If You Want to Start Blogging, You Have to Get Up and Dance

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Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.
~Dave Barry

When I wrote in Blogging Is About Writing on Problogger that readers will forgive writing mistakes if the blogger is passionate and knowledgeable about their subject matter, a lot of people stood up and applauded virtually. They loved the idea that you don’t have to write perfectly to blog, but it helps.

Is it necessary for every blog to be perfect and have a purpose? Honestly, like the quote above, you do not have to dance well, you just have jump in and dance.

It’s your blog. Do with it what you want. If it feels good, do it. Party hearty! Party on, Garth!

Must You Blog? Then Blog

I’m still in Israel as I write this post, and I’ve met a lot of old friends who listen to me talk about blogging and WordCamp Israel. After a few minutes, they lean forward and say, “I’m probably the most ignorant person in all of Israel. Forgive me. What is a blog?”

I explain that a blog is a website that isn’t a static billboard but a conversation on the web.

“Should I get one? Do I need one?”

“Do you?”
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What’s the Score on the Latest Google PR Crunch?

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If you’ve been reading up on the blogosphere lately, then you would probably be aware of the latest Google PageRank drops that several high-profile sites and blogs have been experiencing since the past couple of days. For one, the Blog Herald itself among a few of our other sites had been badly hit–from a PR 6 to a PR4. Hey, that’s lower than my own personal blog, and for that matter a lot of other blogs out there, including MFA and spam blogs, to be frank.

Other sites–notably high-profile blogs–have been hit, too. And these are not only the blogs, but also popular mainstream media sites, with several very trustworty newspaper sites included. Does that mean Google now deems them–and us–less trustworthy?

What’s the score with this latest PageRank crunch? Are we being penalized for monetizing links? Are we being penalized for bad inter-linking practices? These are the speculations as to what is most likely the reason behind the PR drops.

Andy Beard says these “favorites” have likely been slapped by Google for either (or both) selling links or extensive interlinking within one’s network.

Many of the reputable sources that have received a penalty are part of extensive blog networks, and they have one factor in common. They have massive interlinking between their network sites.

They may also sell links or advertising that passes PageRank on some of their less visible properties, but those properties benefit from the high pagerank sites that link to them, with sitewide links.

It is also being argued whether this is a PageRank update in general, or if Google is just penalizing a few, select sites for going against the Google guideline against artificially jacking up rankings through paid link schemes or link exchanges.

Some blog networks have been affected, while some have not. Those that exercise extensive intra-linking in their blogrolls, like b5media (via Technosailor), 9rules (via Scrivs) and Weblogs, Inc. were highly affected. Others that weren’t much into this practice were left mostly unscathed (if at all affected), such as Bloggy Network.

Whether it’s one thing or the other (as I’m not sure if anyone has actually confirmed the root cause as of this writing), one thing is for sure. Google has just shaken up the online economy. And I say this both as an economist and as a manager of a new media network.

Fact is that around the behemoth search and advertising company Google is built a secondary economy. Blogs and websites use PageRank as one primary metric for reputation and trustworthiness. Many site owners bank on their sites’ or domains’ PageRank, and use these to command or negotiate advertising rates.

It’s like the gold standard applied online. And with this mass PR drop, Google has just devalued the webmasters’ gold. In effect, Google has just caused the value of this thriving industry to fall in a single day. What was a thriving economy is being rendered worth less (while not worthless, of course).

But then again, we can argue that this economy is artificial in the first place–with people putting too much premium on PageRank, and especially with people putting a price tag on PR. But in that case, wouldn’t Google still be morally (and legally?) liable for killing off its competition? Do keep in mind that Google runs its own advertising program and is at the top of its game.

Other new media networks that were affected have expressed they are keeping their heads up high and will continue to cope and thrive. Likewise we at Splashpress Media admit it won’t be easy to overcome this challenge, but we know we will survive and move on and forward. It would take a little shift in strategies and priorities, sure. We live in a changing world. And with the fast-changing nature of new media, we should also know how to adapt well and keep in tune with the times.

Are Tags Working?

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Are blog tags working? Are they working for your blog? As a blog reader, do you use them to search a blog when you visit? Do you visit Technorati and search through their tags for information, or do you just hit the search engines?

We’ve been playing with tags on our blogs for about three years or so and I’m wondering if they are still working.

Categories work. I use categories all the time on the blogs I visit. They represent the content on the blog, directing me to categories of information I may be interested in. I also use them as identifiers on the expertise of the blogger. If the categories are related, they must know what they are blogging about. I see categories as your blog’s table of contents.

Tags, however, are more like your blog’s index words. They are micro-categories. Do you use them when you visit a blog? I’m not and I’m wondering why.
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Blogging Tips: Prepare Your Blog For Traffic

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Blogging Tips - book cover, copyright Lorelle VanFossenThe following excerpt is from Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging by Lorelle on WordPress.

While most people are thrilled to start their blog and get any visitors, they often forget that a good point or interesting blog concept can generate instant attention, bringing a flood of visitors to their blog.

Don’t be caught off guard by a sudden influx of traffic. You may want the popularity that comes from having your post dug by Digg or listed in TechCrunch or Wired, but if your blog’s server can’t handle the load, your blog may be down faster than your moment in the spotlight lasts.

Be prepared for the high traffic load, if you are planning on it, with these tips:
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Theme Sponsorship at Performancing

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Last April, I wrote about sponsored WordPress themes, in light of Blogging Pro’s release of their InSense theme with a sponsored link at the footer (but not a required link, as users can take it out). Performancing has also been exploring this business model, with the recent PhotoPress theme, recent announcement that sponsorship for News Theme, the Performancing Theme slated for release this coming August has opened, with $500 as the starting bid.

We are now taking bids for the August 2007 Performancing Theme sponsorship. Bids start at $500.

To give you a sense of the value of a sponsorship, take our first sponsor, Fusilly T-Shirts for the Photopress Theme. That theme has only been released for about three weeks, and yet a search on the linked keyphrase “funny t-shirt” brings Fusilly up on the front page of the Google SERPS (as of this writing). That’s a relatively high-competition keyphrase placing on the front page relatively quickly.

Performancing cites the SEO benefit as the main come-on for sponsors. You get your choice of link URL and anchor text to include. However, there are no 100% guarantees (as with most search-optimizing techniques, in my opinion). Still, with a clean-looking Design Disease creation like the News Theme (click for live demo) I can say the theme will be popular among bloggers who wish to establish a serious and professional look for their blogs.

The Evil Linking of Sploggers and Scrapers Messing With Your Content

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The other day, I found a fascinating post on blogging programs that really held my interest, exploring why someone would stay with a specific program even when it made them unhappy. I noticed a reference to Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, but the link wasn’t to his name but on the word “of”.

Splog uses buried links to direct visitors to porn sites in stolen content

I thought that was odd and noticed that other strange words were in links: her, the, in, about, and he. Very odd linking pattern.

A hover over the links found that they were links to porn sites.

Suspecting this was a splog, I wondered if the author had intended to write this interesting article and stuff it with the nasty porn links or if this was indeed a splog. I selected a block of text with unique phrasing and ran a search in Google for the phrase wrapped in quotes. Indeed, I found the original author and then informed them of the scraping and copyright violation as well as the nasty links.

Getting Scraped is a Compliment

Many feel that getting your blog content stolen and scraped by a splogger is a compliment. It means they care enough about your content to “spread the word”. Or they think that it won’t hurt them, but benefits them due to the trackbacks and link love.

This is crap. Loads of it. Piled very high.

It’s a load of garbage because few splogs give credit to the original author. In fact, they have programs which strip the HTML links and tags so they are free to insert their own with no good links getting in the way.

Google’s new PageRank algorithm now investigates and considers links and content in many ways. It’s about keyword matching and relative content linking.

If there is a credit link back to your blog, and the links within the blog post are not inline with the blog contents, on the blog and the linking blogs, the discrepancy is noticed and can score against you. If the content from two different sites match, and the links within don’t, it can score against you.

If you are worried about duplicate content, then be more worried. If the duplicated content is matched up with your blog, then your site may get scored low for such duplication. It isn’t just the duplication on your blog but the duplication of your content off your blog.

Many a blogger’s PageRank has dropped due to splogs scraping their content, so help stop scrapers and sploggers from stealing and abusing your content. If others abusing your content is a compliment, it’s a painful one.

Is Twitter The Next SEO Haven?

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Blogs have come to be very SEO-friendly, because of their nature of being frequently-updated, and link-rich. This is the very reason behind the rise of such monetization programs like Text Link Ads and ReviewMe. It’s not really the potential inbound traffic that advertisers are looking for, but the potential SEO benefits from link-building.

Sadly, spammers and black-hat SEOs have also exploited this characteristic of blogs to mass produce splogs (or “spam blogs”) for purposes of link-building. Sure, Google and the other search engines have learned to flag and de-index spammy sites. But sploggers still go on, with many using scripts that automate scraping of content. Sadly, the prevalence of splogs has also prompted the search engines to consider lessening the “link juice” of sites that sell text links (but this is worth another blog post altogether).

With the newfound popularity of microblogging/presence networks like Twitter and Jaiku (and a host of others), these may well be the next haven for people looking into optimizing their sites for search engines. For instance, Neil Patel at Search Engine Land recently wrote that Twitter can be used not just for messaging, but also to generate traffic, particularly since Twitter allows for embedding links in tweets. Plugins like Alex King’s Twitter Tools even automate things for WordPress bloggers. You can set it to post a tweet automatically every time you publish a blog post.

Secondly, Twitter status pages themselves are starting to get indexed by the search engines, and I would think many of these have been getting good Google PageRanks on their own. To illustrate, the twitter.com home page has a PageRank of 8/10, which is considerably high. Robert Scoble’s Twitter page has a pagerank of 5/10, while my own Twitter page has a PR of 4/10.

I think in this aspect, Twitter has an advantage over Jaiku, because Twitter statuses and user pages are set as subdirectories (i.e., twitter.com/username), while Jaiku uses subdomains (i.e., username.jaiku.com). SEO-wise, subfolders are treated as part of the original domain, while subdomains are treated as separate sites altogether. Therefore, whatever SEO benefits twitter.com is getting will trickle down to its subfolders, including user status pages and tweets.

There are even times when Twitter or Jaiku status updates have been topping search engine results, like this one example by Chris Pirillo, in which Jaiku and Twitter updates that linked to a blog posting of his ranked even higher than his original blog posting itself. The same thing happened in another experiment involving Twitter and a blog post.

And then there are the alternative uses of Twitter. For instance, Robert Scoble now uses Twitter for link blogging. And I think this is better than link blogging using a full blogging platform or even social bookmarking services like del.icio.us because of the push aspect of Twitter. Instead of having to check a site or a feed manually every now and then, I get Scoble’s links on my Twitter client (i.e., Twitterrific for the Mac, or even via IM/mobile if I choose so) whenever he posts links.

And it’s not only the push aspect. Each time I post a link on my Twitter status page, all of my followers’ friends pages get to display that link, too. If I have thousands of followers, not only does Twitter push the link to their clients (IM, desktop client, mobile phone, or even web), I also get thousands of new inbound links toward that link I just posted.

These, among other reasons, make me think Twitter, Jaiku and other microblogging/presence services may be ripe for the picking for SEOs. Unfortunately, spammers might also start to mass-produce tweets with links to their own sites. At least they won’t be disturbing anyone, unless they have friends/subscribers in their networks (which can be done with some social engineering).

Of course, sometimes this may not work as intended. For instance, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per post, and so most Twitter clients (including Twitter’s own web interface itself) use URL shortening services like urltea.com and tinyurl.com. I discussed the disadvantages of short URL services a while back on my blog, and my concern is basically about the URL shortening services getting the link love instead of your own domain.

Another problem might be Twitter’s infamous downtimes (albeit with cute downtime messages). There’s not much SEO benefit if a site can hardly be indexed because of downtimes.

Still, this is a new phenomenon worth looking into. Where there are web apps, there will always be people looking for ways to explore–and possibly exploit–these for their own purposes. Will Twitter–and other microblogging services–be the next SEO haven?

Wordtracker plays Keyword Challenge game at Internet World exhibition

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The UK-based online keyword research company Wordtracker has been playing a Keyword Challenge with delegates at the Internet World exhibition in London this week.

They reckon that most web site owners simply guess what their most important keywords are, and the game aims to show that’s just not good enough.

Playing in London now, and at previous conferences in New York, Las Vegas, and Chicago, the Keyword Challenge game asks people to guess which of two randomly chosen keywords is the most popular for a specific market sector.

From over 2,000 players, many who claimed to be experienced search engine optimisers, the success rate was just 54.9%.

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How SEO Confronts Its PR Challenge In The Blogosphere

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I got a lot of attention from the search engine optimization (SEO) community this past week for a post on “What Gives SEO A Bad Name” — the example I used, a parked domain appearing as a #2 Google search results, turns out to be Google’s fault, not the work of an unethical SEO. Or so it appears, based on some very plausible explanations posted by some smart SEOs in the comments of the post — but I can’t know with 100% certainty what’s going on inside Google’s black box, and that’s a problem for SEOs.

Some SEOs got upset with me for appearing to unfairly perpetuate negative perceptions of SEO — but if my post was a mistake, it was an honest one (I posted a correction). The point I’ve been trying to make to the SEO community, not always successfully, is that because they live in a black box, SEO’s PR challenge involves correcting a lot of misperceptions. Many of those misperceptions are unfair, but they are not always intentionally malicious — and they exist among potential SEO clients, like me

UPDATE: Speaking of great search ambassadors, Google’s Matt Cutts showed up on my original post and all but confirmed that my example is likely a problem in Google’s algorithm, although it’s pending investigation. Matt said that if it does turn out to be a problem in the algorithm, it could lead to a larger fix, which would certainly be a happy ending to this tale.
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Flash is Nice, However Words Get You Found

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The recent death of a family member has finally brought together parts of the family long separated for stupid reasons. Among them came a young man fresh out of college wanting a career in web design. His eagerness to impress me, once he found out who I was, was delightful. Together we raced to a nearby computer and his hands shook with excitement as he typed in his new portfolio domain, thrilled to get an expert opinion and review.

Well, all I can say is that it was pretty.
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