Google doesn’t really care about spammy links

Posted by stuart as splogs, pagerank, google

First things first - if I read one more blog telling me that spammy links to my site can hurt my rankings, I’m going to knock on all my neighbours doors asking if they have a puppy. When eventually on of them responds in the affirmative, I’m going to storm their house and kill said canine.

If spammy links could hurt a site, we’d all be running around dropping links to our competitors on free-for-all links pages, and nuking them into oblivion.

Now, on to my point:

It’s no secret that the GoogleFairy has been quite busy of late wandering around the web sprinkling her green GoogleDust on sites here and there, taking GoogleDust from some sites, depositing it on others.

Whilst Google exporting PageRank to the toolbar engenders not nearly the hysteria that it once did, you just know that webmasters the world over are secretly checking all their sites, quietly patting themselves on the back for their gains, and bemoaning their losses, despite the disparaging posts they are making in their blogs about the irrelevance of PageRank.

Of course, I was one of those said webmasters. One of the things I do when there’s a toolbar pagerank update, is go through this blog, checking the posts that I know were popular at the time of their writing, and gained a few backlinks in the process.

One internal page I checked had actually gained a PR of 4, the same as the home page. The funny thing is that it was this post. In short, this post was just a list of 5,000 highly searched terms.

The post was an experiment to see how many trackback links I could get from sploggers (people searching through RSS Feeds for specific keywords, then publishing an excerpt of the post, with a link back to the originating site). Yahoo Site Explorer is showing 143 links to this post, each one spammier than the last.

If we’re to take pagerank as google’s measure of authority of a page, it would appear that Google thinks that this page is of a higher authority than some of the excellent blogs I read.

So here’s a tip - If you’re a pagerank whore, or if you’re into selling websites, don’t worry about building out a quality site with quality content and quality backlinks.

Just throw up a post with a shitload of high search volume terms on it, and watch the links roll in.

Do you dofollow your pingbacks?

Posted by stuart as nofollow, dofollow, linking, link love, link exchange, links, pagerank

I’ve noticed something interesting a happening little more frequently lately, and I’d like to ask you, the punters for your thoughts…

The thing I’ve been noticing is that when other bloggers link to a post of mine, they are no-following the link.

Now when you link to a post of mine, you basically get two, and in some cases, three do-followed links back to your blog:

1. From the original pingback/trackback section under the post you’re linking to,
2. From the recent comments list in the sidebar of the blog, and…
3. If you comment often enough, in the “People who Rock!” (most active commenters) section in the sidebar.

I can understand people’s reticence to dofollow links in this age of Google getting a little over-zealously slap-happy with bloggers who sell text links and paid content, but let’s have a look at the reason that the nofollow attribute was first introduced.

The nofollow attribute to a href tag is meant to tell the search engines that the owner of the page upon which the nofollow tags appear cannot vouch for the quality of the content being linked to.

That original purpose, noble as it may have been, is now being held like the sword of damocles above the head of bloggers who now fear any outgoing dofollow links may be penalized.

Taking the above point about being able to vouch for the quality of the content beyond your nofollowed link, the linker needs to ask themselves whether they should be linking to the content in the first place. If you don’t trust that the quality of my content is good, why are you linking to me at all?

Take a look at number 5 in this list from searchenginejournal of 13 reasons nofollow sucks:

5. Linking to someone with a NoFollow attribute is a sign of not trusting them. It’s like reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves.

In my opinion, it’s also a little like going to one of those sweets boxes you see on the reception desks of large companies, usually selling bags of sweets for some charity or another, and instead of paying $2 for your bag of lollies, paying one dollar and taking the candy anyway.

You’re getting full value from your link from me, why are you being so stingy at passing that link love back?

So here’s the question:

What do you think is a fair policy for nofollowed pingbacks? Should I nofollow the outgoing link back from my blog? Delete the pingback alltogether? Just leave it and get on with writing content so maybe some one eventually links to me with a dofollowed link?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this….over to you!

Why any proposed google boycott is a complete wank.

Posted by stuart as blog traffic, blogging, pagerank, google

Ever since the four horsemen of the apocalypse rode into town and started eating babies the google paid link pagerank slapping incident, I’ve been hearing whispers in the shadows about a proposed webmaster boycott of Google.

I thought I’d channel my vast intellectual resources (I even stopped drinking single malt scotch for the day) into having a look at whether this was, (as I thought) a complete wank or not.

Now in my “real” job, one of my clients provides me with about 80% of my work. Whilst this is nice and all, I’m a little uneasy about having so many eggs in one basket. This client can be a little difficult to deal with at times, sometimes payments are late, sometimes I have a little trouble getting him to understand the limitations of HTML and CSS, but hell, he gives me 80% of my work.

Will I boycott him for being a bit late with his payments sometimes?

Shit no.

This is the thing that people need to understand about the way Google is now treating paid links. You are now being given a stark choice:

1. Continue to do paid posts/sell text links and pay the pagerank toll, or;
2. Stop doing the above and keep your pagerank.

It really is that simple.

You can continue to do business with Google, or you can choose not to. The choice is yours.

While it may be a prudent business decision to not rely on Google for a large portion of your income, I’ll be buggered if I’m going to boycott the traffic and income they give me.

More on ranking for rubbish content

Posted by stuart as pagerank, seo, search engine optimization, google

I wrote the other day about ranking for rubbish content.

Well, I’ve thrown a few more pages up, this time with product keywords at the same density (5 - 7%), and within two days, I’m ranking first page in a couple of search engines, and out-ranking long standing pages. In one instance I’m out-ranking two commercial sites with a PR of 2 and a PR of 3.

This is just bizarre!

(If you try this, you’re not going to want to put AdSense ads on these pages, unless you want to say goodbye to your account)

Yes you can rank for crap content

Posted by stuart as pagerank, seo, search engine optimization, copy writing, google

About five months ago, I wrote a post here about how I managed to rank number one in Google for a keyword (against about 360 competitors) with just one backlink and some random text in two days.

In summary, I created two pages, SEO’d out the wazoo, targeting the keyword doowadiddy. One page had static (rubbish) content, the other had text which was randomly regenerated every time it was loaded, whilst maintaining a keyword density of between 5% to 7%.

Well I went back and had a look at Google this morning, and I’m still merrily holding down the number one and two spots (five months later!) for that keyword (now with about 580 competitors). The interesting thing is that the page with the static text is actually ranking higher than the page that randomly regenerates the copy with a predetermined keyword density. Maybe frequently updating content isn’t as important as we’re led to believe?

The biggest joke of all is that the static page has received a PageRank of 2! (With no backlinks at all showing in Google)

The static page also ranks number three in Yahoo! Neither page is anywhere to be found in MSN Live search (maybe Live Search is a bit smarter than we give it credit for?).

So what does this mean?

Maybe Google isn’t as smart as we might like to think they are. Surely their algorythms would pick up garbled random text?

I think there’s something in this. I’ll conduct some more experiments and publish the results when they’re in.