Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

An interesting article in the NYT today called A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web describes how Vitaly Borker makes his business tick using negative feedback and reviews to game search engines:

“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes dot com,” the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”

Ironically, the New York Times links directly to one of Vitaly Borker’s sites, giving him a big boost of authority in search engine rankings. (aside: What do I have to do to get the NYT to link me, I wonder?)

Over on TechCrunch there’s a flattering review of a new Website SEO Analysis tool called Woorank:

WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. [...] I gave the tool a spin and generated a report for techcrunch.com – turns out we’re worthy of a WooRank of 82.4. [...] Frankly, that’s a lot of valuable information available free of charge.

I gave it a spin on my homepage, and it gave up some valuable suggestions (as well as a score of 68.2, which isn’t too bad):

Among its suggestions are the following:

• Add meta-description and meta-keywords to every page
• Put alt-tags on all images
• Make sure the site validates
• Use a 301-redirect on WWW
• Get listed in the DMOZ/Yahoo directories

While the information it offers up is useful, it’s almost exactly the same as WebsiteGrader, and less detailed on load-time, etc, than . But, the way to go, of course, is to plugin your blog URLs into as many of these cookie-cutter analysis sites as you can, do some thinking on your own, and make a few tweaks. Everyone has their favorite tools, so let me know of other free “SEO Analysis” sites in the comments. If I like them, I’ll update this post.

The blogosphere today is in collective shock after Google downgraded the pagerank of many leading blogs and news sources. The response tends to fall into several categories: we knew it was coming, pagerank doesn’t matter, and we deserved it. Techcrunch does a pretty good job of examining the evidence behind the update:

The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.

Here’s a table of pagerank changes organized by the percent difference:

An interesting tidbit comes from Syntagma who note that “the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.” So, it might not be easy for you to fix your linking strategy and regain Pagerank automatically.

Ironically, this coincides with GOOG hitting $666 today. And, Silicon Valley is calling us “Pagerankled.” For you people out there running blogs, an immediate solution is the following:

• Make sure you nofollow any links that you don’t directly control
• Avoid using static link-farms like directories, like linking to every blog in your network from every page
• Don’t let your commenters add links to their sites

Here’s an example of the link distribution of my site after I’ve properly annotated some links with nofollow:

The green areas (header, footer, content, and some meta data) represent regular links, the red areas (advertising, sidebar links, tags, and related stories) are nofollow links, and the blue areas are dynamic links (javascript widgets) which don’t need updating. I am not sure if I want to nofollow anything else–what do you think?

Update: Forbes weighs in, “it could also be Google simply taking into account the growth of the Internet.”