PayPerPost Blog Links Still Impact Google Rankings

by | Jan 16, 2008

October was a tough month for PayPerPost (PPP) bloggers. Many PPP opportunities required a blog to have a certain PageRank to be eligible to take them. Unfortunately, right before the holidays, a very large number of PPP sites saw their PageRank drop to zero. Suddenly, they were unqualified for the better paying blogging opportunities.

Posts from Matt Cutts at Google confirmed that this was an intentional penalty, not just the usual suspect data from the Google Toolbar. The belief passed through the forums and the blogosphere that these sites had lost all ability to provide benefits through links (e.g. “link juice”).

Meanwhile, we were still seeing our clients benefit from PPP opportunities, both in direct traffic (suggesting that the sites had not lost search engine rankings themselves) and in ranking benefit (suggesting that link juice was still being passed. Clearly, something else was going on and I was determined to discern the facts scientifically. The details on my investigation follow.

Hypothesis: The “penalty” Google imposed on PPP blogs is more cosmetic than actual.

Prediction: If the penalized sites are truly unable to pass any link juice, then a link from that site to a page on another site will have no impact on Google’s rankings.

To test this theory, I had a group of sites each use unique, fantasy anchor text to link to a brand new page (unindexed and never before linked) on a single site (so that there were no variances of site trust on the destination page). The destination pages all included different excerpts from the text of Beowulf (so that the content of the page was unique across the site) and did not include the targeted keyword on the page. If the destination page later returned in a search for that keyword, it would be shown that the site was still passing link juice.

The anchor texts were created using a password generator, using six or more characters in length, and had no more than five hundred (500) Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in Google at the time of creation (many were misspellings of other words or used as forum logins by others, so they did have a few SERPs).

Methodology: The test consisted of eighty-three (83) sites. Fifty-four (54) were PPP blogs that had been “penalized” by Google (PPP Group) and twenty-nine (29) were non-PPP sites (Control Group). The members of the PPP Group were located via a posting on the PPP forum. We asked PPP bloggers that had been penalized to participate in this test so that we could determine whether their blogs still provided any SEO linking benefit.

Each blogger was given a unique combination of anchor text and destination page on the target site and was told to place the link on the homepage of their blog. Once the links were live, the target site was monitored daily to determine if/when it started ranking for any of the fantasy anchor texts in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The test was allowed to run for six weeks.

Results: Of the PPP Group, fourteen (14) caused pages to be ranked in Google (25.93%) and thirty-two (32) to be ranked in Yahoo (59.26%). Of the Control Group sites, fifteen (15) ranked in Google (51.72%) and sixteen (16) ranked in Yahoo (55.17%). None of the sites caused pages to be ranked in MSN.

Conclusions: Clearly, the claims that PPP blogs have lost all ability to pass link juice have been definitively proven false.

However, the possibility that an actual penalty has been imposed still remains. The PPP sites pushed pages into Google at half the rate of Yahoo, while the Control Group pushed pages into Google and Yahoo at very similar rates. This suggests that Google may have lowered the actual PageRank for the pages. Whether this was to zero so that only the link juice from the page itself is passed (none of the link juice coming into the page would be passed) or to some other amount is unknown.

Alternatively, this differential rate may be due to Google’s attempts to reduce the influence of Google Bombs. The anchor texts for the PPP Group were actually somewhat more competitive than that for the Control Group. On average, the keywords in the PPP Group had 196 SERPs while the keywords in the Control Group had 129 SERPs on average, a difference of about one-third. If the efficacy of the Google Bomb filters is based upon the number of pages that rank for a keyword (as many believe), then this could account for much of the delta.

Another lesson learned is that it appears that MSN will not rank a page based only on the anchor text of the links coming into the page. The key phrase must be on the page itself.

Commentary: It’s very possible that the penalty imposed by Google is not purely cosmetic, and that an actual lowering of PageRank did occur. As it happens, PageRank is no longer all that large a component of Google’s relevancy calculation, so even if PageRank was actually dropped to zero, PPP posts still have definite SEO benefit for advertisers.

That’s no consolation to Posties who lost revenue due to not being able to take on new paid blogging opportunities, and I sympathize with their pain. Unfortunately, Izea’s connecting the sale of links to PageRank was a sure-fire way to draw some ugly attention from Google. Hopefully Izea/PayPerPost advertisers will be willing to accept RealRank as a suitable proxy for PageRank.

Further testing will be needed to determine whether or not the penalty was cosmetic, and if not, how severe a penalty was imposed. I still believe that at best the penalty is quite limited. Google’s ability to programmatically determine which blogs are doing paid blogging seems too still be somewhat ineffectual. Many PPP blogs were not hit with the penalty, and there are numerous reports of sites that have never had anything to do with PPP having their PageRank zero’ed out. The risk of collateral damage was quite high and even a purely cosmetic penalty would achieve Google’s goal of punishing the sale of PageRank. It’s probable that Google didn’t want to take that risk.

The next round of testing will begin in a week or two. If you’d like to take part, please drop me a line through the blog.

Picking Your Poison: PPC vs SEO Keywords

by | Dec 20, 2007

Dart throwing, names in a hat, coin tosses, and binge drinking are all accepted formulas for devising a list of keywords for an SEM campaign. There is however differences in creating paid search keywords versus natural search keywords.

The main difference paid search keywords have in comparison to natural search is the breadth of generated keywords. With paid search your keywords are at the mercy of a user’s search, which is unfortunate because a user’s intelligence pales in comparison to that of an algorithm. This is why paid search keywords need to be both precise and all encompassing. Take for instance name brand HDTV’s. Keywords such as “Sony,” “Magnavox” etc need to be included however those are all very high volume keywords, and unless you are willing to pay five or more dollars a click, chances are this keyword won’t see the first page of results. However if you tweak the keywords to match a probable user comparison thought process the keyword “Sony vs Magnavox” would be of more benefit to your overall campaign.

Another important thing to remember in keyword generation is that your customers are not looking for you they are looking for your product or service, which means they’re looking for anyone. Bidding on competitors’ names has received some bad press in the past, but it’s a smart (and legal) way to be seen in the search engines. There is no need to use it as an assault on the competition, but having your name rank among their results will be of benefit to users shopping for your product or service.

Those were just two tips to keep in mind for keyword generation. For the actual generation itself, there is once again no way a human’s intellect can match that of a machine, which is why keyword generation websites can immensely help the process. There are many sites out there, some for free (Google Adwords), that generate a list of keywords along with a number of impressions. Along with this list should be a short list of negative keywords that tell the search engines not to run an ad when an unwanted keyword is entered. For example a pickle farmer would want to create a negative keyword for the type of people that live in Poland.

Developing your paid search keywords is actually the first step in generating keywords for a natural search campaign. Throughout the first months of a paid search campaign you will begin to see which keywords are out performing the rest. The top 5, along with a few long tail keywords that perform well should be considered to be a part of a natural search keyword list. Performance depends on a robust clickthrough rate as well as impressions. In natural search the only thing search engines care about is relevancy, which is why these keywords should be the 15- 20 best keywords that define your site.

If you do not plan on running a paid search campaign preceding your natural search, tools like wordtracker are of use when trying to find high volume keywords. However these high volume words should be carefully chosen. Terms like “real estate” are too broad which is why “Louisville KY real estate” would work better for the algorithm retrieving your site. Also, try to stay away from prepositions. While words like “and, but, for” etc. work for your humans users in paid search campaigns, they are usually bypassed by the search engines.

In terms of keeping up with your competitors viewing their source code to see the keywords they have used in places such as the title, headings, and descriptions is useful when creating ideas for keywords and such on your site.

Above all the aforementioned it’s important to realize the monetary distinction between paid and natural search keywords. With paid search a keyword is more of a one-time payment multiplied by the number of times it is clicked, and you can manipulate this number with targeted ad copy. For example the keyword “SPAM Prevention Software” will be seen by a large market, but if you’re software is designed for enterprises only creating copy targeted for the private market will filter out the public market. With SEO your keywords are more of an investment on the basis of impressions. Which is why to succeed in SEO the same “SPAM Prevention Software” keyword might not be the best overall investment if only 10% of the total audience searching for SPAM prevention software sees it.

While I don’t want to explicitly say that paid search is an art while natural search is a science, it more or less is like that. The majority of the time a user will not put much thought into entering in his/her keywords which is why it is important to think existentially in order to have all bases covered in a paid search campaign. Conversely in natural search you are catering to an algorithm that is essentially a cold, heartless robot that wants nothing but results. Much like an elderly, widowed piano teacher.