I want to let it be known that not everything you read on blogs will be accurate. What is more disturbing is the blogs that might be written by “popular” people, can often be viewed as true facts. I don’t think that people purposely release incorrect information, I just think they try hard to give great articles and sometimes stretch the content further than need be. I definitely am not here to say I know everything about everything, but when it comes to linking, we have been around the block enough to know what is not correct.

Tonight I read a blog post about “Google Filters and how to get around them” and there was some good info here and there, but I definitely would debate some of the link info given.

CO-citation Linking Filter: This popular filter by Google watches your inbound link structure. If your link is on a site who’s outbound links are related to casino’s and porn sites and your automotive site is an outbound link on this site then google will think your site is related to porn and casinos, there are all-legal sites where you can learn to play gambling online check it out isleofraasayhotel.co.uk. Players can visit almost any of the top casino sites like http://agenidnpoker.me/ and find dozens of the most popular card games, including blackjack and baccarat, table games, like roulette, and hundreds of the top online slots. Poorly constructed co-citation will damage your ranking and make it hard for you to rank well for the terms you are targeting.

This quote from the article referenced is absolutely crazy. Let me paint the picture of why it is so wrong. We were recently at Pubcon in Vegas and Matt Cutt’s was speaking about linking. He brought up the thought that inbound links can’t hurt you. He gave the example of porn sites that have the initial home page that makes you agree to the terms, you agree and proceed into the porn pages or you disagree and it redirects you to disney.com. What he explained is, there is no way they could penalize disney.com because some porn site decided to link to them. The only way disney.com could be frowned upon is if they returned the link back to that porn site. It would show a relationship between the two.

I believe the author of this post was giving good Google filter information, but it definitely was not all accurate information. When it comes to inbound links, you can NOT be penalized because of links that point to you if there is no reciprocal link!. If this was true, then all anyone would have to do is put bad links to their competition. Google can not count a link, but they will not put a penalty on anyone because of an inbound link they have no control over.

Since early in the week our staff was able to get LinkWords back to running smoothly. We should be good for a long while now as we have planned for plenty of growth. Requests are being processed faster than ever.

We appreciate everyone’s patience who were affected.

We wanted to alert all LinkWord publishers/advertisers that we are currently moving the entire system to it’s own infrastructure. This will cause a temporary offline status for all LinkWord ads (no ads will appear on publisher sites). Publishers will not need to do anything to their sites, we have just disabled the system so it will not cause issues with any sites showing ads. We hope to have everything turned back online by tomorrow afternoon/evening (2.6.07).

If you have any questions, please contact support. We apologize for any inconveniences.

I just wanted to let our publishers know that we have been experiencing huge increases of traffic over the past week and it has been causing our servers to have periods of lag. We are working on the issue and hope to have it resolved quickly.

An immediate solution for anyone that wants to make sure the lag doesn’t affect their site is to replace any file inclusion options you have on your site with static html ads.

* Regular text ads – use copy/paste option
* Rotating text ads – use the local file inclusion option

Again, we’re working on the issue and should have it resolved soon.

Thanks for your patience!

Do you think you are good at developing plugins for different blog and content management software? Then you might just be the person we’re looking for!

We are on the hunt for someone that can help us develop a LinkWorth plugin that makes publishing our different ad products easier for partners. We have the basic idea, we just need a specialist to make it all work.

If you are interested, please send an email to admin (@) linkworth.com. Reference “Developer Needed” in the subject line.

There has been updates to the Google AdSense TOS. This is important to LinkWorth publishers who use AdSense as a source of additional revenue. We posted before about how our ads do not violate their terms as long as you do not format them to mimic AdSense ads. It is still the same thing, just make sure your users can differentiate between AdSense ads and LinkWorth ads. If you have any question or doubt, don’t chance it, make them look different.

Here is a good article I read with more detail. You can move on to the JenSense blog to read further if you are interested.

Publishers have often complained about the rigidness of the AdSense policy that prevents publishers from running AdSense on the same page as another contextual ad program. So running AdSense & Yahoo Publisher Network on the same page during the same page view would be a no-no, but rotated 50/50 would be perfectly within the AdSense (& YPN) policies and terms. But not any more. Their competitive ad policy has gotten much, much tighter when they updated their AdSense policies today.

Their competitve ads & services policy was updated to this today:

Competitive Ads and Services In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.

read more | digg story

I’m always hesitant to post something that might have been out for a while and I look like someone that is slow to keep up, but although others have posted about ChaCha, the human edited search engine, I think there are a lot of others who have not heard about it. So as the generic business guy would say, I’m going to do my due diligence and talk about it for those who are unaware. 🙂

Today a friend asked if I had ever heard of “ChaCha“. Obviously my first thought was the dance, but then when he said “a search engine”, I quickly pulled it up online. I noticed the normal search field and then two search buttons; 1. Normal Search 2. Search With Guide. Here is a snapshot:

So once you enter a search phrase, you can either use the “ChaCha Search” button and have typical search results returned, or you can click the “Search With Guide” button and you are taken to a page that has a left sidebar which is a chat window, then on the right there is a blank page, which is where the guides results will eventually appear. A guide, as they refer to them, is the human on the other end that is specialized in the particular category you are searching in. Looking at the ChaCha Underground, there appear to be thousands of guides over all the main categories. The guide then strikes up a chat with you and helps narrow down a few search results that they feel will meet your needs. I have saved my conversation so you could see my questioning and her answers:

Status: Looking for a guide …
Status: Connected to guide: KendraN
KendraN: Welcome to ChaCha!
KendraN: Hello
KendraN: How are you today?
You: hi kendra
You: i’m just checking out your site
KendraN: okay, what can I help you find?
You: so lets say i’m searching for “text advertising” … do you tell me sites? or give me results you think are bests?
KendraN: I would give you the link to the sites that has the best information
KendraN: Guides are supposed to give you at least three sites
You: Ok, so can you provide results for “text advertising” ?
KendraN: sure, just one moment
KendraN: These would be the type of sites I would give you and then ask if this was what you were looking for
KendraN: If yes, woot! We’re done, if no, I would clarify what you are looking for and search more.
You: How many live guides are available at any given time?
KendraN: I don’t really know, but probably hundreds
KendraN: There are alot of us
KendraN: We come online as we please
You: Do you volunteer to do this? or do you actually all work for the same company?
KendraN: We are considered private contractors
KendraN: We are not employed by them, but they pay us for the work that we do
KendraN: We are paid per time searching
You: Very cool. Now is the search database chacha uses actually their own or another engines?
KendraN: We have our own
KendraN: But the guides can use any resources we like
You: Where is chacha located? The home office I guess?
KendraN: I am not sure
You: I’m sure I could probably find it on the site

I asked how one becomes a guide but I was just referred to their website. From what I can tell, they are not accepting guides any more. It appears they have plenty and in order to pay all of these people, I would imagine they need to earn a good bit on advertising.

It’s a very interesting concept and it’s a little slower than just using a normal search engine, but it just comes down to preference. One good thing about normal search is it’s anonymous, so you can search for whatever you want and pick the sites you want. Using another human, although you’re not right in front of them, it’s not so anonymous. It also is slow and you are going on another person’s decision rather than you getting to select what you feel is best.

One of the more important aspects of any website to become an authority within their respective market is content.  Adding highly optimized content to your site, along with a strong, same themed linking campaign, is any advertiser’s road to owning their market in the search results.

LinkWorth now offers content development to Advertisers and Publishers who need the help.  If you are interested in well written, SEO friendly content for your site, contact support and we can discuss your needs and the costs involved.

Need traffic? Want permanent inbound links? LinkWorth’s Directory Submission service (a.k.a. LinkDir) is an easy way to drive relevant web traffic to your site and increase your link popularity for a nominal one-time fee. Whether you are looking for improved rankings or just need more visitors, LinkDir is a great add-on service that can help.

The LinkDir Directory Submission service will manually submit your website to up to 300 of the largest, most popular directories on the web using a variety of titles (keywords) and descriptions. We literally “hand submit” to each directory to ensure inclusion in the most relevant categories and we will even provide screenshots of the “registration complete” page at your request.

Perhaps most importantly, using the LinkDir Directory Submission service will save you a lot of valuable time. Considering it can take 10 minutes to submit to just one directory, it makes sense to outsource this tedious task to a team of dedicated professionals.

To add this service, inside your LinkWorth account look for the PRODUCTS menu option and the LinkDir option will be found. This is available for both Advertisers and Partners.

I happened across an article through a spam comment post, which led me to webmasterworld and their discussion on the subject. The owner of wikipedia, Mr. Whales, calls out Google results are SPAM! He goes on to explain how his software is the wave of the future to combat companies like Google and their automated algorithmic methods that were easily manipulated by interested parties of their respective markets. He explains how his software (wikiasari) will be edited by a human before it is allowed within an index.

So there are many angles I could go on this, so lets dive in and hit them one at a time:

1. Initially, I was like, he might be on to something. A way for humans to have the say so on if a document deems the right to be listed well. Then I quickly thought of how well wikipedia does and there is so much spam plugged into those documents all over, it’s not even funny. Then the idea of corruption for those who have the power. I’m a pretty honest guy, but I was on DMOZ editorial staff back in its inception. I was very fair to anyone that submitted, but when it came time that I had sites that made money, I was probably too fair to let them in as quick as I did.
2. I then visited the site and it initially looks just like wikipedia. So what exactly will be the difference? I was hoping for a sample of results, but either missed it or it didn’t exist yet. I also noticed that in the article, Mr. Whales took a few shots directly at Google, yet, when you visit their mock site, it’s laced with Google AdSense ads on the right panel.
3. Finally, this guy speaks as if his model is fool proof. It’s definitely what you want to see in a leader to the free world, but obvious holes in his story make me giggle a bit more than get excited about the project. Billions of legitimate documents and you’re telling me they will all be judged fairly and accordingly by a real human initially? And what happens after time passes and 50,000,000 documents need to be reviewed again to ensure all is well? You hiring a sweat shop to do this all for the statistical data that makes humans feel better knowing it is being done?

In summary, this debate is quite an interesting one. There are some smart people over at webmasterworld quizzing some great points on the subject. Hey, regardless of what my post here sounds like, I would like to see Mr. Whales get this into production. There is nothing better than a little competition when it comes to company giants like Yahoo & Google!

I think Mr. Whales needs to speak with LinkWorth on how we can provide his new Wikiasari with the proper advertising system to differentiate himself further from the search giants. 😉 John Whales, give me a call (Ron Wicker), and I can tell you about the perfect platform for you that would be pay per performance without the ads taking up side bars or head & foot locations.