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

Today, I will reveal the real secret of getting a great Alexa rank. I discovered when I found scrapers sites in my inbound links!

Mind you, no one is scraping my blog; they are scraping “How to Boost Your Alexa Rank”, published at “Alexa: Web Discover Machine “, a blog written by a couple of fellows who work for Alexa and discuss nothing but Alexa.

That post linked Skyrocket Alexa and that link now appears at a quality blog that looks like this:

Maybe I should email that blogger and ask him which affiliate programs he uses? Cause’ I bet I could make money with a big Skype ad too!

Now for the secret to boosting Alexa!

Now, I’m pretty sure almost no one would intentionally visit that blog. But, I noticed the scraped blog has an Alexa rank of 265,915.

Many bloggers running sponsored posts would love that type of rank.

How did the scraper site achieve that? Well, here’s my theory:

See that gal wearing the red cape? I know she’s got an Alexa toolbar installed. And the Asian guy in the black turtleneck? I bet he has an Alexa toobar installed. Heck, I bet everyone of those visitors have toolbars installed!

I suspect the real secret to boosting your Alexa rank: Scrape blogs with good Alexa ranks.

Heck, you probably don’t need to scrape them. Just link ‘em regularly. Their Alexa toolbar totin’ authors will stop by and give your Alexa a nice bump.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 3 comments

Hey, serious bloggers. Pay Per Post has a new innovation, and it may be time to sign up. (And I’m saying this as someone who is not currently a postie and may have trouble persuading them to let me back.)

Pay Per Post is now set up to reward blogs with real traffic!

Of course, in some sense PPP always rewarded blogs with traffic. However, they used Alexa to measure traffic, and it’s so bad that this blog shows more traffic than my knitting blog — which gets 10 times the traffic I get here!

But Alexa will now provide real traffic monitoring.

How? On Sunday, PPP announced Argus, a monitoring system that will:

1. Make it easier for advertisers to find suitable bloggers to carry ads and
2. Provide actual traffic data to advertisers surrounding visits, pageviews, click throughs, traffic sources.

This tool uses the javascript installed in the footers at Postie blogs.

(Knowing you can track with Javascript, I’d been hoping they were planning this. Turns out they must have been!)

Evidently, PPP will still use Alexa as a traffic indicator to supplement their data. Still, presumably, if real traffic metrics exist for blogs, advertisers will quickly turn to the more suitable measurement — which is certain to be the PPP data.

In my opinion, Argus is a great advance all around. The advantage to advertisers is obvious. Though less obvious, Argus also has great advantages for serious bloggers who wish to monetize.

Advantage to bloggers

Bloggers will also benefit because a real traffic monitoring system will:

1. Permit high bloggers real traffic to attract the higher priced opps. Previously, it was the heavily gamed “Alexa” traffic that won the higher pay.
2. Allow posites to stop wasting time creating blog rolls that they auto visit armed with “Linky” and “Alexa” Firefox tool-bar extensions.
3. Encourage posties to devote themselves to building real traffic by writing great blogs!

Great work to the Pay Per Post team! Hopefully, other companies will follow your lead and start using real data too.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | No comment

Is your Alexa rank in the toilet? Even though you have traffic? Well, now, if you have friends, and a Wordpress blog, you can fix that! Using the new You Visit, I Visit plugin which is developed to overcome the two short comings with other Alexa projects. There are:

1. People get busy and forget to visit the “links” hub where they open all t heir friend’s blog pages.
2. Reliable people feel ripped off when they visit people who don’t return visits.

This plugin fixes that by a) creating an auto surf button at your own blog and b) preferentially visiting only people who visit you.

How do I use the plugin?

(more…)

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

According to Compete, Andy Beard’s Niche Marketing blog traffic was up 2290% in July and rocketed past that of Darren Rowse’s Problogger.

Evidently, Jason Calacanis and John Chow have also grown stupendously.

Hey, I want a 2290% boost in traffic too. I better ask the three of them for tips!

Or maybe not. After all, neither Andy nor Jason’s Alexa ranking has budged. John’s has gone up a bit lately– maybe because he overcame the ill-effects of the Google ban.

Real? Or Toolbar?

Well, it’s remotely possible both traffic ranking companies are right. After all, Compete measures the number of unique montly visitors and and Alexa measures daily visitors. And Compete estimates US traffic while Alexa estimates worldwide traffic.

But why do I think the difference is due to differential adoption of the toolbars both services use to measure traffic? (Maybe Andy can shed some light on this?)

I’m sure LordMatt is right the same thing affected all these blogs Compete ranks. Toolbar? Fix in Competes algorithm? Whatever it was, it affected Niche Marketing,, Feverish Thought, Dosh Dosh, David Airey and, possibly, Lord Matt

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 7 comments

Alexa is widely used: Pay Per Post, Text Link Ads and many other service use this to estimate traffic. Today, I’ll explain the common rank gaming method — which I will call “The Alexa Project”, that is known to work. I’ll also describe why Alexa Projects generally work only for a short time and then describe what’s required to make them work forever .

The Alexa Gaming Method

A well known method to trick Alexa into believing you have high traffic relies on four things:

1. A group of friends who agree to work together. This group might call themselves the “Alexa Project”.
2. All friends installing both Alexa and “Linky” extensions to their browsers. (The Alexa toolbars are available FireFox and Internet Explorer. Linky is available for Firefox.)
3. At least one friend sets up a web page to act as a “hub”. This web page includes links to every blog in the Alexa Project.
4. Using their Alexa browser, all friends in the Alexa Project agree to visit the hub regularly and automatically open every link on the page, either manually, or automatically using their Linky Tool bar.

The behavior of an individual participate is illustrate to the right. Basically, the visit the “hub page”, and click open every link. In principle, they have visited their friends site, and so, in some sense, their friend deserves to have Alexa give credit for the visit.

So… it’s not really an exploit, right?

Yes, the method is, in fact, an exploit. After all, what everyone who joins the project knows is that somewhere between 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100 people have Alexa toolbars installed. (I tend to think the value is roughly 1 in 500, and I’ll use that number from now on.)

So, if a blogger can get 10 friends a day to visit using Alexa toolbars, Alexa credits the blog with equivalent of 5,000 visits by “random” people. By banding together, a group of 10 people who visit each other blogs every day can seriously drive down their Alexa ranks. (With Alexa, #1 is the best rank. )

Does this really work?

Yes. This drives down your Alexa rank.

In fact, this exploit relies on Alexa measuring traffic exactly the way Alexa tells people it measures traffic. If someone visits using an Alexa browser, Alexa counts it. Otherwise, Alexa doesn’t count that traffic.

In case you are wondering why you can’t just reload your blog over and over and over. Well, Alexa only counts any individual IP once. You can give yourself one “Alexa hit” a day. After that, you need real visitors with their own Alexa bars installed.

What Goes Wrong?

Frailty, thy name is “Alexa Project Participant”. Over time, each participant begins to neglect their job. (And it is a job — unless you would have visited the blog itself to read that blog anyway. But you wouldn’t; otherwise, no one would need “The Alexa Project”. )

Anyway, maybe the unreliable participant visits on Sunday, but forgets to visit on Monday. Then, they forget again. A few more forget to visit. Eventually, everyone begins to see their Alexa ranks degrade.

At that point, the more reliable members get discouraged: They know they are giving their friends a boost, but their friends aren’t returning the favor!

Soon, everyone stops. And everyone’s Alexa rank starts to rise up again.

Sometimes people start to regroup and try to convince others to hold up their end of the bargain. That can work for a while, then the whole cycle begins again.

How could the Alexa Exploit be made to last forever?

Why, by writing plugin! Maybe you could call it “You Visit, I Visit”.

What would the plugin need to do:

1. Permit users to enter their friends blogs into a database.
2. Create a button that lets users auto-visit their blogs from their own blogs. The p
3. Include a script that detects their friends visits. (This can be done by reading referrers and logging the ones that match their friends blogs.
4. Once underway, the blogger using “You Visit, I Visit” would click a button and only visit people who actually visited them! (And if the other bloggers has installed the plugin, well, they know they’ll get a return visit. )
5. And everything should be fairly invisible to outside observers, because, well… There are people who claim this is “just visiting their friends blogs” and “just getting credit for traffic”, but there are others who bet to differ.

When will the plugin be available?

Soon. A skanky ugly version is available already. It’s being given a few days rest (so I can figure out if there are things I’ve overlooked.)

I won’t be using it on my monetized blogs. Instead, to test out the thing out, I’ve coded the plugin so that a user will always give a final visit to my zero-traffic test blog. Once things are underway, I’ll publish the real traffic stats and the Alexa rank. Then we’ll see how little traffic it takes to get a great Alexa rank!

If you want to try test it out. Let me know. You can leave comments or email me at lucia AT thedietdiary DOT com.
Updated: You can download the Alexa boosting plugin here.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 3 comments

The Skyrocket Alexa Test Version II results are in: you cannot increase your Alexa rank by getting friends to place redirected beacon images to your blog on their blog.

Alexa daily traffic graphs showing the effect of using Alexa redirected image beacons are now available. If the proposed image beacon exploit worked, we would have seen the Alexa traffic ranks of LordMatt.co.uk, thedietdiary.com, money.bigbucksblogger.com and rankexploits.com all approach the same high value after August 15, marked as time 4 in the image below.

This didn’t happen as you can see:

Despite redirected image becons displayed onall four sites, the Alexa ranks of all are moving independently. In particular, the rank of the zero traffic ‘rankexploits.com’ is in the basement– where it should be. Sure, the rank of LordMatt.co.uk and money.bigbucksblogger.com look similar, but that turns out to be a coincidence. (It also illustrates why these sorts of tests require using several blogs!)

Anyway, the exploit doesn’t work. Because the results are posted publicly, I suspect no-one will need to feel the need to waste their time trying it for themselves.

History discussing why this exploit was tested and what happened.

(more…)

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 5 comments

As my regular readers know, I am currently running public tests to see if rumored Alexa exploits work. Because Pay Per Post has discussed the issues surrounding my experiment twice, I want to also discuss my current view of Pay Per Post.

The short story is that, having given it some thought, I realized that I had to sever any relationship with paid-to-post programs if I wish to run the tests to gaming strategies. By my own request, I ceased to be a postie on Monday. But, that’s actually the small story, as it happens to have to do with me, personally.

The larger story has to do with Pay Per Post reaction: When they became aware of the experiment, Karen, of Customer Love, announced that Posties would not be permitted to participate in even short term tests to see if Alexa can be exploited. Later, “froogle” announced that PPP will be auto-detecting attempts to exploit Alexa using these redirects.

Karen and Froogle at Pay Per post are correct to announce this policy and check for compliance. (Checking is easy. I set this up so that participants cannot conceal participation.)

One reason given for PPP’s action appears to be this: PPP currently uses Alexa for segmentation. Therefor PPP cannot be permitting Posties to be exploiting Alexa to improve the price they charge advertisers.

As it happens, though I didn’t really think of this before launching the experiment, I recognize PPP’s policy as manifestly correct.

I suspect people will wonder why I didn’t think of this in the first place. Part of the reason is that, initially, I was focused only on testing the rumored exploit. I’m afraid, like the famous cat, I will someday be killed by my own curiosity.

Also, as it happens, I hadn’t taken a PPP opp in over 6 weeks or so and didn’t intend to take any if I actually managed to game my Alexa. So the thought “Oh, I’ll be able to take better opps” didn’t really hit me. (If it had, I would either have done the test secretly or resigned from PPP immediately. )

I also believe Alexa is inherently deficient due to the self-selection bias introduced by the toolbar and I believe it is already heavily gamed. So, I sincerely don’t believe a few blogs plublicly testing exploits makes much of a difference in overall accuracy or fairness of Alexa ranks.

Of course, the other reason I might have not thought of it is simply, ordinary stupidity and thoughtlessness.

Nevertheless, the fact is, PPP is correct: regardless of Alexa’s faults, because PPP uses Alexa for segmentation, Posties cannot be conducting of Alexa exploits on their blogs! (At minimum, the tests must be designed in ways that do not affect a PPP blogs’ Alexa rank in even the slightest. But that is difficult to know in advance.)

But I want to conduct tests and do so publicly. So here’s what I did.

Recognizing Pay Per Posts position is correct, I did two things rather quickly:
1) I yanked the redirect images from blog footers. Because of the experiments design, this immediately ended the first experiment which persisted only a few hours and so can have very little effect on anyone’s rank.¹

2) I voluntarily resigned from Pay Per Post.² I had to ask what the process was, and did a bit of fiddling at the PPP interface, but unfortunately, the process isn’t obvious. I sent pm’s to four PPP staff asking the procedure and also filled out a ticket. Within two hours of filling out the ticket, I was out of the system. I thanked Karen of Customer Love. (For those wondering about any financial consequences to me: there are none. I hadn’t taken a PPP opp in at least 6 weeks. )

3) I redesigned the experiment in a way that will actually give clearer results without the need of many blogs.¹

So, now I am free to conduct the current experiments and, what’s more important to me, I am free to conduct future experiments without violating PPP policies or exposing PPP or posties to any unfavorable publicity.

I also think Posties taking opps from Pay Per Post should applaud PPP for their quick response on this.

1. In fact, for those wondering, preliminary results suggest the short term test had absolutely zero effect. Because I was in the process of resigning, I kept images on my own blogs. The preliminary data suggest that this exploit does not work. LordMatt’s sudden increase in Alexa when he asked a few people to include images at his blog was probably due to a real increase in blog visitors with Alexa toolbars. Still, I need to continue 3-4 days to get incontrovertible evidence which I think is useful because rumored exploits are constantly popping up.

2. I also yanked my blogs from ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews. It is suprisignly difficult to automatically delete a blog from many of these services!

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 5 comments

The Skyrocket Alexa Experiment was paused due to issues which I will discuss later. Meanwhile, I am resuming it. The good news is the new test will be more definitive than the one I planned initially.

Meanwhile, this post is mostly designed to get Lord Matt the new footer code assuming he still wants to participate. I could email it to him… but why do that when I can use this as an excuse to also explain how we will “know” whether or not showing redirected images can be used to game alexa ranks.

Instructions for Lord Matt

If you still want to pay, paste the following code into your blog footer: <center><iframe src="http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://rankexploits.com/AlexaPlan.html" style="width:400px;height:30px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="1" rel="nofollow"></iframe></center>

How will we know if the exploit works?

I have placed images on two blogs at www.thedietdiary.com, a blog on money.bigbucksblogger.com and one on a new, zero traffic domain called “rankexploits.com”. LordMatt has an image placed on Lord Matt’s Blog.

If the redirected image do pass Alexa rank, and Lord Matt and I both place these in our footer we should see this:

• Evidence that only suggests it works:
  The daily reaches and ranks for all three domains should increase noticeably within a week. Because money.bigbucksblogger.com and lordmatt.co.uk already get sufficient traffic, we should be able to view graphs and see the ranks shoot up. We can also read numbers. (Note: If Lord Matt doesn’t see this post, his rank and reach will exceed mine.)
• Evidence that is pretty convincing:
  The daily reaches and ranks for all three sites will approach each other and all will eventually look identical to each other. There could be small differences because some parts of some domain don’t show the image, but three domains with nearly identical, high, Alexa’s would be fairly convincing to most people.
• Clear and convincing evidence:
  The signal from “rankexploits.com” will nearly identical to all the other three when in reality, it should be absolutely zero. I have set .htaccess so the only way that domain can get traffic only through referrers on my domains and LordMatt’s domain. So, there will be zero Alexa traffic.

  If the exploit works, Alexa will show a high daily and weekly rank; if it doesn’t work, Alexa will correctly report zero traffic.

If this doesn’t work, then what?

Well, we all know Alexa is wretched even this exploit doesn’t work. After all, if it worked, my knitting blog would dramatically outrank this blog! Alexa is biased toward sites that interest SEO / IT / Advertising and / Blog about blogging types. That doesn’t include knitting!

Still, what I’m trying to test are rumored intentional exploits. So, if this works, it will demonstrate publically that this rumored exploit doesn’t work. (I consider public proof important, even if some people tell us they have demonstrated this doesn’t work, privately to themselves and we should all believe them even though they won’t show us the results. )

That said, if this particular exploit doesn’t work, I will set about testing other rumored exploits discussed on various forums I have visited. I’m fairly confident I’ll eventually find one that works.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 2 comments

Let’s all use the trick Lord Matt seems to have found for boosting Alexa Rank! Matt has two theories about how to game Alexa. One is that it’s sufficient to redirect a beacon image through Alexa to get rank.

See the blue line shooting up? That’s Matt’s Alexa reach surging on the day he began one of two experiments. If Matt’s “image is enough” theory is correct, and you join me, we can all end up with awesome improvements in our Alexa ranks in a week! So as not to risk adversely affecting Alexa’s servers to function, I plan to add only the first 10 bloggers who join. (I figure 10 blogs is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of blogs with Alexa widgets in their footers! At the same time, it’s enough blogs to let us know for certain whether the image redirection works.)

If you’d like to play, here are the three steps to take:

1. Paste the following code into your blog footer: <center><iframe src="http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/Alexa_Test/AlexaPlan.html" style="width:450px;height:60px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" rel="nofollow"></iframe></center>

After you paste the code, this will display in your footer:


2. Upload a small beacon image to your server: I advise creating your own 3px x 3px image in some color you like so you can “see” your image.

   If you can’t create your own image, just download my lime green 3px x 3px image: . ( I’ve enlarged it to make easy to click. The URL is:
   http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/alexasmall.gif )

3. Post the url for your images and your blog in my comments. When I read the comment, I’ll check if you’ve added the code to your blog footer. If you have, I’ll add your beacon image to the Alexa test file. Your image will automatically appear on all participants’ blog footers.

Assuming this works, as soon as I slap your image into the file, your Alexa rank should begin to be boosted by visits to all three of my blogs; mine will be boosted by yours. See the beauty in this?

Anyway, I encourage you to join in any time. To get the largest boost, tell your friends to join: If we can get 10 blogs and watch the Alexa ranks at all 10, I think we’ll really learn something!

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 28 comments