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Is this what we’re supposed to expect from all the smart bloggers looking to gain more free backlinks in the future? I wonder how long it will be before actually paying people to post comments on dofollow blogs using your URL becomes mainstream enough that Google will slap the collective blogging crowd and figure out an algorithm to make links from comments irrelevant. Considering sidebar links already weight less (or so i hear, a little way down that page at #5), lowering the weight of links from comments is the next step.

Then again maybe it will get drowned by all the people switching back to nofollow links from comments.

I spent some money advertising another blog i run on the tnx.net ads network. I ordered a small number of PR1 and PR2, as well as a larger number of PR0 link pointing to a specific post that i wanted to promote. My only goal was to pass some PR juice to the page and see how TNX works on the advertiser’s point of view, and not to drive traffic to the page. Generally, i wasn’t that impressed.

The other blog is travel related and TNX has a travel section to point ads to, so that was a natural choice. I ordered about 100 PR0, 3 PR1 and 3 PR2 link. Granted, getting traffic on a general travel info site is a feat in the travel sector with all the heavyweights fighting for Google’s attention, but this is a fairly limited niche site. The campaigns took a couple of days to activate and start displaying on sites, and the results where underwhelming to say the least.

From the PR0 pages that the ads appeared on, a rough estimate would be that 95% are not even tracked by Google, or in the supplemental index. The rest of the pages with PR1 and PR2 proved to be a disappointment as well, picking up dead forum posts and abandoned pages. Another bad sign was a couple of sites i discovered that never even displayed the ads, i doubt TNX actually checks the pages their ads appear on to make sure everyone plays fair.

Overall i was disappointed by the performance of the ads, some lousy links are to be expected when you target low PageRank sites, but 95% of unranked pages helps very little.

1.) Stop posting for weeks at a time, then only post to say that you haven’t been posting much.

2.) Stick to a stable diet of paid posts and sponsored reviews.

3.) Stick enough ads to your RSS feed to drive away even the most dedicated visitors. Then fill your site with ads to drive away even new visitors.

4.) Never, ever reply to a comment.

5.) Stick to personal posts, possibly about your pet, or even lolcats.

6.) Never use a spam blacklist or moderate comments.

7.) Expect traffic to stay the same, or even rise, during your two month vacation.

8.) After a long absence do a list post, much like this one.

Seems like IZEA, the company behind PayPerPost, will be using their own devised RealRank to value blogs from now, instead of PageRank. On the IZEA blog they posted a getting started with RealRank article which explains the basics. The RealRank system is supposed to compete directly with Google PageRank for valuing blogs for advertising purposes. Today they took the next step and announced that they have moved blog valuation in PayPerPost (their most succesful service) into the RealRank system.

The RealRank system values blogs on three areas:
70% weighted towards visitors per day
20% weighted towards amount of ACTIVE inbound links per day
10% weighted towards pageviews per day

One of the downsides is that you pretty much give up your statistics to IZEA as the RR system requires you to install a plugin to actually get a rank, and the plugin sends data about your visitors back to IZEA. How big of a splash IZEA will make remains to be seen, it depends on how many bloggers and webmasters will adopt the new system.

Finally, i got around to designing and coding a decent template for serverdome, as the last two designs were actually very, very bad looking. (I had several people commenting on the “mustard colored” blog). The template is far from over, as the plan is to release it as a free wordpress theme when i am done polishing and customizing it for public consumption. This version has some glaring oversights, (and probably some problems i haven’t noticed yet) like the lack of a functional footer and support for some plugins.

The curved corners are done through the use of the wonderful Nifty Corners Cube that you can use to get rounded corners on any html element using just javascript.

A big improvement over the last design is the customized look of the MyBlogLog widget. I always hated the default look of the widget and wanted to customize it but couldn’t bring myself to go through the mess that is the MBL code. This article on styling the MyBlogLog widget was a huge help in figuring out where every little piece of css goes.

All in all, I’m fairly happy with the look and feel of the new template compared to the old designs. I was considering using a free template and not have to worry about designing and coding a template from scratch but i prefer to do things by myself and knew i wouldn’t be happy until i had my own custom design.

Want to know when the downloadable version of the template will be available? Why not subscribe to the fabulous RSS feed ?

So you took the big step and removed no-follow tags from your blog’s comments and/or trackbacks? Great choice but it’s not quite over yet. There’s quite a few smart (at least by their reasoning) people that will try to trick your willingness to reward comments and links by using your blog as a free linkback service for their blogs.

How to find a DoFollow spam comment

The first thing to look for is the name of the commenter itself. Proper commenters use their name or online alias, or at most the domain name of their site. Spammers instead use keywords to promote relevancy to the page they’re linking to. So for example, someone with a blog about making money online would use “Make money blogging” as his name, so he would get a link to his blog with relevant keywords.

Also the link url is always suspect. Beware of deep linking. I had a guy comment on my “7 most annoying things bloggers have on their sites” article with the name “Blogging tools” and the url pointing to his blogging tools category on his blog. Smart yes? Well.. not really. Nice try, but when i do decide to run a free link service, I’ll be sure to announce it.

Comments on old posts can be used for the same reason. An older, well linked post with PageRank is a good target for a spammer to get some links back to his page. Use this handy plug in to automatically close comments and trackbacks on older posts.

I also make it a habit to follow links from commenter to check out their site and will generally delete comments with links that point to made-for-AdSense sites and article scraper sites.

DoFollow spam is obnoxious and annoying. It provides little to no value to the discussion, most spammers will just try to stroke the poster’s ego and make it look like they are contributing.

This is why Google relevancy is and will be the metric for monetization for a long time. I did a quick search for the term “make money blogging” on both search engines. Google managed 100% of the returned links to be relevant. How well did Yahoo manage? All the results where on the spot, but out of the top ten results, 3 are (useless) links to social services (2 technorati links, one Netscape Propeller almost-empty category) with the rest being real resource sites.

You could argue that technorati is relevant, but it really isn’t. Yahoo feels that the top two spots both belong to technorati listings, while Google thinks that StevePavlina.com and ProBlogger.net deserver the top two spots. As far as I’m concerned (and anyone who would be looking for actual ways to make money blogging), Google’s results are correct, while Yahoo’s aren’t.

This is why, unless Google decides to scrap it or completely remove it’s public display, PageRank is here to stay. It might not be the metric that bloggers use to judge a page, but it is the metric that advertisers will use to value your site. It’s easily comparable, comes from the 800 pound gorilla of the internet, and in the end, that is what matters.

Did i ever mention Michael Martinez is my hero? He writes about SEO on his SEO Theory blog. Michael posted a list about the basics of SEO for blogs today, which is of course a piece of crap. Wordpress can do most out of the box, and the rest depends on the blogger’s focus on SEO. The list is a veiled attempt to get the ADD blogging crowd (including me) to actually read through the real post, which has more insight than any list can ever provide. If you have to subscribe to just one SEO blog, this is the one.

NewestOnTheNet.com has a huge list of StumbleUpon articles, with my own StumbleUpon bounce rate post in there too. I haven’t had the time to go through every link yet, but a couple of the entries i enjoyed is The StumbleUpon experiment by Dan Grossman and How to write for StumbleUpon by Copyblogger.

I still have a lot of things to say about SU, a month after starting this blog the social service managed to bring over 6.000 unique visitors to serverdome. The amount of SU data and ideas on the list is quite a bit and needs some digesting if you haven’t bothered with SU before.

65 Must Read StumbleUpon Articles

These services will all pay you to post reviews on your blog, along with a couple of more obscure services.

Payperpost.com

The mother of them all. PPP has the most advertisers available.

ReviewMe.com

ReviewMe is catching up to PPP and also offers the option for advertisers to contact you directly.

SponsoredReviews.com

Sponsored Reviews is the opposite of PPP and ReviewMe. Advertisers post opportunities and bloggers can bid on the assignments for the lowest price.

Smorty.com

I posted my own review of Smorty a week ago. Seems to have more options for smaller blogs.

PayU2Blog.com

Blogitive.com

Blogsvertise.com

LoudLaunch.com

BlogToProfit.com

BloggingAds.com

Money4Blogs

BloggerWave.com

MyLot

MyLot pays you to post on their own site, contribute to discussions and the such.
DayTipper
DayTipper pays you to post tips on their website.