Category Archives: SEO

Does Google really hate Text Link Ads?

16 Friday Nov 2007

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The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing at Google. Or maybe it does, but it doesn’t care.

www.text-link-ads.com is doing just fine, thank you very much.  Visit their site.  Despite all the buzz lately about how text link ads will invalidate search rankings, kick your dog, and destroy the universe, the site still has a healthy Pagerank of 7.  Shouldn’t Google be penalizing them?

OK, I know what you’re thinking: the site itself isn’t doing anything wrong. It doesn’t have any text links on its own site so technically it’s not violating the rules of the road. Even though every one of their customers and every one of their clients is violating Google’s rules, they’re still technically on the right side of the law.  And Pagerank is probably a fully automated score and Google doesn’t want to tweak it by hand.

OK, fine. But search for text link ads at Google.  The first two paid results are for the company itself.  That means Text Link Ads is paying Google for that placement and the purchase was approved by an AdWords sales rep.  The marketing copy on the site even touts improved organic search engine rankings as the primary benefit of buying text link ads.

“Sorry, guys, everything you do is wrong, but feel free to buy ads from us anyway.”

If Google wants to discourage paying for/selling text links, shouldn’t they stop promoting the company that’s leading that charge?

Google resetting Pagerank?

01 Thursday Nov 2007

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,

I was sent this yesterday.

It says that Google has plans to roll out some significant changes to their ranking and ad system.

1. Get rid of Pagerank and replace it with Visitor Rank, where users with the Google Toolbar can thumbs up/thumbs down the site they’re on.

I can definitely see them getting rid of Pagerank. They really don’t want webmasters to focus on Pagerank and they want to discourage text link vendors. Why not bury bury Pagerank altogether?

Visitor Rank also makes sense as an ingredient in the hodge-podge that makes up a sites rankings.  Could be gamed, of course, but take the data with a grain of salt and it could prove very useful.

2. Confirmation click for AdSense

In theory, the visitor would have to click on a confirmation button after their first click on AdSense.  What? Two clicks to reach an advertiser?  When the company is still contending that click fraud isn’t a real problem?  This is really, really unlikely.  Advertisers don’t want their potential customers to have any friction.  This won’t happen.

3. Stop reporting of back links

Like the hiding of Pagerank, hiding back links also makes some sense. It’s valuable for webmasters to be able to find who’s linking to them, but for the SEO savvy, it’s used to help them build links to make them more attractive to Google, not to users.  Anyway, I think it’s possible they may do this, but not a slam dunk.

4. Replace “nofollow” with “dofollow”

This would require that links be tagged with “dofollow” or the search engine won’t follow it at all.  Now, that is just plain ridiculous.  If the blog post had sketchy credibility with me before, it lost it all on that one.  Google would throw out 99.999% of the links in the world and require everyone to retag their links?  That’s just silly.

I’d bet the post is a list of possible things that Google has considered, or a wish list of the engineer the blogger is citing (if there is one), or even a wish list of the blogger himself.  I just can’t believe that it’s a list of things that Google is launching in the near future, though the discussion is interesting…

Surprise! Gaming Digg works!

01 Thursday Mar 2007

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Just in case you didn’t believe it, despite all the evidence to the contrary, gaming Digg works.

Check out this article on Wired News. Fantastic. The author’s site was eventually buried, but then again, the author made the site specifically to be stupid.

You can easily imagine a site that someone actually cares about, but is not necessarily outstanding, could be fraudulently promoted by U/S.  I don’t have a solution for Digg, but it is interesting.

It’s really just another case where we should not be blindly enamored by the “power of the people”.

Update: Anti-Wired post from Michael Arrington. My response? You’ve got to be kidding me. I can’t speak to previous articles in Wired about the demise of Digg, but investigative journalism is totally reasonable, and the author of the Wired article didn’t do anything so crazy in her investigation to deserve that much wrath. Frankly, I don’t think this would be news at all if Digg’s management wasn’t so adamant in saying that they can not be gamed. That’s pretty much “Bring it on!”, if I’ve ever heard it.