Have the forces of blackhole SEO spread beyond the reaches of Wikipedia and eBay to dig it’s claws into Twitter, as Sugarrae has asserted?

Though Rae mentioned the issue last September, SEO specialist Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl tweeted about it yesterday, together with some choice thoughts:

i mean – do you really believe that twitter links are passing NO credibility, NO juice, NO nothing…?? just like wikipedia ….riiiiiiight.

maybe implement a sandbox for new users
certain threshhold until they are trusted enough to get into a non-robots.txt directory

why not utilize robots.txt solution…instead of nofollow?
i guess nofollow in general just gets me riled up and pissed off

What would happen if twitter got rid of the nofollow on all links? How would it affect the web?

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So why’re we revisiting this issue?

Blackhole SEO is where an inherently social site like eBay or Twitter decides to shut it’s doors and stick “nofollow” tags to outgoing links. So in SEO speak, you won’t get any “link juice” or benefit to your Google PageRank from the PR you’ve built at the site.

Taking a survey, Twitter profile pages (the page that is twitter.com/[your username]) does garner pagerank over time.

A rough survey with either the Google toolbar or the search status firefox plugin yields:

Google PageRank (PR) 4

• Ian Fernando
• Miles Baker

PR 5

• Zac Johnson
• Oilman
• Shawn Collins
• Joel Comm
• Wil Reynolds
• Andrew Wee (me)
• Todd Malicoat
• Reg Saddler AKA Zaibatsu

PR 6

• Darren Rowse AKA ProBlogger
• Michael Gray AKA Graywolf
• Sam Harrelson
• Guy Kawasaki
• Jim Kukral

PR 7

• Chris Brogan
• Barack Obama

PR 8

• Twitter Home page

How do these profile pages build up PR?

It’s unlikely that many twitter users would link build to their user profile, especially since Twitter resides on a public network (ie you don’t own this piece of virtual turf). So it’s likely that these could be links might have resulted from links pointing to your profile page from other twitter users’ profiles, or high authority blogs including blogroll or blog post links to your twitter profile, etc.

If the weight of inbound links is high enough, your twitter profile will earn pagerank. If that’s the case, labelling all outgoing links from your twitter page with the “nofollow” basically tells Google (whom “nofollow” most clearly influences) that the content you’re pointing at does not merit much weight/authority/value…

So given that a PR 5 backlink or 2-way link would be beneficial, the “nofollow” tag may put a downer on twitter users perception of their value to the community, especially since the “blackhole” structure favors twitters own efforts to increase its pagerank.

Granted, there may be some logic in preventing spammers from sqeezing twitter for link juice, but a blanket “nofollow” on links within tweets and on the user profile page (use “view source” to verify the nofollow flag), puts a dampener on things.

As Todd mentions, this blanket approach could be remedied by either a temporary sandbox/holding area for new accounts, or handled via a robots.txt file.

If sites like Squidoo can be effectively managed, and pass link juice to external sites, couldn’t twitter do the same with a little additional intelligence?

If users are spending 1-2 hours each day on your site, why this continued distrust of sites that users are linking to?

If users pointing to poor quality content is an issue, couldn’t the whiz kids at Twitter use some suitable metric to filter the social scammers out?

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Followup post: “DoFollow or NoFollow: The I Can Has Backlink Dilemma“

Obviously, an auction site (or “digital marketplace” if you prefer that term, publishing blog posts about content publishers generating affiliate income is going to draw some interest.

eBay, from my experience, has taken a fairly non-supporting position towards affiliate marketers on it’s network, so seeing them point to Brian “Copyblogger” Clark’s posts is refreshing.

Except, instead of pointing at Brian’s post “Why Affiliate Marketing Will Save Free Online Content“, the eBay blog post points at his feedburner feed, the pretty obscure “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Copyblogger/~3/274785900/”

Which is one step forward by giving support for free online content, supported by affiliate marketing, but on the other hand, slaps this free online drive, by denying link juice so Brian’s blogpost will rank higher in the search engine results.

On the other hand, it could be an intern or uninformed blogger over at eBay who pulled the link off Brian’s RSS feed and simply published it on the blog. But really, if it was an oversight, shouldn’t a company which generated net income of $460 million on revenue of $2.2 billion for the 2nd quarter ended June 30, 2008, know better?

Some bloggers won’t care about search engine positions, while others (myself included) will use linkbuilding as part of our traffic generation strategy.

While it’s nice to get some referred traffic through the citation in a blog post, since bloggers are providing high quality content worth linking to, shouldn’t the aggregator give a direct, followed link to their source too?

In the journalism world, we’ve a standing practise to cite source and give credit and attribution when using an expert source. Although recent talks with Michael Gray AKA GrayWolf, seems to indicate that it’s a whole new ballgame when you’ll look at the online world.

What do you think?

What is Blackhole SEO anyway?

As described by BlueHat SEO Eli, it’s where link authority AKA ‘link juice’ is trapped within a site and the outgoing link authority is severely capped or restricted altogether.

In layman’s language, it’s a site which happily accepts your backlinks, but holds back the goods when it comes to linking out to other sites.

The consequence? You’ll rank lower in Google’s search results and these blackhole SEO sites will bubble up to the top or get more firmly entrenched, if they are already there.

Blackhole SEO is achieved by the use of “no follow” tags or by directing links to an internal page, like a resources, reference, glossary or database/encyclopedia page like the TechCrunch Crunchbase.

The blackhole sucks linkjuice and doesn’t send much, if any, of it out.

Among the named suspects – the New York Times, TechCrunch and Wikipedia.

What does this mean for internet marketers?

Offsite SEO efforts will be restricted by these blackhole practises and has Seer Interactive’s Adam Melson’s wondering if Facebook is stealing your hard-earned earnings?

Likewise, Quadzilla defines a black hole and gives you some ideas for rolling your own blackhole.

Unsure of whether to try to beat them or join them? Aaron Wall lists the pros and cons of blackhole SEO.

In the final analysis, you might be wondering about the implication of being able to build link authority for your own sites, especially as more high authority/high trustrank sites start implementing this insidious site structure into their business operating model.

For user content generated sites like Wikipedia, will there be as great an incentive to provide quality content if you will be denied a linkback to your site?

The situation is far from being resolved, but the wave of discontent is certainly starting to build.

Stay tuned for more developments.

While I won’t go as far as to call BlogHer founders Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort Page and Jory Des Jardins “evil and sexist pigs”, it’s worth looking at whether Michael is justified in his accusations.

I took a look at the BlogHer 08 brochure, a massive 50-page PDF including the conference schedule and speaker profiles and the lack of male speakers stood out.

Is it wrong for an event to exclude male speakers?

I guess it would be easy for conference organizers to point to speaker submissions or to a speaker email link and say that they’re opening the doors to male presenters. It’s another thing to go out and proactively seek out and invite qualified presenters outside of your normal demographic (eg: mommyblogger, seo experts, ppc specialist, daddy bloggers, etc).

A community only grows when it’s challenged. We could go to events like Affiliate Summit and listen to people within the industry get on the stage and continually pat our backs and tell us what a kickbutt job we’re doing and posting 100% growth rates on pretty powerpoint presentations.

It’s another thing to take a visionary like Shawn Collins to invite a controversial speaker like Jason Calacanis (known for starting incendiary comments) to present the keynote at Affiliate Summit West earlier this year.

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While BlogHer is a newer event having only been around since 2005, going out to proactively invite speakers who are vastly different from the mommyblogger profile (I would imagine they’re mainly middle class, college/university educated) to expand the mind and more importantly get new ideas.

If steps to grow the event aren’t actively taken, it could just become a MommyBlogger-targeted BFF (best friends forever) type networking event with ‘rah-rah’ presentations included.

While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the practice, I feel that it sets up expectations that the blogger or website owner will have to deliver on once the visitor lands on your page.

If you can keep your readers happy, you’ve laid the foundation for a successful and low cost (possibly free) traffic generation model.

The sad reality is that more than 90% of the sites using such techniques have average (and usually sub-standard) poor content.

At best, this is gimmicky in my opinion and best used for one-off, throwaway adsense-oriented traffic.

But if you’re a serious Internet Marketer in this for the long haul, you’d do much better to build your brand, which means either using your photograph, or an image which represents your online presence.

Iconic Avatars: Michael “GrayWolf” Gray, Jim Kukral, Rasheed Ali, Robyn Tippins, Todd “StuntDubl” Malicoat, Shawn Collins, Chris “Drinkbait” Hooley, Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.

Credibility and reputation are essential to your long term success, and being consistent in your online branding build rapport with your visitors. Consistent branding will bring you intangible returns in the way of joint ventures which will net you much more than merely driving traffic to an adsense-optimized site.

I don’t know about you, but it would be difficult to take some aspiring marketer who uses a Hooters girl as his icon, seriously, much less consider a joint venture.

• SEO/SEM

TropicalSEO gives you the lowdown on linkbuilding services and a couple of recommendations. Is TrustRank the new PageRank? Read his post and see.

Check out:
–> The Very Best Link Baiting Services

• Blogging

Hit a plateau in your blogging efforts?

Yaro Starak has analyzed ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s path to blogdom and provide some insight that blogging can be a pathway to greater things.

Check out:
–> The Advantages Top Bloggers Have That You Don’t

• Affiliate Marketing

Super Affiliate Ros Gardner bumps her adsense earnings up 5 times and shows the changes she made to achieve that. And yes, you get to see the social proof too.
Check out:
–> Adsense Earnings Up by 512% in December

• Social Traffic

Michael Gray AKA Graywolf’s embarked on a campaign to hit the top 50 communities on MyBlogLog. Will it bring more traffic? Not according to Stefan Juhl.

Bring Michael one step closer to his goal by joining the GrayWolf community.
While you’re there, you might want to join my Andrew Wee MBL profile if you haven’t done so already.

Check out the original post at:
–> MyBlogLog Shameless Whore

Far from dying, there’s a resurgence in blogging, judging by the flow of private equity and growth of blog networks.

Just look at the nearly 1,200 submissions for the Round 5 submissions for the 9rules Blog Network or check the stats at the Blog Network List. Darren Rowse’s b5media blog network got a nice chunk of capital funding too.

2007 will see a further evolution of blogging as we know it.

Perhaps ‘blogging’ (a truncation of weblog) may evolve as a term to fully encompass what it represents.

Here’re 4 trends I see this year.

• Offline to Online Content Migration

Even without Amazon and Google’s efforts to digitize content for the Internet, a multitude of content publishers are bringing more content online every day.

Besides info portals, such as About.com and Wikipedia, individuals bloggers are blogging about their pet topics.

Aside from quoting online news sources, bloggers often cite print media, cable television, movies and other old line media (I guess this year someone will start call it media 1.0?). During this process, it’s inevitable that more content will migrate from a paper-based medium to an electronic one.

It only means that the online will will only continue to get more info-rich.

At the same time, it also means that third world countries where dial-up Internet connections (remember those?) at speeds of 28.8 kbps (that’s kilobits, not megabits) will only get further stratified by the digital divide.
Beyond food, water and shelter, the info-rich online environment will provide an opportunity to accelerate progress in the developing world.

• Blog Income Monetization Opportunities Increase

Bloggers increasingly have a number of options to generate income from their blogs.

Options like Google Adsense publishing, paid content posting (from the likes of PayPerPost), banners and text links, affiliate marketing and CPA networks, provide options for bloggers to go beyond just posting on a ‘passion’ (ie unpaid) basis to considering blogging as an alternative to a 9-to-5 job.

For newer bloggers however, it will take some time before they get their rhythmn going.

And I’d still advice newer bloggers to build up good content and develop a following before cramming as much adsense and banners on your blogs.

These monetization strategies generally require planning to create quality content, effectively publicize your blog, generate sufficient viewership and readership numbers, to successfully create a decent income from your blogging efforts.

Most bloggers will be able to generable a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand dollars worth of blogging-related income once they learn the ropes. But to step up to the next level of a professional blogger, it’ll require effective blogging strategies. (For which I’m currently developing products to address those needs).

• Blogging Goes The Rich Media Route

Perhaps it’s due to it’s traditional association with maintaining an online diary, but blogging still remains very text-based. You might sometimes get the occassional graphic or photo accompanying the posts.

To date, the number of blogs with audio or video still remains quite low. In fact, a number of blog directories have dropped the vlog (or video blog) category altogether this year, due to underwhelming demand.

Attaching a video from YouTube can sometimes be a bugbear (even if it’s as simple as pasting HTML code into your blog).

Plus, you’ve probably encountered the ‘bandwidth traffic jam’ which hits many of these video hosting sites at peak hours.
In the coming year, we might see more Internet bandwidth expanding as Internet Service Providers buy bigger chunks of bandwidth, and increase bandwidth to the video service providers.

We might even see new video caching services available which will help ease the video bandwidth bottleneck.

As for the immediate future, podcasting looks like it has the next lowest barrier of entry, especially as bloggers become more adept at audio applications like Audacity.

Looking for inspiration? Check out Webmaster Radio

• RSS Goes Mainstream

Email went mainstream approximately in the mid 1990s, when email addresses started appearing on business cards, despite the fact that email has been around since the 1960s.

The predecessors to RSS (really simple syndication) were developed in the mid-1990s. And although push-type services like BackWeb and Pointcast were a little ahead of the curve, bloggers are among the early adopters of RSS services.

To date most casual Internet surfers have no idea what RSS is, much less how to subscribe to a RSS feed. (You could’ve included me in that category about half a year ago).

Added to that is the fact that RSS readers tended to be web-based or required third party applications to access. Which makes RSS a mess for most net surfers to get into.

Will 2007 be the year that RSS readers become more user friendly? (I still have problems successfully subscribing to Atom and RSS feeds sometimes)

Here’s a thought, if all email clients supported RSS feeds and even better, RSS appeared as almost indistinguishable from email, wouldn’t we see widespread adoption of RSS?

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The Blogging Predictions 2007 meme

Those were my blogging predictions for 2007 and I intended to launch an Internet meme off this post.

(check out the classic Leeroy Jenkins World of Warcraft Internet meme. Avoid if you’re offended by gamer vulgarity)

Here’s the meme topic: What’re your Blogging Predictions in 2007? (Include your top prediction or a selection of your expected trends)

How to play:

1. Blog about the meme topic
2. Include a trackback to this post at: –> Blog Predictions 2007 Meme Trackback
3. Pass it on to another 5 bloggers.

Come back here and check out the trackbacks for the link madness. What better way to start out 2007, eh?
To kick things off, I’ll send this to a selection of 20 blogs:

1. 9rules Network Official Blog
2. Darren Rowse AKA Problogger
3. Yaro Starak – Entrepreneur’s Journey
4. Apogee Weblog
5. Rachit Dayal
6. Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney
7. Andrea Schoemaker AKA PlanetAndrea
8. Neil Patel
9. RumblePup
10. Robyn Tippins AKA Sleepyblogger
11. Chris Hooley – ThinkBait
12. Michael Gray – Graywolf
13. Andy Beard
14. Scott Jangro
15. Kevin Nair
16. Shawn Collins
17. Steven Wong
18. Gobala Krishnan
19. Rashenbo
20. Dazzling Girl

And lest I forget, the TickMe bloggers crew:

which includes fellow 9ruler Cameron Olthuis

hmm…this is almost too much work for the new year…

PS: If you’d like to play, do your own meme post and trackback to: Internet meme trackback

PPS: Meme project updates can be found at: Blogging Meme Reloaded

It looks like Scott Jango might be on to starting something viral with his post: Have You Got An Affiliate Marketing Blog?

As you’re expect, the big guns of Affiliate Marketing: Ros Gardner, Shoemoney, Linda Buquet, Shawn Collins, Kris Jones, are already on the list, though I’d expect it’s just a matter of time before the likes of Ewen Chia, PlanetAndrea and Jon F appear too.

I’m lucky I didn’t do a trackback to these guys. It would’ve been pretty cheap…
Who knows, I might’ve fired a backlink at Chris Hooley, GrayWolf, Neil Patel, or even one of those crazy guys like TofuMonkey.

Who knows what might’ve happened next?

Oops.

Oh gosh.

Oh well.

I’d have shot the link into the Affiliate Marketing TickMe group (with 67 members. Yes, you need to be a member to see the group. And yes, I spawned the group). But Dave Naylor hasn’t implemented a forum/bulletin board function yet, so I can’t easily announce it to the group members.

Yes, go ahead and petition give feedback to DaveN in the comments area at: TickMe – New Social Networking Site

PS: If you feel that I’ve succeeded in creating the LinkBait Post of the Year, please let me know in the comments below.

If you don’t feel so, it only means I’ve failed.

PPS: Here’s Scott Jangro’s Affiliate Blog Directory