Robert Scoble demonstrates his lack of SEO understanding - or is he dodging the real issue?
November 10th, 2006Robert Scoble (of Scobleizer fame) made a post earlier today on how Wordpress.com doesn’t allow PayPerPost and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) gaming tricks to be used on their blogs. Fair point. However, a visitor calling themselves Remarkable posted the following comment:
“Also, if you want to put lots of ads and things on your blog, why are you using a free service? Pay for a host and put that stuff somewhere else.”
Says Robert, advertising his book (twice) on his free Wordpress.com blog
Not saying you shouldn’t. But, it’s not that different from a sidebar of Google Ads.
To which Robert replies:
Remarkable: good point, but stuff on the sidebar isn’t treated as SEO the way that stuff in the content area is.
Now, partly I’m confused as to what Robert is trying to say here. Taken literally the sentence doesn’t make any sense but what I believe he’s trying to say is that the sidebar on a WordPress blog doesn’t influence SEO - Wrong. Wrong big style.
First off, the commenter wasn’t talking about SEO, they were talking about putting ads on a free WordPress account. Secondly, whatever is on the sidebar can heavily influence SEO on a blog - After all, the sidebar appears on every single blog page! Robert, Robert, Robert, as VP of Media Dev at PodTech.net you really should know that already. Or is Robert skirting around the issue. After all, he has probably one of the most commercial blogs on WordPress.com that he used to drive traffic to a number of third-party commercial sites on a regular basis.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 3:51 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 10th, 2006 at 4:05 am
Sorry, talk to the folks at Microsoft and Google. Links in the sidebar that appear every single day are FAR FAR FAR less ranked than links in the content part of the page that changes every day.
November 10th, 2006 at 4:18 am
Robert, some points:
- Google’s page ranking/site ranking algorithm is probably one of the most closely guarded secrets out there. Having been studying and experimenting and reading extensively about SEO for several years now I can tell you that you can’t make a bold statement without being wrong.
- “Links in the sidebar that appear every single day are FAR FAR FAR less ranked than links in the content part”. A couple of issues about that statement. First, unless Google scrutinizes the code and extracts the sidebar code from the rest of the page (which I doubt, given how big a job that would be - although some people are known to radically change the default template used by the various platforms in case Google do that), the sidebar is just a standard part of the page. Also, the sidebar is a constantly changing in terms of links (latest posts, etc).
- A link, even in the sidebar (or header or footer, which are static) from a high PageRank site to a site with lower PR is almost always beneficial to the site getting the link. FACT.
November 10th, 2006 at 10:25 am
Your readers might find this little piece on the typical blog sidebar interesting although the site in question might have changed the sidebar now (the owner of the site thanked me in the comments)
How a blogroll Can Destroy Your Pagerank
Maybe Google are also going to start discounting internal tagging methods employed by some sites as well.
Wordpress.com Linking Structure
November 10th, 2006 at 11:32 am
Thanks for the link!
True - a big blogroll can be counter productive because your site starts to stray into the realm on being a link farm. The same is true on any large set of links. But for a reasonable number, there’s no penalty.
November 28th, 2006 at 8:11 am
Linkfarm is actually much less of a problem.
The big problem is that pagerank is shared between all the links on a page
On this very page (currently) you have more links to external sites than your own internal pages.
Hack the code of whatever plugin you are using for the social buttons and add “nofollow”.
I am sure Sitemeter really needs more PR
November 29th, 2006 at 5:29 am
Is there any special techniques that can be used to optimize a wordpress blog on my server for SEO. One issue I see is no way to change the title tags on each page, where it seems to take the blog name for the home page.
I have several hundred 600+ inbound links.
I have pinged Technorati manually and used pingoat as well as pingomatic every time I add a new blog.
There is plenty of content, about 30 articles.
What else can I do? What else should I do to optimize my blog?