In an interview with Stephan Spencer, Matt Cutts, the Google Spaminator admits that aggressive link buying is “more likely to help” than harm a website. Look for the quote a bit over half-way down the interview.

This may be just stating the obvious, because anyone who is still buying links will be able to produce the evidence for themselves and not need affirmation from Matt Cutts, but I think it’s an interesting point to make after such a turbulent few months in the SEO industry.

Personally, I think if you’re in a competitive industry, you have to buy links. If you don’t, you won’t compete. That goes double so for newer websites, and websites without massive marketing budgets.

Knowing where to buy your links is now the real test.

This is just dumb.  Somehow I got on one of Joel Comm’s mailing lists.  Fine, I’m on a million of them anyway, sometimes I read, sometimes not.  Today I read one from him, which references a website of his.  I looked at the website and noticed a really dumb error on the website.  An error that should induce a Home Simpson ‘D’oh’ from anyone who looked at it.

So, being the nice guy that I am, I jotted off a quick email to him about it.  Naturally, used the email that had sent the newsletter from.  Of course a smart marketer would want to receive emails from his customers, right?

Nope.

Here’s what I got moments later.

 Thank you for your email.

I’m sorry, but email sent to this address is not read by a human.  In order to contact us with support issues, please visit our help desk at:

http://www.thehelpdesk.us

Anything that requires a reply should be submitted at the help desk.

However, If you have non-urgent questions or joint venture requests specifically for Joel, you may submit them at:

http://www.askjoelcomm.com

Due to the number of inquiries, it is physically impossible for Joel to reply to all of them, but they do get read on a weekly basis.

To your success!

The InfoMedia, Inc. Staff

Seriously, you can’t make up stuff like that.

We seem to be going over, and over, and over, again the debate about nofollow. I thought it would be worthwhile to include here a couple of comments that I made on other blogs.

This is what I posted in response to Loren’s post that sparked off this round of the debate.

Great linkbait Loren! I agree with much of what you’re saying. While comment spam was the original problem that nofollow was supposed to solve, I think that the greater concept is still applicable. Yes, it’s a bandaid that’s imposed by the search engines to make their jobs easier. But, I do see the usefulness of it. If you (or any webmaster) do not have good editorial control over what links are placed on your website, nofollow is a good tool to let the search engines know that you cannot vouch for the quality of the links. If you, or Wikipedia, can take the time to give editorial review to all links posted, then of course the nofollow is irrelevant. I think a lot of people have perverted the meaning of it, though. But, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
I posted the following on Scobleizer;

I think a lot of people are missing the main point of the nofollow tag. Naturally SEOs will be opposed to it, because they get no juice when they put their links in the comments on your blog. But, preventing people from manipulating search rankings by posting irrelevant links all over the place is the whole reason nofollow was created. It doesn’t matter if it’s link spamming on Wikipedia, or comment spam on Scobleizer. If Loren, you, or Wikipedia feel that they have control over the quality of the links being posted, then of course there is no need for the nofollow. When you remove the nofollow, you’re telling the search engines that you’re vouching for the quality of the links being posted on your website.

And this on Marketing Pilgrim in response to his speculation whether it will increase comment spam or the quality of comments.

I wouldn’t think it would increase the spam comments so much as lowering the general quality. You’d probably see more people posting a short, useless comment like “I agree” or “good post”. I see it a lot in the forums, where people post crap posts just to get their signature into the thread. Not that it doesn’t happen in blogs, but I’d think it would tend to increase when people think they might be getting some juice from the links…..if anyone is going to be removing the nofollow from comments, they’re in effect saying that they’re going to be taking each comment on a case by case basis to ensure that the site being linked to is of quality. IMO, that’s the purpose of the nofollow, if it’s a link that hasn’t passed editorial control. If the blog’s owner is going to check and vouch for each of them, then yea the nofollow doesn’t need to be used.

Also, reference to this post at the “Official Google Blog” from a couple years back.

Ken Yarmosh knows what I mean.  I’ve been making a pointed effort over the past few months to write about and link to new or less popular blogs, that I find interesting.  Here, here, here, and here for example.  Yea, not much, but it’s a starter.  I like the way Ken frames the idea, though.  He’s defining it as a “professional peer group” which gives it a much more organized feel.  Sometimes when I link out, I might send the person a note, comment on their blog, or give them a trackback.  But, I think now that’s just a first step in building a professional peer group.  Stronger relationships with people who blog on similar topics is absolutely a goal of mine, and should be a goal of yours too, and definately do not overlook anyone simply because their blog is not very popular.

One of the most difficult jobs of webmastering is getting a community site off the ground. Among the most successful methods of promoting a new forum is by running a contest. I’ve been following a contest put on by Lee Dodd to promote his new site, the Earners Forum. Lee created the Earners Forum to bring together people interested in making money from websites. The novelty of the forum is that Lee has setup private areas where people are grouped together based on their level of income.

To build buzz about his forum, Lee came up with an idea for a contest. Typically, contests will have one winner, perhaps a second and third prize. To make it more interesting, Lee has set up his contest to have five winners, each to receive the same prize. I like the idea of more than one winner. Particularly in this case where were there only one prize, and a frontrunner could discourage others from jumping in and making an attempt at the contest. Randomly selecting a winner perhaps would have a similar effect, but in this case Lee has the contestants working toward the prize (more on that later).

So, what to give, what to give? Money. Obviously. Lee states that he’s going to take a single day’s worth of his revenue, which is rounded to $5,000. Split that five ways, and we have an even thousand for each of the five winners. Could someone without deep pockets successfully use a contest to help with their launch? Sure. Lee is offering an hour’s worth of consultation to each winner, and, five websites, one to each winner, built up and optimized for Adsense. This could be applicable to most any niche, as Lee is taking advantage of his skill in the topic to make value here. But, we don’t stop there either. Lee has assembled a number of co-sponsors for his contest. I’m not privy to the exact arrangement, but generally you’d be offering the co-sponsor free advertising in exchange for goods or services to the contest winner.

Who will win? The sixty-four thousand dollar question. Or, to be more precise, the $4,072 question, as this is the value placed upon each of the five prizes. Contestants earn points for several tasks. Each of these tasks is something that is very relevant to building a forum. Posts. Recruiting new members. Writing articles. Spreading buzz through blog postings. Each valued at a different point level, the five contestants with the most points at the end of the month win.

How well do contests work? In this case, it’s working out very well for Lee and Earners Forum. Earners Forum counts 870 members, and over ten thousand posts, less than a month into the forum’s existance. I’ve rarely seen a forum take off that quickly. Heck, most forums don’t even make it that far ever, let alone in a few weeks. The conclusion? I’m off to brainstorm some contests for my own forums! Good luck Lee! Point of disclosure, I’m moderating for Lee at Earners Forum.

Matt Cutts posted this on his blog, which is pretty much exactly what I remember him explaining in a session at Pubcon.  It does explain why I’m seeing less of the Googlebot at my sites recently, and I’m very happy to have it explained.  The short version (see his site for the long version) is that instead of Googlebot, Newsbot, and Mediabot (Adsense) all doing a crawl of your websites, Google will now have something called a “Crawl Caching Proxy” which will allow all of the bots to share the same information, thus reducing the number of times that Google needs to visit your site.  Thus, if Mediabot just crawled, Googlebot wouldn’t need to do it again right then.  Benefits?  The reduction in the number of times your site is crawled should save you and Google on bandwidth, and probably Google on processing power too.  I have already noticed the difference, and I used to notice the Googlehump a lot on my sites.  Have a look at this site if you want to see the Slurphump.  I have it set up so it will identify each of the major bots, as well as registered members.  Over the past few months I’ve been seeing Slurp at a ratio of ten to one over registered users.  I hope Yahoo! is working on a more efficient bot.

Wikipedia editors need to be aware of some of these insidious schemes that the less ethical search engine marketers are doing.  After my last post about Wikipedia, I hope there are some editors keeping an eye on what I’m writing.  My last attempt at communicating was a bit clumsy, but I do believe I got my message across.

It’s amazing what some of these guys are coming up with, to take advantage of Wikipedia.  I saw this tip at Digitalpoint’s forum.  Dominic is explaining how to channel “link juice” when you get one of your link spams to “stick” in Wikipedia.  Do a search of Wikipedia for your selected keyword, and make internal links of that keyword back to the page where you got your spam stuck.  That increases the effect of your spam link with the search engines.

How do you use that against your competition?  According to Dominic, if your link doesn’t stick, but your competition’s did, you can sabotage them by doing the reverse; to remove all internal links within Wikipedia pointing to that page.  This would have the effect of lowering the value of the link out to the competition.

He also notes that the aspiring Wikipedia link spammer should not place Adsense on the landing page of the link.  Is there a prejudice against Adsense in among Wikipedia spam fighters?