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 publicizing your archive of paid posts.

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….

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.

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’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.

Reading Graywolf’s blog, I was reminded to watch out for duplicate content issues and Wordpress. It turns out that the wordpress default doesn’t nofollow “tags”.

Because bloggers who tag posts tend to create zillions of tags, they often end up with exactly one post in a many individual “/tag/” directories. This nearly always create duplicate content, which is not a good thing.

You’ll want to fix this; it’s fairly easy. I fixed the issue by modifying my robots.txt file.

What’s a Robot.txt file?

The robots.txt file is a plain text file you place in your root directory. It tells robots not to crawl specific files thereby eliminating the duplicate content issue.

The robot.txt file for BigBucksBlogger now reads like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.js
Disallow: /*.png
Disallow: /*trackback
Disallow: /*.css
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?

I’m keeping robots out of my tag, author, comments and wp-admin directories, out of a number of subdirectories in wp-contents, and out of javascript, png, css, trackback files.

Because I don’t use the Wordpress default permalinks, I’ve also blocked robots from crawling addresses with query strings. Do this only if you aren’t using query strings in your permalinks otherwise, you’ll block the ‘bots from your whole site. You really don’t want to do that. Permitting the bot to index duplicate content is bad; indexing no content is worse.

I could block the bots from other files, but there is generally no need to block the robots from any file that is never linked. Also, you never want to block robots from your index.php file, sitemap or ‘.php’ files in general.

Once you create the robot.txt file, just save it with the name robots.txt file and drop it in my root directory.

Should you block from categories?

I don’t block bots from my categories directory because I only post excerpts on those pages. So, I don’t worry too much about duplicate content on those pages. In fact, since I find the ‘bots often index those and bring me traffic, I want the ‘bots to crawl those. (I am planning to change things to post 10 excerpts per page; I think that will make it easier for people who look at categories to find what they want to find.)

If you run full articles in your categories, you may wish to block ‘bot from those. The same holds for all your archives. (I’m going to be modifying my template to show nothing but excerpts at all addresses except the front page and the individula posts. This should prevent a lot of duplicate content issues without the need to block ‘bots.)

Is there anything you can do to avoid duplicate content?

Sure. In fact, there is a great Meta Robots WordPress plugin available that lets you tailor no-follows on your blog. One of the options is adding nofollow metatags to the headers of files in your “tag” directories. This will eliminate the duplicate content penalty as well.

Using the plugin also permits you to precisely tailor link-juice flow around your blog. I’ll be using this soon and explaining many of my “nofollow” decisions after I install the plugin.

SEO Egghead recommends bloggers check their posts for insserted links to mp3 sites he has discovered at his site, and provides a plugin for this purpose.

I may be wrong, but I think you need to use his plugin. You should be able to get the same information by clicking “manage” in your dashboard, finding the big “search box” and entering ‘adshelper’. Then, click search. WP will return a list of posts containing links to “adshelper”. Next repeat the search for ’softicana’. If both searches return zero pages, you’re clean.

While your at it: why assume these are the only hacker-advertisers? Take a little time and search for words like “mp3″, “casino”, “mortgage”, “viagra” and anything else you can dream up. If you find anything, blog about it so other bloggers can learn and check.

With luck, if my suggested method of testing useless, and you really do need to use the plugin, Seo Egghead will pop in and tell us I’m wrong. (I asked at his blog last night, and I’ll keep checking for an answer .)

Are you wondering how I did?
I seem to be ‘clean’ on both ‘adshelper’, ’softicana’ and a variety of other terms I dreamed up.

Hmmm… Plugin idea
If these sorts of HTML tainting attacks are common, I should probably write a plugin that periodically scans all blog posts for a standard set of blacklist terms, plus terms in the users own blacklist. Monthly checks at all our blogs would let us catch these things and warn others. It would be an easy plugin… hmmm….

If readers do run this test, and any come up “tainted”, I’ll seriously consider writing that plugin. Meanwhile, I need to get through updating all my existing ones first!

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 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!

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.

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?

Theoretically, the advertiser was walloped by Google for paid links, and is trying to correct the issue. They are now writing posties asking them to remove posts, as required to get Google to consider re-inclusion in search results.

Will Posties remove the links?

Probably. Few want to screw over their paying customers.

Still, the responses can be a bit funny. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek quip:

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

Ouch! And who is to say it’s entirely unfair?

Here’s a refusal:

[...] 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.

So, I guess if you pay for links in content, you may lose control!

Two other posties suggest additional evil spins on the request:

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

Which prompts at least three Posties to point out that such requests should be funneled through PPP. After all, how is the Postie to verify who is asking them to remove the links?!

Presumably, PPP will figure out a procedure to deal with these novel requests. Who’d a thunk this would happen?