JLH Design Blog

Google Webmaster Help Group has been over run by  someone giving constant wrong, bad, and just scary information.

There is no way for any real work to be done with all the noise.  It must be fixed.

If you were persistant enough to visit Matt Cutts blog, scroll to the bottom of the page, click the previous entries link, click the next previous entries link,  and then scrolled down the How to Report Paid Links post, you may have noticed that Matt updated this post in the most quiet manner as possible, 3 clicks deeps from the home page.

On May 12th he added considerably more content to the original posting which has already received over 600 comments.

In an effort to justify defend the existence of paid directories he wrote:

I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.

I thought directories were really web 1.0, but I guess since the flood gates have just been opened again, I thought I’d start my own.  I really wanted to avoid the bestweblinkdirectoryontheplanetforyoutouse.com type of domain, so I started to look for one that has SEO in it.  SEO is the reason we are doing this right? SEO.com was taken, darn it, someone beat me to the punch.  BUT www.eseeoh.com ( get it? ES - EE - OH )was still available!

Now, should I really build a directory that is going to be 100% genuine human evaluation?  I don’t think the world needs another one, but Matt Cutts says its fine to sell those links evaluations, so maybe I should.  An honest site evaluation would take me 1-1/2 to 2 hours to complete, which should mean I will have to charge between $210 to $280 to make it worth my while.  That’s still less than the Yahoo directory, and we don’t know if they’ll even be around a year from now.

So I grabbed my first SEO based domain, if you don’t count www.linkthingy.com which I haven’t finished either, maybe I’ll turn it into a directory, fully blessed by Google of course.

Every so often you do something silly. Something that is normally below your supposed level of maturity. If that something happens to be published on the internet it just may be there for a long, long time to come. Then one day you are reading your feeds in Google Reader and come across a post that promises to be sprinkled with fart jokes and your past rears up and bites you.

There are a few ways one can handle news from the past. 1) you could deny it 2) blame it on the cat/dog/son or 3) you can own it. I choose to own it. Without further ado…

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I may be going out on a limb here, but I would think that anyone familiar enough with the concept of getting their website listed on Google and having such an interest that they’d seek out help in that manner would understand the use of the Google as a search resource.

But surprisingly, when someone stubmles their way into Google’s Webmaster Help Group they loose all abilities to search the thousands and thousands of questions that were asked and answered before them.

If Google gave me a nickle for every time someone asked when their PageRank would update or why link: doesn’t show all of their links, I’d be flying along side Larry and Sergey in my  767 / space shuttle / flying electric car or whatever else I could afford then.

Okay, onto the point of this post.  I wanted to upload the following picture, so I could point out to newbies that Google has developed this new SEARCH technology, and where it is.  I could have FTP’d it, but opening up wordpress is easier, and now I’ve got something to point them to.

Here are some pictures of the boys taken this weekend.

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I need a new challenge.

Ok, let’s say your a big German car manufacturer and Google just gets done praising your site which draws attention to it.  Then other people notice that the site is spamming with hidden text.

Does Google?

A) Ban and remove the site
B) Penalize the site
C) Give them a phone call, tell them what they did wrong, wait till they fix it, and then blog about them again, giving them some more PageRank 8 links.

The answer

Would anyone like to guess what Matt and his posse would do if my site had hidden text?

0% probability of getting the heads up
0.0001 % chance of getting a notification via webmaster tools.
99.9999 % just be banned with no feedback whatsoever.

Basis

It’s been well documented that I support the use of nofollow on sites that use nofollow exclusively for their external links, such as wikepedia. However there are sites that even go a step further and don’t even allow links. WebmasterWorld is one of them. While they may have very legitimate reasons, such as not wanting to get spammed, to avoid conflict, or reduce noise, etc. I feel it unfair to use them as a reference in posts when I know that they won’t reciprocate to the many contributers on the site. I should also add my editorial comment that their ban on even mentioning specific sites cripples their help forums to the point of near uselessness, with all of the “in my sector” and “I’ve seen in my niche” posts that can’t be used for anything other than pure conjecture.

By use of the nofollow tag I am still sending them traffic, which is above and beyond their policy, but not influencing the search engines with a positive vote for the site. I know I’ll catch some heat from SEO’s who love WebmasterWorld, and I use it often for technical reference, but as I said at least I am sending them traffic.

Solution

For a while I was adding rel=”nofollow” by hand, but that got to be a pain, and I’d forget sometimes. So I developed a Wordpress plug-in that does it for me automatically, in posts and comments. Feel free to use and distribute the plug-in. It’s easy to install, and requires no further action on your part.
Install

1. Download the file.
2. Unzip the file.
3. Upload to your plugins folder.
4. Activate plugin.

Options

1. If you’d like to want external links to open in a new window change line 49 which is by default $txfx_iel_use_target_blank = false; to $txfx_iel_use_target_blank =true;
2. If you don’t want this plug-in to work on comments, then delete line 94:
   add_filter(’comment_text’, ‘wp_wmw_nofollow’, 999);

Acknowledgements

I just modified the Wikipedia nofollow plug-in by Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson, which was based on Identify External Links by Mark Jaquith.

I’ll pay to link to you, or you can pay me not to.

Google’s position on Paid Linking is clear, they do not like it, unless they are declared paid, both per Google’s recommendations and perhaps someday the FCC. It makes the linking structure of the web unnatural and deceives the search engines. In essence, someone with enough money could buy themselves to the top of the rankings by buying enough links. It’s contrary to the democratic nature of the PageRank system of Google.

I however still hold my editorial discretion and will even pay for the right to link to whom I want to.

With all of that in mind, I intend to extend this offer that comes with two options:

INTRODUCING THE JLH PAID REVIEW

I will review your website’s content and blog about it, and any subsequent pages you specify without any link per the following understanding:

1. You must first submit your website for a free pre-review, where I will editorial choose which sites I will review.
2. If I accept your offer for a review, the review is by my design, be that positive (mostly) or negative (rarely), and you agree to that before payment.
3. The review will carry a human readable status of “This is a sponsored review“
4. The fees for this service are $ 250.00 for the main site home page, and $ 75.00 for each additional page.

Optionally

1. If you so choose, I will add a link to each page on your site reviewed within the review which will have rel=”nofollow” added to them. If this option is chosen I will then pay you $ 25.00 per link that is added and nofollowed (limit 1 per page of your site reviewed). The human readable status will read, “This is a sponsored review. I have also paid for the right to link to the site using nofollow”
2. You may also choose to allow me to link to your site’s pages without the nofollow attribute. As payment for this opportunity I will then pay you $ 50.00 for each link supplied (limit 1 per page of your site reviewed). The human readable status will read, “This is a sponsored review. I have also paid for the right to link to the site”

All reviews can take up to a week to process and will remain on the site for at least 1 year, if the site is taken down for any reason you will be refunded on a pro-rated basis from the day of posting to the demise of the site.

A quick note here.  If you’ll notice the top commenters on the right has reset.  That’s because the widget I used has it set at for the month, this being May 01, we’ve started anew.

So start commenting!

And stop linking to link-condoms and blacktape things (you know who you are)