I am not a lawyer, this isn’t legal advice, and I am trying to make this “non-specific” to any particular theme because it affects users of themes, not just the theme authors.

The Difference Between GPL & Creative Commons

The primary difference between the GPL & the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses (such as SA – share alike) is that the GPL is aimed at programmers, and the Creative Commons is intended for various forms of art.

The GPL comes into play based upon distribution

Creative Commons covers distribution, but also covers performance, as art can normally be seen or heard.

In the recent WordPress GPL discussions, it was clearly stated by people involved with developing WordPress core that they have no issues with end users, as they are not distributing code.

This wouldn’t be the case of copyright infringement involving the Creative Commons and art which ends up being displayed.

Creative Commons make it pretty clear that their license isn’t intended for software pointing out that they have no distinction between source code and object code.

WordPress Theme Directory

If you use Creative Commons artwork within a theme, it doesn’t qualify for the WordPress Theme directory. It is impossible for such a theme to be 100% GPL because Creative Commons placs restrictions on users in how they can display the artwork.

The only person who can change the license for a particular item licensed Creative Commons is the copyright holder.

Specific Example: FamFamFam Icons

FamFamFam icons are highly popular for good reason, as many of them are 100% free to use.

The Mini set is licensed as public domain

These can be used in WordPress themes and plugins with no licensing issues as you can use 100% GPL. You might still add a credit in your license, but there isn’t a GPL compatibility problem.

The flags are licensed as public domain

These can be used in WordPress themes and plugins with no licensing issues as you can use 100% GPL. You might still add a credit in your license, but there isn’t a GPL compatibility problem.
All the translation plugins use these with no issues.

The “Silk” icons are licensed as Creative Commons 2.5 or 3.0

If you click the image you can see the full set of 1000 icons which are free to use, even comercially.

These icons can’t be used for themes submitted to the WordPress repository, because only the copyright holder could make that assignment.

The fun scenario is the RSS feed icon – whilst it is generally free to use, Mozilla do have some specific guideance for use, thus it isn’t strictly public domain. The icon provided by the Feed Icon site that is similar is 14×14 – they also have 12×12 in various colours.

Within the dev pack from the Feed Icons site there is a 16x16x32 RSS icon that is 734 bytes
feed.png from the FamFamFam “Silk” set is 691 bytes

However there is also a very clear visible difference which you can see when you load the icons into an image editor.

These are reasons why the RSS icon isn’t part of the free mini pack, but can be included in the Silk pack under the creative commons license and if you use the FamFamFam version of the feed icon, you are bound by that license.

You could use them with a GPL theme with a split license

If you have a split license theme, the FamFamFam icons have to remain Creative Commons 2.5 or 3.0 – you can’t place them under your own proprietary license.

Remember Creative Commons covers display, so people using your themes are also bound by the license restrictions, thus in the case of FamFamFam I believe the requirements are that you provide a credit notification and link, though it is even stated that doesn’t have to be a sitewide link.

This means you may use it for any purpose, and make any changes you like. All I ask is that you include a link back to this page in your credits (although a giant link on every page of your website really isn’t needed, contact me to discuss specifics).

It is possible for commercial projects that Mark James, the author of the icon set would be willing to waive the license requirements for customers, but that would require specific licensing, and even then he would still own the copyright of verbatim copies.

If you are using a theme which has icons from the “Silk” icon set, you need to have a credit link somewhere unless you have specific notification that the icons have in some way been licensed such that you are excluded from this requirement.

I am not playing license police today as this affects not only theme authors but also their users, plus I am not sure how far Mark would want to press the license of his version of the feed icon which is the most common issue, but certainly not the only one.

If you are a theme author and discover this is an issue, make sure you own up about it in public, on your primary website, and give Mark some links.

Fuge Icons

There are some huge similarities between the FamFamFam Silk icon set, and the Fuge Icon set – however from what I can see they are different.
There are details of license options provided as an alternative to the creative commons license, but that doesn’t allow for sub-licensing.

Note: I realise there is a way to (ab)use this with both free & commercial themes to force attribution links, but you wouldn’t be able to tie that to specific PHP that is GPL licensed. An interesting paradigm.

Update

Joi Ito on the board of Creative Commons and yesterday wrote about the worrying trend of non-standard licenses. One thing I would like with CC licenses is a very clear definition of what a copyright owner looks on as commercial use. In many case no commercial use might prevent reasonable use by the primary intended audience.

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.

I spent the better part of a week and a few hundred dollars ($300-$400) on various WordPress sales letter and affiliate themes – I came to the conclusion that they weren’t something I would use.

• Some I would class as pretty but lacking substance (polite version of crap)
• Every single theme was designed around the concept that you run a single theme on your blog at a time
• They all suffered from what I regard as a horrible plague – theme option pages – if you need to set up lots of options after you have uploaded a theme, you have lost a sale, unless I can also import and export settings.
• The worst aspect of theme options pages is using them for the content that might appear on a page, because it is a nightmare to set up split testing, and when editing, you really want all the words on the page in front of you.

So I set about creating a solution for myself…

I started of with Thematic which I had already been playing around with for a good 8 months. Themeatic is an offshoot or branch of Sandbox of which I was also a fan, but built upon a grid system that hopefully I won’t totally destroy when I finally get around to theming on this site.

The first challenge was custom CSS for every page, and navigating my way through the maze of which functions initialized at which time within the WordPress core, such that the style sheet used is determined by the page selected in the default custom layout selector.

The end result is only 160 lines of code in functions.php, plus some in individual custom theme pages, and that may well get shorter as I optimize things, but the end result is something unique and useful.

I am a strong believer in doing things once

Once I have created a custom sales page theme for this system, though it is not limited to sales pages, it can be used without any setup overhead other than selecting it within a dropdown list and hitting save.

And of course, everything is created based upon a child theme of Thematic, thus when Thematic has one of its frequent updates, there will be very little if any pain in upgrading.

WordPress Split Testing With Google Website Optimizer

There are a number  of plugins that claim to provide support for Google Website Optimizer. Most only work with A/B split testing as the authors couldn’t figure out the best way to add tags to post content.

In addition often the GWO code was placed in the wrong place in the header, it needs to be after Doctype, but before the CSS to effectively fully replace the CSS – I realise CSS is meant to be cascading, and you can force your way through when it doesn’t quite work out, but sales pages are meant to load fast.

So our single CSS file by default no matter what style the page is gets wrapped with GWO selectors by default. The most important element on the page, the post title which most of the time is used as a headline also gets wrapped in selectors by default.

You don’t have to test them all the time, but they are there when you want them. 

I eventually selected one plugin solution, from an Italian company who do landing pages. I may end up tweaking things more, moving various thing from functions.php into the plugin, though many of the hooks I have used are specific to thematic, even the one I ended up using within the plugin to get the correct placement of the GWO code in the header.

Whilst I claim that this video would only be 5 minutes at the start, it is actually 8 minutes, but demonstrates the full process of setting up split testing with my current solution.

I am sure you are also curious about how it works, so here is the demo sales page from the video, with split testing currently enabled.

The reason I haven’t yet implemented shortcodes are 2-fold.

• I don’t need them
• Using PHP, it is quite easy to use most of the work I have done with any other split testing software, either javascript or PHP based, for those with tin-foil hats (most affiliates using Adwords extensively?)

The PHP plugin I discovered rocks – I tweeted about it a couple of weeks ago.

Implementation for other theme frameworks isn’t immediately planned, and code after some more tweaking will be made available in various ways (for the geeks whose shoulders I had to climb on to get this far), and I will probably package things in some way for those less technically inclined looking  for a “solution, along with modified versions of various themes I have rights for.

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

Listed below are some of the ways that WordPress Sponsored Themes are still being allowed on the WordPress Themes Viewer.
Whether gaming the system is universally possible for everyone, or just “friends” would be very difficult and costly to determine.

I am not pointing anyone out, and I am glad that the themes I have spotted that fall under each method remain on the main WordPress theme viewer, because in general most sponsored themes are better quality than the totally free ones.

What defines sponsored themes is actually difficult to determine, and whatever unofficial yardstick is used is not universally applied.

Outsourcing

Just hire someone to create totally original themes on your behalf, and have the only credit link to your own site where you distribute it.

Joint Venture

Some of the required attribution links are quite interesting:-

You must provide attribution links to the original designer as per the license you are using to distribute/re-distribute the theme. You are expected to provide “visible footer links”, as meta-links are likely to be removed by the user, and a link in the CSS description is not visible. If you want, you can add an extra meta-link or CSS link. If you are found infringing copyrights, your theme will be removed without prior notice.

Lets ignore for now that these specific requirements are against the GPL otherwise WordPress would probably have to have 50 links in the footer.

Approach one of the better designers to create your WordPress theme, and have it based upon their original design but with very different CSS.
Support the theme on your own site with help from the original designer.

Note: I have noticed a number of themes using this strategy have been removed from the official theme viewer, or at least they no longer have a listing, but the theme can be viewed and downloaded from old links.

Joint Venture 2

Theme design isn’t just the CSS code or even the php functions, just a quick sketch is part of the design process.

Claim dual authorship for a theme because it is based on your current blog design and the designer was just “inspired” to create an original.

Joint Venture 3

The theme designer creates a theme and names it based upon a keyword, and creates a blog on a new domain for support.
Setup the support blog using sacrificial SEO to drive as much link juice to your own sites as a sponsor.

Joint Venture 4

Buy an existing theme hosted on its own domain and have the domain redirected to a support section of your own site.
You can still hire the original designer, or another good designer to look after the theme, and benefit from the link juice.

Powertips

• You are more likely to keep your theme included if you use your name in the link credits as one of the designers, possibly with a keyword on the end. Thus I could probably get away with “Andy Beard – Niche Marketing” but not “Niche Marketing”.
• Even better if your theme has features specific to your niche, but is different to the theme you use on your blog. Not only will you have a slightly better chance of slipping though, you will also have a much higher chance of your theme being used on a related site.
• Ensure your theme is high quality
• Ensure your theme links through to a quality site offering support – I would be tempted not to include your theme on first release in the main theme directory, but on the second or even 3 release after you have had a chance to add some support posts.
  Support posts can cover simple things like how to change the header, or make changes to the css.

Devoid of Logic

I have spent some time looking at the sponsored or “teamwork” themes that are still available on the official theme site, and they seem to display characteristics as above. It could well be that many of those that remain just haven’t been caught yet.

That being said, I have also noticed a number of themes that no longer appear on the theme viewer because it seemed like the purpose of distributing the theme was for SEO, even though the design in my mind would certainly count as a team effort and not 100% the effort of the person uploading.

With all said and done, if your theme is of exceptional quality, and you can gain a little coverage, you might not miss your theme not appearing on the theme viewer – you might not gain as many downloads, but you will most likely gain just as many other sites linking through to you, as no links will be wasted on links to the theme viewer.

Currently Technorati still return an authority rating for your blog, even if they have determined you are gaming the system, but there is no guarantee that that will remain the case indefinitely.

Many blog monetization systems rely on Technorati authority as an indication of the value of placing a link on that blog, and thus there are quite significant rewards for having a high authority, which results in a lower ranking position, “1″ being the top ranking.

Open Source Publishers

One of the best rewards of publishing Open Source software is you can often include a link back to your site somewhere on the pages of the people using your software. These links in turn are used by various search engines to rate the authority of the site being linked to. With Google one indicator is Pagerank, with Technorati it is their authority.

Even the most prominent Open Source Developers are not immune from being banned by Technorati.

Compare Matt’s blog to the “official” top authority blog, and there is a massive divide.

Widgets

Widget publishers are not immune to the Technorati nerf stick. Even if you are a top rated SEO blog such as SEOmoz, and gaining 100s of editorial links on a daily basis, you might be removed from the top100.

Theme & Plugin Publishers

Theme publishers are not immune from being banned by Technorati if they include live links to the blog from the themes they give away for free.

Blogrolls

There are various ways to exchange blogroll links such that they are counted by Technorati, but don’t provide real links that are seen by other search engines.
Whilst joining such blogrolls might not get you banned (unless you hit the top 100), it is more than likely that Technorati will start discounting those links.

Blog Networks get away with some massive interlinking, but the more legitimate networks are making an effort to make those links more relevant.

Paid Links

In this case I am referring to links which appear to Technorati as a blogroll – if you buy lots of obvious “sponsor links”, it is quite possible Technorati is going to ban you.

I can’t say whether that is why John appears to be banned, but it might be one explanation, though the majority of John’s links have certainly come from other kinds of payola.

Unfortunately it doesn’t take much poison to taint a well.

Paid Reviews

This is a tough question and Technorati are faced with a similar problem to Google. Which links are editorial, and which are purely for pagerank and other factors.

In my opinion, quality reviews are most likely to remain in all indexes, but then I am an open supporter of quality paid reviews which give more value than just links.

All You Care About Is Money?

If all you care about is money, then obviously for as long as Technorati continue to report your authority via their API as being significant, even if you are effectively banned, then gaming the Technorati authority system could be looked on as a good idea to boost your earnings from text links and reviews.

The big problem with many of the ways of gaming the system is that they are permanent. Those links are out there, so if you have some success with a theme you publish, and through your own blogging efforts you start to approach the top100 list, there is no way to fix the problem.

There is no rule saying that Technorati have to continue giving a rating of banned sites by API, thus any “gamed” rating in the future might effectively return a “zero” in the future.

Why Should You Care?

If you are going to publish a theme or create a widget, you need to think carefully whether having a Technorati rating is something you wish to maintain.

I am not referring to whether you are listed in the Top100, but whether you would have a rating being returned at all by the API.

It is easy to say that you don’t care about being listed on Technorati, all you care about is how much you can sell your links for, but what happens if Technorati decide to stop reporting banned sites via their API?

There is a chance you might get reincluded, if Technorati develop technology so that they can discount links from the sidebar and footer totally, but it wouldn’t be so simple to still allow legitimate blogroll links.

How To Avoid Being Banned By Technorati

It is well known that Technorati currently don’t follow 301 redirects, so the solution currently is quite simple.

• Decide on a theme name
• Register a domain name for the theme
• Use the domain name for the link within a theme
• Use a 301 redirect from the domain name to your blog

You could actually just use one domain for all your redirects, or use a 3rd party service that issues a 301 redirect though that is placing your eggs in a basket you have little control over.

Alternatively just use nofollow on the links, but then they will not be seen by other search engines, and that would be throwing away good “Google Juice”.

A 301 Redirect would still be recognised by Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.

If in the future Technorati do support 301 redirects, it would most likely be possible to tell them not to follow certain redirects for your themes. The most likely scenario for the future is an interface in Technorati to allow you to tell them that 2 listings are effectively the same.

Note:-Technorati Authority is not the same as Technorati Favorites.

Technorati to my knowledge haven’t banned anyone from encouraging people to add them to their Technorati Favorites.

Technorati Authority on the other hand is the cornerstone of their search results to determine relevance, and thus they are going to defend it.

Retroactive Action

I have no idea how you could take retroactive action to fix your ratings.

This affects me too, a while ago I created a widget for LinkedIn, and it linked to a static page. As the functionality of the widget was eventually blocked by the service it was intended to promote, I changed the graphic used, and most links have now been removed from sidebars.
In hindsight I would have used a domain name and 301 redirect.

Theoretically any authority gained from that widget will be outside the 6 month rolling window that Technorati use within the next 2 months, and my own situation will be cleared up.
This would be much harder to achieve for theme and plugin authors. Maybe easier for those with paid links.

What you give with one hand you take away with another

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<?php } ?>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Macalua has just released a Top Posts By Category Plugin which seems like a great idea that could generate some additional traffic to posts already receiving high traffic.
Hmm, that would be a little bit like what Alister wrote about Knuttz recently.
I am not sure of the easiest way to leverage it.. maybe an invisible category “hot”.

It might also have some use combined with Alister’s Classy Body Plugin so that not only can you have a different look for a category, almost like a seperate blog, but also display the top posts in that section.

Note:- I haven’t tested these plugins yet

Thus you should provide copy and paste linking.

There is an easy way to do this with the Link to Me Textbox plugin – I did however add a few tweaks to the code to make it display correctly and “future proof” it.

First of all for the link in the template you have to add they suggest you use

<?php link_to_me_textbox(''); ?>

Instead I used something much safer

<?php if (function_exists('link_to_me_textbox')) link_to_me_textbox(''); ?>

It is important to add plugins in this way, otherwise if you switch off the plugin, you might break your blog them until you edit your templates again.

Secondly I modified the CSS by adding the following lines

height: 60px;
min-height: 60px;
width: 450px;

This post discusses why there are 2 references to height in the CSS as an IE workaround.

I would prefer the CSS to be in a seperate file, or stored in the database, and automatically inserted in the header by the plugin for many of my niche sites, and an option to do the same with the actual code in the comments.