Calm down – I know your heart is probably pounding like crazy right now, especially if you are working on your own blog which focuses on SEO. I felt the same way when I started reading Lee Odden’s post about Wordpress labeling SEO blogs as “banned .” Reading on, however, it was made clear that Wordpress is pertaining to blogs which are search engine optimized in a “bad” way and not blogs which talk about SEO – much like this blog.

These are the blogs which Wordpress specifically bans:

• Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it’s gone!
• SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.
• Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (”Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category.
• Warez blogs: Blogs that promote pirated copies of ebooks, software packages, music, movies, games, etc.

I suppose that Wordpress could word the classification tags in a more specific way so as to avoid confusion and reactions like I felt when I first read the post. Still, we should not overreact as we know very well that blogs such as this one do not fall under any of these categories.

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For many people, it used to be that Flickr was perfect for SEO purposes. However, when Flickr suddenly made use of nofollow tags to comments and picture captions, it seemed that the bomb dropped on these people. Naturally, negative reactions erupted all over the web because of this action – which took place around last week, by the way. If you have not heard of this, don’t get immediately swayed by the prevailing opinion – that Flickr is now useless for SEO. I ran across a post on this issue, which provided me with a better perspective of the whole she-bang. Will Paoletto at BigOak Blog shares:

1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.

2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.

3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.

So there you go – you still have three areas wherein you can work your SEO magic. What do you think?

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And I thought that many SEO experts were leaning towards keeping silent about their expertise! (Remember my post on silence being the key?) Well, if I were to judge by the actions of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, I would say that there are SEO experts out there who would like nothing more than to help people out in their quest to learn more about SEO techniques.

He came up with a plug-in for Wordpress that would display SEO tips. The whole idea stemmed from the default plug-in “Hello Dolly.” I am sure Wordpress users know about this – every time you log in to your Wordpress account, you will see random phrases from the lyrics of the song “Hello Dolly.” Van Zanten decided to play around with it and have it display SEO tips instead – much more useful, I should say.

So how did he come up with the SEO tips? He sent out an appeal to everyone to send in their SEO tips and, according to him, within 30 minutes, he was able to receive hundreds of SEO tips from other SEO experts! Talk about selfless sharing here, huh? These contributors even went as far as to help Van Zanten collect and fine tune the submitted tips. Now, with the plug-in anyone can view the tips anytime they want on their very own blog.

The best thing is that the plug-in is for free! You only have to download the plug-in from Van Zanten’s blog and you are good to go.

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This year, those of us interested in search marketing in general can look forward to several events sponsored by Third Door Media. The Search Marketing Expo will be held in different locations through out the year, the soonest of which is the Search Marketing Expo West which is to be held from the 26th to the 28th of February at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California.

An array of topics is going to be highlighted, including organic search optimization. Here are previews of the three keynotes that will be presented in the conference:

Program chair and SearchEngineLand Editor-In-Chief Danny Sullivan will kick off SMX West on February 26 with “Search 3.0, Search 4.0 and Beyond.” He’ll discuss the implications of blended search (Search 3.0), personalized and social search (Search 4.0), and what’s next for search and search marketing technologies.

Participants will also get some hints about new search technologies in the works at Cuill, a stealth search start-up with former Googlers as founders. During the February 27 keynote conversation, Cuill Vice president of products Louis Monier will describe efforts at Cuill to set new standards in search, in addition to providing perspective on developments in the field.

The day-three keynote will be “Generation Next: Search In The Coming Decade”, a panel discussion with luminaries from the major search engines predicting where they see search headed. This session will be moderated by SearchEngineLand’s Chris Sherman and SEMPO Chairperson Gord Hotchkiss.

For more particulars about the SMX West, visit their site. Alternatively, you can look at more information on the different SMX events in other places.

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Google Labs is experimenting with a voting system for their search result pages.

From the official page:
“This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.”

Basically, when you type in a search phrase, you’ll automatically have the option to “vote” for results that you like better. Clicking on the arrow button for a result means that you “like it”, thus moving the marked result at the top of the page (it is indicated with an orange asterisk as shown in the picture on the left). If you “don’t like” a result, you can click the X button and you won’t see that particular result when you use the same search phrase again.

This feature is currently in its experimental stage, so the Google gods only know how long it will be available and what aspects of this project will be permanently incorporated into the search engine.

If implemented, what does this mean for SEO?

Here are some things you should think about before you redo your entire SEO strategy for the sake of this new feature:

• It’s still experimental. This means that this feature could only be temporary, or that it isn’t in its final version yet. What Google finally ends up with might surprise you, so while you may speculate endlessly, plan for several possible scenarios and implement your new tactics only when the feature is made permanent.
• This is only available to users with Google accounts. Even then, not all people with Google accounts are logged in when they perform regular searches. Also, if these Gmail statistics are any indication of the numbers and demographics of Google account holders, you’ll see that they don’t have the biggest market share overall. Plus, their demographics compose of people aged 18-34 , tech-savvy, and have a relatively higher income than the average Yahoo or Hotmail user. If this isn’t your market, you needn’t be too concerned. Here are some other interesting statistics.
• There’s no social networking aspect. I’ve seen other blogs compare this feature to Digg, but that’s a bit misleading. It’s a similar voting system, yes, but it’s private. There isn’t any hint of social networking - yet. Only you can see your personalized results, and, as far as I can tell, there’s no way for you to broadcast your votes through your Google account.
• People might still figure out a way to exploit this for SEO purposes. I’m not sure how to do this yet, because the customized search results are private, but I’m sure some SEO genius out there will find some flaw in Google’s voting system.
• Creating well-maintained, unique sites with great content is still the way to go if you want more stable long term success. Happy end users and a strong readership is what makes websites successful in the long run. This is something that many website publishers and search engines agree with.

What are your thoughts on Google’s voting system? Have any of you tried it? Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

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Just last Thursday, Google decided to drop the PR of selected PayPerPost blogs to zero.  PayPerPost also acquired insider information that other similar networks will be affected.  Here’s an excerpt from Ted Murphy’s post at the IZEA community blog:

We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks “bob”) that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost,ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.

At one point in the post, Murphy criticizes Google for not taking out on blogs like TechCrunch .  Of course, TechCrunch responds here.  But what really caught my eye was this part of their reply:

I can’t see a lot of bloggers being happy with losing Pagerank so we should see an exodus of bloggers out of PayPerPost (particularly ones with traffic) over the next few months. This will leave PayPerPost with inventory deficiencies that will result in diminished revenues making the PayPerPost business model unsustainable going forward.

 So what should the average blogger do?

If you read my post on the previous Google PR update, you’ll see that I’m a big fan of marching to your own drum rather than following Google’s because you’re afraid to lose PR.  Doing so has yielded positive results for some bloggers, like that guy who made $1500 out of the last PR update.

Don’t move out of PayPerPost immediately.  That is, if it’s been working well for you.  Some scared bloggers might move out, and if the number of advertisers doesn’t drop, you’ll have less to compete with. Wait it out a little, unless Google PR is something incredibly valuable to you.

Alternatively, you can sell paid posts (or links, for that matter) independently.  You don’t have to be part of a network like PayPerPost to do that.  The disadvantage is that you won’t be easily accessible to advertisers as you would be in the PayPerPost (or any advertising) network.  This means more work for you, especially if you’re going to be sneaky about it.

Instead of Google PageRank, use alternative statistics to measure the worth of your blog to advertisers.  There are other ways you can show this, like disclosing unique pageviews, RSS subscribers, etc.  Some people use figures from Alexa, but doing so is as accurate as a monkey counting bananas with a calculator.  Izea is coming up with RealRank, which should be interesting because the formulae, etc. will be disclosed publicly.

John Chow also wrote a post about how to sell links in a Nazi Google controlled internet.  Something you should check out, especially if you use Text Link Ads.

Any PayPerPost users among our readers?  What do you have to say about this issue?

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In my previous post, I talked about the “What now?” aspect of the most recent Google PR update. Many popular bloggers ended up on the losing end.

If there were losers, there were also winners. And I’m not talking about Google.

An anonymous Problogger reader earned at least $1500 because of the PR update. (Click here for more details)

Basically, it’s the laws of supply and demand coming into play. Most of the blogs were scared off by the result of the PR update and stopped selling text link ads altogether, but the number of people who want to buy these ads are still relatively the same. Here’s a quote from the guy’s email:

1. About 50% of the blogs in my niche that used to sell text links have stopped doing so.
2. I’ve had about a 50% increase in demand for text link purchases in the last week.
3. I have had an increase in the number of private text link sales this week.
4. The amounts advertisers are willing to pay me have gone up.

See? Sometimes, not bowing to the big G pays off

Since Google just picked the top earners or the most popular blogs selling text links, the guys directly beneath them, those with roughly the same PR, but maybe not as much popularity or clout, are going to benefit big time - if they take the chance.

Of course, it’s going to turn into some kind of vicious cycle if Google decides to strike again. The new “Big Players” will be punished, some small fry will be scared, and others will benefit from the big guys taking the heat. Then, text link ads will be mostly sold underground and will be a market that Google can’t measure or control.

Any readers out there who was on the winning end of this PR update? Feel free to share your stories, please

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This week, several popular blogs reported a significant decrease in their PageRank after the recent Google PageRank update.  At first, the entire blogosphere was confused about what caused this drop, until it became apparent that selling paid text links on your website can hurt your PR.  It’s certainly no surprise, since Matt Cutts has been saying since June that Google thinks link buying is outside their guidelines and that “we might take strong actions on that in the future”.

Well now they have.  It took a while, but the confirmation about this update was eventually released.

So what’s been the over