Archive for April, 2007

Can Google Find and Spank your Paid Links?

So last week Matt got the SEO industry a little riled up when he asked people to send him information on who’s buying links, and from where.  The Fear Uncertainly and Doubt (FUD) that followed was partially Matt’s to blame, but mostly the fault of those who misperceived what’s going on.

Sure, Google is trying to "not count" links that are paid for.  Websites that are really bad offenders (basically sites that have been deemed to not be worthy of passing link value ) will not be able to pass link juice on to other sites. People can report (and Google can easily find) the "High Pagerank" totally pimped out sites and then decide if they want to outright stop the site from passing link value on to the sites that are advertising.  Look at The Stanford Daily (back in March 2005). If you were Google would you want to count those advertising links? I know if I were Google, I’d slap a PageRank Block on that site…..even if it was my Alma Matar.  Talk about "Above the Radar" link buys….damn, wonder who said "let’s buy a link from the online newspaper of the alma mater of the founders of Google and Yahoo". 

From what I’ve seen, these sites are probably blocked from passing this link juice via a Google Hand Job (You sell so much we can’t trust a thing your site links to…the end). Hand Jobs are hard, harse, and slow. Can you blame google for trying to algorithmically find what may be paid links and just filter those out?

I don’t think that Google is trying to ban entire sites anymore, but to rather be able to algorithmically detect links that might be paid for on any webpage. Hum…If I were Google..let’s see…how could I tell if a link might be paid for….well I know I can get rid of 90% of them by finding words like "Paid links", "Sponsors", Paid Ad", "Paid Advertising", etc….and if that word is followed by a bunch of links going to other sites, I’m not sure if I’d trust those links….hum would I trust links in footers and sidebars? would I trust a list of links all going to unrelated places? would I trust a "stand alone link" (a link that’s not part of a sentence)? What else could they find as "flags" that a link is purchased?

My favorite quote on this whole issue comes from SugarRae:

The bottom line is that good paid links are un-detectable by the search engines. These deals are done via emails and personal meetings in a way that is not obvious and un-detectable by algorithms, when done well. So, Google is making up for their incompetence at detecting well done paid links by enlisting the general public to report what they guess are link buying activities. But, again, good paid links aren’t obvious, so the end result is that Google will be taking these reports and guessing too… *guessing*… whether or not those links truly are paid and possibly penalizing your site accordingly.

So let’s say that your site is reported to Google for either Buying, or of Selling Links. What’s the Penalty?
Danny did a great post titled "Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links?" where he talks about what can happen:

What’s the price? Google is the main search engine that talks about this, with the key penalty being that a site might not be allowed to pass PageRank. Specifically, that means a site might find it can’t transmit any ranking link love to other sites. Fine, sell your paid links, Google says. If we detect it, we might prevent those links from getting any gain.

There’s an expansion and a refinement here, also. The expansion is potentially, a site could be banned from Google. I’ve rarely seen anyone talk about this happening, a site being thrown out because of paid links. As you’ll see, it would really screw Google up to do this, as well.

The refinement is that Google might specifically exclude paid links from passing along link love. It’s not that hard to identify where paid links appear on some major sites, then flag that segment of the page to be ignored or excluded when link rankings are calculated.

Google is constantly evolving and getting smarter at judging what can be trusted and what can’t. Link trading died, 3 way linking died, buying huge above the radar PR links died, buying advertising that detectable will also die too.

Think Stealth. Think Ninja Links:

• In November of 2005 I mentioned Links within content linking to content which I still highly believe in to this day.
• In December of 2005 I wrote more advice which again is still worth heeding "Buy Links Under the Radar where Matt can’t find them."
• Then in October 2006 I talked about my own Google God in my Head, and what it tells me.

Go ahead Google, find those paid links. Find those SEO’s who can’t keep up with the changes. We get a rise out of it.

.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Thought you might like to see a few pics of last nights party put on by the Internet Marketers of New York.  Thanks to those who helped to make this a rockin party that was also a charity event for Ronald McDonald House.

on my way to the party, driving through times square I spot Yahoo out my taxi window.

Jim Hedger and Greg Niland (GoodROI)

I could finally legally buy a drink for Neil now!

Bus stop stand banner …on the bottom left in real small print it says Ask.com

Bruce and Lisa

BOTW Gang

Popularity: 1% [?]

I was tagged by Sebastian, who was tagged by Matt Cutts, who was tagged by Vanessa Fox, and on and on (see full list here)

5 Reasons why I blog.

1. When stuntdubl was working with me I started feeling like people might be thinking that Todd was the SEO and I was just the CEO (that didn’t know SEO) so I started blogging to show that I’m more than a CEO, but also a dedicated SEO.

2. To help train our link ninjas. We have an internal link ninja training program, complete with belt levels. Here’s some of my blog posts that are included in the ninja training program:

Google God Speaks to us
TrustRank
What a links page should not look like
Links within content linking to content
Cherry Picking Links
Buying Links Under the Radar
Forward Links
Get links from pages that have backinks Training2

3. Saves a ton of time answering questions that prospective/current clients may ask. Here’s some of the ones I refer to the most:

Sorry, I won’t do SEO for your new website.
Links as Pennies and Old Ben Franklins.
Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks.
Click Rate for Top 10 Search Results
Will the real link request please stand up?

4. To get new clients.

Leads from We Build Pages are often from people who found us via search engines searching for phrases like “internet marketing services”, “internet marketing company”, etc….but these people often need lots of education and are not nearly as qualified as those who read my blog. Leads from people who say they read my blog are much better quality because I know they’re educated in SEO.

5. At heart I’m still a link addict. If I can write something that gets picked up in the SEO community (with a link) I get a rush through my veins.

I’m tagging:

Jim Westergren, Stuntdubl, Andy Hagans, SEOBlackHat & Brian Provost

Popularity: 1% [?]

I was reading Mr Wall today who had been reading this interesting thread on webmasteworld, and made these comments on his blog in a post about Different link having different goals.

…Two big things that are happening are more and more pages are getting thrown in Google’s supplemental results, and Google may be getting more aggressive with re-ranking results based on local inter-connectivity and other quality related criteria. …

After reading most of that Webmasterworld thread, I see the best meat of that thread, of course, comes from Tedster:

My current idea (this is used in many IR approaches) is that a preliminary set of results is returned, but then one or more factors undergo further testing. The preliminary set of results is now re-ranked according to multipliers determined in testing just those preliminary urls. These test factors could also be pre-scored and updated on a regular (but not necessarily date co-ordinated) basis, and be available in a secondary look-up table somewhere for quick use.

If your url doesn’t get into the preliminary set of urls, then this re-ranking step won’t ever help you — because no new results are "pulled in". If your url is in the preliminary set, the re-ranking may help you. But if you fail one of tests, then your relevance score, or your trust score, or your aging score, or your whatever score, can be multiplied by 0.2 or a fractional factor like that. that would send your url on a rankings nose dive.

So this type of re-ranking could account for the yo-yo behavior we see, going from page 1 to end-of-results and back again. Note that the url is not thrown out of the result set, the preliminary result set is kept intact, but just re-ranked.

Part of making re-ranking technology like this practical and scalable would be getting very quick preliminary results — often cached preliminary results, I assume. This need for speed might also account for the large numbers of urls being sent to the Supplemental Index, making for a less unwieldy primary index.

Supplemental urls would only be tapped if the total number of preliminary results fell below some threshhold or other.

This is my current line of thinking – purely theoretical, although informed by some knowledge of the art of Information Retrieval. I keep looking at the changes and asking myself what kind of math could account for the new signs we are seeing.

As long ago as 2 years, GoogleGuy mentioned in passing that we were tending to think in terms of filters and penalties, but that Google was moving away from that model. I think they’ve moved a giant step further — although some filters are clearly still there (only 2 results per domain for example) and some penalties as well (often manual).

I believe Tedster hit the nail on the head with some great points.

I’ve had this picture in my mind of a row of Google servers. data is gathered, and fed to the first computer that ranks the pages based on Pagerank, the next computer then recalculates the rankings based in TrustRank, the next computer reorders the listings based in interconnectivity of the community, the next computer reorders them based on Filters that are applied, then more filters and more reordering…then there’s different datacenters each with a slightly different weights on each prior reordering….and as more data is fed in, and more reorders and filters are applied the more things change….phew!

So with this picture in my head, like Aaron, I too see obtaining diferent links with different goals. The goals that I see working on are these:

• I see getting trusted links from trusted sites to raise the trustrank value.
  (Find Trusted sites and write to them and offer them something of value)
• I see getting links from subpages that have direct trusted backlinks to them to help trust and power.
  (Get links from pages that have backlinks to them…..they are worth sooooo much)
• I see boosting my co-citation site neighborhood by getting links on pages that link to other sites in my neighborhood.
  (Common Backlinks (link to our public tool, sorry, only our private  tool strips the crap scraper results from this list)
• I see boosting my co-citation page neighborhood by putting other trusted links next to my links (mixing neighborhood with trust).
  (here’s my paragraph ad with links to me and a few other highly trusted related sites)

I see trying to do all I can do so that when Google’s "done" ordering and reordering and filtering, refiltering, over an over again, that if I’m lucky our guys will come out on top. That’s the goal. The types of links above are what I’m focusing on for my strategy.

And yea…as far as Google Supplemental Hell goes….yea, Google’s cleaning house….Tedster also makes some great notes about that.

Speaking of Supplemental Hell, here’s something else that I’ve been experiencing…if you publish 300 pages today and 3 months goes by and no one links to any of these 300 pages…guess where they might be going? (Supplemental Hell?) – (Moral, don’t publish a bunch of pages in once (esp in a new folder) unless you know they’ll get some backlinks and trust to those pages within a few months…I’ve seen many sites have entire folders go to supplemental hell after people published hundreds of pages in that folder in 1 day and then nothing there got a link for the first 3 months of existance….and seen other new folders/pages survive (so far) that got a small handful of nice backlinks to even a few pages in new folders…..kinda says something about checking for "quality rating" of new pages…no links to any pages in a folder and supplemental hell for them all. (Moral, publish a new folder with 300 new pages, get some of those pages some trusted backlinks, and hurry!)

In other news: I’ll be away all next week for SES in NYC. I was only going to stay a few days, but I’ll now be speaking on the "Linking Strategies" panel on Friday at 9am so I’ll be staying the whole week. See ya in NYC!

Popularity: 1% [?]

I was away last week so this week it catch-up. Things are moving fast for ole Jimmy here. Seems like a lot of my time is now totally scheduled. Never a dull moment. Since I’ve not been blogging much lately I thought I’d give a run down on some of the things here that have been on my mind lately. Just because I’m being quiet, doesn’t mean nothings going on….in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Blogging:
I feel bad for hardly posting…..seems I’ve said so much already, all I’ve got left to say are the things I’d never say publically. (I can still hear Todd saying, "Stay under the radar Jim!").

SEO Tools:
The past 3 months we’ve been building our own private tools, so nothing has been going public….and all the tools I’ve got in mind for the near future are also all going to have to be private tools as well.

We Build Pages Business:
Maybe I shouldn’t say this…but we hit our 8 month client goal in the first 9 weeks of this year (also having many existing clients increase their investment with us helped us to reach this goal too).
I wasn’t planning on hiring much more now, but with the remainder of the ninja’s time, I’d almost rather put into investing more on our own sites (ya know, them old sites ;) ), rather than taking on many more new clients….we’re exploring many things in this area …. but in any case, it looks really good what ever direction we move in there.

Link Ninjas and SEO Pow Wow:
Stay tuned for something Huge going on here. What would you say to tons of training videos, a private Jim’s blog (where I don’t hold back….much , Private We Build Pages tools, online training manuals, and more?

Linking:
Not sure what to say… 17 full time link builders….it’s a hell of an unmolested and under the radar site database that’s also being created…nothing more I can say there.

Wife and kids:
All fine. Sam and Nate are growing like mad. Nate’s still not sleeping through the night (I’m on binky duty (3-4 times each night)), and often up at 6 (if Mary feeds him once during the night, I’ve got the second (if he wakes up before 7)

————

So next week is SES NYC.
Today Joe Morin posted the official SES NYC 2007 Party Event and Schedule.

The big debate here was to go to NYC alone, or to bring the Ninja team. Bringing the team is pretty expensive, so instead we decided to rent tour busses and take trips each month to: Boston (3 hours), Montreal (3 hours), NYC (3 hours), and Niagra Falls (6 hours). Those 4 trips combined would cost the same as bringing a small ninja army to SES NYC for one night….and I think our team would rather the trips where we can "bond" rather than "sell".

I’m thinking of only spending Monday and Tuesday nights in NYC….we’ll see. On Monday night there’s a Charity Party open to all ($40 donation at door) being hosted by the Internet Marketers of New York. I’m hoping to catch that and maybe Tuesday I can luck my way into some other party too.

Cheers!

Popularity: 1% [?]