of Ultimate Tag Warrior. They have now switched to having personal database pages on a db.techcrunch.com subdomain.
Their tag pages however still exist, and are called their company index.

Rand Fishkin was asking Matt Cutts about search results being indexed within Google search results at SMX and from what I gather, the primary criteria is whether the tagging is useful for users.

Techcrunch obviously has a lot of link juice to throw around, and typically writes more than one post about each company. They do however sometimes talk about multiple companies in a single post, thus there is occasionally some duplicate content appearing on different tag pages.

Techcruch really don’t need tags for SEO purposes, though using tagging might help a little with relevance – they are effectively using tagging as their primary HTML sitemap and show full content.

Thus I would think Techcrunch’s use of tagging is a benefit to readers and highly valuable.

I should also note that there are a lot of blogs in the Technorati Top100 that use internal tagging, with the pages being indexed.
Wordpress.com uses tagging extensively, with all tags being indexed. I am not sure if this is of benefit to searchers.

I am not sure about Technorati’s tagging being of benefit. When a Technorati tag page appears in search results, I personally don’t click on it, but then I would most likely not click on Wikipedia entries either, unless I was specifically looking for a Wikipedia entry.

Youtube might have blocked off tags, but then Google have to be careful of favouritism these days with lots of hungry Bloggers, and lawyers watching their every move and acquisition.
Youtube seems to already be doing well with Universal search. How do Google detect largely duplicate videos?

Whether my own use of tagging is as highly valuable to readers is certainly questionable, but when you look at the limitations of current search engines, I think using tag pages is actually fair game, as long as you don’t abuse things too much by using tags that are not relevant to the content.

The Biggest Benefit of Tagging

Dubious amounts of traffic from Technorati themselves?
Having useful pages for people to link to, not only from their blog posts, but also Wikipedia?

No…

The number one ranking factor was TITLE TAG, and to a lesser extent additional headings

I have been able to gain some additional traffic simply by tagging with and without spaces.

I could also add to the mix various forms of interlinking, the fact that every time someone picks up my content on a splog I gain around 15 links (though low quality generally, some of these sites are PR4+), and how easy it is to spread juice around if you need to.

Tag Pages & Duplicate Content

For the last few months, Google has had what I would regard as “The Google Yoyo”

Here is a chain of events

1. Google had only a few of my pages listed using “site:” though I was still receiving 40% Google search traffic
2. I reported myself for paid links, and a short while later, I had 4000 pages indexed, and almost no supplemental
3. I added a translation plugin – it creates translated cached pages for the whole site, but it only linked from my single pages. (more on that for another blog post)
4. I started gaining more pages indexed, and still no supplemental
5. I started seeing hour by hour different results, sometimes I would have some supplemental results, and they would disappear 10 minutes later.
6. Indexed pages and supplemental results seem to have stabilised

I currently have around 11,000 pages in the main index, and 9000 pages listed as supplemental.

My translated pages gain less juice than any of my English pages, so are more prone to be supplemental.

Tag pages which only contain a single post are generally supplemental, even if they are linked from a piece of content that gained some good linkage both internally and externally.

Translated versions of tag pages that were supplemental, are also supplemental.

So far I haven’t done any optimization on my tag pages to try to make them more “unique”

4.9 > 3.6 ? (Titles > Duplicate Content)

One of the most common things to do with PPC advertising is to use a version of the keywords with and without spaces, especially with only 2 words, or with a website name.

I have done that with tagging for a number of products, and sometimes it has resulted in a good deal more traffic, or traffic when I wouldn’t have seen any traffic at all. On some promotions I am talking an additional 1000+ visitors.

I have mentioned in the past that I rank for WordPress Training with a tag page, actually so does WordPress.com – it isn’t a competitive term, but it only cost me typing one additional tag on a couple of pages.

Double results in the SERPs are often coveted, and these frequently appear when using tag pages, so one listing will be the most specific page on your site, and the second result might be a tag page to all related content.
If I was someone searching, I have a feeling a tag page might get more clicks than if you had a single listing plus a “more results” link – I don’t have any eye-tracking data to prove that.

Tagging and Google Blogsearch

I have seen some strong results in Google Blogsearch for my content, although it is hard to prove whether that is because of tagging specifically, or other ranking factors.

4. PageRank ‘Aiming’

I have blogs that use siloing and minimal crosslinking, and in fact I can just copy what I sent someone in an email a couple of days ago.
The person asking wanted to create WordPress structures similar to the structures described so brilliantly by Michael Campbell, and then in greater detail by Leslie Rohde in Revenge of the Mininet and the Dynamic Linking ebook.

********** email about WordPress Siloing ******************

You can do it with hacking the core files, or creating modified functions in functions.php

The easiest way however is to add nofollow to links generated by various functions

http://guff.szub.net/2005/01/27/add-link-attribute/

and possibly

http://www.sochi-travel.info/articles/wp-nofollow-from-home/

You could also use tagging to channel pagerank around a little, though that ends up slightly different to Leslie’s teachings.

You might also find this useful

http://www.memwg.com/seo-siloing-wordpress-plugin/

You might also want to use one of the many plugins that stick noindex follow or noindex nofollow on all the duplicate content pages.

I actually forgot to mention custom query string in that reply.

If I was using siloing on this blog, and no translation plugin, I would have less than 500 indexed pages.
With tags and translation, currently 11,000 pages in the main index, and 9000 supplemental.

Can a bigger net catch more fish?

Now Google seem to be reporting the supplemental results correctly, I can work on moving more of those pages into the main index.

Milk Bottles & Duplicate Content

For me, one of the most important concepts is that if you are going to have duplicate content pages, they shouldn’t leak Google Juice excessively.

Google themselves say that the reason for supplemental results isn’t duplicate content, but a lack of pagerank. Rank flows from one page to another, it doesn’t dissipate.

The same is also true if you use Dofollow, you should try to maximise your internal linking as much as possible with related links, tags etc to shift a little more of the incoming juice to other pages that might need it.

I see people suggest noindex, follow as being good for tag pages and other duplicate content. If you have external links on those pages, maybe noindex, nofollow would be better – I can’t see any benefit in the follow.

More Google Yoyos

Link attribution for syndicated content is really broken this week, maybe due to recent algorithm changes. As an example I used to have a very solid 3rd and 4th place ranking for “dofollow” – fairly understandable with the amount of links I have on my list of dofollow and nofollow plugins.

For the last week or so 2 articles that link back to my originals syndicated on Webpronews.com have been ranking, and those articles didn’t receive lots of links.

Now whilst I don’t mind being regarded as such an authority, it might be looked on as a slight weakness in the tagging system.

Then again, they didn’t label me as a Schmoe.

I noticed Andy Beal has now labelled himself as a Schmoe, here is a list of all the other SchMOes so far:-

That seems like a fairly influential bunch

• Blogs are a form of social media
• I talk about optimizing blogs
• MyBlogLog says:-

Spam – If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud! Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer). Tag anyone who spams you with the term schmoe. Picture_13 While they have the ability to delete the tag and never see it again, WE can see it internally. As their user account racks up the schoe tag, we’ll investigate their conversations and take appropriate action.

Now Danny is yawning about tagging but then Danny doesn’t use tagging on Search Engine Land.
Andy doesn’t like being likened to the phrase.

And what are the legal ramifications of allowing just anyone to publicly label another a spammer? Calling someone a spammer – or allowing them to be called one- could be a huge detriment to their reputation, and something they may wish to contest in a libel case.

At least Andy does understand tagging has benefits, as he also uses UTW.

I was serious about tagging myself

Come on guys, forget the theatrics, lets actually review the product and not worry about our personal ego.

Using Delicious For Tags

Fair enough, both owned by Yahoo, noone is ever going to take the right to use the tags away from MyBlogLog.

But Why Use Delicious Formatting?

For me tags have to have words split in some way, so you have

blogging tips
blogging+tips
blogging-tips
blogging_tips

All pointing to a single page, but that page shouldn’t be

bloggingtips

Search engines don’t pick up the individual words when they are joined in this way, and we have all seen domain names that are a little troublesome if the words in the domain are split in the wrong place.

Why Use Technorati?

Well unless this is the first signal that MyBlogLog intends to buy Technorati next week, they shouldn’t rely on Technorati for tags, even if they are paying them for the data.

Use Data From Feeds

• Feeds have categories
• Feeds have tags
• Feeds have labels

Different blogging platforms tend to do things slightly differently, but there are only so many you have to deal with.

MyBlogLog is already picking up RSS feeds, all they have to do is use the data.

This is on Techmeme but more significantly it is on the Megite Fave Train Meme where I can see that Wendy, Matt and Robyn (on her personal blog) had something to say.

I am excited that we are starting to get some new features, I just don’t like the implementation or think they are really going far enough.

Technorati will also allow you to search a particular blog regarding a keyword and pull up related content.

Technorati Is Missing 2 Things That Google Blog Search Does Much Better

There are 2 extremely useful features that Technorati has missing, that are vital for quality search results.

• Supplemental Results – Huh? An SEO blog saying that supplemental results are good? Well in Technorati’s case they would be – they do pick up duplicate entries, and display them as such in some search results, it is not universal. Because of the way Technorati tends to crawl sites, there are quite often duplicates of the same content. You will notice in the screenshot at the top of the page, the Bruce Clay blog has a listing for their front page, and their permalink.
  Some blogs have many more listings for the same content, mine probably more than many, but that doesn’t mean I want 10 of my results showing on the first page of results for a particular term.
  You will see at the bottom of this page that I am pulling a search query by RSS from Google Blog Search – If I did the same from Technorati it would be full of duplicate results.
• Extended Results – This is an interface issue that Technorati could easily fix. Whilst it is possible to search a site for a particular term, you have to know that site has more information first, and navigate your way to the right interface, which with Technorati is not always obvious.

Google Blog Search Extended Results

I am going to cover this first, because this is a brand new feature introduced sometime yesterday, and I am probably one of the first to notice it, and happen to have convenient screenshots taken just 23 hours apart.

In my last post on Google Blog Search, I used the following screenshot, grabbed just before I published my post.

Now if you look at the result at the bottom of the screenshot, you will see my own listing, which had a fair amount of longevity.
Publishing the post displaced my old blogsearch content from the listings, maybe permanently if Google decides that that listing is more relevant, or maybe until it is no longer given an extra benefit due to freshness.

I only have one listing, and it is my most current or the one with most authority – the balance seems to normally tip around the 4 or 5 day mark.

Here is a new listing for the same search taken 14 hours ago, just 23 hours after my followup post on Google Blogsearch was made.

You will notice there is now an extended results link. That signifies that my site has additional information about this topic.

For a casual searcher things like that are not significant, but for someone like myself who uses Blogsearch as a serious tool to find relevant content, it is extremely useful.

The fact that Google also knows about that additional content on my site, just hours after publishing is also extremely significant, because that can also have a significant blogsearch weighting factor. If someone has mentioned Blogsearch multiple times, they might have more authority on the subject

That additional authority on a particular subject doesn’t seem to have any weighting on Technorati… at all. Technorati authority seems to mainly based on total number of links, and not based on authority of a particular subject.

As an example, Technorati doesn’t think I am much of an authority on [tag]dofollow[/tag] or [tag]tagging[/tag] – it is only recently I have moved up from having “a little authority” to having “some authority”, no matter what the subject.
Also of note is that Dougal Campbell isn’t looked on as an authority on plugins for WordPress, and his recent post that I linked through to from my Ultimate Guide to DoFollow Plugins isn’t listed in a search for Dofollow as an authority.
Yes I know that WordPress developers were removed from the Top100 because they dominated the Top10, but that shouldn’t mean they have no authority.
If you want WordPress news “straight from the horses mouth”, don’t use Technorati, as an example a search for WordPress 2.2 news with a lot of authority will not bring up recent developments, which I know Dougal has posted about, and so has Matt.

Back to Google Blog Search…

All things being equal (which they never seem to be), I should always outrank Techcrunch or Problogger when discussing something like Blogsearch, but there are other factors, as you can see by the fact that Alister’s blogsearch post on Problogger.net is still outranking my post with an almost identical title (though it does have more words in it)

Did you notice I am outranking the Bruce Clay blog? – The Lisa posted linking through to Alister on Problogger within a few minutes of my post – I am not sure who was actually first to post.

Alister’s article on Darren’s site so far has had 64 references, compared to the 2 references I had from Matt at Globally Local and Dan at The Wrong Advices.

Google Blog Search Supplemental Results

Another thing I noticed for the first time is that Google also have introduced supplemental results for the references. The Lisa was linked by Danny Sullivan in his roundup. If you look at the references you can see one listing, plus supplemental results.

Now for anything to do with RSS, I don’t want to read supplemental results. The feed I am using at the bottom of this page would be useless if it contained supplemental results.

The number of items found on Google are not affected by duplicates, so it is a real number. Technorati’s numbers tend to be inflated by the duplicates.

Things to Improve

I would like a listing that includes the additional references that were part of the extended results, so if a site has 10 documents that are looked on as being or suitable authority, all of them will be shown.

If I am trying to mix RSS content, I want the “real deal” and not just the most recent item.

Aftermath

It is a shame so many of the people linking through to Alister’s guest post are attributing it to Darren.

Now the even more worrying thing I have seen from all the people linking through to Alister’s post is that many want to increase the size of their blogroll, and I am sure 95% of them have no clue about linking structures or the fact that blogroll links also appear on all their duplicate content pages.
That is why I originally took the time to write a post in response to Alisters, because in all things there has to be a balance.
The majority of bloggers don’t research what they write, or don’t research using a blog search engine that brings up results based on the authority of the content, and not the historical authority of the blogger.

I am going to cheat and just stick an RSS feed here in the post, it is just a list of bloggers who linked through to Alister’s post (you can do some fun things with RSS)

!inlineRSS:blogsearch

Some of them might well have read Alisters post, and also read my own, but I am doing this automatically. There was nothing wrong with Alister’s post per se, it was an interesting interpretation of a patent written by a Google employee 2 years ago, but that doesn’t mean that every factor within it is actually relevant and used with a large weighting – some factors can have a negative counterbalance that exceeds the benefit.

Take everything with a huge grain of salt, test, track, experiment, and see you in the blog SERPs.