December 2007

First things first. Yes that headline was a joke. No I don’t really think that. No this isn’t an Eric Ward post. So let’s move on from my link factors post as it has nothing to do with this one…other than the total linkbait title.

I noticed on Monday of this week (4 days after my last post) that after over a year of blogging, naturally building quality links, providing Google with plenty of content, not using any black hat techniques (only talking about them), decent subscriber numbers (for me at least) and my blog just got tanked. The DP tools would call it the sandbox, some would call it tripping a spam filter, the tin foil wearing people would call it a Google conspiracy, and I would call it…well I’m not really sure. I don’t think it was any of those things but then again I can’t explain it. Maybe Eric called up Google to punish me

Let’s look at some examples.

* themadhat - find the white rabbit - clearly I should rank first for this. Clearly my blog is the most relevant for that search. Even in quotes I’m not first. Let’s see what’s in front of me:

My BlogCatalog page
MyBlogLog Page
My StumbleUpon page
My Bumpzee page
My ozmozr page
My Blogflux page
A Technorati page
My Jaiku page
Some scraper shitbag SEO company
My mobitype feed page
Another ozmozr page - the feed this time
My Technorati profile
THEN MY BLOG - #14 BABY - WTF?

So I’m in the middle of writing this post, and I see that Sugarrae has been bitch slapped for a long time. She ran a little test from my Monkey Balls post to see if she could jump ahead of me. Clearly her blog should rank above mine as she has much more authority (at least to me and everyone but Google apparently) and she’s got lots more high quality links, but as you can see, last week I was sitting at #1 for that.

Today? #43. I’m sure there are 41 more relevant pages discussing Monkey Balls SEO out there. (PS: Thanks Rae for the pics, I didn’t have visual evidence before that).

Let’s take a look at how my blog is optimized internally. I don’t spend all that much time on it because frankly it doesn’t make me any money, but I did do the important things. All the proper SEO plugins are in use. I avoid duplicate content by properly by using nofollow on my archive links, I properly redirect non-www to www, I only use snippets on the category pages. I didn’t miss anything big that would cause penalties.

Things that might cause algorithmic penalties. Don’t sell links and I never have. Don’t do paid reviews or paid posts and never have (there’s a button on my about page because I’m lazy and haven’t taken it off, but it goes through a noindexed javascript redirect Google wouldn’t be able to follow anyway). Don’t conduct any link spamming on this blog. Don’t buy links for this blog. Don’t do any weird redirects. I do redirect other domains here (www.aaronchronister.com and a few others, but they are all legitimate).

I have plenty more examples but essentially I tanked on everything. Rae listed three things that could have happened to her, and I added a couple.

• 1. Google doesn’t know its head from its ass
• 2. Someone at Google dislikes me on a personal level
• 3. I’m penalized or devalued - collateral damage from some spam filter
• 4. Eric Ward made a phone call / pushed his destroy button / link bowled me (I don’t really think so, but the timing was ironic)
• 5. Matt Cutts is an evil alien (no, that didn’t make sense, it was my obligatory matt link)

So all that being said…WTF Google? It isn’t that big of a deal as I don’t particularly get all that much traffic from search anyway and this blog isn’t monetized, but come on Google. The only explanation out of the above list is Google doesn’t know its head from its ass. I don’t see how or what kind of penalty I could have tripped, and I’m not doing anything bad that could get me a manual penalty. #5 it is then. Greetings earthlings.

PS: Sorry to Rae, I was really half-way through this post…and not meaning to copy when I saw yours. Let’s just call it a Sugarrae rules the earth backup post

Wiep recently came out with a Link Value poll in the essence of the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors and asked a panel of 17 link building experts their opinions on 39 different properties of a link and the potential weight of each. It’s a great report with some excellent insight so if you haven’t seen it, go give it a read.

As you may have noticed by my not so subtle title, I’m concentrating on a certain expert. Now I don’t personally know Eric other than speaking to him at a couple of conferences so this isn’t a personal attack. I know he’s been link building since 1994 and whatever blaa blaa blaa. Maybe he just doesn’t want to let go of any information but in my opinion this makes him look like a Digital Point poser. Let’s look at his responses to each question:

1. Anchor Text: “Multiple factors play into the ultimate effect of anchor text. The best anchor text in the world is meaningless if the site has not shown previous signals of trust.”
2. Type of link: “Again, multiple factors play into the ultimate effect of text and/or image links. The best image links in the world are meaningless if the site where they reside has not shown previous signals of trust.”
3. Surrounding text: “Multiple factors play into the ultimate effect of surrounding text. In some cases it will be useful, in some cases it will be useless.”
4. Number of links: “It will depend on quality of the source sites.”
5. Location of link: “It will depend on the source site.”
6. Reciprocity: “It will depend on the sites and the subject matter, and the historical subject specific reciprocity tendencies”
7. Target page: “As with all things, it is not as simple as people want to make it. No two sites are created equal and thus the links between them cannot be categorized equally.”
8. Location of link in source code: “It will depend on the source site.”
9. Page authority: “It will depend on the source site.”
10. Total amount of links: “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It will depend on the source site’s previously earned trust.”
11. Page authority (in internal links): “I’ve ranked pages #1 with nothing more than a single link from a single page.”
12. Age of the page: “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You have to know what to look for. It will depend on the source site’s previosuly earned trust.”
13. Page relevance (contextual relevance): “It will depend on the both source and destination site.”
14. Amount of non-linking content: “It will depend on the source site’s previously earned trust.”
15. URL of the page: “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You have to know what to look for.”
16. Page authority (in PageRank): “It will depend on the source site.”
17. Last date of page edit: “Not always. You have to know what to look for.”
18. Page type: “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It will depend on the source site’s previously earned trust.”
19. Domain authority (in quality of backlinks): “But…not 100% of the time.”
20. Age of domain: “Unless it was an old crappy site to begin with. If the content was junk, ten years later it is simply aged junk.”
21. Relevant authority (in rankings on relevant keywords): “Bingo. Keno. Yahtzee. Amen.”
22. Domain authority (in PageRank): “But…not 100% of the time.”
23. Domain authority (in rankings on irrelevant keywords): “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It will depend on the source site’s previosuly earned trust.”
24. Domain relevance: “For higher end trusted content sites the domain name relevance is absolutely meaningless, and has to be.”
25. TLD (.com, .edu, etc.): “You can find worthless content on any TLD. The TLD alone is not enough to say the link value will be higher/lower.”
26. Robots.txt excluded page: “SERP only.”
27. Javascript link: “SERP only.”
28. Noindex page: “SERP only.”

No response on Age of the link, Amount of outbound links, Relevance of other outbound links, Quality of other outbound links, Page relevance, Domain authority (in # of backlinks), Alexa ranking, Link is on penalized page, Redirect link, Bad neighborhood links are present and Paid Link triggers.

Weip didn’t list what value each person placed on each item so that makes it a bit confusing sometimes. However, I can see only one answer that actually isn’t doublespeak. Question 21, relevant authority in rankings on relevant keywords. Well yea, of course. The remaining culmination of his answers: “it depends, sometimes, not always” and according to him all these will work if the domain has trust (but he had no response to paid link triggers). Sometimes. Maybe. If you know what to look for.

If I were looking for some link development outsourcing and/or consulting (which I currently am actually) this doesn’t make me want to call him at all. Sometimes I’m sick and tired of people being labeled as “experts” in this industry simply because they’ve been around for a long time. Woopie fucking doo, you’ve emailed Jerry Yang…sign me up. I’m sure Eric know what he’s doing and he’s had a billion testimonials and has been called the godfather of link building, but I’ve yet to take away one piece of advice from anything he’s said online or at a conference that actually helps me do anything. And by no means am I calling myself better at it so let’s not even go there.

I just made some enemies. Bring it.

Everyone has a PubCon recap so I won’t bore you with the normal rundown. If you want the full coverage head over to Search Engine Roundtable and check out their PubCon coverage. They did an excellent job covering PubCon and SES Chicago (as if anyone was in Chicago). Let’s get to the juicy stuff from my crazed brain.

First off Rae, Carolyn, Vanessa, Jon & Scott, Rhea, and Nick you all kick ass and I’m looking forward to once again hanging out and consuming ever increasing quantities of fermented and/or distilled beverages. I briefly met a few others that I didn’t have much time to chat with. Jane Copland who hates her caricature and Tyler Pratt who doesn’t like people who draw his caricature. Bill Slawski and Todd were usually swamped since they’re so wildly popular. Dave who was occupied with a six foot tall beer. I chatted briefly with Andy Beal at the Gooruze party (and thank you to the Gooruze folks). We’ll have to find more of those six foot beers to consume sometime.

Second, many thanks to Dave at Purposeinc.com for holding the first annual SEO poker tournament. It was a blast even though I got my ass handed to me on a silver platter and was almost the first one out. Jim Boykin and I think someone said Neil Patel were out first. Maybe. My only consolation is that Dan Perry put me out (in like 3 hands) and he won the whole thing.

Now that I’m finished with shouts, here are some thoughts on the conference part of it:

First a small complaint…MORE WATER!! We stay up until 3am every night drinking and there is a 7 ounce water for lunch and most of the water bottles on the table are gone before I even arrived. Need more hydration!

Perl - PHP Session - Way too basic. I’m not that strong of a programmer, but explaining how to install Apache almost put me to sleep. The security part was fairly interesting but didn’t provide much actual info. The PHP part….blaaaah.

Link Building Strategies - One of the better sessions. Rae some good info on things to look for when outsourcing link dev. If she would have told me that about four years ago it would have avoided lots of mistakes. I took the jump in and see approach. With the amount of link buying I do nowadays I still hit some bad apples but she gave some great tips. Jim, Roger Montti and Greg Hartnett basically just said to stay under the radar.

Link Baiting - 96 Different Strategies - This was also one of my favorite sessions. Todd had a great rundown on the type of links, distribution channels, and target markets involved and stressed to know what they are before you even start. Targeting those pansy’s that crank it thinking about the next ipod on digg are going to be much different than the tree huggers on Hugg or the political nut jobs that like tasers on Reddit (apparently tasers make the reddit home page every day?). Andy Hagans and Bill Hartzer spoke next. Andy pointed out you should submit to all social media at once for maximum penetration (penetration…haha) and to put a call to action at the end of posts to try and convert some of that traffic. I think he spoke about sex too. Actually I think they all talked about sex. Baby.

Link Buying - What a crock. Aaron Wall had the most information, which wasn’t much. Everyone else either changed their presentation or stuttered through a doublespeak “stay under the radar” speech. My most anticipated session was useless. Probably due to the evil influence sitting in the back.

Effective Domaining Strategies - Since I’m new to domaining I was anticipating this session as well. I’d give it a B-. Monte Cahn has some good pointers on what to look for now that the market is fairly saturated. Jeff Libert showed everyone a list of domains he bought this year letting us know there are still some good 3-word domains around. I felt like he did too much bragging about what domains he owned and how cool he was so that’s about when I tuned out.

Domainers Round Table - Eh. Opinions (different ones at that) on where the industry is going. It succeeded in confusing me on which directions I should be looking.

WereWolf Tournament - Missed it because I had to catch up on some work, but it sounded interested. And I did score a pack of cards anyway. I heard Matt did a black hat dance. Who’s got it on video dammit?

Search and Blogging Reporters Forum - Another decent session. A couple good tips and a lot of banter between Rand and Andy. Then Rand mentioned he keeps some stuff to himself. I’m so shocked.

Effective Affiliate Strategies - Blaaah. How to be nice to your affiliates, then how to become an affiliate. Move along.

Organic Site Reviews - Some fucktard got up and gave them an affiliate site with a shit ton of blogspot links. And Matt was on this panel. Idiot. Boser and Graywolf tried to talk him out of it but he wouldn’t listen. The only thing that was cool was how quickly Matt’s CIA tool works. It took him about 20 seconds to tell the guy he only had 3 links counting. The dude shut his mouth after that.

Tools of The Trade - Good for beginners I guess. Next time Todd, let’s just swap some internal tools and we’ll call it a day.

PubCon Classic - W00t! Great time.

There are some people I missed and didn’t get to meet. I spotted them several times but either they were busy and I didn’t want to knock someone over to say hello or I was conversing with someone else. Lisa Barone was elusive, I missed Patrick, Rebecca must not like me ;), I met Tamar briefly before she hopped a private jet, and Esrun was out spamming stuff and I forgot to IM for a meetup. Next time I’ll buy you guys some beers and shots as a bribe to say hello.

Oh yea, and one final shout out to “that guy who knows about SEO” who explained to Rhea and cshel what SEO was at the poker table because he didn’t know them. That’s funny. (His name is Brian by the way girls) Thanks for hanging out for the week…it’s a good thing you chickened out of that bet too, I’m about to take over your spot

UPDATE ** Shit fire, I knew I’d forget people… Tim Dineen from indeed.com and I had some interesting chats this weekend. Sorry Tim!

I blame quite a few people for this, but it took me about 30 minutes to type this sentence. Really glad to meet everyone and can’t wait for next time! The end…I now have 3 hours before I have to be at the airport…. Pucon was well worth it tenfold and I’ll have a recap next week when I can see without the swervy letters

** Edit: That word was PUBCON ** (shut it)