As 2007 winds down one thing is crystal clear: people are desperate for escape. Case in point, the Top 10 queries on Yahoo! over the past year. Of the top 10, six are female sex symbols, two are faux sports and two are grounded in an alternate universe. Shame on any of you who typed the following words into a search engine in 2007.

10) Jessica Alba. I guess we can thank Maxim magazine’s “Hot 100” for this search. The Mexican-Danish “actress” has suffered from OCD and has a tattoo of a daisy with a ladybug on the back of her neck. I only know this from searching her name. I swear I wasn’t looking for images!

9) Fergie. She’ll be 33 in 2008, making her the oldest person to make the Top 10, and all but ensuring she won’t make the list next year. She’s a chameleon. Part gangster part “lady.” But even that didn’t lock in her spot. Take notes people, if you wanna land in the Top 10 you just need to piss in your pants.

8- Fantasy Football. I love sports. In fact for a while, I was into all of the fantasy sports. Then one day I woke up and realized that players making the league minimum were still earning six times my salary. And to add insult to injury, they actually like their jobs.

7) Rune Scape. This is one of two items on the list that I am not embarrassed to admit I did not know. Now that I’ve search it, I still don’t get it. Something about casting spells or something. Maybe this is the reason athletes make so much money. Unlike you, they’re not sitting in cubicle playing video games.

6) Lindsay Lohan. Not to be mean but the only reason to search Ms. Lohan is to see if you’ve finally won the Dead Pool. It’ll be interesting to see if she takes the number one slot after she OD’s. Even money says that will happen in ‘08.

5) Beyonce. Number one hits, a budding movie career and almost as many endorsement deals as Peyton Manning. Given her media saturation, don’t you people get enough? Maybe you’re searching her obviously fake relationship with Jay-Z. Either way, you can bet her sister Solange is in her room crying, she ranked number 987,872.

4) Naruto. Loud, obnoxious and hyperactive, Naruto Uzumaki is the world’s most famous fictional adolescent ninja. I had no idea what Naruto was. Honestly, I’ll probably forget tomorrow – so I’ll just search it again. Maybe that’s why it ranked so well.

3) Paris Hilton. She’s bared it all on video and served her time in jail. Now that she’s a “lady,” there’s really not much for her to accomplish. Short of killing someone (always possible) I’d expect to see her slide down the list next year.

2) WWE. Yes, wrestling is fake; but it’s still damn entertaining. Whether it’s Vince McMahon accusing his mom of molestation or an A-list star succumbing to roid rage (allegedly) and wiping out his family, the physical soap opera known as wrestling was custom-made for Internet buzz.

1) Britney Spears. She might be pregnant again. Let us set the record straight, the baby is ours. What can I say? We’re a fertile bunch here at Jack of All Blogs.

Just as I thought linkbaiting schemes were a thing of the past, I come across yet another link whoring scheme that I think is all wrong. Do a search on viraltags and viralinks and you will come across this post instructing you to add a matrix of links under any post on your blog, and adding any blog that pings back to your post into the matrix.

So basically it’s link exchange. You get links from people who wish to pingback from your site, and you add their links in return.

Pretty interesting idea, I would say. However, if this concept were to be as successful as the promoters would say, why aren’t they on top of the search results for the keywords viraltags, and even viralinks?

Maybe they used a name of an already existing service (there are sites called viraltags.com and viralinks.com)? Maybe it’s really a fluke?

Here’s what I think. The concept is indeed interesting, as it takes advantage of blogs’ automatic pinging/linking back mechanism in order to “notify” other viralink bloggers that there are people asking for a link back. And we know the value of inbound links in terms of search optimization. However, there might be misplaced enthusiasm about such “viralinking” schemes.

• Link farms? The way the links are set up—which are in matrix form—might be thought of as link farming by Google. Come on, we know Google likes links that are interspersed into text naturally. There’s probably more value in a single link coming from a blog post of substance rather than a long list of hundreds of links. Jampacking your post with links would just dilute its link-love value.


• Anchor text. The original viralinks post tells of linking using a matrix of dots or stars. Where’s the SEO value there? Aren’t you aware that the anchor text plays a big part in optimization. If you used asterisks as anchor text, then you would just be optimizing the site linked to for the “*” keyword (if there is such a thing). You should use something more descriptive.


• It’s artificial. I read some bloggers claiming this would enhance your popularity on technorati. I’m thinking otherwise. I would say the guys over at technorati would think of such schemes as unnatural ways of jacking up link popularity, and hence would eventually filter them out. So whatever popularity you get will likely be short lived.

I guess there may be some merits to getting into link-exchange schemes. But one thing I really hate, and would like to highlight here as such, is how these things uglify your site. I’m not about to add a hundred or so links below my posts (or even just one) just for a link exchange program. I would rather write interesting, substantial, link-able material that everyone would blog about and link to.

Last April I chanced upon a post on JohnChow.com that I thought quite disturbing. I would’ve responded there, but the lazy guy in me thought of postponing it. So here, two months after I’m writing a reaction.

In one of John’s evil SEO trick posts, he says one good way to encourage people to leave comments on your blog is by displaying the top comment authors on your home page. This way they get a link from your front page, and with WordPress this is usually not dumbed down by rel=nofollow (something previously discussed here on JOAB).

This can prove to be beneficial to both blog author and reader. Authors will get more comments on posts. Readers get SEO love from another blog’s front page. It’s much like purchasing a text link, John himself says.

Looking at my Top Commentators lists, I can see that, from a SEO standpoint, three commentators are doing it right and the rest are doing it wrong. Getting a link on the Top Commentators list offers more SEO benefit than traffic benefits. It’s the same as buying a text link. The link sends you traffic but its main purpose to help you improve your Google ranking. Knowing this to be the case, then the anchor text for the top commentator link should be anything but your name (unless your name is very descriptive).

So if you comment on a blog, instead of using your own name you use a descriptive anchor text.

But then that got me thinking. If everyone did this, then no one would be signing blogs using their names or aliases. Everything would be signing as “website copywriter,” “cheap custom content,” or some other text. Maybe people will also start signing as “buy viagra” or “xanax” or some other spammy sounding name. And what happens when that becomes the prevailing trend? You will have a helluva time filtering your comments for spam.

Your spam filters might come up with a lot of false positives. You might end up having to sift through your moderation list for otherwise valid comments.

Worse, wouldn’t this make the line that separates spam from non-spam disappear altogether? And wouldn’t this mean that most of your commenters become spammers by definition?

Personally I have my limits. It’s okay to sign as your blog or website’s name. But if you’re using my comment threads too much for marketing your product, service, or brand, then that’s spam in my book.

Evil, indeed. And bordering on stupid. If I had commenters like that I would block them outright. Search optimization and marketing sometimes just make things too annoying for the regular user.

A favorite writer, Liz Strauss recently wrote over at the Blog Herald about the dichotomy between relationships and information when it comes to the Web.

What is a link? Is a link clicks and traffic and Google rankings? Or does a link represent that I know you, that I’ve read your content, that you’re relevant and of value to me? Is a comment conversation or something I can buy or rent?

We’re living in two Internets. It looks much like the companies we find in the world of brick and mortar. One is about places, information, and data. It’s the buildings in which people work. The other is about people, relationships, and conversation. It’s the people who work in those buildings. One is a structure. The other is social

From her articles, I’ve come to know Liz as a relationship blogger, so she highly values relationships in her blogging activities. I doubt if she sells ad space or text links on her personal blogs. Who she writes about, you’ll be sure she’s personally recommending them, by way of linking.

When I started blogging, it was mostly personal. My blog was about my life. Sure, it sounds corny, but a good majority of bloggers are blogging on personal matters. Blogs are their online diaries, and not their soapboxes and online newsmagazines. So on my personal online journal, I linked to sites and other bloggers that I found interesting. Back then, the concept of paid links was still not as prevalent as it is today.

But then blogs became popular among search marketers and optimizers for their link value. If you could get a link from an A-lister, not only would you get traffic, but also good link juice. Or if you can’t get quality, you could at least get quantity. And the text link industry was born. Now you see sponsored blog posts and reviews everywhere. Sometimes it’s weird how people would insert paid links within their paragraphs, even though the anchor text is unrelated. Sometimes people would incessantly post, several times per day, just to meet pay per post quotas, (quality drops significantly in these cases, in my observation). You don’t know what’s real anymore.

Going back to Liz’s point, it seems there’s nothing really wrong with being informational instead of social on your blog. I think the point is that blogs these days are becoming more and more impersonal. Pretty soon, the concept of blogs as personal journals might be a thing of the past.

Technorati is at the top of its game. If you’re searching for buzz in blogs, what’s the first site you go to? Google blogsearch? Probably not. It’s likely technorati. Technorati has refined blog searching and linking relationships to a T (T for technorati?). And what’s even better, it seems to be ranking high in Google searches for certain keywords. Here’s the scoop from Valleywag.

Suddenly, it’s all clear: Technorati’s pages, on subjects such as Wikipedia, get plenty of links from the blogs it indexes; they have strong “Google juice”, and so score highly in searches, particularly for technical words; no wonder, as embattled founder Dave Sifry recently boasted, the traffic to these “tag” pages is growing at a “torrid” pace. Google is Technorati’s number one source of traffic.

Aha! so all those links to http://www.technorati.com/tag/(insert tag here) are causing Technorati’s Google juice to skyrocket. I’ve always been wary of inserting the default technorati link in my blogs, instead choosing to use internal tag links. I believe here on JOAB, we use the ultimate tag warrior plugin, which generates internal links for tag archives, instead of technorati links. No, we’re not giving technorati link juice not because we don’t like it, but because we’d rather keep our readers within our own site. We still get indexed by Technorati, anyway!

But then it’s not all that easy. Pretty soon, Technorati might just feel Google pulling the rug from under their feet.

These themed pages are akin to search results; there is no original content, merely an aggregation of excerpts from the blogs that Technorati indexes, no more effectively than Google. And Google is a jealous search engine.

Yes, Google is a jealous search engine. So Technorati had better watch out. Or at least they can re-format their tag archive pages, so these won’t be seen as just aggregation of excerpts.

[Via 901am]

Matt Cutts, de facto spokesperson of Google in the blogosphere, posts here how to report paid links to Google. The meat of the discussion (although quite implied) is that Google wants to downgrade sites that sell links. Now I’m not one to question Google’s methods, but this sounds like discrimination to me. And it sounds like Google is admitting that their algorithm still cannot match human intelligence when it comes to filtering content.

Tony Hung, over at Deep Jive Interests, wonders whether this is Google’s Achilles’ heel.

Personally, I’m beginning to wonder whether or not if Google will EVER be able to meaningfully track paid links if they’re not overtly notified as such on your blog. Google’s worries are valid: paid links are fine for traffic, but not when it comes to alerting search engine results — or page rank. The problem is that links can be paid for and sold without any notification on your blog, and there would be impossible to tell. For example, not that I would do it (or AM doing it for that matter), but there is no way of knowing whether or not reviews of anything, including web2.0 properties, have been discretely paid for behind Google’s back. The presumption is that the link is “organic” and that its ranking in Google is based on the worth I’m placing towards the link destination.

Wait a minute. So does this mean each and every blog that sells links—yes, even through Text Link Ads and other similar link programs—run the chance of getting downgraded in their pagerank/trustrank? We are opening a very big can of worms here, so to speak. It’s not only the ethical issues (i.e., what constitutes link spamming? How many paid links is too much?). It’s also the business issues I’m concerned with.

Is this the end of TLA, ReviewMe, and even other paid link/review programs? Is this the end of private link sales on sites and blogs? A lot of blogs and sites thrive on paid links and affiliate marketing. And I don’t think all sites that sell links and ad space are bad. Yes, some sites live solely for the purpose of selling links. But this doesn’t mean all sites that sell links are like that.

Then there’s the question of abuse. It’s like DIGG users ganging on certain other DIGG users, burying stories en masse. What if a group of no-gooders decides to gang up on sites they don’t like, and report to Google as link sellers? What if competitors report each other? What if I decide to report sites out of the blue?

This might make people who write PayPerPost or ReviewMe articles choose not to disclose their writing for compensation.

Quimby’s tiger was released from his soul over Paid Text Links Ads and Google’s policy on them. Or my post about it…whatever. Ah well…paid or unpaid links, Matt Cutts slobbering and Google worshipping aside, surely we can find something more approriate to release our soul’s energy over?

I dunno…where shall we start? Global Warming...Starvation in Africa...War in the Middle East. You name it. There’s a whole host of issues, that we as responsible, reasonable and educated people (hopefully) need to discuss and search our souls over. Or not. Maybe you are on an internal journey, seeking enlightenment. But splitting hairs over Search Engine policies towards paid text links is a tangent of an abstract issue, at best, and while it’s definitely worth discussing, it’s about as unspiritual as you can get. It doesn’t matter what, if any, your God (or faith) of choice is, but none of them would encourage you to link your soul (pun intended!) to such a trivial matter.

Of course, my tongue is firmly in cheek here! It is great that those who write and contribute on JOAB can openly disagree. What a boring world it would be if we all did agree. And Quimby made some good points: one that sticks to mind is that most of us who work in developing websites are often way too obsessed with Google’s power and the pagerank it gives to a website.

And ironically, since my post last week wondering whether Google was updating, Matt Cutts (more slobbering here, Quimby....) has, for the first time ever, recently posted a clarification on Google’s policy towards pagerank. To quote a couple of segments relevant to our own questions at JOAB-:

If you don’t care about PageRank and your site is doing well, that’s fine by me.

I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm.

I’m not sure if I’ve given the official word on a PageRank export before. It’s not a big event here at Google. Frankly, I didn’t even know we’d done our 3-4 month-ish push of this data. When I saw people talking about it online, I went to check and see whether it was a real push or not.

So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export.

Seems that the much awaited Google pagerank update may be underway. Check out your website, especially if it is new at the various datacenters-: here.

A good example includes WebmasterWorld.com, which is moving from a PR7 to a PR8. Many sites, although unstable and unpredictable at this time, appear to be holding onto current rankings. JOAB, for instance, is still a solid PR6. Amongst the early losers, there appears to be some downgrades on some well known, recently sold blogs from PR6s to PR5s, but nothing too drastic as of yet.

Bloggy Network can be pretty satisfied with the first glimpses of this update. For its homepage, an out of the box PR5, as well as for some its related sites, like Bloggy Hosting. And out of the box PR4s for its newest additions, like: Charities Blog, Travel Blog and Hollywood Blog.

So hang on to your undies and watch those toolbars and SERPs!

Mosey’s latest post unleashed the tiger in my soul… Wait! Maybe I don’t have a soul… I buy and sell links after all.

You know what. I think all this fuss about the PageRank economy is all a load of BS. Sure, you can raise a bunch of hypotheticals and point to the success that Google has had in solving problems algorithmically in the past. You can talk all you want about people who have gotten screwed in the past by relying on a business model that was, in the words of Google, pure evil! Broohaha!

I don’t care. Really, I don’t. Linking works now and linking will work in the future. Perhaps the value of bought links will go down slightly as the meme spreads of an imminent, pending Google crack down. Perhaps the strategy of fear will pay off ever so slightly.

But linking is linking. At its best, Google can decide to deflate the value of linked lists. Lists of links. But there are plenty of good lists of links. Not all linked lists are bad linked lists. So tell me how the logic works? Does Google have an algorithm for determining which linked lists are good and which are bad? If so, then you just emulate the good lists better. Bundle links into patterns of semantically relevant topics.

Or…better yet, watch the link buyers and sellers develop semantic link generators. What’s this you ask? Well, let’s say I want to buy a link on site X. I pay $30/ month and in exchange, site X installs a wordpress plugin that dynamically places your link in semantically relevant locations throughout the blog post content. Now let Google do its algorithmic dance.

The point is this: the value of run of the site links might dampen over time. Sure. And legit blog networks will get just as hard as evil link sellers. But even so, the value of links are still central to the SEO game, and so long as there is motivation for link building, there will be an economy for buying and selling links. The distribution mechanism of the economy might get more sophisticated, but it will be there and it will continue to stay strong.

Oh, and by the way, stop slobbering at the feet of Google. They don’t have all the powers you ascribe to them, anyway.

In a recent post, I refered to the problem of relying on a business model that is based on paid text link advertising. I think it’s worth discussing this topic more and there have been some worthwhile recent debates about this very subject on blogosphere.

In Google’s “Quality Guidelines“, it states pretty clearly-:

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Matt Cutts (hopefully, needs no introduction) said in a post last month-:

“The best links are not paid, or exchanged….the best links are earned and given by choice.”

Such was the reaction to this post, that Matt posted again just a few days ago to clarify his position-:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future.”

Matt’s take on this is logical. Why, when Google won’t recognize its own paid ad links as “authentic votes” would it reward other sites’ paid ad links? Right now, the process still does reward, in error, those webmasters who want to gain pagerank. But the days of such PR transfers are clearly numbered.

An excellent soul-searching post appeared re: this topic on the O’Reilly Radar blog. To quote from the post-:

“Long term, I’m pretty sure that supporting people who game search engines is not a good thing. The result will be that search engines are less able to reach their promise as an expression of the collective intelligence of the net.”

...in reaction to a post of outrage on Phil Ringnalda’s blog.

This harks back to the Link Condom arguments a la 2005, open warfare in some cases: Danny Sullivan says YES, Jeremy Zawodny says NO and a host of other SE gurus weighing in. All of that seems to have quietened down over the last six months, but maybe, just maybe, it’s rearing its head again before the next Google PR update.

I have to confess to being a complete hypocrite in this matter. I sell text links via TLA and have even bought some on behalf of clients. Why wouldn’t I? It’s easy money and satisfies my clients who are obsessed with the pagerank game. If it gives them peace of mind and a way to make sense of things, so be it. I’m always just amazed at how many of my clients, extremely intelligent in so many respects, buy into this pagerank hoodwink. Of course it matters…I guess...but it’s just too random, without clear guidelines, to base anything concrete, business-wise, on. I have a lot of PR5 and PR6 websites which are just rubbish, make zilch moneywise and don’t appear in SE results for anything. Meanwhile, I have a lot of PR3 websites which have had a mountain of love and work put in, make lots of money and appear high in the SEs for a bunch of enquiries. As one of the comments said, by TallTroll, in reply to Matt’s aforementioned post-:

Matt, the professionals don’t care a lot about PageRank, and you know it.

And where it gets totally absurd is when people are buying text links in order to gain pagerank, so that they can in turn sell text links off the very same site they have been buying links for. Oh dear!! If only life were so simple....

I’ve been down this road before. Last year, on behalf of a large SEO firm in Dublin, with quite some trouble- I set up a team of manual reciprocal linkbuilders in Asia. I had 50 employees in place and had orders for over 100 websites, requiring an average of 300 confirmed, quality, relevant reciprocal links per month, each. Going on a 10% success rate, that’s approx. 3,000 websites researched per month, for each order- thus the significant manpower required. And then…the Jagger update happened in October, 2005. In a single day, our “business model” was gone and we were burnt. Out of the game. Finished. You could say that we had been unlucky- as what we were doing would have been almost a guaranteed success for the previous five years, so ours was just bad timing. In hindsight, however, I have come to realise that it was a “house built on sand“. On behalf of our clients, we were trying to artificially inflate their website’s ranking and employing shortcut SEO techniques, trying to fool Google and the other SEs in terms of link popularity.

This is the same scenario waiting to happen with paid text link ads. It’s not if, it’s when. Doomed. I’ll leave the final word to Matt Cutts-:

Many people who work on ranking at search engines think that selling links can lower the quality of links on the web. If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.