Lions and Tigers and Bears! Oh My!

Valued readers - I have been quite busy lately. This post is to let you know that I in fact did NOT fall off the face of the planet and that new posts will be coming soon!

A note of interest: Gmail now requires a cell phone number to be associated with all new accounts! How do I know about this before they make the offical announcement? Sue me, I have lots of emails ;P

I'm upset over the passing of Michael - I grew up with his music, like you all did I'm sure. I can actually moonwalk, it's not as easy for dogs. My favorites were billie jean, thriller, smooth criminal and somebodys watching me.. I wish they would leave him alone and let him rest. I really don't care if he was pumped full of drugs or not.. it's no ones business but his own.

This is fun.. just blogging about nothing instead of my usual tutorials and serious SEO talks.

I'll have some fresh posts to you very soon. Please don't leave me, you're all I have!

No, don't share this ;P

I Call Shenanigans on Matt Cutts!

It's this particular question that boiled my blood today. It's from Matt Cutts' personal blog mattcutts.com/blog <-- (This is a link omission by the way. See how it's plain text but I'm treating it like a link.. this way it doesn't drain rank)

Matt is answering a question about the recent Google algorithm change (read about that on onecoolsite if you haven't yet) concerning nofollow links.

Doesn’t (the recent change) encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?

Matts Answer: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

from MattCutts.com/blog

The no-nonsense answer: Yes! Turn off the comments on your blog and you will see an improvement in the SERPs, moreso now that we can't nofollow but this is how it's always been.. even though it makes your blog suck.

No one said anything about 'hoarding' rank, Mr. Cutts - this guy is simply asking if his comments are going to suck pagerank out of his site since he can no longer label them 'nofollow' to redistribute juice. The answer to that is yes.

"parts of our system encourage links to good sites." This has nothing to do with anything. If you are linking to authoritive sites, it shouldn't be in the comment section. Most of the comment backlinks come from other bloggers..

Are these webmasters from the authoritive sites really commenting on anyones blog?? No.

To a well-linked internet - this recent algorithm change is practically assault with a deadly weapon. If there is a bonus for non-reciprocated outlinks to authoritive sites like Cutts suggests above I assure you it's a small one.. small enough for me not to have ever noticed in my time as an optimizer.

Either way, the whole Web 2.0 movement is about the users controlling the content. What if there is some uber-great content that I want to link to.. but it's not on an authoritive site? If we have everyone linking to the 5 top sites for their niche, the SERPs are just going to get regimented and stagnant, with the authoritive sites staying on top and the new comers somewhere around the 15th or 16th page. Sure, it's less work for Google to administer and remove spam, but it comprimises freshness for the end user and sticks a middle finger up at webmasters everywhere.

But Codesucker, you shouldn't even be thinking about SEO.. just write good content.

Nope. I'm one of those so called SEOs gaming the system and guess what - The brains behind every single one of those authoritive sites has someone like the dog barking exactly how to optimize at them.

Guess what I'm telling clients?

Link out less.

They pay dogs good money(not really) for consultation.. I need to back up every claim I make with authoritive resources - you want me to tell real people to link to 'good' sites for a google bonus of some sort? Leave blog comments on and hope for commenters from 'good' sites? I can't back that up at all - In fact it's downright silly from where I stand, there is no evidence to support such dangerous nonsense.

Since hearing about the change I am treating every outlink as a Google penalty.

Should I be worried about dropping in rank due to said 'changes'?

No, they have already been implemented.

Final words on the issue.

I'm not peeved about the rule change it's the above statement I have 'beef' with and I am sure I'm not the only one who will attack it. I have zero sympathy. Heavy lies the crown, Mr. Cutts.
 

Link Sculpting 2.0 - How to do it NOW

Scuplting isn't dead.

Nofollow isn't dead either, but the combination of the two certainly are.

You can read about the recent Google algorithm change in a guest post I did for onecoolsite. For details about the actual change see the post Matt Cutts tells SEOs 'nomore' link scuplting via nofollow.

The truth is that the more outbound links a page has, the less each link is worth. If you aren't familiar with this concept please brush up on the linkjuice algorithm.

So if we wanted to add a link, but didn't want it to draw juice, we used to just make the link nofollow. This practice is over.

The best of the new options contributes to a less well-linked internet. To avoid decreased ranking from these algorithm changes, some experts are advising the removal of all these links. They have a good point, this way the rest of the links will still be worth the same amount. But, are you really going to get rid of all the tags, categories and comments?

Link Sculpting 2.0

The new link sculptors will find success by manipulating link orders and, now, by omitting links.

Link Order

Link order is the position the link holds on a page. If it's the first link a webcrawler will run into, it's got the highest order. The last links to be traversed have the lowest order.

I described how to sculpt via link orders in an older post: Carving via nofollow and link orders, this strategy is still valid today.

To take advantage of the strategy, the highest ordered links on your page should link to other pages where you want the most linkjuice to flow. Consequently, thos pages will end up with the highest pagerank. and end up with the highest pagerank). once overlooked pawns of this strategy, link orders are the new key to sculpting.

Link Omissions

The days of long blogrolls and newsfeeds are over. Long lists of links are out, even if they are part of an aggregation and pump 'freshness' into your site. SEOs will now think twice before adding any links, especially outbound ones (referrals) to another website.

Not only referrals are in Danger

So are the links that go to another page even in your own site. For bloggers, these are the tag links, recent comments, and, I hate to say it, even the archive in some cases. (The archive is the backbone of your site. I've alway recommended displaying an archive on every page).

Blogger automatically lists the tags for a post. Each of these tags links to its own tag page with all the posts using it. To redistribute the juice, Blogger makes these links nofollow. Nowadays it doesn't matter, and the juice is getting spilled either way. Tags are ordered higher than comments. We will be seeing a lot less of them (displayed on the post page, at least) in the future.

What about blog comments?

This recent change endangers blog comments. Big Time.

Blog comments are the most interactive part of the blogging experience, posts have hundreds of comments. Each one of the comments comes with a link that is sucking up juice.

Now SEOs are trying to say that, since we can't nofollow the blog comment links in order to redistribute juice, we might as well not even have them. This is a sad day for the internet. What's going to happen eventually is that SEOs will change the code so instead of linking back to the commenters site, it will just display the URL in text. Bleh.

and on a much lighter note..

DoFollow comments finally approved by Codesucker!

Until now, I saw doFollow comments as a great way to suck the juice directly off a blog page and spill it throughout the community. Good for the community, bad for the blogger. The number one rule for link sculpting used to be to make all your comments nofollow, no matter what. Now, comments either dofollow or they don’t get get counted at all in the sum of outbound links. So, it's as if we will be losing the juice anyway, but without benefiting the community of commenters!

The only thing you have to watch out for with dofollow is administration. Always approve comments before showing them on a dofollow blog. Google will hit you with penalties for spam links left by malicious commenters if they are dofollow.

Keep in mind that the comments of a blog are the lowest ordered links of the page. They don't really give out too much juice anyway... but every little bit helps, right? Eh.

Happy Sculpting.

Bing SEO Part 2: Some answers. What is DEO?

It's been a few days playing with Bing and keeping my ears open. I'm loving a few things, especially the expandable content boxes, which ultimately lowers our traffic as webmasters. I hold no grudge for I'm an internet surfer first, webmaster second.


The only conclusive result offered is that Bing is substantially harsher about domain age. From a Bing vs Google SEO test on seowizz.net, Tim Grice suggests the title tag may have a slightly stronger influence on Bing than it does on Google - but domain age is a definite.

Tim also suggest another difference in that Google seems to award less then Bing for backlinks. Bing seems to favor backlinks rather than a well optimized page based on results from the second Bing vs Google SEO test of the series. The test shows a well optimized page that holds the #1 Position for Google is far lower ranked in Bing - because it doesn't have as many quality backlinks as it's competitors. For the test keywords, the Pagerank 2 site is ranked higher on Bing than a well optimized PageRank 5 competitor. These are some interesting results considering the differences of both search engines.

How do I optimize specifically for Bing?

You don't. The reasons for the differences between Bing and Google SEO come from situations you can't control. Domain age and backlinks are out of our hands, there is no difference in on-site SEO for Google and Bing.

Bings pretty much using the same Microsoft results we've seen with msn and live but with a cute Googly interface and a couple cool features. My belief is that it will get much more cash orientated in the future. I'll keep my eyes open, but I'm pretty sure DEO is going to be the same as SEO

What is DEO?

Decision Engine Optimization - Well it's a 'Decision' engine isn't it? Grow up, Microsoft.

Have you seen the Bing TV ads? They are ridiculous, they make it seem like they are curing cancer. It's Google with some pepper, not everyone likes pepper - calm down, Bing.
 

Guest Posts + Bing and Wave!

Valued Readers - Please bear with me the next couple of days I will be stupid busy working out some issues with my design business. I will be unable to write or answer long emails - if you desperately need my attention please send me a DM on twitter I will be back to my overactive social self shortly and I've got some great posts on the backburner.

Did a guest post SEO and Social Media on Kikolani.com - this revisits the concepts in my earlier post social media linkbacks and nofollow.. also writing a couple more guest posts this week which I will feature as they get published.

Bing is live! So far I'm impressed and there ARE differences in the rankings of Bing and Google, the reasons for which will be discussed and answered within the SEO community. I don't suggest making efforts to optimize for Bing until we realize exactly why some sites rank higher than their competitors on Bing but not Google, I have some theories. Why are they eerily similar to MSN SERPs? I'll back back after more research.

You heard about Google Wave, right? It's revolutionary - two people can type on the same wave and both can see each others text before hitting 'send'. Waves can also be embedded into HTML, this is good for blog comments because follow-ups can be seen and answered without the commenter having to actually load the blog page.

Check out Bing and get excited about Wave!
 

Bing SEO! Do I have to optimize for Bing now?

(EDIT: This series is updated here: Part 2: some answers, Google vs Bing SEO which was written after Bings launch)

Relax, it's not even out yet and don't touch your code in public. I'm full of questions that will soon be discussed and answered within the SEO community, I do predict a shakeup of sorts however.

Bing will be much more strict than Google, hardly operating based on linkbacks and on-site SEO at all, but rather research and only ranking authoritive sites, or passing linkjuice only from authoritive sites and their pages. This is something the Google Monster will not do and in a sense is why I believe Bing is set for failure. If my batsenses are working right, bloggers particularly are not going to do well on Bing results.

These are some Bing concerns and questions when thinking about how the community will be effected by Bing in terms of SEO, especially bloggers.

Bing can sort by location

So am I going to see more search traffic (from Bing! OMG yay!) if I type 'new york' into some of my blog posts because that's where I am and where my internet footprints come from?

Bing can sort in favor of jobs

So will having the JobThread advertisement widget provoke more Bing visits? Or is this just open to Monster.com Careerbuilder.com Hotjobs and a couple other ones?

Product reviews, health keywords, travel decisions Oh my!

Is Bing going to send more (search?) traffic to my blog if I sell something in the sidebar with great product reviews? Or is this strictly voted on by users.. kinda like Digg??

Does Bing respond to nofollow? What about PageRank, what's my BingRank?

LoL, relax. I'm going to assume they implement nofollow and even stricter ranking rules then the Google Monster.

Are you excited?

I'm thrilled. Ask.com actually tried this and failed back in 2007 - here's a blog post from back then about it on SearchEngineLand.com* Turns out that it has almost the same features as Bing and what's eerie is they put out a similiar promotional video, like the one you can see now on Bing.com - there was also some babble about it competing with Google at the time.. deja vu?

Bing was originally named Kumo apparently, it was internally tested among Microsoft employees recently according to SearchEngineLand, you can read the memo sent to the employees via the link.

I pulled this little tidbit of hard earned and spent Microsoft research dollars out of the article for you, my readers attention:

"In spite of the progress made by search engines, 40% of queries go unanswered; half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks; and 46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes." -SearchEngineLand

Interesting. So let's see if Microsoft can do anything about that. I'll be watching, so will the black hats - I don't think Microsoft knows what it just got itself into.
 

Biff and the Perfect Backlink

CodeSucker 3:14 " Acknowledge the Google Monster and offer Him glorious backlinks when He sends His minion search spiders to inspect and index our humble pages. Oh Lord, let my backlinks be relevant and my content be fresh! "

The story of Biff

Biff writes some unique, great content!

Biff promotes the page with this content in hopes that someone reads it and references the content somehow on a webpage. The way we say 'Hey, thanks for the content!' on the internet nowadays is a backlink - At least that's what Google thinks.

It happens.

Great, there is a willing webmaster looking to reference Biff's content on one or maybe more of their own pages! But Biff forgot to optimize his content properly with named anchor tags - so this webmaster is forced to reference Biffs entire page instead of the specific content via an achor. What's worse is that the page referencing Biffs content has none of the keywords that Biff wrote in his content, in fact it's totally unrelated.

What just happend here?

Well, Biff got some backlinks and will be awarded PageRank, but the webmaster could've passed alot more linkjuice and relevancy to Biffs page if the content was referenced directly, instead of just being a small part of the entire page. Also, the backlink doesn't come from a page with any of Biffs keywords. Biff is going to see an increase in PageRank from the Google Monster, but he shalt not be rewarded for 'relevancy' the real Holy Grail of SEO. It's a combination of relevancy and PageRank that dictates the order in which pages come up in the search results.

Biff properly optimized his content with named anchors and promoted it through more niche specific networks.

Another webmaster referenced Biffs content, on a page with even higher pagerank than the first! The only problem is, they referenced the article by writing 'I read this article here' and there was no relevant surrounding text with any of the same keywords in Biffs article - the minion search spiders couldn't really understand what was going on and thus passed little relevancy to Biffs article in the eyes of Lord Google who still awarded plenty of PageRank to Biff for the backlink. It looks like Biff just can't get a break today in terms of relevancy.

Finally - Biff gets a properly anchored linkback from a webmaster with relevant surrounding and achor text! The backlink was also from a page on the same subject that Biffs content was about, they had more than 3 common keywords! The backlink was also the first link referenced in the article so it had great link order!

Then the Google Monster came to Biff and awarded his page with some relevancy for his keywords. Amen.

 

Blogger Doesn't Validate

It doesn't even come close.. not out of the box, at least. First of all, everything about the navbar is invalid and there is no way to remove it while remaining within the terms of the Blogger.com TOS agreement other than switching to paid hosting.

There are very few Blogger.com sites that do validate, they are usually very minimalistic layouts. However, Wordpress.com pages seem to validate like cake right out of the box.

I casually checked out my homepage for this blog at validator.w3.org, I wasn't asking for any trouble but all of a sudden things got ugly:

676 Errors, 145 warning(s)

It's not important to have 0 errors, but 600+ is pushing it. I'll also point out that many successfull sites like Ebay.com and Amazon.com don't come close to validating either. It's not a kiss of death to have tons of validation errors, but search engines respond much friendlier and quicker to pages that don't.

My next couple of points reference Blogger or Wordpress? Which is more SEO compatible from seowizz.net

Tim from seowizz.net points out that Blogger jacks control of your h1 tags on every page, so while everyone else is getting help ranking for their keywords in h1 tags, Blogspot bloggers are forced to start with h2 headings to help rank the keywords in their posts. The h1 heading on Blogger blogs pages all belong to the blogs title and there is no way around it. Tim shows us why this is a problem -

"The H1 tag is the main description of your on page content after your title tag, therefore it is important to make it diverse throughout your pages." From seowizz.net

Also, in the same post Tim points out that Blogger didn't get the memo about 'code to content' ratio and how storing CSS on the page dramatically increases the amount of code the spiders have to sift through to get to the content.

"This becomes an issue on blogger as all your CSS elements are on your pages, this seriously increases your code to content ratio " From seowizz.net

There seems to be alot of SEO issues with Blogger, I truely believe new search concious bloggers looking for a blogging platform should choose Wordpress. Alot of people seem to think Google gives a little ranking boost to Blogger blogs since Blogger is owned by Google - this is dangerous nonsense and no SEO has provided any evidence to validate such a theory.
 

Social Media Linkbacks, Rankings, Nofollow and a Reality Check

Promoting via Social Media has many benefits, one of the pluses thats been getting attention recently are the backlinks these social media sites generate and how they effect a pages rankings.

Lets start by first understanding that these backlinks are on dynamic pages, they aren't permanent by any means and will most likely be assigned a nofollow attribute value. This doesn't mean the links aren't valuable, however.

Some social media sites create more backlinks than others - Particularly Digg and StumbleUpon seem to generate the fewest backlinks of all online communities in my experience.

I want to particularly point out Mixx, I have been using many different social media platforms to promote this very blog and have seen more backlinks from Mixx than anywhere else. When you submit to these sites it doesn't just backlink it once, it creates a backlink every time someone favorites it, votes it, shares or even comments. Every Mixx group that you submit it to makes multiple backlinks as well. For instance, the recently posted nofollow post linked above immediately saw 226 backlinks from Mixx alone a week after I submitted it.

Lets also call out FriendFeed to share some of the glory here. FriendFeed, if you have been living under a rock, is one of the easiest ways to juice your social media presence. It automatically scans your feeds from various social media sites and shares your actions with subscribers while creating an ideal satellite presence for any blog.. In other words - I created an account a month ago and never logged in, sure enough every time I Dugg, Stumbled, Mixxed and blogged, FriendFeed knew about it and created backlinks to the pages I promoted.

I got into FriendFeed because I noticed the backlinks in site explorer from my friends sharing and commenting on my blog. Don't forget the most important part - it gets shared with their subscribers.

But wait a minute - CodeSucker, some of these links you are praising are nofollow and dynamic, FriendFeed backlinks are lost quickly in the vast archives of shares and comments on any 'friends' feed. What's the deal?

Awesome question, like I stated above: These links aren't permanent and while they will help with your optimization on search engines, they all respond differently to the nofollow attribute. Google, for instance, still peeks at the nofollow links destination and is believed to consider it with the surrounding text for relevancy, but not pagerank. Ask.com ignores nofollow and Yahoo will still index the nofollow link target, but not pass trust.

Also, these links are still links on the internet, nofollow or not. Let's have a quick reality check and realize that a link is a link. The internet is built on links, it's how we've transitioned between pages since it's inception. Free inward links are great, especially if they are automatic like these on FriendFeed. Remember the whole point is to get people to notice your site - most link building webmasters and bloggers do keep an eye on their backlinks and will notice your satellite presence if you give them Diggs, Stumbles, Votes, etc. regardless if the link is nofollow.

This is true that traditional social media backlinks don't last very long, in fact if you follow your dynamic links with site explorer, you will notice they diminish over time as the linking page loses significance. Keep in mind that search engines aren't rewarding for the number of backlinks as much as they are rewarding for link velocity. The key here is to not let down your guard and stop working on your site, keep yielding fresh new backlinks often by creating new content and promoting.
 

What in the web is going on? Google battles Black Hats

Image Credit: TechArena

Googles recent changes have the internet in a huff. Right now a war is going on around us between Googles webspam department and Black Hat SEOs. Why now? It's sort of like a perfect storm situation:

Google made recent changes to the way they rank websites, not so much dealing with pagerank, but more with search rank. If you haven't been reading this blog please see the post on the April Black Hat SEO attack on Ford\Nissan. The problem here is that the black hats have caught up with Googles algorithm and understand it too well. They manipulated the results for many popular Ford\Nissan terms, this caused the public to trust these sites and ultimately thousands of computers were infected with adware\malware. One of the infected sites had over 1 million linkbacks.

So what did Google switch? This is obviously very tabu, we're never going to get a straight answer out of Matt Cutts, he's more of a politican than a webspam department head in my opinion. I believe and have seen evidence to support that sites less than a year old (no, not pages.. I mean the second level domain, the whole site) are being penalized. This is certainly a way to control spam, giving a site a full year to live on the internet and not raise any red flags is a clue that it's trustworthy, but it's certainly not a given.

Another factor playing a large role in the war is the collapse of Geocities. Most of these pages had substantial rank, they were very old and well linked - Google just stopped indexing them recently, this creates a large hole in the internet and rankings are shifting like crazy. We won't be able to see the PageRank changes for a few more weeks but anyone paying attention to their search rank on their favorite keywords should be pleasantly suprised by an increase in rankings.

There are alot of factors at play right now, some of them are good for new sites and some bad, but the truth is that Google unrolled a plether of new options (One of the coolest being Slice and Dice which you can read about on onecoolsite) for their search (most that have existed for some time now) they are trying to release these publicly in coordination with their algorithm changes in order to put webmasters minds at ease, when people hear of 'Google changes' maybe they will chalk it up to the interface? Nice try Google, but you're not getting that bull past this bulldog.

But what is Google supposed to do?? Can you think of a better solution? I have been trying for a while, as a web developer and blogger I would benefit from coming up with a decent way to control spam on a site as scalable as Google.com, I've racked my brain and seriously can't think of anything better than penalizing new sites and ranking based on backlinks. Sometimes we have to eat a mud sandwich and this modern era of search is one of those times.

In all seriousness, now is a great time to create new content and market for backlinks, Google is trying to make up this rank that was lost through the Geocities collapse. Keep in mind that the PageRank formula matches a page against all other pages on the internet - now there are less pages. Also keep in mind that PageRank influences SearchRank, but SearchRank can't influence PageRank.