Calendar
Network
Feeds
AndyBeard
After w while Google will take into account links, and determine the original source. It can take a week or so for Google to work out link attribution.
The same happens with all forms of syndication, whether it be RSS or older forms of syndication such as article marketing or press releases.
Ultimately, if there are links back to the original, Google often works things out, and if not, at least the syndicated copy has more chances of ranking compared to similar articles on competitor sites, and you get a backlink from a fairly authority website.
I would suggest outsourcing to a colleague for their 20% time to clean them up, and have the Googlers as guest bloggers on Matts blog.
I am sure what Matt has written would be a good framework for a collegue to expand on and get a little exposure in a less corporate environment.
I am not sure what is more evil, releasing each category 5 minutes apart, or doing it in reverse order.
I am sure it is going to be a great event, but someone submitted this with an affiliate link
I am not sure if this is a perfect category match for this, though there will be some programming work for someone, in fact Michael VanDeMar has already offered some help on some of the more technical stuff if required.
It could be looked on as a product for sale, or a collective undertaking.
I am also wondering how many people are going to come up with spoilers or guesses as to how I came up with my top post of 2007 from back in February when I only had a couple of hundred subscribers.
No worries Maki - the content itself could be looked on as analytics, or a different way to monetize your blog once you have gained (real or not) a certain level of "authority", or just a comment on what content is appropriate to publish.
To unsphinn something you need to go to your profile where it lists the items you Sphunn
For me the most interesting thing about the announcement is that Matt has change domains to ma.tt The old domain was banned from Technorati because of the Wordpress default blogroll. This new domain is clean with the old one directing to it.
I think those CEOs who are not in it for the money often do well stepping aside from the CEO role to handle other tasks
Jim lets take an example, you recently tried to purchase a review from me - I turned it down, but a few days later you got a free mention with a link. Doing that didn't cost me any time, or require any kind of special endorsement.
If I had accepted the money, and written 2000+ words about your site, with the discretion of linking to you or not, if I had linked it would have had to be nofollow. The only difference is the time it takes and what value is placed on it.
You would have also run the risk of having a critical review at the top of the SERPs, which is a risk you don't have with Yahoo.
People who mentioned the product using affiliate links didn't have to use nofollow, even though they might have more financial gain.
If I linked to you with ?ref=andy and you cleaned it up with some php, Google would have to treat the link as an affiliate link even if it wasn't.
You are not alone, I have probably rejected 80% of the reviews I have now been offered, many for time reasons, a few are off-topic
A freelance writer writing about a product even if they are paid monetary compensation is arguably less biased than an employee or shareholder.
If you paid me to review Google Reader, I am sure I will pick more holes in it than any PR review by a Google employee from their personal blogs.
Robert Scoble has talked about Microsoft bloggers having a mailing list for new products to blog about
Sure there are bloggers out there that have less editorial control and respect of their audience than I have, but those same bloggers also probably don't have as much effect on Google's algorithms.
And then of course there is the value of a single link from my blog where I often have more than 200 links on a page, tons of those from comments.
I have been treading water for 12 months because of the grey area
Jason Calacanis links through to new pages on Mahalo all the time, what if all shareholders in Mahalo did the same? On every topic they wrote about?
Exactly Jim, I am not selling links, unlike Yahoo
But if I had written a full review it would have taken me a lot of time, and I would have linked through to the interview you did with Shawn, the one with Lee, maybe the video on the Pepperjam blog, and those are all wordpress blog posts.
I don't know the inner working of Akismet, but if they are smart they would check pingbacks for a nofollow link - Spam Karma has been around longer and checks for the presence of a link, it just doesn't check for nofollow.
Matt has been suggesting that links from a review should all be nofollowed, thus I could possibly get myself blacklisted in Akismet if I used nofollow.
Thus this doesn't just affect my links to a person I am reviewing, but has a great influence on my editorial control.
I have never used W3C arguements, or even the changes in use, because as soon as nofollow was introduced, I used it for purposes other than what it was intended (controlling juice)
The wording doesn't really matter, because Google can say that a compensated link is a biased endorsement. If it is in the spec, pages will be valid.
My 3 main arguements:-
1. Level playing field - there shouldn't be unspecified trusted sites who can sell links, and everyone alse can potentially get a visible or non-visible penalty
2. Level playing field on compensation - employees, shareholders etc have more to gain from linking than someone trying to feed their kids.
Google have even gone as far as teaching website owners running affiliate programs how to clean up their SERPs (and concentrate juice), rather than insisting that affiliate links get blocked.
3. The vague message about other links in a post also requiring nofollow, but Google offering no technical way to selectively prevent blogging software sending a ping which could result in
problems with spam plugins.
Lots of low end paid reviews are for people reviewing other people's blog, which involves links that would automatically generate a pingback, and might also involve links to 3rd parties.
If Google wants to play government they can, but if they set laws, they should be equal for everyone, no matter what their employment status or influence.
e.g. When Matt writes about Google reader, it is just PR - he is smart enough to rip holes in it if he wanted to do an unbiased review.
Of course whatever they finally decide, they also have to display the truth in the toolbar, otherwise it is like the NY Times printing a deliberately false book review, because they don't want the author to make any money for personal reasons. Or they could just get rid of the toolbar... that would bring some life back to the Google Directory
I think Google should also clear up any public misconceptions regarding the use of nofollow on links that have some level of editorial approval, such as blog comments, or the links here on Sphinn. The only statement currently that I know of is in regards to Wikipedia, and that Google hope that trusted links will eventually have nofollow removed. There is nothing really covering other UGC.
Congrats Maki, you deserve every one of them and more
I also noticed you have been extremely successful on Digg for the last few weeks (but for other people's content)
You woud have thought by now Jimmy Wales would have also created Wikip*rnia -(edited as a site by that name actually exists)
I think it more reflects the efforts a Wired reporter will go to in an effort to portray something in a bad light, possibly as an attempt at linkbait to which I didn't yet bite.
John Chow actually writes fairly decent paid posts even though I have been slightly critical about some of them.
Paid blogging services don't force people to break a social contract with their readership writing off-topic content.
It could be argued that that weird anchor text was purely to help search engines find related content to ambiguous search terms, I suppose it might be better than polluting your own onsite content, or cloaking on a misspelled domain name. I am not a huge fan of paid reveiews for SEO purposes btw, but playing devil's advocate.
Google has never proven that paid reviews result in poorer search relevance - but they do, as Shoemoney would say "Make Google Look Stupid" because they can be purchased and affect search results, for better or for worse
Jeff in some ways it is similar to paid posts, but most people don't realise that.
If someone take a lot of time over the presentation to you, provides you with a sample, and a little link love in return, it is good karma to write something.
With paid posts someone might still get a link, but I spend a lot more time on it
I actually combined a few mentions in a single post, because it was shortly after I really got back online, and also mentioned both jim's launch and Armand Morin in the same post.
Tad that would be like using Adwords and not doing any keyword tracking - sure you can see increased traffic and maybe conversions, but you have no idea where from
Feedburner does offer some useful features, but it can't tell you where you got your subscribers
It is also a good way for Yahoo to encourage adoption of Delicious
SU already does something similar, and you can do this with Aaron's SEO For Firefox as well to a certain extent.
There is going to come a time that the What's New page will totally change every hour, or every 30 minutes - interfaces will have to change to keep up with growth.
Some of these sites are also displaying Sphinn buttons, but they haven't got the readership of bigger blogs
I would prefer that they only do it with their best content, and only do it on sites that allow self submission, of which Sphinn is one of them, but at the end of the day, is using a submission tool so much worse than paying a consultant to do it for you?
Miriam yes that is a very good breakdown, but also as Maki points out commenting styles play a huge roll in statistics gathering.
Some statistic gathering of blogs are based upon the number of comments each blog receives, thus replying to comments in a bunch of replies by the author can have a reduced impact on comment numbers. This might be a good thing if people are using subscribe to comments, and the replies are inconsequential - I would hate to send out an email from my server with just an "I agree"
I am a fan of threaded commenting, but at the same time I am aware that it can lead to better or poorer quality comments
Story: A Letter To Mr. Matt Cutts!
Jill, Google these days is taking the line that if there wasn't a commercial relationship, would the link have happened? Whilst Google is being specific about a cash payment rather than other forms of Payola, I think these things should be pointed out.
I am not sure this is quite as clear cut as the golf balls or buying a license to use a corporate search package, but to be honest the case study wasn't exactly of much quality either
Story: Are You An SEO Expert?
I don't know sweet FA about so many different things, even if I wanted to do regular consulting I would have to be really careful what kind of job I undertook.
It is almost embarrasing that the page which receives the most search traffic on my blog is a compilation of code gleaned from other places that I couldn't have written myself.
Then again I am brutally honest stating that on that particular page, reference my sources, and send traffic to those sources daily.
I don't think a single person can know everything, but they can still be looked on as a specialist or expert and know nothing about other aspects of the business.
You can make a lot of money online just by doing the basics, in fact people sticking to basic stuff often earn more.
If someone is referenced in an editorial capacity by people who you consider to also be experts, then that goes some way to transfer trust. This is ultimately what Google wants in their rankings too, though they seem to think an expert if compensated will betray their audience - I am sure some or many do.
Does someone have to develop new ideas to be an expert, or just a good practitioner of accepted best practice?
Should an SEO blog concentrate on basic SEO concepts, or only write content based upon new research?
When you write an article about why title tags are important for SEO or conversion, who should you credit who has done the research?
Maybe it is easier to credit a collective intelligence document such as the SEOmoz ranking factors, but finding original research on title tags online isn't as easy.
If an SEO practitioner simply uses the Ranking Factors document to explain what he will do for a client, and fixes basic stuff and does a little link building, and makes his customers happy, does that make him an expert, or someone who doesn't really know what they are talking about?
A Doctor is still looked on as an expert in the general field of medicine, even if they haven't done specific research in a topic to the same extent as a neurologist
There is a negative side to not allowing it - people like the extra traffic possible from Stumbleupon and if you prevent hotlinking, the images can't be used.
Then you should look at Icanhascheezeburger - the success of the site is because everyone hotlinks their images - they have made it as easy as possible to hotlink, but with attribution.
How are photo and video sites popular? By hotlinking and viral content that in some way draws people back to the site.
These days there are too many exceptions you need to make
As you will see from the comments, it seems Bloglines doesn't cache images, and it could be the same for other feed readers.
WebproNews syndicate my content with permission. I don't think they hotlink to images, but if they did, it is not something I would worry about.
Some things I would worry about would be if I had the problem Lee from Toprank had with one of his viral widgets pulling in images from his server - it got too polular and the bandwidth / server load was becoming a problem, so they introduced a new version, and the old version they added huge icons.
In such a situation I would be more inclined to find a way to host the content cheaper or free, and use a redirect to the new location for the image.
A classic example would be "how much is your blog worth" - the image is hosted on Flickr - the only problem is that the code doesn't update over time, just like many of the follow on widgets people use
Maybe, though last time I looked at Hamlet's RankSense he had some very useful ideas in the making, and blackhats seem to automate some stuff very well indeed.
Story: Why does Sphinn outrank me for my own content?