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

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

How a Blogroll can kill your PageRank

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

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

Now about the site in question:

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

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

Initial Site Analysis

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

The internal categories are mainly PR2

The archives are mainly PR2

The individual post pages are generally PR1 or unranked

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

But the site has been around for 16 months

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

So what is wrong with the site?

Take a look at the sidebar

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

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

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

What visitors?

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

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

Solutions

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

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

Increase internal linking to compensate for all the leakage.

How to Increase Internal Linking

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

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

External Linking

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

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

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

Conclusion

It is not rocket science, just simple maths.

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

It contains some simple modifications extending the operation to include the UTW is_tag() function.
The changes made are not unique, as they are the same as have been described on a number of Non-english language blogs such as 082Net – a little hard to find if you don’t speak Korean, and as I have found in the past, if hacks are not provided as a distributable final version, very few people use them.

This plugin is intended to be used in advanced linking stuctures such as those described in WordPress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches

Rather than blocking duplicate content pages, they can be used to your advantage, but as customized landing pages and a method of channelling “Google Juice” away from pages that are receiving the majority of links, to pages that you wish to rank well, and also to your homepage to enhance monetization.

This plugin allows you to modify the default number of posts displayed by the WordPress loop before it creates a new page.

Not Just For SEO

There are all kinds of ways this plugin can also be used for aesthetic appeal and improved navigation.

It should be noted that this is a totally white-hat solution that even Googlers would approve of, as it is frequently recommended these days that sites should be developed to have a wider footprint rather than a deeper one.
It is one of the best solutions to minimise supplemental results on WordPress which are typically from a lack of PageRank, and not as many assume, duplicate content.

Full details and new permanent home for Custom Query String

A couple of additional notes in passing.

It is possible to use the original plugins (which was up to version 2.7) with UTW, but it involved jumping through a few unnecessary hoops which would decrease adoption and also prevent a number of useful linking structures.

This plugin was really in need of a home to ensure that people download a fully working version. Many links are broken to the original, and those that exist are to older versions.

As my readers appreciate, I just tinker with code, thus if extensive modifications are needed with the release of WP 2.3, I might need to strong-arm a friend into helping me manage the programming.

That being said, I am quite capable of supporting the plugin, and explain how it can be used in various ways, which is often more time consuming than the actual coding.

Whilst my advanced WordPress SEO tips might look a little daunting, Custom Query String is actually very simple to use.

Just install it as a regular plugin, go to Options >>> CQS and set up declarations for categories and tag pages, and date archives if you use them (most installations have them somewhere)

Update

There are a few versions of CQS now available for WP2.3+ including Custom Query String Reloaded

I have some additional changes I still want to make with my own version

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 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.

I have checked the ballots and there doesn’t seem to be any scandals – rigged voting would have been news worthy and actually profitable, it just goes to show how honest people in the WordPress community are.

Here is the voting:-

I don’t want anyone to feel that a vote is being wasted, thus for the next round I will be carrying forward half the value of previous votes rounded up, thus those that receive some votes in previous rounds will have a slight head-start in the next round of voting.

I am looking for more nominations for Best WordPress Plugin, and hopefully next time round we will see more voting.

Proof of $100 Donation:-

Payment Details
Transaction ID:		8L9571889R560693X
Item Price:		$100.00 USD
Total:			$100.00 USD
Order Description:	Donation to UTW as voted on by my readers
Buyer:			Keedz Limited

I have read that tagging functionality is being brought into the core of WordPress, and UTW might evolve into a way of expressing that data.
Christine Davis has worked hard with UTW, and I was actually glad I could give some recognition for all the hard work she has done in providing tagging support to WordPress in such a comprehensive manner.

Hopefully the next round of voting will gain a little more publicity, and that I gain a few more product reviews so I can make more donations to more plugin authors.

I am going to finish with a quote from my “almost namesake”, Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim

If you want something picked apart, Andy Beard is your man.

Donations are going to be made (if possible) in large chunks of $100

[poll=1]

Voting will be open until sometime during the morning of Friday 6th April (EST) – hopefully that will give the winner some nice additional beer money for the weekend.

Earnings to date for paid reviews: $30 + $75 + $98 = $203

That means the first giveaway will be for $100 this Friday

I decided to try using the WP-Polls plugin to run these polls for a number of reasons.

• WordPress Plugin Authors like their plugins being used
• It has lots of powerful configuration options
• It will add more relevant content to my site
• It doesn’t pull information from a 3rd party server, potentially slowing down loading

What you give with one hand you take away with another

If you are giving away all your Google Juice from your sidebar, then you get less juice for

• Your own pages
• The links to sites in your content
• The links from your comments

This isn’t just a problem with Top Commenters, it is also the same with blogrolls, and I have discussed that in the past as well.

There is some WordPress Logic you can use for all page elements depending on whether you are using widgets or not.

If you are using widgets, you would probably have to use a variant of the text entry box that allows PHP – I don’t monitor developments with WordPress widgets too much, but in the past I have found the way they are implemented in most themes to be too much hard work to customize where things appear, and on which pages. I don’t know of a version of widgets that allows drag-and-drop and total control over the placement of widgets on specific pages.

If you are using normal sidebar.php code, then you can use something like the following code.

There are a number of Top Commenters plugins, I have just grabbed the code insert from one example.

<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>

< ?php
if(function_exists('fp_get_topcommenters')) {
echo fp_get_topcommenters();
}
?>

<?php } ?>

If you wanted the Top Commenters to appear on both your homepage and your single pages (the ones that permalinks point to), then you would use something like this:-

<?php if ( is_home() || is_single() ) { ?>
< ?php
if(function_exists('fp_get_topcommenters')) {
echo fp_get_topcommenters();
}
?>
<?php } ?>

There are lots of conditional flags that can be used within WordPress in this manner. Here are some others but it might not be an exhaustive list.

is_home()
is_paged()
is_search()
is_attachment()
is_single()
is_category()
is_author()
is_archive()
is_404()

There is also a function with Ultimate Tag Warrior, but you should ensure that UTW is installed in the same statement just in case you switch it off.

<?php if ( function_exists('is_tag') and is_tag() ) : ?>

Most themes already use similar code for various elements for the sidebar and in the headers.

Watch out for multiple occurrences of the logic in various files such as

sidebar.php
home.php
index.php
tags.php
single.php
page.php
archives.php

Some themes just include the sidebar.php on all pages. In this case you might have to use lots of nested logic to achieve the level of control you require.
Other themes only use sidebar.php on pages that use index.php, and have custom code for single.php – this allows you to use slightly less logic, but means you have to edit code in multiple places.

WordPress SEO Tips & Hacks

Subscribe to Comments Hacks – I am including this at the top of the list because it is highly important. Emails sent out from your domain could cause you problems with email delivery or spam complaints, and the plugin by default doesn’t comply with CAN-SPAM if you or someone else (a spammer) includes a marketing message in your emails.
The danger of overloading your server with emails being sent faster than your host allows is also worth thinking about. I know multiple blogs that have problems delivering all subscribed comments and I am sure the owners are not aware of this.

Just imagine you have 20 people comment on a post, and then you get 5 new comments in the space of one hour – that would put you over the limit on most shared hosting.

Mine are set up to be delivered by Gmail by SMTP – which email host is going to block Gmail totally?

Spam Karma latest release, and I also speculated that I get less spam using it than if I was using Akismet.

My Ultimate List of Dofollow Plugins first published in February still gains links on a daily basis, and has helped convert 100s of people into removing nofollow from their comments and trackbacks.
I have a followup project planned that I will launch within the next week that will provide a way of highlighting blogs that wish to be highlighted as supporting DoFollow.
The page also now includes information on how to remove NoFollow from blogs using Blogger and I hope to be able to include detailed Typepad and MoveableType instructions (I know of 3 people working on this)

How linking to social media and bookmarking sites could affect your search engine performance. The discussion that followed on is just as informative as the post.

Tagging and How Tagging Can Help SEO is one of the primary topics of this blog. I have written a lot of posts regarding the benefits of using Ultimate Tag Warrior (that is a link to the tag).
My analysis of the Google BlogSearch Patent didn’t gain a lot of links from SEO blogs, but then most SEO bloggers don’t understand the benefits of tagging and are too worried about duplicate content (another tag link)

Do you get linked to by the press? I also highlighted how bad some press agencies are with linking.

My attack on Top Commenters plugins caused some uproar. It is great to provide a way to thank the people who comment on your blog, but I prefer to do that by using DoFollow.
If you can understand my milk bottle analogy, you will go a long way to improving the SEO profile of your blog. If you do use a Top Commenters plugin, at least include it using some WordPress logic functions such as is_home() and is_single()

Top WordPress Plugins

I will be opening up the voting for the first round of my cash donations for best wordpress plugins later today (I need to decide which plugin or service to use). I am giving away real money in large chunks to help support WordPress Plugin Development.

Monetization & Blogging Tips

Warning about using Amazon Contextual Links

PayPerPost vs Jason Calacanis turned into an in depth discussion regarding ThisNext vs PayPerPost on Disclosure (you really have to read the comments)

Performancing Metrics Is a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing for Niche Website owners and why I recommend Clicky instead.

I write a lot about disclosure in affiliate marketing and blogging. Whilst PayPerPost is constantly being highlighted, the people doing the highlighting are actually as guilty of poor disclosure and unethical practices themselves.

Maki asked a number of bloggers why they display a feed counter and I gave what I believe is the most in depth answer. There are some good tips there for those people who already have an existing mailing list to jumpstart their blog subscription for an insane amount of social proof.
Why don’t Aweber and Getresponse offer a decent email subscription to RSS feeds that reports numbers to Feedburner? Anyone who uses their services misses out on the social proof benefit.
They should also offer their own social proof icons for email subscriptions.

In some ways I hate product launch formula style marketing of services. The scarcity factor makes it hard for a potential buyer to make an informed decision despite all the proof.
Sometimes the materials left over are of huge value, and I recommend you watch the videos from Rich Schefren.

Product Reviews

Stampede Traffic

Sponsored Reviews – with this service you can negotiate with me for paid reviews :)

Volusion Shopping Cart – was I too harsh on them?
Auction Ads

Web 2.0

Is this the Future of MyBlogLog when we finally get an API? Smart internet marketers should already be planning on how the data could be best integrated into other applications.

Tips on using Reddit and Stumbleupon. The StumbleUpon post lists my membership details to a number of social networks… lets be friends. I really should include those in my sidebar.

Sometimes it is amazing the knock-on effect of what you blog about.

My How To Use MyBlogLog post sent Cord some traffic, but the important factor is the quality of traffic sent. Eric from MyBlogLog saw the post, read Cord’s 2 part guide, and then listed it on the MyBlogLog blog, along with some more tips.

I wrote a fair amount about Twitter, partially because it was the talk of the blogosphere, and partially because as with all emerging technology, there were a lot of ethical problems in using it for commercial use. The best way to read full coverage is to use my Twitter tag.

I love Technorati, but they really have problems coping with all the new kinds of RSS and micro blog services such as Twitter, and co.Comment

I had some Digg success earlier in the month, with a story I submitted to Digg actually reaching the front page. The discussion is well worth reading with some insight from Michel Fortin and others.

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.

She has also been reporting on feed stats. Now whilst I don’t want to be accused at looking at her “details” again, if you add her WordPress.com subscribers to her Feedburner subscribers then her total is approximately 2500 subscribers. I am sure she also gains a lot more readers through various other interfaces on WordPress.com who don’t use a feed reader.

Branding & Name Recognition

Matt Mullenweg is well known for being the “#1 Matt” in the search results, and can tell people “Just search for Matt” in Google to find his blog.

Lorelle is now in the same situation, actually she is doing better than Matt. Lorelle now own the first 4 results in Google for “Lorelle”

There is less competition for Lorelle than Matt, but it is still quite an interesting legacy.

Hmm, there are less pages in Google with “Andy” than “Matt”… I suppose anything is possible.