What Does Zemanta Do Exactly?

It adds editing functions to various popular online blogging interfaces, WordPress (both .org and .com), Blogger and Typepad. These are the type of functions you could probably add a plugin for if you are using WordPress on your own hosting, but wouldn’t be available for Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.com users.

That makes it something worth taking a careful look at for niche marketers, even if you use WordPress for most of your blogs, as it might save you lots of additional installation, possible incompatibility problems in the future with WordPress upgrades, upgrades to plugins etc.

Links

Links are provided based upon various keywords that you use – unfortunately the links are almost all to Wikipedia articles, or a few popular websites.
I am wondering if it learns as it goes along, so I should probably include links to myself for niche marketing, internet marketing, online marketing, internet business, social media marketing, WordPress SEO etc.

Tagging

Zemanta provides tag suggestions based on keywords used in an article. It also seems to pick up related keywords, so for Zemanta whilst I am typing this it also picked up “Seedcamp” as a tag, which is where the developers attended to get seed funding.

I should note that whilst writing this article it didn’t pick up blogger as a tag, just as a link so far – actually that has just changed. Zemanta updates all the options available every 300 characters automatically, though you can force a manual refresh.

Yes the same functionality is available from multiple WordPress plugins, but this doesn’t require plugins and works on multiple platforms.

Gallery Pictures

Every 300 characters you write a small gallery of pictures updates in the right hand menu, based again on some kind or keyword or fully contextual algorithm.

Whilst writing the article on the book survey the following pictures were chosen. (note: I have just added them to the page with the code they use, which includes a mass of block spans and floats – nasty stuff)

Example pictures

Source: Shutterstock
Source: Shutterstock
Source: Fotolia
Source: Fotolia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia

Maybe I should have forced them into a table

The pictures seem to originate from various free stock photo sources plus Wikipedia commons. I must admit the pictures come wrapped in some fairly ugly code that is probably going to look wonderful to thousands of RSS readers.

<span class="zemanta-img" style="margin: 1em; display: block; float: right;"><a href="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/Image:101_016_DRI_Ingolstadt.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/202px-101_016_DRI_Ingolstadt.jpg" style="border: medium none ; display: block;"></a><span style="margin: 1em 0pt 0pt; display: block;">Source: <a href="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/Image:101_016_DRI_Ingolstadt.jpg" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a></span></span>

Other than the horrible code, there are other problems

• The pictures aren’t very useful – some require additional payment for larger versions, and they are all small thumbnails even if larger pictures might be available for free
• Clicking an image in the right hand side menu inserts the image at the top of the document you are editing, and even replaces an existing one. I had to copy and paste each one before selecting the next to include all 9 images above
• No dimensions provided in the code for the images
• The images are linked, along with attribution – that is overkill especially without using nofollow – there isn’t a link to a license

This part needs a little bit of work to make it useful, with both thumbnails and full images of a defined size, previews and much cleaner code.

Articles

This is a time saver for new topics, maybe less interesting for longer term because there isn’t enough of a selection to choose an appropriate article for topics that have a long history in the blogosphere.

I am just going to link through to what I can currently see for Zemanta

Each article you click is added using a fieldset.

It will be interesting to see how this appears in an RSS feed as well – you notice how much effort they are placing on branding Zemanta with all the attribution?

This type of linking may be of some use for readers, but doesn’t really encourage a blogger to visit the articles, and add something to the conversation – it is just links to related content, not what it should be, real commentary.

Your average blogger is going to have a real headache looking at this code to decide how to edit it, and the titles added to the links are really not very useful.

<fieldset class="zemanta-related" style="margin: 0.5em 0pt 1em; padding: 0pt;"><legend class="zemanta-title">Related articles</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul" style="margin: 1em 0pt 1.5em; padding: 0pt;"><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://fourstarters.com/2008/03/28/zemanta-content-suggestion-for-bloggers/">Zemanta - Content Suggestion for Bloggers</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/a-content-suggestion-engine-for-blogging-that-could-work/">A content suggestion engine for blogging? That could work...</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.blogherald.com/2008/03/27/zemanta-for-bloggers-good-idea-bad-idea-or-great-idea/">Zemanta For Bloggers? Good Idea, Bad Idea, Or Great Idea?</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.simonwaldman.net/2008/03/26/trying-out-zemanta/">Trying out Zemanta</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zementa_brings_a_semantic_layer_to_blogs.php">Zementa Brings a Semantic Layer to Your Blog</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://funkykaraoke.blogspot.com/2008/03/zemanta-content-suggestion-engine-for.html">Zemanta - A content suggestion engine for blogging</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li></ul></fieldset>

But for this article it was a real time saver other than one problem… duplication – at one time whilst I was writing there was a link included to an article on Read Write Web, but for some reason when I came to click the list of 6 links, that had disappeared. I tried refreshing a few times with no luck.
It has actually now refreshed correctly, but every time I now try to introduce the links somewhere in this existing article, I seem to end up losing half of what I have written. There is some strange rewriting going on – this plugin is complex, and currently a little idiosyncratic.

Update – eventually I managed to get it to show all 6 articles

Whatever you use from Zemanta, it automatically includes this badge at the bottom of the article – lots more viral branding and links – I think there is a little overkill.

It is Alpha

I am trying to not be overly harsh and just give useful feedback – this plugin is just alpha and shows a lot of promise, for people who like to use an online interface for their blogging.
I wonder if an additional plugin is planned for use in some way with Windows Live Writer or other desktop software which have plugin interfaces. I can see there being additional demand.

Overall I am impressed and feel this will be a very useful service for the future. I am not sure how they are going to make money from it, though they do have funding.

I discovered this touching remark from Wikia and Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales about Jason Calacanis…

With all the links Mahalo gives Wikipedia you would think there would be a little more love…

I wonder how long it will take for Wikia to have some quality content on competitive search terms.

This article does not reference Google Toolbar PageRank in any way

First of all you are going to need to do a little homework.

Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts

The Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts was truly exceptional and revealed a number of gotchas that for some reason continue to be circulated.

Key takeaways

Matt Cutts: … Now, robots.txt says you are not allowed to crawl a page, and Google therefore does not crawl pages that are forbidden in robots.txt. However, they can accrue PageRank, and they can be returned in our search results.

Matt Cutts: … So, with robots.txt for good reasons we’ve shown the reference even if we can’t crawl it, whereas if we crawl a page and find a Meta tag that says NoIndex, we won’t even return that page. For better or for worse that’s the decision that we’ve made. I believe Yahoo and Microsoft might handle NoIndex slightly differently which is little unfortunate, but everybody gets to choose how they want to handle different tags.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won’t be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn’t make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

I have just provided a couple of highlights, I am not attempting to replace a need for visiting the site I am citing. This is something I hate seeing, when people take other people’s content and repurpose it, thus making the original article worthless.
There are a few other gotchas in there, I suggest you read it 2 or 3 times to really understand what was said, and what wasn’t said.

Dangling Pages

One of the best descriptions of dangling pages is on the Webworkshop site, though they are assuming that links are totally taken out of the equation based on what they quote from the PageRank paper.

“Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.” – extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Alternate interpretation

This is just an aside, as the amount of juice lost to dangling pages currently is hard to determine, and could be handled differently

They are assuming that if page A links to 6 other pages, 5 of them being dangling links, then the website will be treated as only having 2 pages until the end of the calculation.

Whilst I haven’t delved into the maths (and probably couldn’t through lack of information and lack of knowledge), it also seems to me that at the time the pages are taken out of the cyclic calculation, a percentage of the link value can still be taken with them.

Thus though the site for cyclic calculations will be just 2 pages, the link from A to B might only transfer 1/6 of the juice on each cycle.

At the time the original paper was written, Google only had a small proportion of the web indexed due to hardware and operating system restraints.
In modern times they have a lot more indexed, thus a more complex way of handling dangling pages could be possible.

More food for thought, a link to a page that is considered supplemental could be treated as a full link or as a link to a dangling page, or some other variant.

Even more food for thought, a site with multiple interlinked pages with no external links at all could be looked on as a “dangling site”.

Ultimately what is important is that dangling pages are a juice leak, though it is difficult to determine exactly how much

Additional Research On Link Juice Flow

I have referenced these works before, and I am just going to keep on referring people to them.

• SEOFastStart by Dan Thies – a good introduction to SEO, and also introduces the ideas of controlling juice around a website – no email signup required
• Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell – a timeless classic as long as PageRank continues to be important – the download page isn’t hidden if you really don’t want to sign up to Michael’s mailing list, but I have been on his list for years.
• Dynamic Linking by Leslie Rhode – A bonus that comes with Revenge of the Mininet

I mentioned these is a comment on SEOmoz recently in a discussion on PageRank, and for some reason my comment received just 2 up votes and one down vote.

I don’t gain in any material way from promoting these free ebooks, though I might gain some goodwill. The main reason I link to them is because they are a superb resource, and it saves me countless hours writing beginners material.

OK, On to some debunking

Blocking Pages With Robots.txt Creates Dangling Pages On The First Tier

In the quoted paragraph above, Matt clearly states that pages blocked with Robots.txt still accumulate juice from the links they receive.

Those pages don’t have any external 2nd tier links that are visible to a ‘bot, thus they are dangling pages.

How much juice they leak depends on how Google currently factor in dangling pages, but Matt himself suggests not to create dangling pages.

If you read any SEO Guide that suggests that the ultimate cure for duplicate content is to block it with robots.txt, I suggest you might want to question the author about dangling pages.

Meta NoIndex Follow Duplicate Content

This is a better solution than using Robots.txt, because it doesn’t create dangling pages. Links on a duplicate content page are still followed, however both internal and external links are followed and thus are leaks, often multiple leaks for the same piece of content when using CMS systems such as WordPress which create site-wide links in the sidebar when using poorly designed themes, plugins, and especially WordPress Widgets.

If you read an article suggesting using Meta Noindex Follow, ask the author how they are controlling external links on duplicate content pages.

Meta NoIndex Nofollow Duplicate Content

If you use Meta Noindex Nofollow, whilst this is handled slightly differently by Google to Robots.txt, as the page won’t appear in search results, it is still a page accumulating Google Juice if you link to it, another dangling page or node.
Second tier leaks from the page won’t leak, but the page as a whole will leak depending on how Google are currently handling dangling pages.

I don’t see people recommending this frequently, but as with Robots.txt, ask the author about dangling pages.

Dynamic Linking & rel=”nofollow”

Extensive use of Nofollow and other forms of dynamic linking are the only way to effectively prevent duplicate content pages in some way having a effect on your internal linking structure and juice flow. The Wikipedia page on Nofollow really isn’t correct.

The Dangling Sales Page

To finish I want to give you an example of how a sales page that previously might have benefited from lots of links can easily be turned into a dangling page and effectively discounted from cyclic PageRank calculations.

Sales pages started off just as a single page with no links:-

Despite all the links coming to the site from external sources, this website is a dangling page, thus excluded from iterative PageRank calculations. It might still benefit from anchor text and other factors, but it effectively is not part of Google’s global mesh and passes on no influence.

Add Legal Paperwork And Reciprocal Links Directory:-

A much more structured site, and whilst it gains some benefit from reciprocating links there are 2 factors that are almost universally overlooked.

1. No Longer A Dangling Page – because the site now has external links, it is valid as part of the global ranking calculations. Other pages as mentioned above were previously stating that the amount of juice passed to dangling pages was minimal, so this could be potentially a huge boost.
2. More Pages Indexed – it is only a few pages, but with PageRank it is often not just how much juice you have flowing into a site, but what you do with it.

The reciprocal low quality links might not have had a huge amount of value compared to the benefit of being a member of the “iteration club” and having a few more pages indexed.

Add a link to the designer

Some early single page sales letters were not dangling pages, but didn’t benefit from any internal iterations, and acted as a conduit of juice to their web design firm.

The Danger of Using Nofollow or Robots.txt on Unimportant Pages

I have actually seen this on a few sites:-

• Reciprocal Link Directory Removed
• Link to web designer removed
• Nofollow added to legal papers that are looked on as being unimportant

Such a website is now out of the iteration club, it is a dangling page as it is no longer voting on other pages.

My Own Gotcha

I mentioned that this catches me out as well.

A while ago I wrote an article about linking to Technorati being a problem. It might still be true, but the amount of juice lost through such links might also be lower than I thought, due to Technorati using meta nofollow on every page. Technorati tag pages are themselves dangling pages with no external links.

Wikipedia and Digg on the other hand are not dangling pages. They still have external links to other sites, and thus any links to them are part of iterative calculations.

I would still say it is best to have tags pointing to your own domain tag pages, and to use nofollow on links to Wikipedia and Digg, though with Digg I suggest that is only on links to submission pages which contain no content.

Stumbleupon is also tricky – there are no external links from individual pages, but there is extensive internal linking.

With Digg and Stumbleupon, profiles rank extremely well, so you can use them for reputation management even if you get no juice direct from the profile.

I think I was the first to describe Wikipedia as a black hole of link equity, explained why you should nofollow Wikipedia extensively, and was one of the first to promote Ken’s Nofollow Wikipedia plugin.

You would have thought in 10 months they would have come up with an alternative to using nofollow on all those out-bound links.

They do however link out to a few trusted sites without nofollow, from just a few pages. I suppose Google does still allow them to be part of their iterative calculations.

Another Own Gotcha

This isn’t 100% something I can fix. I have suggested people use robots.txt on certain sites knowing it wasn’t the perfect solution.

You might notice on this site I don’t use an extensive robots.txt, and the design of my site structure is deliberate, but then at the same time I use nofollow with lots of custom theme modifications, and should use it a lot more.

Eventually I will come up with solutions to make things a little easier.

Tools In The Wrong Hands Can Be Dangerous

Using Robots.txt and Meta Noindex, Follow as a cure for duplicate content is a SEO bodge job or SEO bandaid. It may offer some benefits depending on how dangling pages are being handled, but is certainly not an ideal solution due to the amount of leaks that typically remain or dangling pages that are created.

Anyway one paragraph interested me

One of the most important parts of the QC and serping process is making sure the sites we link to on Mahalo do not have scraped or stolen content, that is, the sites do not take content from another source without attribution. We also don’t want to link to sites that borrow content from other sources with attribution if we can link to the original source instead.

I would like to applaud Mahalo for this concerted effort not to link to Wikipedia any more.

Wikipedia by their own charter does not contain any original material, and worse, they don’t give search engine readable links to their sources of information (thus potentially inflating their position in the search results compared to their sources)

Just copy the links and nothing else from the bottom of each Wikipedia article, make sure you remove the nofollow, and there will immediately be better content on Mahalo.

Of course it would be necessary to verify the links, but after that the link to Wikipedia can be dumped, as it is just the link URLs for which Wikipedia have no copyright claim.

Additional bonus – you would gain a little more credibility with your arch enemies (The snake oil SEO scumbags) by actually doing something they might agree with.

All words in this article in italics should be taken with a little bit of sarcasm

But is it all just hot air?

Also vailable as Audio [MP3] video [mp4] iPod [mp4]

Staring

Jason Calacanis (here is a link to all my Jason Calacanis coverage)

Michael Gray also known as Graywolf
Brian Provost of Scoreboard Media
Allen Stern of CenterNetworks
… and some quiet blogger called Andy Beard who no one has really heard of but at least he gets everyone’s names spelled correctly ;)

Whilst throughout the podcast Graywolf was referred to as the wolf, and most of Jason Calacanis’ readers know he has been slacking a bit on his fatblogging, in some ways I can’t help thinking that at least in this episode, the real wolf was the one sitting in the chair.

I was my quiet, unassuming self especially at 1am on my “virgin” podcast, and on an international call it isn’t easy butting in on a conversation to make a point.

The domains by proxy discussion generally took over the discussion halfway through, and being a European (si3429 of 2006) I stayed out of it, and there was some great comparison of Squidoo and Mahalo.

Jason seems to think that all SEOs are out to game his service. I still think Mahalo is going to fall into a trap of always listing the same “trusted” sites such as Wikipedia, because for any term there might be 1000 credible links, and many of the SEO / Affiliate sites could easily have better information than even the original sources.

A good “white hat” , “thick” (rather than thin) Affiliate site is going to have potentially better information and links than Mahalo, and Mahalo scalability was looked at.

The last 5 minutes covers the greenhouse program and how people might attempt to game the Mahalo results.

With Mahalo having $250,000 reserved for Wikipedia donations this year from the $10 -$15 that editors can choose to give to Wikipedia instead of keeping for themselves, and the prominent position of Wikipedia links on every results page, I am sure Jason would really love those links being reciprocated (with a followable link to a fellow “trusted” Wiki).

You can probably make more money writing for PayPerPost than Mahalo, and have the chance to write better quality content.

Yes that is a referral link, and if you sign up for PayPerPost using that link, I will make as much as Jason pays for the “1 to 2″ hours he thinks it takes to write a good “Mahalo Search result”

You could also sign up for PayPerPost using the “Review My Post” button at the bottom of every one of my posts. All you then have to do is write a blog post, link through to my post in a short review, and we both make $7.50

If you love everything about Jason Calacanis, and want to rip apart everything I have said about Jason in the past in that review, you would still make $7.50

I suggested in the comments of my previous post on Mahalo that a researcher might spend a full working day in total on a search result.
For a partial search result with the Greenhouse program, I would hope for at least 4 hours of effort in evaluation and creation. If you have a search page with 20 links, surely it takes more than 3 to 6 minutes to find and evaluate each one for inclusion?
In Europe (well in the UK) that is $40 at minimum wage, but surely a good researcher is worth more than that?
Jason says he will evaluate the payments in the future, maybe he will introduce a tiered system where you can qualify for $40 to $100 per search result and bonuses over time for maintaining them.

Wikipedia is a non-profit, Mahalo is a business – outsourced workers don’t benefit from typical startup perks such as partial ownership, they deserve better compensation.

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.

I hadn’t been following the news for a couple of days, so I popped over to one of my old haunts, The Register to see if there was anything I should know about. Occasionally, especially if I visit The Register early morning in Europe, I can pick up some interesting fresh stories that are fairly exclusive, or have some different angles.

I was greeted with this story about Wikipedia:-

Great story (scandal and controversy), hot subject (Wikipedia), pretty naff headline (“Farewell, Wikipedia?”)

In fact the headline wasn’t a total disaster, it caught my eye, maybe because it could also suggests an end to Wikipedia itself, but maybe that suggestion is a bit subtle.

So I highlighted the very clear “comment” paragraph and hit my “Ultimate Digg Bookmarklet”

Ultimate Digg Bookmarklet?

javascript:(function(){x='http://digg.com/remote-submit?phase=2%20&url='+location.href+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);if(document.getSelection()){x=x+'&bodytext='+encodeURIComponent(document.getSelection())};setTimeout(%22y.focus()%22,1000);y=window.open(x,'digger','width=650,height=450,toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,scrollbars=yes')})()

I couldn’t get this to display correctly as a dragable link
I picked this up some time ago in the comments on a blogspot blog, you can probably find it if you search hard enough – supposedly it works in all browsers, and not only picks up the URL and Title, but also the story paragraph you highlight and outputs it in a popup window. It is very useful.

I decided to just use the “comment” paragraph for my headline and story description, and forget the original title.

I ended up with the following:-

24 Year Old Fake Wikipedia Professor Forced To Step Down?

After pressure over the weekend from Wikipedia’s Il Duce Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia’s most illustrious fake professor Ryan Jordan has resigned his post at Wikia Inc.

I did add one small detail from the original title that just seemed to add a little more curiosity… a question mark “?”

I hadn’t read the whole article in depth, and there could have been a good reason for The Register’s use of the question mark in their title.

The Power Of ?

All I did was submit a story I thought was good, seemed to be original from a reputable source, and which might be of interest to people on Digg.

A couple of hours later it was up to 5 Diggs, and I also noticed a number of similar stories that had quite a few more Diggs. Doing a little searching I discovered the story had been breaking over a number of days. With my submission effectively the same story, though with different commentary, I didn’t expect it to get much reaction.

I am not a top Digg user, and had never had a story promoted before. I have a few friends on Digg, but we are talking 10s, not 100s or even 1000s.

16 hours later I was again browsing through Digg, mainly to see if there were any interesting comments on a story about StumbleUpon I had digged (it is a really good guide).

I was actually extremely shocked when presented with this:-

As of this writing the story is still live on Digg, it hasn’t been buried.

I Am Not A Copywriter

If this story was being written by Brian over at CopyBlogger or maybe Michel Fortin then they would probably be able to tell you why that particular headline was successful.

I counted at least 20 maybe 30 stories on the same subject, and those were just the ones that didn’t get buried. I am sure The Register being looked upon as a credible source helped, but lots of credible sources were reporting on the same story, and many of the headlines I have seen were very similar, but without one small detail.

?

It wasn’t until I started reading the comments on the Digg story that I realised why the story might have been Digged, though honestly it wasn’t something that was “engineered for success”. All I did was submit a story…

Half the comments were actually related to the question mark, such as

Why is there a question mark in the title?

Hes copying fox news with the question mark. Adds mystery and intrigue hehe.

and many others…

So did one character turn a 4 day old news story into a front page Digg?

What should be nofollowed and what shouldn’t, and whether nofollow should even exist at all really is a complicated subject, although Graywolf did explain fairly well the history of nofollow. The annoying thing is somehow he managed to delete a load of comments whilst house-keeping after a massive spam attack. I am going to try to dig them out of co.comments, but I might have had it turned off.

Chris has responded to my comment to his previous post with a video. Now I have only just got used to having my face showing on this blog, and webcams have never been my thing, so I am going to respond with just a few words.

Yes it could be an antitrust thing, but then again if it ever came to that, the damages could be astronomical. Imagine all the startups current vying for various types of paid links whose customers are unofficially being warned off paid linkage. “Hey, I could have been as big as Google if…”. I said somewhere else, I honestly lose track, Google should ban Adsense on any site that has commercial links without nofollow:- all encompasing including linking to sister sites, blog networks subdomains, links to employer, etc, etc So Matt would have to nofollow Google, and Scoble would have to nofollow Podtech. AOL would have to nofollow all links to Weblogs, and the Weblogs sidebar between sites would also pass on no juice.
Either that, or just devalue junk links that are not relevant. If a company has thousands of dollars in advertising revenue available, it is likely they have some kind of useful product that people buy. They just don’t happen to have a friendly site that is a massive authority able to give them instant authority status overnight.
Sure there are a few duds, but then you have a few of those at startup presentations too, and certainly at computer game shows

If you have people battling against each other, they shouldn’t be using nofollow, because they are quite often using quotations. Carsten’s pointer arguement.
If you want to delve into the ethical debate at Wikipedia, Nicholas Carr had some good commentary on Wikipedia with lively debate. He then made a follow on post discussing the previous comments with his own views.

I do think nofollow or real dynamic links should be used for links to aggregators, search engines and social bookmarking sites. In the latter when you are linking through to submission forms, not if you are linking to a specific story.

Long before “nofollow” webmasters used dynamic links… such as this one

Andy Beard

If you want links to give no reputation, that is one of the many ways to do it

<span style="cursor:pointer;cursor:hand;text-decoration: underline;color:blue;" onclick="window.location='http://andybeard.eu/'">Andy Beard</span>

You would normally use a class in a style sheet.

The benefit of nofollow is that it is so much easier to apply quickly. Why all these scripted CMS, Blog, Wiki and Forum applications needed a new tag to defeat the value of blogspam (ineffectually) is hard to tell, maybe just a PR exercise?

Linking out to relevant content actually has benefit in ranking. I have actually seen Wikipedia drop significantly for some terms in Google SERPS… yes I am shocked, I am not sure if this is after preventative action to the change, or is a significant indication that linking out helps ranking by a large margin (more than I thought), as long as it is relevant.

Anyway enjoy this SEO Video on Nofollow

There is currently a case running in the Danish courts that will effectively decide the law in Denmark for linking to a page other than a home page, typically known as deep linking.
We are not talking about hot-linking, pulling an image or video off someone else’s server into the middle of your own content, but linking as you might to this blog article, using the permalink.

There is a mapping company in Denmark that creates web pages based on other people’s data, such as a company address, and provides maps on how to get there.
They then bury deep within their terms and conditions a link to another page that states that they will charge you money if you link to one of their map pages without permission.

I suppose that is similar to me adding a terms and conditions page, and from that a linking page stating that anyone who links to my blog has to pay me $1000.

Sounds like a lot of money doesn’t it?

Krak.dk only charge $940

Krak.dk have been forced / encouraged by their previous outing on Digg’s front page to not charge a blogger for linking to a map, as long as they are not for profit, and providing they ask permission first. As of this writing however I am led to believe they haven’t changed their official paperwork on their site, or improved their notification on the content pages that you could be charged $1000 linking to information about themselves.

Business sites however are not in the clear, and one is currently fighting “the just cause” for the rest of internet users, but is having their plight ignored.

Paul O’Flahery recently wrote:-

The court case between Gauguin (an auctioneer house) and Krak.dk is now well underway and I’m eagerly awaiting the outcome of this. The case is getting good coverage in the Danish blogosphere (just check out Overskrift), and well it should as the outcome of this case could affect us all.

Unfortunately this hasn’t been picked up by any major Search Engine news site, or A – List Blogger.

The consequences of Krak winning this court battle, and maybe for the ruling to have a knock on effect across Europe are extremely serious, and could damage the way the internet works.

Websites would again become insular, not linking where credit is due simply because noone has time to search for hidden terms and conditions requiring you to pay $1000 just to link to a page.

I did my own analysis of all the links currently going to Krak.dk internal pages – their sugar trap will possibly net them $6m if they win.

Here is the current statement of the rules from Krak AFTER all the coverage from the last 2 weeks.

Official Krak answer:
Every blogger in the world is welcome to use deep links to Krak maps for free. But please ask us.
When it comes to commercial use, Krak has the same policy as Google and others. You cannot use our copyrighted maps without asking.
Krak alone decides whether the use is commercial or not.
In the actual case, the site by nature looks like a blog, but may in fact be a business, so we decided he had to pay.
If we were wrong, and if the blogger in question in fact is not selling anything (no animals or accessories), we will reconsider.

Best regards,

Poul Moeller
Kraks Forlag A/S

• This is more serious than a small tweak to a search engine’s algorithm
• A change in the terms for Google Adsense is insignificant compared
• The latest start-up from “Demo” is inconsequential
• Hell this is bigger news than Robert Scoble talking at a new PayPerPost gig (and for the record I respect Robert for doing so, and for his disclosure)
• And for search, no matter how important people might think Wikipedia is, I guarantee the ability to freely link to any web page is of much higher consequence.
• I am not sure how this compares with Britney Spears or Paris Hilton up the skirt pics, but imagine you couldn’t link to the site that just listed them?
• I am not sure how this compares in importance for global warming – hell if people couldn’t link to each other, maybe the internet would become less attractive, and we would all plant more trees.
• Windows Vista? Well you can always read an opinion on Paul’s blog about how his better half liked it (a non-geek)

Maybe I should spend the next hour checking every page of Paul’s blog in Denmark just in case he has a hidden charge for linking to his. I don’t have to do that because he is a normal sane person running a normal legitimate business and doesn’t need to trap people into paying him money.

Seriously, this story need some main-stream international press coverage.

Then I noticed a mention over on Matt’s blog (just search for Matt) in the comments that somone had written one.

Wikipedia Nofollow Plugin

And here is a link to Wikipedia to test it

Edit: after posting I grabbed a screenshot

Oh and I submitted it to Digg

Lol, ok so the “Digg This Plugin” is seriously screwed. I link through to a Digg I made for the original blog post, and the original author – in the comments I posted a link to here as an example of it working. Digg this now thinks I have votes for this post, and the button actually seems to link through to the digg on someone elses blog. Weird…
Someone has created a more secure “Digg This” plugin called “Digg That”, which apparently cures the problem, I will give it a try.