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Matt Cutts vs. V7N

Geek Smackdown!

Written on Friday, January 26th, 2007 by lorien1973 :: 1 Comment so far

V7N - some forum/site I never visit, apparently has a new service where they sell contextual links. Cleverly, its url is: http://contextual.v7n.com/. Not knowing much about this, I assume its a service where you post up an offer asking bloggers to write about your site and, in turn, they’d link back to you. Much like Pay Per Post.

Matt Cutts brought it up in the sense that it is “undetectable spam” in reference to an errant email he had received. The whole post is kind of funny, actually. Cutts suggests that finding these links and discounting them is easy enough, programatically. Yeah right. Contextual links are, by far, the hardest to detect. As I’ve brought up in many forums, I could show up 100 pages and ask “are these purchased or natural links” and I bet you couldn’t guess more than 50% (which are your odds of getting any guess correct). Making a program to guess correctly is even harder.

I’m curious why Google simply doesn’t close the loophole that makes these schemes work. Discount anchor text. Google has taken the first step by finally fixing the “google bomb” problem.

Here’s my question to Cutts on this. Let’s assume you buy blog entries from blogs that get traffic. These blogs lead directly to traffic and sales for the target site. Blogger gets paid; target site increases traffic/revenue. Where’s the harm done? Now, if ‘links’ don’t help in Google (in terms of ranking, popularity, etc) who really cares. But, will Google actively penalize you for getting those links. That’s the question.

Pay Per Post Sends Me Free Stuff!

Me Likey Presents!

Written on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 by lorien1973 :: 2 Comments so far

Pay Per Post sent me a box of free stuff today! I got a giant blue pen (14 inches long), a t-shirt (maybe or a towel - havent opened it yet) that says “blog mogul”, 2 calling cards, some breath mints (what are they trying to tell me?), and a big green foam finger with a dollar sign on it. Not so sure about the finger, but everything else is really cool. Thanks Pay Per Post!

It’s not a $10,000 beach towel from Google, but me likey presents!

$10,000 beach towel you ask? - Google’s first present (to me, at least) was a beach towel with the Google logo on it. Really cheap beach towel, too. It was sent during the summer, so it made sense, but I think its thread count is like 8. Since I spent about $10,000 on adwords that year, I call it my $10,000 beach towel. I have never used it - would YOU use a $10,000 beach towel? I didn’t think so! While the later presents have been cooler and more “Google-y” - the digital photo frame, the color changing radio, the USB crap - the first gift is always the best.

I’m the best at getting Wikipedia links!

Well, not really, but you are reading this anyways…

Written on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 by lorien1973 :: 1 Comment so far

More of an egads post than anything else.

A year or so ago, I wrote this article at Search Warp, and today I find out that not only has it gotten a Wikipedia link, but also, apparently has some .edu backlinks as well. I think its the first link to something I’ve written from Wikipeida, so I’m pretty proud of that. No applause necessary.

And I wondered how that article was getting so much traffic too. I do sell a lot of related products, so maybe people are coming from Wiki and buying from me. I know; fat chance.

Me: Search Warp’s Largest Traffic Source

By traffic, this author is the #1 author on SearchWarp.Com.

Written on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 by lorien1973 :: 1 Comment so far

Not sure why it matters, but I think its interesting.

According to Search Warp, I’m the #1 author on their site. I know some of my articles have gotten positive and negative comments, there, as well - based upon the email notices from Search Warp. I’d bet the most negative is the self serving “dent removal” one I did a few years ago. Basically a commercial for a product I sell. I’ve recently added ones that are more neutral and offer alternatives besides actually buying stuff from me. One of the people at Search Warp suggested I do so, and I finally got around to it and did it.

I was bored this evening - actually writing a bunch of content and needed a break - so I broke down the above page a little bit. Of the top 100 authors, I account for about 14% of that traffic. I almost bring as much traffic as the 2-4th authors combined and I more than double the 2nd place author as well. A few months back, I noted that I was the #2 author on Search Warp. Something drastic happened though, as I believe I had about 31,000 referrals at point and the #1 author had about 33,000. So it must be framed over a given time frame.

If anyone feels to congratulate me on my minor acheivement, please feel free!

Chaos Theory and Google Supplementals

Is Google purposefully throwing Chaos into the SERPs?

Written on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 by lorien1973 :: 1 Comment so far

If you are like many webmasters these days, you have noticed an increase in your supplemental results for a site: search on Google. While this blog is done for informational/entertainment purposes only, we do run several actual money making sites.

Supplementals and non-indexed pages are becoming an issue that needs to be dealt with. Back in November, if you’d search for “purple dull widgets” (for example of course, and referred to as PDW for simplicity’s sake), our item page - the most relevant to the search - would show up (PDW at XXXX.com). Now, if you search PDW, our section page (rather than item page) shows up (Widgets at XXXX.com) and the item page is no longer indexed at all.

In fact, up and down that search; except for Ebay, no page title exactly matches PDW at all. Why?

Chaos? We were #1 for PDW for over a year. Many of the other sites were 2-10. Is it good business for google to show the same results for a year for PDW? The internet is about fresh, new, now.

If you were going to a search engine and saw the same results for PDW every day, would you continue to use the search engine or would you move on? Be honest.

Given that everyone follows the same Google rules; it makes sense for Google to throw a little Chaos into the mix. Random irregularities creating different SERPs at different times of the day for no apparent reason at all.

If anyone else has a better reason for the supplementals, random weirdness at Google, non-indexed pages, etc. Please posit your ideas. Until then, and we’ve been considering this for months now, Chaos is the new normal at Google.