Quote of the Week from Eric Ward’s article on so-called “best practices” in link building:
Hannibal Lecter followed a set of “best practices” when he ate a census taker’s liver, and those best practices included Fava beans and a nice Chianti, but having best practices didn’t make him any less insane.
Does an over-optimization penalty exist? And what counts as over-optimization? I came across this discussion on on the “950 penalty” on Webmaster World. They posit that too many internal links with optimized anchor text is what triggers an over-optimization penalty. And maybe they are onto something.
This week I was testing the effect of increased cross-linking on a Wikipedia page — by finding related articles and linking back to the target, by adding the target to more relevant categories — and I probably doubled the number of internal pages linking to the one I wanted to boost.
Instead of boosting the page in the SERPs, it appears this effort might have torpedoed the page. This morning it was nowhere to be found in the top 100 results anywhere. It’s not a competitive term, and none of the other results appear to have changed dramatically, so it seems reasonable to me to assume it was something about this page, not the results in general, and that there was a causal relationship between the links and the drop.
I’m not entirely surprised that “excessive” interlinking could hurt; I’m just surprised that (what I’d consider to be) a moderate amount of interlinking could get a Wikipedia page penalized so quickly. I truly believed pages on that domain were more robust and could stand up to that strategy. (After all, there is a ton of internal linking and all internal links on Wikipedia use optimized anchor text.)
Well, time to undo some of those links and see if it comes back.
Update: March 2
I removed most, but not all, the internal links and the listing came back rather quickly, though in a lower position than before.
On an upbeat note … I managed to get a Wikipedia page erased from Google, temporarily? Damn, how awesome is that?
When you use the link: operator to search on a domain that is 301′d to a different domain, Google pulls up results for the target URL. For example, let’s say you own XYZ.com and you set it to redirect to ABCD.com. If you try to do a quick search to see if there are any sites still linking to XYZ.com — let’s say you wanted to contact them to change the link to point directly to your new URL — Google shows you a list sites that link to both XYZ.com and ABCD.com.
So you open up and view the source of page after page after page and there’s no mention of XYZ anywhere.
There’s no way to isolate who’s linking to the old site using the link: operator.
The reverse would make sense — include in the backlinks a list of all pages with links that somehow end up on that page — that makes sense because you could presumably see everything that is passing PageRank to the target page.
But for the query “link:xyz.com” to show me a list of pages linking to ABC, just because XYZ happens to redirect there doesn’t really make sense to me. After all, it’s possible those two domains aren’t even controlled by the same people and neither the target page, nor anyone linking to it, has anything at all to do with the redirecting page (i.e., XYZ.com).
I’m trying to see who’s linking to a certain page using the link operator. None of the pages in the results point to that page. Am I missing something obvious?
This probably is a whole lot clearer with some diagrams or screenshots - I’ll see about posting an update over the holidays.
Oh yeah… and happy holidays!
Funny link-building tip from our friends at SEO Black Hat: “Buying and selling links without the nofollow tag is now officially a black hat SEO practice that is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines… If you buy the entire site then you’re no longer violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by changing where it links.”
That’s pretty damn funny. (But don’t get me started on the whole “buying a link is black hat” Ugh! This gets me mad! My opinion on that issue is much like PhilC’s and a big clap clap clap to brettbum for his excellent posts.)
I totally want to throw in a TLA affiliate link right here, but stupid Blogger won’t let me insert any scripts into the post. Let’s see if I can work around that…)
Google has been warning the SEO community it would put the smack down on paid links. The message started coming in loud and clear earlier this year with the Google guys and gals talking at conferences about how the GOOG don’t like no bought links, and that sparked a lot of debate on all the forums: Just how would search engines distinguish paid links from “natural” links?
Then, in case you weren’t listening, Google started a de-PageRankifying campaign that was sure to get the community talking: first it dropped the Toolbar PageRank of paid directories (presumably those that had been created for SEO purposes) and then, more dramatically, it stripped major general-interest sites like the WashingtonPost.com of their precious green Toolbar pixels.
“You listen’ now, punks?” asked Google.
That, all the savvy SEOs knew, was just a shot across the bough bow, because does WaPo really care about how many green pixels it gets in the Toolbar? Does that change the economics of their business? No. But…with the holidays coming and Google having a reputation for making big, disruptive algo changes right before the big shopping season, I for one warned that sites utilizing paid linking as part of their link strategy would see the effects soon.
And in three… two … one:
Here’s are the Google rankings of one site for its top keywords and keyword phrases — check out what happened to that site’s rankings since Friday (I was out of the office on Monday, so it might have happened as recently as yesterday). [ed. I should note that none of the affected pages themselves lost any Toolbar PR, because the TBPR thing is only symbolic. It's the rankings (and therefore traffic) that actually matter.]
Just eyeballing this chart, it looks like paid links were stripped of their link juice, but not that the buyers of those links were heavily penalized. In the example above, most of the rankings dropped only a page — that’s significant, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as bad as the dread Minus 30 penalty, or an outright ban. Unlike the Minus 30 penalty, there isn’t going to be an opportunity to beg forgiveness. The links that were devalued can be removed, but that won’t help get your rankings back up. In fact, it’s entirely possible that Google isn’t done with this update yet and that further drops in these sites’ positions will occur.
But not everyone loses out in this latest rankings shuffle, obviously. Some sites — those that didn’t participate in detectable paid linking — get to move up a couple of spots. (Well la-dee-da, lil’ Goody Two Shoes.)
But, you knew the “buy yourself top organic rankings” strategy wouldn’t last in the long run.
Or maybe I speak to soon… also possible that this was a one time index clean-up and not a permanent change to the algorithm, in which case you could continue to discreetly buy links on other sites that haven’t been outted yet. hmmm…. I’m not saying that paid links are the best value for your money right now, but people tend to overreact to changes in the search engine landscape. I really wouldn’t advise you to pull the plug on every paid link you have out there; knee-jerk reactions to an algo shift aren’t going to help. There’s no way that Google figured out every single link that’s been paid for on the entire Internet … point of the hyperbole: some of those paid links might still be worth quite a bit. The trick is knowing which ones.
I also want to know how this is going to effect business of the big text link brokers. Are people going to stop buying text links now? I for one still think there’s plenty of opportunity there, as long as sites selling links stop being so frickin obvious about it. Like the WashingtonPost - they put the same block of paid link on ALL of their tens of thousands of pages. Of course that was going to be detected!
How ’bout you? Are you changing your strategy? And how do you hope to make up for the lost rankings now that the paid links aren’t boosting your position (assuming you paid for links, that is)?
Updated December 7: May I Have This Google Dance?
Less than 2 weeks after I published the post above, a funny thing happened. All the rankings came back to what they were before and have been holding steady since. I think they listened to me when I said “good things come to those who don’t panic.” (Paid links are dead! Long live paid links?)
It’s the end of the month and I realized I’ve barely posted at all in the last few weeks. There are at least half a dozen posts started but never finished just sitting in the queue, but a heck of a lot of good that does anyone.
So, yeah, I’ve been pretty busy. Lotsa stuff going on at work. I can’t really talk about it (shhhh) but I’ll mention that I had to lay off two of my staff, which was really hard to do. I’m also spending more time on brand management (again) and product merchandising, the latter of which generates a greater sense of urgency going into the holiday season than SEO projects do. (Xmas SEO? Puh-leeze, we took care of that back in July. J/K)
Obviously the big SEO chatter this month was about the contentious paid links debate and the related issue of several major sites (like the WashingtonPost.com, for example) losing a lot of PageRank. Bruce Clay does a nice job of rounding up relevant posts on the subject here and here. If you haven’t been following the debate, you might want to start with Rand’s roundup of the links session at SES San Jose.
Other news some of you may find interesting is that Google seems to be changing the way it displays sitelinks (at least intermittently). Here’s an example of the new 8-link layout I’m seeing a lot in Google’s sitelinks:
I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to start blogging again more regularly soon, once the work drama subsides (assuming it does).
My analytics show that someone found this blog at some point searching on something related to why you should blogroll. There isn’t anything on the site to answer that question, and I thought it was a good one, so I thought I’d take a shot at it. So here are 5 reasons to have a blogroll on your blog:
So why don’t I have a blogroll? Another good question. Where would I put it? My site isn’t really designed for more links in the template. I could get rid of my “What Am I Reading” list, but I think that serves a very similar purpose — to provide up-to-date, related content.
If you read this blog and think “this blog is fabulous, but would be so much better with a blogroll!” let me know. If you’re a reader of this blog and think “this is the worst SEO blog ever!” … well, I’ve got a 3-point rebuttal: 1) shows what you know — that honor is already claimed by this blog. 2) Why do you read it if you think it sucks? That’s not very smart. 3) Keep it to yourself. I don’t like to hear from not-smart haterz.
One of the interesting tidbits from this morning’s discussion with Google’s Matt Cutts has to do with how Google diffuses a “Google bomb” (such as the ones that Stephen Colbert recently pulled off with “greatest living American” and “giant brass balls“).
The reason they crop up and then disappear suddenly (as opposed to never succeeding in the first place) does not include any editorial intervention — however suspicious it may look. That’s consistent with what they’ve always said, even when the “miserable failure” results had President Bush’s bio page at the top forever.
Apparently the algorithm that sniffs out Google bombs is not built into the regular ranking algorithm; it’s run separately and only once every couple of months.
Another (valuable?) insight from this conference: Vanessa Fox is a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. (Updated June 15: Vanessa Fox is leaving Google!)
SponsoredReviews.com launched in beta today and of course I went and signed up right away. (Damn, that’s one more site I need to include in my review of paid blogging services, which I said I’d do last month and still haven’t gotten around to.)
Right off the bat, the thing I already like (from an advertiser’s perspective) is that the system more closely resembles an RFP system; that is to say, you post an opportunity (here SponsoredReviews.com uses the same language as PayPerPost) and bloggers can submit bids to do the reviews for you. You can accept a blogger’s bid, haggle over the price or reject the bid outright (if the blog is off-topic, of poor quality, too expensive, etc.) None of the other paid blogging services allow you to reject specific bloggers.
Within 30 minutes of posting an opportunity to see how well SponsoredReviews.com worked, I had 2 bloggers bid on it — which seemed decent for a service that just launched earlier that morning. After about 2 hours I had about two dozen bids.
Like ReviewMe, SponsoredReviews.com allows you to actively approach specific bloggers with your opportunities, which they can then choose to take on if they wish. The mechanism by which to search for relevant blogs to approach is similar to ReviewMe; advertisers can browse by keywords the bloggers have chosen to describe their sites.
As far as the service goes from a blogger’s point of view, I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but I like that I can pursue specific opportunities (like PayPerPost) and that the payouts tend to be higher (like ReviewMe, except the likelihood of actually getting to do a review are much higher. I have yet to be approached by an advertiser through ReviewMe since I signed up).
If you’d like me to review and link to your site, you can do so from my SponsoredReviews.com profile page. But I’d caution you to read the paid reviews I’ve done of other sites first (read: if your site sucks, I won’t hesitate to lambaste you).
I’m still working on that (unpaid) review of the various pay per blog services, but in the meantime, PayPerPost is really trying to get the word out about the upgrades they’ve made to their blog marketing service.
The most important update allowed for segmentation — that is to say, for advertisers to narrow down which bloggers could take an ad “opportunity” according to blog topic, Alexa rankings, Google Toolbar PageRank and other criteria.
Unfortunately, the interface was really buggy the first few days after the new release, which is never a good way to launch an upgrade. Advertisers were unable to increase the number of blogs they wanted to recruit for any given ad campaign; bloggers found that their Alexa rankings and Google PR were not adequately reflected in their accounts, so they were excluded from participating in ad campaigns they should have been eligible for.
Luckily nearly all of the major bugs appear to have been ironed out now. And that distraction aside, the upgrade was a good one. Because advertisers now have more control over the quality of sites their “ads” run on, they are willing to pay more for those links. There are some campaigns paying as much as $1,000 per post … if you happen to have an on-topic blog with PR7 or higher.
These higher payouts make paid blogging more attractive to serious bloggers and is probably attracting bigger, more reputable sites that might not have considered PayPerPost as a revenue opportunity (not when they could get $200 at ReviewMe, and the usual payout for PayPerPost pre-segmentation was less than $6).
I’m pretty bullish on PayPerPost (which has nothing to do with this being a paid post - Scout’s Honor!), and if they keep innovating (and keep aggressively reminding participants that disclosure is mandatory) I think the service will continue to attract new bloggers and advertisers.
