Between Stations » blogging

Mythology of Sponsored WordPress Templates

Julie — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 16:16:03 +0000

The WordPress Themes site did a massive housecleaning of sponsored themes the other day. Some of the users of WordPress are happy, some unhappy. Some theme designers are happy, some unhappy.

The basics of the situation is that many of the themes with sponsored links on the WordPress site got nuked. Most theme owners claim there was little notice to get themes updated and into compliance with new policies. Others claim that even themes that complied with new policies got nuked.

Reading some of the justifications from some of those happy about affairs shows quite a bit about myths surrounding the idea of inbound links.

I’ve seen a number of people claim that when you use a sponsored template, with links to the sponsor in the footer, you are ‘giving away your PageRank to this sponsor!’

I really see several issues with that assertion:

Most blogs don’t have much in the way of PageRank to ‘give away.’
Those that DO tend to create custom designs, or know enough about branding to want to avoid heavily spammy sponsored links.
Most of the themes I’ve seen that have 3-4 sponsored links look really bad. Ugly = not likely to be downloaded.
Providing a few outbound links on ANY site isn’t going to trash your own ability to rank. It’s all a matter of proportion.

I honestly doubt all that many sponsors of the spammy-class of sponsored themes (ie, themes with 4-5 outlinks on it) see a lot of rank help from the activity. It doesn’t fall into the same class in my mind as the people who comment-spam blogs on Bob Dole drugs, but it’s not altogether dissimilar.

The people who know least about sponsors and themes and etc. most likely use hosted solutions and don’t know how to download themes anyway. Those people also likely have the lowest PageRank, anyway.

Those who know at some level that all the footer links at least look bad, might be spammy, and might be intended as SEO (but kind of fall into Dunce Hat SEO in my book) are the people less likely to have downloaded these themes.

Those who are pretty sure, if nothing else, that the spammy footer links are ugly, and who have high-traffic blogs, are likely also the ones who get some customization done and don’t need sponsored links anyway. And those are the blog owners who could actually help a sponsor.

(And that’s before even calling into question if the links count for much anyway. Footer links are the dead real estate and code zone of a page, and are typically easy enough to discount in an algorithim the way most page code lays out. But I won’t even go there right now.)

Political Search

Julie — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:40:26 +0000

Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.

Self-Consciousness & SEO

Julie — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 01:58:44 +0000

…or, “Just use the internet to do illegal downloads and porn like the rest of us,” says my pal Jawa.

Being an SEO means being self-conscious about your own actions and the actions of others on the Internet. At least it does for me, possibly because it’s semi-universal, or possibly because I am a freak with a degree in literature and in navel-gazing fiction writing.

A friend posts to their personal blog about the ‘worst online shopping experience ever’ and links the offending retailer? I comment and explain how to no-follow — because even if you go for negative anchor text, there’s still some link equity to it for the site targeted.

I like a book, or a restaurant, or buy a shiny new bike part? Well, I can post about it and no-follow, or post about it and not link it because I like it, but not in THAT way, kind of like being in junior high and liking my square dance partner but not like boyfriend-like, just in that ok-as-a-square-dance-partner and this-phys-ed-unit-is-stupid way.

My mom reads an online review? I do a text analysis to determine if it’s real or totally bogus, written by the owner, and then I tell her about inherent bias in user-supplied reviews.

A friend posts a picture of their cat? I suggest taking it to a LOLCat generator, or using the video feature on their camera phone to help further pollute the electrons of the universe with more grainy video/image of pets.

My bike club has web site hosting problems? I look at the domain headers and sigh a lot.

Life would sure be simpler if I did something sane for a living, like garbage collection.

5 Reasons Why I Blog (hi paulie)

Julie — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 20:37:51 +0000

Paul Jahn, who I like to call the Pope of Search Marketing, is playing blog tag on the subject of ‘5 reasons why I blog.’

So.

Because blogs amuse me from a perspective of history. There’s some extent to which blog comment streams remind me of dial-up text BBSes. And the server this is on generally reminds me of 300 baud modems, but that’s another rant for another day…
Depends on the blog. My cycling blog is mostly in existence to provide context for some other projects I have going on, like mapping and teaching. This one is mostly to occasionally irk some people, like Paul and my current boss and David Temple.
Just in case I lose my job by irking my current boss. (ok, no chance there.)
Because I needed a place to play with Google Analytics where I don’t care that the TOS in GA means they own the data.
Insomnia. Beats watching cable tv at 2 AM.

Webmaster Tools: Too Much Information?

Julie — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 03:49:38 +0000

I am endlessly fascinated by some of the reports in Google’s Webmaster Tools, but wonder if they don’t provide too much information for the average user.

For instance, apparently this site ranks for the search phrase ‘adjectives for hate’ right now. Checking in Keyword Discovery, I find they have a record for the query “adjective for the word hate.” Uh, woo?

Of course, I play with my blogs for fun. When I think of clients I know, or clients I have had who know enough to think, “I will verify my site! This is going to be great!”… my head hurts. These aren’t people who have stablished real KPIs or who will evaluate if the terms they show for, either in Webmaster Tools or their own analytics package, are worth showing for. They won’t evaluate conversion rates. No, they’re just going to look and go hysterical. Crawl error? Never mind that the crawl error takes place on their print-friendly pages, whcih they really should imp a robots.txt on anyway, it’s hysterics time!

Even if they rank for something fun, like ‘flaming pop tarts,’ as one client of mine once did. (Note: In that instance, since the client didn’t like being found for that phrase, I suggested we remove it. We did. Problem solved.)

I only value hysterics from clients when they pay me by the hour.

Spring Break: Comment Spam Gone Wild!

Julie — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:15:03 +0000

In honor of Spring Break, we remind you why spam filters and comment moderation are blogger tools to cherish:

Hello !
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I believe you will have a lot of exciting times ahead in your future with the web!
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tramadol http://tramadol3akak3.blogspot.com
viagra http://viagra-0ak0.blogspot.com
phentermine http://phentermine-minus-kg.blogspot.com
tramadol http://tramadol-1usa.blogspot.com
I believe you will have a lot of exciting times ahead in your future with the web!
carinsuranceonline http://car-insurance-online07.blogspot.com
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phentermine http://phentermine45akl7.blogspot.com
cialis http://cialis-3ak7d.blogspot.com
health insurance http://health1insurance1online1.blogspot.com
All the best!

All the best indeed. What baffles me about this approach is that as someone who has done e-mail marketing, if you’re at all smart you figure out what triggers spam filters. Given that there are some pretty predictable comment-spam standards for the big blogging softwares — and that comment moderation tends to be default to on rather than off for neophyte users — you’d think some of these clowns would actually, you know, try to link-spam one at a time. (Most of the set-defaults tend to trigger at two. I’d feel bad for pointing this out, but it is that obvious if you look in either WordPress or Blogger settings.)

This is why the Big Three created the nofollow standard to start with. I tend not to believe that even on some of the bigger sites (read: popular and ranking) that even slipping in one or two links at a time, though methodically, does all that much for overall performance of the site.

It’s far better to piss people off and create link-bait, in my mind. It’s also more fun!

Nostalgia: Web 2.0 is the Old Web

Julie — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:46:44 +0000

Every so often, I get nostalgic for Days Of Olde(tm) and the early days of the Web. Those magical days when the Web was all Webrings (invariably of people’s D-n-D characters), lists of CDs, and pictures of people’s cats. On GeoCities.

Then I consider several things:

In 1996, I wanted to move from Chicago to Minneapolis. I spent Mondays at the Borders on North Michigan reading the Sunday Star-Tribune for job ads. These days, it’s easy to be totally online with hunting.
Webrings DID invariably include people’s gaming characters.
The blink tag. Holy moly. I had to clean up instances of it even in 2000 when I was working on a major corporate portal. Blink was NEVER a good idea.
MySpace and LiveJournal are fundamentally GeoCities 2.0. You can find lots of “I’m listening to…” things (lists of CDs!) and pictures of people’s cats

Sometimes the whole notion of Web 2.0 cracks me up because in some ways, all Web 2.0 represents is a throwback to people making bizarrely-colored pages on GeoCities. This time, though, it comes with the phat broadband connection to allow for massive, poorly sized images of people’s cats. The inbound link algorithim really dates from something like a topical Webring, which explains why it’s so poorly suited to e-commerce. Web 2.0 is fundamentally about democratization of content — taking back control of the Web from corporations and the corporate shills (like myself) who co-opted it for commerce.

It will be interesting to see where business attempts to ‘use’ Web 2.0 go, and what some of this action means for the traditional link model. It certainly changes the process of SEO to be more about building trust. And possibly about providing more pictures of one’s cats:

NoFollow Tags

Julie — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 16:22:37 +0000

What with recent hullabaloo about nofollow links following some comments from Google’s Adam Lasnik, I was thinking about how often nofollow isn’t used but should be.

Everyone always talks about the tag in the sense of paid links versus editorial links that Google should count as ‘votes.’ But its when you start talking with a loaded term like votes that I start thinking about political bloggers and how so very few of them know the magic of nofollow.

Blogging is a neat tool. When you use a service like WordPress or Blogger, no technical acumen is needed. It allows anyone to become a political wonk, even if they get no readers. But the very things that create controversy among well-read political blogs — such as Ann Coulter using an inflammatory f-word to describe John Edwards last week — end up creating linking popularity for the very acts/speech/writings the bloggers are decrying.

Links throughout social media, even when intended to be anti-the-site-linked, seem to have the same impact. It’s kind of like a gaper’s block staring at the multi-car crash.

On the bottom line, it just validates the known fact that people outside of SEO circles tend to be unaware of how, exactly, any given result ends up on their SERPs.