All About Content

… for themselves.

It seems there’s an inordinate number of search marketing firms using paid blogging services like PayPerPost and Blogsvertise to build links to their own sites. Apogee Search, for example, is using PPP to advertise its services for helping small businesses get Top Google Rankings (what seems like it would be a very competitive phrase, but the results for that search don’t seem very authoritative). I don’t know why exactly, but this strikes me very much like when personal injury attorneys advertise on late night TV — I guess it’s kosher, but it strikes me as déclassé.

Here’s an interesting quote from Apogee’s site: “Remember there is only 5% of the SEM industry that is worth trusting” (which I’d rewrite: Remember, only 5% of the SEM industry is worth trusting… except I think that’s awfully pessimistic.) And another one: “Starting with SEO instead of PPC is a red-flag of common industry malpractice.” Say what?

I really don’t think fostering mistrust in search engine optimization firms is a great strategy for promoting your own search marketing firm, but there seems to be an awful lot of that going around.

This has been a paid post (filed under Blatant Advertising) via PayPerPost.

Title pretty much says it all. According to Text Link Ads you need to be upgraded to the new version of Blogger for the script to work, but that’s actually not quite true — you need to use the new version of Blogger and use one of their standard templates. If you have an older custom template that you migrated to the new (then-beta) Blogger, you don’t have the option of adding widgets. And the way the script is set up to display the text link ads, you need to add an XML feed to your template via a widget.

I’ve tried creating a separate blog, setting up the ads, and then copying the code into the template for this one; but that doesn’t work because when a widget is created it’s specific to a particular blog id… and I haven’t even been able to find out what the blog id for All About Content is (did old Blogger sites get blog ids?).

It’s probably not that hard, but as a non-programmer, non-coder I’ve hacked this about as much as I can without having to actually rebuild this blog with a new template (and I don’t want to do that!). A reply to my emailed question to the company basically says, “it doesn’t work” (or rather: we don’t support that).

Okay, so I’m done for now. Never mind that idea.

Update: Just discovered some Blogger help pages that might help me hack this thing some more. It’s probable that the old template won’t let me use the widget builder (which is a bit like a WYSIWIG) but that I could somehow write the necessary code snippet by hand. That reminds me of some other adjustments I’ve been wanting to make. Will report back later.

For advertisers, there is a significant difference between contextual ads and (non-ad-served) text link ads. Contextual ads, like the Sponsored Results you see on the side of search engine results pages are all about ROI; whereas text link ads are primarily about (c’mon now let’s be honest) buying relevant inbound links that are intended to drive up rankings.

But for publishers, one concern looms larger than all others: show me the money!

After doing some investigating into the whole industry of purchasing text links (not to be confused with paid content or paid blog postings), I’m starting to come to the conclusion that I should migrate away from Google’s AdSense system in favor of a text link broker like Text Link Ads, or the equally creatively named Text Link Brokers (both terribly generic company names that serve as ultra-relevant anchor text anytime someone links to them).

So here’s the thing, it took me a whole year to get my first Google AdSense check. I look to be on track for another year of the same. Don’t get me wrong, I have no real complaints about the program. So why am I thinking of walking away with money left on the table?

Reasons Why Text Links Are Better Than AdSense

1. Google’s minimum for actually cutting you a check is higher than most other services, but until the money is in your bank account you haven’t actually earned anything yet.
2. With contextual ads you only get paid when someone clicks, while the simple act of publishing the text links is all it takes to earn money under the other model. And depending on the default level you set for editorial oversight, text link ads can run themselves as easily as the AdSense script.
3. While one could argue that visitors to the site might actually be interested in contextual ads and that text links, by comparison, are simply link spam –i.e., that I’d be doing my readers a disservice by switching to text ads — the truth is that I don’t think any regular readers of this blog are too interested in the cheesy contextual ads that get displayed alongside my posts currently.
4. Because text link ads don’t require anyone to actually click through, there’s less pressure to pimp out a site with ads in very prominent locations. (Google advises advertisers to pay attention to eye tracking and heat map studies to make decisions on where to place ads.)

   and finally…

5. Even if I only sold 1 link a month with Text-Link-Ads.com, I’d still be earning more money than I do with AdSense currently.

Whether you think text link ads are “black hat SEO” doesn’t really matter if you’re the publisher, not the advertiser. Even if there’s a possibility that the search engines start discounting your links by virtue of being lower quality, the only reason this should matter to you as a site owner is if the ability to pass PageRank is part of your sales proposition (which means, de facto, that you were already trying to pull one over on the algorithms).

If you’re a very large site, text link ads look pretty tacky, so I certainly don’t think revenue should be the only consideration when deciding between AdSense and paid links; but on the other hand, AdSense would detract from how seriously I would take a large, would-be authoritative site as well.

If you’re interested in selling ad space on your site as well, visit Text-Link-Ads.com.

I recently asked the g00gl3r at g00gl3r.com to add me to his (or her?) blogroll. And he/she agreed in exchange for a post where I link to him/her. A blogroll link for a single post? Oh yeah, baby, the g00gl3r must have been impressed with my PR5 homepage. [ed. Apparently it didn't come across that I was trying to be a little ironic. I think Toolbar PR is silly and is actually fairly meaningless.]

Okay, done. Now let’s see if my link gets added to another SEO blogroll. Now you’re probably asking, “Is that all it takes? Isn’t that too easy? Why don’t you just do that a few dozen times with a bunch of obscure blogs and then you’ll have hundreds if not thousands of inbound links?”

And that would be a very insightful question/comment on your part. The truth is that it wouldn’t be worth the work. Back in the bad old days before Google (and cohorts) got wise to link spam farms that was one of the first and easiest SEO strategies to address, but the data show that sheer number of IBLs is not as important anymore.

Quality, Not Quantity, of Links Counts
A recent case study by Fortune Interactive shows that the quality of inbound links, not quantity, is the most important factor in SEO.

In fact, the report says, “IBL Quantity is of least relative importance among the off-page factors across the board.”

WebProNews explains:

For Google, it’s not about how many people you know or how many people seem to like you. It’s about, mostly, who points to you and says “there’s a person worth visiting.” Fortune Interactive’s reverse engineering to decode how search algorithms work suggests that one weighty somebody is worth more than a multitude of nobodies. …

Though each engine weighted IBL quality differently, Fortune Interactive determined with its proprietary SEMLogic technology that what happens off the webpage is more important that what happens on the webpage. In fact, IBL reputation was more important than even IBL relevance.

The fact that link building is important in SEO efforts is hardly breaking news, but now that reputation counts über alles, there really is very little you can do cheaply and easily to manipulate your link juice significantly. The only sure-fire strategy: Write killer content and get important people to link to you. If you write killer content consistently then you might get added to a “worthwhile” blogroll. Or, even better, get slashdotted.

My little local paper, the Washington Post, which has always pushed the envelope when it comes to trying new technologies and new ways of interacting with its readers, recently signed a partnership with del.icio.us.

Registered del.icio.us users can bookmark washingtonpost.com articles right from the page. Each article includes links for tagging del.icio.us, as well as Technorati trackbacks.

This is a good example of an old media outlet “getting” the Web. Instead of getting defensive (like European publishers, or the NY Times, which started restricting access to some articles to non-paying users), the Washington Post is embracing new ways to leverage the Internet for its own advantage.

The story broke earlier this month that Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny sells links on his personal blog without using nofollow attributes. Matt Cutts of Google, on the other hand, has for month been championing nofollow tags on all paid links.

The story that’s playing out is that Zawodny was “caught” doing this, as if underhandedly, with bad intentions, polluting the sacred ground that is the World Wide Web. But it’s not like he pulled a Wordpress stunt by hiding the ads.

At issue, to simplify it for those of you who don’t know, is that the current generation of search engines, starting with the invention of Google, count links to a site as “votes” of sorts in their algorithm and that paid links are basically fake votes. A while back, at the urging of the industry, the engines said they’d obey a “nofollow” tag, which webmasters can apply to an entire page or just one link at a time. Those links would then not be weighted in the PageRank (or equivalent) calculaton. Hence the call to put nofollow tags on “unnatural” links.

Just to be contrarian and for the sake of debate: I find it strange that Google’s algorithm is now dictating how the Web should be structured. Paid ad links existed long before any algorithms were created that factored them in.

I guess I just don’t see how it’s my responsibility to keep search engine results relevant (by their definition) by catering to their algorithms - that’s their job. If they think advertising shouldn’t count as part of their equations - well bully for them. Advertising goes way back - it’s part of how commerce work. And the Internet, like nearly everything else, is governed by economics. If the engines don’t like paid links, they should, can, and for the most part have, figured out ways to discount those links.

Basically what we have is a great example of the tragedy of the commons. And I’m just not inclined to blame the individual herder for adding more cattle to the field as long as there aren’t any rules against it. And for now at least, there aren’t. As easy as it is to forget these days: Google is not the Web.

Get background on this nofollow debate. Check it out, even if only for the Link Condom parody site.

Back to SEO basics: What is PageRank and why do SEOs talk about it?

The PageRank system was developed by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to help determine a page’s relevance or importance. This method of counting links to a page as votes of popularity set the Google search engine (then called “BackRub”) apart from the previous generation of search engines.

Naturally people tried to take advantage of this by artificially inflating the number of inbound links (IBLs), so Google explains that its PR algorithm “looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; 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.’”

But still, people try to make up in quantity what they lack in quality by engaging in artificial linkbuilding schemes (the linkbuilding is artificial, the schemes are real). And with each successive algorithm update Google seems to be discounting volume more and more. The latest Jagger update, word has it, really went back to focusing on votes from “important” pages and discounting votes from pages that themselves don’t have many IBLs, as well as votes from pages that are not related to the topic of the page.

Contrary to popular belief, and despite how logical it seems, PageRank is not named thus because it ranks pages. PageRank is a value that’s part of a much larger equation that’s calculated whenever someone does a search on Google. PageRank is named after Larry Page.

Read more about PageRank and methods used to exploit it for higher rankings.

So WebPro News asks, are you paying attention to the practice of Google Bowling, where competitors sabotage your organic rankings by involving your website in unsavory SEO practices to get Google to penalize you? Sounds scary. The problem: That’s nonsense.

Questionable inbound links generally do not carry any link value. But there’s no evidence that Google penalizes a site for its inbound links. I don’t believe they’d do that for precisely the reason the author gives: it’s too easy (and too obvious) a way to game the engines and hurt your competitors.

The only reason Google will actively penalize you for the types of links coming into your site is if you are involved in a shady linking scheme. For example, a lot of spammers use triangle linking: Site A links to B; Site B links to C; and Site C links back to Site A. This way there’s no “reciprocal linking” which has long caused inbound links to lose value.

Still, the search engines have enough data to easily sniff out these A-B-C schemes and considers them “bad neighborhoods.” It can tell that there is an unnatural pattern because all the links only go to each other and because there are no links coming into the bad neighborhood from the rest of the web.

It’s close to impossible to get someone else’s website (over which you have no control) involved in this kind of scheme without the webmaster’s knowledge (since it involves putting links to other bad neighborhood sites on the site).

So if you’re a webmaster, don’t fall for any “Pay $9.99 for thousands of links instantly” come ons. And don’t link to sites that you don’t think are of value to your customers.

How one goes about soliciting legitimate and valuable inbound links, well that’s a different topic. Probably one of the hardest SEO things to do. But as for the search results being manipulated by malicious competitors - you can rest easy that it just doesn’t work like that.

Updated Nov. 24:
There some related discussion on the subject of whether competitors can hurt your site’s rankings on a Oct. 12 SearchEngineWatch discussion thread. One of the posters tells of some experiments he has run to test the theory.