I get no kick out of promoting a piece-of-crap-boring-as-hell-cookie-cutter-turnkey-site. I got to be infatuated with a site I’m promoting. It’s got to blow me away. Simon Cowell may call you “karaoke”, “cabaret”, “cruise ship”, whatever - I only live once. I don’t have time to waste promoting mediocrity.

Udi Manber recently wrote:

[Google’s] goal is always the same: improve the user experience. This is not the main goal, it is the only goal.

Don’t even think “if you build it they won’t just come” which is just a poor excuse marketers use to swipe more of your dough. If those words don’t strike a chord in your brain somewhere, nothing I do or say will help you.

Recently, several real estate agents were up in arms about Trulia using widgets and nofollows, accusing Trulia of employing “aggressive” SEO (as if that’s somehow a bad thing). The truth is Trulia is just following the SEO rule book. The real threat is the amount of money and human resources Trulia has at its finger tips. Trulia’s technology will rapidly evolve. Meanwhile an agent is boxed in by an uninspiring “SEO-friendly” template thousands of other people are using and a limited marketing budget. There’s no competition. Taking collective action against widgets is just delaying the inevitable. Even if realtors stopped linking to Trulia, sites like businessweek.com will continue to link in. If you want to talk massive inlinks, how about nearly 4,000 dofollow links to trulia from CNN.com?

So far, one and perhaps the only edge agents have over Trulia are comprehensive, up-to-date property listings. If Trulia somehow gains access to that, what then? When will people wake up and realize SEO isn’t about worrying about SPAM (site positioned above mine) its about pushing their sites to the next level? If Microsoft didn’t bother creating the XBOX360 what would their market share look like now? If you refuse to evolve, your days are numbered on the web.

Your move. The clock is ticking.

Parasites of the Interweb

There are short-sighted people out there always looking for short cuts. They won’t hesitate to pay you $600/hour to hear you say “you need to write unique META descriptions.” Ya know, easy fixes and promises of big returns. It’s all about high ROI. Contribute to the community as little as possible and milk it till its drier than Erg Chebbi. It’s “you reap 10,000,000 times what you sow” syndrome. It’s about living off the web like a parasite. It’s about putting money in your pocket screw everybody else.

For those people, internal nofollow is an easy sell because its easy to implement. You don’t have to spend hours writing blog posts. You don’t have to share valuable ideas with other people. You don’t have to come up with anything original. You don’t have to dump your template site someone else spoon fed you and design a truely compelling site from the ground up. All you have to do is spend a couple of hours adding rel=nofollow to your pages.

I’m not saying short cuts don’t exist. After making thousands of bucks and 5,000+ visits/day per psuedo-spam domain using a script that took less than two hours to code, and having PPC campaigns that make me $10,000 for every $500 I put in, I know there are short cuts.

Still, there’s a time and place for every SEO tactic. We’re always short on time, and given multiple choices, we are forced to choose which path to take. Clients want instant gratification. Don’t give it to them - unless the client is willing to settle for 80% long term/20% short term strategy. If a client is unwilling to do the right thing, warn your client in advance that what you’re going to do for him/her is probably going to be a complete waste of your time and hir money. That way, a few months down the road, your client won’t come back to you and bitch that nothing is happening. The appropriate response in that scenario is “I told you so.” Don’t take the blame for your client’s bad judgement calls.

What should you change before you touch internal nofollow?

First order of the day has always got to be injecting value into your website so that its by far the best in your niche. If it isn’t the best, forget SEO, forget marketing, forget everything else. Work on improving your site.

How do I know that something I built is going to sell? I know because I use it every single day.

Second, increase visibility. No, forget “authority links from high PageRank pages.” Get noticed on Craiglist, Myspace, whatever, it doesn’t matter. If your competitor is dominating Google Maps results in your area, for example, you know what you gotta do. If you run a search on Trulia and get a bunch of listings by your competitor, you got work to do.

Many big dogs in my vertical don’t depend on Google. Sure, they get 80,000+ Google hits/day, but that doesn’t represent the majority of their traffic. They leech traffic off other sites, they buy traffic, they get on top lists, they submit videos to Youtube — they do whatever it takes to generate traffic. Is the traffic not converting? Filter it, trade it, sell ads - as long as your site is visible, there’s money to be made. You fixate on rankings and high TBPR links and guess what? You’re probably going to end up just scraping by.

Internal nofollow isn’t evil. But unless you have unlimited amount of time, you gotta prioritize your SEO campaign. Internal nofollow should not be at the top of your todo list.

For example:

(<a [^>]+>)(.*)</a>

Ok let’s try that in English:

1. (<a [^>]+>) matches <a href=”….”.>.
2. (.*) *should* match anchor text (I’ll elaborate on that).
3. </a> matches the closing A tag.

<a href=”http://www.searchengineland.com” rel=”notpaid”>search engine land</a>

will correctly extract the anchor text “search engine land.” BUT because (.*) is greedy,

<a href=”http://www.searchengineland.com” rel=”notpaid”>search engine land</a> is cool because vanessa fox posts there.</a>

will incorrectly extract:

search engine land</a> is cool because vanessa fox posts there.

as anchor text. Hmm..

So how do you fix this? Instead of using a .*, use .*? or other non-greedy modifiers like +?, ??, or {m,n}? (I haven’t tested the last three, I assume they work).

(<a [^>]+>)(.*?)</a> will extract anchor text from web pages.

1. Digg/reddit/stumbleupon are nearly useless. Of course, there are alternatives and workarounds, but really, life would be easier if digg had a nsfw section.
2. Everyone is scared of linking to you. Since almost everyone uses either affiliate content shared by 1,000 people or Matrix Content that looks all the same, there’s no such thing as unique content. Mainstream people are scared of linking to porn sites. And adult webmasters will not link to each other ever unless you set up a link exchange. There is no such thing as editoral links in the porn niche (except for sex blogs, but those are for female bloggers; men generally suck at talking on and on about sex). You either have a traffic link, an affiliate link, a reciprocal link, or an internal link. Nobody links out for free.
3. 90% of adult webmasters still don’t get the concept of one-way links. Major adult sites like penisbot was built on reciprocal linking done on a mass scale. They accept dozens of sites a day which are required to link to them and they in turn link to those sites. Those webmasters don’t see massive recip link networks as a link scheme because the links are “relevant” - as if Google could tell the difference between a page about [girl+girl action] and [slippery dildos].
4. There’s nothing to write about. Porn is about pics and video - not text. It’s like optimizing for flash - its a nightmare because you have to spend hours typing bullshit just so you ranks for something. Yeah, you can write paysite reviews, publish chat logs with Brooke Banner or some other hot starlet that does weekly cam shows, post barely sfw videos on youtube, and talk about a girlfriend that’s been annoying you. But on the whole, you’ll end up writing alot of jibberish and saying stuff you don’t mean.
5. No matter who links to you and who you link to, you’re in a bad neighborhood. If real estate sites got bitchslapped for excessive reciprocal linking, well, porn sites’ been in hot water for years. Google doesn’t trust links in adult; even a site with over 300,000 links is stuck at TBPR 5, a sign that most of those links aren’t passing much value. But even if each link only pass a trickle of juice, 300k crap links add up to #1 ranking for terms that drive over 80,000 visits/day from Google. This happens because even though you’re in a bad neighborhood and you got a busload of crap links pointed at you, everyone is also in the same rut, with a lot less links in their profile. So you still end up on top even if you break all the Google rules in the book.
6. Running AdWord ads is a challenge. Conversions are phenomenal; but the teen porn flag is easy to trip (different reviewers have different opinions on what is and isn’t compliant) and one disapproval too many can get your account killed.
7. A Yahoo! Directory link costs a small fortune. Apparently Yahoo never heard of a level playing field or they assume, like VISA does, that porn sites make way more money than mainstream sites so adult webmasters can afford to pay more every year.

And a few reasons why optimizing porn is easier than mainstream

1. Google image search generates a ton of sales. I have a few images on this domain but none of them makes me any money. Not so with adult traffic. If you know how to nail top position, you really don’t even need organic search traffic. One key is to have as many thumbs on a page as possible (and of course the page has to be in the main index - unless Google changed that up). Post a ton of thumbs on your home page (yeah, Google image search is primitive - PageRank is a bigger factor here, since anchor text doesn’t work). Use huge pics - which helps you rank higher if a surfer filters a search by image size, and use framebreaker JS to prevent people from just looking at one pic then backpedaling to Google porn TGP.
2. Yahoo Video. You can generate 600~1000 uniques a day per a set of videos thanks to Yahoo Video. The trick is to make sure traffic converts; otherwise your bandwidth bill may eat into your profits, especially if each vid is big (if each vid is 5mb, 1000 downloads = 5 gigs/day)
3. There are thousands of long tails you can optimize for. Model names, celebrity names, paysite names, niches, superniches, DVD titles - an endless stream of keywords you can monetize, some with little to no competition.

Usually, Google pulls up indented listings if the secondary URL is relevant enough to rank on the same page as the primary URL. As tedster on WMW noted, “You can see this mechanism at work by changing your preferences to 50 or 100 results per page - that opens up the opportunity for more urls to be clustered.”

Sandboxsam, a new user on Webmasterworld, noted a trick you can use to filter out those indented listings.

1. Go to Advanced Search on Google
2. Set number of results to 20
3. change num=20 to num=6 in the adress bar

That filters out secondary URLs from search results (unless it ranks 6th or higher).

A while back, Fantomaster advertised Brad Callen’s PPC Arbitrage ebook on Sphinn with a blog post containing an affiliate link, which made some people think Fantomaster was trying to make a buck by leveraging his reputation on Sphinn. His post went hot, then a mod later pulled it off the front page. I got myself into an argument with Ralph after I called the ebook “crap.” He said (paraphrasing) “how the fuck do you know if its crap if you haven’t read it? You’re judging the content based on the way its marketed. Don’t talk till you read the book.” A day later, I downloaded the ebook. It was well-written, containing how-to information anyone can follow.

Now I’m in a similar situation where I’m asked to review something that I haven’t dug my teeth into. I don’t have access to Internet Marketing Ninjas’ members area. I can tell you its a great program because Shoe explains step by step how he made his first mill, or that it sucks because the information that you pay for you already know, like how to set up a 301 redirect. But fact is no one can tell you whether or not the program is worth 3K unless they tried it. All I’m going to tell you is decide for yourself. Jim has his reputation riding on the success of this program - that by itself should tell you something.

Facts About Internet Marketing Ninjas

Internet Marketing Ninjas  is a brainchild of Jim Boykin, who recently won Search Engine Journal’s The Best Link Building Blog of 2007 award. Here’s the facts:

• 15 hours worth of video, featuring Aaron Wall, Jill Whalen, Lee Oden, Todd Malicoat, Jeremy Shoemaker, Jim Boykin, Niel Patel, Cameron Olthuis, Bill Slawski, Christine Churchill, and Jim Gilbert


• More authority SEOs will join to contribute their knowledge and more videos will be added to the members area throughout 2008.


• Access to Webuildpages tools that used to be public but are now private, including Quick Backlink Checker, Backlink Anchor Text Analysis, and Strongest Pages Tool.


• Topics include link buying, keyword research, PPC, linkbait, Digg, link building, and affiliate marketing.


• Membership: $3k/year

Visit the site to see free preview vids.

The Buzz

Want more dirt? Check out the buzz. Since the program just launched, none of the articles really give you any specifics. Still, Hobo-web’s interview is worth a read; SEO book’s comments contain back and forth arguments about the program’s high price point; and you also might wanna check out the link to Webmaster radio’s podcast.

http://www.seodisco.com/internet-marketing-ninjas/

“I heard one of the best testimonials of Internet Marketing Ninjas from Todd Malicoat, when we were chillin’ at PubCon. When I asked him if he would advise me to shell out the money for the membership, he enthusiastically said that Shoemoney’s videos alone are worth the dough!” - Kid Disco

“If you’re in doubt of the price tag, Barry has vouched for it. ” - tamar

“It is pretty expensive, but it seems to me to be well worth the price tag.” - Barry

“For one year recurring membership fee of $2999.00 you will get access to some of the most amazing SEO tools around plus 15 hours of free video interview ” - Bruce Cat

“I agree that Jim could have shown more value upfront with some of the stuff he put in this package. Some of the tools have “never been released” next to them without stating what they do. As Jim gets feedback I am sure he will start offering more info about those.” - Aaron Wall

“Jim is a friend of mine, and I know he always underpromises and overdelivers.” - Sebastian

–Neil McCauley, Heat (1995)

Unless you were living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you know Google’s been busy lately in its War Against Paid Links. According to Danny Sullivan, Google is now bitchslapping the “guilty high-rollers” to make an example out them and to put the fear of God into link sellers and link buyers.

While this move triggered a hailstorm of debates on ethics in the SEO community, the reality is this: Google will continue to tighten its security system. Whether Google’s stock price is $625 or $125, Google will continue to walk that path. Google will never be completely “hacker-proof.” Then again, it doesn’t need to be. Its goal isn’t to detect all paid links on the face of the Interweb.

See, the cops don’t work the streets expecting to catch every grocery-robber, rapist, and gangbanger in town (don’t get your SEO handbook in a twist because I’m comparing link sellers to criminals; its just a damn example, not a full-fledged analogy).

For example, according to ~1990 stats, only 16% of rapes are reported to the police. (Now I can see some people are gonna start asking, “but how do you define forced sex? If I tell my GF she can’t have my cream bagle unless she has sex with me, is that considered forced sex? Or what about if I rape someone but she ends up having 10 orgasms and begs me to marry her, steals my phone number and won’t stop calling me and says if I don’t marry her she’ll report me to the police for forced sex? What if she just felt a little uncomfortable for the first two minutes and then started really liking it? There’s so much gray area around the definition of forced sex maybe I’m a rapist and don’t even know it? I mean, some girls say no and then when I stop they say hey, why the hell did you stop? Keep going dammit! Do I really deserve to spend 7 years in jail and pay a $200,000 fine for using a cream bagle as a sex-bait tool? Isn’t that excessive? If my best friend rapes someone, why do I have to rat on him? Isn’t it unethical to snitch on a friend? He was drunk and he was horny. He couldn’t help himself. She was asking for it anyway, with that low cut dress exposing her boobs. She really shouldn’t dress like that. Yeah, its HER fault! Why do women make such a big deal about sex anyway? The government shouldn’t tell me what to do; it’s a free country. I should be able to do whatever I want!”)

In the United States, 1 out of every 5 women in college is raped (1995 National College Health Risk Behavior Survey). Less than half of those arrested for rape are convicted, 54% of all rape prosecutions end in either dismissal or acquittal, 21% of convicted rapists are never sentenced to jail or prison time, and 24% receive time in local jail which means that they spend an average of less than 11 months behind bars.

So in an ideal world, 649,733 rapes per year might lead to around 600,000 rapists sent to jail every year (give and take a few, considering cases where a group of men rapes the same woman or one man rapes more than one woman). In reality, only around 103,957 rapes are reported, and even if all of the perpetrators for those rapes are prosecuted, 56,136 rapists are dismissed/acquitted, and 10,042 convicted rapists don’t see jail time. In the end, we’re left with 37,779 rapists in jail out of ~600,000 - or a 6% success rate.

If you rape someone, you have a 94% chance of getting away with it.

A cop, unless he/she’s smoking crack, doesn’t expect to get from a 6% success rate (or 94% failure rate, however you want to look at it) to 100% success rate overnight. What he expects is to see that 6% inch up to something like 9%. A crackdown on rape will not stop rape from happening. Rape is simply not going anywhere. And if you rape under the radar, there’s a very low chance of ever spending time in prison. Police efforts may eventually fail. But just because the government cannot stop rape from ever happening doesn’t mean the government is going to just let it happen.

Google is a bank with a high-tech security system. Any security system, however, has its weaknesses. Matt Cutts and his Anti-Spam squad continue to plug holes in the system. They resort to scare tactics to lower the number of people trying to beat the system. They are trying to go from 6% to 9%.

An SEO professional’s job is to continue to find ways to bypass that system and “get the cheese”, as an open 9-ball hustler pal back in the Big Apple used to say.

But its not my job to whine about the system. It’s not my job to waste time questioning the legality of that system.

It’s my job to

: understand the system
: exploit any weaknesses of that system

Identify tactics, draw up a plan, execute, re-evaluate, and make another run. If you’re in this for profit, everything else is digital vapour.

“Got. Got. What do we got? *What do we got?* Bon voyage, motherfucker. You were good. I’m going to the hotel. I’m going to take a shower. I’m going to sleep, for a month. ”

–Vincent Hanna, Heat (1995)

Dan explains:

In most sites, your global navigation links to the entire second tier from every page, including the home page. This causes the second tier pages to accumulate a lot of PageRank, at the expense of your third tier.

Makes perfect sense. Sites with slightly low link popularity (home page TBPR 3-4) often have no problem getting the home page and most of the category pages in the main index, but they often can’t get some of the product detail pages to stick. Why? Often its because of exactly what Dan said: the internal navigation makes the home page and second-level pages PageRank-hogs, leaving the third-level pages high and dry.

Some SEOs call Dan’s tactic “siloing”, and attribute its benefits to better themed internal linking. For example, Haylie from Bruce Clay talks about siloing, albeit with a focus on ranking, not index penetration. Siloing, in this case, is done by setting up thematic pyramids via links or directory structure. Just imagine a tree hierarchy, where leaf nodes link up to their parent, then a set of parents link up to their parent, and so on, till you reach the root node.

Dan disagrees: “At the time we all assumed this had something to do with the topics of the pages not being closely related, but we were wrong.” According to him, increase in site traffic is due to increase in PageRanks at the third-tier.

So how do you implement Third-Level Push? In brief:

1. Use nofollow to prevent second-level pages from passing PageRank to each other. This forces PageRank downwards to the third-level.

2. Use nofollow on links on third-level pages to second-level pages so that a third-level page passes PageRank to its parent page but not to any other pages in the second-tier.

3. Tiered Pairing: To prevent second-level pages from losing too much PageRank, you can link them in pairs: e.g. page A with B, C with D, and so on.

4. Circular Navigation: To circulate more PageRank on the leaf level, link them up in circular faction, so page A links to B and C, B links to C and D, etc.

That’s third-level push in a nutshell.

Note: Avoid deleting or adding links to do this (like I did); instead, just use nofollow. There’s no bigger sin than compromising user-experience for the sake of SEO (well, there probably is, but lets not get into that).

A Third Level Push Implementation for Wordpress

Does third-level push really work? I decided to use this blog as a guinea pig. But how do I implement third-level push on Wordpress? Sure, you can just Google for a “SEO Siloing” Wordpress Plugin, but that’s no fun. Warning to the faint of heart: don’t try this at home:

1. open template-functions-category.php
2. find function wp_list_cats($args = ”) declaration.
3. around line 236, under parse_str($args, $r): enter:

if ( !isset($r[’nofollow’]))
$r[’nofollow’] = FALSE;

// That sets the default nofollow value, in case no value is passed.

4. Look for the return list_cats.. line.
5. At the end of the long argument list (after $r[’heirarchical’]), type $r[’nofollow’]
6. Find function list_cats(…..).
5. At the end of the function declaration argument list @line 279, after $hierarchical=FALSE, type: “, $nofollow=FALSE”
6. Now look for the A HREF echo statement, around line 327.
7. Replace $link = ‘<a href=”‘.get_category_link($category->cat_ID).’” ‘; with:

if($nofollow==FALSE) $link = ‘<a href=”‘.get_category_link($category->cat_ID).’” ‘;
else $link = ‘<a href=”‘.get_category_link($category->cat_ID).’” rel=”nofollow” ‘;

8. Finally, open sidebar.php. Look for the wp_list_cats line for single posts (not the home page), around line # 104, that looks like: wp_list_cats(’sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0′);

Replace that with wp_list_cats(’sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0&nofollow=TRUE’);

That’s it.

Potential negative side effects: If your blog doesn’t have a lot of backlinks, your category pages might go supplemental. In that case, try Tiered Pairing.

UPDATE: Joost apparently incorporated my idea into his Robots Meta Plugin. Check it out.

Does Siloing/Third-Level Push Really Work?

So what happens to PageRank flow after I implement a third-level push?

Here’s a before and after:

Before:

(Pages in the main index are green. Notice I channeled most of my site’s PageRanks to only those URLs I want to rank, so I had some supplemental URLS but none of them I cared about.)

After:

Hmm…so basically I lost PageRank to some of my unpopular category pages. But where did all that PageRank go? To just a handful of recently-published posts, which had high PageRanks to begin with. So it doesn’t really look like I gained anything, does it? In fact, it looks to me like a whole bunch of pages might go supplemental.

See, there’s no point in having pages with too much PageRank (at least for getting pages indexed). You want a moderate amount of PageRank on as many pages as possible.

Nah, instead I want something more like this:

Notice now PageRanks are more evenly spread throughout my site.

(screenshots generated by PageRankBot).

Sitewides’ Gotta Go (Modified Third-Level Push)

The problem was I had other sitewide links besides links to category pages, like “recent posts”, “top posts”, and links to the home page. Those URLs stole the PageRanks the category pages gave up.

In short, sitewide links are bad. So what did I do?

1. Dumped sitewide links: Got rid of sitewide links to recent posts and top posts (better to nofollow them but I was in a rush) and nofollowed links to the blog home page. Used third-level push (nofollowed sitewide links to category pages), except I prevented blog articles from linking back to its parent category page to keep the page from accumulating too much PageRank.

2. Added related posts plugin to circulate PageRanks to internal pages “randomly” instead of sitewide.

Aside: Some SEOs will tell you you should never, ever, ever nofollow links to your internal pages because it sends a negative quality signal to Google. First, Vanessa Fox, an ex-Googler, confirmed that a reason nofollowing internal links may be a bad idea is because the target urls will still be indexed if other people link to them (not that I take her word blindly as Gospel but hey, I don’t have time to test everything a Googler says). My policy is to use nofollow on internal links only when I want to control the amount of PageRanks flowing into a URL but I still want to keep the URL in the main index. For example, I wouldn’t nofollow a link to my privacy policy or TOS; I would just use robots.txt disallow (sure, robots.txt doesn’t guarantee that a URL stays out of the main index, but I don’t care about that; I just don’t want internal link juice to flow to my TOS page. But if you really wanted to get rid of a URL from Google’s index, use META noindex instead of robots.txt).

Conclusion

Will this setup help me or hurt me? Time will tell. The main problem is that now my site’s PageRanks are unfocused; my top posts aren’t getting any special attention. I can modify Wordpress so that X% of links to top posts are nofollowed instead of nofollowing every single sitewide link. That way, my most important pages will have the highest PageRanks but they won’t be PageRank hogs.

I do believe that third-level push can work, as long as you have some kind of tool to make sure PageRanks are actually being pushed down to the third-tier pages. Just by nofollowing links to category pages won’t guarantee that, though preventing sitewide links from flowing juice will probably do the trick.

Why should you care about this stuff?

As Matt Cutts recently explained (emphasis mine):

You could do a similar post with a bunch of Play-Doh and show how you have a certain amount of Play-Doh (your PageRank), and you choose with your internal linking how to spread that Play-Doh throughout your site. If a given page has enough PageRank (reasonable-sized ball of Play-Doh), it can be in our main web index. If it has not-very-much PageRank (tiny ball of Play-Doh), it might be a supplemental result. And if only a miniscule iota of Play-Doh makes it to a page, then we might not get a chance to crawl that page.

The Play-Doh / PageRank metaphor is kinda disturbing, but hey, whatever works.

If you rather build a good site than worry about supplemental results, why are you reading SEO blogs? Come on, be honest. When’s the last time you read an SEO blog that talked in-depth about optimizing a dynamic page for fast page loads or repeating graphic elements on a page to create a sense of unity or using element size and position to establish a visual hierarchy?

Never, right?

But if you’re a control freak like me, read on.

WTH Does It Do?

Though some of you guys gave me positive feedback via comments and email about PageRankBot, I’m not sure if all of you know exactly what to do with it.

Inspite of the misleading name “Supplemental Results Detector”, its not a tool for detecting supplemental results. You have site:www.domain.com/& and site:www.domain.com/* for that. There are also other tools out there (I think Aaron Wall has one and sitemost just came out with a new tool).

I don’t really care how many of my pages are supplemental, but I do care when a page that deserves to rank in the SERP goes supplemental. One way to address that problem is PageRank distribution management. That’s what I built this tool for.

Tactics

First, figure out which pages on your site are important and which pages aren’t. Ask yourself is this page valuable to my visitors? If the answer is no, the page can go. You might also ask yourself what is this page supposed to rank for? If the answer is “contact me” or “privacy policy” then ask yourself why the hell would I want traffic for “privacy policy” and am I out of my mind thinking I can rank on the first page for “privacy policy” alongside Google, Sun, Apple, Adobe, and NY Times?

But if your “contact me” page contains your email address or IM information and your clients find you by Googling for your contact info, I would keep the page in the main index.

To mark unimportant URLs, multi-select URLs that are unimportant, then Edit > Toggle Importance.

Now flag supplemental URLs. Some of you wish the tool does this for you automatically. It doesn’t. Instead, label URLs returned by site:www.domain.com* command by going to Edit > Mark Page As > Main Index.

You can use the search tool to find URLs. For example, the following image shows a search on seo4fun.com for urls containing the word “pagerank”:

Now go to View > Filters > Hide Marked, which hides all the URLs you just marked. Select all the URLs you see, and then set their status to supplemental.

Find Your Link Targets

To manage internal PageRank flow, you add internal links to your site. Decide which page you’re going to add a link on (link source) and which page you want that link to point to (link target).

To fish out your link “targets”, view only supplemental pages and sort them by PageRank (View > Filters > Show Supplementals and then click on the PageRank column). The topmost URL marked “important” is your best candidate:

1. The page is important to you (you feel the page deserves to rank in the SERPs).
2. The page is supplemental.
3. The page with the highest PageRank = easiest url to pull back into the main index.

There’s your link “target.”

Note: If your site has multiple “entry points” (i.e. not all inbounds point to the home page), PageRank flowing into your site from those entry points will change the dynamics of how PageRank is distributed. In that case, take the PageRank values this tool gives you with a grain of salt.

If you’re anal enough to want to account for IBLs pointing at specific pages, then you can “add juice” by going to Tools > Simulate Backlinks. First, set the home page TBPR (use a float, like 4.2 for more accuracy). Go to View > Column Filters > Approximate TBPR. That will show you approximate TBPR numbers translated from raw PageRank numbers. Choose a URL, and adjust as needed using the + and - keys.

Find Your Link Sources

There’s a few ways to figure out your link “sources.” One way is to find the page with the most PageRank bleed. (Don’t believe PageRank bleeds? We’ll argue about that in another post). Amount of PageRank bleed depends on percentage of outbounds to inbounds and a URL’s (non-visible) PageRank. For example, a PageRank X URL with two outbound links and two internal links would bleed (X/4)*2 PageRank. Bigger X (increased number/quality of IBLs pointing to a URL) means more PageRank bleed. More internal links means less PageRank bleed, even if the number of outbound links stay the same.

Let’s not get too obsessed with PageRank bleeds though. You can solidify Google’s trust in your links by linking out organically. A site that doesn’t link out needs a strong set of credible, trusted IBLs to “validate” with Google (e.g. amazon.com). Consider your outbound links a part of your link profile and a key ingredient in proving to Google that your linking habits are 100% natural with no artificial colors, flavors or sweeteners (yeah, I know that was bad).

Link from Pages with the Highest PageRank Bleed

First, limit results to URLs in the main index by going to View > Filter > Main Index Only, so you only link from URLs in the main index. Then sort by Outbound PageRank (click on the “Outbound PageRank” column header. If you don’t see the colum displayed, go to View > Column Filter to activate). The topmost URL with the biggest outbound PageRank is your link “source.”

Link from Pages that Flow the Most PageRank

Another way is to find a page with that flows the most PageRank with each link. Go to View > Filter > Main Index Only. Then click on the “Increment” column header, which sorts the result in the order of PageRank flowing per link. The topmost URL with the biggest Increment bar is your link “source.”

Connect the Dots

Finally, point a link from your link source to your link target.

If your modification isn’t sitewide, select the URL you just updated and recrawl that URL only instead of recrawling the entire site to update the site’s PageRanks.

You can also try flattening out your site’s PageRank curve (see the two graphs in my previous post about Google hiding supplemental results).

Take It Slow

If your site has enough PageRank, Google should update your pages in the main index every 3-4 days, if not sooner (e.g. if you show up for Google News) - though dramatic on-page edits like rewriting a TITLE tag might make Google sit on a page for a week or two. It should take you no more than 3 days to get a URL out of the supplemental index, as long as you have enough URLs in the main index to play around with.

First, your clients should know that just because they don’t see the supplemental results label anymore, it doesn’t mean their worries are over. Their supplemental pages are still supplemental. Google is just trying to hide the fact.

They should also know that just because the label is gone doesn’t mean you can’t detect supplemental results. You can, and here’s how:

• site:www.domain.com/& hack, which seems to pull up urls that used to be labeled supplemental. Of course now that Danny Sullivan blogged about it, that hack probably won’t last another week. (UPDATE: The hack was covered last week, according to Danny, the same week I pulled almost all my SEO feeds from Google Reader so I’m not bombarded by SEO news. Bad timing, I guess)
• site:www.domain.com/* shows pages in the main index.
• Old cache date. If s page’s cache date is old, its a sign that the page may be supplemental. Why? Because Google doesn’t refresh a supplemental result’s cache all that often. For example, my blog’s main urls have cache dates ranging from Jul 25~26, 2007 (today’s date: Aug 1, 2007) while my old supplemental pages have cache dates as old as Jul 6-7, 2007.
• Low-to-none competitive term traffic. If you’re not getting Google hits for two-word queries or getting no traffic at all to a specific URL, it may be supplemental.
• Uneven PageRank distribution, which you can control by downloading the Supplemental Results Detector Tool. See how sugarrae.com and seo4fun.com distributes PageRank?
  
  See how sugarrae’s PageRank distribution is pretty even, so that there isn’t a huge gap between the home page and the deep pages? The site is 99% supplemental results free. Yeah, its a high TBPR site with only ~100 pages (which means plenty of PageRank to go around for each page) but so is vanessafox.com (TBPR 7 with ~100 pages), which has more supplemental results than sugarrae.com.
  
  (orange urls are supplemental)
  In contrast, seo4fun.com concentrates PageRank on just a handful of pages while the rest of the site gets very little attention. Consequently, some of the urls near the bottom of the chart with low link popularity are supplemental.
• Low Toolbar PageRank (0 ~ 3). The toolbar is a weak indicator due to delay but more green generally means less chance of a page being supplemental.

TANGENT:

(One interesting tidbit I found in the recent Google blog post is Matt/Prashanth Koppula saying a url with complicated query strings also might go supplemental. At this point (considering the fact that Dave said stale pages go supplemental as well) it’s probably safe to assume a myriad of minor factors are involved)

(After reading the post, reasons why Google likes supplemental results are pretty clear:

1. Crawl the web more fully to serve ~1000 results (or maybe Google’s satisfied with just 10-100) for every possible search query, which means a) a happier user and b) more pages to display AdWords on.
2. Improve efficiency by taking advantage of prioritized crawling: crawl important, frequently updated pages more often while crawl less important, unupdated pages less frequently. Unfortunately, this often means only home page/top-level nav pages get indexed while pages with actual content fails to make it into the main index. I often get frustrated by a search result that lands me on a blog category page with 40+ blog post links instead of the blog post itself.)

Wrapping up:

A site with many pages in the main index receive traffic for competitive two-word queries. Traffic land on not just a handful of pages but on thousands of pages. Googlers promise that, by the end of the summer, supplemental results will generate more traffic and will rank for more terms. We’ll see. There are a ton of spam pages in the supplemental index, so Google will have to walk a thin line - otherwise odd query terms will be swamped with low PageRank spam while legitimate supplemental results never see the light of day.

Image courtesy of What Is the Matrix

If you spend hours a day surfing blogs, you’re trapped in the Matrix. Being an ex-hardcore MMORPG addict makes me an expert on getting sucked in. In that world, I met thousands of people, I slew dragons, I saved lives.

Meanwhile, in the real world, I sat in front of my computer for hours tapping on my keyboard and staring into my monitor.

I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing… why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night, you sit by your computer.

Living in a cacooning world, you give in to your urge to socialize - to connect to other people, to not feel alone, to feel important, to feel wanted.

Like throwing a rock into a lake and seeing ripples on the water or shouting at a mountain to hear the echoes of your voice, you feel a need to confirm your own existence.

But does reading about Google policing paid links help you get your laundry done? Does knowing that Yahoo redesigned its home page take care of your phone bills? Does leaving a comment about why Jason Calanis is wrong pay for your baby’s diapers?

You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?

Ignorance is bliss.

When I wake up in the morning, I instinctively fire up Google Reader to jump-start my brain. Since I’m my own boss, sometimes, that quick peek turns into hours of reading and commenting and posting and I get no work done.

Here’s a thought de jour:

You already know enough.

“Hey, it just sounds to me like you need to unplug, man. You know, get some R and R” - The Matrix

Class.forName({nameOfYourDriverWhateverItIs}).newInstance();

You can either:

Set CLASSPATH in DOS

Go into DOS (Start/Run/cmd.exe):

set CLASSPATH=.;{pathToYourJarFile}

For example, if your jar file is at: C:/Program
Files/java/jdk1.6.0_01/lib/mysql-connector-java-5.0.6-bin.jar,

Type:

set CLASSPATH=.;C:/Program Files/java/jdk1.6.0_01/lib/mysql-connector-java-5.0.6-bin.jar

Now,

javac YourJavaFile.java
java YourJavaFile

That’s all. But it won’t work if you’re trying to run code in Netbeans.

Set Your Project’s Classpath in Netbeans

If you’re using netbeans, set your project’s classpath.

1. Right-click on your project.
2. Select “Properties.”
3. Click “Libraries.”
4. Click “Add JAR/Folder”
5. Choose your MYSQL driver JAR file.

HEY. Did you find this post useful as hell? I know you did. Then link to this page, Stumble it, Del.icio.us it, do whatever you can to pump this page up the Google SERPs so other people looking for this info can find it easier. Thanks.

Why This Has Anything to Do With SEO

It took me over 30 minutes to find this solution. I was this close to throwing in the towel. So once I figured out the solution, I wrote a page I wish I found at the top of Google’s search results when I looked for “jdbc classnotfoundexception.” That way, other people looking for the same information won’t be frustrated like I was. Because I’m working in a long tail space, to get this page to rank high I just optimized the content. But I didn’t keyword spam or pepper my H tags with related terms. Instead, I optimized for you.

Yep, you.

Ok, so it’s not perfectly optimized for you if you’re an RSS subscriber of mine, since you’re interested in SEO, not Java. But if you found this page through Google, you’re thanking me now because:

• I give you exactly what you were looking for.
• I get straight to the point. Instead of starting off with a long irrelevant opening paragraph, I explain the problem and give you the answer. Instant gratification baby.
• I keep it short. I use as few words as I can to save you time.
• I keep it simple. Instead of trying to crack you up with dumb jokes or titilate you with fancy metaphors, I use simple words so even a caveman can “get it.”

Some people say ranking is about links, not content. Is it better to be tall and rich, or loyal and charismatic? Why are marketers trying to convince you its all about looks? (Yeah, just think about that for a minute :D)

Given two websites with equal visibility, the site that publishes the most compelling content will always win, showering the site with even more visibility. If marketing is all it takes, Paris Hilton would have sold more CDs.

Related Articles:

A few articles that both helped me and frustrated me (hint: natural outbound links to relevant, authoritative pages will help you win Google’s trust):

• Establishing a Connection (The Java Tutorials)
• Basic JDBC Concepts
• Lesson: JDBC Basics

Nowadays, supplemental results aren’t much of a mystery anymore to most people. As Matt Cutts replied to Michael Martinez at Seattle SMX, people know all they need to do is to get more “quality links.” The answer is so simple, so easily digestible that I’m starting to see people answer supplemental threads with just three words - PageRank and duplicate content. As if.

What makes you gain weight? Eating too much. Duh. Knowing that doesn’t help you much, does it? How can you lose weight and keep it off? Knowledge isn’t power. Actionable knowledge is power.

Understanding Supplemental Results and PageRank Distribution

You have countless internal-link-based tactics at your disposal to combat supplemental results. In a thread on WMW titled Supplemental Page Count Formula?, I summarized:

If your site is largely supplemental, it means 1) not enough quality inbound links to your site 2) you have too many pages 3) you link out too much 4) Google may think your IBLs are artificial 5) Cannonical issues are causing PageRank to split.

Bouncybunny replies:

I’ve never heard points 2 + 3 being relevant for pages falling into the supplementals.

I’ll leave the discussion about PageRank leaks for another day. As for point 2, I explained (in geek speak):

Think of total PageRank X (sum of all inbound PageRank to your domain) split between Y number of pages. Roughly speaking, bigger page count = lower average PageRank per page (depending on your site structure). We know that a page with PageRank below minimum threshold “goes” supplemental. With excessively high page count, average falls too low, and you’ll end up with many pages in the supplemental index. By reducing the number of pages, you slightly increase average PageRank per url. That can result in several supp pages popping back into the main index.

As a matter of fact, Shoemoney claims he got rid of some of his supplemental results by following Aaron Wall’s advice: robots.txt disallow noisy pages.

Don’t Cut Up Your Pizza Into 60,000 slices if You Ordered a Small Pie

Thanks to Andy Beal, you can hear Matt Cutts say basically the same thing:

If you got 60,000 pages, and you only got “this much” PageRank, and you divide it […he mumbles], some of them are going to be in the supplemental index. Given “this many people” who link to you, we’re willing to include “this many” pages in the main index.

The picture below shows you how PageRank is distributed on this domain, assuming an artificial scenario where all inbound links are ignored:

(click on the thumbnail to see the details)

Aside: I generated this chart using Google Docs, Photoshop, and my Supplemental Results Detector, which a few of you guys might remember I wrote back in December 2006. It’s a simple script that emulates Google’s PageRank iteration. Though it ignores inbound links and uses the original PageRank formula where all PageRanks add up to the total number of pages on a domain instead of 1, it’s a pretty good indicator of which pages on your site is prone to go supplemental. It’s a gift-from-above for PageRank horders, but at the same time, it helps you organize your internal links more strategically.

Notice:

• More inbound links = bigger pie. As you guys link to me more often (hint hint), my pizza gets bigger, which makes all my slices grow. Phatter slices mean fewer supplemental results.
• More artificial links = smaller pie. Reciprocal links, cheap directory links, link injections,easily detectable paid links - all of these work to some extent if you play it like Sam Fisher. Uline.com ranks on the first page for “cardboard boxes“, Thisisouryear ranks first for “website directory”, and customermagnetism ranks 13th for “search engine optimization” all thanks in part to paid links. Major adult sites also dominate competitive porn terms using hundreds of thousands of reciprocal links. But having tons of artificial links pointing at your site makes them easier for Google to detect. If Google decides to devalue the PageRanks passed by those links, your large pizza turns into a medium, sometimes causing your site to enter the realm of Google Hell.
• More pages = smaller slices. As I publish more posts, I create more slices, causing all my slices to shrink. What happens to a commercial site that publishes 100,000 new pages in one day? Or what about a blogger that publishes 10 posts a day but gets completely ignored by the linkerati? They often go 99% supplemental because you’re adding a ton of more slices while the pie stays the same size. More slices mean smaller slices. And if they’re too small, they “go supplemental.” But if I publish something useful, people will link to me, increasing the size of my pie.
• Fewer pages = bigger slices. Conversely, deleting pages causes the size of my other slices to grow. It’s like a page “taking one for the team.”

Move Away from Default Wordpress Setup for Better PageRank Flow

The chart also gives you an idea of how the default Wordpress template distributes PageRank. The blog home page gets the most love; category pages are second in line; recent posts are third in line. A second page of your category pages (e.g. /category/seo/2/) and old posts have the least internal link juice flowing into them by default.

If you use the Recent Posts Plugin, your recently published post gets love from the blog home page, first page on your category and archive pages, and every single posts page. If you use install a Top Posts Plugin, you can direct extra juice (and traffic) to your favorite posts (see Jim Boykin’s blog, though the way he has it set up is kinda fugly). The Related Posts plugin can help maintain internal linkage between old posts.

Internal Linking Tactic is Half the Battle

As Adam Lasnik would probably tell you, the best cure for supplemental results is to create original, compelling content, marketing it, and getting links you deserve. But you can also get mileage out of working with the PageRank you already have. Think of it like tweaking one of your landing pages to improve your CTR. A 2% increase can add up to alot of money. Remember, people used to believe duplicate text caused supplemental results. But its duplicate urls creating more slices than you need that’s partly to blame, as Vanessa Fox recently confirmed on her blog:

Does having duplicate content cause sites to be placed there? Nope, that’s mostly an indirect effect. If you have pages that are duplicates or very similar, then your backlinks are likely distributed among those pages, so your PageRank may be more diluted than if you had one consolidated page that all the backlinks pointed to. And lower PageRank may cause pages to be supplemental.

Big Companies Are Already Highly Visible

In the white hat world, you need to develop a valuable product and then launch a marketing campaign to bring eyeballs to your product. If your a newbie webmaster with a domain name no one’s ever heard of, you have a long road ahead of you. First, you need to build a product to sell (aka. website). Pour millions of visitors on a piece of crap and your conversion ratios will look worse than plentyoffish and traffic will go right through you like you weren’t even there. Once your done developing a great product, you need to go on a marketing blitz, because the greatest website in the world will sound like a tree that fell in a forest if no one knows your site exists.

On the other hand, Universal Studios, MGM, McDonalds, IBM, Apple … these companies existed long before the birth of search engines. These companies have access to mass media (TV news, commercials, billboards, radio, newspapers, magazines, movies). They branded their names permanently into our collective psyche. Even if Google didn’t exist, people know how to find them on the web.

Google is Just a Middle Man

When do you need Google? You need Google when you’re looking for something but don’t know where to find it. But as time goes on, you figure out where to find whatever you’re looking for, so that Google becomes a middle man you no longer need. If you were looking for Ali Larter’s pics, for example, you might first surf Google Images. If you were looking for a list of movies she starred in, you go to imdb. If you wanted to know the names of Asia Carrera’s kids or if she’s still having financial problems, you either go to her official website or go to Wikipedia. If you wanted to buy a DVI adapter or a new PSU, you go to newegg. If you wanted to download MTV videos on YouTube that might disappear by tomorrow. you visit keepvid. If you felt like stalking Vanessa Fox, you’d go to twitter (Vanessa, don’t worry. I’m too busy to stalk anyone :D).

See? If you know where to find what you’re looking for, you don’t really need Google, do you? (unless you’re thinking of sites like Webmasterword with lousy search features)

For Big Brand Names, SEO is An Afterthought

For companies like Universal Studios, SEO is almost an afterthought. The bulk of their “marketing” that’s been going on for decades penetrates households that don’t even own a computer or don’t have enough money to pay for internet access.

If you already got high visibility, all you really need to do then is build a razzle-dazzle 59 points out of 60 website that turns your visitors into marketers.

Building a Website with Compounding Traffic

Have you ever lost thousands of daily uniques because your Google ranking suddenly tanked?

You have? Ok. But what happened to 30,000 people that visited your site last week?

If your site’s stickier than cyanoacrylate, 100 daily uniques from Google would pile up into 1,000 visitors/day after 10 days. Do you see that happening with your site? If your site’s traffic isn’t rising, you need to work on content, not SEO. I’m not just talking about building more pages. I’m talking about injecting value into your site, making it amazing, mind-blowing, unforgettable. Sure, adding more pages targeting more phrases might increase number of incoming daily hits, but what good does a million pennies in your pocket do you if you have a gaping hole in your pocket?

In investing, you look for high interest rates that compound year after year after year. Investing $4K a year in a Roth IRA at 8% average interest rate, for example, will turn you into a millionare in 30 years all thanks to compounding interest.

Most people know this, yet they often don’t put much effort into building a website with compounding traffic.

Universal Studios Can’t Care Less About SEO

Universal Studios obviously hasn’t bothered to SEO their official website, universalstudios.com:

• 100% Flash pages like this makes some SEOs frown. But see, it’s a dichotomy: on the one hand, people say SEO is 99.9% about links. They also say all Flash and no text is bad SEO. Makes you wonder if people spreading these ideas are capable of logical thinking.
• Home page redirects to index.php. That’s not necessarily bad if it was a 301 redirect. But it’s a 302.
• The second site: search result triggers a 404.
• According to the home page META keywords, the home page wants to rank for matt damon,ppv, vod, on demand, pay-per-view, jerry springer. Despite the TBPR 7, universalstudios.com ranks for none of those words because the IBL anchor texts are untargeted. According to SEO Digger, the home page does rank for over 637 terms.

It doesn’t matter though. If Google vanished tomorrow, people will still visit universalstudios.com. What will happen to your site if Google vanished tomorrow?

1. Anchor text targets money terms. Anchor text like “buy viagra”, “car insurance“, and “search engine optimization” are more likely to raise Google’s suspicion than if you used anchor text like “click here for more info on why Text Link Ads suck.”
2. Links are off-topic. (e.g. “online casino” link on a “paris hotel” site)
3. No context. Anchor text without context is like fish out of water. Sure, there are legit reasons for linking out from your sidebar. But the reason is unclear because there’s no surrounding text to provide context.

If you’re buying links through link brokers like Text Link Ads, stop wasting your money. Your chance of avoiding detection is lower than Boris Yeltsin scoring a one-night-stand with Maria Belluci. Instead, surf on over to technorati, search for topics related to your niche, sort by authority, and start at the top of your list. Email the owner of every blogger you see there, offering them money for blogging about your site. Remember, every blogger has a price, so don’t take no for an answer.

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. - Oscar Wilde

There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path - Morpheus, The Matrix

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting. - Stephen R. Covey

If you are failing to plan, you are planning to fail.

Don’t sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff.

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

If you don’t do it excellently, don’t do it at all. Because if it’s not excellent, it won’t be profitable or fun, and if you’re not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?

Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.

I am grateful for all my problems. I became stronger and more able to meet those that were still to come. - J.C. Penney

The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs.

If each of us sweeps in front of our own steps, the whole world would be clean.

Flow with whatever is happening and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of the wise man is in his heart.

All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost.

More wise sayings.

Why does Google care? Well, Google’s relevancy rankings will be hurt if people can buy their way onto their pages instead of earn their way to those search results pages by doing the best content, etc. Lots of people are doing comparisons of Google’s search results to Yahoo, Ask, and Microsoft’s search engines. If Google’s result set isn’t the best Google’s market share will start to go down as people figure out there are better engines out there. That, in turn, will hurt Google’s advertising business.

Not to mention that if advertisers know there’s a cheaper way to get onto Google’s search engine than by buying an ad, they’ll go with that system. So, Google has a LOT of incentive to swat down PayPerPost and pay-per-link style systems.

Aaron Wall also points out that Google would make more money on Adwords if Google makes search results harder to game:

The more I think about it the more I realize why Google doesn’t like the various flavors of paid links. It has nothing to do with organic search relevancy.

Not quite. Google cares alot about organic search relevancy. But here’s the catch. As I commented on Aaron’s blog,

Google wants informational sites on the organic results front page while forcing commercial sites to battle it out in the right column. Searchers looking for information on “coffee” will be happy with his organic results (Wikipedia, nationalgeographic, coffeereview, coffeeuniverse), and searchers looking to buy coffee will click on adwords and buy.

If commercial sites show up in organic results, there’s no reason for people to click on Adwords.

That means Google not only wants highly relevant organic results, but highly relevant results that are also non-commercial.

(Time to write meatier, more “informational” articles and dump those aff links from thin pages, huh?)

So Google is smacking down on paid links to increase its profit margin.

So what?

Do you read SEO blogs because they’re fun to read? Do you buy Adword ads because you want to help people find better products? Give me a break. I run ads to make money - pure and simple. And just because I have selfish reasons for giving you a great product doesn’t take away from the value of my product. Sure, Sony makes money off selling PS3s - so what? You want them to make them for free?

We’re all in it for the money, so “Google is selfish” objection doesn’t wash.

And the nominees are…

1. Google, you’re just trying to make more money on Adwords.
   Rebuttal: Just because I make money on a product doesn’t take away from the value of my product. You’re gonna tell me Sony’s evil because it doesn’t make PS3s for free?
2. Innocent sites will get penalized if Google guesses wrong or if a site owner isn’t familiar with Google’s Guidelines.
   Rebuttal: None. This is a fair point and Google needs to address it.
3. It’s Google’s own fault for building a link-dependent algo.
   Rebuttal: There’s no way Google can judge the quality or accuracy of content on a page unless they build a machine that can read and think. News flash - We’re not there yet. Google HAS to rely on links. There’s no way around it. You might bash NASA for not being able to build space colonies, but I got no respect for armchair quarterbacks that don’t even understand the game.
4. There’s no other way for some niche sites to link build.
   Rebuttal: Graywolf argues against people “who don’t think linkbaiting can be used to their boring clients such as carpet cleaners, when I came up with five ideas in less than 15 minutes.” Porn is one tough niche to crack because no one links for free, but other niches in comparison aren’t so tough. Is no one linking to you? Maybe your website isn’t offering anything new or valuable.
5. Google is telling webmasters to build for search engines, not for people.
   Rebuttal: Have we all forgotten that Matt Cutts said build for both search engines and people?. Now I agree rel=nofollow is building for search engines. Absolutely. Most users won’t even know its there. So we’re stuck in a grey area. But so what? Building for search engines is what SEOs have always done. Why do you pay $10,000 a month for links that send you 2 hits a day? Why do you waste hours writing unique META description tags? Why do you charge $600 an hour for SEO services? To improve usability? Gimme a break. And if you really have issues with building for search engines, maybe its time you quit your profession, because SEO isn’t about content building.
6. Paid links are whiter than other spam tactics like cloaking or hidden text, so why doesn’t Google go after more nefarious tactics first?
   Rebuttal: Who says Google isn’t working on a solution for better cloak detection? If you assumed paid links is the only thing Google’s spam team is working on, you assumed wrong.
7. Small site owners who make a living off selling links will go broke. You don’t wanna see them get evicted or something, do you Matt?
   Rebuttal: You’re making a living off contributing to spam and my heart should bleed because … why? Find something better to do with your websites.
8. This is all FUD. Google is lousy at paid link detection.
   Rebuttal: Yeah, some of it is FUD. If Google could detect paid links, they wouldn’t need site owners to tag paid links with nofollow; they’d just auto devalue paid links without all this media hype and move on. And for easy-to-detect links (can you say Text Link Ads?) they probably already do. If a big chunk of your paid links are automated or above the radar, this isn’t FUD. You are fucked. If all your paid links are contextual, relevant, and point to high quality sites, then yeah, its FUD.
9. Most links involve some sort of compensation, even if money doesn’t exchange hands.
   Rebuttal: Compensation isn’t the problem. Even marriage is a kind of a trade. I get to have sex every night with a beautiful wife in exchange for providing a roof over her head, helping her make babies, and giving her money to buy expensive jewelry and clothes. Ok so did she marry me for my money or did she marry me because she loves me? Compensation is a non-issue; almost everything in life is a trade. It’s the intent that’s in question.
10. I aint’ worried. Some paid links are impossible to detect.
    Rebuttal: Yeah, some individual links are undetectable. But many aren’t that hard to detect. And if Google detects a pattern of manipulative intent, your entire IBLs will become suspect.
11. Google, you’re not being realistic. You can’t expect dishonest people to behave honestly.
    Rebuttal: None. Google needs to find a completely automated paid link detection method that doesn’t depend on people’s good will. Rule breakers will always break rules. From that POV, nofollow doesn’t work.
12. Google makes money off link sellers like Text Link Ads by letting them run Google ads.
    Rebuttal: Google’s out to make money like everyone else. Besides, don’t blame Google’s Spam Team for what Google’s Adwords people do. They’re two completely different breeds of people.
13. Pay Per Action doesn’t offer disclosure until you mouseover.
    Rebuttal: Big deal.
14. Reporting paid links is snitching.
    Rebuttal: Spam Report’s been available to the public for years, and most people (except Sugarrae) have used it at least once. You’ve even bitched about Googlers not acting on your spam reports fast enough (34 million results? Wow). So why the sudden uproar? There’s no bad karma in filing a spam report on a spammer. If you buy links, yeah, that makes you a spammer. But why worry? Googlers go out of its way not to manually penalize sites because manual bans don’t scale. That means hours of tweaking and testing before you see any spammer get penalized. As for “paidlinks” report, Google doesn’t even have a working algo in place yet. So why are you panicking?
15. Matt, be clearer about what’s a paid link and what isn’t. How about charities that links to a list of donors. Are those paid links?
    Rebuttal: None. Even though some links are obviously paid for, others aren’t so obvious. Google needs to clearly define what constitutes paid and what doesn’t.
16. You can damage your competitor by buying links to his site then reporting those links to Google.
    Rebuttal: Google is running a beta test on an algorithm that targets thousands of sites, not just one particular site. And history says Google punishes link sellers, not buyers. That may change over time (Andy Beal: “Lasnik explains, why penalize hundreds of sites that sell just a single link, when it’s the recipient that is clearly benefiting?”) but I don’t see that day coming anytime soon. This is SEO FUD defense against Google’s FUD - and it ain’t pretty.
17. Using paid link reports to spot spam introduces a human factor in Google’s algo.
    Rebuttal: According to tedster, a WMW mod, “Google is already using human input to a degree, and they’ve even patented a more scalable method for integrating editorial oversight without needing to rely on it for everything.” I don’t see Google fully automating everything. There are always going to be Google Adwords reviewers, Google Video submission reviewers, people who read spam reports and site reinclusion requests, engineers who think up new algorithms, PHDs that develop new BETA products… Sure, I’m sure Google would like to automate everything, but a human factor isn’t being “introduced” - its always been a factor.
18. Google, why are you cramming the Ten Commandments down webmasters’ throats?
    Rebuttal: Wanna cloak? Keyword spam? Use hidden text? Build doorway pages? Buy links? Go ahead. No one’s stopping ya. Do whatever you want with your site - it’s your site. But when you walk into someone else’s house you respect their rules or you’ll be asked to leave. It’s that simple. I like what Linkmoses said on Matt’s blog:

    Ultimately we only have one choice to make. We either follow Google’s reco’s or we don’t. Nobody is forcing anything on us. Like the speed limit, we can -choose- to drive faster, and usually don’t get caught. Like the speed limit, we have no right to act shocked if we are pulled over.

19. If a link points to a relevant, quality site then compensation is irrelevant.
    Rebuttal: Everyone has a price. Anyone who insists he/she won’t link to a crap site for any amount of money is blowing smoke. If I offered you one million dollars to link to a page that said something really nasty about your mother, you’ll not only link to it but send 10K uniques/day to it using Flash banners and Adbrite.
20. Paid links improve search results. Successful companies with quality products and the baddest buying power deserve top rankings.
    Rebuttal: Let me introduce to you the players in this game. SEOs: These guys make money off fortune 500 companies who pay them $550/hour to buy up links. Without this tool, SEOs lose their edge. As Rand Fiskin says, “you’d be at a huge competitive disadvantage to your slightly less pointy-white-hat competitor.” Link sellers: these guys live off this monster of a marketplace; they do not want to lose their ability to make thousands of bucks a month on links. Big companies: their ranking depends heavily on paid links - these guys don’t want paid links to go away either. Mom and Pop website owners (yeah, you): you guys are basically screwed. The top 10 spots will be dominated by companies with millions to blow on links and these small website owners can’t compete. The delusion is that every webmaster is made to believe that by buying links, he can someday rank in the top 10, or if not rank at least a few spots higher. The reality is that no matter how much money you spend, if 10 websites outspend you, you’re never gonna show up on the front page. If the 10 richest companies dominate top SERP positions, 99% of you are screwed.
21. Google, you made PageRank a commodity by displaying it in the Toolbar.
    Rebuttal: Only novice link buyers rely on the toolbar to find potential link sources. I assume Jim Boykin does alot of link buying, but I doubt he ever looks at the toolbar when measuring up a potential buy.
22. Google, you’re being hypocritical. You said Yahoo Directory is ok because people pay for the review, not the link. So if someone pays me, I review his/her link, and then add the link to my site, why should I get penalized?
    Rebuttal: None. I can’t wrap my head around this one. I understand Google needs expert pages like Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ to calculate topic-dependent authority scores or calculate TrustRank, but to me it sounds like you’re skirting the issue. Alot of people who sell links review and reject link requests.
23. Aren’t Adwords and adsense paid links?
    Rebuttal: First, Google has no problem with paid links for traffic/advertisement. Get that through your thick skull. Second, neither Adsense nor Adwords pass PageRank. Google’s search pages are disallowed. Notice the line “Disallow:/search”?
24. It’s not our job to police the internet..
    Rebuttal: Did Matt Cutts offer you money to report paid links? If not, I don’t consider that a job. As for policing the internet, you’re not policing unless you spot a cheater and get him banned. Google isn’t interested in banning anyone. They’re interested in BETA testing their new algorithms. So its more like collecting guinea pigs than playing the town sheriff.

You want to see me try to counter them, right? I might later, but its Monday and I got alot of other stuff to do. *ducks*

For now, here’s my off-the-cuff advice - something you already know. If you’re shopping around for links, buy them under the radar. There are some paid links Google will never be able to detect, but a service like Text Link Ads isn’t one of them. Those links scream “paid links”, and the company is too visible. Assuming Text Link Ads links still carry some juice, they’ll be the first sinking ship among many if Google has its way.

UPDATE: This list is growing by the minute - 24 objections and counting. I updated this post this morning with rebuttals so people like Nick will have something to sink their teeth into.

http://www.viagra.com/content/index.jsp?setShowOn=../content/index.jsp
&setShowHighlightOn=../content/index.jsp

No wonder viagra.com is beat by .edu spam for “buy viagra.” It seems the company opted out of hiring a competent webmaster (no you don’t need an SEO to figure out redirects). Or is there something major usability-oriented thingie I’m missing? Nah, I can’t think of one legit explanation. Can you?

BTW, Vanessa Fox Nude is now 5th for “vanessa fox”, and 1st for “vanessa fox nude.” Her new blog outranks DaveN and Search Engine Land, two very “authoritative” sites. That’s reality folks. On the other hand, she won’t have an easy time outranking webmastercentral, but if she reveals more skin (er..how Google really works), she’ll make it to the top.

So, should I post a serious reply, try to be funny like Wayne Knight fumbling through Thank God You’re Here, or write a link bait piece like I was Rand Fishkin Jr.?

I suck at talking about my cats, so I’ll let my honesty bore you to death.

In December 2005, one of my money sites went completely supplemental. I’m talkin’ a 2000+ page site reduced to 3 pages. This was back before Big Daddy when no one had a clue about the supplemental index. On WMW, everyone was fixated on duplicate content, gs1md leading that discussion with a ton of insights into combatting canonical issues. The SEO “experts” outside of WMW didn’t have much of a clue. For example, This is the first article I ever read about supplemental results, written by Jim Boykin:

Now, for the dirt - how to get out.
1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

(Love your blog Jim, but first impressions die hard :D) On Sept 6, 2006, Ammon over on cre8 said this about the supplemental index:

Supplemental usually means “Google knows of this URL, but has not spidered the document recently for it to be in the main index”.

As late as Nov 2006, in reaction to my post claiming low PageRank was the primary factor producing supplemental results, Rand Fishkin responded:

I think it’s bogus - maybe it’s the primary factor in that a huge number of pages that are no longer linked to (in site structures from large sites) drop into supplemental, but for most of the real pages that webmasters want in the index that get dropped, I don’t think PageRank is playing a big role.

Now, Michael Martinez bitched about my Supplemental Results page being irrelevant, out of date, and first tier, (which, in retrospect, isn’t completely untrue)

The article may very well create a buzz and go on to become one of the SEO community’s standard references on how to deal with Google’s Supplemental Index. And the irony is that it’s wrong, even though the correct answer (as far as what I have seen work in the past few weeks) is buried amidst all the bad/good advice.

but what he doesn’t know is there was virtually nothing on the web about supplemental results in the Spring of 2006 which is when I started writing that page. Even though the page feels near obsolete now, back then it was ahead of the curve.

Anyway, during Big Daddy’s release, Matt Cutts mentioned that lack of trust in the inlinks/outlinks of a site leads to PageRank devaluation, which leads to low overall PageRank for a domain, which leads to pages dropping out of the main index - which exposes supplemental results.

But guess what? No one was listening, or didn’t want to listen, because

They resisted letting go of the idea that PageRank is dead.

When you look at the mechanics behind any piece of code, you discover function calls, loops, if/then statements, variables. Like it or not, PageRank is one of those variables. While it remains inside Google’s code, it maintains its influence, however slight, regardless of what anyone outside of Googleplex wants to believe.

Marketers who excell at writing digg-happy headlines will tell you what sounds cool - but what do they know? For example, marketers say “trust” alot (yeah, I know, I do too). Trust in the scope of supplemental results isn’t about domains; its about links, exchanged links, paid links. It’s about pattern detection, not authority. It’s about link devaluation, not a ranking boost. Trust in the scope of TrustRank has to do with high PageRank sites penalized in search results when they got lousy link profiles. TrustRank doesn’t effect low PageRank sites.

But stuff like that bores the crap out of most readers. You want to read stuff that gets you more sales. You want to know how to game Digg. You don’t want to waste time trying to postulate theories about an uncracked algorithm.

If you look at my archive links, you’d notice I started this blog on March 2006, right around the release of Big Daddy.

So, I guess the one and only reason I started this blog is a selfish one - I used this blog like a sailor uses a compass while lost at sea.

Then again, I was never really that lost to begin with.

I’ll tag these guys:

Ireland SEO Marketing
John Andrews
Peter T Davis
Red Cardinal
Scoreboard Media Group

It’s not what you publish, its where.

Authority Matters

Where you publish a post matters. No question about it. V7n ranking high with just a handful of links says volumes about how authority score still remains a force to be reckoned with. Red Cardinal outranking my post with very few backlinks also proves content - even anchor text (if there aren’t enough of them from the right sources) - isn’t everything.

Nothing Really Matters

But “trust” and “reputation” isn’t everything either. Peter is telling me all that really matters is a big rep. Is SEO that simple? Is driving in NASCAR just about having Jeff Gordon behind the wheel? Is a 9-ball power break just about hitting a rack hard as hell?

If reputation is everything, I dare Peter to change the title of his post to “Expensive Golf Course” and see if it can maintain its position for “seo course.” All the so-called SEO’s in-the-know will tell you the post will tank.

There are hundreds of factors. We hear that 24/7 - but let’s say it again.

There are hundreds of factors. Yeah, only a few of them really make a big difference. But there’s no factor that is so dominant that you can forsake all the rest.

SERP for “free seo course”. Screen cap for posterity (plus this SERP flip-flops more often than John Kerry)

SERP for “seo course.” V7n is now off the front page.

Don’t Think You Can’t Outrank Wikipedia

What does this prove? First, it proves that even if your website doesn’t have that visibility you need to break into the “SEO circule of trust”, you can still outrank authoritative sites like V7N, SE Roundtable, and even Wikipedia. A gazillion links to a domain makes internal links that much more powerful, but you only need to outrank a page, not the entire domain. Put another way - even if a domain has millions of links pointing at it, if one of its pages has a weak link profile, you ca