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

I just got an email from an advertiser wanting me to remove a post from September 13. 1. What would be the logic behind that? 2. Can I delete posts, and if so, how old do they need to be?

Why ask to remove the link?

Will Posties remove the links?

"*chuckle* . wonder if they would pay you to remove it Wink"

[...] the say they don't want links from blogs anymore. Well...........I'm a tough love bitty, and my post is good and I don't delete content.

A funny/evil thing to do would be to change the links to a competitor!

That would be a smarter choice, because if I was an evil competitor, I would nicely start emailing all the posties to get rid of the post of my competitor Twisted Evil

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 4 comments

An advertiser paid Venomous Kate to run a haiku contest mentioning Google. Naturally I entered! Then, I wrote more haikus.

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

Fantastic! Someone thinks my post is fantastic!! See?

Daegan wrote a fantastic post today on “Dear John Reese: Are Tampon Sample â

Admittedly, the author is a bit muddled about my name, but they dropped me a link. Isn’t that exciting?! …Well….No. I know if I leave the trackback, my blog risks a Google penalty!

That trackback will soon link into a “bad neighborhood”. If you read further, you’ll discover why out-link to bad neighborhood’s could cause Google’s algorithm to suspect a blogger of posting paid links resulting in Google penalty!

But first: How to identify “Daegan Spam”:

1. A trackback will quote some of your post, nearly always attributing your words to someone else. I’ve been called “Daegan”, “AnnPlugged” and a variety of other names.
2. Often, the “Blog” consists of nothing but very, very short quotes. They don’t violate copyright and won’t cause you duplicate content issues. This may lead you to shrug it off and permit the trackback.
3. On some blogs — when the spam is fresh– the collection of links are sort of interesting.

   For example, today, a link lead me to a forum where someone advertised a LinkShield Link Protection, a service that will cloak affiliate links. That’s a type of product I might want to learn more about.

So, if you are aware of the danger, the spam is pretty easy to identify. Yet, it seems innocuous doesn’t it?

How could a link to that blog result in a Google penalty?

As the spammy trackback ages, the blog content becomes truly spammy. Idea Hustle, which originally left a trackback on my Duplicate Content Plugin, now redirects to a probably worthless paintball directory site, which could become anything in future.

If I leave this link in place and allow it to “follow”, I suspect I will soon be linking into into a site Google considers to fall in a “bad neighborhood”.

That’s bad for me because we know:

1. Google’s algorithm examines what we link to determine our trust and page ranks.
2. That paintball link look very spammy; after all, bloggers are often paid to link to these sorts of products.
3. Google has been penalizing even very good sites for anything Google considers or suspect to be a paid link.

So, clearly we need to keep links like that off our blogs — especially if we “dofollow”. Luckily, the solution is easy!

Send “Daegen Spam” to Akismet!

Sending these to Akismet gets it of my blog, and also protects all blogs from this sort of spam.

Better yet, even if I miss one or two of these, I never actually give these places a dofollow. Lucia’s Linky Love won’t give the follow until they drop at least 3 trackbacks. And after I get up date all my plugins (insert some cursing at WP here), I’m going to add a feature to LLL so I can periodically review sites that are currently “dofollowed”, that way, I can catch things retroactively. (I keep saying this… some day I’ll even do it! )

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 8 comments

Only 15 minutes ago, Google sent me an email suggesting I try their new adsense videos. I’d search for advice on how to best use this, but it’s new. So, presumably no one really knows.

I decided to just test, and slapped a video in here.

All I’m seeing in preview is a link to “Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com”. Hhhmmm…. Maybe a video will appear after they search my post? Well, I need to attend my Thursday night knitting group. If something cool appears, I guess I’ll see it when I get back.

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

You don’t have any secrets? No secret nude photos directory? No directory of your plots to take over the universe? No . . . Wordpress plugins that scream “I post paid links?”

Well, remember that there are people who like to report paid links to Google’s snitch service. Some may know enough to load your plugin folder by typing http://yourpaidlinkblog.com/wp-content/plugins/ into their browser.

If they do, will they see a list of all your plugins?

What’s bad about letting Google snitches see this list?

Well, if you’ve got the “wrong” kind of plugin, the snitch may report you to Google for taking paid posts! (And the snitch is probably correct about the paid links. After all, why else have you installed AutoPaidLinkInsertion.php? )

Google may or may not spank your Page Rank for this, but your advertisers would probably prefer Google didn’t know you were selling paid ads. (And hey, who knows? If the word gets out, some advertisers may start checking your plugins folder to figure out if Google is likely to know you are a link farm. Hiding this list could mean more money for you.)

So, maybe you’d like to prevent snoops and snitches from seeing that list of files?
Here are two easy ways to do it:

1. Upload an index.html file to wp-content/plugins. This will hide that file list in /wp-content/plugins. However, you may need to repeat this when you upgrade Wordpress. Also, you won’t hide the listing in any other folders. That may not bother you– unless you are storing something you’d rather keep under wraps.
2. Add one or two lines to the .htaccess file. Modifying .htaccess in the root directory can keep snoops from viewing listings in every directory on your site. If you think these snoops don’t exist, read Voyeur Heaven, which I discovered while Stumbling. Obviously, people snoop for many reasons including industrial espionage, curiosity, and, a desire to find porn.

How to modify the .htaccess file

Now, visit your web site using ftp. Find the ‘.htaccess’ file; the ‘dot’ in front is important. Now insert these two lines at the end of the file.

#prevent people from viewing directory listings
Options -Indexes

The first line is an optional comment. The second line prevents people from reading the list of all files when a directory that doesn’t include ‘index.php’ or ‘index.html’ file.

Now, save. Then visit your blog to make sure the blog loads. If it doesn’t, fix the .htaccess file immediately.

You’re done!

From now on, no-one can surf google for ‘index.php’ and discover stuff you might not wish them to see. Click to see how well it worked for me. http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/wp-content/plugins/.

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

1. How to create undetectable cloaked nofollows in Wordpress .
2. Why it is almost always a bad idea to do this.

How to cloak nofollows so only the Googlebot sees them.

1. Prevent anyone other than Google from loading your site using the Google user agent. The purpose of this step will be to prevent detection. This can be done using BadBehavior or Noobliminal's script to verify spiders.
2. Insert a few lines PHP code at the top of your Header.php code. This code a) detects the Google user agent, b) checks if this is the page you want to cloak and c) if both occur, it adds the new Robots Exclusion tag. Here's the code to cloack-nofollow my 'page 3' in a Wordpress blog. $user_agent = $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]; if(preg_match("/(google|mediapartners)/i",$userAgent) && is_single('3')){ header("X-Robots-Tag: nofollow"); }

Cloaked nofollows using "X-Robots-Tag: nofollow" is a bad idea.

1. It's unethical: There are legitimate reasons to nofollow links. However, only reasons I can think of to cloak a nofollow tag are either to deceive advertisers who pay you are to gip people you promised link exchanges. If want to "nofollow" every link on page 3 without cloaking, delete this bit in the if statement: "preg_match("/(google|mediapartners)/i",$userAgent) &&". That will nofollow the link for everyone. But if you are a bit evil, you're still tempted, right?
2. You will probably make your blog drop out of the SERPS! Why? Well, when you nofollow this way, you no follow every link on a page. This means you will nofollow links you want followed. If you nofollow only one page, this probably isn't an issue. But suppose you begin trying to get clever and nofollow your whole sponsored category? Or every page that contains at least one paid link? Yes, you'll avoid any Google penalty for paid links. But Google will stop following your internal links. Then, unless you are very, very careful, and very very clever, you will soon find your blog dropping out of SERPS for everything. So, massive nofollowing using the "X-Robots-Tag: nofollow" will probably hurt you more than anyone else!
3. Cloaking violates Google's guidelines. Now, this might seem like an odd reason. After all, the reason one might wish to nofollow is to obey the guideline of "nofollowing" all paid links. But you don't need to cloak to obey that, right? You can do nofollow publically-- letting everyone including advertisers know what's up. But, if you try to conceal this from the advertisers by cloaking, you violate a second Google guideline. Only Google can catch you, and we don't know what they would do. But, given the negative impact that will come from nofollowing all your internal links, why risk getting an additional penalty for cloaking?

That's how you cloak nofollows... and why you shouldn't!

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 10 comments

If you are monetizing your blog, or just want lots of traffic, you need to organize your Wordpress templates so that search engines give you the highest possible rank. We all know that one of the things you must avoid is duplicate content. But did you know that Google may think you have duplicate content even though you don't?

Well, you might. It turns out there is a teeny, tiny thing you can do that will eliminate pesky hidden duplicate content.

Today's optimization tips will help you avoid duplicate content and make your pages a bit more crawlable. After you implement it, you will hardly notice any difference in how your blog loads. But it will make a big difference to spiders.

What will happens? Well, normally, if you can load a blog post using either of these two addresses:

1. http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/hide-sponsored-categories-plugin/
2. http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/hide-sponsored-categories-plugin

That's fine for a human being; the don't notice one address ends with '/' and one doesn't. However, Google considers the two address to be two pages. So, as far as Google is concerned, you blog has duplicate content. That means lower page rank. That means fewer Pay Per Post opps!

Can I eliminate the duplicate content?

Yep! You can redirect one of the address to the "other" address. Users can still enter either addresses and get to the right place. But the spiders will now know there is only one page.

Make the fix, follow these two steps:

1. copy code in the text box below. <?php $queryString = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']; if(!$queryString){ $requestUri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; $uriArr = explode('#', $requestUri); $requestUriFragment = $uriArr[1]; $requestUriBase = $uriArr[0]; $uriArr = explode('?', $requestUriBase); $requestUriBase = $uriArr[0]; if ( substr($requestUriBase, strlen($requestUriBase) -1, 1) != '/' ) { $canonicalUrl = 'http://'.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']; $canonicalUrl .= $requestUriBase .'/'; @header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently', TRUE, 301); @header('Location:'.$canonicalUrl); exit; } } //include(”pagefunctions.php”); ?>
2. Paste the code into the very top of your header.php file. (This is the "header" file in your template directory.) Do not leave any blank lines before or after the code. If you want a better view of where to put the code, click to enlarge the image to the right. After pasting in the code, click update to save your changes.

You are finished !

Still, do check your blog still works. Small things can break this. For example, some browsers change quotes 'a' into this `a`. See, the second quotes slant? (The reason I reiterate Sebastians tip's with a few changes was to make it easier for beginners to cut and paste the code with fewer glitches. I made two other minor changes.)

If your blog broke strip out the code (it probably won't) and ask someone for help!

Now visit some individual posts. Delete the trailing '/' from a url and reload. Wordpress should now add the '/'.

Whoo hoo! Duplicate content fixed!

Do you want to learn more SEO secrets you can use to improve your traffic and page rank?

Visit Sebastian's pamphlets great tips at optimize Wordpress for search engines. I'll be implementing most of these at my blogs.

If you understand his information rich directly, you should go there first. Because I ran into a few snags copying just cutting and pasting quotes, and with a couple of other minor things. I know php so I was able to modify things just a bit to make it easier to cut and paste.

Over the course of the week, I'll do the same for each tip and explain in my own words why you should use the modifications he suggests. When it helps. I'll also provide the code with minor modifications that I made to eliminate the snags I ran across.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 27 comments

I found the secret to getting out of the Google sandbox: Write a plugin others want!

I’m now getting my first visits from Google, see?

My very first hits from Google come from people who are specifically looking for the Kontera Control plugin. They don’t know what to call it, but you can see “Kontera” in the search.

Even more importantly, with regard to knowing I’m out of the sandbox, once Google noticed people clicked on my site after searching for my Kontera Control plugin, Google started to return my blog for other non-Kontera related searches. (Heck, I’ve gotten vistors for “John Chow banned”!

I’m out of the sandbox! Whooo hooo!

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

Evidently, John Chow has been banned by Google. Not only has he lost “make money online”, but he has also lost rank for “John Chow” and “JohnChow.com”.

His fans may continue to follow his advice, but I ask you: Can you afford to be banned by Google, Technorati and Digg?

In his June 28 blog post¹ John says:

I am 100% positive that Google will eventually restore my number one ranking for my name.

I guess we’ll all have to wait and see what happens.

© Lucia for Big Bucks Blogger, 2007. | Visit Post | 4 comments