Did Google bitch-slapping my blog for just using the words Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, Payu2Blog and other paid companies?!? Even though a blog hasn’t run a single post from these companies? !!!! ??? !!!!

Of course, it’s not as though I can ask Google to tell me. But, from Ted Murphy’s fingers, I learn this:

We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks “bob”) that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost,ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.

Not mention these companies names!?

Of course I also mention these company names constantly. I even joined them all. After all, my niche is creating plugins that help bloggers who monetize do so. Joining the programs is essential to developing appropriate tools for these bloggers and understanding which features are useful.

But if Google’s blog could actually detect followed paid links they realize I have none from these companies!

In fact, if the Google meisters had any brains, they’d figure out one of many of my plugins are of inestimable value to their search engine.

Google meisters might ask, like what?

No Follow Old Spam Links:

You know what this does?

If a paid blogger runs paid a paid link, they can automatically no follow them after the contract period expires. That’s right: the links switch “no follow” after a set number of days. (The blogger can pick. I think I set mine to 60 days).

Sure, I know Google might not be thrilled with temporary follows, but sheesh! Your ‘bot is constantly crawling. Don’t you think it can’s see these things go “off”? The two I posted way, way, way back went off long, long ago. (Like earlier than May or at worst June!)

Guess what Google. Other bloggers use my plugin. Their “nofollows” turn on after a number of days.

So Am I supposed to never say Pay Per Post?!

Now assuming I lost page rank for posing the words Pay Per Post. What the heck amd I supposed to do if I want my rank back?

Andy Beard describes how I can request re-inclusion in Google’s ranking system. Evidently, I’m supposed to figure out what I did wrong (by guessing) and then undo it.

So… is mentioning PPP a violation of the guidelines? Am I supposed to delete thoese evil words, promise never to type PPP, Izea, Social Spark, PayU2Blog, ReviewMe or Loud Launch, ever again, and then ask Google if they’ll consider giving me page rank?!
Seriously?!

Oh, and if I can’t say these words, can others? Like, say the guys at TechCrunch, who seem to be permitted to say “Pay Per Post” with impunity?!

Hey, if Google wants to bitchslap me for posting the words Pay Per Post, Izea, Social Spark, or whatever, I guess they can do so. But … well.. sheesh!

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 77 comments

Want proof Google can’t detect paid links? While I was out of action attending to fire drills with my real job, it appears my blog rank dropped to zero!

How did I discover this the drop? Well, Lorin Larkin emailed me and asked:

Where’d you disappear to? I always look forward to your posts and you’ve been MIA. I was also interested in your take on the Google slap. I see you have enjoyed it with the rest of us!

All I can say is “Huh?” In all honesty, I think the incoming links for Lucia’s Linky Love and my other plugins are editorial. Sure, I encouraged people to mention the plugins– but no one is required to post. I think other incoming links are editorial.

I posted once for Smorty and Bloggerwave: Those links have been no-followed for a long, long, long time. Do I run PPP ads? Review me?

So… huh? On the other hand, “C’est La Vie!”

Now… off to read what the “in the know” people have to say.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 17 comments

Comfirmed by Joe of Pay Per Post / Izea: Some publishers are paying posties $100 to remove paid links. The discussion takes place on this thread.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: Several posties wouldn’t have been able to find the paid links to delete without the spread sheet provided in the request!

So, if your a postie, you might want to ask yourself: If someone offered me $100 to remove a link, could I find it?

How to make it easier to find your own paid links without making it easier for Google to find them.

1. Place all sponsored posts in internal hidden categories.
   Do this by creating a “sponsored posts” category, then using “Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin” to prevent the category from showing in the main portion of your blog. You can create as many internal categories as you like, which will help with book keeping on your side and reduce the number of post you need to sift through to find the link you want to delete.
2. Use WordPress’s built in search tool to find urls inside links.
   Which search tool? Where? Log into your Administrative area in wordpress, then click “Admin”. Near the top left, you’ll see “search”. You can enter searches like “thepaidlink.html”, then click “search”. Wordpress will return every post containing thepaidlink.html, even if string is contained inside a hyperlink. (If you’ve marked the post “sponsored”, you can be certain you are deleting the correct link! )

Interesting Lesson: Not being nice pays.

A nice postie who honored an earlier request writes:

well darn, if that is regarding the biz rate opp, I should have just left it and then I would be getting this $100 too now I guess, but NO, I removed it on the 1st email I received…lol

October’s Google fall out shows that it can be profitable for some posties to risk their page ranks and not delete paid posts. It can be even more profitable to refuse to remove them unless the advertiser pays! Hhhmmm….

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 18 comments

Do you remember Shoemoney’s Pamcake’s eyerolls at the idea that “Nofollow” blogs have good comments? Well, if you need any proof, visit the two blogs currently neck and neck in the “2007: Best Weblogs” contest. At both Climate Audit and Bad Astronomy, you’ll find plenty of heated debate.

The things you won’t find are:

1. Automated Spam Comments
2. Over SEO’d comment “names” and
3. Pink link condoms on the author url links.

In fact, while you will see link condoms in the comment content at Climate Audit, it appears that “Bad Astronomy” is full boar nofollow, giving real “follows” to links in author names, in comment content and trackbacks.

What are the two blogs discussing currently?

To some extent both blogs are discussing the 2007 Weblog awards which became rather contentious. (In comments on some blogs, some are acting as if the outcome of this blog award will determine national policy on Global Climate Change.)

The winner of the competition was scheduled to be announced last night– but the decision was deferred due to voting irregularities which included voting that continued for as much as four hours after poll had closed. The organizers are evidently combing through the data in an attempt to figure out which of the tens of thousands of votes cast were cast by zombie ‘bots.

The winner will be decreed on Monday! (Update, Friday 3:26 pm CST: WeblogsAwards has just officially decreed the “race” a tie.)

Zombie ‘bots voted?!

For those of you wondering whether ‘zombie bot voting was possible, evidently, it was easy! No-Oblimimal has described how to hack Weblog Awards (2007.weblogawards.org/) flimsy ballot security, and what Webblog Awards’s programmers could have done to prevent the ballot stuffing by ‘zombie bots. (It seems the voting system was less secure than my blog comments!)

Hmm…

I think I’m now against internet voting in real elections. (Not that I was ever for it.)

Oh, and despite Pamcakes eyerolls, I am keeping the “follow” on my comments.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 9 comments

John Reese, the promoter who brought “Blogrush” recently announced “TrafficJam.com”; evidently TrafficJam will help our blogs even more than Blogrush. The Blogosphere seems to have ignored the announcement. . .

But I won’t ignore it! John Reese is now promising loads of traffic through “TrafficJam”, requesting bloggers be patient and telling us feed back is positive. He has also closed comments at his blog. Given this marketing push, I think, bloggers do need to make decisions based on data; sharing information helps other bloggers make decisions.

What’s Blogrush done for Big Bucks Blogger?

(more…)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 13 comments

Which blog do you prefer? One that makes easy things hard to understand? Or one that makes difficult things easy to understand?

In “Is your blog easy to read?” Muhammad Saleem recommends the second. He also guides bloggers to an online readability tool to test the reading level of your blog.

Guess what readibility level I rated? Yep. I write like I’m in grade school.

I’d say that’s not bad for a gal who has also written stuff like Ensemble-average equations of a particulate mixture.

I used the tool to test Volokh.com a blog written by a bunch of law professors: they write at the junior high level.

I bet you’re wondering about Muhammad Saleem’s blog’s readibility level? Highschool.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 12 comments

Do you check your referrers? I do. I even try to learn things about search from my referrers. Today, I learned two thing when I investigated why I had a high rank for the Google search PageRank Zero October 2007.

What did I learn? First, no matter what else happened during the PageRank dust up, Google still likes older pages. Second, we should all give some attention to our archives.

Now, a bit of background. When I was my highrank for PageRank Zero October 2007 I thought three things:

1. Google relevancy on this search term is not so hot.
2. Who ranks #1 for “PageRank Zero”? and most importantly.
3. Archives matter.

These thought led to a bit of investigation, from which I “learned” a thing or two. Below, I’ll expand on these thoughts, and provide the lessons they taught me about Google search.

Why do I think Google’s relevancy for this search is not so hot?

Two reasons.

1. The #2 result was the top page of my monthly archive. The top page of my October archives were relevant for this search several days ago when they matched the current Google cache. That shows text from Ten Google Page Rank Haikus. which matches the topic of that search rather well.

   Today? There is no mention of “PageRank Zero” on that url.

2. The #1 result for that particular long tailed search is Courtney Tuttle’s Going From PageRank Zero To PageRank Hero. (I’m condomizing the link in my never ending effort to seize the #1 position for totally useless search terms!)

   Sound relevant, right? The problem? Whoever was searching for “PageRank Zero October 2007″ likely wished to read articles about the “Google Page Rank Debacle of October ‘07″. Courtney’s post was published in April; his October article would have been relevant.

Lesson:
Before proceeding, it’s worth noticing something: My October Archives page is older than my haiku page. It also has a direct link from my main blog page. Court’s April 2007 article is older still and it’s older than his October article.

Google still seems to like older pages.

Guess what ranks ranks #1 for “PageRank Zero”?

(more…)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 6 comments

I’ve updated Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3. Sort of. It turned out the plugin already worked for WP 2.3. However, I did make a two mods at user request:

1. Josh Spaulding requested the ability to dofollow trackbacks immediately. That function now exists.
2. Tricia identified a bug that appeared to sometimes occur when people left “names” with apostrophe (that is “‘”) in them. I think I coded corrected.

If you’d like the new version, download Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3. Unzip. Place in plugin folder. Deactivate the old version, activate this one.

If you notice any problems, let me know so I can fix.

A word or caution
Trackback spam can be particularly pesky. I have seen a rash of semi-innocent looking scraper blogs that post snippets of your content. I call these Daegan Spam. If you keep those trackbacks and visit later, you will notice the blogs get redirected to irrelevant thin-affiliate sites for commercial products. This causes you to link into a “bad neighborhood”, which is a bad thing.

I’m planning a tool to help us find these things months later, “just in case”, but haven’t thought through the best way to do it yet.

Meanwhile, be very vigilant about trackback spam. When in doubt delete.

In the “irony” department

I found a bug in “Hide Sponsored Categories Plugins” for 2.3. It only happens for categories that have apostrophe’s in their name. I have such a category. It’s the one for “Lucia’s Linky Love!” So, I’m currently running the old version. Needless to say, I’ll be fixing that bug!

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 11 comments

Recently, Sebastian suggested that paid link sellers could switch their business model by secretly no following links. That is, making the paid links look like they “follow” except when viewed by Google’s spiders. These type of links would be called “cloaked nofollows”.

As it happens, I thought about this strategy way back when I wrote How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles. Sebastian’s article discussed the “pro” side of this cloaking nofollows on paid links. I’m going to discuss the “cons”.

But first, a bit of nuts and bolts.

Is it possible to cloak nofollows?!

Absolutely! It is entirely possible to deliver one page to the Googlebot and another to human visitors. I discuss how to deliver cloaked nofollow entire pages in How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles. Should you wish to delve deeper into the subject; I recommend reading Sebastian’s and Tellin’ Ya’s articles.

If you were to want to cloak nofollows with Wordpress, you would likely do it using a plugin you could use as linkbait, right?

Here are 6 reasons why I wouldn’t write a plugin to cloak nofollowed paid links!

(more…)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 15 comments

Recently, Shoemoney blogger Pamcakes recorded a video in which she says the dofollow movement a “became a blogroll circle jerk” of brandnew or low quality blogs “dragging on for months”, announced that Greg Bozer is setting up a dofollow list for ‘quality’ blogs, and then tells us she’s “looking forward to the follow on blogposts where people tell us how much more time people have spent moderating after removing nofollow from their comments”.

What is Pam’s evidence that the dofollow movement is a blogroll circle jerk? Or that the dofollow blogs will have trouble with spam? Eyerolls.

Still many bloggers read Shoemoney; many might ask: Are dofollow blogs poor quality? Brandnew? Full of spammy comments?

If so, why is the dofollow movement gaining popularity? And, more importantly, why do I run across so many good dofollow blogs?!

Obviously, just as there are poor “dofollow” blogs; there are also loads of poor “nofollow” blogs. There are brand new dofollow blogs; there are tons of brand new “nofollow” blogs. What of it?

But the insinuation that dofollow disproportionately attracts spam is just flat out, wrong.

The reality is Dofollow often raises the level of comments.

How does dofollow raise the level of comments?

(more…)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 16 comments