payperpost

Why Removed Supplemental Index Labels are good for my business

Marketing Fan — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 12:50:18 +0200

Earlier this week Google has removed the “supplemental index” labels from the SERPs, and as with every major poops from Google the whole SEO scene freaked out on this!

Me too – because I have to thank Google for giving me – and my clients a new competitive advantage.

Why do I thank Google for removing interesting signals?

Well, until last week every wannabeo-seo and his mother could see (in the SERPs, see grandfathered sample below)

if a page had a problem with ranking…

There have been huge posts by Jim , Halfdeck and Halfdeck again and a lot more on what/why/where supplementals are. Even I posted about Supplemental Hell and one PayPerPost link buying penalty bringing pages into the to supplemental index.

Today however…

People need to put more effort into detecting if a page has problem due to being in the supplemental index.

That means a certain (large) amount of SEOs just won’t be able to do this in their everyday job.

Halfdeck has his own Supplemenal Detector which is a fancy JAVA application that is in fact a “pagerank emulator” – ~~and all pages below a certain threshold are marked as supplemental. I encourage you to download this data scraper, and I’m sure it works nicely – but haven’t tried it.~~

After playing with Halfdeck’s Pagerank emulator I must say that it’s a great way to simulate how the “link juice” flows thru your site and where you are actually wasting precious link juice (i.e. on useless stats pages). Halfdeck even implemented a “backlink emulator” where you can judge on the effects of an additional PRx link to any page you like… pretty cool tool – it just lacks TBPR live queries, but I hope he can add that in the next version.

But, in fact I never cared much about the TOTAL number of supplementals, but always if a single page is in supplemental. Why that?

Well, I guess Link Ninja Master Jim Boykin knows why – it’s because you don’t want to get links on pages in the supplemental index because they won’t get crawled as often.

Jim’s recent explanation on finding if a page is in supplemental pretty well details how to detect if a page is “healthy” at all – i.e. ranks for obscure terms.

If a page does not even rank for an obscure terms on it, you don’t need a link there.

So you ask again, why is this cool for your business?

Because the way to check if a page is worthy to spend time to get a link on it has just become a bit harder. You will need more work, time, effort, unless you automate it. Just as we do here.

And this is the perfect situation to use an “internal tool” (as many SEOs have) as a competitie advantage to get more and better links in a shorter time… heck – some link builders might spend another couple clicks on each page to find out if it qualifies for hunting for link.

We Don’t :-)

In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” on top of our brower toolbar bar when we visit a page.

In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” label as it used to be printed for ALL google users in the past, nicely embedded in the SERPs.

And in fact Google has bought itself now 10-20 more Google queries per SERP page my Link Arbeiter team screens when looking for links – plus we are inflating the pageloads of all those sites we screen by one…

Do you think that hurts Google? Nah – enough resources.

Do you think it hurts me? Nah – just got a bunch more proxy IPs to make up for the bigger Google scraping load.

Do you think it will hurt the SEO scene building links? Well …

I would assume a huge bunch of people won’t even notice a difference – after all even SEOmoz de-classified 70% of SEO companies for not knowing the SEO basic

Furthermore a couple of smaller equipped companies will struggle as they will need to do more a lot more work (as per Jim’s description) to get the same results…. and I mean – A LOT MORE.

Now this moves the benefits to larger scale companies (as Google is) that DO have an intact SEO infrastructure for their daily SEO work.

But the small scale link builders will first have to build that infrastructure, browser plugins and knowledge to make visible what Google has just taken from the public.

Thanks Google !

Blog Posting Services, the new way to sell Page Rank - officially now

Marketing Fan — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:49:24 +0100

As you might have noticed, there are more and more blog posting services, out there – an automated broker-stype system selling blog posts for a one—time fee to advertisers…

to create BUZZ of course.

Well, frankly, since that whole “review” craze started last year or so you must admit it was all nice talk about “creating buzz”, giving your product exposure and mentioning yourself within a “topical community”

Sure, blogspot.com IS a community… but I doubt that bloggers that write about their mum and her dog, their favorite recipe as well as the anxiety attacks (and the pharaceuticals used to cure it) can be called a “topical community” when it comes to writing about HDTV Plasma Screens ... can they?

Just this week the so far leader-of-the-pack PayPerPost (when it comes to exposure and volume) released what was OVERDUE.... the Page Rank / Alexa Metric for buying blog posts.

Now you can restrict your blog posts BY

topical category (which is good, but I’ve still to see those “major topic leader blogs on highly competitive topics)
PAGE RANK (aka PR, aka green bar, aka It used to be important)

ALEXA RANK (aka Traffic meter, aka let’s fake it with some hit bots and referer spam)

I tried to order some payperpost blog posts

and instead of writing PR7 blogs ONLY, Alexa rank max. 50,000 and bidding 6$ for a post (hehe) I filled out those fields.

And guess what guys, the minimum price suggest by payperpost (EXCLUDING their 35% on top “service” charge) was around $125 or more

Does it make sense?

YES, sure it does – link prices are based on traffic metrics mostly… at least until the whole world learns about trust (aka domain status) and topical relevance being more important than pagerank.

ReviewMe gave it’s sites a pricing based on these two factors (IMHO) from the beginning… you cannot even “suggest” a low balling price there.

Oh – and the new sponsoredreviews service suggests that you can earn from $10 to $1000 … so if you got a PR9 blog, I’m sure the $1000 for the perm link will be possible for you.

Is this link selling?

YES, absolutely.

If you want a link from a post on a blog of PR3 min it will cost you $10

(meaning a perm link on a PR1+ page)

If you want a link from a post on a blog of PR4 min it will cost you $12.5

(meaning a perm link on a PR1+ page or hopefully a PR2)

Is this selling page rank?

Please read the above paragraph and judge for yourself.

Does Matt Cutts like this?

Naah, I bet he won’t.

And as you know, you shouldn’t mess with Matt (AKA show him your sites for blacklisting, thanks Jim for that great laugh last night)

But will all sites get blacklisted?

Naah, I bet that won’t happen either… at least not on a large scale.

It’s because you have that “editorial review” thing when you are buying a link from withing a blog post. Bloggers can ALWAYS judge if your site selling payday loans is a ledgit site or not, and probably they can decide if the link to with with “Pay Day Loan” or “payday loans” or just loans.

In fact, they COULD even NOT link to you … and just mentioned your site’s url… that’s called editorial discretion of the blogger.

But, the only problem – that post will get rejected when PPP does their job for the 35% cut … making sure all the links required are in there and are good.

Is this legal?

Well, sure man. Nobody can threaten you to not sell links on your own website. Not Google, not Matt Cutts and SURE THING not the FTC or any other of those choppy big US organizations…

I’ve read some ramblings some days ago where people discussing if link selling was LEGAL at all… OMG. I knew it… your editorial discretion and free speech at risk.

I have no doubts that not only Matt Cutts is on the payrole of Google, but a shitload of lobbyists in the US government and all sorts of organizations like the FTC (at least that’s what I read in the Google story).

Now if they pay all those “don’t sell links” preachers, we have to see some effect.

And of course with the twist of “deceptional advertising” (which blames people for promoting products with wrong promises and false claims) the FTC had a nice pitch to introduce that whole “disclosure policy” thing, which is a good thing at all to avoid people rambling soo positive about a shitty product just to make a PR1 link happen.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s ok if people disclose that they are reviewing stuff for money.

But does that make a difference when it comes to that shitty PR1 link on that 3 months old blogspot blob with 2 backlinks from the 2 friends of the lonely kid earning some extra pocket money?

No.

But does that make a difference for Google?

Yep. It sure does.

With all those footprints of links to Disclosure.org, and “I disclose”-Buttons, as well as the HUGE “Sponsored Pay Per Post” buttons you see in every second blog now they have all the means to identify sponsored posts to blacklist them for … guess what?

SELLING LINKs :-)

You won’t notice much when that happened, except that the link juice transfered from that shitty PR1 page goes down from 1.0 to 0.0 .. nothin more

Google has the technology to interpret, understand the meanings of content, and there are patents out there that even diagnose the “mood” and “tonality” or a writing (aka positive or negative twist)

But, as you can imagine, it’s not scaling yet.

The recent Google infrastructure updates brought back what we had in 2003… more regular page rank updates… rolling page rank updates… I’ve seen pageranks assigned at lightspeed of a few days if good domains linked to pages on other good domains…

Ok, so they fixed the stuff that stopped working in 2004 on a large scale and got more flexible.

But it’s years until they can rollout the current state-of-the-art text interpretation thing…

And until then, they can hunt down link networks not only by statistical patterns (for recip links), but also by simple patterns like “links.html” filenames or a simple link to the “Sponsored by PPP”-button :-D

And judging from that, it REALLY doesn’t matter if you can formally restrict your paid reviews by page rank or if you hide that (“Min PR3”) somewhere in the text…

It just makes sure the pricing get’s a lot easier, chunking in more money for posts on the few high PR blogs in the network… :-)

Overdue post, new employee, Pagerank Update, Feedvertising, NicheRevolution & Stompernet, new projects, affiliate progam

Marketing Fan — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:01:41 +0200

Way overdue post – I’m so busy with my studies and my other projects here that I didn’t post for 2 weeks…

So I thought I’d do a little roundup and commenting right now…

First cemper.com most important company news:

I am already working with my first austrian employee Sandra for weeks – she’s a freelancing student to help me out in addition to a ton of other freelancers from India, US and elsewhere that I already employ…

And frankly, after some weeks I must say – she’s doing great… Sandra studies Information Management here in Austria which is actually a study just about the stuff that I do – Search, Document Retrieval, etc… a bit of everythingn… I am feeling lucky I found her so quick …

well, also I’m actually also looking for new office-space here in vienna… let’s see..

Some more seo/marketing stuff

Pagerank update

Google updated it’s pagerank snapshot some days ago… nothing new and as Matt Cuts says about pagerank

matt cutts wrote:

By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point.

and Jim diggs out some great pretty frustrated comments by Roger / Martinibuster

jim & martinibuster wrote:

OVERKILL TO PROVE MY POINT THAT BACKLINK SEARCH IS NOT ACCURATE

Matt Cutts at SES London

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/001073.html

I am not saying that buying links will not help a site rank better

I am not saying that buying links will help a site rank better

The GREEN BAR on the TOOLBAR is NOT PageRank.

hehe…

Feedvertising

Text-Link-Ads relesead their “Feedvertising” program for placing links in RSS feeds last week … and I was probably one of the first to notice, as I couldn’t perform some search functions on their site during the rollout ( but they fixed their bug in seconds… )

it only supports wordpress blogs at the moment, but I need to test this program ASAP, because I believe your link would get into the feed and by that get syndicated automatically to a ton of readers – AND scrapers :-) hehe… and that could mean a fractal link spam explosion :-D

PayPerPost

The paid blogging service seems to gain momentum… while I think the idea is great, I certainly doubt that it might impact overall quality of some weblogs… and of course – it’s pretty easy to get a list of all sites that are registered there… and …hmmm – blacklist them for not passing any link love ??? what do you think?

Stompernet

after Andy Jenkins sent out a ton of viral-style videos and really did a good job in marketing their “SEO Consulting network” seems to have been sold out the first day… if you read in their mails they got some 40k subscriptions… which is a REALLY valuable list of SEO interested people… I wonder how you would value that… I’d say you could use that list to send out offers on a regular basis – list valuation $500k or more

Nichrevolution

Brad Callen’s membership site that provides you with PLR articles, audio and e-books and a ton of sales copy to build “information product sales” sites… yeah – I’m in… an I’ve already started building up some sites using his content and products… I wonder when I will make the first sale of that Gardening Ebook :-) ... but it’s a nice thing as it gives me some stuff to try to sell that I would otherwise NEVER have produced… and that’s like a cool playground for all kinds of experiments with SEO, PPC, split testing and much more …

more of my own stuff

My community research thesis is lacking a bit behind… I really love the topic and read tons of stuff, but I need to speed up with writing

CEMPER.COM finally got a new design … pretty fancy and thanks to ram for that… I still got a bug there if you find it and are the first to post, I will give you a free permanent link on a site you will LOVE !!!

Looking to implement a cool affiliate program using drupal – this takes a ton of time as there are 40+ products out there… but as it seems the current match is between IdevAffiliate (which I know and promote for some time) and “Post Affiliate Pro” which seems to have the better support and those guys are even located in Bratislava – only 1 hour from Vienna… cool. I will let you know.

And I am actually looking for a nice billing/invoicing solution and a workflow/helpdesk tool to integrate into my workflow – for better customer support … as you can imagine – that WIDE area of products and soso-products takes ages to wade thru… and just when you thought you found it, you encounter the next problems… I even already purchased one solution just to find out with the great support that it maybe won’t suit my needs… but hey -I got the license, I got the code – I could maybe fix it …