Blog comments for PageRank - is Google really that stupid?

Posted by stuart as , , ,

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

“Shit! PR updates coming, gotta spend six hours a day leaving comments of questionable value on blogs (better make sure they’re not using “nofollow”) for the next couple of weeks.” 

Do we really think Google’s that stupid?

We live in a perpetual state of fear that we’ll piss off Google in some way, as they hold a hand full of aces as far as most of us are concerned in our endeavours to turn a buck:

1. They own the search engine which sends us most of our traffic
2. They own the advertising network which provides (most of) us with the largest slice of our income

We have no doubts in our belief that Google will detect invalid clicks on our AdSense ads, we believe implicitly that Google will penalise us for duplicate content, and we’re even scared to make a mistake in our layout, robots.txt, or even who we link to from our blogs.

Yet we persist with this fantasy that Google’s not smart enough to work out that those little bits at the bottom of blog posts with links where the names are have been left by the person who’s blog they point to?

By the above definition of pagerank, a link is considered by Google to be a “vote” for the site it points to. For Google to allow people to vote for themselves would be just plain stupid.

So even if Google’s allowing these links to count for something now, you’d better believe that the day is coming where blog comments will be devalued as a source of pagerank.

A shout out to the regular commenters

Posted by stuart as

I love you’se all!

Will

SarahG
Empress

Mark

Rhys

Gary

Oli

Is paid blog commenting really that bad?

Posted by stuart as ,

There’s a lot of self-righteous indignation floating around the blogosphere at the moment about the idea of a paid blog commenting servce which has recently come to light.

Tortuous howls of protest abound, with gnashing of teeth and threats to turn on nofollow as a way to combat the undoubted flood of spam we’ll all be getting.

Judging by the quality of the quite obviously paid comments I’ve received on this blog in the last 24 hours, nothing has really changed. Instead of deleting spammy comments from bots and misguided souls looking to boost their pagerank, it’s becoming apparent that it will be even easier to spot these paid comments, because they follow the basic rules required to get past askimet and the like:

• No more than two links in the comment
• No javascript
• etc etc.

Mark over at 45n5 has a regular commenter who goes by the handle of Valentin.

Valentin leaves insightful (if maybe a little difficult to understand due to his or her broken English) and helpful comments. The thing is, Valentin doesn’t link to a blog or website in his comments. Valentin has become a trusted and valued (I assume) commenter on Marks blog, so would it be that bad if he decided to offer a link in his comments for a price?

Let’s say someone offered Valentin fifty cents to use their link in his name when he comments on Mark’s (and I assume he comments on others) blog? Would that be such a bad thing?

Food for thought…

New typo generator at textreplace.com

Posted by stuart as

OK, so it seems I have a bit of work to do before my multi-national ebay typo tool is ready for public consumption (yes, dear feed readers, I deleted the post pointing to it when I realised that there were some problems with it)

What I have been able to finish today is the textreplace typo generator.

Whilst it doesn’t allow the multiple keyword entry that the seotools typo generator does, it does offer one feature that I think typo-seekers will find useful:

It offers you four options as to the output format of your typos:

1. Comma separated
2. Space separated
3. Tab separated
4. List (as per seobook)

Anybody who’s tried to wrestle a large list of  typo keywords into either excel or a php array will understand why this might be useful.

Enjoy the textreplace.com typo generator. 

Australia’s Competition Regulator to sue Google?

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It seems that in a case of “it’s not the size of the dog with the bark, but the size of the bark in the dog”, Australia’s ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Comission) is alleging that google is allowing PPC advertisers to use competitors brand names in their AdWords ads on the search network.

This is nothing new, I wrote about this very thing in July last year.

The issues that the ACCC has with Google are twofold:

“The ACCC said that in 2005, sponsored links titled “Kloster Ford” and “Charlestown Toyota” allegedly appeared on Google, but the links allegedly directed users to the Trading Post website.”

“Google also continues to allegedly fail to “adequately distinguish sponsored links from ‘organic’ search results”, according to an ACCC statement.”

Whilst they may have a case in the first instance, as I’ve said before:

“The question is, is there anything wrong with this? I’m not sure, but imagine being a small startup company trying to get off the ground with an AdWords campaign, and having someone like Microsoft come along and buy up the top AdWords spots for your keywords. Anti-competitive? Possibly. Unfair? Probably.”

Google probably needs to get its shit together on this issue, as the potential for abuse is more than apparent.

Where I’m not so sure is the second issue. A quick look at search results on Google, MSN, and Yahoo show as near as damnit to identical layouts: Sponsored results at the top on a tinted background, organic results below, and sponsored results in the right side. All three use a term “sponsored results” or similar for both the top and sidebar listings.

So what exactly is the issue?

Maybe this explains it a bit better:

Quoted from the ACCC statement: “The ACCC understands that it is the first regulatory body to seek legal clarification of Google’s conduct from a trade practices perspective,” the statement said.

“This is the first action of its type globally.”

A bit of glory seeking on the international stage maybe? This action needs to be considered in the context of the reputation that the ACCC has in Australia - An inconsistent, bumbling, toothless tiger. Their handling of telecommunications infrastructure and broadband after the sell-off of our government owned telecommunications (near) monopoly in Australia is testament to that.

This still doesn’t explain why the ACCC has not named Yahoo and Microsoft in its statement. I could be wrong (and can’t be assed looking it up), but I would guess that Google’s annual turnover is probably bigger that Australia’s GDP, so I don’t think that they’d be particularly concerned by the action.

What does concern me is the use of my tax dollars to fund pie in the sky, doomed to fail publicity stunts.