DISQUS

Genuinely good advice not just for online relationships but also offline ones too.

Too many of us find ourselves wrapped up in the online safety blanket that we forget the "rules" that govern real life.

Loved the post hence the Stumble and Twitter RT.

Judging by the hangover I have today and the number of cans in my recycling bag, I think I'm well on the way to being a millionaire...Is beer tax deductable?

<abbr></abbr><abbr>Mikes last blog post..You’ve Lost That Blogging Feeling</abbr>

Yup. One of my sites went from a PR6 to a PR4 with the last round and now dropped to a big fat zero with this one. I noticed it a couple of days ago and thought that maybe it was a temporary glitch but it looks like they slapped me good and proper this time.

Ho hum...

I've been waiting for this post since you mentioned it the other day and I'm not disappointed. What a great alternative spin on the whole BlogRush/TrafficJam thing.

Gonna have a proper look at Pawans plugin over the next couple of days with a view to reintroducing BR.

I'm still not convinced, though, about the quality of the traffic BR sends through. I found it didn't really hang around as long as other traffic sources to the same articles (i.e. StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphinn, etc.). How does it perform for you, Andy?

Hope everything works out well on the adoption, Andy. Timothy looks like an absolute diamond.

I laughed out loud when I checked DomainTools and saw that you'd already registered the domain name! It got me thinking about whether in years to come parents will dispense with the traditional baby names books and simply do a whois search...

Without doubt the two things I would like to see StumbleUpon improve on are

1) The ability to search my own Stumbles by tagging and context. The old interface was actually easier to do this.
2) Your point #3. This frustrates the Hell out of me.

Hopefully the good people at SU are aware of this and doing something about it.

And there's the thing, Tim. Make a link human friendly via the anchor text or title and you've probably made it search engine friendly too.

Of course what they define as a company is pretty woolly but that's for another day ;)

Well this is one that I definitely want to watch! Absolutely hats off to you, Andy, for taking this stance.

Ultimately links can always be redirected to a followup review which refers to the first, and that followup isn't a paid review.

Too right. This is something that I advocated last year as a work around. Ultimately how can the Big G penalise you for that especially if you've robots.txt'd them off the original page?

I look forward to hearing how things work out with this.

I understand where you're coming from on this one, Andy, but I'm not convinced that large scale fraudulent use from Eastern Europe is what sits behind this. I'm not denying that what you've outlined is not only possible but also very probable but would that really be the sole reasoning behind these changes?

I'll say now that apart from thinking that they're a bunch of clueless numpty megalomaniacs, I have no other answer but the timing of all this post PR slap combined with more publishers complaining about smart pricing seems odd to me and, as TzuVelli points out, the DoubleClick deal.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, the deal has been approved by the FTC (i.e. it'll be OK for US publishers) but not by the EU. Coincidence?

Ackk...maybe I've been reading Graywolf too much ;)

Patrick Gavin confirmed on my blog that TLA have no intention of using nofollow on any of their links or changing their business model. Adding nofollow would be against TLA TOS so it would be interesting to see if Pat and the guys pulled Arrington up.

I have to say that I was shocked when Patrick said that they weren't looking to make any changes. As I pointed out, they have a duty to protect both advertiser and publisher but it seems he disagrees...

An utterly brilliant observation of the situation, Andy, and one that I'd like to see Mr Cutts and the guys respond to. I'm not going to hold my breath, though...

The last data I saw suggested that Big G have a 65% market share in search. I would suggest that most publishers would probably add another 20% on top of that when they look at their search referral traffic. Whether we like it or not, Big G own search. If it were as simple as saying a big FU to Google and continue to make websites and blogs for our readers benefits, life would be so much easier but it's not. Without a Google presence, a website will wither and die and it seems that Google want to dictate how we operate online.

Doug Heil is one of the most vociferous fans of G over at Matts blog and he constantly refers to the "free traffic" from Google. Crap! There's no such thing as free traffic. You basically have to lube up and take whatever they give you from the Plex because without that 65%/85% of traffic, you have nothing so what choice do you have?

The woolly areas are, as you say, borne out of G's algorithmic deficiencies. There is no way on Gods earth that they can generate an algorithm which accurately detects all paid links. It's impossible. So what they do is put into place the "Report a paid link" option within Webmaster Tools and spread the biggest FUD campaign in living memory. A downside to this is that innocents get caught in friendly fire as we saw in the October Bitch Slap Fest. A further downside is what you highlight here. A fear of linking at all.

An Andy Beard post without a single link? Unheard of.

So does this mean that Google have won? That basically webmasters, bloggers and content publishers become so paranoid about linking out for fear of a Big G Bitch Slap that they don't link at all? Well FU very much, Google. Congratulations on shafting the Internet!

I'm in no doubt that the visible TBPR reductions were the first part of the "penalty". The next step will be removal from the index for the heathens that dare to link out without a Google condom.

I've been following Google since the late 90's and this is by far and away the most f*cked up piece of brand degradation that I've ever seen. They were once the geeks champion. They're now the biggest bullies in the playground.

Sorry to ramble in your comments section, Andy, but as you know, this is a subject close to my own heart and you've reopened a can of worms that I'd put to one side for the festering...I mean festive break.

As I said in my post (thanks for the link, by the way), I don't think the supplementals have gone anywhere. All they've done is repackaged the previously unpopular mechanism for publicly displaying them. The idea behind it, in my opinion, is to stop SEOs whining about the number of pages they've got stuck in the SI by not just removing the old SI tag but to publicly declaim the index.

The fact remains that the internal G quality scoring metric will still be in place. That won't have gone anywhere in a hurry despite the public "we'll index anything, us" statement.

It's funny the way Big G work. A couple of days ago they launch, without much public acclaim, the changes to the Webmaster Tools section so that you can see things like duplicate meta tags but, within 48 hours, they remove a far more visible method of seeing how your site ranks within their index.

I really can't see that the internal forces at G are talking to each other because they seem to give with one hand and take away with the other.

Loving this on two counts. Firstly the Matt gag and secondly the dig about Google knols. Spot on!

Disappointed to hear you took this step. Looking at your linked posts you're admitting that Google won.

Linkbait?

Disappointed to hear you took this step. Looking at your linked posts you're admitting that Google won.

Linkbait?

As the response by both TLA and Izea suggests, the cull is being conducted manually. I've got not doubts about that. It's also not being done particularly scientifically either. A lot of my squeaky clean client sites got slapped for no other reason than association.

Let's face it, if Site A is committing the heinous crime of displaying TLA on their posts, it's not too difficult for a $10 an hour intern to look at the Webmaster Tools console for Site A and then apply an across the board slap to all the other sites without looking.

I'm pretty certain that's what they've done because some of my sites that weren't associated with my Webmaster Tools account escaped the slap totally.

Duly added to the feed reader provided by the company that dare not speak it's name ;)

I have to say that I admire you tremendously for taking this step. I'm going to be watching with great interest to see how it works out.

Really keeping everything crossed for you, fella!

I have to say that I admire you tremendously for taking this step. I'm going to be watching with great interest to see how it works out.

Really keeping everything crossed for you, fella!

I'm no Nostradamus but I reckon visible PR will not be here Jan 1. In addition I will say that the next round of paid link/sponsored post/hell we just don't like you (delete where applicable) penalties will be applied in January and these will be serious penalties - drops from the SERPs.

We'll wait and see. I must admit that my F5 button took a pounding earlier today when I hit Digpagerank after Court's post and then I went off to do something more productive. Like watching my fingernails grow.

Oh stop it! You'll make me blush. All I did was leave a comment on your site. I mean it was a nice thing to do but legend? Please. That's too much.

Oh. Wait. I get it now.

Ackk....

Just checked a dozen or so of my sites. Most of them have dropped two points. None of them have ever been involved in paid linking or dubious linking policies. These include some of my client sites. I've been very clean with my client sites.

My own? Bollocks. Reap the whirlwind and all that but I'm not prepared to play games with other peoples livelihoods.

Ladies and gentlemen, PageRank has left the building.

Shaun - it's not a canonical issue at all. I double checked it before I posted it earlier.

Either the data centres have gone FUBAR or PageRank has left the building. Google slapping everyone else I can understand but self flagellation? Surely not...

Well according to a thread on Digital Point and according to iWEBTOOL, You Tube, a Google owned company, has dropped from PR8 to PR3 so maybe the whole thing is a data centre issue and Matt and all the boys are laughing their socks off at us right now.

You know, it would make sense. AdSense data has been screwed through all of this too.

Mine is anywhere between 0-4 depending on which data centre you believe. In addition Everton over at Connected Internet has just had his collar felt and dropped to from 6 to 3.

I've given up trying to second guess what's happening. My gut feeling is that there is a slap happening and it's going to take a couple of weeks for the dust to settle.

I also wonder, as Maki did over at Sphinn, whether or not Big G have noted the furore over this and are perhaps adjusting the manual penalties dished out to the higher profile or more vocal sites.

UPDATE: Just noticed one of my other sites has dropped from PR6 to PR4 in the last couple of hours :(