Page Rank for People

I just read about a bold new idea. It is Page Rank for People. Instead of assigning a rank to web pages like Google does already, somebody could assign and track ranking of individuals. This is a type of reputation ranking. The best part of this idea was all the comments people wrote on the topic.

Many thought this would be very hard to implement. Others thought you could mimic a lot that is already being done for web page rank. Obviously you need some type of secure ID to prevent impersonators. A technology called Calais already parses web pages to find people on them. This might be an extension of that idea.

There are a number of issues involved. Consider the fact that many people have the exact same name. The goal of this technology would be to bridge web pages with actual people. For all we know, Google may already be working on this technology in stealth mode.

You would need to detect false networks to get this to work correctly. Nobody wants to trust a score that can be easily gamed. Another issue might be the use of ghostwriters. You may have to alter your people rank accordingly for them. However this is probably no different than somebody else writing your web pages for you.

All in all, it is a very interesting idea. I await the first implementation. Perhaps it will be done by Google. Or it might be the event that marks the decline of Google as we know it.

Rebecca Has Left The Building

Rebecca Kelly has left the SEOmoz staff. She is off to some undetermined new job. Her new blog is Fresh Edge Media.

And now I have a confession to make. Seeing Rebecca on SEOmoz made me coming back to the sight for more. Now she is gone. Bamm. SEOmoz gets dropped from my reader.

Good luck you you Rebecca. We all know success will follow you. Peace out.

Article Distribution

The information for this post comes from an article I read in Website magazine. It talks about the history and details of Article Distribution. In the past zines got put online and became ezines. These ezines in turn morphed into Article Distribution (AD). AD is like a supermarket. You upload your article. It is made available to other web sites. The article is free for use. You then get exposure. In other words, you get an audience.

Guest authors on blogs are normally experts. Therefore to be successful with AD, you should produce quality articles. It is best to have a very specific topic. You could share unknown information, or explain a difficult topic. Part of getting you material read is to generate great headlines. This means you should use numbers, be specific, and use power words. This all goes for writing normal blog posts as well.

Some well known article sites are ArticleDashboard and SearchWarp. Some such AD sites have you post a link on them which points to an article hosted on your own site. An example of this is Digg. That is, Digg has huge lists of links to articles located on the web. Other sites which deal with links like this are Sphinn and Mixx.

Your articles normally will have a bio section at the end. This is where you share a little bit about yourself. More importantly you include an anchor link in the bio section directing the reader back to your site. The goal is for other sites to link back to you. This sounds like an interesting way to get readers and back links. I have not tried it yet. However I am willing to attempt other technique to grow my blogging business and page rank.

Weird Ads

Recently I have been seeing a lot of ads on the Internet for teeth whitening. This subject by itself is not unusual. However the placement of the ads on sites seems very much out of place. What does teeth whitening have to do with Software Development for example?

Things started to make sense when I read a blog entry on this very subject. Apparently it is not just teeth whitening ads that are on the uptick. There are also an influx of flat stomach ads, as well as government grant ads.

Here is how this scam works. The ads have pictures. When you click on the ads, you get to a web site with testimonials. You are supposed to be able to order the product for free. However you must give a credit card number to receive the free product.

What this actually does is start a free trial. Then you get billed monthly for more of the product. Guess what? It is almost impossible to cancel the subscription. How in the world can this scam continue? Obviously some people must be getting duped, because I keep seeing the ads being displayed. I have a good mind to block these ads from my own sites. Although I like to make money, I don't like to do it at some poor schmuck's expense.

Here is the industry behind these ads. Vendors of the product have affiliate programs. The affiliates create landing pages for the product. They throw up some bogus testimonials. It is very easy to do this. You can even copy other sites. The affiliates then buy advertising to get suckers to click through. Ad networks such as Google AdSense think the landing pages look good. These networks say that they depend on users to report abuse.

Everybody except the end user seems to make money on this scheme. The vendors get new people to bill. The affiliates get their cut, as well as the ad networks. Who is going to crack down on these scams when everybody is making out like a bandit? This feels like the dark side of Internet advertising.

Good Place to Start

There are many myths about what SEO can do for your web site. One thing is for sure. It will not immediately get your site ranked first in the search results. But some small changes can go a long way in rising your site up in the SERPs. Here are some things I have heard over and over about good SEO practices.

The most common sentiment is to make sure readers of your site are happy and want to come back for more. That will take you further than any SEO hack. Now with that being said, there are some other small SEO changes which can help you out. You should have a unique title on each web page. The title should also be short and concise.

When you do generate URLs, put meaningful words in them that relate to your subject. Lower case URLs are preferable. The text you write should be easy to read, and have top notch content. Yes I know that is a tall order to fill. But you must strive for it. It is best if the content is 100% unique. That will get you extra points.
I have heard people caution you against using too many images. I err on the side of too many images myself. There should be an ALT attribute for images. You never know when somebody is going to read your site with a text browser. The search engines like this as well.

You can link out to other sites. But you should add a rel value of nofollow. This is usually not a problem on my pages. I link mostly to my own sites. However when I do link out, it is for good cause. So I don’t mind losing a little link juice for a worthy cause. Finally you should list your URL on your business cards. I know my cards prominently display my web site URL.

Paid Link Spam

I received what seemed to be an unsolicited e-mail this week. It was a reminder that I had submitted my link to their directory recently. They stated that there were 57,000 other people who submitted free links as well. They do not have the resources to get to all these submissions. Tell me something I don’t know already.

Here is where the e-mail got a little sloppy. It stated that their directory had sent “2.000.276” visitors to sites like mine. Yes I understand what they meant to say. They had 2 million people click their links. But this is a sales pitch. At least get your grammar correct.

The more I read, the more I felt like I was receiving a sleazy sale pitch. They stated that they were slashing prices 30% this week. I live in the USA. However the costs were listed in Euros. In addition, I only have 7 days to take advantage of the discount.

Apparently they are discontinuing free links. Here is the kicker. The e-mail stated they “would be sorry to loose [sic] me”. One again, you should really nail your English grammar before sending out the sales pitch. Know the difference between lose and loose. Otherwise I will assume you are lost.

The bottom line is that I have good content on my site. That should be enough for you to want to link to me. It is ok if you don’t have the time or bandwidth to add me to your directory. Just don’t try to sign me up to pay for a link on your site. That is not going to buy me anything. If I really wanted to pay, I would be going to a site with a higher page rank than yours buddy.

Page Rank Scultping

I received my first copy of Website magazine in the mail this weekend. So far it looks to be a most interesting read. My favorite article from this issue was “Google Pagerank Sculpting for SEO Profit” by Dante A. Monteverde. This was an informative article since I had never heard the term Pagerank sculpting before.
Sculpting is the practice of using the rel-nofollow attribute on links. You control which outbound links provide link juice, and which do not. This was invented by Matt Cutts of Google. It was initially in response to spammers posting links in comments. Systems that automatically use nofollow on comment links prevent any value from being passed on through such a link.

It is not only Google that will honor nofollow. Yahoo and MSN do the same. You could be more hard core and employ a robot.txt file to prevent crawlers from reading your links. However on some sites you want to link out and make it count, while on the same site you might want to do a little sculpting. Nofollow gives you this fine control over the passing of link juice.

I normally deal with the loss of link juice by not linking out to other sites other than my own. In rare circumstances I do link to worthy sites. However with nofollow, I can link away and still prevent the link juice from spilling out of my page and onto other sites. It is just one extra attribute to add onto the HTML link reference. I might try this out. The only time I will not use this is if I want to keep my viewers on my page. But that is another story.