Well, I was in the mood for some PHP earlier, and was also working on adding Yahoo’s robots-nocontent tags to my pages, so I decided to waste my whole day relearning regexp stuff (my most hated aspect of php because I can never remember the expressions.. btw this regex cheat sheet is useful if you have a bad memory like me) and developing a little tool that helps you see what you’ve blocked out and what you haven’t. For those of you who have already started playing around with this tag, you probably noticed (like me) that it’s a real pain in the ass getting everything blocked out the way you want it, without accidentally screwing up your divs, spans, paragraphs, etc., or even worse, marking valuable content as robots-nocontent.

Here’s the tool.

This little tool will check your pages and highlight the parts you’ve blocked out in yellow so you can get a visual idea of what you’re telling Yahoo is content and what you’re saying isn’t content. You can also click a link at the top of your results page to toggle between a full code view and one that just shows what you haven’t blocked out.

Hopefully you get some use out of it, because I probably shouldn’t have spent my whole day coding it — (Yeah, I’m rusty with PHP, it probably shouldn’t have taken a whole day).

BTW, Some people are bound to notice little mistakes or glitches. If you happen to find something that needs fixin’, please let me know.

  

  

I was interested to read this afternoon that Yahoo has introduced a new “nocontent” tag to help them understand which parts of a page contain the “meat” or actual content, and which are just there to help users navigate the site / provide more general information.

I have one particular site that is ranking very well in Google but very poorly in Yahoo, so I was eager to give it a try. I implemented the tag in both the header and footer, but was hesitant to “nocontent” the navigation menu even though Yahoo seems to recommend this in their post.

Yahoo has also mentioned that they’ll be updating their index tonight to allow this new tag to be incorporated in their algorithms, and suggest that some reshuffling is bound to take place. As mentioned above, I’ve already implemented the tag in a couple places, so I’m excited to see if there is any change in my Yahoo rankings for the site in question. I’ll post a follow up if I see any action :).

If you’d like to give it a try, here are the ‘instructions:’

Applying the “class=robots-nocontent” Attribute:
Listed below are several examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options:

<div class=”robots-nocontent”>This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site</div>

<span class=”robots-nocontent”>This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page</span>

<p class=”robots-nocontent”>This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site</p>

<div class=”robots-nocontent”>This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents</div>

You can use the “class=robots-nocontent” attribute with all XHTML tags and thus have great flexibility on applying this to your site pages.

  

  

I try at all costs to avoid doing what I’m about to do which is to make a post just telling you to check out someone else’s blog, because I hate reading these myself :).   The reason I hate these posts is because out of the 40 to 50 blogs I subscribe to, often times 10-15 of them have basically the same thing regurgitated with only a slight variation.   So I apologize, but this one was just too good. 

Suntdubl’s SEO Playbook, in my mind, isn’t so good because it’s a playbook.  The reason I liked it so much was because of the amazing job Stuntdubl does in eloquently/uniquely describing SEO.  Aside from that (which imo is the part that makes the post worth reading and sharing), it does have some basic SEO/internet marketing guidelines.

My favorite quote?

“Technology and marketing were formerly unique disciplines with very different types of people.  SEO’s are the folks in between.”

I don’t think I’ve heard a better description of what an SEO really is.

You should check it out for yourself, though—it’s not more than a 5-10 minute read.

  

Tags: stuntdubl, seo, playbook, play, book

  

“So will you do it for me?”

That’s basically what Matt says in a recent post on ‘hidden’ links. As I read through the post I had so many strong reactions I had to keep setting down the page to allow what I was reading to sink in. How could Matt Cutts really be posting this garbage? The only voice of reason in the comments section, although perhaps in an overly aggressive tone, was that of graywolf—of course he was quickly swarmed by the die hard Matt Cutts groupies.

I like Matt—I’ve mentioned as much in past posts on this blog and I’ve even got my dad subscribed to Matt’s feed. That being said, I couldn’t believe Matt could post something as pretentious and embarrassing as this. His post is virtually equivalent to lamenting “Well, we tried… But here at Google we just can’t figure out how to do what needs to be done algorithmically, so will you guys please do it for us?”

Who are you? Microsoft? Come on, Google, I thought you guys were the best and the brightest. Are you really telling us you’ve been forced to stoop this low in order to provide quality results? Quite a slap in the face to your engineers, if you ask me.

At the outset the post appears reasonable—basically, Matt says you shouldn’t use sneaky CSS/javascript to disguise links to porn sites. Okay, I can understand that. Fair enough. I still think Google should figure it out algorithmically if they want to do things right, but at least I can appreciate the point.

Later, however, it seems that Matt’s anti-spam zeal reaches new and ridiculous heights. Specifically, he goes on to say:

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.

Even now I can’t believe this truly is a quote from Matt’s blog.

This “simple litmus test,” in essence and without exaggeration, suggests that Matt believes every webpage on the internet that has a paid advertisement (Matt doesn’t even limit this to text links) including a link to the advertiser’s site (pretty much standard practice), is in violation of “search engines’ quality guidelines.” [Note the apostrophe used in “search engines’ quality guidelines”—what is this Matt, the Google version of the “royal we?”]

Matt, do you really find it appropriate for you to dictate the internet’s ‘linking legislation?’ You overstepped your boundaries here, to such an extent that even ardent Google fans would have to concede that this as an inappropriate use of a border-line monopolistic market position. You’re using Google’s dominance to redefine the internet as you see fit. What’s next? Google-compliant gHTML? You can’t possibly believe that every webmaster in the world should have to read Google’s quality guidelines and carefully redirect or rel=’nofollow’ all paid advertisements that include a link… can you? I hope not.

The bottom line is this: If Google has a problem with paid links, they need to figure out a way to algorithmically detect them, or come up with some other way of ranking sites. Proclaiming stringent “quality guidelines” that essentially ask webmasters to do the work that Google doesn’t want to is a myopic step down a dead end street. Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”

It is not “to take advantage of a dominant market position by bullying / forcing webmasters to change their pages (the world’s information) so we don’t have to work as hard.”

I feel that was a little unclear, so I’ll rephrase: Google is supposed to organize the world’s information—not tell the world how that information needs to be presented.

Matt, you should be embarrassed. Or at least edit your post and retract this silly decree. We all make mistakes—I just hope you don’t stick with this one.

PS: Please don’t ban my sites. I swear, my lord, I’ll use nofollow or a robots.txt’d redirect.

  

  

If I had to identify an area in the online-money-making-world that I believe is grossly neglected yet holds extensive long-term potential I would have to say “forums.”

Why?

First, because forums are so unfairly criticized (I have five and still consider this a big mistake on my part… that number should be far larger). For years I’ve been reading posts and discussions revolving around what type of site someone new (or even old) to the SEO/SEM world should create. About half the time, forums are mentioned as a possibility but are quickly dismissed as unprofitable. “Forums suck! My forum only gets an AdSense CTR of about 0.1%! Meanwhile, my niche, informational sites get a CTR of as high as 35%!” the argument usually goes.

If you’ve never run a forum, this might sound convincing. But it’s not.

Of course the CTR is miniscule. You have guys that spend their entire days on the same site, and they do develop ad blindness. Unlike many search visitors, these regulars are already at the site they want. They typed in the URL. These users load tons of pages and will rarely click any contextual advertisement. The unfortunate mistake, in my opinion, is to think that you should be earning contextual revenue from such users, because they’re already doing you a huge favor. Let’s think about what’s really going on in a forum where a user hangs out all day but never clicks an AdSense advertisement. This user, 99.9% of the time, is posting a lot! My metal forums, for example, have 120,000+ posts and I’ve barely promoted them - the users love to post and they do just that. And what is a forum post? A post, in a very simple sense, is a bunch of words. But, these words are often “expert” and cover a specific (niche) topic. These posts are discussing issues that are on people’s minds, and that they want to know more about. From this perspective, it’s fair to say that such users are creating content for you, for free. The content is often great for SEO (discusses things people search for) and it didn’t require you (the webmaster) to do any keyword research, writing, etc. “Good writing” is expensive. The lowest prices I’ve found for fluent English, and this is certainly dumbed-down borderline spammy English, is $.02 per word. This price, depending on where you look, can be as high as $.25 per word or even more (If you don’t believe me go check out some sites like elance.com). Connecting the dots here shows that although you aren’t assigning the writing to your forum users directly, or placing an order, you are still getting content of monetary value for free every time someone posts. The only costs I can think of at the moment are your bandwidth, the domain, and your time in setting up and/or moderating the forum (although this last ‘cost’ is almost always delegated to volunteers).

In addition to the free content, loyal users will often link to you from their signatures in other places: their blogs, homepages, other forums, whatever. Again, this is something that can easily be translated to monetary terms (e.g. text-link-ads.com).

Finally, creating a forum sits well with your conscience. You’re creating something “good”—not a questionable, perhaps low quality site about a topic you don’t really know a lot about. You’re creating a platform people can use and enjoy to discuss topics they’re interested in. In other words, you’re giving people exactly what they want and in many cases I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say you’re making their lives better.

To borrow a quote from Thank You for Smoking, “the job’s almost done for us!”

Building sites that are useful and that grow on their own—without your constant contribution and oversight—is a formula for success. Once you have the traffic there are lots of ways to monetize it (click here for a podcast where Shoemoney and Lee Dodd discuss the monetization of forums), so don’t let a poorly interpreted low CTR statistic impede your judgment. And it’s not too late, by any means—there’s still room for quite a few more forums :).

PS: Although I’m sure most of my readers are well aware, for completeness I have to strongly recommend vBulletin. You can be up and running in less than an hour, even with no prior experience.

  

Tags: forum,, forums,, seo,, sem,, forum, seo,, forums, seo,, vbulletin,, shoemoney,, lee, dodd,, webmaster, radio

  

As most of my readers have probably already heard elsewhere, wikipedia recently reintroduced their nofollow tag on outbound links to try and prevent spam from SEOs.

Secretly, I believed this might have been a bit of a trick and that wikipedia was a large enough site that they might have gotten in touch with Google directly and informed them that they were putting on a nofollow tag to dissuade spammers, but that perhaps Google should (unspokenly) ignore that tag.

As always in SEO, you can never really be sure, but I think that today and yesterday the discounting of wikipedia links caught up to me in a very real way. The site I’ve mentioned on this blog in the past–that I started on October 1st and that was getting around 1,500 to 2,000 uniques daily–had a fairly limited number of IBLs. Maybe 500 or so, but they were good ones and the site is a genuinely useful, good site. I think we had 12 Wikipedia links at last count, all valid and longstanding, based on contributions we had offered.

Yesterday, however, our traffic from Google was literally reduced to a third of what it had been before. Simultaneously, we got some of the best links I’ve ever attained in all my days of SEO. I wish I could brag with these here, but I just don’t feel comfortable posting URLs, etc. on an SEO blog I’m sure you understand. Anyway, the only reason I could possibly see for this very dramatic reduction in traffic is either an algo change or, in my opinion more likely, the impact of Google’s recognition of Wikipedia’s new nofollow policy. After all, 12 PR5+ links from an authority site like Wikipedia, with valid and helpful anchor text is a pretty significant contribution to a site with only 500 or so unique IBLs.

Of course this is all anecdotal and theory, as always with SEO, but it seems to me that it’s the only variable that changed and also that it happened just when I would expect Google to have had time to recrawl and recalculate the Wikipedia links. Food for thought. Please let me know if you’ve had similar (or contrary) experiences!

  

  

No, I don’t mean it’s the new “most important” component of the Google algorithm.  I mean it’s the one that probably isn’t that important but causes people to OBSESS.  Just like toolbar PageRank has done for years.

As always, this is personal opinion.

In the SEO world—in forums, blogs, tools, etc.—a ranking factor that is coming up more and more is age.  And people are saying, almost universally, that older is better, although most confess that freshness is important in tandem (i.e. you should keep adding new content).

If you objectively consider age as a ranking element, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s better or more relevant.  In fact, it could just as often be a negative attribute.  When I search for Vista reviews, for example, chances are I’m not looking for a review of the first beta.  I’m looking for the newest review. Sure, I could use Google news for this, but the results are limited and normal users probably don’t do that.  So why would Google put weight on age?  The short answer: they don’t.

Then why do all these high profile SEOs talk about it so much?  It’s the age old mistake of misinterpreting correlation and causation.

When reviewing high ranking sites, of course it’s going to look like age plays a role—older sites have a head start in link building and virtually every other aspect of SEO.  But just because older sites are ranking better it doesn’t mean they are doing so because of their age.  Most of the time, they have more natural links, more content, etc.

I frequently hear SEOs blaming poor rankings on a site’s age.  They go through their normal quick link building routine, whatever that may be, and then they don’t rank well right off the bat.  Looking for something to explain their poor rankings, they say “Oh, well it’s gotta be because my site’s so new.”

It’s an easy mistake to make because it seems to obvious.  But it’s wrong.  You’re not ranking poorly because your site is new, per say.  It’s because your site hasn’t doesn’t have enough—or good enough—links yet.  If you create a new site targeting competitive keyword terms, I’m sure you could rank in the top ten very quickly; IF you were able to get links from authority sites that were relevant and natural.

To push an example to an unrealistic extreme, just for sake of argument, consider creating a new site targeting a competitive term like Search Engine Optimization.  Most people would say you’re looking at YEARS of ‘age’ before you stand a chance.  Well that’s probably true, but ONLY because that’s how long it would take you to get enough link / trust juice.  Say this imaginary site were linked to from the Google homepage, Yahoo’s homepage, a good DMOZ category, etc. (multiply that by 1000) in just a few days.  I’d be willing to bet that it would rank well in a few weeks.

If you’re thinking the example is totally screwy because this is a pretty much impossible scenario, you’re missing the point.  The point is that it’s not about AGE, it’s about links.

I can specifically recall an episode of SEO Rockstars where they have Matt Cutts on as a guest.  The guys discuss an experiment they conducted with their nofollow / Link Condom site.  To sum up, they try to get Matt to admit the site isn’t ranking well because it’s young—and that their comparison page (on an established blog I believe) that they SEOd for the same term is ranking well because it’s on an older site—but Matt repeatedly denies this charge, surprisingly directly, citing other algorithmic elements (including some on site affiliate links).

Anyway, the main point is that if you sit around waiting for your site to age so it will rank well, you’re making a big mistake.   It’s not about age.  It’s about links.  In my mind, saying a site is ranking well (or even better) strictly because of domain age is like saying a site is ranking well because it has high PR—after all, most sites that rank well do have higher PR, even though we know and accept that PR is not the reason for their rankings.

  

  

As I’ve said in a couple of my previous posts here, the SEO Loser experience has opened my eyes to the blogging world. I recently set up a Bloglines account I could use to keep track of which blogs had new posts without actually loading them all up. It seems to work very well, but the most interesting thing about it is that I’ve basically got 10-15 popular search engine related feeds side-by-side. What this means is that as I go down my list, even if only at a subconscious level, the qualities that differentiate each blog become clearly apparent. I’ve always noticed that a fresh perspective can sometimes be interesting, and often times those fresh perspectives come from the untainted or unbiased newbies.

In addition to attaining a “fresh perspective” from outsiders, a business technique I’ve found to be very helpful is simply looking at what the historically successful players are doing (for the business-school-ites we can call this benchmarking). Don’t go out and copy them or you’ll just be competing with someone who’s better than you. Instead, look at what they do and why it works. Then find out how you can ‘borrow’ principles from their strategy that would compliment or improve your own.

The specific example that inspired this post was Search Engine Land—Danny Sullivan’s new undertaking. I also think that because I am new to the blogging world I have a fairly objective opinion and assessment as I go from page to page on my Bloglines list. But when I’m comparing Danny’s Search Engine Land—which I approached thinking “Oh God, let’s come up with something more creative than ‘Land’”—I’m really, really impressed. This guy is a machine. Looking more carefully, I see that he has a few other, skilled posters helping out, but regardless–Search Engine Land is pumping out the posts (7 new posts today by the time I was eating lunch, and looking back a week or so this doesn’t seem to be out of the ordinary).

First of all, with that kind of output, it would be hard not to get links. Second, these don’t seem to be mass-produced posts. Granted, a large number cover industry news that you can read about elsewhere, but most of these topics include a unique perspective. More intriguingly, however, is the fact that among these copious posts some really good linkbait is hidden. Yesterday, for example, Danny blogged about Search Engine Land’s stats. It was fun to read his review, particularly because it was so personal and comes from a guy who has spent years working with established, authority sites. What do his stats have to do with linkbait? Well, he posted his referrals for December in a tabular format with a link to each. The top referrer (Google) had sent a mere 1229 visits and the last-mentioned referrer only sent 88. What does this tell me as an SEO-minded blogger reading his post? Whoa, if I send him even 88 visitors I might get a link from his blog next time he does this! Maybe that wasn’t the goal of his post, but I bet I’m not the only one who had that thought as I read.

Let’s assume I was alone in this; I was the post’s only link-baited blogger. Big deal! There are another six posts to read and it’s only four and a half hours into the work day! The volume of content they’re producing will eventually hit a nerve with just about everyone. And with blogging today, hitting a nerve means getting links. The lesson I hope to take away from this is simply that while link baiting works and is a great technique, it’s not the only technique. You don’t have to wait a week between each post trying to come up with something people will just have to link to. Sure, those posts are awesome. But so are a lot of others.

  

  

The man, the myth, the legend. To black hat SEOs he embodies the dreaded arch enemy. To white hats, he is the source for authoritative, accurate advice you can trust.

My feelings toward Matt Cutts were always somewhat ambivalent (he seemed like a cool guy but I lumped much of his advice into the “how it should be done” category)–until I attended PubCon Las Vegas where he was the one who stuck up for the small site owners against the SEOs that bashed them. I really respected and appreciated that. I have read his blog for (guessing here) at least a year and enjoy it very much. For some reason, perhaps due to my success in late 2003 and early 2004 in promoting sites using “questionable” techniques such as purchasing unrelated links and using programs like the Digital Point Coop, I read Matt’s blog but I never really let myself accept or fully listen to what he was saying. Much of his advice I brushed off, thinking “of course this is what a Google employee would say.”

The result? As a fresh college graduate I was scrambling to get some sites online earning money through AdSense or affiliate programs. I never participated in truly spammy techniques like cloaking or scraping, but the sites I was creating were not providing anything truly unique or enlightening. Researching and devoting days to building legitimately useful sites sounded like a lot of work—and who wants to work?

These sites, promoted by purchased links, directories and article submissions received a ton of traffic from MSN and to a lesser extent Yahoo. This traffic converted well with affiliate programs but was essentially useless with AdSense. Perhaps this is because I am fairly new to AdSense and failed to approach things correctly—I’m not sure. One thing was certain, though: I was getting little or no traffic to these new sites from Google, and AdSense didn’t seem to like the traffic I was getting.

Was I surprised? No, at least not by the minimal traffic from Google. My head was so stuffed with terms like the “sandbox” that I never expected to get quick traffic from Google. I did, deep inside myself, have doubts about any sandbox. A straight sandbox wouldn’t make sense—there are lots of valuable, quality sites that are also new, and Google is too smart to ignore those sites. This is why I am skeptical of strictly defined sandboxes or age filters.

If there is no sandbox or age filter, then why are so many webmasters experiencing effects consistent with such controls? It’s a good question, and the answer (this is all opinion) is a subtle one. My hypothesis, that appears to have been correct based on my own current projects, was that the “TrustRank” concept that had begun to enter the SEO consciousness was very real. My definition of TrustRank is a PageRank-like metric (although we cannot see it in our toolbars) that is only negligibly affected by the quantity or PR of incoming links. Instead, this invisible Trust Rank is developed by the attainment of truly relevant, natural and authoritative links. Nothing new here—we’ve all heard this a thousand times before. I was reading similar explanations as far back as a year ago.

The more I contemplated the TrustRank concept as SEOs were discussing it, the more I realized that what we were now referring to as TrustRank was really a moniker that embodied all the advice Matt had relentlessly poured on deaf ears. Still, as SEOs, most of us didn’t think of it like that. Most of us, biased by years of simple metrics, believed we’d derived the “new, new thing:” TrustRank. My point is this: If we step back and consider the concept of TrustRank objectively it is really nothing new or innovative. It’s just what Google has been telling us all along. Why is it a big deal now, then? Because Google is getting better each day. Many of the best programming minds in the world call the GooglePlex home. In the end, they are going to win. The algorithm they develop will reward sites that do what they want and penalize (or at least neglect) those that do not. Matt Cutts, then, can really be thought of as the voice expressing the direction of Google’s TrustRank, or algorithm in general.

Does this mean blackhat SEO doesn’t work? Of course not. I know tons of guys getting richer each day from blackhat sites. But I will say that blackhats are fighting an uphill battle. They are essentially attempting to outdo the collective accomplishments of many of the brightest minds in the world.

With these feelings in mind, I finally acquiesced. I decided to ditch my routine of throwing up medium to low quality sites. In the end, I was working my ass off trying to build links (when your site is nothing special, as some of you surely know, it is hard work getting links that matter). It would almost be easier, I concluded, to just do what Matt advocated and create something truly useful and innovative. Even if it were a bit more difficult, I was confident it would stand the test of time.

While I don’t feel comfortable disclosing the URL of my latest project on this blog, I will say that I have been personally (along with a friend I convinced to join me) slaving away developing what is genuinely a useful resource. I am three days nigh of the two month anniversary of the site’s creation, and I’m getting approximately 1,000 unique visitors a day and over 5,000 page views from Google alone.

To me, those results are testament to the invalidity of a sandbox. I was careful in my construction of this project and every time I considered adding a new section, page, or feature, I stopped myself and thought “What would Matt think about this?” In my mind that question is synonymous with “What would Google think about this?” If the answer was “He’d like it,” I would proceed. Otherwise, I’d think of something else.

It seems to be working. I can say that the last time I had a site getting this kind of traffic from Google alone, this quickly, was in early 2004. The only concern I have, after attending PubCon Las Vegas, is that my questionable past may come back to haunt me. During the site review panel Matt was involved in, he asked one of the victims who had submitted his site for review why he had so many domains he wasn’t using. Google is a domain registrar that doesn’t sell domains. The only purpose of this I am currently aware of could be to find out who owns what domains. I’m no expert on the intricacies of the domain registration system, but I am under the impression that registrars (like Google) have no problem seeing through private registrations. I know there are a few domains in my portfolio that Matt wouldn’t be too fond of and I really hope these do not negate my new whitehat efforts.

Please don’t take this as an attack on blackhats. I find the blackhat world exceedingly interesting and, by virtue of its competitiveness, fun. But in the long run, I have accepted blackhat defeat. If I want to make money from a site in the long run I am going to continue to ask myself “What would Matt think of this?”

*A comical side note is that the site mentioned above is getting less than 5-10 visitors a day from MSN and Yahoo combined as opposed to approximately 1,000 from Google. What a reversal from the norm!

BTW: Because I’m enjoying my blogging experience so much due to the readership and comments, please let me know if you disliked this post. I can stick with event coverage if my SEO writings are lackluster Don’t want to scare anyone away…

  

Tags: matt, cutts, mattcutts, search, engine, optimization, seo, blackhat, white, hat, whitehat, black, seo, loser, seoloser, internet, marketing, trust, rank, trustrank, pagerank, page