I quite like some of Alex’s products, I have been critical of most of Jared’s and I suppose I am neutral on Brian’s as I have never bought any.

Hyper lazy affiliate banner

In theory it is like a simplified version of Zemanta with an additional option to check to see if a reciprocal pingback link has been published.

There are lots of options to get rid of most footprints the problem is people are lazy and leave the defaults.

Thus you get nice footprints like this

<p><!-- pingbacker_start --><br />
<h4>Related Blogs</h4>
<ul class='pc_pingback'>

The other problem is people are greedy.

Rather than choosing the most related posts they add as many as they can – a numbers game, and may or may not keep the links.

I am referring to extreme greed.

• Is the plugin legit? It is just a tool
• Can it be abused? Most certainly
• Are idiots abusing it? Without a doubt
• Is it blackhat? Not necessarily

If you want to test the plugin you get it as a free download from an exit pop sequence if you visit the site via the banner above.
I don’t think as a tool for finding relevant links it is a bad thing, and if you are automating content aggregation in some legitimate way then those receiving (genuine) (relevant) (followed) links aren’t going to complain too much.
With a lot of creative thought something like this could be turned into a very crude Techmeme clone built on WordPress.

WordPress Comment Solutions

Shaun almost a month ago released a modified version of Lucia’s Linky Love that removes links from comments rather than nofollow them as a partial solution to Google’s changes to PageRank distribution in regards nofollow.

Dave Naylor is also doing something similar

I also now need to take you back to a comment I left over on SEOmoz

Vladomir Prelovac has come up with what I would regard as a partial solution to this problem

I am glad someone has done this as I have been dropping hints about taking this approach for the last year in various places, back to the old Webbbs days, though it needs taking a few steps further to be truly effective.

There are however some big monster bugbears that need to be considered with this approach, just like with tag pages.
The benefits you will see on his site, with a huge amount of PageRank to play with from the release of WordPress Themes are potentially significant, whereas with a smaller site it can lead to complications, and you might for instance want to noindex the newly created comment pages ;) Vladomir doesn’t use tag pages extensively, more selectively.

For the last six months or so, my understanding of how Google ranks pages has changed significantly, in part due to studying the way Google handles huge sites such as Blogcatalog & Technorati, but it would be wrong for me to publish details without clearance from Tony at Blogcatalog because I had access to their analytics.

Whilst a lot of it would be speculative… almost like a fairy story, for some it might be more akin to a lightening strike than a light bulb moment.

Imagine you have a choice between having a tag page or a comment page in Google’s index

• A tag page you can specify the exact title tag
• A page created with SEO Super Comments you can’t, in many ways the comment is about as optimized as a Tweet on twitter.

Twitter’s upstream based on Alexa is only 10% Google.com, so maybe 20% overall – a large proportion would be navigational queries & Twitter account holder names.I am not 100% confident about Alexa upstream numbers, but they might be more accurate for Twitter than many sites.

You would get an occasional tweet ranking for very long tail terms, but it is not significant.

So if you are creating new pages for comments, you would want them in the index only under specific circumstances.

• Existing flat site architecture with all original content in primary index
• Your categories are indexed and viable landing pages
• You have your tag pages sufficiently indexed which may require various techniques to make the content more unique and useful.
• Have ways to use comment data on tag pages
• Have ways to create tag pages based purely on comments and 3rd party content ;)
• The permalink for a comment from comment feeds points to the new pages, not to an anchor/fragment/”#name” – this has been something that needed fixing anyway, because permalinks on WordPress posts with lots of comments are currently broken, because comments can move from page1 to page2 – there are lots of ways to then use this RSS feed pointing to unique URLs on your site ;)
• Rewrite rules for comment URLs
• Link to a comment should use anchor text based on the title
• Link from a name should provide all comments from that user on a single page
• Extensive use of Ajax – this gets a bit complicated, and it would be experimental, but why have the whole comment on the post permalink at all? At least from a spider perspective. A representation of the comments can be pulled in as pre-cached page fragments. Comments could also be pulled into member profiles if a person commenting is also in some way a site member, and maybe in that situation an individual commenter page should be totally replaced by a member page.
• Integration with social media – if you are pulling in tweets, friendfeed etc, give those a page as well, and then allow people to even comment on those directly from your blog, and push the data back out to whichever service.
• Pull more data from trackbacks/pingbacks – grab an excerpt and host it on your site on a unique page. If someone comments on it from your site, send a pingback

The Future Of Commenting And Aggregation

An even more radical approach would be to totally get rid of “comments” as a unique entity, and many other social sites for that matter, and have only unique personal streams of media, long or short form, video, pictures, text or a mixture, and what appears on other sites, whether on a blog as a comment, or on Twitter, Youtube or an social site would just be a syndicated copy of your original content. Just one permalink for the original content, with full ownership and privacy controls over who could see it.

In many ways Youtube is just a video feed reader where you syndicate your unique video, and you should link back to the original source, and get the original source ranking :)

What I am suggesting is a somewhat reverse approach to “Echo” recently launched in private beta or the Friendfeed aggregation.

A single source that you push out to other sites, rather than a multitude of aggregators. More like Tumblr or Posterous, but with much more control.

As a marketer however, it makes it difficult to reward comment participation without some kind of additional registration process.

The Complexities Of Syndicated Comments & Social Mentions

What really turns your mind upside-down is when you have a situation where you have a private blog post in a members area, and someone leaves a comment which is specific to the private content.

The commenter needs to maintain access controls, but at the same time the owner of the site with private content needs control as well, which can possibly be overridden. Who gets priority and ultimate control?

Who would have moderation rights? If moderated, would it be only the syndicated copy on a publishers site, or the canonical version maintained by the commenter.

Do you really want to mention in an “echo” on your blog that you cross-posted the same content to 100 social media sites?

Disqus?

I recently highlighted Disqus as a solution, it still is, but my reservations are increasing after using the service for a month – whilst the WordPress integration is clearly stated as being beta, I am going to call it a very raw beta – there are tons of problems with synchronization and comment moderation leaves a lot to be desired. My last support ticket to them was 6 days ago, with a second full comment export to try to get sync sorted out remains unanswered.

I have informed them already that I am pulling the plug – the synchronization attempts are hopefully to fix problems that might prevent others having problems in the future.

There are other issues that I don’t feel should be aired here on the blog. I am giving them some time to hopefully get them fixed.

Other WordPress Plugins?

A big shout out to 4 other plugins I have been using recently

Autooptimize – so far it is the best CSS / Javascript optimization plugin I have used (and I have used quite a few) and the author has been highly responsive with fixes to various plugins and widgets. It sets expires and gzip correctly too.

What I have also done is hacked things so Disqus uses local CSS and images, that I will eventually be able to migrate to a CDN, though the Disqus CSS brings up all kinds of horrible warnings in Yslow and Page Speed Firefox Plugins.

Wp Supercache Plus – I am currently using it with Eaccelerator – I am using the “bleeding edge” version from SVN, and am in the process of implementing fragments with thematic – I had a few problems using it with memcached WP Supercache combined with Memcached object-cache.php.
Fragment caching with comments especially will reduce server load each time a new comment is added to a blog under heavy load, such as a product launch.

Probably also long overdue is a mention of Tim’s WordPress Membership Plugin. On the surface most plugin offerings look the same, it is only when you look at the code and how they have overcome hurdles that some solutions shine – I was involved a little with the early stages over a year ago and many features have since been copied, and other offerings have leapfrogged Your Members in more obvious ways, but at its core I still believe Your Members to be the most flexible solution (oh and you can see the support in public). There are lots of useful hooks and ways you can extend the platform, relatively easily, though a little PHP knowledge goes a long way. It is also pretty secure.
The full reasons deserve a lot longer post, but other solutions get promoted extensively without extensive research into alternatives – I need to spend another $500 on alternative solutions before I can realistically write a comprehensive review.
With Your Members it is possible to control access level to comments as well as the posts themselves. If you have a private post, you also want to selectively keep the comments private.

FAQ-Tastic – Zain now has both a free light version (that is very flexible) and a pro version – it is a serious solution for anyone looking to leverage their audience to create new product or content offerings. I am frequently asked to add an “Ask Andy” section here on the blog, but I will most likely do it in a more private area.
Comments on custom areas of WordPress is something I don’t think 3rd party systems will ever handle effectively.

This post has been a little bit of a mixed bag, but hopefully you find something useful & worth sharing with others.

Link to updates from Matt Cutts plus tips on how to continue PageRank sculpting effectively.

Has Google in one quick swipe removed all benefit of Dynamic Linking (old school term) or PageRank sculpting (when it became “trendy”), and potentially caused massive penalties for sites nofollowing links for user generated content and comments?

I have left a few comments on various blog posts over the last few days, especially on SEOmoz and Twitter, but though it important to solidify some thoughts here, and potentially add a little more perspective.

PageRank Sculpting Formerly Known As Dynamic Linking

The idea of controlling the flow of “Google Juice” around a website to pages that matter, or to other sites that matter has been around for a long time, at least as early as 2003 when Leslie Rohde (Stompernet Faculty) was calling it “Dynamic Linking”.

Those were the days before “nofollow” and you had to use Javascript to accomplish the internal linking control.

In the past I have linked to Michael Campbell’s Revenge of the Mininet which also provides access to Leslie’s original Dynamic Linking membership site. They are both now free, (Michael used to charge $79.95 for his ebook)

I am sure I have sent 1000s of people to Michael’s newsletter signup page over the years, but I am equally confident that 90% of the visitors didn’t sign up. I don’t receive any kind of payment recommending Michael’s work, or Leslie’s dynamic linking.

In many ways I look on at least a passing understanding of these groundbreaking ebooks as required reading for any of my SEO articles

From the comments I see on most SEO blogs, and even many of the articles, I am quietly confident that these seminal works haven’t been truly understood, and of course the content rarely gets referenced.

So I am going to do something unprecedented, and I hope Michael won’t mind – the page does appear in the SERPs

Here is a direct download link for Revenge of the Mininet

Once you get there, you can pick up a password to access Leslie’s Dynamic Linking site

Leslie has always had this great disclaimer

DISCLAIMER!

Some of the techniques and technologies described in the foregoing are not without their pitfalls and potential unintended consequences. If you are new to web business, inexperienced at search engine optimization, or do not feel comfortable with HTML and Javascript (at least at a rudimentary level), you should not attempt to employ the advanced techniques shown here!

Access The Source of SEO Knowledge

Michael Campbell

I have just given you access to 4 or 5 year old information that in all likelihood is more advanced than you will find discussed on 95% of SEO blogs and forums, and whilst I don’t from principle/ethics join any private SEO content area to avoid conflict with what I blog about, I am quietly confident that it would still be looked on as advanced content for members only, or not even covered in such depth.

But that is just a trickle of knowledge compared to direct access

Michael has had an internet marketing newsletter for years.
He also now runs a private membership site which is very affordable, and you can follow him on Twitter @dmcorp

Leslie Rohde

I am still eagerly awaiting an update to Leslie’s Dynamic Linking suggested on his SEO Software site.

A major update to this material is currently in process owing to some recently discovered changes in the way Google is processing links. Look for an announcement early next year (2009) — the changes will likely revolutionize on-site linking techniques … again!

Leslie also has an SEO Strategy blog, which he actually updates once in a while. I am going to have to explore the blogging platform he uses, Pebble. You can also follow Leslie on Twitter @leslierohde

There are 2 other ways to learn more from Leslie

1. Just before the New Year Leslie put together a new site “Optimize Recession” where he introduced the idea of “Zone Based SEO” – I mentioned it on Twitter.
   Zone based SEO might seem obvious at first, but it allows you to systematize and possibly even automate specific SEO campaigns, especially now it is possible to extract ranking positions from Google referrer data.
2. Stompernet – Leslie is one of the faculty at Stompernet, who now offer very progressive SEO and marketing training. Start off just by joining their newsletter and the 7 Deadly SEO Sins course plus free videos, and possibly get their “Stomping The Search Engines 2″ course for $1 (plus a trial to their Net Effect magazine)

The Death Of Dynamic Linking With Javascript?

Of everything that has been discussed about Google making changes to which links they will follow and count going forward, how they handle javascript is probably the one that is worth the most consideration.

The first I read about it was on Search Engine Land in an article by Vanessa Fox (who used to work for Google as a member of their webmaster team) covering Google Javascript Links.
(Note: I know that anchor text is very contrived, but SEO is about helping people find what they are searching for, not snake oil or gaming Google)

Having given a great link, I can justify grabbing a small code example

Some examples of code that Googlebot can now execute include:

• <div onclick="document.location.href='http://foo.com/'">

• <tr onclick="myfunction('index.html')"><a href="#"
  onclick="myfunction()">new page</a>

• <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open
  ('welcome.html')">open new window</a>

Javascript That Is Still Dynamic?

This will probably work

onclick=”myfunction(‘jkhhjstdysd’)

Have myfunction() within a file loaded in the header, or preferably in the footer for faster page loading. You would still want to use the CSS that Michael and Leslie suggest for usability.
Somehow define which destination ‘jkhhjstdysd’ refers to, and that could potentially be broken down into components.

If Google somehow cope with that, and possibly easier would be to just use pure external javascript that pulls in some XML, but that then complicates things if you want to mix real links with dynamic ones.

But this is moot if nofollow actually still works.

Does Nofollow Still Work For Dynamic Linking or PageRank Sculpting?

I am going to lead with the freshest insight I have read, Dan Thies (also Stompernet Faculty) thinks things are being blown out of proportion.

Here are the primary opinion pieces and coverage I have seen, though I am sure there were plenty more

Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting

Didn’t comment, was too busy looking for other coverage

Google (Maybe) Changes How the PageRank Algorithm Handles Nofollow

My comment on the post

I can only think that Google have been misinterpreted.

If I have a blog post with 300 comments, and have the links nofollowed (my blog is dofollow but example), then there would effectively be juice lost due to the comment links.

Links are valuable, because they add to the relevance of a comment made, because a reader can follow them to find out more about the person.
However they also form part of disclosure.

If this is only for internal links, there are major problems because often a link will be nofollowed because it points to a tracking link that is also blocked by robots.txt

Any sensible knowledgeable webmaster is going to nofollow those links, because they serve no purpose for Google in their current state, and who wants to turn them into hanging pages.

That may also be a workaround, if Google handles links blocked with Robots.txt differently

No Clarification Forthcoming from Google on Nofollow & PageRank Flow
My comment on the post

I can’t see any evidence that this is affecting external links.

Wikipedia is still a black hole of link equity. If this affected Wikipedia external links, we would see some effect, because due to recursive calculations through internal linking, it could potentially reduce their juice pool by as much as 30%

It would also affect the Ebay group with sites such as epinions.

If it has any effect, it will be internal links only.

The amount of juice lost could be similar to dangling or hanging pages, and due to many poor SEO articles suggesting robots.txt for duplicate content, Google Webmaster guidelines suggesting robots.txt for search results, and just ignoring obvious signals such as TBPR.

Yes, any smart SEO could spot the toolbar showing some green on pages blocked by robots.txt and work things out for themselves.

But the juice goes into the internet ether, and due to macro PageRank calculations, comes back.

If anything, this will help Google surface more long-tail content, and sites with lots of pages will benefit.

Live Blogging Of Matt Cutts @ SMX

You & A With Matt Cutts

Is What’s Good For Google, Good For SEO
Important to read both articles because it gives a clearer insight to the exact wording on lots of different issues.

Alternative Reactions

PageRank Sculpting is Dead? Good Riddance

PageRank Sculpting – Recent Matt Cutts Video

I have to strongly point out that this video was recorded before SMX, and maybe even a week or 2 before. It is on the official Google webmasters channel on YouTube, thus has probably been vetted in some way for accuracy.

Full Transcript

Matt Cutts on PageRank Sculpting

Rand, In Brighton, and that might be Rand Fishkin, I don’t know asks:-

What are your views on ‘PageRank Sculpting’?
Useful and recommended if implemented right, or unethical?

Well I wouldn’t say it is unethical because it is stuff on your website – you are allowed to control how the PageRank flows around withing your site.
Erm, I would say that it is not the first thing that I would work on.
I would work on:-

• Getting more links
• Having higher quality content

Those are always the sort of things that you want to do first.

But then if you have a certain amount of budget of PageRank, erm… you certainly can sculpt your PageRank.
I wouldn’t necessarily do it with the nofollow tag, although you can put a nofollow on a login page, or something that is customized where a robot will never log in for example, but a better more effective form of PageRank sculpting is choosing for example which things to link to from your homepage.

So imagine you have got two different pages.
You have got one product that earns you a lot of money every time someone buys, and you’ve got another product where you make… you know 10 cents.

You probably want to highlight this page. You want to make sure it gets enough PageRank that it can rank well.

So this is more likely to be a page that you want to link to from your home page.

So when people talk about PageRank sculpting, they tend to think nofollow and all that sort of stuff, but in some sense the ways that you choose to create your site, your site architecture, and how you link between your pages is a type of PageRank sculpting.
So it is certainly not unethical to have all the links come into your site, and you decide how to link within your site, and how to make the pages within your site.
Erm, I do think that having more links because you have great content is a better way to rank well because it is a second order effect to be sculpting your PageRank.

It can be useful, but it wouldn’t be the first thing that I would do.

Commentary on Matt’s video I will leave to my good mate Dave
PageRank Sculpting; its all old school baby

Response From Google After SMX About PageRank Sculpting

None…. yet – regard this as a placeholder

I do have some thoughts though:-

1. I think we need a strong statement that external links with nofollow would not cause PageRank to evaporate.
2. Nofollow is a simple solution for user generated content and comments, but if it has any effect of PageRank disappearing, we are going to lose the links on tons of blogs totally.
   It would be a sad day that an action by Google reduced the interlinking of the web.
3. I don’t want to encourage use of javascript for PageRank sculpting – it is not really very good for accessibility
4. Noscript – Nested embedded object items, containing links or thumbnails to source that may well be descriptive of content? This is needed if RSS Readers and web based email clients are going to continue to strip out video embeds.
5. Links that lead to pages blocked with robots.txt and other hanging pages really need to be nofollowed. I think we need to know that in that situation PageRank wouldn’t normally evaporate, but I can understand why that might not be confirmed.
6. I would love a much clearer indication of page size that Google will index as there are just vague notions that it can be more than 100 links per page.
   If a size is specified, is that gzipped?

Matt Cutts On PageRank Sculpting

Matt Cutts today (June 16th 2009) wrote a post confirming that Google now treats PageRank significantly differently than the original PageRank patent, and that links with nofollow, whilst they don’t pass PageRank to the linked page, also can reduce the amount of PageRank that flows to other links on a page.

Rank Fishkin has already responded with analysis
Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow

I also missed this commentary from Matt Leonard on why this could potentially make life harder for niche sites

There are bound to be more posts appearing on Techmeme today

PageRank Sculpting Isn’t Dead – It Has Evolved

Lets take a look at my WordPress SEO Masterclass

Those Red links in the Sandcastle structure are not nofollow, they are oneway linkage.

It can be achieved with fairly simple coding, I even posted part of it over 2 years ago though the code needs to be updated for WordPress tagging rather than UTW.

This linking structure still works extremely effectively, but with one major caveat – internal & external links on the tag pages being used to channel juice back to the home page can’t be nofollowed.

If you are using default WordPress “ugly excerpts” they don’t contain any HTML content, no links to worry about other than the links to the posts.
Tag pages should thus be restuctured to highlight your best content, otherwise you end up with 3rd level push. 3rd level push in most cases isn’t a bad thing, if you don’t have a lot of comment links.

Rather than remove links that you previously nofollowed, the key is to add additional internal links to useful pages.

There are ways to handle the comment links, retain the benefit of having the comment content on your blog, and even keep giving your visitors a little link equity (dofollow links), though that solution will require significant programming effort.

Blogspot bloggers are now totally messed up, as even adding nofollow to their tag links isn’t going to retain juice.

Those who based their internal linking on my advice are not significantly affected by this change, and as this actually happened over a year ago, it is one of the reasons they have benefited.

The new PageRank sculpting could be looked on as advance information architecture, which was always the advanced PageRank sculpting

Expect a new WordPress SEO Masterclass soon, but it is unlikely to be free, and I would avoid following the advice of anyone who suggests conning your community using Iframes and Javascript for comments.

Update: Additional coverage worth a read @ Search Engine Land, Future Now & Search Engine Watch

I don’t think there is one “premium” WordPress Theme that doesn’t claim to be perfect for SEO “out-of-the-box”, so I thought I would bash some theme developer heads around and maybe knock some sense into them.

They might achieve 50:50 of what could be expected of a true SEO theme (though I haven’t seen the latest Semiologic Pro out in the wild), and potentially with the aid of 3rd party plugins currently available, they could reach 80:20.
However most claim they don’t need 3rd party plugins to achieve their eminence in WordPress SEO

That doesn’t leave WordPress SEO plugins off the hook, there isn’t one plugin that gets beyond 60:40 or with some tweeking possibly 70:30, depending on what factors you feel are important, or are aware of.

Awareness is certainly one of the problems…

First Link Priority

First link priority is something that was first raised as a concern at the end of 2007 in a number of tests carried out by Michael VanDeMar.

You May Be Screwing Yourself With Hyperlinked Headers

Single Source Page Link Test Using Multiple Links With Varying Anchor Text – Part Two

In mid-2008 there was continued discussion at SEOmoz, it was debunked by SEO CO, and “re-bunked” by SEO Scientist

Shaun also did some testing in October 2008 on first link for internal links.

Michael followed up with even more testing in November

Now around mid-August 2008 Stompernet were also starting to ramp up the launch of their new premium SEO training product, Stomping the Search Engines 2.

This product actually has some very personal history, as I was first expecting it to launch… in 2005 – I was pretty much a newbie online marketer, intrigued by SEO and blogging (I was already into internal linking in a big way) and approached Andy Jenkins to see if I could blag an early review copy.

That version never materialized, but I belive became a cornerstone of their coaching program and eventually Stompernet.

In Stomping the Search Engines 2.0, Module 4 Session 4C, Leslie Rohde talks about a concept called First Link Priority. This training occurs at 4 minutes and 9 seconds into the video.

Grab the 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes Course to learn more about First Link Priority

I don’t know how much Stompernet have tested this, exactly when they started their testing, or when they made this information available to their members, but lets give Michael VanDeMar the benefit of the doubt as the first person testing this, and Stompernet were probably testing this early 2008.

I have always stated you want the content first, before any navigation, but had assumed a nofollowed link wouldn’t be counted. For a long time I was using a nofollow link in my header, and many of the blog posts above came during my “blogging break”.

Now open a new tab in your browser, and visit a few blogs running premium WordPress themes that supposedly are “Perfect” for SEO, and have everything covered, and many are even heavily promoted by notable people in the SEO community.

There are 2 things you will notice:-

1. If they have some kind of header navigation, it appears in the source code before the content
2. Many of them use a home link at the beginning of the navigation, and some even nofollow the link in a vain attempt to stop the link counting for both juice and anchor text.
3. If you look at the source code, you will find they are still using SEO plugins of various types.

If you know what you are doing with CSS, you can have top navigation appear even in the source code for the footer of your theme.

Referential Integrity

I must admit the first time I heard the term “referential integrity” in connection with SEO was in a free Stompernet video which you can gain access to just for joining their mailing list, as part of their 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes series. It is a term normally asociated with databases, though I can understand why Leslie “borrowed” the term.

I loath explaining things in depth when someone else has already done an excellent job, thus I strongly recommend you sign up, as Leslie does a great job of explaining an “emergent property” that isn’t on any patents.

Grab the 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes Course to learn more about referential integrity

One major factor explained in Leslie’s video is what you say your own pages are about, not just the on-page factors, but also how you reference your own pages.

As “pagerank sculpting” was the big SEO topic of 2008 (something Leslie first taught in 2004), we could look on this as “keyword sculpting” or “topic sculpting” – please understand this isn’t exactly the same as siloing – very close cousins but not the same.

In many ways “topic sculpting” is repairing the damage caused by lazy webmasers using modern content management systems, pumping out content pages and internal navigation on auto-pilot, and only really caring about the links they received from external sources, often resorting to search engine spamming to gain referrential links with the anchor text they required.

That however is only the “confirmation” element in the above screenshot.

Definitions

Just to avoid confusion, I want to define the following terms

• Entry Title – The title you add in the text entry field above the visual editor in WordPress, that is then used in various WordPress functions to create default slugs, the “Entry Title” DIV on Posts and Pages, and is also used in wp_list_pages(), wp_list_posts() and even the default meta titles.
• Meta Title – this is the title that appears in the header of each page, and appears as the title in Google search results. Sometimes this is confusingly labelled as “page title” within WordPress SEO plugins.
• Short Title – A title that can be used as anchor text for navigation elements that is optimized for passing of internal reputaion or anchor text to the destination page.

I should also point out that the idea of Short Text isn’t new, other CMS solutions have had this feature for years, and the ModX community use it as a key unique selling point of why ModX might be better than WordPress.

WordPress Pages – Topic Sculpting

You have always had the ability to precisely define the anchor text of WordPress pages, simply by creating your navigation menus manually with a little HTML directly in your theme files, or using a text widget.

By Default if you use a widget or theme using wp_list_page() then the link anchor text will be the Entry Title for the page.

Some work has been done to optimize the anchor text pointing at WordPress pages – the Thesis theme has recently introduced ways to define specific anchor text, and there are existing WordPress plugins that achieve the same functionality, or possibly with more flexibility such as Page Lists Plus by Tim Holt.

Page Links Plus allows you to define the anchor text used for links to WordPress Pages

This still isn’t a perfect solution:-

• You might want to use multiple widgets contain 7 links plus or minus 3 (this would be a concept familiar to you if you have watched a previous Stompernet video series, and downloaded the Stompernet Scrutinizer)
• You will probably want different sets of links or widgets appearing on different pages – there are some clunky solutions available, maybe things will improve with WordPress 2.8
• If you are a geek interested in optimizing your conversion, you might even want to split test things – with the way I have created my split test code for WordPress, I can actually split test different widgets on the page, removal of widgets etc.

WordPress Posts Topic Sculpting

With WordPress posts, things become a lot more complicated, though the hardest part was realising it is a problem that needs to be fixed.

I have deliberately created the Entry Title for this post extremely long – you will see post titles used of various lengths on blogs. General advice from SEOs is to ensure you have keywords somewhere near the beginning as it was historically thought that the position of the keywords in links, headings and meta titles matters.

Shaun actually narrowed down the maximum length for anchor text to 55 characters last year.

Based upon my Entry Title, that would mean my anchor text for this post would be:-

“A Geeky Look & Some Simple Solutions To Achieving First”

Sucks doesn’t it?

But with a standard WordPress installation, using conventional blogging techniques, even using premium SEO optimized themes, that is the crap anchor text you end up with.

Yes I am using slightly crude terminology, but when I was at college studying engineering, we had a technical term for the material that Lada engine blocks were made out of… crapite.

WordPress could be likened to a Lada

Lada – Credit

A Lada can get you from A to B – technologically fairly simple, but an enthusiast can tinker with the engine, add “go faster” stripes, and get some performance out of it.

In many ways WordPress is similar

WordPress Post Anchor Text Usage

To understand all the complexities of title use in WordPress, you have to know where they can potentially be used, baring in mind the purpose for the links.

How Different Titles Are Typically Used In WordPress

(I created a nice, compliant XHTML table in Seamonkey composer, but WordPress without plugins hates tables)

The Simple Solution

Whilst everything above might seem extremely complex, there is in fact a very simple solution that can be used with almost every theme, without modification, other than a radically different approach to CSS styling and conventional post entry.

However this approach requires that you through aside any misconceptions that might have been falsely hammered into you that content is king, and you don’t really need to think about SEO, just create great content.

You need to think like an SEO & Marketer… just a little

Got it? Great!

Please forgive me, I really couldn’t resist using a provocative title in the example.

You don’t have to be quite so bold with your headline.

Your Entry Title would still ideally be H1 on single pages, and H2 on navigation pages, but styled to be a lot less conspicuous.

This method effectively forces you to use custom excerpts with HTML, otherwise you are not going to have much of anything to encourage clicks.

The Geeky Solution

There are plenty of intermediate solutions, many using custom fields, modified themes etc.

This is the personal solution I am currently using on Andybeard.eu

This is rough code… there are some CSS problems in Internet Explorer resulting in links being hidden, I am only currently handling navigation links from the home page and various archives, and I still need to add some simple code to check whether the Headspace WordPress SEO plugin is installed.

Here is the end result:-

Geeky solution to First Link Priority & Referential Integrity With WordPress

Headspace allows you to define custom meta data for each post, that then gives you a text entry box along with other SEO data entry fields.

This is actually vital for work-flow, having all the options you need to think about within a single panel, and because Headspace is a framework with plugin modules, it is possible to simplify the interface to only include the items you need, and then hide other functions behind the “advanced” link.

The Headspace WordPress SEO Plugin allows you to add custom meta entry fields that can be used in themes directly, or using filters

Here is some code to play with, taken straight from my functions.php of the child theme I use with the Thematic theme framework.

<?php
// Information in Post Header TOTAL REPLACEMENT
function gwo_thematic_postheader() {
    global $id, $post, $authordata;

    // Create $posteditlink
    $posteditlink .= '<a href="' . get_bloginfo('wpurl') . '/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&amp;post=' . $id;
    $posteditlink .= '" title="' . __('Edit post', 'thematic') .'">';
    $posteditlink .= __('Edit', 'thematic') . '</a>';
    $posteditlink = apply_filters('thematic_postheader_posteditlink',$posteditlink); 

    if (is_page()) {
        $posttitle = '<script type="text/javascript">utmx_section("PostHeader")</script>' . '<h1 class="entry-title">' . get_the_title() . '</h1>' . '</noscript>' . "\n";
	} elseif (is_single()) {
        $posttitle = '<h1 class="entry-title">' . get_the_title() . "</h1>\n";
    } elseif (is_404()) {
        $posttitle = '<h1 class="entry-title">' . __('Not Found', 'thematic') . "</h1>\n";
    } else {

$shortie = MetaData::get_custom ('shorttitle');
	if ($shortie == '') {
		$shortie = MetaData::get_page_title ($post->ID);
	}
	if ($shortie != '') {

        $shortlink = get_permalink();

		$shorttitle .= '<<a href="';
        $shorttitle .= $shortlink;
        $shorttitle .= '" title="';
        $shorttitle .= __('Permalink to ', 'thematic') . the_title_attribute('echo=0');
        $shorttitle .= '" rel="bookmark">';
        $shorttitle .= $shortie;
        $shorttitle .= "</a>\n";

// Open Div For Our Shortlink Tab
		$posttitle .= '<div class="short-tab">' . "\n";
// For IE
        $posttitle .= '<div class="tab-canv">';
        $posttitle .= $shorttitle;
        $posttitle .= '</div>' . "\n";
// End IE
// For All other browsers (SVG Object)
        $posttitle .= '<![if !IE]>' . "\n";
        $posttitle .= '<object class="tab-obj" type="image/svg+xml" data="data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns=\'http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\' xmlns:xlink=\'http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\'><a xlink:href=\'' . $shortlink . '\' target=\'new\'><text text-anchor=\'end\' padding-top=\'10\' x=\'-10\' y=\'20\' font-family=\'Tahoma\' font-size=\'18\' transform=\'rotate(-90)\' text-rendering=\'optimizeSpeed\' fill=\'#888\'>' . $shortie . '</text></a></svg>">' . "\n";

// Fallback Old Browsers
        $posttitle .= '<div class="tab-old_canv">' . "\n";
        $posttitle .= $shorttitle . "\n";
        $posttitle .= '</div>' . "\n";
// End Fallback
        $posttitle .= '</object>' . "\n";
        $posttitle .= '<![endif]>' . "\n";
// End For All other browsers
        $posttitle .= '</div>' . "\n";

}
	$posttitle .= '<h2 class="entry-title"><a href="';
        $posttitle .= get_permalink();
        $posttitle .= '" title="';
        $posttitle .= __('Permalink to ', 'thematic') . the_title_attribute('echo=0');
        $posttitle .= '" rel="bookmark">';
        $posttitle .= get_the_title();
        $posttitle .= "</a></h2>\n";
    }
    $posttitle = apply_filters('thematic_postheader_posttitle',$posttitle); 

    $postmeta = '<div class="entry-meta">';
    // $postmeta .= '<span class="author vcard">';
    // $postmeta .= __('By ', 'thematic') . '<a class="url fn n" href="';
    // $postmeta .= get_author_link(false, $authordata->ID, $authordata->user_nicename);
    // $postmeta .= '" title="' . __('View all posts by ', 'thematic') . get_the_author() . '">';
    // $postmeta .= get_the_author();
    // $postmeta .= '</a></span><span class="meta-sep"> | </span>';
    // $postmeta .= __('Published: ', 'thematic');
    // $postmeta .= '<span class="entry-date"><abbr class="published" title="';
    // $postmeta .= get_the_time(thematic_time_title()) . '">';
    // $postmeta .= get_the_time(thematic_time_display());
    // $postmeta .= '</abbr></span>';
    // Display edit link
    if (current_user_can('edit_posts')) {
        $postmeta .= ' <span class="meta-sep">|</span> ' . $posteditlink;
    }
    $postmeta .= "</div><!-- .entry-meta -->\n";
    $postmeta = apply_filters('thematic_postheader_postmeta',$postmeta); 

    if ($post->post_type == 'page' || is_404()) {
        $postheader = $posttitle;
    } else {
        $postheader = $posttitle . $postmeta;
    }

	echo apply_filters( 'gwo_thematic_postheader', $postheader ); // Filter to override default post header
}
add_filter('thematic_postheader', 'gwo_thematic_postheader');
?>

The modified section (for first link priority and referential integrity) is commented in the code (Begin / End Shortie Code)

The logic is fairly simple:-

1. If short title is defined, use it
2. If there isn’t a short title, but a meta title is defined, use that instead
3. Otherwise don’t display a short title at all and stick with the original entry title as the first link and anchor text.

I will repeat, the code is rough, and if the Headspace plugin is currently switched off, it will break your blog.

I used SFV Object, you could also use SIFR to replace and style text, or custom images that somehow dynamically style the text link, though make it relevant to the text link and article, and maybe use GD Library to add a text caption.

Here is the CSS I am currently using. It is broken in WordPress in Internet Explorer, at least using The Thematic Framework, though works in isolation on some simple test HTML.

html>body .tab-canv { display: none }
html>body .tab-obj  { display: block }
.home #content .post {margin:0 0 0 40px;}
.archive #content   {margin:0 0 0 40px;}
.tab-canv, .tab-obj { height:300px; width:30px; }
.tab-old_canv { font-family: 'Tahoma', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; }
.short-tab {position:absolute; margin: 0px 0px 0px -40px; max-width: 30px; width:30px}

<![if IE]>
.tab-canv { float:left; text-align:right; padding-bottom:20; filter: flipv() fliph(); writing-mode: tb-rl; font-size:18px; font-family: Tahoma; background-color: white; display: block; color: #888 }
.tab-canv h2{font-size:18px;}
.tab-obj  { display: none }
<![endif]>

Please make sure you check out The 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes from Stompernet – learn your SEO from the source

Special Note: This is the kind of content I will be preparing for private member access soon, and at least some of this content once I have refined the code a little, will be removed from the public.

Please check out the follow-on post in this series

Is Stompernet Wrong About First Link Priority?

As well as offering an alternative opinion about first link priority, you will learn how to run your own SEO experiments.

One of the promotions I was testing was for Jeff Johnson’s WordPress SEO Blogging Software.

The post was written on Friday, not the ideal time to publish, but I have always had reasonable response over weekends, and it was also picked up on Search Engine Land which gives it an additional boost.

The topic is about as targeted as it can get for my audience, WordPress SEO. I spent a fair amount of time in research, and gave a very fair overview of the software, its value even as a freebie (I had previously spent $150+ on other solutions that are now out of date) and had taken time to contact Jeff to get some things changed.

I didn’t give it a “glowing testimonial”, but I did find it useful, and though others would as well.

So how well do you think it performed?

What follows are 2 polls, you will probably have to click through from your RSS reader or email for these to work correctly. Whilst for the last few days Google hasn’t been reporting feed subscribers through to Feedburner correctly for my site, my total subscribers are now hovering around 4000.

Poll 1 – Clickthroughs

[poll=4]

Please vote on both polls

Poll 2 – Signups to Download

[poll=5]

I will have a followup in a few days.

One of the great things about promoting an affiliate product as opposed to linking through to someone else’s blog post is that there is normally some form of tracking on the back end, so I can actually see how many people clicked through to read about Jeff’s product (which is free) and also how many signed up for his email list so that they could download the software.
This gives an exceptional overview of both sides of the traffic equation not normally possible, and many affiliate promotions don’t offer both.

A few days ago I was honestly prepared to rip a product to shreds. It wasn’t that it was a bad product, but it wasn’t as well prepared as it should have been, and from what I can tell it was due to an honest communication error between a well respected online marketer and his programming team.

But before I talk about the product itself, I am going to give you a little history lesson.

WordPress Elite

A few years ago I purchased a script called WordPress Elite. It was pretty useful, and allowed you to point the software at a server, and create WordPress blogs based on a default configuration plus you could select various parameters.

I even sold a couple of copies as an affiliate.

It didn’t do everything, you still had to log into the WordPress blog and activate the plugins, configure them etc, and at the time I was an SEO newbie… some would say I still am ;)

The marketer however sold the business, and the new owner didn’t do anything with it. He got some new subscribers. He asked the list once for new features, then nothing was released, and the script never really supported 2.x very well.

WordPress Super Installer

I managed to pick this up really cheap when it was first released, and I soon forgot that WordPress Elite was going through some teething problems.
Unfortunately development pretty much stopped at the beginning of 2007.

First, as with any newly released version of software (including wsi) there are bugs and anomalies that need to be worked out before the version is completely stable. I know one bug in particular reported to WordPress about v2.1 is it’s lack of compliance with the xmlrpc standard. Xmlrpc is what most of the blog content auto-posters use to post content to your blogs via remote methods (as apposed to logging in a posting something manually).

Though the newest version of WordPress may have some advantages over the previous versions, I don’t feel for the sake of building blog farms to achieve back links to your money sites that it makes sense to quickly jump on-board a new version, just for the sake of having a new version.

The last update I received from Randy Rhodes (not Randi from Air America) was at the end of July 2007.

WordPress 2.0.x is still maintained because it needs to be for Debian inclusion, thus if you don’t need all the fancy features of WordPress 2.1 or above, it is still a good choice, especially if you are fed up of things breaking all the time, or have tons of WordPress blogs to maintain.

Other Scripts

There are other scripts out there, plus various services that promise to install WordPress on your behalf. I must admit I am not that keen on forking out more money, changing business processes, and then for another script development to grind to a halt.

I would never trust an automated service to install WordPress packages for me. There are a few cropping up again, there have been a few in the past, but why reveal all your niche sites to a 3rd party hiding behind a website, even if you trusted them to do the installation, and have access to your server.

WordPress Packages

If you are not too reliant on 10s of plugins, you can get by just creating WordPress packages. Include a set of standard plugins and themes that you have tweaked, upload, switch on the plugins, and configure them to your liking.
Or you can create a process, and pay someone else to do it for you.

SEO Optimized WordPress Package

Jeff Johnson has just released a special package for WordPress SEO

The installation is painless

Setup your database as always
Edit your config as always
Upload
Enter your blog name and email address
Log in
Select a theme

So what is done for you?

Permalinks
Plugin Activation
Plugin settings (though I am not sure how much they differ from default)
Ping list

Shall we coin a new phrase… the “4 Ps”

The themes are also relatively well optimized, so you have H1s where they should be

Pretty useful?

WordPress SEO Plugins Installed

All In One SEO Pack
Google XML SiteMaps
Sociable (the new official version with nofollow)

also Akismet and Simple Captcha

Why Was I Going To Slam It?

This problem was exasperated by many of the themes Jeff Johnson decided to include in the package, some optimized themes from MyType.com who basically take fairly average WordPress themes, optimized them a little, and then stick 5 spammy links in the footer to various pages on their domain, many seem to be paid client blogs.

(disclaimer: MyType.com currently rank first for WordPress SEO and I have a post blocked by robots.txt ranking on the same page – it is not exactly a competitive search term, doesn’t bring much traffic, but it probably takes 100s of spammy theme links to rank for it now)

In addition Jeff had included a few links on the default blogroll, and a badge in the sidebar.

When you added up the total number of external links per page, and it came to 14 without the WordPress default links etc, it couldn’t really be looked at as a good recommendation for SEO, especially if people download it who are less experienced.

So I emailed Jeff, and within a few hours I had a reply that it was going to be fixed. I think I may have been the only one who was concerned.

It Is Not Perfect

I don’t like some of the sites on the pinglist they use – lots of .jp sites – my personal pinglist for “quality” blogs consists of just one site, Feedburner, and I let them handle the pings to other places.

sidenote: I keep seeing Pingoat listed on ping lists – last time I checked Pingoat hadn’t been accepting pings for 18 months, maybe that is now closer to 2 years. Web pings only. Maybe John Reese when he purchased the site switched that function back on and didn’t tell anyone (such as update the Pingoat blog) – looking at recently updated blogs on Pingoat, it seems like the Poles might be using a script to spam the hell out of it.

I would use a different plugin selection, though I am sure the version of WordPress Jeff provides to his clients has a more comprehensive feature set. That being said, you really want to minimise plugin use if you are hosting a lot of blogs on a single server.

The themes are better than the originals, though you might want to look for replacements.

As they stand, if lots of people use this WordPress version for blog farms and datafeed sites, they have a bit of a heavy footprint. They still have a lot of nofollow links in the footer, plus 2 blogroll links and a banner

It Is A Time Saver

Even as it stands, for an experienced WordPress users it represents a time saver, and for someone less experienced who has problems with the basic steps of setting up plugins, permalinks etc it is a good resource, especially if the package gets improved over time.

Jeff is providing lots of instructional videos on how to install the package, though effectively it is the same as any WP installation. He does recommend using this only for new blogs, though there is a procedure that can be used for existing sites.

It Is Free

Whilst I started off with some real concerns, what concerns remain can be cured with very simple hacking. I expect this to be well maintained.

Thanks Jeff, great value for money – download it here.

p.s. I am not sure how long Jeff will have this available. It is just one of many things he is providing free of charge as part of a product launch, and these bonuses tend to disappear from public display once a launch has completed.
My advise would be to download it and test it on a few spare domains, tweak it for your own use and feed the blogs you create with some content.

I can understand why Matt Cutts might want to change what noindex does, it is not just Koreans making occasional mistakes, for instance I just noticed the whole WebProNews video blog is currently noindex nofollow. I am sure that is a mistake, it is easy to make in WordPress… just one click and save.

All in one plugins are dangerous if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve

Rel-nofollow, meta instructions and robots.txt are just tools.

Just because a tool is available to use in your toolbox, doesn’t mean you should use it. You don’t always need to use a big hammer to repair a TV set though sometimes a big hammer just isn’t big enough ;)

Inclusive PageRank Sculpting

Whilst I agree with Michael that nofollow has a purpose and I use it as a tool to achieve desired results, Shari raises some good points.

The Search Engine Land blog doesn’t use nofollow on links, but the “information architecture” is sculpted with a very flat profile. SEL is an information resource, and all pages are given almost equal emphasis.
That may not be true of a niche website, e-commerce site, etc – this is something that has to be determined on a case by case basis.

If you are looking at WordPress SEO in a competitive niche, for specific keywords, having a specialist toolset available is an advantage.
That page is blocked by robots.txt, but still ranks highly for reasonably competitive terms based upon anchor text within plenty of editorial links, and internal linking structure, domain authority etc.

Pages blocked by Robots.txt still accumulate Google Juice.

But you shouldn’t give a baby razor blades to play with, let alone a chain saw.

Less Important Pages Can Be Your Quarterbacks

My sitelinks are currently a total mess, and haven’t been updated since November. I have so many links on my front page that Google has a hard time to determine which pages are most important, and some internal pages have attracted a fair number of external links.

On many sites, a contact form, privacy policy, advertising page etc might be important to appear on your sitelinks, but less important in standard search results.

Simple Site Structure

Here we have a simple site structure, with 14 landing pages linked to from the front page. Of these pages, we have determined that 6 are unimportant, and 8 we would ideally like to appear in sitelinks.

The following are just a few examples of how we could arrange the linking structure.

I should point out the following:-

• It is much more complex than these simple diagrams because I haven’t included any 3rd tier (or deeper) pages
• I haven’t included any home links or links from a 3rd 4th etc tier to higher tiers
• Iterative calculations need to be thought about
• There are no leaks

Keep Them Out Of The Index

In this example the pages are so unimportant we want to keep them out of the index, and prevent them soaking up any Google Juice.

We nofollow links to them, and use meta noindex follow on the pages – this keeps them out of the index even if someone else links to them, but allows juice from those links to flow to other pages.
In this situation we should also ensure that there are no external links on the page using plugins such as my nofollow those dupes.

Not So Important Pages

Here we are thinking about usability – we still want those unimportant pages appearing in a site search or a more specific long tail search, but they are not key search terms.
Maybe some of these pages have an effect on site quality.

We nofollow links from the homepage, and maybe from the sidebar or footer throughout the site, but have a live link from the HTML sitemap.

When You Have Multiple Levels Of Importance

In this example we have 3 tiers of importance

• Pages we don’t want in the index or receiving any juice
• Pages that are important for navigation, but should receive less juice
• Primary pillar content aimed at competitive keywords

Our least important pages are still linked heavily, but have no juice being passed to them due to nofollow, and have noindex follow to keep them out of the index, but passing juice if they happen to receive a link.

Our low priority pages are gaining links from the HTML sitemap

Our most important pages receive juice from the home page, and possibly site-wide links.

Nofollow Is Not Required

Nofollow is not a requirement to enhance the flow of Google juice around a site, but it certainly helps.

In this particular case, we have some less important pages that are receiving a lot of jucie, maybe with site-wide links, not just from the home page.

However those pages are not as important as other pages on the site, and would not be our preference to appear as sitelinks.

We allow our unimportant pages to receive the blessing of a front page appearance, but the only links from those unimportant pages are to our most important pages. Juice flows straight through like a 100% efficient conduit.

If we only link to those unimportant pages from the front page, the total amount of juice they receive will be greatly reduced.

No Robots.txt

In these examples I didn’t use robots.txt once.

Robots.txt can be used strategically and in many cases is easier to implement than selective nofollow on links, or noindex follow on pages, but that doesn’t make using it “best practice”.

So Which Method is Best?

None of them, all of them (I just know I will get that question)

SEO is art, you can teach someone to hold a paint brush and all about perspective, but a true masterpiece requires creative talent and a lot of practice.

With my SEO articles I try to go a little further than just showing you how to hold a fishing rod or paint brush

It is quite likely that you have been developing other articles on similar topics for months, receiving very little online attention, and even more worrying, if you create follow-on articles providing important updates, they are less likely to be seen.

The majority of traffic will by default enter your site (the landing page) on the page that received the most links, and this traffic might continue for days, weeks, months and even years.

Ways to highlight other important information:-

• Create a new post to inform your subscribers

  This has a tendency of alienating at least some of your readers, especially those who were not totally convinced by your “blog storm” article. It is quite possible that further articles will be looked on as “milking it”, trying to take advantage of a situation.
  Whilst this might be partially true, the process of providing updated information when/if you are the centre of attention is vital. This is how CNN catapulted into the mainstream, being on the scene of major news stories and providing “up to the minute” news updates.

• Related posts

  Useful for the few people who go to the trouble of clicking them though if they are generated automatically, they can be a little hard to control.
  The problem is that very few people tend to use them, and they generally appear after someone has read the “blog storm” article. Initial reaction will be to the first article they read, and not to any updates, unless you can force them to read updates.

• Update the article with links to newer information

  This is quite a time intensive operation because over the period of a few days you might have to make multiple updates to multiple articles, and when the blogstorm has died down, you might need to optimize the links even further.

  • If all you do is create updates to a single post, whilst new visitors receive a relatively clear picture, your subscribers might only read the original article.
  • It is much easier in the flow of content creation to refer back to previous articles than to update previous articles with links to newer information.
  • If updates are drawn out over weeks or months, it can get very messy

The Simple Solution

One simple solution is to think of any news item as a series of posts, and to use a plugin designed to help you create a series of articles around a particular theme.

The In Series Plugin

The plugin is quite well documented, and will allow you to modify the order in which posts in a series are presented, and you can style the content such that it stands out.

The Advanced Solution

The ideal situation in many cases is to create a specific landing page for a series of articles, that can then be optimized for specific terms, and used to channel both humans and search engines towards the most important articles you want them to see.

This is actually fairly easy to achieve in a number of ways, and most of the skills are similar to the various ways you can perform siloing I described in my WordPress SEO Masterclass.

Here are the basic tasks that need to be undertaken:-

• How to create an optimized landing page

  There are a number of ways to create an optimized landing page. The ideal method will really depend on your existing site structure and the ways you currently highlight content.
  An additional concern is certainly your technical ability. It is much easier to create a round-up post or a page with related links than to create landing pages using more automated methods and get the page looking right.

  • Using a dedicated category with optimized template such as category-6.php in WordPress
  • Creating a dedicated page with manually selected links
  • Using a siloing plugin which presents posts from a particular category on a single page
  • Writing an update post with links to each of the previous articles

• Planning Content

  Work out which articles to link to from a landing page, keyword strategy, and linking structure both to the existing content on the topic, and to other pages you want to get a lot of link juice and attention.

• Planning Redirects

  Not all of this can be automated unfortunately. If you have made specific references to any of the articles that you are about to create redirects for, you need to make a note of them, because these might need to be adjusted so that they contain updated URLs.
  It is hard to do this with incoming links from external sources, and not always desired, but I think that internally where you might often have referenced 4 different articles from within an update page, it is best that those links remain pointing to the specific articles referenced, thus will need to be hand edited.

  Create a table of original URLs, and the updated URL which will soon house that article.

• Create Updated .htaccess

  Create… don’t upload yet

  Here is an example .htaccess entry

  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  redirect 301 /2007/01/day-job-killer-review.html http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/day-job-killer-review.html
  </IfModule>
  

  In that particular example I was quite lazy and brought a review quickly to my front page by changing the publish date, but I also added a redirect because Google had indexed the old URL.

  I would suggest that these changes should be made right at the end of your .htaccess file.

  It is possible to manage 301 redirects with plugins, and WordPress 2.3+ is also meant to handle some things automatically, but I haven’t experimented with that yet and I don’t like being locked into using particular plugins for my site to function.

• Create Landing Page

  Depending on the method you will be using this may or may not include updated URLs automatically. If you are crafting the links by hand, you may need to refer to your previously prepared table of changes.
  Until the redirects take place, the new landing page will get very little attention from Search Engines or visitors, and whilst it is not ideal to have currently broken links on a page, it is probably better to have a few links that are broken than have lots of visitors get redirected to a page that doesn’t exist.

• Upload .htaccess or Modify Existing URLs

  This stage speed is of the essence, as it is a bit like a chicken and the egg scenario. If you are working with a large site you might need to work out some way to automate this process.

  If you upload the .htaccess first, then visitors will arrive at your landing page, and either click on links that return a 404 page not found error, or in the case of using categories or silo plugins, they will click on links that redirect to where they currently are on the landing page.
  However this is probably better than changing URLs before the .htaccess is in place.

  Once you have uploaded the .htaccess, it is time to modify existing URLs to those you have planned to use.

  I would suggest that “time is of the essence” at this stage, it is not something you can undertake at the end of a working day, though “more haste, less speed” should also be taken into consideration.

  Even with extensive planning, it is fairly easy to mess something up in your linking structure and 301 redirects.

This isn’t an article for SEO beginners, I leave those for the “experts” to write.

Your mileage may vary – I have written this article mainly as part of my own planning stage to make similar changes on this blog.
I have a number of topics that could benefit from using this method, including WordPress SEO, PageRank, Dofollow, Technorati, and even my “about page” which could take advantage of many of the blogging memes.

How much benefit you might gain from this may be marginal from an SEO point of view, or could make a substantial difference.

Fortunately the primary reason for doing this in many cases is to improve the browsing experience for users, so that they arrive at a landing page that provides them with a current overview of a topic, with possibly additional background articles that you feel are important.

There is a lot more to linking structure on a website or blog than just sticking nofollow on a few links to pages of less importance, or installing a wonder “do everything” SEO plugin.

Power Tip – once you get comfortable with this, you can actually plan your content with this strategy in mind, choosing your page titles and URLs carefully to maximise the benefit of redirects in the future.

In many ways this technique is the opposite to 3rd level push, though the concepts are not mutually exclusive, as whilst you are diverting link juice from a 3rd level document to one on the second tier, that juice then flows evenly (if you want) to your 3rd level.

Optimize your site for users not search engines ;) [cough]

I am not sure I am going to be able to knock him off the top spot, and this very post will probably gain him a few more votes, but I would like to think that one of my older articles could at least be a contender.

If This Content Is So Good, Why Hasn’t It Been Submitted Before?

There are a number of reasons why my old post on WordPress SEO and Dynamic Linking might not have been submitted by anyone in the past, and I think it is important to elaborate.

• The post in question was originally written in June, thus it pre-dates Sphinn – Danny doesn’t mind older content being submitted as long as it adds something of value.
• It was written as a Paid Post – I am sure some people are shuddering already, and others might just have a little gleam in their eyes – after all what better way to emphasise a point about some paid content and links being of high value than to have it highly rated on Sphinn
• Sphinn Might Not Accept a Paid Post – This is one reason I personally didn’t submit it sooner, because I respect the wishes of the admins, as well as the community. I asked Danny in a comment on Sphinn and I have taken his reply to mean that this submission would be acceptable.
• I was unsure of the “current climate” regarding paid links – I think in part SES San Jose has brought even some of the most white hat SEOs to question Google’s stance, and whilst Google’s stance is like a rock against a storm tide, hopefully… eventually… we will have some clarification on some of the more grey areas.
• The article was a load of junk? – no one has given me that reaction so far in the comments, or the other correspondence I have had about the article – the article also generated a lot of consulting enquiries which I turned down or have yet to progress to the next stage
• The content wasn’t original – whilst I reference other people fairly often, it is never without my own opinion, and in this case I think most SEOs think “siloing” is advanced linking structures – this article goes well beyond siloing

Gaming Sphinn?

Of course not…

I am just making my readers aware that I have submitted an article they might have enjoyed or even been tempted themselves to submit to Sphinn, if it wasn’t for the “stigma” of it being a paid post that might damage their reputation in some way.

Want to Make A Statement?

This might be one way of doing it…

Matt Cutts reads Sphinn, at least occasionally.

So do a lot of people who don’t fully understand the arguments frequently raised by SEOs about paid links, and services such as ReviewMe, Sponsored Reviews and PayPerPost

This post in particular I feel highlights something wrong with Google’s arguments and I am quite happy to provide it as an example (many people would be scared to do so)

Won’t Google Discount The Links?

All links within the site review were given editorially. The PPP interface doesn’t really provide for this, but it was negotiated before acceptance and I have documentary proof though it is private communication.

It Looks Like Google Have Already Discounted The Links

Google Backlink check on Emonetized

I should note at this time that the review was a one off “contract” and thus I am not receiving any monetary compensation for the links in this article.

That also proves that Tim’s blog is in the same area of topical authority, it is natural for me to be linking to him, and all the links are relevant.

Tim was honestly giving me a little compensation for the time I spent on a review.

Unfortunately it is impossible to prove whether my links to Tim really pass some Google Juice or not, because Google’s link: command doesn’t provide all the results, and might even skip some of the most relevant.
SEO Round Table highlighted today a few ways to check if links pass value – I have checked a number of my other links to other people and have seen my links credited. My WordPress SEO article has received a fair number of incoming links, and I have linked to it multiple times from pages that received links.

It was also syndicated in full and listed as the feature article on Searchnewz.com (note – I didn’t give a followed link to my syndicated article, although it is syndicated with my blessing)

Using Nofollow To Control Juice?

Matt seems to say that using nofollow to control Google Juice is ok, as long as you don’t orphan content.

Voting

I really don’t want this post submitted, despite the fact it might have evidence (though inconclusive) that Google are discounting some links they probably shouldn’t.

However if you liked my old post “WordPress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches” I would appreciate a vote on Sphinn, whether you thought it was great content, or because you want to highlight to Google that some paid content can be great, and the links editorial.

If you think it is junk, tell me so in the comments on that post, and give me some better examples.

Obviously I could just change the permalink to bring it to the front page and give it a little more attention, but I am saving that for a future test on Google’s algorithms

I am not talking about original words, but original ideas which can be based either on experience from experimentation or what I would describe as reasoned theory?
Experience based on following conventional wisdom just doesn’t count – you only need to read one SEO blog for accepted best practice, it doesn’t really matter which one of the mainstream SEO blogs you choose. You might choose a few more for industry news with differing opinion.

The kind of blogs I love to read are those with substance, even if I can’t fully understand all of them first time around.

Now with that said I am going to highlight a few choice articles.

WordPress SEO Goodness

I am not the only one working with WordPress SEO dynamic linking structures. Here are 2 great examples

Sebastian has recently (thank goodness) switched over to a new domain and a WordPress installation and it seems creating some customized WordPress linking structures.
I haven’t fully worked out the benefits and drawbacks of what he is doing, but it will certainly ensure all his content gets indexed.

Halfdeck discusses SEO for Fun, and in my experience he only writes useful unique content. He uses his blog as a testbed for linking structures and also provides a tool for linking structure analysis.

Dan Thies recently let the cat out of the bag about Google proxy hacking but I actually want to highlight his SEO ebook. It is full of solid information – it gives you a good grounding for some of my more geeky posts that discuss creating such structures with WordPress. (it is free)

It might be a little easier for some people to understand than Revenge of the Mininet (and the bonus dynamic linking ebook) which for the last 10 months I have been strongly recommending. (Also free)

Jaimie is also a SEO worth reading (though he has been taking some R&R due to illness) and wrote the code to fix the proxy hacking – hopefully he will have a WordPress plugin for those that need it soon.