Then… September 29th.

For the last year or so Google has been in overdrive with doing updates and tweaks. I’m starting to think they might simply have too many employees who feel the need to keep themselves busy. I thought they were fine before, and if they want to work on more features, how about new things, continually tweaking search results that aren’t broken seems wasteful. These changes have hit lots of other webmaster, but not me, my sites were never affected, until now.

So around September 29th two updates happened, Google’s 20th so-called “Panda” update which is supposed to be an anti-content farm update originally targeted against those big content farms who push out mile wide inch deep 300 word articles 10 times a minute, and a so-called EMD (exact match domain) update that penalizes sites with keywords in their domain that are low quality.

First, I find the EMD domain thing stupid, and I really mean stupid. It is like judging a book by its cover or a person’s character by the color of their skin. If a site is quality it should rank well, if it isn’t it shouldn’t. Second guessing your own algorithm by penalizing certain domains is just stupid. The off-page quality score system that gave birth to Google works, no need to second guess it by mere humans making arbitrary decisions on what type of site they think is good.

I do not think I was affected by the EMD though since I can see no pattern with it. I favor keyword rich domains, and always have, but I have not seem losses on exact match searches. I’m still #1 for those on the sites I check. It is other searches for those sites on content pages that I lost rankings on.

Case #1, my gardening blog. Gardening is my #1 hobby, if I could quit everything else and just garden I would be happy. I would sell all my other sites at the right price, but I would keep my garden blog. I started this blog 7 years ago because I liked gardening and could easily write about it, and knew how to start blogs for obvious reasons. 100% unique content written by me (or user submissions for comments/posts). On many of my sites I use a copyright statement footer link, this site doesn’t even have that. It has been #1 for gardening blog for many years, and still is. It has also been #1 for garden blog for many years… but is no longer. Now it is like 5th. Traffic loss on Sept 29th was about 50%. This is pretty much a straight up wordpress blog, not a content farm, how could it possibly be labeled as a content farm? I hate thin short content. All the content is unique and usually at least 1000+ words (I write long posts). So if this was hit by Google’s Panda Content Farm algorithm, what are they doing over there? Honestly? I don’t even try to SEO this site, I just write good content and other blogs link to me. I can’t think of any change to make to this site to make it more white hat, it is a standard blog with unique content, isn’t that supposed to be the ideal?

Case #2, a Google maps mashup site/application I made a few years ago called Wildcrafting.net. This site was so noncommercial it didn’t have ads on it until this week. I finally stuck one ad unit on it a few days ago (after it lost the traffic). This site was an outgrowth of my survival forums (more on those later) so it does have one link to another site, but only on the homepage. It too has no footer links even. The site has some non-unique content in the form in a USDA database, but also tons of unique content submitted by users and all told the content is presented in a 100% unique way. This site still ranks well for the exact match domain term, at #3 behind the exact match .com and wikipedia. But lost 50% of its traffic or there about.

Case #3, my literature site, my oldest and highest traffic content site, 13 years old. Traffic has always fluctuated, but I did detect a drop around Sept 29th as well, it looks to be a 10 to 20% loss. For many many many years I have held the #2 search position with this site for author name keywords such as William Shakespeare or book title keywords, usually only behind Wikipedia. I don’t monitor all 300 authors or 4000 books, but on the ones I do monitor I did lose rankings. For instance for William Shakespeare I went from 2nd to 7th, Wikipedia also went from 1st to 2nd. The new 1st is a previously unknown to me site that I can’t remember ever seeing ranked before. Other authors or books I dropped as well, others I held steady. This site is so old and has been ranked well for so long it has really really really good authoritative incoming links from academic sources, newspapers, magazines, etc. I don’t think it’d seem to be related but I did remove several thousand low performing affiliate links (that were already nofollowed, by the way). We’ll see if that makes a difference. The site, publishing public domain literature, does of course have non-unique content. But I also pay writers to produce author biographies and book summaries, and book introductions are often user submitted, so it does have unique content on what I call the author or book hub pages (unique except for the many sites that steal my content, I could spend weeks on DMCA requests with this site), and those are the pages that were hit it seems.

Case #4, my second oldest site at 11 years Wilderness Survival. It has a mix of public domain and proprietary content, but the most popular stuff is all public domain, it has been #1 for wilderness survival for over a decade, lots of user submitted content too, lots of good incoming links. This site showed no traffic decline at all. Very steady. It does have a footer copyright link.

I had other sites that either held steady or lost traffic as well (such as the site you’re reading, it lost as well, I’ll admit I don’t write here much anymore, but please, this is no content farm.), but these 4 illustrate… well… nothing. The two least commercial most unique got hit the most, the two most monetized hit the least. It seems unrelated to uniqueness of content, and in truth, it seems the more unique the content the worse the hit was which is weird. I’ll do nothing to the survival site, because it is fine, apparently. For my gardening blog I’ll probably do nothing, because I can see nothing that is bad. Maybe I’ll go through the code and make sure I’m not missing anything hidden. Wildcrafting I’ll leave as is because again I see nothing that should be done. My literature site, being so huge, also could do a looking over. I already removed those (previously nofollowed) low performing affiliate links, maybe I’ll do more of that.

Ironically, the two sites with a footer copyright link lost the least traffic, so maybe I need to add an off site footer link to the other two.

Mostly, I’m hoping Google realizes this change, whatever it was, did not actually accomplish anything good and they roll it back.

Today only to celebrate their 15 year anniversary, they’re offering 50% off, I’ve never seen a discount so high. I’d recommend pursuing it. Use coupon code “SINCE94″

Pinterest, the new social networking site that crushes Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter even, second in traffic only to Facebook, is apparently the fastest growing website in the history of the Internet.

It is basically a really cool Facebook app that perfectly leveraged Facebook’s existing userbase for rapid growth, it also currently has the Eric Cartman, Gmail, marketing system (you’re not invited) in place to, supposedly, moderate new growth, and yet it is still skyrocketing.

Pay attention people, unlike Facebook which is about people and relationships, Pinterest is about things, and places, and links, lots of links, in fact it is nothing more than a giant bookmarking service, call it Del.icio.us 2.0, but with an interface (think pretty pictures) more suitable for mobile browsing and for the soccer moms of the world. In fact, from what I heard, 90% of the users are women from rural and urban areas, probably just because of who the first adopters were. It is such a simple thing, so brilliantly executed, and so sure to make a few new billionaires, I wish I had invented it. I’m sure we all do.

I’ve already noticed a deluge of referrals coming from the service to certain sites of mine, especially my garden blog. I’m unsure how big of an impact this new massive link engine will have on SEO since much, though not all, would appear to be hard for Google’s crawlers to find, Google definitely finds some of it though, it will be an area to watch. How long will it be before “Pin It” widgets are as ubiquitous as the Facebook likes? Not long at all, considering I would think them to be more useful to site owners as the potential for viral traffic seems higher with Pinterest than with Facebook likes (since pins get more prominent placements on Pinterest boards than likes on Facebook walls).

The most interesting thing to me is that when you sign up with Pinterest they ask you for your interests and they make you auto-follow some other Pinterest users. Who are these people? Early adopters heavily active on the site. One person I was automatically following has over 2.5 million followers. These people will be the next taste makers of society, the influence they will have will be enormous, this is so much more powerful than twitter. 140 characters (of normally nonsense) cannot compete with pictures that can basically be advertisements for a brand or product. If you can put a picture of a new product in front of 5 million eyeballs, you have power, and there is certainly money to be made. In the not too distant future I predict people might just start Pinterest boards, not blogs, and try to build an audience, in fact, I bet you some people are doing that right now. Should you? Maybe.

If I were a budding Internet entrepreneur instead of already very successful (not trying to brag, just saying I don’t have the time), I would try to jump on this bandwagon. Leverage whatever audience you already have on a site or blog and try to build a definitive Pinterest board for some industry or niche. It won’t work for everything, the site revolves around pictures so topics like accounting aren’t a good fit. If you wait much longer I believe the train will have left the station, in fact it is pulling away right now. Even if you don’t get millions of followers with the influence (and thus money making potential) that goes along with that, if you got just a few thousand that would be an audience that you could leverage to promote new content or products in your niche, and remember, the site works virally.

What if you, like me, don’t think you have the time to pursue becoming an influence baron? You should still leverage this new link and traffic machine. The first thing you should do is to take (or legally buy) more photos for use in your content, and make them good photos. The more attractive a photo, the more likely it will be pinned and re-pinned. The second thing of course would be to start adding Pinterest widgets to your sites next to all the Facebook like buttons.

Do you ever wonder what Google homepage links are worth? What kind of traffic?

I have the luxury of ranking well for many, many, classic literature authors, usually top 3, often #2 only behind wikipedia (and before wikipedia went all nofollow a few years ago, I usually beat them, because they link to me heavily).

Every time Google celebrates an author’s birthday with a fancy logo, that logo is often a link to a Google search for that author’s name, which is where I come in.

Traffic spiked yesterday, and so I find out why. It was Jules Verne’s birthday, Google made a fancy logo, it was linked to their search results, and I was #2 (behind Wikipedia). As of right now, very early on Tuesday, the graphic is still up.

What did this graphic get me? 20,000 unique visitors above average for that keyword as per Google analytics. Each visitor also viewed on average over 4 pages, which is pretty above average for that site, so almost 100,000 extra page views.

This translated directly to hundreds of dollars of extra advertising revenue. Though, YTD ad performance has not yet matched the gold rush that was last November and early December.

If only Google would celebrate Jules Verne for a whole week, but I imagine it’ll be down later today.

Update: Best Day Ever

Google left the logo up all day on 2/8/11, at least it was still up when I went to bed, and it was gone this morning.

Having the logo up all day certainly helped more than it did for part of the day on 2/7. 44,500 extra unique visitors. 2.89 pages per visit (a little less than the day before). But that seems to be because they clicked more ads, so that isn’t a bad thing.

Overall, this created my best day ever for advertising revenue, and for site traffic. My previous best day ever was Black Friday, November 29th 2010. Today killed that. Absolutely killed it. Now my eCPM wasn’t the best ever, that was back around late November early December, my previous high. I can only imagine how much I would have made if I had the traffic I had yesterday with the eCPM I had during the Christmas season last year.

However… there is an issue you need to be made aware of. Something I have overlooked previously, and I am not the only one I’m sure.

Older style AddThis buttons use standard anchor tag links as part of their functionality. These links point to AddThis.com and of course AddThis has benefited by getting a Google PageRank of 9 out of it.

For every legacy AddThis button you have on your site you’re sending a sliver of PageRank to them. And like a death by a thousand cuts, those slivers can add up to serious weight if you have enough pages on your site, like many do (especially people with forums).

Of course, maybe you were smart and back in the day you edited the code to make the link nofollow. Unfortunately with Google’s change to how they handle nofollow you’re not helping yourself at all by using it anymore. By using it all you’re doing is not helping AddThis. When Google made the nofollow change I went through and changed most of my nofollow links, but I forgot about the AddThis buttons until recently.

On some of my larger sites I literally had tens of thousands of external links pointing to AddThis.com, taking weight away from my own internal links. This is not a good thing.

Luckily, AddThis has a few newer (beta) buttons using primarily javascript with no standard functional links included. I highly recommend going through your websites and updating to these new button styles. It can be a significant PageRank boost if you plug leaks like this.

I am buying a listing today and almost forgot about this coupon, only good for October, so not much longer, but its 20% off. If you have a new site or a site you want to buy some link juice for, consider it. The coupon code is “SAVE20.” They only do coupons once or twice a year, so this is a good opportunity.

The changes will finally be live.

I for one am ecstatic.

Yahoo has always provided subpar results for me, my sites do not rank nearly as well. Their directory has also failed in usefulness, and it is their own fault for devaluing it. Their crawler, Slurp, is also annoying.

Just as one example, on Google and Bing I am #2 for william shakespeare, second only to wikipedia, I actually was #1 before wikipedia went to nofollow (I had 1500 links from wikipedia, it was good). I’ve been ranked this well for years and am well established. On Yahoo? I’m #9.

This pattern is true over all of my search results. Yahoo is always about a page behind, at least. I overall find Yahoo algorithm to reward spammy links more, which is something I don’t generally engage in. There is not a single listing on any site of mine that I track that I do better in Yahoo than in Google or MSN.

So I’ll hopefully have Slurp sucking down less resources, and get more traffic from Yahoo at the same time. This is good. Soon Yahoo’s horrible search marketing program will die as well, also good. I’ve already posted previously why Yahoo is the worst company on the Internet, and I firmly believe it. I will have to have a little celebration tonight to ring in the demise of their search index.

The call started out somewhat funny.

Him: “I was just on your website and I’m actually calling from Google.”

Me: “So you work for Google?”

Him: “Well, I’m calling from Google and….globalmarketexposure.”

Me: “So you’re calling from Google.”

Him: “I work for Global Market Exposure, we’re an adwords qualified company working on behalf of Google” (finally, half-truth!)

Me: “Did your company used to be called Netbiz?”

Him: “No, we’re much better than Netbiz, we can get you uploaded to the first page of Google within an hour. We-” (Did they choose to inappropriately use the word “upload” to sound more technical? I was so impressed with his masterful use of Internet jargon!)

Me: “You don’t actually work for Google, you just setup adwords ads for people, something they can do themselves. ”

The call degenerated rather quickly from there on.

Why doesn’t Google weed out companies like this that use confusing sales tactics? Quite frankly I think it gives Google a bad name. It is also highly unethical to represent ads as search placements, they’re not, they’re ads.

For the record, companies like Netbiz or this new outfit, Global Market Exposure, place advertisements through Google Adwords. Adwords is an auction based advertising system whereby the highest bigged gets slot 1, the second highest slot 2, etc. With each bid being modified through internal Google systems that judge quality and click through rate (a high bid no user will ever actually click on because the ad sucks isn’t going to do Google any good). Anyone can do this yourself for free.

This advertising differs 100% from Search Engine Optimization. Which is the practice of painstakingly building and tweaking your site so that it ranks better naturally in the unpaid main search results. There is no quick fix for search engine optimization, and as a general rule if someone says they can give you a top listing automatically or within hours, they’re talking about placing adwords advertisements, not doing SEO for you.

Using one of these companies is akin to using someone to put an ad in the phone book for you. Maybe the person is an expert at phone book ads, and maybe you’re too busy and don’t have the time. But you could probably do it yourself, and you could also probably setup your own adwords advertisement yourself. Plus, since you’ll not be using a middleman, you’ll be spending less money and so more easily obtain a positive ROI.

Caveat Emptor.

On an unrelated note the company uses the domain google-placement.com looks to me like a trademark violation. Anyone want to place a wager on how long that lasts? Anyone know a Googler to forward that juicy tidbit to?

Anyways, you can use the coupon code “SINCE94″ to get 20% off your order through the end of September.

To simplify, PageRank, or link weight, is passed from one page to another through links. To decide how much each link gets the total weight the page has to offer is divided by the number of links on the page. Previously Google, and other engines, removed rel=nofollow links from this equation entirely. Meaning if you used rel=nofollow on your external links, especially those submitted by users such as in blog comments and forum posts, you allow more weight to be passed through your internal links, thus benefiting your site. You can read more about this topic in the above linked post as well as in these two articles: All About Link Popularity & Pagerank; Site Architecture: Optimizing your Internal Links.

The change is that rel=nofollow is added back into the equation, and the weight rationed to the nofollow links simply is never delivered, it goes to the abyss, it is vaporized, never to be seen from again. This change was done quietly around a year ago, Google only just spilled the beans last month, but this would explain the roughly global PageRank drop (where most sites lost PR) that occured back then, all the nofollow links within Wikipedia alone would vaporize a large amount of the Internet’s overall weight.

What this means for site owners is that where you thought you were once conserving PageRank, you’re now just hurting yourself. You should remove all nofollow stamps on all internal links, all of them, and on external links they’re now pointless for link weight conservation.

We can choose to go back to the other methods of link weight retention, methods that we used prior to the invention of nofollow, but many of them are also likely poisoned by this change (such as running through a redirect script blocked by robots.txt) and others have accessibility issues or may be considered blackhat one day.

Instead I immediately thought of a solution that doesn’t aim to block all link weight leakage, but instead aims to mitigate it as much as possible, this is done through two concepts. Depth and link ratios. The deeper a link is in your site, the less PageRank it’ll tend to pass, and the higher the internal link/external link ratio on any given page, the less will be lost.

The solution thus is what I call, Two Step External Links this is really just a visible static page redirect, instead of the automatic redirects that have been used in the past. This type of redirect actually has exists for as long as the Web has, only it was primarily used for liability reasons at government, school, or medical websites where the sites did not want any perceived liabilty for the quality of the content their external links pointed to. What is new is using this method of link for PageRank retention.

Now, you’re supposed to use rel=nofollow on your blog comments and forum posts because you do not exercise editorial control over those links and you do not want to be blamed if they point to bad neighborhoods. But suppose you’re a really good blogger and have a 20 link menu on your blog, but then you make a really good post and get 200 comments on it, all with an external link. If all of those comments are nofollowed, you lose 90% of your PageRank on that page, 90%. If all those links are not nofollowed and not otherwise redirected, you lose 90% of your weight still, and you also open yourself up to the “bad neighborhood” linking liability (plus you’re rewarding potential spammers, thus encouraging more spam, and we hate spam don’t we precious?) If, however, you use my plugin for your blog you recycle 95% of the 90% of weight you’re losing back into your site, meaning instead of losing 90% of your original weight, you’re losing 8.5%.

How it works is, as I explained above, through depth and ratios. You have a visible redirect page that has your fully menu on it and the external link, but since there is just the one link vs your menu (as opposed to 200 vs your menu), it is vastly out numbered by your menu, and so you mitigate the link weight you lose.

I have had developed two plugins for this system. You can download them here. One is for vBulletin, the other is for WordPress. Each plugin has a whitelist so you can exempt certain domains from redirects. Each has a setting to allow the redirect page to itself have a meta refresh redirect on it (to automatically forward after X secondS), and each has a setting to set the external link on the redirect page to nofollow or not (I recommend nofollow). The vbulletin plugin also has a setting to only show it to guests (users not logged in).

The WordPress plugin is really easy to install, just upload it to your plugin directory, the vBulletin plugin requires a few file edits. In both cases if you run other plugins that modify the same parts they may not work, and in both cases it has been tests on both the newest and slightly older versions of the software.

The plugins are free to use, they are in my opinion completely white hat, and both are extremely effective at retaining link weight within your site.

Also both redirect systems are powered with a simply query string and so you can easily send links through them from anywhere else on your site once installed, such as your custom CMS or from within articles where you write the links manually, to then redirect those links as well if you want.