As I continue to scratch my head at the near-worthlessness of website advertising, I honestly wonder if the saturation of crap has killed the ad revenue model as we (or maybe just I) know it. I’d like to share some thoughts on the subject and would love to hear what you guys are experiencing out there.

I’ve been running P2L for 4 years now and I’ve been using AdSense pretty much from day 1, so while I don’t pretend to be an AdSense guru, I think I’m qualified to speak on behalf of the average Joe in terms of trends and such. I’ve also dealt with over a dozen major networks and have tried all sorts of cheats and tricks… some worked, some were bogus and I really want to know if this is something everyone is experiencing. When I first started to use AdSense on P2L, the site had at least half the traffic it currently brings in, yet ad earnings were quadruple what they bring in now. In fact, the ad revenue is so worthless, that I don’t think it’s even worth it to clutter up my sites with them for the price they fetch.

Not only that, but the only new visual improvement AdSense has made to their ad format in 5 years is the ability to have rounded corners! The complete lack of ad variety and customization has subconsciously programmed any average web surfer to completely ignore these ads. You don’t even think about it, you naturally ignore AdSense ads… AdSense is battling every possible trick to avoid unintentional clicks, but to be quite frank, that’s the only way anyone clicks on an ad in the first place. Granted you do get the nice folks that click your ads to help support your site, but they are few and far between and getting a visitor that clicked an ad out of genuine interest because they actually read the ad is even more rare.

Want proof?

For 1 day, I ran a bogus AdSense ad on the front page of P2L that looked exactly like an ad unit. The ad said “Contact P2L if you see this and get $100″ and I linked it to the contact page. I had tens of thousands of impressions of the ad and about 200 clicks. Not a single person sent an email for the $100. No one reads the ads…

My point is that after all these years and the billions Google has raked in with their cash cow, why the hell can we STILL not have underline removed on titles and have a transparent BG on the ads?

AdSense also suffers from the same fate as all the other ad networks out there… if your site isn’t used by a US majority, your ad revenue sucks. I don’t think it’s a big secret that ad networks cater primarily to the US market, and while many networks will serve to international markets, the earnings on those international clicks or impressions are dismal at best and quite often non-existent. In fact, when Chitika first started up, they didn’t even tell publishers that while their reports would show AND count international clicks, final payouts would be for US ONLY. What a shit storm that created when the first paydays came around.

And this situation only gets WORSE! As everyone and their monkeys are signing up and using or forming ad networks, premium publishers are losing their value and advertisers know it. PPC style campaigns can be run for pennies in premium markets if you know what you’re doing… a couple of years ago this was impossible. A secondary reason for the rate drops is the ridiculous volumes of click fraud the networks have to deal with from these garbage turn-key style “AdSense Ready” sites. When Advertisers and their networks lose money, you can bet it has to come out of SOMEONE’S pocket, and it won’t be theirs.

And again, this is not just restricted to AdSense… Yahoo, Miva, Clicksor, Clickbank, Fastclick and all the rest of the big networks are all dropping and it is become increasingly difficult to run on a ad based revenue model as your sole income unless your site brings in HORDES of traffic, I’m talking millions of uniques a month. Not too long ago, I remember reading an article a couple of years ago (and agreeing) that a site with 2000 visitors a day can start monetizing with ads and expect to earn some decent revenue. Not something you could call “full-time salary” matching, but still a nice little stash at the end of the month. Now I’d say anything less than 10k a day is a waste of time unless you’re serving up a high paying keywords niche such as airline tickets and other high paying areas. But let’s face it, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably in the graphics arts or programming field and you’re not really in the mood to learn all about air travel or the latest Cancer research to start and maintain a high paying keyword website on the subject.

And to top it all off, the realm of tutorials and graphic design type sites are known as very low converting sites with poor advertising ROI, so guys like me who run large tutorial type sites are really trying to scrape the barrel. And I’ve run tons of tests on my own site, so I know just how badly some ads will convert… I’ve run campaigns of my own that rang in 20,000 clicks and converted in to maybe 10 sales. That’s pretty damn sad… but then again I’ve had clients advertise on P2L that told me they came in with 500% ROI, which is AWESOME!

The bottom line from my point of view is this: People come to P2L for FREE tutorials and free content, they are not coming to buy stuff. It is very hard to convert on people that are coming for free content. Now if we look at my little hobby model kit site at www.predatorstuff.com, this site only brings in a FRACTION of the traffic P2L pulls in, yet it makes 10 times more money. Why? Because people that come to Predstuff are looking for stuff to buy, so they are a buying market and it’s easy to convert potential customers to completed sales.

And that brings us to the all important question… With P2L v5 in development, how do I bring it back to profitability and make it worth running? I love running P2L and all, but let’s be honest… I wouldn’t be working on it day in and day out if it didn’t pay off. I need to make a living and I can’t afford to spend fulltime hours on ANYTHING that doesn’t yield some decent financial returns, and to be quite frank, right now P2L is a money pit. In fact, in the last 2 months, P2L has cost more than it earned and I am now investing quite a bit in this new version.

In fact, I think it’s safe to say that v5 will be my last push in to making P2L return to profitability and taking it to the next level in terms of traffic and overall performance. The site has been huge, but has been really idle to me for months. I’m not happy with it, but I don’t think there’s much that can be done to it’s current framework to improve it. But let me tell you that this new version will see a HUGE push by me and our staff to bring us back in to the light of the tutorial community and we’re going to be bringing you some genuine new concepts, as opposed to stuff P2L already has and just changing the way it looks. We will of course be making improvements on what’s currently available, but we have 2 or 3 completely new goodies that I think will be a very tough act to follow and quite unique to our community. I’m not saying no other site does what we’re bringing to you, but I think it will be a first for a tutorial portal site like us.

And with these changes, I am hoping that we are able to at least double our current traffic and with that, some basic CPM ads should be enough to make the site worthwhile and fund our new initiatives. This is my hope until we can identify a niche market where we can offer our own branded product and move away from the volatile ad revenue model.

But I really have to scratch my head and ask how some of the smaller sites are handling this… granted a small site doesn’t cost $500 a month just in server fees, but I’m sure it still sucks to write tutorials for 50 hours a week and then count your revenue in pennies. I mean, you could have spent those 50 hours collecting glass bottles and probably made more. I understand that there should still be the love of running a site and we shouldn’t always think of “how is this going to make me money”, but let’s be realistic… You’re going to have a hard time convincing yourself (not to mention your significant other) that working on a website for 40+ hours a week for months and years when you have a house and kids with nothing to show for it is justified.

Well that’s it for tonight folks, time for bed! I would really love to hear from you guys on this issue… please comment either on what I said or your personal ad revenue experience. Heck, maybe you have some ideas of your own on how P2L can generate some decent revenue you would like to share! Click on the comment button below and speak up.

Thanks!
Dan

PS. You’ll notice money is tight… I’ve gone from crafty icons and other pretty graphics to hand-drawn stickmen I made in my handy sketchbook. Although, there’s something quite charming about stickmen shooting themselves don’t you think?

Well after going back and forth a couple times with Corel support, I’ve been informed that the nib issue in Photopaint is an official limitation (aka BUG) and has been sent to the Corel engineers to be addressed either in a service pack or a new release. Here’s the email I got:

This has been a confirmed to be a limitation of the Photo Paint 12,X3,and X4. To answer your questions, yes, you can reset the nibs to factory default, the same way when you delete them. I sent your request to our Development Team to be added, as a enhancement, for the next release.

Color me confused, but how was this not reported before? It’s been an issue for over 4 years… Seems to me this is a pretty significant issue. Well folks, looks like I found something Photoshop does WAY better than Photopaint.

Dan

Hello everyone! Today I was giving some serious contemplation to upgrading to the latest version of CorelDraw Graphics Suite, which is the X3 version. An upgrade is $200, so that’s a pretty good deal, ESPECIALLY if the Nib management issues are fixed. So I called up Corel Support and asked and they suggested I download the fully functional 15 day trial version. I did, and guess what? Yep… the exact same issue is there and I’m really disappointed. So I’m now going to document this error for their support engineers (as per their request) so they can hopefully resolve the problem, and you guys will know what I’m talking about when I complain about the Nib management issues.

First off, the ability to have custom Nibs is VITAL to your productivity and I am absolutely shocked at how dismal the Nib management is in Photopaint and that this bug is over 4 years old and still not fixed. Hopefully by creating this walk-through, the good folks at Corel can fix this. I love brushes and I used hundreds, if not, thousands in Photoshop and the Photoshop brush management rocks (Photopaint Nibs work like Brushes in Photoshop). I won’t be upgrading until Corel can fix this… it’s really that important.

Please note that for this lesson, you can click any screenshot thumbnail to get the full version.

First off, let’s just confirm the version I am working with. I performed a fresh download and install today (January 21st 2008) of Corel Graphics Suite X3, version 13.0.0.739 trial edition. The trial is a fully functional 15 day trial version, that is supposed to be fully patched with the latest service packs and fixes and has no limitations at all for the 15 day trial period.

I have not customized the functionality in any way… this is literally a brand new install and I have not played with the settings aside from turning off color management.

The first thing I am going to do is create a new 800×600 pixel document with a white background.

Next, we will need to open up the Brush Settings Docker so that we can access the Nib Management functions. Simply click on Window > Dockers > Brush Settings, or hit Ctrl-F8 and it will open the docker… note that the docker will be blank until you access a brush tool.

Here you can see the docker is blank, so click on the Paint tool, or hit P:

After clicking P, you will see the docker is activated and you can now see the brush settings and the currently selected brush. The round circle area on the docker allows you to rotate and skew the brush, and the square shows you a preview of what the brush looks like.

When you click on the square, it will show you a list of all the current installed Nibs in this file… scroll all the way to the bottom and select the last Nib in the pack. In my case, it’s Nib 82 and it’s a spray mist style brush. TAKE SPECIAL NOTE that the small thumbnail in the list AND the larger thumbnail in the square preview box MATCH.

Now, for this example, I want you to delete this Nib… you can delete just this Nib or you can delete all of them, the bug will be present either way. To delete the Nib, click on the Nib Options button (circled in red) and click on Delete Current Nib:

Now, scroll down the list again and you will see that the Nib 82 is now gone and Nib 74 is the last on the list. So far, everything is normal…

Now, in order to start running in to problems, we’ll need to add a new Nib to our collection. Now you can download masked PNGs and such to create nibs, but for the sake of this sample, we’ll keep it very simple and just add a rectangle shaped Nib to our list. To do this, start by selecting the rectangle tool and drawing a rectangle on our canvas:

Once you have your shape, we need to mask it, so hit Ctrl-M and this will automatically create a mask around the rectangle:

Now click on your paint tool again so we can access the Nib options in the docker:

Now we can add the Nib! Simply click on the Nib Options button again and click on “Create from Contents of Mask…”:

It will then ask you what size to make the Nib… just leave it at the default and click OK to proceed:

And VOILA! We have our new Nib ready to go! Note that the square preview area shows the rectangle Nib:

But now we have a problem… Click on the square to show your list of Nibs and scroll to the bottom… the mini thumbnail to the new Nib is wrong, it’s showing the the old Nib we deleted. But yet if you click on it, you get the rectangle brush!

Even if you click on another thumbnail and then try again, it’s still wrong… the new Nib is not showing the correct mini thumbnail.

You can see the Nib works, but the thumbnail is wrong:

So that’s how the bug is created… the mini thumbnails in the Nib selection list is not refreshing properly… it’s using the original nibs that were previously in that slot. Now, for 1 Nib it’s no big deal, but imagine if you had dozens or hundreds all doing this??

Now here’s the deal why some folks may not notice this… if you do NOT delete any of the preinstalled Nibs that come with Corel Photopaint and you simply add Nibs to the pack, the new mini thumbnail will be fine. But here’s where things get ugly… if you add a dozen or so, you’re fine, but what happens if you want to use hundreds of custom Nibs? Nibs after all are HUGE time-savers, and in the world of business, money is time. Well, this would be all find and good, except for one major problem. The Nib file has a limitation, and it’s well under a couple hundred Nibs. Once you hit that limit, you’re screwed because the only way you can add more Nibs is to delete old ones, and then you run in to the mini thumbnail issue.

I’m not sure what exactly the limit is… I did hit it once when I first found out about all these problems but it was once I hot either 100 or 200 Nibs and it basically said I could not add any more Nibs and to delete some to add new ones. Now, this wouldn’t normally be a huge deal, because you can save and load .NIB files… this means you can have unlimited amounts of .NIB packs, each containing 100 - 200 Nibs. Well, the theory sounds nice, but even if you load up a new .NIB file at this point and you start adding nibs, they will all have the mini thumbnails that you original maxed out Nib pack has!!!

The only way to deal with this is to simply create nib packs and give them sensible filenames like flames.NIB, and grassbrushes.NIB… when you load them, all the thumbnails will still be wrong but at least you know which pack has what Nibs, and you can scroll through them in the Preview area until you find one you want. It’s a pain, but it’s the only way around it unless Corel fixes it. What’s worse is that you have to start using the Brush Docker all the time because the little quick Nib selector in the toolbars up top use those mini thumbnails that are wrong.

So that’s it… that’s the bug and that’s what I hope Corel fix for the next version or next service pack.

HOWEVER, I think I should also address something to Corel engineers that they can hopefully act upon. Some of us (like me) would like to be able to distribute .NIB packs to other Corel Photopaint users… heck maybe we can get more Photoshop users to check out this amazing package. But we can’t because not only are the thumbnails not working, but we have no of creating a new and blank .NIB File! So to create a Nib pack for distribution, we first have to do a “Nib Save As”, tediously delete each Nib one at a time, then add the custom Nibs we want. So as an improvement, it would be REALLY nice if one of the options under the Nib Options button was “Create New Nib File” or something.

These two improvements to the Nib Management would transform this entire aspect of the software from frustrating and borderline useless to absolutely awesome!

Thanks and I hope this gets some TLC from Corel!

Dan

As promised, I would like to address the statement that Google PR is “a meaningless number”, “it’s a void and empty score” or “it’s just a number”… Sorry guys, but it’s not as much as we would love it to be, and Google knows it’s not. So with Tom Berringer’s help, I’ll try to explain my point of view on why PR is as important as ever and how the latest PR penalties are damaging even if they don’t affect traffic directly.

There’s a great saying in this badass action movie, and it comes towards the beginning of the movie when Jonathan Shale (played by Tom Berringer) is looking to establish authority over his ghetto classroom and he is guided by the words of Principal Claude Rolle (played by Ernie Hudson). He explains in order to gain instant respect with his students, at the beginning of the year they have a presentation where he basically smashes his fist through a piece of wood, hinting rather strongly at what will happen to anyone deciding to get a little too uppity in class. He then explains he uses the concept of “power perceived is power achieved”, and he’s absolutely right. Even though he didn’t physically break some punk in two, the students definitely knew that’s what would happen if they stepped out of line.

Well, Google has broken their boards a few times and have created a similar concept: “Value perceived is value achieved”.

There is no arguing that there is perceived value in achieving high page rank, and if you can increase your site’s page rank, you achieved in earning your site increased value. You can scream that page rank is meaningless all you like, but there is no question that PR is alive and well, even if it has nothing to do with your traffic any more or even your quality. In the hearts and minds of webmasters the world over, PR is just one of a few key indicators or a website’s value and is used to gauge all sorts of dollar related indicators. And examples are out in plain sight!

Along with Alexa ratings, Google PR is one of the biggest selling points for any site looking to sell ad space, services or even to sell itself. In fact, PR can even be used to gain customer trust… surely a website with a PR 5 can be trusted a lot more than some PR 2 site that sells the exact same thing right? Value perceived is value achieved.

If there’s one thing Google knows, it’s how to make money and how to influence the web, even if it’s to simply correct or improve their own internal functionality. Let’s face it, if Google has a policy change for internal controls that affects ranking or positioning, webmasters around the world jump on it like wildfire and look at how to optimize and adapt their sites to this new change. It’s only natural, there’s nothing to be ashamed of… many of us count on Google for TONS of traffic, revenue, sustainability and ultimately, e-survival. In this latest move to penalize key websites for selling links to influence their PR index, Google knows exactly what they are doing… by lowering visible PR ratings, they are reducing the perception of value in that site. You’ll have a lot harder time justifying your ad asking prices if you went from a PR7 to a PR4 despite your traffic levels staying exactly the same.

Same thing goes for those of you looking to sell your website or company. One of the first things an experienced buyer will do is check your PageRank… if your sales pitch is reporting massive inbound site traffic but your PR is in the toilet, it does nothing but raise red flags. Then if you try to explain that your PR has been penalized and you’re “really a PR 7″, you’ve just raised another flag and opened up a can of worms. Would YOU buy a site that had just been penalized for any reason by Google? That’s like buying a car that a mechanic just warned you about shooting flames out the exhaust pipe, but “it’s nothing to worry about”.

How about SEO companies? Would you take an SEO company trying to sell you an expensive consulting package seriously if their own website couldn’t muster up anything beyond a PR4? Sure, it’s just a number right? Somehow I don’t think so… again, value perceived is value achieved, and the door swings both ways.

So how does Google fix this? They can’t and they probably won’t… truth be told, PR should simply be removed in favor of a visitor related tracking system similar to the Alexa rating system tracked via the millions of people using the Google Toolbar. Visible PR is meaningless purely from a search point of view, I agree… but when it comes to perceived website value, having your Google Page Rank penalized is a crushing blow to anyone’s monetization efforts and I truly feel bad for any webmaster that was hit with this problem and innocently had no idea their linking methods would land them in trouble.

That’s my take on the PR number issue, and I hope you’ve enjoyed my rather stretched out analogy. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter so please feel free to click on the comment button below and use the form to share your feedback with me and the rest of my blog readers.

Dan

I’ve been reading up on the updates and comments on this page rank update that has wreaked so much havoc, and it’s definitely a pain, but also a learning experience and hopefully some of you other webmasters can learn from what I’ve experienced. Here’s what I’ve found out since my last post and some action we’ve taken…

First off, if you don’t know what page rank is or what this post is talking about, you need to read my first entry on this problem HERE.

First, Google has confirmed what we suspected in this update. As per the post on www.theregister.co.uk:

Google has confirmed that the recent update to its “visible PageRank” system is an effort to crackdown on sites trying to rig this closely-watched web popularity contest.

Over the weekend, Google search engine guru Matt Cutts told Search Engine Journal that the company is intent on punishing web publishers that attempt to sell their PageRank currency to other sites.

A site with a high PageRank can often boost the rank of a less-popular site simply by linking to it. As a result, popular sites will often provide such links in exchange for cash. And Google doesn’t like that.

Here’s the word from Cutts:

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

As Cutts says, Google has changed its visible PageRank values - the scores that pop up on the Google Toolbar when users visit a site. This is merely an approximation of a site’s “real” PageRank, which is actively used to sort search results.

Cutts’ email goes a little further than the official company line. The Google PR machine gave us a slightly-less-direct explanation.

“Google is always working to improve the ways that we generate relevant search results and update our opinions of sites’ reputations across the web,” said a company spokeswoman.

“Values in the Google Toolbar can fluctuate for a number of normal reasons, including changes in how we crawl or index the web, or changes in the link structure of the web itself. In addition, Google may update the visible PageRank indicator in the Google Toolbar to incorporate not only our view on the back links to a page or site, but also to incorporate our opinion of the forward links for a site.” ®

So in short, Google is trying to penalize people that sell links on their high PR websites to people that are looking to boost their website’s own PR, which is something Google doesn’t like. Let’s be clear though… this is TOOLBAR PR, not the site’s actual internal ranking, so traffic is completely unaffected. It’s done this way so that your site’s traffic remains unaffected, but your site’s perceived monetary value is lower… Google is trying to hit you in your wallet. PR is a common measure used to determine website value… I’ll be talking about this tomorrow in regards to the “PR is just a bogus number” statement.

Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t sell links on your site to monetize your website, but if you want to be listed on Google, they expect you to take certain steps to ensure that those links you are selling are for direct click-thru traffic and not link farms for PR levels. So, how do you sell links but not get penalized for selling links for PR? You have to use the “nofollow” tag.

Unfortunately guys like me were innocently selling links purely for monetization, not to manipulate Google’s PR structure, were penalized. This is why P2L was reduced to a PR 4 from a 6. Yes it’s ignorance, but there are MANY webmasters that have no idea what “nofollow” is, and if you’re one of those, click here to read the official Wiki.

OK so now that you know what “nofollow” is and what it does, let’s look at Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

- Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
- Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
- Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Unfortunately there is nothing in the main Webmaster Guidelines that says anything about selling links or using the nofollow tag to avoid penalties. For your average webmaster, you would have no idea about this.

Now let’s look at this huge post by Google’s Matt Cutts about the nofollow tag and how to use it:

Hey all, I’ve been meaning to stop by the webmaster help group, and the “Popular Picks” thread drew me in. Here’s the question I’ll tackle: Admin Aaron asked “What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag other than to protect against blog comment spam?”

My short answer is that the nofollow attribute on links is a pretty general mechanism, and you’re welcome to use it how you like. Let me tell you what it does, then I’ll give an example or two. I answered a nofollow question for Rand Fishkin recently. You can read the full details at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/questions-answers-with-googles-spam-guru, but I’ll quote the important bit:

“The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.”

So nofollow as a link attribute causes Google to drop those links out of our link graph. If you have a nofollow link from page A to page B, we won’t crawl via page A’s link to discover page B. Note that we may still find page B via other links around the web, though.

What are some appropriate ways to use the nofollow tag? One good example is the home page of expedia.com. If you visit that page, you’ll see that the “Sign in” link is nofollow’ed. That’s a great use of the tag: Googlebot isn’t going to know how to sign into expedia.com, so why waste that PageRank on a page that wouldn’t benefit users or convert any new visitors? Likewise, the “My itineraries” link on expedia.com is nofollow’ed as well. That’s another page that wouldn’t really convert well or have any use except for signed in users, so the nofollow on Expedia’s home page means that Google won’t crawl those specific links.

Most webmasters don’t need to worry about sculpting the flow of PageRank on their site, but if you want to try advanced things with nofollow to send less PageRank to copyright pages, terms of service, privacy pages, etc., that’s your call.

I gave another example where nofollow would work well at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/quick-comment-on-nofollow/ . Someone wrote an oompa loompa dating site as a joke, but that site started to get hit with spammy comments. If you write custom software where you’re worried that people might spam the software with links to, I dunno, Ukrainian porn sites, then you can add nofollow in your software on the links that you think might be spammed. If a spammer has a choice between your software and some other software that doesn’t use nofollow, your software might not get hit as often by spammers.

If you’d like to find out more, Eric Enge and I did an interview that touched on how Google treats noindex, robots.txt, and nofollow: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml

Hope that helps!
Matt Cutts

Great information, but again there isn’t really anything here saying that nofollow should be used not to influence PR for those of us selling ad space to generate revenue on our websites, which more and more represents a HUGE number of webmasters.

BUT then you find some information HERE! This group post is clearly starting to touch on the direct issue at hand… you can sell text ads, but you need to tell Google that they’re ads and not natural outbound links.

And then, we find it… the official word from Google on Paid Links!

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

So mystery solved and hopefully by adding these tags to our advertiser links, we can have our penalization removed. I’ve gone ahead and requested our re-inclusion, so we’ll see what happens. This has been quite a learning experience, that’s for sure. BUT I am a little disappointed in Google on this… they didn’t have to penalize anyone, they could have addressed this via their alogrithms. Check out this article by Eric Enge, it’s pretty much spot on about how I feel about this.

The big news remains the apparent punishment in PageRank terms of sites which are selling links. What surprises me about this is not that Google did this, but three other things:

It surprises me that they missed so many sites that are obviously selling links. I am aware of many, many such sites that monetize their sites in that fashion, without NoFollowing their links. Given the set of sites affected, it really does seem like the punishment was manually selected.
However, that makes it even more curious when you consider that influencers like Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal were selected.

It surprises me that they punished sites that sell links, but clearly labelled them as Sponsored, or as Advertisers, or some other equivalent. Google will never win that battle. Monetizing sites is something that every site owner has the right to do. Such a small percentage of site owners even know what a NoFollow is, that a policy of punishing people on that basis does not make sense to me. Besides which, cant Google detect these types of clear labels and simply discount those links algorithmically?

It was also a surprise that there was no apparent impact on traffic. This was reported by both Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal. So given the broad swipe that they took at sites as mentioned in point 2 above, I suppose that this is a good thing. But simply altering tool bar page rank in a way that does not impact traffic will get them nowhere.
The link selling market will continue to thrive without PageRank. At this point in time, selling links is more about Anchor Text than PageRank. Nothing in this update has changed that.

You can read the rest of the article HERE.

On the same token, Google is a FREE search engine, so if you want to play in their party, you have to conform to what they tell you… don’t like it? Don’t list with Google I suppose… I’m sure this is how they’re looking at it anyhow. Just remember that if you are a webmaster and you want to count on Google for search engine traffic, you are responsible to read the Webmaster Guidelines at least once. You might be surprised at what you find!

That’s it for now gang, time to go pick up the little one from school! I’ll keep you posted if the actions we took had any affect in lifting our current PR Penalty. Later on (Maybe tomorrow?) I will post my thoughts on the “PR is just a number concept”. While this may be true from a direct traffic standpoint, it’s completely false in the marketting sense and I’ll touch base on the various reasons why PR is still a critical number for your website.

Until next time!
Dan

PS. Special thanks to Nick and Jamie for their respective contributions for source material.