Luigi the Blacksmith

I’m reminded of a joke that talks about a blacksmith named Luigi who lived in the Welsh Valleys. Luigi was complaing about a nickname he had acquired and how his reputation had been damaged. All his long life he had worked hard as a blacksmith, fitting new shoes, looking after the horses of the farmers and the gentry, he really thought it unfair that he should be labelled in the way that he had. “20 years a blacksmith, I’m Luigi the Blacksmith, 2 minutes with a sheep and I’m Luigi the sheep shagger”

Reputation hits hurt

The serious point is that for whatever reason, this blog like many others appears to have taken a visible greenbar hit. The greenbar representation does not equate to this blogs link profile.

My little Luigi joke is related to the fact that I have actually made in the 10 months I’ve been blogging here just one sponsored review (which was clearly labelled as such) does this make me some kind of link selling evil seo bastard? Of course not, it’s ridiculous to assert such a thing, yet why else? Why else has this blog seen such a marked drop in its green toolbar PR?

I really wasn’t going to say anymore on this PR thing(plenty has been said already) but I was kinda narked so decided that I just had to pass comment – get it off my chest and be done with it.

I don’t really care that my visible PR has been penalised, but I do care about the reasons behind it, I think it’s an infantile and ridiculous thing to do, the sortof thing some blind cyclops might engage in some cave somewhere.

Last week this blog had a toolbar PR of 4, yesterday it was 3 today it is 2 tommorrow I might be 1.

I don’t sell text links

First off, for the record. I do not sell text links on this website. I’ve discussed things like reviewme and payperpost and TLA and sponsoredreviews because they happened to pertain to what some of what this blog discusses, which so happens to be the monetisation of written content.

Lets take TLA for example, I like many others have a link through to their stuff via some affid banner or text, mine happen to be nofollowed. I nofollowedthese because I’m not a total idiot, I have no desire to stick two fingers up to a company that happens to deliver paying customers every once in a while, that would be silly, that said I still have the right to monetise what I do in any way that I choose to, it’s for me to weigh up the pros and cons of course. Which is why I took the decision to nofollow my PPP and TLA links from the outset.Ithought thatthiswas what people like Mr C had requested. I didn’t like it, but took a broad based decision deciding it was one of those fights for another day.

The reasons were 2 fold.

Reason 1 as I’ve said already I didn’t want to antogonise the 800lb gorilla and reason 2, I didn’t want to leak any juice to stuff that basically already had my tacit support by virtue of me placing their code on my real estate. That action alone was enough, they didn’t merit site wide dofollows too, that would have been like me paying them twice.

No Nofollow blog?

Perhaps they don’t like the fact that by and large this happens to be a dofollow blog. I allow followed links for those who take the time to comment here. Those who are denied are usually done so on the back of a choice taken by me that feels that they are either spamming me or just generally have one of those aint worth sixpence type websites.

Suffice to say that there is not one thing I’ve done on this blog that is outside of any search engine guideline.

Don’t poke the big fat ape

Ive critiscised them a little sure, who hasn’t and why wouldn’t I even. Christ I blog about seo and search engines, lots of others do too. I ask my readers questions I am genuinely interested in what others think, it’s one of the reasons why I post little polls and ask sensitive questions. If that’s a reason (which I doubt) then that’s just a little pathetic. Google have to recognise that criticism comes with the terrority. The feudal lord has raised his tax take,people will complain and criticise, it’s part of the human condition, always has been always will.

Begging forgiveness

Would I consider a reinclusion request and admit to ‘wrong doing’ or ‘badness’ or being evil? Heck no. Their egos are theirs and theirs alone to live with, why the fuck should I go cap in hand confessing like some remorseful sinner for something that is so asinine it’s barely worth geting flummoxed about!

As Andy said in a previous post when he was first slapped. To those who don’t know and view the Pagerank green bar thing as a signal of quality, then it looks like I have a low grade shitty blog. Google is saying this blog is crap and not to be trusted. That really isn’t on.

Whoa whoa calm down…?

Of course…all of this could but be a step back to the days of old where PR updates were a part of the regular landscape.In the absence of any official statement from the Google FUD machine it’s all people can do but speculate.

Lots of people today are reporting fluctuations, some blogs that had seen a toolbar drop the other day have seen a return to form, others (like mine) have seen a worsening.

Andy put together a little list

I don’t get why Google are getting so hatey with the people who collectively, helped them become as strong and as wealthy as they have. Its like we all created a Frankensteins monster that is just out of control having swigged a bottle of A grade Vodka smashing up the laboratory, trying to get to Dr Frankenstein and wring his neck!

It’s bad bad karma, its arrogant, it’s lots of depressing little things, that for now I’ve already spent far too much of this precious thing called life on.

Have a great day!

Related posts:

1. Mybloglog is evil – no seriously, it must be!
2. Why every blogger should have subscribe to comments checked by default
3. 10 magnificent steps on becoming a crappy blogger

Maki wrote a good blog post today that for me spoke about marketing and creating things of value that have the efffect of creating converted users; that’s, people who will buy into whatever it is you do or are trying to achieve.

Be it via a comment, a hit of a subscription button, an add to favourites action , a credit card transaction or a link through to what you wrote or advertised, the bottom line is that without any of these sorts of actions, the likelihood is that you are either writing for yourself or selling something that is overpriced and overvalued or just not worth discussing.

Don’t rely on search engines

Free search engine traffic is great. A most welcome bonus that if used correctly, can help build a following, but that’s where it stops. If you are obsessing about building your rankings then your target sight is off kilter, you are looking at the wrong part of the equation.

Posts like the ones from across the blogosphere today and in the previous weeks regarding PR and paid links should be a wake up call for anyone who is serious about earning a living from a website online. If you remind yourself that your free traffic is very likely to be a transitory thing, if you tell yourself everyday that your free search engine generated traffic is likely to disappear tommorrow, then you’ll be doing yourself a huge favour.

Search Engines are not automated non policed systems, they do employ people to look at certain things and do take actions against people as and when they see fit.

You can complain until the cows come home but at the end of it all, rightly or wrongly they can do whatever the hell they like, when they like and how they like. There is no court of appeal, you can’t storm parliament, go on strike or sit out in the road, neither can you chain yourself to a fence either, if they kill your site and you care about or genuinely need or rely upon the traffic they send to you, then as harsh as it might sound – without a plan or loyal following you might as well just shut up shop, or get used to talking to yourself!

Yeah yeah, so what’s the plan then smarty arse?

Well…but of course there are positives, you don’t have to sit around burying your head in the sand hoping that you are never hit, you can at least try and adopt a meritocratic world view and build real traffic, *your* traffic, people who visit you because others have discussed you in some way because you are doing something or selling something or just saying something that adds value to the world and the playground in which you are kicking your ball around in. Be it via word of mouth or some href piece of html.

Take a look at these blogs here, all of whom have seen a reduction in their visible toolbar PR

Auto Blog
Engadget
Problogger
Copyblogger
SEG
SEJ
Andy
Maki

Then look at their webstats and their site metrics, look at their published subscriber numbers. Look at their Alexa, compete and technorati numbers. Look at the people who are commenting on their stuff, look at how well they are linked to and on what sort of terms. Then ask yourself why that is, I tell you what, I’ll save you the bother with the answer, as the answer is simple – All of the above are quality resources with something to say, it really is that simple.

Maki’s right

Google is an factor that is outside of your control. Sure, you can follow their rules or adjust your behavior to fit in but that still doesn’t put Google within your palm. What do good entrepreneurs do with uncontrollable factors? They create what-if contingency plans to accommodate for possible loss

Sigh – I’ll leave you with this little Portishead track, cos it kinda has a few on target lyrics, ‘you don’t get something for nothing, gotta try a little harder’

Related posts:

1. Bait and switch a legitimate traffic building tool?
2. Great Viral ideas – make one for yourself and get traffic

Matt Cutts in a recent interview said that Google does allow PageRank to flow through noindex pages. If you have pages on your wordpress install that add little value to your readers and you’d like to prevent them from being indexed, then you might want to take that into account.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won’t be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn’t make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

(emphasis mine)

He goes on to talk about sitemaps to illustrate the example, which is very useful as ultimately, if you want search engines to index your stuff, then you probably want them to index the stuff you actually write and talk about rather than some random page that just has lots of links to your stuff.

I’ve done a quick and dirty mod to my head theme using is_archive and is_category wordpress functions as I’m not realy interested in my archives and cats being indexed. It’s my content that I’d like people to read and have the most ranking juice applied to.

Anyhow, if you add this to your header.php file in your WP theme, then it will do the job. You can make it googlebot specific or replace the word googlebot with the word robots. Do bear in mind however, that other search engines may not apply such directives in similar ways, so you might just want to stick with the googlebot approach.

<?php if (is_category() or is_archive()) {?>
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex, follow”>
<? }?>

This says to googlebot, do not index this page but follow the links within it. Just open up your theme and put it after the </title> tag line wich can be found inside the <head> section of the html.

Whats the point in doing all of this?

Why am I doing this? Does it even matter?

In a world where lots of people talk about similar things, it is sometimes the small things that make the difference between getting seen or not. This for me, is one of those small things that might make a difference. It’s an experimental thing too. Currently a site:yackyack.co.uk search at Google shows a lot of pages for this domain which really just shouldn’t be there, or lets just say add little value in the grand scheme of my yackyack.co.uk world. It’ll be interesting to see in however long a period whether this little tweak makes any difference to referrals or rankings for desired keyterms.

You’ll lose longtail referals

A downside is, that I’ll get less referrals for long tail searches.
If you look at a typical cat or archive page you’ll see that its full of snippets and titles which when read in their whole make little sense. To a bot that saw these as individual pages, it could well return them for obscure queries, simply because of a certain mix of words that is purely accidental. In most cases, I’d question the value to both me and the reader.

From a grab the traffic and do what you can with it perspective, it’s a different thing entirely and if such an approach is important to you then I really wouldn’t do this.

Related posts:

1. PageTank – Have you been hit by the PageRank hatey stick?
2. NOYDIR wordpress plugin
3. Google spidering its own custom search results?

I’m watching Ugly Betty, but only half heartedly, just can’t get into it, so i start flicking through the wordpress tag link in the control panel of this install. I came across this site entitled “Do You Want to Double your PR for the Next Update“.
Anyhow,I almost felt moved to comment and say, well no actually mate, that’s a lot of old tosh, but upon reflection thought nah, what’s the point he’ll either get miffed at my audacious brass neck daring to question his ‘expertise’ and the like, and either delete what I say, or just try and argue black is blue.

He says a few things about so called ‘Dangerous Mistakes’ and the ‘Killing of Pagerank’ and well, you’ve probably read similar stuff in a form somewhere or other. His central claim is that a PR5 site had 15 Errors and a PR3 had 83, ergo the greater number of errors is the cause of the lower PR. Did you get that nugget? If you have low pagerank, its because you have html errors and need to validate your code.
.

.PR5 Site Had 15 Errors and PR3 Site Had 84 Errors

..Don’t You Think You Killed Your Pagerank. Html Causes Trouble With the Google Bot.Hence They Cannot Read Your Html Completely and They Abandon Your Site HalfWay.Giving You Only Half of the Pagerank…

Yup, there ya go.

This Googlebot, you know – the one that is part of that big old do no evil organisation apparently has issues with bad html and does things like half pagerank when it encounters it.

Well Mr ProBuzz, sorry but that is not true. Might be at some point in the future, but today, simply not true. You are misinforming your readers and should add a big portion of IMHO at the bottom of stuff like that.

Ok, I’m being a teeny bit ugly perhaps. Maybe its this show Ugly Betty, everyone is kinda mean to her too, but come on please; where do people get these ideas from?

The reason I’m a little gnarled (just a small bit) is that there are people who are reading his stuff and thanking him for his valuable info. People who obviously know no better, people who are taken in by a few words that seem to be ok yet when put under any spotlight of observation and scrutiny suddenly fall to pieces.

Its not a huge leap away from my pet peeve of those people who say, ‘give us just 100 dollars a month and we will submit your site to 20 million search engines’. Cos what happens subsequently, is that after they’ve spammed businesses with a zillion and one emails, is this.The companies who have been spammed/suckered/taken in/mugged off, subsequently view all things SEO related as laden in snake oil. When they subsequently contact people like me, I’m left with this huge job of work explaining to them that it takes a hell of a lot more to succeed on line than a directory link in a few spammy FFA’s. Once bitten twice shy, one is left having to restore confidence to a person who is looking at you through squinted eyesand all because its too easy for some arse to rip joe bloggs off.

IMHO, of course

Anyways, I’m an SEO expert, no really I am, trust me, you have my word…

Related posts:

1. Why domain authority and trust is not to be trusted
2. Blogging is dead, no more blogging, a last word