LZZR

ART POWER - How Google counts links

Just came form holidays. Well, obviously not. Sorry. Just needed to invent some excuse for not writing for such a long time. My holidays ended weeks ago but as it always happens you come back to work only to discover such an enormous backlog that it takes twice as long as my holidays lasted to sort it out. So, going through the pile of things amassed over time I came about this draft that I started sometime in midsummer. I double-checked the factual side of things and all seems perfectly actual even now. So, after a little polishing I decided to publish this post in a pretty much the same shape it would have appeared in August (better late than never).

Doing SEO myself for quite some time and having a good number of friends and acquaintances of the same trade, naturally I had plenty of opportunities to observe and analyse different SEO practices and eventually I came to a rather strange conclusion: it seems there are probably only two types of SEOs in whole world. All of us have to deal with the same set of circumstances, namely we have to feed something to Search Engines in order to get a desired output from them and we have not a slightest idea of what is happening in the process. Search engines are perfect black boxes for us as we know what comes in and we can see what comes out but we are not allowed to see inside the box. There may be two ways to approach this rather tricky situation. One type of SEOs is practicing an approach that is very much akin to ancient magic. They take their client, perform some strange divination rituals on them and utter their prophecies that are just bound to be fulfilled. It isn’t a big deal if they don’t – there are so many taboos in their recommendations that it’s simply impossible not to break at least one of them. And of course this sin of breaking taboo is the only reason the magic didn’t work, that is of course if it didn’t, because if it did it is only because it is what it is – magic. Of course I know some from this bunch whose magic really works no matter what the circumstances are, but these are rare exceptions. Remarkably, SEO magicians are almost exclusively found among the troops of so-called white-hat SEO. The other party that is quite distinct from the former one consists of those who are mostly fascinated by the workings of the engine itself. The greatest joy for them is to catch a glimpse of those gear wheels, triggers, levers and latches all in motion. The pleasure, I confess very much akin to that of a Peeping Tom watching naked Lady Godiva who incidentally happened to be a patron of all engineers. The grand idea is in this case is ultimately to perform some sort of a reverse engineering upon Search Engine mechanism thus achieving a thrilling sensation of superiority. But this could never be perfected to the end perhaps not only because these black boxes are so carefully guarded by their owners, but also because even for the developers of Search Engines they are now exactly this - perfect black boxes. Otherwise why Matt Cutts would be using the word heuristics to describe the working of the Google engine so many times?

So, the article here is probably naye good for divination purposes but might be of some interest to those among us who belong as I do to the voyeur type.

This whole thing was triggered by a strange example that was discovered quite by chance: once I’ve been checking Google output for a rather unusual search: art power. Don’t ask me why, as it is just my little hobby to check out weird searches. This search phrase is a strange fruit indeed as it belongs to a class of generic searches, those that are likely not to produce large volume of searches but naturally have extremely high competition. This one quite as expected returns 321,000,000 results (at the time of writing). And now allow me just a small side note on the way Google deals with generic searches: the results tend to have much larger than average proportion of pages coming from large media resources, often newspapers like NYT and so on and media portals like BBC etc (you got the idea). Hence, as I observed, if you are able to obtain a link from a resource of this kind it will directly boost the responsiveness of your site to generic searches. But now let’s come back to the subject. Somewhere within results 351 - 360 for this search you will find this strange page. Mind you it isn’t such a bad position considering the competition – we can insist that at least 320999640 pages (321,000,000 - 360) are less relevant in Google’s opinion that the page in question. By now I expect you couldn’t resist the temptation to click on the link above to examine the actual page. Now, what do you see? Correct, a perfectly blank white page, no content whatsoever. Shocking enough as such isn’t it? And now note an even more distressing detail: Google thinks there is the word art on this empty page! What the hell is going on you ask. Although you will not get a definitive answer even if you open cached text version although it will get you much closer. I hope you in no time realised that what we are dealing here with is a frameset. Remarkable on its own and even allows us to formulate our first conclusion: it seems likely that Google assigned the content of frame to the frameset URL. But we’ll pass this remarkable fact without much discussion here as it is only indirectly relates to our question. Suffice to say that the preference to the frameset instead of nested pages is most likely defined by the overall site structure rather than by the framed page construction. Just to remind ourselves that our main question is: how come such a page ranks so high in Google? The only way to learn this is to go to the page itself and examine what it is made of. First of all of course goes our indispensable virtual currency - the Google PR and the page itself has moderate PR 3. Remarkably the word art is present only three times in one tight paragraph somewhere towards the very end of the page plus these three letters can be met as parts of bigger words about a dozen of times. Surely, it’s not enough to achieve such a high position. And what about the second word, power, as apparently it is nowhere to be seen on the page itself? And as always View Page Source is at our disposal to help in our predicament. Now drum roll, please! What do you see? Shock! Horror! We see the old number sign link trick inadvertently used on this page about 30 times. For those who are not aware of this trick here is a brief story. Just to remind you, the number sign as a partial value of the href attribute of the a tag was initially introduced to be used together with the name attribute to provide an easy on-page navigation. Basically it creates a relative link to another part of the same document. Subsequently with introduction of JavaScript this became a tool to create a JavaScript OnClick event without actually sending the browser away from the page and this is exactly how it is used in our example. The SEO part of it mainly consisted of a superstition that circulated since times immemorial that stated that placing a number sign link would somehow magically increase the potency and power of a page. I must admit I used this trick indiscriminately so many times in my youth without even bothering to think what it actually does, just relying on its magic powers. When I started paying more attention to what I am actually doing it turned out to be not so difficult to figure out what is happening with a number sign link. Basically Search Engine for some obscure reason takes these links seriously and assumes they are perhaps as valid as any other internal link. The only difference in this case is that a page links to itself which supposedly creates some kind of a loop back in PR or other link ranking calculations and as a result it should double or at least amplify the importance of the page. Presumably the effect of an outside link pointing to a page with this kind of loop back should also be amplified compare to an ordinary page thus allowing to create powerful pages on purpose. And all this is just because the number sign link somehow temporarily short-circuits Search Engine algorithms. Not bad, isn’t it? But it is surely black hat, isn’t it? Well, as usually it depend on the definition. I assume there is no algorithmically doable way to distinguish between a normal use of a number sign in link and its SEO-related application. Although in theory it is a punishable offence, in practice the prosecution can not be enforced as it remains untraceable. So in effect Search Engines algorithms could not penalise its usage, but only compensate for its effect. Being such an old trick I thought it had been compensated for years ago by all main Search Engines. In any way in my recent memory only MSN had been observed to be still prone to this, but who takes MSN for something other than a joke in terms of their algorithms? And now I am proven to be wrong again. As you can see the mighty Google itself is swallowing the same old bait. What in the world is going on here? We’ve observed hoe this page might have received a preferential treatment but still have no answer to our main question: why it ranks for art power having no mention of power on the page itself? Now let’s take a closer look at those loop back links we discovered. Mon Dieu! (Pardon my French) Yet another shocking revelation awaits us here. What we see an OnClick JavaScript alert that simply throws up a popup message that has the word POWER twice in each text element. If we count all instances this word is repeated altogether 62 times on this page! If this was a part of the page text I would not have been surprised at all. It reminds me so much of a classical keyword stuffing for a two words search where the first word has a very low density whilst the second one is overstuffed. This combination had been known to work since times immemorial and is working even now inasmuch as keyword density still matters. The preference for this unbalanced pair type of pages for two word search phrases perhaps comes from the fact that pages with even density of both search words en even more so with both search words coming together in sequence get penalised for fear of keyword stuffing and those pages that look the least similar to suspicious pages get favoured. All in all it would have worked out perfectly if the text of this JavaScript alert was counted as a part of page text, but we all remember the textbook SEO axiom: Search Engine Robots don’t read JavaScript. Or do they? OK, what we really know with a high degree of probability is that they don’t execute JavaScript. And this is only based on our assumption that it is much too much in terms of computing resources to attempt to run each and every section of JavaScript code on the net. But again, it is only our assumption, albeit confirmed by similar declarations coming from Search Engine spokespeople, but do we always have to trust their statements? Naturally we can not assume on this basis that Search Engines don’t read JavaScript code and don’t use it as a part of their relevancy calculation algorithms. Particularly attractive this idea looks when applied to our case where JavaScript alert message can be seen under certain circumstances as part of the overall page text since human agent can read it after all. Admittedly there are some arguments to counter this hypothesis. Formally the JavaScript alert is not counted as a page content proper which can be easily confirmed by the absence of our page in this search. Surprisingly enough we don’t find our page even if we search in anchor like this.
Equally however we know that Google never tells us the whole truth. Google insists that the word power is present in links leading to our page but at the same time displays no results for link operator search for this URL. Clearly something is missing here. After all Google allows us to see only what it wants us to see. Hence I’ll stick to my guns and offer the only explanation I think is plausible for this example? However strange and unorthodox it might look: Google actually reads JavaScript and hence

1. Google counts the word POWER in JavaScript alert towards the total in keyword density thus taking the page for the desired unbalanced pair type
2. Google counts the word POWER in JavaScript as anchor text too (actually I have reasons to believe that virtually any text contained within a tag will be counted as an anchor text)
3. Google is still prone to the number sign link loop back

This is so far the only possible explanation I can find for the phenomena we just observed but I am myself very far from being completely satisfied by it. The flaw in my analysis is apparent and should I mention that I made no effort to hide it? Having no better explanation myself I’ll be ready to accept the challenge and if you are ready to come up with an alternative I will only be happy to get engaged in a fruitful discussion. To aid those prepared to offer an alternative analysis of this example I may throw in another curious fact, namely the root of irational.org domain itself ranks rather high for our art power search too.

If the line of reasoning drawn above holds true, the consequences are quite intriguing. Not only one may extract some practical tricks from these features, but it also confirms that some statements coming from Google itself were at least premature, particularly that the possibility of effective Google Bowling is still alive and kicking.

For those who expected to discover some sort of magic potion in this article I may only say: I don’t sell snake oil here.

tags: godiva, google, javascript, lady, peeping, seo, tom, anchor text, art, holidays, linking, magic, onclick, power, trick, voyeur

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Posted by LZZR under SEO Tricks, Google | Comments (3)

Why it is good to link to LZZR

We are all hungry for inbound links these days and even more so since the introduction of nofollow which I personally hate as it did not solve a bit the problem of comment spam it was supposed to solve but had a detrimental effect on social networks and blogsphere in particular. It turned all of us bloggers into a particularly greedy bunch. Before placing a link we started to think of how much we would lose if it’s an open link without nofollow. Although my attempt to mock the whole nofollow concept by inventing a rel=follow attribute proved to be popular enough it nevertheless is too limited to change the picture in any significant way. The only solution to this seems to be generosity. But generosity itself isn’t enough in a world governed by the principle of self-interest. Attempts to persuade an average webmaster that outgoing links from his/her site are beneficial since eventually they will bring a hub status to the linking resource were not too convincing. It needed more than just empty promises of some benefits in the future. Linking should be mutually beneficial for both the linking site and the linked one and more these benefits must be obvious and immediate. For quite some time I’ve been thinking about a strategy that would realize these objectives and finally I think I came up with one.

Initially the idea was triggered by observing rather old-fashioned SEO attempts to pull out their own sites from Search Engine results using site: operator. I am sure you are all familiar with this dumb trick and if not just follow this link to see what it does. You see? This is an example of pure greed and selfishness. You pull out your own site and only your own site. Now let’s try a different search this time using not site: but link: operator (example). These are URLs of resources linking to lzzr.com. And what’s the point, you might ask? Surely if you are greedy it does not make any sense to promote someone else’s URL but if you are clever you’ll quickly realize that it’s in your own best interests to have inbound links from strong pages. Think about the amount of time and effort (and very often money) an average SEO spends on acquiring links from pages with good Page Rank. Now, the same goal can be achieved simply by making some effort promoting pages that already have natural links to you! They are already out there, just give them some link love. Of course this way you push up resources that are not owned or operated by you and hence you loose something but the gain which in my opinion outweighs the hypothetical loss you may suffer is that all of those pages link back to you!
From strictly SEO point of view you create a perfect 3-way linking structure where Search Engine Results Page (SERP) serves as an intermediary between you and pages linking to you. In other words you link to results page and results page links to a number of sites each having a link back to you. This 3-way linking is known to be much more effective than a usual reciprocal linking and is not punishable like the outdated link farm method. On a side note: I strongly insist that the structure I just described can not be considered search engine spamming as it makes a perfect sense from user’s point of view. Let me explain: I as a webmaster certainly hold a pretty high opinion about myself and my website. Equally I should value those who appreciated my website by placing a link to it. Thus promoting websites linking to you is just a simple sign of respect and appreciation. I also assume that sites linking to my content are relevant to this content hence linking to them enhances user experience!

However the potential of this structure is limited since search engines are rarely indexing their own pages (Google results page will not be indexed and processed by Google but Netscape results page for example will be seen in Google) and even if they did these result pages are still orphan i. e. have no internal links coming from within the search engine itself. A perfect solution would be to have a page like this to be a part of your own resource – an objective that was horribly difficult to achieve until very recently in purely technical terms.

Now here is where Web 2.0 comes to the rescue. Let’s check this example from Google BlogSearch (similarly you can pull your results from Technorati but Technorati is lame). True it only displays links from blogs but look at the bottom of the Google page – you see it can be pulled out as Feed! Now, do I need to continue? Almost every single Web 2.0 resource or service comes with a built-in ability to pull and display feeds. Now all you need to do to promote blogs linking to you is to set up such feeds at every possible place and watch how pages linking to you grow in reputation and PageRank pushing up your own resource on the way.
This is exactly what I do for my blog. The easiest way is to create Yahoo Pipes page combining Google and Technorati feeds. But the easiest doesn’t mean the best since Yahoo Pipes are notoriously slow and are usually badly indexed by Google. Surely I must have more SEO Tricks up my sleeve. I obviously keep and maintain LZZR accounts on all major social networking services to beef up both LZZR online presence and exposure which is a bon ton thing to do these days. At every opportunity I include a feed with links to sites linking to LZZR.com. Of course different services have different options and consequently different SEO efficiency. On major blog systems such as Blogger, MSN Live, Wordpress.com etc. you are only allowed to display a limited number of feed entries in your external feeds and as a result sites that are at the top of Google Blog Search and the most recent Technorati entries will be favoured. In addition these link blocks are set up as separate page areas different from content and links due to their small number will have a substantial link churn. Not so good but at least something. Squidoo is a better place as they allow including a substantially large number of feed entries and besides they are displayed within the main content area of the page. But the best opportunities can be realised at Tumblr and Jaiku blog services. These two are really godsend as each new feed entry in those systems is published as a separate blog posting thus permanently affixing each link. Another interesting option is to propagate you back links feed by setting up special groups at various services like Bumpzee or the same Squidoo.
Note: I purposly avoided placing such link feed blocks on lzzr.com itself to prevent Link Farm structure.

So here is the deal: you link to any page at LZZR.com and get a bunch of backlinks to your site from places I manage and be sure do my best to promote. Your site must be a blog and it should be already indexed by Technorati and Google. I suggest you write a blog post about this very idea and link back to this very article rather than to the root. This will be more beneficial to you as the article itself already contains a bunch of outgoing links to places where I set up link feeds. However if you don’t want to link direct to the article any link to any page within lzzr.com will do including a root link. I became so excited about this idea that I even designed some buttons for the occasion. I think they visually represent the idea of LZZR linking where a LZZR link reflects from an intermediary.

Feel free to copy them and don’t be afraid of hotlinking as hotlinking is good!
Now if you are still thinking that this whole idea is just a shameless self-promotion – go back to the beginning and read again. I am sure you’ll find a rational core in all this. There is a good deal of self-interest in all this of course. I get inbound links from you. But at the same time you get a number of links pointing to you in return and this number is going to grow for as long as I’ll be finding new places to insert my link feed into. I will also be promoting pages with back links by all means available as this is in my own best interest. Thus there comes a perfect win-win combination!

PS:
Of course the temptation to copyright this idea and call it LZZR linking^TM is huge but in the spirit of true generosity I will refrain from doing so. You are free to replicate this structure for your site as this would be a really effective way to fight the nofollow greed. The only thing I would object to is if you decide to pass this idea as yours without proper attribution in a form of a backlink to this article :-). And should it be mentioned that linking back is in your best interests anyway… It’s good to link LZZR.com!

tags: 3 way linking, feed, google, lzzr, lzzrseo, pr, page rank, pagerank, rss, seo, seo trick, back link, backlink, bon ton, generosity, link churn, link farm, link love, web 2.0, win-win

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Posted by LZZR under eSEO, SEO Tricks, Search Engines, Blog | Comments (27)

Prefetch or not prefetch for SEO

Prefetch attribute had been around for some time but had some limited use as it was supported only in Firefox. Now with an explosive adoption of IE 7 that seems to support this attribute it can open some really good opportunities for not-so-whitehat SEO. If it does what it does uses for this wonderful feature may vary from rather exotic Alexa Cheat to affiliate links (cookie cutters) or a banal Google search spoofing like the following Motorola LZZR search.
There are however some repercussions one must remember about.

• Judging from the Google Webaccelerator FAQ Google itself must well be aware of the fact that the hit in question is not user-initiated from x-moz: prefetch HTTP header sent by Mozilla browsers (it is likely that IE is sending some identifiers in headers too).
• The page with a prefetch link is tracable via referrer header so the whole plot can easily be uncovered

At the same time until most interested parties adapt to this new attribute there is a window of opportunity for this trick especially if used in combination with Javascript and or server side scripting (PHP would be my choice).

tags: firefox, ie7, affiliate, alexa, attribute, cheat, cookie, google, header, lzzr, motorola, prefetch, seo, tag, trick, webaccelerator

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Posted by LZZR under SEO Tricks | Comments (0)

Summer Holidays for Linkie Winkie

For a week or so I’ve been busy doing some other stuff and nearly forgot about Linkie Winkie. Today checked the site again and as I predicted it started to show its teeth - two winderful spikes of activity in a form of two large fangs suggest that there might be slightly more to it than just natural flow of traffic. It looks like it takes some holidays (days off rather) too.
When I’ll be back from holidays in about ten days I certainly will run my Log Analyzer software to see exactly where it comes from ;-).

tags: log analyzer, activity, fangs, holidays, spikes, teeth, traffic

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Posted by LZZR under SEO Tricks, Blog | Comments (5)

Learning the art of linking

Linkie Winkie is indeed something exciting - looking at how this social experiment is structured one can learn a lot not only about the ways robots crawl web sites (I recently got acquainted with a good few of previously unfamiliar ones ), but also how fast the episiteic (or epilinkic) spreads, which sites are likely to be affected and how SEs react to this spread.

I wholeheartedly admire the ability to pull data almost in real-time, make selection based on a keyword/codeword/signature and adjust the system accordingly. Well done!

The machine seems to be here, the only question is - how it is going to be used?

Concerning the timing - I hope I’m getting it right this time. Last time I was a day or so late for the party.

tags: link, linking, social experiment

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Posted by LZZR under SEO Tricks, Blog | Comments (4)

What SEO contests are made for

It’s been a buzz for quite some time now - to set up a SEO contest and rip the benefits. All possible varieties tend to spring up from moderately decent elursrebmem to shamelessly self-promoting CarCasher.
Sometimes I wonder - what’s the point of it all as it is hard to understand what exactly might bring seemingly sane individuals to participate in so obviously vain undertaking?
On the surface it seems to be just a simple willywagging excersise but is there more to it?
Of course if you really win you start building yourself a SEO reputation or might get accepted into the esoteric circle of SEO gurus. But there is only just one winner - the owner of the conters. Apart from obvious things like:

• FREE inbound links
• FREE traffic

he/she or they get also something much more interesting - namely a new search term, search phrase or even a whole search cloud previously nonexistent.

Let’s see how the thing works taking elursrebmem as an example. Surely no one searched for this term prior to the date of the contest announcement. This word did not exsits and hence was not indexed by any SE. As soon as a contest begins it generates an explosive amount of searches for this word both naturally (Let’s check how we are doing on Google for the contest. type) and kind of unnaturally to use a softer expression.

Consequently, unless the search is manually banned or blacklisted by Search Engines (a practice commonly referred to as euristics by various GoogleGuys) it should be treated “as normal” by SE algos. In effect it would mean that suddenly a totally new object appeared somewhere in this world and searchers became extremely interested in it. In othe words buzz that begins to spread. Now who was the first to publish the info on this exiting new word and to which site all of the links related to the word point? I hope your guess is right. Now, what this stie gets? The status of AUTHORITY on the subject and this seems to be priceless :-).

Note, however, a serious weak point of this linking strategy - it creates a simple many-to-one (or star) structure that would obviously look a bit suspicious to SE. To look more natural all the participating sites have to be interlinked in some way, directly or indirectly. Fortunately there is a simple way to overcome this obstacle which I suggest all future SEO contest organiser should use: rules of a contest should state that to qualify a site should link to at least one other (or better more) of participating sites. A social experiment on a grander scale! But wait, doesn’t it remind you of something? Ponzi schemes? MLM marketing?

Is this however a street with only one way traffic? Well, not exactly. When you see a SEO Contest going on you might jump on that train too. Using a tail catching tactic you might put a word of that contest or even a link to contest rules somwhere on your website pretending you are a part of the contest too. If you do it early enough you might still be able to catch the wawe of a newly formed tsunami of searches for that search term and if you are lucky to ride this wawe for a long time.

Anyway, the whole idea of becoming a SEO Contest organiser sounds so good that I am beginning to think of setting up my own LZZR SEO Contest (guess what the word for that contest would be)?

tags: free inbound links, free traffic, lzzr, lzzr seo contest, seo contest, buzz, contests, elursrebmem, linking, search phrase, search term

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Posted by LZZR under SEO Contests, SEO Tricks, Blog | Comments (4)

Social Experiment - Some Clues

Thinking about a wonderful social experiment called Linkie Winkie

• it doesn’t have to be a link
• it should be a blog post (title becomes a link text)

Now what’s left is to figure out the timing right

tags: link, social experiment

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Posted by LZZR under SEO Tricks, Blog | Comments (2)

What this guy is really up to?

Take a look at this guy - what is he up to? I kind of realised he is talking about SEs indexing large amounts of non-HTML file formats (what is so new about it BTW). He also combines this file format signature with meaningful searches but I can not grasp why and what for? He is also feeding one SE results to another SE (can do too, but is it all what he’s doing?). What is the point of chaining with @?
So, at the moment I don’t have a clue if it is just paranoia or he is up to something. Any help appreciated.

tags: indexing, seo trick

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Posted by LZZR under SEO Tricks | Comments (0)