All posts by Patrick Altoft

Rumour has it that Google is going to team up with Digg to punish people who continually submit their sites to Digg just to get a PR boost.

A lot of people think the rumour is false but it is interesting nonetheless. Links from Digg are not editorially given – it’s pretty much just a free for all – so there is no reason for Google to count them.

The only time a link should count is when it hits the front page. Perhaps Digg should be nofollowing all the other links?

Remember that the aim of Digg isn’t to get links from Digg, it’s to get links from Digg readers websites.

The worlds largest webmaster forum has this month banned members from exchanging votes on sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.

Most people are happy about the ban while some members either don’t understand it or want the ability to exchange votes reinstating.

Exchanging votes in public is a very bad idea and sites like Digg have been banning sites and users for around 2 years now. They used to have moderators scanning DP threads and banning urls almost in real time. Later on they switched to just checking referrer data and flagging stories for manual review if they found lots of visitors from the forums.

The main issue was that the stories were all of very low quality and had all the hallmarks of spam so it was easy for sites like Digg to start taking harsh action.

Most of you might have seen the Google Quality Rater Guidelines by now, I’ve read them and the content is quite worrying for a number of reasons.

The main problem is that the document is written to cater for editors who don’t know much about the web. It explains spam, PPC and thin affiliate sites in a few paragraphs and then expects the editor to have the knowledge to play with peoples livelihoods.

Obviously we don’t know how much Google validates the information given in these spam reports but it worries me that so much power is being given to people who don’t understand what a thin affiliate site is before they read the document.

What the document doesn’t do is explain that while one page might be thin the rest of the site is packed full of useful information. How can you judge that?

Search has been fairly static for a few years now with no major alterations in how search engines rank their results. Google, Yahoo and MSN all use links and on page factors as the main indicators of relevance and Google especially does an excellent job at providing results.

To improve on the results the search engines need to figure out a way of including bookmark data in the results. Google already has a patent for re-ranking results based on bookmarks either on the users machine or using an online service and Yahoo could easily integrate del.icio.us data if they had more resources.

Firefox 3 comes with better bookmarking and no doubt some Firefox users would be happy to share their bookmark data with Google to get more personalized search results.

The big question is which company will do it first?

While conducting some link analysis recently I started thinking about the process that Google would carry out to see if a site was building links against their guidelines.
The key issue is that if a site has 100,000 natural links thanks to some tools or articles on the site it is very hard for Google to flag the site as being unnatural if they spot a thousand paid links.

On the other hand if a site has 2000 links and 1000 of them are clearly paid then Google might take a much harsher view.

Having a largely natural link profile allows you to be much more aggressive with your on page optimisation and to use paid links to build your rankings without appearing to be gaming the system.

Ask any SEO consultant to explain Google bombs and they will be able to show you how linking to a certain website with keywords in the anchor text propels that site higher and higher in the search results.

Websites in all industries use this tactic to rank highly for their target keywords – in essence it’s nice and simple. If you have a car insurance website you just need to attract lots of links with the anchor text “car insurance” and your rankings should improve.

The problem with this method is that Google claims to prefer natural links and how many natural links can you get with something like “cheap loans” as the anchor text? Not many is the answer. In fact Google could easily detect paid links simply by looking for keyword rich anchor text and flagging the links for manual review.

There are hundreds of people on forums such as Digital Point giving you the opportunity to have a blog post published across 100 different blogs.

This tactic is clearly not going to be something Google agrees with so if you want to use it then make sure you follow some simple rules.

The first is to make sure you don’t link to your site using obviously unnatural anchor text. Rather than saying “Visit SEOptimise for SEO” you should say something like:

“I was reading an interesting post about xxxxxxxxx on the SEOptimise SEO blog last week and it raised some great points. However I disagree with xxxxxx”

The key is to make the post appear 100% natural and, most importantly, something that you haven’t written.

Have you ever wondered how some sites get so many links? Clearly sites such as Google deserve to have millions of links but I decided to see which sites and sub pages were building links into the millions.

Check out the results below and see if you can spot the linkbait strategies that have got a site penalised, the automated linkbuilding strategies that work very well and the benefits of creating great plugins and tools.

  • 150 million links to http://www.statcounter.com/
  • 24.8 million links to http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
  • 24 million links to http://wordpress.com
  • 22 million links to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
  • 14 million links links to http://www.technorati.com
  • 13.7 million links to http://www.moneyexpert.com/Compare-Loans.aspx
  • 7.5 million links to http://www.moneyweb.co.uk/products/mortgages/mcapital.html
  • 5.5 million links to http://threestore.three.co.uk/
  • 5.5 million links to http://www.microsoft.com/
  • 4.8 million links to http://www.apple.com/
  • 4 million links links to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/
  • 3 million links links to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/
  • 2 million links to http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/popularity-contest
  • 1.3 million links to http://photomatt.net

Launching this week Yahoo Buzz is a Digg style service that works with a closed list of 100 sites that Yahoo has handpicked.

The most interesting part of the service is that the most popular stories will be promoted to the Yahoo homepage! Apparently a Wired story that was featured on the Yahoo.com homepage received 2 million unique visitors within 2 hours.

Yahoo will rotate stories that make the homepage and hopefully will be monitoring the traffic they send otherwise small sites will crash very quickly.

Having had a website hacked in the last few weeks and knowing a few other people who had sites hacked this issue has been playing on my mind.

Countless blogs and personal sites are being edited my malicious hackers every day to include hidden links to unscrupulous websites. The aim of adding these hidden links is that the sites they link to will end up ranking highly on the search engines and sometimes it works very well.

The consequences are that often the hacked site gets a penalty or malware warning on Google and sometimes the owner doesn’t ever figure it out.

My worry is that the people doing the hacking are often classed as SEO’s because they are engaged in the practice of moving their websites up the search engines rankings. To me this tactic is nothing to do with SEO in the form that most people practice the strategy but as hacking becomes more widespread the issue is only going to get worse.

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