“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?)

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 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.”

Google has turned over new algorithms that know how to handle Googlebombing:

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs).

Wikipedia is fast on the scene, but only noting that:

On January 25th, 2007 Google announced on its official Google Webmaster Central blog that they now have “an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.”

There’s a bit of an edit war going on to try and decide what this means. How do you detect an intentional Google bomb from simply a newly popular site? This could have an accidental impact on a lot of smaller websites.

Yahoo: Britney Spears, WWE, Shakira, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, American Idol, Beyonce Knowles, Chris Brown, Pamela Anderson, Lindsay Lohan

Google: bebo , myspace, world cup, metacafe, radioblog, wikipedia, video, rebelde, mininova, wiki

Lycos: Poker, MySpace, RuneScape, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Pokemon, WWE, Golf, Spyware, Britney Spears

MSN Live: Ronaldinho, Shakira, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Harry Potter, Eminem, Pamela Anderson, Hilary Duff, Rebelde, Angelina Jolie

AOL: Weather, Dictionary, Dogs, American Idol, Maps, Cars, Games, Tattoo, Horoscopes, Lyrics

You can view the Top 10 Searches of 2006 spreadsheet on Google Docs, if you’d like. The data came from the following sources: Yahoo, Google, Lycos, MSN, and AOL.

Initial observation shows that searches are primarily dominated by celebrity terms, and that AOL’s searches are corrupted by their “AOL Keyword” search system. Google’s are likewise corrupted by what I suspect is manual filtering to produce tailored techie terms. Yahoo, MSN Live, and Lycos share 50% of their terms with others’ top terms, while Google and AOL come in last at 20% and 10% respectively, an indication of poor search quality.