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?

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!

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?

1. Did Blogrush send much traffic?
   Nope. In one month, this blog received 11 visits from the Blogrush widget. The increased number of categories in Phase II might help– and for this reason, I’ll leave the widget in my footer.
2. Were the 11 Blogrush visits targeted?
   Blogrush traffic doesn’t seem to include people interested in reading my posts. According to Google Analytics, Blogrush visitors remained at my site, on average, 19 seconds and had a bounce rate of 64%. In contrast, Stumble visitors stayed for 1 minute and 25 seconds with a bounce rate of 36%. The average visitor remained for 2 minutes 33 seconds with a bounce rate of 56%.

   Stumble visitors appear to read; Blogrush visitors don’t.

3. What sorts of blogs appear on my Blogrush widget?
   It’s been weeks since John Reese supposedly implemented his quality standards. Despite that, the widget is still full of blogs I would not recommend to my visitors.

   When preparing to write this article, I clicked the Blogrush links. I visited: a missing page, an author “about” page, preview.tinyurl.com, ( a fine resource. Too bad it’s not a blog.) and a blog article about lawyers’ need for virtual assistants.

   One click sent me to the affiliate page shown in the thumbnail to the right. Mind you, I have nothing against affiliate marketing; the problem is the site is not a blog. In case you are wondering: No the page did not blink.

   Oh, notice the ?hop= in the url?
   

   

4. Do Blogrush’s Phase II filtering features help me block the non-blogs? In principle, now that I’ve discovered the “Affiliate Splash Page” blog, and the “TinyURL imitation blog”, I could visit Blogrush and block them. That would require me to a) regularly click my own Blogrush widget so I can catch the bad blogs, b) copy the urls of these pages, c) open a new tab, d) log into Blogrush, e) go to the appropriate filter page f) paste the url into the box and save.

   Of course, I would only be able to block blogs I actually identify. I can’t discover every blog that populates my widget. Who knows what my visitors might visit.

Blogrush: Only good for conversation

So, there you have it: Blogrush has brought little traffic, the traffic is poorly targeted, by displaying the widget, I promote non-blogs and blogs outside my niche.

As usual: It’s still free. Blogging about the widget fits this blogs niche. For this reason, I’m willing to leave this in the footer until such time that John Reese kicks me out of the program.

What’s Blogrush done for other blogs?

It’s mostly wasted Blog Real Estate that could be used for other widgets, ads or the bloggers own blogroll. In return, bloggers got very little traffic. When posting her stats for October, Caroline Middlebury, who has experienced phenomenal traffic growth, noted that Blogrush doesn’t bring her traffic; like many bloggers, she’s bagging the widget in favor of other widgets that really can bring traffic or income.

What about TrafficJam.com?

Supposedly, TrafficJam will publicize the “hot” topics that appear in Blogrush widgets, helping quality blog posts get more traffic.

But is TrafficJam likely to be a resource for identifying great posts? I’m not so sure. It appears “hotness” will be based on the clickrate on titles appearing in Blogrush widgets. I don’t know about you, but I have no idea if a post is great until after I click. So how would this sort of “hotness” indicate quality?

I think it’s pretty obvious why news of TrafficJam.com did not set the Blogosphere on fire. Blogrush didn’t fill its promises. TrafficJam doesn’t sound promising. Still, who knows. It might be great. But one thing is true:

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 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.

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”?

A forum post! Specifically, this entry at Webmaster world with an entry dated 6:52 am on Oct. 16, 2005 that reads:

My website, or rather a page or two which I occassionally check (as a general rule, I don’t enable the Page Rank feature of my Google toolbar), usually carries a page rank of about 4-6. On October 15th, my traffic dropped to less than 10% of normal, so I checked its page rank. zero. Zip. Zilch. Bizarre.

Below that, we find links to a variety of blogs. As far as I can tell, all but the forum entry were written well before October 2007. So, once again, for this search Google relevancy isn’t exceptional. (It is a toughie though. The person searching should have tried the blog search tool!)

Lesson:Google still likes older posts.
We all know there are many relevant posts about the October 2007 events posted on blogs. They didn’t show up. Why? Age often matters more than relevance.

Why do archives matter?

Google still likes older posts. It also likes pages linked from the top page of the blog. At month’s end, my archives may often be my oldest “relevant” entries; they are always linked from my top page. Google is likely to send people to my archives rather than my individual posts.

It would have been useful if the person searching had been able to find my Google Page Rank Haikus by way of my monthly archives. The haiku’s themselves do link a fair number of articles discussing the “PageRank Incident”. The person searching may well have been a blogger who was writing their own post. They didn’t find the relevant article at my site: they will surely never link it.

Lesson: I need a better format for archives
If my archives displayed at least 10 articles, most of the content would match Google’s cache. Currently they display three, which means that quite often, Google will send people to an irrelevant page. This is my fault more than Google’s.

There are other problems with my archives. Clearly, I need to put “improve archives” on my “to do” list.

Here’s another to do.

Ask readers their thoughts on archives.

Do you know of any useful plugins, features or ways of organizing my monthly (or topical) archives to ensure Google search results send visitors to the correct page? Are there other features I should consider? If you have good ideas, I’d love to read them.

I’ve moved on to other things. These plugins are no longer supported.

Article

I’ve updated L’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 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 “L’s Linky Love!” So, I’m currently running the old version. Needless to say, I’ll be fixing that bug!

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!

I’m placing the ones I think most important at the top.

1. Unethical: Fraud.
   Let’s say you enter a contractual agreement with someone. You told them would provide them with “X”, they paid you “$Y”. They pay you. And then, you don’t provide what you agreed to provide. You obtained money under false pretenses: That’s fraud.
2. Legal Woes: Users would get sued.
   In most countries, contracts for services are legally binding. If you violate a legal contract, the customer can sue. If they can prove their case, they will win. No judge is going to buy, “But I was just using a publicly available plugin” as a defense.
3. Poor Business Practice: You’ll eventually lose customers.
   Ok, lets say you aren’t worried about being sued. You live in west-soutwest-outer-Slobobia, beyond the reach of the law.

   Guess what? It turns out some decent SEO companies actually test to determine whether your links pass page rank. Do you think the engineers at Pay Per Post aren’t going to be offering a service like this within a year? Do you think V7N doesn’t already do it?

4. Uses excess CPU.
   In comments, Lord Matt noted that delivering cloaked pages requires coding to detect who the visitor is, processing that, and then delivering different pages based on the result. This requires a some amount of CPU; if done properly, the load might be acceptable. If done improperly, it could suck mega-cpu.
5. Error prone: Users might sue me!
   Honestly, I don’t trust myself to think of all the failure modes for a plugin designed to defraud customers. Will it work with caching? Will it work with widgets? With WP 2.2? WP 2.3? WP 2.3.x? With the “Bizarrely written yet somehow beautiful” theme?
6. We don’t know how Google would react to this.
   Google will know you are posting cloaked nofollows. Who is to say Google won’t suspect someone cloaking nofollowed paid links of also posting followed paid links?

My advice: Don’t cloak-nofollow paid links.

Cloaking your no-follow paid links sounds clever. I suspect some will do it. Maybe if you are very,very, very clever, you will succeed. For my part: I won’t do it, or write a plugin to do it, because it’s unethical. But, even if it weren’t, I know I’d screw it all up and burn myself.

In the final analysis: either you think followed paid links are ok, or you don’t. Either you risk your page rank accepting money to post followed paid links, or you don’t. But accepting the money and then publishing cloaked nofollowed paid links? That’s just not right.

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?

First, dofollow encourages visitors to comment. Since many visitors subscribe to comments, they often return and conversation ensues. As a blogger, I like this! As a blog visitor, I find these dynamics conversations attractive. They improve the quality of the blog– and ultimately improve the bloggers own content.

Contrary to Pam’s eyerolls, we dofollow bloggers figured out how to deal with spammy pointless comments months ago. This is done both through vigilance, and by appropriate choice of dofollow plugin. (I wrote L’s Linky Love to help me filter human comment spam.)

In fact, we can learn a lot about the effect of “dofollow” on comments by comparing the first three comments at Pam’s post slamming dofollow blogs and Andy Beard’s response post.

Evidence that ‘Dofollow Blogs’ have better comments than ‘Nofollow Blogs’:

First 3 comments on a “nofollow” blog vs. a “dofollow” blog.

Pamcake’s Post Nofollow	Andy’s Post Dofollow
Comment by HustleStrategy 2007-10-27 09:31:17 Pam going to be at pubcon partying like a rock star?	Meg wrote: One of my biggest disappointments at the moment is that my “subscribe to comments” plugin is not playing nicely with the others, or my theme, so I’ve had to deactivate it. I really appreciate the ability to “subscribe” (except when I made the mistake of subscribing to Liz’s birthday bash, went to bed and found 328 emails when I woke up)! Posted 28 Oct 2007 at 2:58 pm
Comment by David Wilkinson 2007-10-27 09:45:10 ROFL!	James – DigitalKeyToInfo wrote: I think Liz is a model for us all to follow. I just hope I can develop a community like hers. More than unrelated links, it is the unrelated comments I see. It just tells me they did not take the time to read-they are not someone that will be part of the community. It is like the MyBlogLog comments that say nice blog, but never visited it, just the community page. Posted 28 Oct 2007 at 4:36 pm
Comment by SonicReducer 2007-10-27 10:09:12 I think the value of the contest just increased by a large margin.	Maki wrote: Liz has a real charm to her and is a top-notch conversationalist. The comments on her blog reflect her commitment to her readers and a two way dialog. It’ll be interesting to compare her model with Perez Hilton or entertainment sites in general. 600 comments is sweet but tiny compared to a single one word blog post by Perez which received 7217 comments. They are left by real people who don’t want anything from his site (traffic/links). Are they still junk? Maybe. Celebrity blogs are a riot.. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a celeb blogger actually leave a comment as a response to their readers. Posted 28 Oct 2007 at 5:37 pm

Need I say more?

Lesson for Pamcakes

Andy’s post responding to Pam’s slam of the dofollow movement was named: BlogRoll Circle Jerk? – If You Encourage Junk Comments That Is What You Get

Maybe Pam should stop and think for a minute. She may realize that “dofollow” isn’t what encourages junk comments. What does? Well, substitute eyerolls for thoughtful commentary on a popular blog you’ll get worse than junk comments. You’ll get comment smegma.

In principle, this plugin may help protect your PR. In practice? Matt Cutts’ has never commented on “No Old Spam Links” and is likely unaware of it. So, who knows?

That said, here are the recent changes to the plugin:

1. I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes when widgets were used. I fixed the bug.
2. I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes occurs when you have no specific people in your “nofollow” list. Unfortunately, this bug was affecting my knitting blog so I was giving out way more followed paid links than I intended! Way more.)(Yes, my knitting blog’s page rank dropped; I’ll elaborate on this in a separate post.)
3. I tested the new version with WP 2.3. It works fine.

So, if your worried about excess followed paid links, I suggest you install No Old Spam Links. If you aren’t worried about Google, or you are waiting for them to announce the plugin helps, then don’t use it.

Other plugin news:

1. Tricia is testing the new version of Kontera Control at her WP 2.2 blog. I’m testing at my test blog. She was the one who alerted me to the general issue of plugins going buggy when widgets are used.
2. I updated “Hide No Sponsored Categories” but I’m letting it sit a few days so I can do a better job detecting any bugs. The future version should work for WP 2.3, be compatible with widgets (in fact, it is widgetized) and hopefully work for all versions of WP 2.2 and above. I also coded to detect problems with early version of WP and inform the user why the options page doesn’t display. (This was, btw, the update from hell because my favorite WP category hook vanished!)

In the case of Google: The blogger who offers the prize could get a severe Google penalty.

In the case of PPP: A blogger will not be paid for any PPP post flanked by the “contests” post.

So, yep, PPP and Google agree! These posts are kinda-sorta “paid”, “sponsored” or “not freely given” and will be treated as such. Now, for some details!

Pay Per Post’s Reaction to Contest Posts

Recently, PayPerPost rejected a post written by Joanna, of Nanashi-inc.net. The reason? Her PPP sponsored posts was placed next to a post that contained a link to a contest for an IPOD; the link served in place of an entry fee.

The problem? The PPP TOS prohibit posting a PPP post next to any sponsored post and PPP considers these “contests entrace fee” posts sponsored.

Google’s Reaction to Contest Posts

A short while back, Dave Airey decided to run a blog contest. He offered a prize; the entrance fee for the contest was a blog post that linked to Dave’s blog.

Soon after, Dave noticed he’d suffered a severe Google penalty; Matt Cutt’s mentioned the contest when explaining the penalty.

Luckily for Dave, he was able to ask his readers to delete the links. After they did, he regained his Google rank!

Similarities!

Notice the IPOD contest run by It’s Write Now Dave Airey’s contesnt. To enter the contest, both require a blog post with a link back to the contests’ blogs.

So, it would appear that both Google and PPP consider these sorts of “contest entry” blog posts with their links to be motivated by some sort of reward, bribe, or what have you. Of course, each business responds differently.

PPP accepts sponsored posts as an entirely valid option for blogs. However, they prohibit bloggers from placing these sorts of contest posts adjacent to PPP’s clients’ posts. So, PPP’s response is to not pay the blogger for the invalid post.

In contast, Google doesn’t like sponsored posts at all. If they detect the contest, they will apply a Google penalty to the blogger who runs the contest. We don’t entirely know whether they will penalize the bloggers who enter the contest. But since Google seems to see these links as unnatural, it seems there is some risk Google might do so.

The irony

If you read the IPOD contest rules carefully, you’ll notice I just wrote a post that qualifies me to enter the contest! Would PPP consider this post sponsored? Would Google? Hmmmm….