Translation

Microsoft is dumping these blogs anyway, and maybe gaining some other value from giving 30M users to Automattic.

This is like upgrading Windows 7 to Ubuntu (yeah yeah yeah)

Problem?

Of those 30 million live spaces blogs, I bet 15 million of them don’t comply with Automattic’s rather strict terms of service, and of course Automattic don’t support any form of advertising unless you are a V.I.P.

Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com. To make this possible, we’ve created a brand new importer for Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com. New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog.

That phrase is a little ambiguous but try this comment by raananbarcohen

@liamdaly — redirects will work forever and you can pick any WordPress.com URL you would like, and then map it with a custom domain.

Free Unrestricted 301 Redirects – Data Portability 101

I have complained in the past quite vocally about how badly Blogger/Blogspot treat people who leave their service by sticking interstitials in the redirects… I ended up a couple of months ago removing 100 pages of historical content back to Blogspot to effectively let it rot because there was no effective way for it to be an integral part of this site.

Microsoft need to find a way to 301 redirect their existing bloggers to whereever they require, as a free service, or WordPress need to provide that service for them. WordPress haven’t done that up until now.

The only way to move from WordPress.com is to pay a $15/year service fee for domain mapping. That is on top of the fees you pay for domain registration.

In many ways the most valuable thing you create when blogging is not the content, but the links to the content. You can always improve content, merge it together, even delete an article totally, but you have the option to redirect a visitor to something more current, and there is a search engine benefit.

Microsoft & WordPress.com need to come up with a better option because I know many real bloggers on Live Spaces who actually make a living from the occasional advert or affiliate link.

The headline from Techcrunch is misleading – this isn’t outsourcing it is selling out.

Their small businesses are effectively being terminated.

My immediate though was to take a look at Lorelle’s sitemap.xml

• Homepage daily priority
• Every other page updated on a weekly basis?

That seems like a good way to tell the spiders to index your site less often than they currently do.

With Lorelle you would certainly want spiders checking the home page hourly as she is sometimes the source of breaking news.

Then I looked at the sitemap with a little more detail, and in particular the entry for her most recent post, the Cyclical Nature of Blog Stats – a post worthy of a link anyway so this is a 2-in-1.

This entry was written by Lorelle VanFossen and posted on June 16, 2008 at 4:57 am

Ah but I know Lorelle writes posts sometimes in batches and schedules them for publishing. Lets look at the XML

<loc>http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/the-cyclical-nature-of-blog-stats/</loc>
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.6</priority>

		<lastmod>2008-06-11T18:59:24+00:00</lastmod>

Last modified 5 days before it was published.

Just for good measure, lets look at the home page

<loc>http://lorelle.wordpress.com/</loc>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
		<lastmod>2008-06-12T02:05:56+00:00</lastmod>

Wrong again – today is the 17th, Lorelle published a post on 16th June, which updated the home page, but it is not reflected in the sitemap.

Sometimes you might be better off with no sitemap at all…

5/10 for finally fulfilling a user request
1/10 for implementation (so far)

If you use similar tags to a high profile blogger, it can help with faster indexing and rankings, at least from what I have observed.

In many ways the effect is similar to linkfarms, using the tagging as a central hub. Many commentators complain when they see Technorati tag pages appearing in the Google SERPs, because Technorati doesn’t have a huge amount of editorial control over the content of those pages, they are more like search results.

In that situation however for any specific query, you are unlikely to have more than one or possibly 2 results appear.

Subdomains

In theory Google are meant to have changed the way subdomains appear in the SERPs, limiting how many subdomains can occur from a single TLD.

Matt Cutts addressed this in more detail

As mentioned on Search Engine Round Table, there would likely be exceptions to the rule for things like the large blog hosts, and Matt pointed out IBM as a likely search that should give more results.

So it would be perfectly natural for WordPress.com to be one of the exceptions, because multiple unique blogs might talk about the same topic, and give a good user experience, which is what Google strive for.

Tags As Subdomains

I notice on a query I used to receive occasional traffic from but for some stupid reason people are competing for it now – it rarely brought more than one query a day when I was ranking first, though it was targeted.

WordPress training in Google (note:- US geolocation non personalized)

The initial results are great.

One of the results is the tag page on WordPress for training – that is covered in my previous article which was questioning whether this is allowed – it is a tactic I would be keen to use if it was officially sanctioned, as would many blog networks.
Actually at least one blog network does do it.

Currently I use internal tagging and I know many of those get discounted as being poor quality, whilst others that are used more frequently are actually better results than any individual permalink page.

However further down the long-tail things get extremely messy.

When you study the pages, you discover that these subdomains were in some way intended for localized tags, so if your blog is in Polish, it would appear on a Polish tag page. Unfortunately the content on the pages is identical.

The English tag page for Training Resource could be looked on as a useful page, though it is still user generated content and easily abused, and a small webmaster doing the same might be looked on as a linkfarm.

The problem is that the Brazillian Portuguese subdomain contains identical content.

If that happens across for example 200+ different languages, then it represents a problem, especially seeing as WordPress.com is a commercial interest.

Whilst I think the original tag pages have merit, I am going to take a harder line with these subdomains.

If they had gone to the trouble of using a translation plugin to make the pages useful for discovery, they would have been useful, even though the translation wouldn’t be perfect. The title and headline being translated would make a significant difference on English search results, even if the URL remained the same.

But Automattic didn’t translate the pages, and they didn’t restrict these subdomains to only blogs written on that specific language.

As they might both read this, Matt & Matt, this in my personal opinion is search engine spam.

These are worse than your typical scraper site.

What Does Zemanta Do Exactly?

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

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

Links

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

Tagging

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

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

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

Gallery Pictures

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

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

Example pictures

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

Maybe I should have forced them into a table

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

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

Other than the horrible code, there are other problems

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

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

Articles

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

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

Each article you click is added using a fieldset.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is Alpha

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

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

There are literally hundreds of such plugins for linking to various Wikis and shopping sites, but for some strange reason those haven’t been included on WordPress.com

Users on WordPress.com aren’t really very SEO savvy and thus are most likely to be “link happy” and of course with the plugin being so convenient, they are more likely to link to Answers.com now than rival sites.

A deal such as this if you were a link broker would be a 7 or even 8 figure deal – especially if there was some level of exclusivity.

If Automattic are being paid for including the plugin, surely they should let their user base know that they are receiving compensation for the links.

Whilst such links are being provided editorially by bloggers, the plugin is like doing the decorating, and then giving a baby a box of crayons to play with.

I am sure they would like the option to nofollow the links, after all much of the material sourced from Wikipedia is user generated content.

If I was an investor in Automattic, and they didn’t receive significant financial compensation, I would be extremely upset. Not only for the lost income, but also the lost leverage and link equity.

If Answers.com were ever in the market to buy WordPress.com, the value to them is vastly reduced. They already have the link juice.

For a competitor to Answers looking for link juice, the value is also vastly reduced, because they will be sharing links, and it would be very hard to tell users…. “Sorry, you can’t link to Answers now, you have to link to XYZ instead”

At a guess, this might knock at least 50% off the value of WordPress.com – it is like damaged merchandise, deflowered.

Then of course Automattic are so against webspam, they wouldn’t dream of handing a stick of dynamite to a baby along with a box of matches and of course they would do it out of the goodness of their heart.

• Matt probably earns a salary from Google as head of webspam
• Matt has been with Google since 2000, so probably has a few stock options
• If Matt says something about a new Google service that encourages other bloggers to write about it as well, it probably has an effect on Google’s share price, so there is a specific financial incentive.

We have seen how blog discussions can have both a massive positive and negative influence on large company share value, especially with Apple.

Full Disclosure From Google – No Way?

• Matt doesn’t have a comprehensive disclosure policy – he does have a short disclaimer to hide behind
• Matt doesn’t use nofollow on links to his source of income
• Matt used to post messages on popular SEO forums as “Google Guy”, but there was never any specific disclosure

Now whilst Matt has mentioned the FTC in relation to paid links before, it has always been in the sanctuary of his “private” blog. At SES San Jose I believe he is there in his official capacity.

Here are quotes from 2 live bloggers

Tamar at SEO Round Table

Matt is up first. Are paid links evil? He says that this is the wrong question. But the right question is – Do paid links that pass PR violate search engine quality guidelines? The answer is yes.

The FTC has said that you must disclose whether you are being paid to market.
Disclosure on the web: the web is used by both people (surfers) and machines (search engines)

What is adequate disclosure on the web? It is understood by both machines and people.

Make a clear disclosure: this won’t pass PageRank -
- Redirect URL blocked by robots.txt
- redirect through URL that does 302
- JavaScript
- nofollow
- Meta tag with nofollow

The Lisa at Bruce Clay Internet Business Consultants

Matt says that asking if paid links are evil or not is the wrong question. He says the right question is, “Do paid links that pass PageRank violate search engines’ quality guidelines?” The answer to that is yes.

He adds that the FTC has said that word of mouth marketing is like any other kind of marketing, and if you’re being paid to say something you should disclose that. Adequate disclosure means it is understood by both people and the machines.

How do you disclose a paid link to the search engines?

* Redirect through URL locked by robots.txt
* Redirect through URL t hat does a 302
* JavaScript
* Nofollow the link

Google says you can buy links within search engine guidelines – meaning they can’t pass PR. Google doesn’t care about those links. However, you cannot buy links that pass PageRank.

Examples of PPP links – fundraisers, donate cars, online, credit, super slots, providers, junk yards, online casino, bypass pill, dating advice, USA online poker, etc.

Both people and machines have to be able to understand the disclosure?
Also why does Lisa use the PPP acronym and not that of paid links rather than paid reviews?

Lets Take A Look at… YouTube

There is no requirement for disclosure
Views and ratings are counted whether a video is commercial or not, and commercial content can make it to the top of YouTube rankings.

Lets Take A Look At… Referral Units

Seven months ago I first published an article about how Google’s guidelines for their referral units don’t tally with FTC and WOMM.
3 Months ago I highlighted that specific questions regarding WOMM with referral units in response to articles on the Google Adsense blog were going totally unanswered.

So Many Different Compensated Links

Just the other day I wrote about the need for a level playing field for paid links.

Based upon current logic the WOMMA should be kicked out of the SERPs for having paid links on their site, along with all their members.
Hey guys, it only costs $1000 per year to join WOMMA, but you could probably barter a little SEO help and get them to pay you, with all those member pages being counted as duplicate content and supplemental.

WordPress

Matt is known to be a supporter of WordPress, and Google are going to make a lot of money displaying advertising on their high ranking blogs.

Surely Google should also have had a word with them about their linkfarm – I have also written about their linking structure in the past.

Matt Cutts still retains a link to WordPress.org on his blog.

From the WordPress default theme (hidden in a comment)

If you’d like to support WordPress, having the “powered by” link somewhere on your blog is the best way, it’s our only promotion or advertising.

So you are paying for use of WordPress by giving them a link – it is advertising without a nofollow on millions of blogs, not to mention the default blogroll and half the WordPress developers selling text links – yes Matt Cutts is using blogging software funded in part by text links.

Web2.0 Sites

At least one of the following sites is sponsoring a very popular WordPress plugin that gives them links, lots of them, quite certainly from millions of pages.

Digg, Del.icio.us, Netvouz, Dzone, ThisNext, MisterWong, Wists

The Sneaky Javascript Advertising

Javascript advertising and widgets is never totally innocent

If you want to be standards compliant as well as using script tags, you also use noscript, and include a link.

1000s of top search terms are dominated by people using links hidden in noscript that most users never see, and copy and paste without even realising it.

Some also take a standard link, and then modify it using javascript and CSS to look like an image link.

Do these huge corporations using these tactics have to now include nofollow on the noscript links?

For a light-hearted look, I have to post this video

Rentvine created this video, which isn’t their niche – they are a home rental site.

Ultimately it is Google’s search engine, and they want to provide better search results and encourage ethical SEO practice.

When I write a compensated review of a service, I almost always spend hours on them, far more than your average Yahoo intern working for the directory, and I earn far less.
The reviews are always relevant to my audience, and I am selective having turned down the last 3 offers I was made to review sites, over $400 I could have earned but didn’t because I respect my audience, or didn’t feel qualified. I only review a service when I can offer insight, opinion and feedback.

As I have mentioned in the past, this topic is of specific interest because of my future startup plans, where the links will be as “whitehat” as Matt Cutts linking to Google, or Robert Scoble to Podtech

If 100,000 shareholders, employees and companies for whom I provide a very specific service for link to my site, is it going to be webspam if they are linking through to authoritative and highly relevant content? I have no plans to ask them to nofollow the links.

Update: I just read Rand’s writeup at SEOmoz on this paid links session at SES San Jose and it offers insight into the tone of the session, further clarification and there were also revelations from the Q & A afterwards.

#
To Matt Cutts – can Google remove the ability of individual pages to pass linkjuice
_
Matt says that not only can they remove single page’s ability to pass PR, they can also remove the ability of only certain links on a page from passing PR, and do.
_
#
To Matt Cutts – would Google ever ban a large brand for an extended period of time for engaging in manipulative link practices?
_
Matt says that Google had removed a very big site in the past for 43 days in total from the index, and this was noticed by Ben Edelman (sadly, I haven’t ID’d the site or post and Matt did not mention it)

The Ben Edelman reference seems to be in relation to WhenU 3 years ago and it seems that was mainly to do with cloaking.

Andy Beal sums up this SES session

I encourage you to read the notes and digest the information. Like me, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that buying select links from highly relevant pages isn’t going to get you into trouble with Google. Buying tons of spammy, non-relevant, run of site links, probably will.

On a subject like this I will quite happily link through to Fantomaster who sells cloaking software

Will it work? Will the Google monster, the paragon of Web Apartheid, finally relent?

Dana on the Online Marketing Blog likens this to a Transformers battle between Optimus Prime (Matt Cutts) & Megatron (Michael Gray)
I am sure the Toprank team recommend buying links on Yahoo, why is a paid review worse?

Update 2

Yesterday Duncan Riley on Techcrunch attacked the general WordPress attitude to paid links.
It would be interesting to look at how many WordPress developers, theme designers and plugin developers are heavily funded by the sale of text links.

Duncan also attacked Akismet, and he is quite right to do so. Spam Karma, with or without the addition of AKisment is actually equally or more effective at handling spam, and can be integrated with Akismet as an additional check.
It should also be noted that the Akismet “spam count” widget doesn’t use javascript, but is one of the widgets that produced a search engine followable link back to an Automattic owned domain.

As I mentioned recently, WordPress Sponsored themes still exist in large numbers on the theme database. In the comments on Techcrunch, Matt Mullenweg seems to be claiming that they have been all cleared out, but that is far from the case.

Duncan mentions the oft used phrase “people in glass houses” which does ring home my earlier article – A List Bloggers in Crystal Palaces Shouldn’t Throw Stones

Update 3

Michael Gray has now published his powerpoint presentation on Google Paid links.

I am not a user of Text Link Ads, but it seems emails have gone out about some code changes, and that they will now be using TinyURL for the links
TinyURL in itself is a 301 redirect, which could however then link to a further redirect or tracking script. I am not sure a chain of 301 redirects would be a good idea, and using TinyURL on its own is still passing juice.

Aaron Wall is also binging out the big guns, arguing why linkbaiting (which Google supports) is not suitable for all businesses.
Some of Aaron’s bullet points against linkbaiting include:-

• it is expensive
• it is time consuming
• the results are hard to predict
• it requires social connections
• it provides off topic low value traffic
• it typically creates content of limited commercial value (other than the ability to pull in links to rank other pages for stuff they did not have enough relevancy or authority to merit ranking for)

Robert was vehemently questioning the morals of people in a blogging network.

Hey, you all work for B5 Media, don’t you? You’re gaming Google by linking all your blogs together which puts people who don’t join a network at a disadvantage. But no one calls YOU on that! Maybe THAT is the reason you don’t like linkblogging. It lets the rest of us gain the same traffic advantage that you have by being part of a network. In fact, on your home page you even reprint headlines, but only from those people inside your network. How convenient of you to take advantage of Google that way! I see it now, you just don’t want any competition.

Now that is a pretty big accusation. Robert is by inferrance also suggesting he has no such benefit.

He later went on to also comment about Duncan’s use of Video

So I went snooping around WordPress.com

All categories on WordPress.com blogs are connected together in a tag system. Even people who pay the guys at Automattic $250 per month for their VIP host have to be connected to the tagging system.

• The tag links from each blog page are live links, they do not include “nofollow”
• The links from the tag pages to other blogs posting on the same subject also do not include the “nofollow” tag

Thus all you have to do is make posts with lots of tags, and get lots of high PR incoming links from a different domain, and depending on how the servers are setup serving content, maybe even multiple different C blocks depending on which server is serving the data for each tag.

Robert didn’t know about this?

WordPress.com is effectively one massive blogging network, heavily interlinked.

The blogs have very few external links compared to all the internal links on every page. All comments and trackbacks contain “nofollow”

Why do you think Robert Scoble has a PR of 8, the same as a giant like YouTube?

As another example, Techcrunch only has PR7

Honestly I have done things that are naughtier

The big problem is that any new blogger who uses lots of tags is going to gain a massive amount of backlinks from WordPress.com link pages.

Those links do not relate to the quality of the blog, and depending on the popularity of the keyword, can remain quite high PR for a long time.

I checked Robert’s 27k+ backlinks on Google. The most influential appear first.

The 4th position in the SERPS was a wordpress.com tag for Dell.

Should Robert Scoble have a PR8 and Techcrunch PR7?

Robert does have more backlinks, but how many are them are from within WordPress.com? I honestly didn’t delve into all the 27K backlinks, and Google wouldn’t show me all of them anyway.

Is this naughty or just smart SEO?