[This is a follow up to: Blackhole SEO: Has Googleâ€s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?]

So the sticking point in recent days (originating from discussions last year) was why Twitter nofollows links from your profile page and your tweets.

Is it because you could be potentially linking to “bad neighborhoods”? Or social spamming links like what some marketers have been doing on MySpace, Squidoo and HubPages and potentially Google Knol?

Here is the thing: the social space and social networks in particular will need some degree of human intervention/curation. That’s why Squidoo has a staff of moderators/volunteers to review lenses, article directories have human editors. The best content review algorithmn still has a couple of years to catch up with user-generated content.

So some human intervention is needed to review content.

And if users are spending 1-2 hours each day on sites like Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, shouldn’t they gain some outbound link benefit from their efforts? Your users are building a big ball of indexable content that appears in the SEs and brings customers to your social network.

Granted, there will be organic clickthrough on resource links, especially if you post great content, but I don’t understand why the nofollows are there.

Argument #1: Prevent links to bad neighborhood which could deteriorate the originating site’s authority status. -> evolving rules-based content filters + spidering destination sites + some manual review will address this.

Argument #2: Prevent PR leakage – so why aren’t you nofollowing links to Amazon Web Services? If you’re paying AWS and not users, shouldn’t you no-follow AWS and follow users?

Argument #3: Want to build up authority status and PR by keeping PR circulating with the network, using nofollows/redirects to other sites, instead of direct links and minimizing/eliminating leakage. Which is probably the worst un-social message that you’re sending out, especially in a social network context.

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Does anyone see the irony in writing a review about a new product or service then pointing to an internal page? Am I the only one who see an overall positive review being undermined by a “but I don’t trust you enough to link direct to you”.

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So it seems like there is some old school thinking when it comes to DoFollowing and NoFollowing.

And if Web 2’s big boys become the “Man” where the priority is on maxing out the analytics/stats to boost your branding/visibility/ad rates, it’s just a matter of time before users head over to another hub where users and content are a priority.

From the Cash Tactics site, Kris describes himself as a “PPC and CPA Marketer but I also deal in retail affiliate marketing and Iâ€m a product owner with my own affiliate program. I own a PPC search engine, several smaller search engines, a couple drop shipping stores, and a few other random sites.”

During our Friday Podcast discussion, we talked about:

• How Kris got started in internet marketing
• Changes and development in search engine optimization for your website
• How to optimize your website structure
• How to get started with a directory or search engine-based business
• The difference between a “thick” directory and “thin” directory

Listen to the Friday Podcast:

Check out:

• The Cash Tactics blog
• Kris’ ISearchEbook training

If you’re relying on organic traffic generation methods, especially from the search engines, there have been recent developments which may cause a change in your strategy.

Some of these include:

• The Rise of Blackhole Seo
• Changes in ranking alogorithmn like Google PageRank (a number of websites and blogs saw their PR score drop by 1 or more in recent weeks) and Alexa rankings have fluctuated greatly since the system was change a number of months ago
• Looming changes Google plans to or has implemented since as lower weightage given to directory links (thanks Wil Reynolds for the heads-up), including paid Yahoo directory submissions.

Which can be like an earthquake sending ripples through your business and earnings if you’re not prepared.

I was speaking with Geordie Carswell, former RevenueWire CEO who’s now involved with his own affiliate marketing projects and his business is thriving, despite the negative indicators about the economy.

In most cases, even with the drop from Google’s PR and dip in Alexa rankings, traffic and conversion levels still remain strong within my websites.

In almost all cases, launching a new campaign or creating a new product will more than offset any hits (real or imagined) that arose because of a change in the search engine algorithmn.

The challenge in being a successful online marketer lies in being able to adapt to change and more importantly, staying ahead of the curve.

By adding new tactics and new strategies to what you’re already doing, you can more than overcome any negatives in the present or the future.

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.

Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins recently uploaded Wil’s slides from his presentation together with other presentations and they can be access here: Affiliate Summit East 2008 presentation slides.

From his “My Favourite 5 SEO Strategies Exposed” session, one of the items Wil talked about was Google’s recent Knol, or knowledge aggregation site.

Located at Knol.google.com, the site seems like a combination of Squidoo in that users can create topic-focused resource pages, with the authority of a Wikipedia.

Knol pages have ranked prominently in Google’s results, such as Aaron Wall’s recent experiment with Search Engine Optimization.

The pages (highlighted in red above) provide opportunity for outbound links, with Wil mentioning the following factors:

And the following factors affecting Knol page ranking:

In addition Wil provides a more tips for refining your Google Knol by using Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker together with other tools like Google Trends, editing your Knol regularly and leaving it open to editing by others.

2 other SEO resources that Wil went into detail for fine tuning your SEO efforts were:

Link Diagnosis:

Link Diagnosis seems to operate on the Yahoo! Search API. During my trial with it, it seemed to take some time and the job didn’t complete. More testing due in time.

The other resource is SEOQuake, which I’ve blogged about before.

Wil goes into detail into how you can use these 2 tools in his presentation.

For more details, visit the ASE08 Presentations Download page.

If it’s anything like previous Affiliate Summits, Shawn might have the videos up in due course.

Recently, Laura has been more proactive moving from the forum management/marketing side of things to becoming a SEO evangelist of sorts.

She recently organized an Austin SEM meetup, with a presentation on local search (aka geotargeted search engine optimization).

Optimizing your website for local traffic, especially if you’re mainly a geographically-fixed business like a hair salon or ice cream parlor can pay off with big dividends regardless of whether you go down the free search engine optimization route or the paid search route.

A number of factors work in your favor:

• Highly relevant and targeted traffic since the campaigns specially target consumers with specific needs
• Generally lower bids, as the pool of advertisers is smaller (even in a metropolitan area like New York City or Los Angeles – it’s a more viable prospect compared to facing bidders all over the world)
• Higher conversion ratios
• Ease-of-followup and greater opportunities to build a continuing relationship (especially if you employ email marketing and/or direct mail in your customer relationship management efforts)

Obviously SEM/SEO is not going to be your end point, it’s merely going to be your start point to generate leads. Building the relationship and establishing trust, credibility, asking for the sale and asking for the repeat sale are going to be the bedrock of your business building efforts.

For the local SEO side, here’re some slides from Laura’s presentation:

3 formats for localized SERP (search engine results page) display:

10 Pack

Authoritative OneBox

Integrated Map

I remember getting a set of highly relevant local results when looking for a shooting range near the hotel where Affiliate Summit West was held in Las Vegas earlier this year. The localized search result with map and local landmarks give a much better user experience. If I had more time, I probably would’ve headed over to the range.

You can check out Laura’s local search slide presentation and writeup.

If you’re located near Austin TX, you might also like to sign up for Laura’s Austin SEM group.

While not going into the specific nuts-and-bolts factors influencing SERPs (or search engine results pages), Amit outlined a number of broad principles to keep in mind when optimizing your web pages.

Principle 1: “Best locally relevant results served globally”

As I’ve earlier noted, your geographic location, specifically your IP number can determine the search results returned.

Amit’s assurance that they operate on the “no query left behind” principle, meaning every user query gets the most relevant results, is yet another assertion that the “user experience” more so than the affiliate marketer, SEO or even adwords advertiser’s interest is given priority.

If you’ve been following developments (and educated guesses) in the SEO field, you’ll know that meta criteria like “time on site” and other deeper level criteria from Google Analytics (and no doubt, Google own deeper level analytics, and possibly algorithms derived from basic analytics) are being incorporated into these ranking factors.

I applaud the SEOs who’re on the leading edge in following and sometimes trying to step ahead of Google to rank higher in the SERPs. For the average internet marketer, developing a long term sustainable business model and providing original, quality, link worthy content is probably the best route for now.

Principle 2: Keep It Simple

What’s simple to a UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon comp sci major might be rocket science to the average man.

Again, the average man-in-the-street marketer is going to be hard pressed to come up with anything innovative, unless you’ve got the technical chops of a BlueHat SEO with his madlib and deeplinking strategies.

As Google has mentioned in its Quality Guidelines, using off-the-shelf software can lead to detrimental results in your rankings (disclaimer: unless you have the technical knowhow to understand the system, rather than keying in your URL and hitting the submit button).

Principle 3: No Manual Intervention

What’s interesting is that the ranking team is making about 10 changes to the algorithm each week, which accounts for the fluctuations in SERP positions (in addition to data from spider data).

Here’s the double-edged sword for marketers and business owners “Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries” – Which explains the phenomenon where a crackdown on MFA (made-for-adsense) sites also takes down legitimate sites – because of a rule-based algorithm. The “trick” is figuring out how to stay on the right side of big G and benefitting from the changes.

Which isn’t difficult if you approach building your online business just like a brick-and-mortar business – based on solid fundamentals, with a long term view and on a sustainable basis.

Going from the social marketing angle, rather than looking at it from the search engine’s point of view, I’d look for links from high trustrank sites – these would typically be authoritative blogs and websites in your niche, and the traffic will send over will be higher quality too.

One indispensable tool I have installed in my Firefox browser is the SEO Quake extension. (extension = Firefox plugin).

SEO Quake is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

When I’m at a search engine result page, SEO Quake will gather various analytics data and domain data.

For example, when combining Google Blog Search with SEO Quake:

It’s a little small, but below each search result is the number of google links, yahoo links, domain age, alexa ranking, del.icio.us links and other information is shown.

[For the actual SERP page, click here]

I wouldn’t use a single metric as a guide, but taken together a high trust site would tend to be older and have multiple backlinks for the search engines.

If you’d like to audit a blog, here is the search string at Google BlogSearch:

And if you’d like to monitor specific blogs, you can configure the Google Blog Search alerts which function in a similar manner to Google News Alerts:

SEO Quake and Blog Search is a good combination for me to measure the quality of inbound links.

If you’d prefer an alternative to SEO Quake, I know Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds likes Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox extension.

You can find the link for SEO for Firefox.

For more SEO advice, you can also check out Aaron’s SEO Book.

A contact mentioned that Google had updated Toolbar PageRank ratings last week.

I hadn’t noticed changes on my blog, but some of my content sites have done from PR3 to PR4. Fairly decent consider that they’re a little over 6 months old.

As mentioned in previous PageRank-related posts, take note that Toolbar PageRank is different from your Live PageRank which is registered at the datacenters and determine how frequently your site is indexed by the search engine spiders.

You can find out your Toolbar PageRank by installing the Google Toolbar.

But more effective than the Toolbar PR, which some would say is ‘old PR’ is the live PR, which can be accessed through the Live PR datacenter check.

Backlinks (one way links to your blog or website) determine PageRank.

If you haven’t already, the following are some of the methods to generate backlinks:

• Article Submissions
• Press Release Submissions
• Publishing RSS feeds
• Participating in blogging competitions

For new Internet Marketers, starting a blog might be an easier prospect.

But if you’d prefer to focus on site design and your concept, you can consider buying a high PR text link from a website in a related niche.

I’d recommend Text Link Ads.

True, they are able to provide a breadth of information that runs into the hundreds of millions of results. But at the same time, how many are truly relevant to the one result you’re looking for.

Sometimes due to reasons of ultra efficient search engine optimization, the most relevant result might be located on page 5 or 6 of the search engine result pages. Finding that metaphorical needles in the haystack tends to lead to frustration, and in the worst case scenario, not finding the information you’re looking for.

Enter the “Human Search Engines”.

While we might not contain the breadth of knowledge that might be contained in a search engine’s databases, we contain one critical factor: relatedness.

Looking up a new concept in the search engine might be analogous to looking up the spelling for an unfamiliar word in the dictionary.

If you don’t know how to spell it, how do you look it up?

When you’re talking to a fellow human, you can describe the concept in abstract terms and they might be able to synergize the bits of information you feed them and give you the answer you’re looking for.

Humans organized by concepts, somtimes involving negative concepts (what a thing is not), while search engines aggregate collections of related words – keywords and keyphrases.

When encountering something new to which you have no idea how the concept (for example social media optimization) is organized, perhaps the means when starting out might be to refer to high authority blogs and websites, to gain an abstract idea of the concept.

By reading news and pieceing together facts from anedotes stories like jigsaw pieces, our mind also functions as an organic conceptual engine, synergizing the isolated facts into a cohesive whole.

It will be sometime before the search engine’s fuzzy logic algorithmns can effectively mimic this ability.

From our hazy understanding of a new concept, we can then gather together a list of keywords and keyphrases, then go to the search engines to gather further information.

With search engines being more dynamic and real-time compared to encyclopedias, this would naturally lead to a more active learning model, especially for the young.

With the Internet and search engines playing an increasingly important role in educational institutions, will this model of education eventually come to be known as Learning 2.0?

Only time will tell.

I checked my Live PR at the Google datacenters:

My Google Toolbar PR displays a 3, though it may be headed to a PR5 at the end of this exercise. Some of my other sites look like they may be moving up a notch.

This is encouraging because I’ve mostly focused on a content-based approach (except for a brief period where I felt I was excessively focused on meta and H1 and H2 optimization). Looks like the organic route has worked out well.

If you’re like to check the Live PR for your sites from the Google Datacenters, check out the following:

• iWebtool PageRank Check

• Live PageRank

It looks like the PR score that iWeb reports from toolbarqueries.google.com might give you the PageRank that’s displayed on your toolbar.

Did your PageRank change? Share your results in the comments.

Typical backlink tracers like SEO Elite and iwebtool give linear tabular reports.

What I liked about TouchGraph’s GoogleBrowser is the ability to visualize the links in 3D.

Witness:

The GoogleBrowser is interactive, meaning you’ll be able to zoom in on a cluster, isolate inbound and outblound links and check out high authority sites you’re linked to.

Obviously, this tool has competitive intelligence functions in allowing you to

scope out the source of authority sites linked to a competitors site.

Alternatively if you’re an affiliate marketer, it gives you an easy way to identify other super affiliates marketing a product (obviously, they’d backlink to the sales page on the product owners site).

Does GoogleBrowser invalidate other SEO products?

Hardly. It gives you a framework to look at links, and more importantly analyze high authority site which are linked to you. It won’t easily replace the other features you’d find in Brad Callen’s SEO Elite, or provide the depth of information you’d find in Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.

[Thanks to Reefer420 for highlighting this resource in the WickedFire Guide to SEO thread]

It was a little shocking to find that my blog permalink structure was organized along the lines of /post ID/post title, resulting in URLs like http://www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com/214/meme-update.html.

Having the post ID (the numerical post identifier) has zero SEO value, so I changed it to /post category/post title, so it’d display as http://www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com/traffic-generation/content-based-posting.html.

Assuming your categories are optimized for appropriate keywords, the search engines will send you more targeted traffic.

One important caveat about this permalink structure is that you have to file each post under a single category. Filing a post under multiple categories would not be good and override any keyword benefits derived from this permalink structure.

Before you make changes to your permalink structure, take note.

There is one devastating consequence to revamping your structure. All previously indexed posts will be lost (a natural consequence of changing your URLs from “/1273/post” title to “/monetization/post title”. You’d want to ensure that your “404 File Not Found” error pages are configured to forward to an appropriate page, or ensure that your theme’s “page forwarding” configuration is set correctly.

Here’s what I’ll be losing in the process of permalink revamp:

A bulk of the 372 pages indexed in Google. A similar number for the other search engines.

A loss of links at meta blog Ping.sg for which I occupy 7 of the top 10 most popular posts this year.

Here’s an interesting discovery though.

I’m ranked tops for the phrase “andrew wee” on Google and the other search engines.

Which might not sound that impressive, until you consider that the incumbent, another andrew wee, was on a very established, mature domain and appeared to be immovable.

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Although revamping the blog permalink structure might seem very painful. It does provide several long term benefits.

Short term pain for long term gain.

Note: This technique is focused mainly on the WordPress blogging platform.

I went to Stuart’s session yesterday and was blown away.

That’s the session mentioned in my post:F.ree Internet Marketing training? No way!

If I had to place a value on the information given, gee… but it’s safe to say those ideas are invaluable in launching sustainable profit-driven businesses.

The rollcall of speakers at October’s event reads like a Who’s Who of the Internet world:

• Jo Han Mok (Copywriting specialist responsible for many successful Internet campaigns)
• Ewen Chia (Super Affiliate to the Super Affiliates like Marlon Sanders, John Reese and the Internet Marketing Center)
• Kelvin Hui (Hong Kong-based Search Engine Optimization specialist ranked among the top two in the world)
• Peter Drew (Australia-based Adsense specialist who operates solo and rakes in revenue in the hundreds of thousands EVERY month)

There’s a special guest who’ll also be presenting at the event.

His book has hit #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list AND #1 on Amazon’s best sellers list.

This guy is the 800-pound gorilla of Adsense.AND HE’LL BE PRESENTING SOME MIND-BLOWING STUFF!
If you’re smart, you might figure out who he is from the tags at the top of this post…

To top it off, the price Stuart offered is frankly, crazy!

Whatever the other guys in the market are charging, he’s going at it at merely a fraction of that.

But don’t take my word for it.

Here’s what one of the guys at the session said:

Do you want to be financially free? Stuart Tan does it again, revealing all the secrets there are to Internet Marketing. You’ll learn about Google Adsense, marketing affiliate products online, making your money work for you rather than the other way around, the power of Viral Marketing, the potential revenue from just sending out emails.. and more! And everything can be done from the comfort of your own home! Best of all, it’s FREE to attend! Do yourself a favour and sign up for it now! You won’t regret it!

-Leong Chee Shan
http://www.ShredGuitarNow.com

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If you don’t already know the 20 different Internet business models, you’re missing out.