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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.

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.

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.

This is one thing i noticed today, MyBlogLog account subpages are getting quite a bit of a PageRank boost. I’m not the biggest MyBlogLog user, i just visit people that visit serverdome, but today while going through the option pages i noticed that the serverdome.org entry page has a PageRank of 1.

Now you’re probably thinking that’s not such an amazing thing and PR1 backlinks are a dime a dozen, but let’s compare a few things for a second. My own page which is a month old is at PR1, whle at the same time Stephan Miller’s page has a PageRank 4 profile. Stephan is about a hundred times more active on the service than i am. After a while, all those links from communities he joined and widget views start to add up, giving a PR boost to the entry page. Adding all your blogs to your page will help pass PR juice to every site linked from there.

For comparison, this blog’s page on BlogCatalog has a PR3. Too bad that the actual link from the subpage is coded in javascript and will not pass PageRank juice from BlogCatalog to blogs.

MyBlogLog observations

1. Whether links from widget views on blogs pass juice to your MyBlogLog page is debatable. The widget displays data through some funky javascript so i don’t think they do.
2. The blog link from the profile page seems to pass PR juice to your page, if you have more blogs, add them there.
3. You can’t use html on your profile description. (I was going to be evil and link to some serverdome articles there with good keywords, my brilliant plan ruined!)
4. Links from other users messaging you on the sidebar are NoFollow-ed, no sneaky spamming that way.

Pixel real estate on blogs has become a hot commodity. If you’re going to sell ad space on your site directly to advertisers or through a link broker service, knowing how important each part of your site is to advertisers means that you can negotiate better prices and better deals.

Bellow is a basic website blueprint with the most important areas highlighted, and the options you can have for each website area.

Why give so much weight to RSS subscribers?

RSS has emerged as an amazing technology to keep readers updated without having to check your site for updates. Subscribers are generaly less than viewers but RSS ads have the advantage of being highly targeted to their niche. Both TLA and Google (feedburner) are putting a lot of weight in RSS.

How did i research this?

A combination of different tools as well as experience with ad placement. Text Link Ads has an automated calculator you can use to get some rough numbers on how much link ads on your blog will fetch based on position. Shoemoney has an ad placement blueprint with prices. Even Google has their say on the best spot for ad placement is.

In case you haven’t been checking my site’s source regularly (who doesn’t really), i removed the NoFollow tag from all comment and trackback links on this blog during the weekend, and went through about 100 comments checking each link for validity. Even with my awesome moderating skills i still uncovered a bunch of trackbacks from article scrapers to remove.

I was hoping to use a plugin that would remove NoFollow on a case by case basis after i moderate each comment but the closest i could find was Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin that will only remove NoFollow from regular commentator links. Since i wanted to reward all commenters (and encourage more people to say their mind), i just removed NoFollow completely from both comments and trackbacks.

List of blogs that remove the NoFollow tag from links.

Why remove NoFollow?

There are many reasons to remove NoFollow from your blog. You might want to encourage commenting, or reward people that actually comment. I’ve even noticed some people removing NoFollow for a while just to get on the DoFollow lists and get a PR boost, then take it off (sneaky yes?). In my experience, removing NoFolow will not hurt your PR as long as you always check comments for links that point to bad neighborhoods, which you should be doing anyway. Google PR for internal and external links is a different thing, you won’t lose any PR juice on your pages if you link to other sites.

Update
Riceblogger has a nifty list of blogs that removed the nofollow tag sorted by PageRank, from PR2 up to PR7.