Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

“Sculpting Pagerank” is basically using the “nofollow” attribute in a link to tell Google (and whatever other search engines that recognise and honour the nofollow attribute) not to follow a link. Basically, as a webmaster, you can say to Google, “I’m not endorsing or voting for this page so disregard this link”.

Originally “nofollow” was introduced to combat blog spam, but smart webmasters like Leslie Rhode and Michael Campbell had been using javascript combinations before nofollow was invented to create links that search engine’s couldn’t follow.

Why?

Simply to prevent PageRank going to “useless” pages like their “privacy policy” or their “disclaimer” or their “terms of service”. After all, if you’re building a website about “cellphone batteries”, you don’t want your “legaleze” pages ranking well because they have nothing to do with what your website content is about… so if you can distribute Pagerank more effectively to your content pages, you’ll have a better chance of getting them to rank highly in the search engines. (of course, humans can still click on the links to the legaleze pages)

The argument against using “nofollow” for the purpose of managing Pagerank burst out into the open again recently when Adam Audette said, “Don’t waste time worrying about sculpting internal links.”

I’m sorry, but I beg to disagree. It’s very quick and easy to “nofollow” links to your privacy pages, TOS and disclaimer… and if all of your site’s pages point to those “legaleze” pages, by adding nofollow to the links you’ll save a lot of wasted Pagerank. Often, because of the number of links, those pages can be some of the highest ranking pages on a website, which is totally pointless for the webmaster and Google.

What do you think? Do you use “nofollow”?

There was a PageRank jiggle recently… it didn’t seem to drop many bombs and passed quite quietly.

Soon after the PageRank jiggle, I got an interesting email…

—
Hi Neil,

I used Real Link Finder for about 30 minutes a day for a week or so when it came out. I posted relevant comments at related blogs and, I might add, enjoyed it thoroughly - discovering many new blogs and opinions in the process. This was a couple of months ago.

Today I was delighted to discover that my blog had gone from a Google PageRank of 0 straight to PageRank 5! That’s on a 6 month-old personal blog with absolutely no other promotion or link-building at all - seriously impressive results. Imagine what would be achievable with serious sustained effort using RLF!

I can’t recommend this simple powerful tool enough and wanted to personally thank you for making it available for free.

Kind regards,
Alex Poole
—

It’s always nice to get a testimonial… but it was also the first hint that something interesting was happening.

I asked Alex how he thought he got the PR5 and he said that, during his link building efforts, he got a few links from a PR6 blog, and he expected those links “to fade as new posts come out”. That was my first clue.

My second clue came from my Articles site, which was chugging along at 2,000 visitors per day. After the PageRank jiggle, the traffic dropped.

I thought I’d better start building some links into the site again because I hadn’t done any link building for a while.

My third clue came today, from Mike Liebner who wrote in his “Words Into Money” newsletter, “You need fresh links! Today and in the future“.

Ok, now I’m starting to see a pattern… “fading” PageRank from older blog posts, a site with “falling” PageRank and traffic because it didn’t get any recent links, and Mike saying you need “fresh” links.

So… here’s my theory…

1: Google loves quality sites.
2: Quality sites get links naturally, and they get more over time.
3: Google may have some kind of “PageRank Decay” where low value links expire over time.

This “PageRank Decay” would benefit Google, because if your site is getting low-quality links, and the PageRank of those links decays over time, you either have to always build more links, or give up.

Webmasters who are trying to manipulate Google will most likely be getting low-quality links. If they spend time building links, they’ll get traffic, but only for a while… unless other sites start linking to them naturally. If they don’t get any new links for a while, their traffic will fall.

On the other hand, if you build a quality resource that other webmasters choose to link to, your sites will maintain, or even improve, their search engine rankings naturally.

I’m guessing that Google only applies PageRank decay to low-value PageRank links. Presumably, the age of a link from a top-quality website would not affect its value. I would imagine that anyone who had a site good enough to get a link from a PR8 or higher site would not see the value of that link dwindle to nothing in six month’s time. Sites with PageRank8 or higher would thereby form a “backbone” of quality, trusted sites from which PageRank would flow to lesser sites.

What do you think? Do you have more evidence for PageRank decay?

The bottom line is that, if you accept PageRank Decay exists then anyone who works really hard to build “low value” links into their sites will have to keep working hard just to maintain their traffic.

PageRank Decay is like a hamster wheel for webmasters who build sites that don’t get natural links.

Dave And Heidi Perry at Home Business Online are having a sale to celebrate reaching PR5.

They say it’s hard to reach PR5 nowadays. Tell me about it. This blog has been stuck at PR4 forever, and I’m starting to think I may have to actually promote it to get to PR5! :p

Congratulations to Dave and Heidi, whose names I recognise as “old school” marketers… although I’m not totally sure why… perhaps they bought ads in my old newsletter or are members of my affiliate program.

So, the deal with their sale is… if you buy one or more of the product they’re selling (from as little as $5) you also get two nice backlinks.

Cool. I just picked up a couple of products and have claimed my links.

I’m really excited to announce the launch of my “Real Link Finder” software.

It finds “on topic” blog posts where you can make comments and leave “Real” links back to your website… links that counts for link popularity and PageRank.

The reason I call it “Next Generation” is that the software only returns blog posts that already have comments but don’t use “nofollow”.

(”Nofollow” means that any links you leave in comments at the blog won’t pass PageRank. By searching for blog posts that already have comments, and then throwing out the ones that use “nofollow”, Real Link Finder gives you cleaner results than other blog commenting software)

More links = Better search engine rankings = More traffic for you!

And the best part? It’s 100% free. No strings. No painful signup process.

To get your copy of this advanced blog commenting software, click here!

I always liked that little “number of pages indexed” at the bottom of the Google homepage… back in the days when they were competing with Inktomi (now Yahoo) and Altavista (now, err, part of Overture, which is part of Yahoo) to have the largest index. I guess now the competition includes Microsoft. Back then, it didn’t!

I was wondering how big Google’s index is now. I found a page saying that the specific search query, *-”a yielded 17,960,000,000. The page is dated December 2006.

So I tried the same search query today and got 11,900,000,000 results.

Does that mean Google has kicked out six billion pages from its index? That’s almost exactly a third!

(Using the *.* search used to return 25 billion documents, but that search no longer works, so it can’t be used in a comparison.)

A shrinking index would account for the recent decreases in PageRank that people have been seeing… if the index has shrunk by 1/3rd, then there’s less PageRank to go around.

Google still claim to have an index, “more than three times larger than that of any other search engine“. Can that still be true if their index is shrinking?

I’ve just finished polishing my new site… PRCashRank. Check it out.

If you’ve ever wanted to know how much your website was worth, but knew that a domain name valuation was pretty much pointless, you should enjoy the free website valuation service at PRCashRank.

Instead of relying on spurious domain name valuations, or the number of pages indexed by Google, it actually calculates the value of your site based on the PageRank of your individual pages.

I think it’s quite nifty. What do you think?

Ok, this is slightly old news, but I just found out about it.

If your pages in the Google index didn’t have much PageRank juice, they were shunted to the Supplemental Results Index. Being in the supplemental index wasn’t a penalty, as such, it just meant that Google didn’t consider your page to be important enough for their main index. A lot of people who were worried about the “duplicate content filter” were concerned that the supplemental index was a Google “dumping ground” for their pages… even though a “duplicate content filter” doesn’t exist.

Google still showed pages from the supplemental index in the search results… if they couldn’t find enough results from the main index. So if someone searched for “italian pink bamboo shoots” and yours was the only page matching that search query, your page would be shown as the only result… even if it was a page in the supplemental index.

So, the supplemental index was nothing to get worked up about… apart from the fact that Google was effectively letting you know that your pages in the supplemental index needed either more original content or more inbound links if you wanted those pages to get into the main index.

All well and good. Until Google removed the “supplemental index” notice when returning results from the supplemental index.

Google said, “Google’s technology has improved over time, and now we’re able to crawl and index sites with greater frequency. With our entire web index fresher and more up to date, the “Supplemental Results” label outlived its usefulness.

For webmasters who have used the supplemental result label as a diagnostic aid, Google encourages the use of our Webmaster Tools and also our Analytics service. These free services can provide you with insight into those pages that users and Google may find less relevant.”

Anyone else think that smells fishy? We all know that Google crawls higher PageRank pages more often. So they must crawl lower PageRank pages less often. But according to them, they now crawl everything so frequently that there’s no need for a supplemental results index. Hmmm. What about all the oodles of duplicate content? Won’t those pages still be in a supplemental results index? I would expect so… all except the most “relevant” page… but now you just won’t know.

Also, saying that “These free services can provide you with insight into those pages that users and Google may find less relevant.” is a bit nonsensical. Just install the Google toolbar and the PageRank indicator will tell you how “relevant” the page is to Google… and hence also to its “users” because Google determines what the “users” see by primarily ordering the results according to PageRank.

Well, webmasters kicked up a fuss. You can read their replies here. What do you think?

Update: There’s more recent info from Google here. Apparently, everything Google indexes is now in one big, ahem, index. Cue lots of slapping themselves on the back, and lots of headscratching and “so what’s” from everyone else.

No, I haven’t gone mad.

If you want more traffic, increase your Trulevance.

I bet you want to know what Trulevance is now, right?

OK, I’ll spill the beans…

Trulevance is a contraction of Trust and Relevance.

Let’s break that down a bit…

Your pages need to be Trusted before they’ll get traffic. The best example of trust is Pagerank. But Pagerank can be manipulated. See the last blog post where Dr Andy agreed with me that links from article directories are now less valuable. Buying and selling PageRank is frowned upon by Google. So how can Google fight back and make sure that Pagerank maintains its integrity? Simple. It downgrades the value of links from low-PR pages, and boosts the value from high PR pages. If you’re outside the “highPR clique”, tough luck… your pages aren’t trusted. If you’re inside the “HighPR clique” congratulations… you can expect a ton of traffic. (ever typed anything into Google and NOT seen a Wikipedia.com page in the results? I thought not).

How else can Google determine trust? Well, what about the age of a domain name? If the site has been around for a decade and not changed ownership or overall content, you can imagine Google would trust it more than a fly-by-night site which pops up, gets a few links and disappears. A lot of people call this the Google Sandbox, where they don’t trust new sites that don’t have good backlinks but I expect it’s more like a fine wine getting better with age. First you have to escape the sandbox, but then your site may get awarded positive points for the length of time online with the same content and overall theme. The longer your site has been online, the better. I have sites from 1997, 1998 and 1999. I know a thing or two about old domains.

Have you noticed how difficult trust is to achieve? You can’t fake the age of your domain… and if you buy an old domain, Google will know about the change at the registrar (because Google IS a registrar)… and even if they don’t pay attention to that, they will notice if you upload your content and the site changes. You also can’t easily get very high PageRank links. This is exactly what Google wants.

The second part of “Trulevance” comes from Relevance. Put simply, this is a combined measure of your off-page reputation, your on-page content and how they match up. If sites around the Internet point to your page as a place for “cookies”, but your page doesn’t mention “cookies” anywhere, you’re going to find it harder to rank for the keywords your page is targetting. If your page is about the Ascari KZ1 supercar, but all the links to your page say “cookies”, Google will see the disconnect and write off your page as irrelevant. Incidentally, this is what happens when you buy an old domain hoping to put your content on it and get an instant ranking boost… there will be a disconnect between all the links pointing to your domain and what your content is about. Whoops. Bye-Bye Relevance.

Off-page reputation mainly refers to the anchor text within links pointing to your site, and the content of the Title tags of those pages. On-page content is what your page is seen to be about… its topic or subject… which is decided by the page title, bold words, headlines, the domain name and words in the URL as well as all the words on the page acting in concert to give your page a subject. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) helps decide what your on-page subject is by checking words on the page against other words it would expect to find from other indexed pages on the same subject… for example, is your page about Apple Computers or Apple Pie… finding the words crust, sugar and oven would indicate the latter.

When the off-page reputation agrees with the on-page content, you get “Relevance”. When you combine Trust with Relevance you get Trulevance… which means Google loves you and you’ll get tons of traffic!

Check out my blog post on “The Truth Behind The Big PageRank Slap” from Nov 7th.

While everyone and his dog was saying the slap was all about penalizing sites that were selling links, I said, “I also believe they hit “article directory” sites and downgraded their outbound links too.”

And what do we see in Dr Andy Williams’ latest newsletter?

“As I looked at more and more examples, I came to the conclusion that links from article sites are not worth the same “value” as they once were“.

Remember… you heard it here first!

Andy has some good tips on how article submissions can still generate traffic and useful links… check them out here.

I regularly get emails from people asking to buy text links at http://www.ScamFreeZone.com .

Why?

Perhaps because it’s been around since 1997. Perhaps because it was once PR7 (for a short time). Perhaps because it ranked very highly for “home business”, “home business opportunities” and even “business opportunities” in the past. It probably still ranks highly for less competitive phrases. Perhaps because I have very few links on the page, so each link carries quite a bit of PageRank.

I don’t know.

Nor do I care.

I’m not selling links.

Go and build your own PageRank.

Recently Google updated the PageRank ratings for websites and a lot of sites saw their PageRank plummet. Many webmasters have speculated that Google “slapped” sites who were selling links for the purposes of passing PageRank… but does that theory stand up?

Let’s look at it from Google’s point of view…

If I were Google and I didn’t want sites selling links that passed PageRank, I would do three things…

1: Encourage any sites selling links to use the “nofollow” attribute as part of the link. Making this suggestion places the emphasis on the *site owner* to comply with Google, which naturally saves Google a lot of time and effort. Perhaps “model” sites like this would get a small ranking boost…

2: Modify my algorithm to identify and downgrade any links that appear to be links purchased for PageRank. Sites who display “Sponsored links”, “Advertiser content”, “Ads” etc can be used to identify patterns in ad location and content. Any patterns identified can be fed into the algorithm and used to locate sites who are selling ads but *not* disclosing the fact to their visitors. If those links don’t contain the “nofollow” tag, then the site is selling links that pass PageRank.

I would then ignore those links for PageRank calculations… especially if they are to sites whose content isn’t related to the content of the page where the link is found.

At his blog, Matt Cutts said Google could detect paid links…

“Google has a variety of algorithmic methods of detecting such links, and they work pretty well.”

… then he gave an example …

“when dailycal.org is selling links to casinos or other link buyers, we prefer not to trust those links.”

… and finally Matt refers to “an email from a “text link broker” that included this suggestion:

Most people use words like, SPONSORS, PARTNERS, FEATURED, ADVERTISERS, ADS and other synonymous terms related to advertisers. Our suggestion is to use ‘different’ titles for these ads. Something like RELATED SITES, COOL SITES, RESOURCES, ALTERNATIVE LINKS and so on.

The email later suggests “to use unique locations for ad links like within content.”

To which Matt says… “I wouldn’t be surprised if search engines begin to take stronger action against link buying in the near future.” Matt Cutts Blog, September 2005.

Not surprisingly, that comment now seems quite prophetic.

3: Downgrade the whole PageRank system. If selling anything up to a PageRank 3 or 4 link was not worth the effort, downgrading all sites by a few PageRank notches would make the business of selling Pagerank disappear almost overnight. All Google would have to to is increase the stratification of the PageRank system… so that more sites are in the lower ranks, and the selling of PageRank would decline substantially. Of course, downgrading Pagerank across the board would just mean that a PR5 page may be equivalent to an “old” PR7 page… but who’s going to want to pay the same amount of money for a “new” PR5 link compared to an “old” PR7 link? And if they buyers disappear, the business of selling PageRank links dies too.

A litmus test for this theory is whether or not your Google traffic falls with your PageRank. My tests show that it doesn’t… which would lead me to believe that the whole system was downgraded. If the loss of PageRank doesn’t affect the amount of traffic coming from Google, then the PageRank change was cosmetic.

I believe Google has done all three… they’ve told sites selling links to use “nofollow”, they’ve most likely identified advertising blocks (especially to “non-relevant” sites) and downgraded those links. They may well have downgraded the whole PageRank system to make selling PageRank links less attractive. I also believe they hit “article directory” sites and downgraded their outbound links too.

One blog comment post I found said, “Actually, if you look at it, it doesn’t seem like any sites are above 5. Maybe 5 is the new maximum.”

I think that guy spoke the truth more closely than he realized.