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?

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

• 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.

If spending $97 on an ebook is a major financial commitment, don’t read any further

Ok, for the rest of you lets get on with the review…

• There is no hype in the sales letter
• There is no hype in the ebook
• There is no hype in this review

Another Web 2.0 Social Media Ebook?

After you read the sales letter that is probably the impression you will have, and in fact you will still have that impression shortly after you start reading the ebook.

Here are some interesting facts for you

Pages 56 (+bonus guide on video, crib sheets and tables)

In fact those few references that were included were mainly in facts and figures like usage data.

So What is this Ebook Talking About?

Traffic Secrets

Whilst many people don’t appreciate the value of ebooks, claiming that the information is out there if you look for it, or join and participate in various forums, that isn’t strictly true.
We live in an age of information overload. Quite often different ideas and new ideas take a long time to rise to the surface, or never make it, not because the ideas are not valuable, or supported by hard evidence.

I often see “specialists” in SMO (Social Media Optimization) and SMM (Social Media Marketing) claim that their methods and expensive services can work in virtually any market place.
I am not going to dispute those claims, but that very statement tends to drown out other methods that could be equally effective for traffic generation that might be equally, or potentially more suitable for certain markets.

Traffic Strategy

The fundamental value from this ebook is that it challenges you to examine your social media marketing strategy, and optimize it for best effect.
This is nothing to do with writing better headlines, or coercing top users at Digg, Reddit or Netscape to add you as a friend and to plug your content.

Whilst Laura’s intention was to target the ebook to beginners in social media marketing, in many ways consultants in social media marketing should read it because it will place a new perspective on information and strategies you think you already know.

Professional Writing

Laura has written a lot of ebooks as a ghost writer, and this isn’t her first outing in publishing an ebook in her own name. This ebook oozes quality production with footnotes on almost every page and links to resources that back up the data and strategies she proposes.

The professional tone may also be one of its shortcomings – The Stampede Secret isn’t a light refreshing read, or suitable for people who prefer information in short 400 word chunks.

To get the most benefit you really will have to read through the ebook a couple of times taking notes – in some ways it reminds me of some of the more serious marketing reports you might receive from Marketing Sherpa.

Recommended Audience

Ideal

You are already making money, and probably think you know everything there is about SMM. You might even skim read the ebook once and think there is nothing new, but if you take the time to sit down and read it slowly a couple of times, you will pick up a new perspective.

• Marketing consultants
• Blogging consultants
• Business owners in niche markets
• Owners of Virtual Real Estate in Niche markets including blogging networks
• VCs and Angel Investors
• Researchers
• Journalists

Possible

Beginners who have tried SMM for their niche websites and blogs with little success, and who have money to invest to accelerate their learning process.

Don’t Buy It

This isn’t an ebook showing you the secret route to success and instant wealth. This isn’t something you should spend your last meal ticket on for that one chance of financial independence.

If the price of the ebook is more than you would spend on a night out, think again.

It will probably take you 3 hours to read this ebook unless you have been studying various fast reading techniques – if 3 hours of your time is worth less than $97, this ebook probably isn’t ideal.

You Can Find This Information Elsewhere

I honestly haven’t gone searching for all this information elsewhere, but I am sure somewhere among the millions of pages of content that are created on the internet every day, you would find at least 90% of this information. The value is in the way it is collated and presented.

Just as an example some of what is discussed in the ebook you could find on my blog, and potentially in more depth, especially in regards to things like tagging. Laura even quoted from one of my articles and linked through, highlighting that people should read the article, and the valuable discussion afterwards.

Unique Information

Analysis of one of Laura’s niche sites in a very competitive market (Acne Treatment) with real proof of traffic numbers from Quantcast – not just screenshots.
This isn’t a high traffic site, it is very much a simple niche website, running on WordPress that anyone could create and generate some income – I wouldn’t expect Laura to expose her most profitable sites.

Discussion of traffic strategy – some social media consultants charge $5000 per day to help you formulate a social media marketing action plan. Most of the consultants concentrate on the search engine optimization benefits, and not how to participate in social networks to find real customers.

How to Write an Ebook – whilst this isn’t one of the lessons taught, the production quality and style is something to learn from.

I am going to finish off with a few select quotes from the ebook that don’t give too much away, but at the same time highlight how much different the overall perspective of the information is.

If anything is going to hold you back in being a fore-runner in the new web, the need to measure and record every click or movement to and on your site would be the culprit. The internet is changing at such a rapid rate that controlling and metering every change you make has the potential to stall your success.

Uptight control and playing it safe is seldom the stance of a pioneer. It is the pioneer who wins in profits, fame and visitor traffic – not the followers and whiners. I am not guaranteeing success by any means, nor am I advising you to risk your life savings on some promising new start up, but I am saying that the occasional ‘play your cards or go home’ attitude is one of the keys to success.

Web 2.0 is a very creative, innovative and fluid environment. Most Web 2.0 sites cannot be put in a box and measured in any consistent and reliable fashion – they are simply too young. There is a level of intuition at launch, an element of change and growth throughout the life of the web property, and yet another level of intuition used for assessment when determining a reasonable sale value.

Conclusion

No hype, no bonus, though if I do see enough interest and sales I might write up a supplement to the ebook going into some of the topics in more depth, especially on the benefits of tagging.
I would probably make that available free to all Laura’s customers.
I may even go into some of the topics that Laura has missed – Web 2.0 grows at an alarming rate, and there is a limit to how fast you can research strategies enough to be able to offer conclusive proof.

Disclaimers are unheard of in most ebooks, but Laura takes this to a new professional level, this is just part of it.

Information within this report may be speculation and are therefore within the meaning of the securities litigation reform act of 1995 and contain verbiage such as ‘expected’, ‘anticipated’, ‘estimated’, projected’, ‘believed’ or variations of those.

I have actually been chucking a few emails backwards and forwards to Laura over the last couple of days, and I thought I would include one small excerpt.

You know you really rock! You don’t even ‘know’ me and you’ve given me so
much of your time. It’s a dying art in our world.

I am not going to include my exact reply, because it mentioned names of people that if internet marketers were actively using LinkedIn, would certainly appear between myself and Laura as shared contacts, and over the last 2 years I have certainly dropped by her blog a number of times.

This comment also shows the benefit of “paying it forward” and the value of providing information for free to eventually reach your goals.

There are quite a few expert marketers who normally charge their clients a great deal of money who I correspond with on a regular basis, simply because they have gained value from what I have offered for free.

One of the bonuses that Laura provides is some very specific email support – she states that she will answer 2 emails from her customers, and highlights the importance formulating those questions to receive maximum benefit. She is not going to exclude pleas for help, and win / win relationships can develop to extend the level of help provided.

I have always been happy to answer emails regarding the products I review both before someone makes a buying decision and afterwards, or you can just ask here in the comments.

I gained a great deal of value from Stampede Secrets. I might not realise that value immediately because I already employ many of the strategies and techniques discussed, and it is hard to quantify the effect any changes might have on my income.
Reading the ebook has certainly helped me highlight the action I should be taking to revitalise some of the niche websites I have had for a long time and hardly ever modify, because each is bringing in a small trickle of income.
Laura has helped me realise that it is possible to employ a few extra traffic strategies for these niche websites that could turn the flow of traffic into a gushing fountain.

Disclaimer:- I am one of the few people who received a free review copy of this ebook, possibly because I offered to take a look before publishing, that Laura reads my blog, and because she quoted me in the ebook. To be honest I might not have purchased the ebook just based upon the sales page. That is the value of affiliate marketing in pre-selling, or explaining the benefits of a product in an ethical manner

Linking to Wikipedia Technorati and Social Bookmark Sites Could Damage Your Google Search Results!

Here is an excerpt from the Google BlogSearch patent document that I discussed in depth earlier today:-

A link distribution of the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. As disclosed above, some posts are created to increase the pagerank of a particular blog document. In some cases, a high percentage of all links from the posts or from the blog document all point to ether a single web page, or to a single external site. If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

Lets take a look at the type of links that people have on their blogs

Technorati Tag Links

Google in the same patent mentioned that tagging could be beneficial for the quality of your site, but what of the detrimental effects of linking through to Technorati with 10 links on every post? Maybe you are undoing all the good work of tagging your content.

Solution: Use local tagging, or just rely on lots of categories or labels to convey tag data – local tagging can be easily achieved using plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior if you use WordPress.

Wikipedia Links

Some people link through to Wikipedia it seems almost every other post. Despite Wikipedia being looked on by many as an authority site, such linking habits might be looked on as spammy.

Solution: Use nofollow on your links to Wikipedia

Social Bookmarking Links

This one is a biggie – some people have 10 or more social bookmarking links per page, and many of the most popular solutions don’t provide “safe” links. By safe I mean that the links serve no purpose because they go to an empty form, so in no way are they a pointer or vote on a particular piece of content. I am sure search engines probably discount them heavily, but they may still reduce the value of other links on your page, and may incur a ranking penalty due to being spammy.

I don’t use a normal version of the Sociable plugin, I use a hacked version. If you are using the Search Status plugin for Firefox, it is easy to tell, because you can see the pink boxes.

If you want to hack the Sociable plugin I wrote this guide a few months ago or just use my hacked version, now available.

Digg buttons such as “DiggThis” are not a problem, because they are normally Javascript. Some others use true dynamic linking using things like “onclick”.

Subscription Buttons

Yep more pink on this site, how about on yours?

It is ok to use a followable link to your feed, in fact that is recommended, even if you use and external service such as FeedBurner.

These buttons however link through to forms, not content. They should always be nofollowed.

Solution: Add rel=”nofollow” to the links

Conclusion

I am generous with my Google Juice, using Dofollow plugins for my comments, and link out to my readers often, but I hate pouring Google Juice down the drain.

For a long time my blogs have performed amazingly well with Google Blog Search. I always appear in the relevant results quickly, and the results I obtain have some reasonable longevity, even when I am not the original source of a story.

Considering how much competition I often have for certain search terms which everyone seems to be writing about because of common interest, I must have been doing a number of things right.

Bill Slawski of SEO By The Sea a few of days ago broke the news of Google’s Patent Application for Ranking Blog Documents.

SEO Round Table posted a synopsis lifted from the Cre8asite Forums that had been posted by Bill, and seems to be the easiest to understand.

I am going to do a little bit of mix and match here, and inject my own commentary but my interpretation of the patent is actually slightly different to those that I have read so far.

It should be noted I am working my way through the patent itself, and not recompiling the summaries of others.

Relevancy & Quality – Blog | Blogpost

It should first of all be noted that in the patent Google doesn’t differentiate between individual blog posts and whole blogs.

The phrase “blog document,” as used hereinafter, is to be broadly interpreted to include a blog, a blog post, or both a blog and a blog post. It will be appreciated that the techniques described herein are equally applicable to blogs and blog posts.

Later on in the patent, they also mention that feeds are also included within the documents that are compared and rated.

two distinct sets of data are used to determine a score of a blog (or blog post) in response to a search query–the topical relevance of the blog (or blog post) to the terms in the search query and the quality of the blog (or blog post), which is independent of the query terms. The quality of the blog (or blog post) may positively or negatively affect the score of the blog (or blog post)

Relevancy – this applies to the search term, thus Google will analyse the blog page, and they will also in some way determine the relevance to the whole blog.
Quality – this is irrespective of the search term, so think about factors from outside your niche

Google Blog Search – Positive Factors Affecting Search Quality | Relevancy

• Popularity of the blog document

A number of news aggregator sites (commonly called “news readers” or “feed readers”) exist where individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such aggregators store information describing how many individuals have subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document

This patent was first of all applied for 13th September 2005, with Google Blog Search launched 13 September 2005. At the time they were logically not basing this on numbers available for Google Reader subscribers. The Google Reader blog was launched October 21, 2005 with a post saying they had been up and running for 2 weeks.
Maybe there is a coincidence between the 2 events.

So which data were Google basing this part of their patent on? Some services such as Technorati and Bloglines do provide readership data, as does Feedburner, though most services report readership data as they are collecting new blog posts to a service like Feedburner, who aggregate the statistics.

It seems there might be some value is collecting Technorati favorites (my reciprocation policy might be well worth it) beyond limited bragging rights. Google of course through Google Reader now have access to lots of usage data, so maybe other sources will eventually be phased out.

• Implied popularity of the blog document

This implied popularity may be identified by, for example, examining the click stream of search results. For example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Click data from search results, possible from Google Toolbar users.

• Existence of the blog document in blogrolls

The existence of the blog document in blogrolls may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. It will be appreciated that blog documents often contain not only recent entries (i.e., posts), but also “blogrolls,” which are a dense collection of links to external sites (usually other blogs) in which the author/blogger is interested. A blogroll link to a blog document is an indication of popularity of that blog document, so aggregated blogroll links to a blog document can be counted and used to infer magnitude of popularity for the blog document.

Everything I have ever read has suggested that for normal search, blogroll links that are site wide carry diminishing value. Just because it is listed here as part of the calculation does not necessarily mean that everyone should start building up huge blogrolls… well unless they want to game Technorati and have a blog network.

• Existence of the blog document in a high quality blogroll

The existence of the blog document in a high quality blogroll may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. A high quality blogroll is a blogroll that links to well-known or trusted bloggers. Therefore, a high quality blogroll that also links to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Another revelation, links on high quality pages are worth more than links on low quality pages.

Remember that “blog document” can mean both blog page and blog site.

Can blogroll just refer to a list of links on what is identified as a blog. Thus a column of links to related pages might also class as a blogroll, whether in the sidebar or below the content.
Thus a list of links to related documents on the same site could be looked on as a blogroll on a blog document.

Related links plugins are very powerful, especially if you also include them in content that gets syndicated by design, or by sploggers.

• Tagging of the blog document

Tagging of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. Some existing sites allow users to add “tags” to (i.e., to “categorize”) a blog document. These custom categorizations are an indicator that an individual has evaluated the content of the blog document and determined that one or more categories appropriately describe its content, and as such are a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

Well some sites do allow you to tag in a meaningful way, maybe Google uses shared tags from Del.icio.us and other sites, but many of those use nofollow extensively.
It is my own belief that self tagging content heavily with plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior helps a huge amount. I have given lots of examples before, but more recent examples include

toolbar pagerank
google reader feedburner
feedburner google reader
compete toolbar
duplicate content supplemental results

Yes, I am just going down the inbound traffic results looking for likely candidates that rank well in both blog and normal search and aren’t totally obscure. These are subjects that sites in my niche have also talked about, with the keywords in the title, and which you would expect to rank higher than my own content.

This doesn’t just affect blogsearch, Google have been using it for some time with the main results as well.
Here are my observations regarding tagging from back in November, especially how they could relate to LSI calculations.

• References to the blog document by other sources

Wow revelation again, god links are worth having either to pages or blog.

• Pagerank of the blog document

Pagerank is still relevant, who knows for how long and how much.

It will be appreciated that other indicators may also be used.

What seems to be missing, at least at time of application?

• Domain age?
• Trustrank?
• Page Titles?
• URLs?
• Growth rate of link popularity

Plus lots more that also factor into it, but general search patents probably also cover blog search.

Google Blog Search – Negative Factors Affecting Search Relevancy | Quality

• Frequency of new posts on the blog document

The frequency at which new posts are added to the blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. Feeds typically include only the most recent posts from a blog document. Spammers often generate new posts in spurts (i.e., many new posts appear within a short time period) or at predictable intervals (one post every 10 minutes, or a post every 3 hours at 32 minutes past the hour). Both behaviors are correlated with malicious intent and can be used to identify possible spammers. Therefore, if the frequency at which new posts are added to the blog document matches a predictable pattern, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Make sure there is some variation when you publish your content for the day, especially with future dated posts.
Most spamming tools are actually fairly sophisticated, thus I am not sure this measurement is very accurate. It most likely indicated a blogger who is very organised these days.

• The content of the posts in the blog document

The content of the posts in the blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. A feed typically contains some or all of the content of several posts from a given blog document. The blog document itself also includes the content of the posts. Spammers may put one version of content into a feed to improve their ranking in search results, while putting a different version on their blog document (e.g., links to irrelevant ads). This mismatch (between feed and blog document) can, therefore, be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

This is actually a very significant and interestingly worded item. Google are stating that they are comparing the content of a feed with the content on your pages to ensure it matches.

Based upon this:-

• Don’t use a content spinner on your feeds to avoid duplicate content
• Allow Google to index your feeds
• If you use related links on your blog, make sure you use them in your feeds too
• Duplicate Content, especially in feeds

Also, in some instances, particular content may be duplicated in multiple posts in a blog document, resulting in multiple feeds containing the same content. Such duplication indicates the feed is low quality/spam and, thus, can be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

I can’t say I have noticed a problem having a lot of straggling RSS feeds on categories and tags.
This could also be referring to things like the large footer I have on each post, though I haven’t seen a problem with that either.

After the last toolbar pagerank update I spent some time studying Matt Cutts’ blog, and also looking at how pagerank was being transferred around my own site. Pagerank is only slightly useful as a guide, and only immediately after an update.
Rather than repeat myself, you can read about my organic garden approach to this site.

• Collective Intelligence

The words/phrases used in the posts of a blog document may also be a negative indication of the quality of that blog document. For example, from a collection of blog documents and feeds that evaluators rate as spam, a list of words and phrases (bigrams, trigrams, etc.) that appear frequently in spam may be extracted. If a blog document contains a high percentage of words or phrases from the list, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

Google invest a lot of research analysing spam, detecting various word matching patterns, and use that to identify other documents.

• A size of the posts in the blog document

The size of the posts in a blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. Many automated post generators create numerous posts of identical or very similar length. As a result, the distribution of post sizes can be used as a reliable measure of spamminess. When a blog document includes numerous posts of identical or very similar length, this may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

This might be of special interest to those that use out-sourcing for articles, you need to ensure the article length changes.

• A link distribution of the blog document

A link distribution of the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. As disclosed above, some posts are created to increase the pagerank of a particular blog document. In some cases, a high percentage of all links from the posts or from the blog document all point to ether a single web page, or to a single external site. If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.

In some ways this debunks the benefits of blogrolls mentioned as a benefit, but as previously quoted, Google are using blog document in multiple context, and comparing the context, thus it could just refer to multiple spam links always pointing to a single domain within the content.

• The presence of ads in the blog document

The presence of ads in the blog document may be a negative indication of quality of the blog document. If a blog document contains a large number of ads, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Remember this is just a patent, and Google recently relaxed the rules about having ads from other networks along with Adsense. As long as a page is of a reasonable size to support the adverts, I don’t think there is a problem. If you just have a heading and 5 words, with 10 advertising blocks, you might want to add a few more words.

However they go on to say this

Moreover, blog documents typically contain three types of content: the content of recent posts, a blogroll, and blog metadata (e.g., author profile information and/or other information pertinent to the blog document or its author). Ads, if present, typically appear within the blog metadata section or near the blogroll. The presence of ads in the recent posts part of a blog document may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

Thus if you are using blocks in the content for all your ads, you might not rank as well, especially if you use multiple networks. You can probably get away with 3 in the content, or maybe 1 or 2 per post.

• It will be appreciated that other indicators may also be used

Conclusion

The feed stats information is very useful, and looking at the timing, my conclusion is that Google might have been using Bloglines and Technorati Favorites data, with Google Reader in its infancy, or maybe though less likely, when blog search was introduced, they weren’t using that part of the patent

For me the most significant information was tagging, but just linking though to Technorati with your tags isn’t a great idea.

Remember that Google have their own blogging system, and they have archives and labels, and they are not going to create a system to generate duplicate content and then penalise you for it. Google wouldn’t have added such a system unless they intended to benefit from the enhanced data.

You don’t have to build your blogs in a 1990s era tree like structure to rank well.

Subscribers and Technorati Favorites may help you rank.

Shoemoney Media and Mediawhiz (The parent company of Text Link Ads and ReviewMe) have released an innovative new monetization model, based upon Ebay Auctions – AuctionAds.com

Mainstream media will no doubt not even think let alone write about the 2 core advantages of this system for a large segment of the affiliate marketplace.

1. International – Even affiliates in the UK were unable to join the Ebay affiliate program in the US
2. Payment – Payment is made by Paypal rather than check, with a $10 threshold

International Affiliates

If you are an affiliate based in the US, almost all affiliate marketing doors are open. If you live anywhere else, or if your company is registered somewhere else, you ultimately always hit barriers for your participation.

Ebay International Affiliate Barriers

Here is an excerpt from the Ebay (US) Affiliates FAQ

The Ebay affiliate program is managed by Commission Junction, who provide an international affiliate management system.
Unfortunately Ebay has chosen to separate their affiliate program by territory, at least for some.
Affiliates based in the US can join the affiliate program of other counties, affiliates outside the US cannot join the US program… one day the European Union might decide that is not free trade.

Here is an excerpt from the Ebay UK Affiliate FAQ:-

It is not Commission Junctions fault, they provide an international platform, although it is confusing for affiliates to identify which affiliate programs they are entitled to join.

International Payment

With Paypal being offered there are several advantages

• Low $10 payment threshold
• No excessive charges for processing international checks
• No delays in cashflow (though it is not specified how quickly AuctionAds will pay)

This might not be a universal advantage for all affiliates, because Commission Junction do offer direct bank transfers in a number of territories. A lot will depend on how AuctionAds calculate when a payment is due.
If their system allows for them to make payments faster than Commission Junction, that is a significant advantage.

There is no need to sign up for our affiliate program because our affiliate program is built right into the ads you display! If a user clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” that is displayed and signs up for our service you earn a bonus 2% of all revenue generated by that user for the 6 months.

You will get paid the first of every month via Paypal. We feature a 30 day cookie on all referrals.

Ebay With TradeDoubler

I noticed that the affiliate program for Ebay.pl is actually handled via TradeDoubler – I don’t currently publish any sites in Polish, but that might be something I will look into for some of my future publishing – maybe their Ebay interface is more “International Friendly”.
I do know that the payment threshold quoted was 150 zloty – $50 USD which is far higher than the $10 Threshold offered by AuctionAds.

If TradeDoubler doesn’t provide global Geo-targetting, it would only be suitable for non-English language sites, at least compared to AuctionAds.

Other Advantages of Auction Ads

What is the advantage over CJ/eBay direct affiliation?

Easy implementation and the leverage of AuctionAds’ creative delivery of eBay’s auctions and our ability to achieve the higher performance incentive tiers with the aggregate volume of traffic to make more money than they could with their own affiliate relationship.

I have niche websites which receive 90% US traffic, but I have never been able to offer Ebay as an alternative sales channel. Whilst I have been able to use Chitika adverts, and have included affiliate links through mainly Linkshare, Ebay quite often was offering much better deals for the products my visitors wanted to buy.

Being able to offer the best deals and make money from doing so is always the best option for affiliates.

Live AuctionAds Examples

So here are some example “live” adverts – no screenhots you will have to click through if reading this in an RSS Reader.

Keyword: Blogging

Keyword: Internet Marketing

Keyword: Gardening and “Mole trap”

Feature Suggestions

• Keyword Targetting – very much like Chitika, a very specific product related keyword seems to be the best option currently. I am not actually sure it would be an advantage to offer contextual or based on several keywords. I did try comma delimited keywords and they didn’t seem to work. Maybe category + keyword would be a good alternative.
• Remove Ads By AuctionAds – if you wanted to place 3 half-banners vertically because that suited your layout, the AuctionAds link in each of them would be inappropriate. Alternatively provide multiple image alignment options – also allow the colour to be changed
• RSS Feeds – I would love to be able to use an RSS feed of the adverts, that I could then use to style in whatever way I choose.
• Direct Affiliate Link – Please provide a direct affiliate link – I missed the link in the interface which is under Account Home.
• Pay Per Click – It would be great if AuctionAds in some way to provide a bridge for international affiliates to advertise Ebay products in the US market via PPC
• auctionads_ad_client – for the tin-foil hat brigade, there needs to be a way of generating multiple values for every niche website. Maybe you can do a deal with Google Yahoo and MSN so these don’t appear in search results, but that isn’t total anonymity.
• Campaigns – Ability to create a campaign on the fly, or at least while you are creating code – this is possible using the wizard, but it seems you have 3 seperate processes currently, and it should be possible to have just one.
• Presets – the ability to save a preset for colour selection, and maybe retain a complete history of ads already created for different campaigns.
• Live Results – Currently the number of results are displayed using Ajax, it would be good to be able to preview them
• Hide Campaign ID – The ability to have none human readable campaign identification (this seems to have been added while I was writing) – I would love to be able to assign my own (as above, campaigns on-the-fly)

Take A Look For Yourself

I strongly encourage you to take a look at AuctionAds for yourself. If you are an international affiliate, it is in my opinion the best option for the Ebay affiliate program, other than features such as PPC and various RSS and API integration. If that can be added to the mix at a later date, AuctionAds as a conduit for Ebay is going to be huge.

Where is the link? At the bottom of the example ads or just click here.

Further Discussion

Actually very few sites so far have picked this up, so I will add links as I see them

Techcrunch seems to be first with the news – they are thinking about giving it a test run on their more product related sites. The advantage AuctionAds for them is that it is Geo-targetted – AuctionAds handle the backend merging of multiple affiliate programs.

Linda at 5 Star Affiliates so far has what she admits to being a short writeup, but she has spotted that sometimes the auction items are expired. She has also managed to hack an affiliate referral ID, which I will have to take a look at doing as well.

Update on AuctionAds

Darren emphasised that AuctionAds is very much a network that will work best with product focused sites. He says he has also had a chance to have a look at the backend – I am not sure that is behind the scenes of what a normal publisher sees, but Mediawhiz normally put together fairly solid services, and I am sure Shoemoney’s team have the security under control.

John Chow also did an in-depth review of of AuctionAds explaining how the payment system works for normal Ebay affiliates in great depth, and also how he intends to use the adverts on his product reviews sites.

Ajay has knocked together some code for making AuctionAds to a certain extent “contextual”, either using UTW or SimpleTags Data.
I don’t think this approach is ideal currently, because I have had a chance to exchange emails with Ddn and currently the widget uses keywords supplied randomly rather than in priority order, unlike Chitika which uses a priority scale. This is something that will be fixed in the near future.

This is important, take for instance this example (though unlikely a good example for Ebay content)

wordpress theme, wordpress, blogging

If these were used randomly, you would probably end up with more adverts which used the keyword blogging, and you might end up with Britney Spears T-shirts or other celebrity stuff. The adverts are often being optimised based on which adverts will finish soon.

If they are taken in priority order then this is ideal, and you could use

barcode number, camera model, camera manufacturer, camera type, photography

For many blogs, using a mixture of custom fields and categories might prove better for targetting, because they can be listed in a specific order. UTW allows tags to be displayed in popularity order, so maybe that could be reversed to achieve almost the same thing.

MyFeedz Sucks as a Feed Reader

To qualify that, let me show you the “user experience” I went though, and how amazingly let down I felt having given it some of my time.

When I first logged in, this supposedly intelligent RSS Reader presented me with a selection of articles possibly based upon analysis of my own blog.
So I imported the OPML from my Google Reader Account.

After importing this is what I was presented with to read

I think at this time I should point out that none of those articles are from my OPML file, and possibly one is relevant to what I sometimes read, but that is on an article directory rather than a blog.

So I tried refining things a little:-

There are the tags that were defined for me to start with

These are the tags that MyFeedz suggests that I pick from. By selecting a few, and then refreshing the display, slowly a few more tags appear, that might even refer to specific blogs I read every day. Also note that at this time they hadn’t imported all my OPML, just a small cross section.

The front page view didn’t change – the stories being listed in the main panel were not from my selected feeds. The only thing related to my OPML were excerpts in the sidebar. Most of the feeds in my OPML file are full content, so only receiving a small selection and just excerpts wasn’t useful. I wasn’t getting what I wanted to read.

So I left MyFeedz for a while and went to write about something else…

A few hour later I received an email from MyFeedz stating that they have processed all my feeds from my OPML. As I am writing this, it is a day later, so in theory they have had plenty of time to work out what I read, and grab the feeds.

MyFeedz Session 2 – Based on Full OPML Results

First of all here are all the tags I now have selected. It doesn’t cover everything, because as an example I read a lot about WordPress Plugins, and I haven’t been given that option.
Who knows, maybe it will give me a selection of the blogs I want to read.

As far as I am concerned, MyFeedz were successful in creating a…

Total Disaster

Here is my new front page

Only one of the blogs on my front page is in my OPML file, and the article listed is 3 days old.

You can however get a little more personalized if you go tag exploring.

Tag Exploring

With tags you can select only your subscribed feeds, and sort by both date and relevance.
Browsing your tags is extremely slow – I am not talking unresponsive or a little laggy – I am talking click a tag and then switch tabs to do something else for a while – infuriatingly slow.

It is actually so unresponsive that it is preventing me doing a complete review.

A tag view lists posts that in some way were tagged or related to that term, so maybe a domain name. Occasionally it also offers some meme like features (think Techmeme or Megite) with links to related posts.

Tag searching seems to have just ground to a halt, so no screenshot will be forthcoming.

I currently can’t see a use for MyFeedz – it isn’t a Feed Reader – no river of news, no way to mark what you have read, no way to read a specific blog, and no way that I can see to look at the history.
It can’t compete with a meme tracker… especially for speed to find out the hot discussions in a particular niche. If you want a meme of your own OPML, take Megite for a spin.
As for specific keywords or tags, you are far better off using Technorati or Google Blogsearch.

Sharing

Robert mentioned sharing in his writeup – there is a way to share with MyFeedz. There are RSS feeds for each tag, and while you are reading you can add a tag to something, so you could use personal tags as thus create a shared feed of your selections.
The problem is I am not sure you would want to share something you haven’t read, thus you will end up having to click through to every site before you share something… extremely frustrating.

For Niche Marketing

It is another source for creating tag based RSS feeds that you can feed to content sites on autopilot, thus I am sure many people will find a use for it ;)

2000-2000=0

If everyone grabs all the images and sticks it on a page on their site, it is effectively like a link exchange directory which people have been doing for years. Google can certain filter links like that out with no problem.

Obviously it is not quite so simplistic, and it should be noted that there is a level of editorial in this. It is real blogs created by real people, and Tino visits the sites to check.

It is also important that these in general are not site wide links – someone with any sense if they did post a full collage would do it on a page a little deeper on their domain, just because of page load times.

Unfortunately this apparently has upset the balance at Technorati, and I am actually happy about that, because it brings lots of things out into the open.

Technorati

Technorati has great prominence in the search engines using other people’s content that people willing let them index, but the reason they have such prominence for all those cool keywords is because they have created one of the greatest linkbait systems on the internet, Technorati tags. The microformat even defines:-

The destination of a rel=”tag” hyperlink is required to be a tag space (a place that collates or defines tags), where the last segment of the path of the URL is the tag

Unless you have your own tag pages internally, there isn’t a huge amount of tag spaces to link to, and the default choice is Technorati for most people, though there are a few other options such as Wikipedia and a few PPC sites.

A while back Technorati started to use “nofollow” on their links to their sources of information to stop benefiting splogs, but if search engine rank wasn’t important to Technorati, they would create all their widgets and links with the nofollow code. But business is business and Technorati make money from advertising.
It is quite possible that Google and the other search engines have already had to take action to devalue the weight of Technorati tags, not too much, but enough so that the top search results for all those terms frequently used wasn’t always Technorati, which might be full of untrusted user generated content.

Technorati created their own importance in search results – they are one of the few “search engines” that appear in natural search results. Using robots.txt would solve that, but Technorati like the traffic.

I actually love Technorati, but I think this is making mountains out of molehills. There are bigger issues which effectively ensure that the z-listers have no chance of rising to the surface without some creative effort.

It should be noted that Technorati haven’t issued any kind of penalty to the participants in the 2000 Bloggers meme, as I just read over on Design Sojourn in a comment by Ian Kallen of Technorati.

Just to clarify: Technorati is not taking punitive measures against 2000 Blogger participants. What was announced was simply an adjustment to our indexing to filter out copy-and-pasted sets of links since our ranking is premised on links that are more conventional social gestures such as replies and citations. There is certainly a good deal of FUD being posted elsewhere about elitism, coercion, and so forth but given what was actually announced, I hope you’ll see through the subterfuge and feel assured that there’s no heavy hand to be scared of. We’re here to serve you and help you make your voice heard, we’re listening.
best regards,
-Ian

Blog Networks

2000 bloggers, it is only a single page on most of the blogs that might be affecting the Technorati ranking results. With blog networks small and large, all those sitewide sidebars also affect Technorati in a major way, and so does preferential linking to same network sites.

Employee Networks

Robert Scoble has discussed Microsofts internal blogger mailing list and the way they can effectively Googlebomb any product for a brand name. Whilst they might not have everyone on their blog roll (3000 bloggers), I am sure there is a lot of internal linking.

Widgets

There are a lot of widgets out there that give real links back to their creators, and whilst this might not affect blogs it certainly affects search results. The thing is the links in most cases are justified because they go to information pages about the widget.
Links are just pointers as Carsten recently discussed over on Search Engine Journal.

If I tag something with the word “WordPress”, it often ends up in a sidebar RSS feed on a blog tracking wordpress, or someones shared feed reader stream that is being indexed. That link appears in Technorati’s index, even if it is temporary.

Syndicated Content

The web, and Technorati are full of syndicated news stories, press releases and articles.

Some of my blog content occasionally gets syndicated, and that appears in Technorati reselts. Some of it is on popular sites, “legitimate syndication” – other times it is “illegitimate syndication”, which would be classed as legitimate if it was on a PR7+ site, but because it is a new site collecting snippets of blog posts on a single specific theme, they are referred to as splogs. At least most of them link back to me with a live link to the source, and if they pick it up directly rather than from Technorati, they get links in the content as well.

I have seen uncliamed RSS feeds in Technorati in the 5-6K range simply because the feed was being syndicated.

Other Tag Farms / Indexes

The good new is it seem that Technorati already filter out feeds from places like the WordPress.com tag index. It is quite likely that index still affects other search results in a big way. WordPress.com don’t use nofollow for their links to/from the indexes as I have previously discussed.

Linkbait

This interview with Tino carried out by Li Evans is now been highlighted as proof that Tino was doing this all just as link bait.

If you create something cool, people link to you. Lots of people create cool things for links and don’t get slammed. Lots of people deliberately highlight controversial stories over and over again just to get attention. Hell even I am writing this hoping I might get a link or 2 from people interested in a different opinion. (and I don’t have nofollow on my trackbacks)

What Tino didn’t expect is that people would carry the thing one stage further and copy all the images with links to post on their blogs.
Tino has suggested a widget, for the future, but that could easily be created with Ajax so that it doesn’t affect results in Google and Technorati, and is just there to give people somewhere cool to continue their browsing, human selected.

Even Matt Cutts believes in good link bait – I wonder what he thinks of 2000 Bloggers…

Conclusion

2000 Bloggers was just a blip, or a small bush fire easily snuffed out.

2000 Bloggers Lives on –

For some reason every single link on Tinos blog is now nofollow – I didn’t think that is possible with blogger as many thing are included automatically – was such action really called for?

I am going to dedicate this post to the shared stance I have with Dane Morgan on Nofollow. If you don’t understand what he means by “Pink Boxes”, this post I wrote a while ago on nofollow will help.

Update: I have done some more snooping and it seems that a number of sites hosted on Blogger have the following added:-

meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”

I don’t know anyone that would do something like that deliberately to a blog they had worked on for months / years.