I was awestruck today when I noticed that the perhaps most important German blogging conference re:publica sells high PageRank links.

Paid links are forbidden by the Google Webmaster Guidelines since 2007

and Google has repeatedly asked webmasters to report paid links aimed at manipulating Google’s PageRank algorithm over the recent years.

The more astounded I was when I discovered that

Google itself, Google.de to be more exact buys a link on the same page.

It’s right there on the homepage. It has PageRank 7 and the links are easily identifiable as Sponsors.

So I took a look at the source code and was quite sure that my Quirk SearchStatus extension has overlooked the obligatory “nofollow” attribute you have to add to sponsored links to stay within the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

I mean after all, these people, the blogging elite of Germany are Internet savvy professionals. They have to know it.

The more I was dumbfounded when I discovered the actual source code. In it you can clearly see anchor text that doesn’t show up on the page itself. It’s hidden. You can see images only that is the logos of the companies buying links at re:publica.

In the source code it says though:


<ul class="sponsors kooperationspartner">
<li><a target="_new" href="http://www.sony.de/" title="Sony">Sony</a></li>
<li><a target="_new" href="http://www.google.de">Google</a></li>;

among others.

So not only are these paid links. This site and with it Google itself violate the Google Webmaster guidelines by using hidden text as well. It’s one of the oldest spam techniques there are on the Web. Here the site uses CSS to hide the text.

So what does this mean? Has Google revised its stance on paid links, now the it buy links itself?

I don’t know what to believe by now. In the past Google departments all over the world have been caught buying links but in most cases they a good excuse. What’s the excuse here? Will Google.de and re:republica get penalized by Matt Cutts? We’ll see.

This blog is probably not important enough to make Google.de and the German blogging elite revise their site so I hope some more important publications cover this story as well.

As far as I’m concerned I don’t think it’s OK to force the little guy with a blog to remove a few paid links on a blog that make a bit extra money while allowing huge corporations like

• HP
• Sony
• Google

itself to buy links with hidden anchor text to manipulate PageRank and search results.

It smells like double standards.

Btw.: re:publica sells links all over the site, not just on the homepage. There are dozens of them. It’s not just one of two.

Of course you can become a cynic and consider site that sell links to Google as a save haven from now. Whenever you want to buy links on high PageRank sites make sure to do it on sites that sell to Google as well.

P.S.: The webmaster of re:publica know what nofollow is. They have links on the homepage that use nofollow. They use nofollow on links from Twitter updates.

Related posts:

1. Google Filters: Exact Match Anchor Text Links Are the New Meta Keywords
2. Where to Buy Links? Turkey!
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1. Google Filters: Exact Match Anchor Text Links Are the New Meta Keywords
2. Where to Buy Links? Turkey!
3. 20 Ways to Get Legit Paid Links Without Getting Penalized by Google

After 13 years of online publishing, 7 years of blogging for a plethora of blogs, being an SEO for six years and being paid for blogging for five years by now I finally am convinced that I know how it works.

What I learned about online publishing, blogging, SEO in more than 10 years you can now read in 10 minutes.

This is my list of 101 ways to make your blog more popular and successful. Most of it I tried myself, other measures have been taken by numerous other bloggers with success so I have to catch up on them myself.

1 – 5: Twitter

1. Get social on Twitter, the people on Twitter will support your blog if you do it right

2. Follow some people on Twitter who share your interests but not too many

3. Reward people tweeting and retweeting you, or say “thanks” at least

4. Tweet only good stuff, so people get interested in you and visit your blog

5. Add a retweet button like the one above to your blog posts or web pages

6 – 10: Niche social news sites

6. Target niche social news sites like SERPd, Earners Club or BizSugar

7. Become a power user at the one that fits you most

8. Tweet good articles from the niche social news communities

9. Use a striking avatar like the sombrero guy image I use

10. Socialize with other (power) users and add them as friends at Facebook or LinkedIn

11 – 20: Your blog

11. Add an unforgettable image or huge headline in your blog header

12. Use WordPress, as it’s the most widely used blogging platform and makes socializing with pingbacks easier

13. Use a great design or customize a great WordPress theme

14. Allow pings, trackbacks and real links in comments (dofollow)

15. Reply to your genuine commenters who add value in the comments

16. Link to other bloggers, most notably your peers, not only the well known ones

17. Create pillar or flagship content like huge lists, thorough tutorials, breaking or unique news

18. Be the first to say something: break news, uncover scams, debunk myths

19. Review and address other bloggers

20. Create a blogroll of blogs that are similar to yours and/or a good supplement

21 – 30: Other blogs:

21. Accept and support authorities in your field

22. Make a list of the top 10 blogs in your field and try being like them and better

23. Contribute guest posts on other blogs

24. Notify other bloggers if they have “Page not found” errors or their design is broken is some browser

25. Get inspired by other bloggers

26. Comment on other blogs, out of interest, not only for marketing purposes

27. Meet other bloggers in real life and connect

28. Submit other’s blog posts to your favorite social media or vote there for them

29. Do not expect other bloggers to like you just because you’re there, actively befriend them

30. Do not annoy other bloggers with IM, email or other means, only contact them if it really matters

31 – 40: Copy writing

31. Write about popular topics but not those everybody else already covered

32. Find a new angle to a story instead of mere repeating or linking

33. Use striking, funny, easy to remember post headlines like “The Day I was reborn, twice”, “I ate my iPod“, “10 Ways to become a Millionaire in 5 Weeks”

34. Do not write too short or too long posts

35. Write timeless blog postings not just yesterday’s news

36. Know your audience and offer it what it wants, not only what you think is appropriate

37. Be yourself, do not write like you would write for an employer, write as if you write a letter to a friend

38. Offend offenders

39. Do not offend people weaker than you

40. Ask questions and incite discussions

41 – 50: X/HTML and CSS

41. Use clean, lean HTML and CSS for website speed

42. Use headings, lists, bold, italic and other means of making a text readable

43. Use large headlines

44. Use the h2 tag for post headlines (h1 is for the blog name)

45. Use image replacement to make your headlines look better

46. Do not use fonts for headlines which are not meant for them and look ugly (Verdana)

47. Make your font size readable in your posts but not too big, your readers are not half blind

48. Use colors that contrast but not too much and not too many of them, black on white is still king

49. Be original but let people recognize that your blog is a blog, by using some well known elements

50. Use compatible CSS rather than CSS 3 tricks only newer browsers support

51 – 60: Images

51. Use images in posts

52. Use striking images in your posts, like collages, bright colors, images that metaphorically illustrate your point

53. Be original, do not just display the Google logo when you write about Google

54. Do not steal images without proper attribution

55. Use a list of images to attract large audiences, but don’t forget #54

56. Use .png screen shots or parts of them as images for your blog posts

57. Use pictures of beautiful women

58. Do not use pictures as the only content of a post if it’s not a list

59. Do not use images that are bigger than 100 kb, not everybody in the world has a fast connection

60. Use thumbnails for bigger images

61 – 70: Topics

61. Cover the most important things in life: Love, peace, happiness, community, freedom

62. Do not write about SEO (it’s too late for me)

63. If you write about SEO call it blogging tips

64. Write about how you feel

65. Interview interesting and well known people

66. Write about stars, people love stars: Angelina Jolie I love you!

67. Write about what you know first hand, what you have experienced

68. Concentrate on positive topics, do not just write how bad everything is

69. Do not write about your wife, kids, where you live, how much you earn or what you bought unless you’re properly armed or live in Sweden

70. Write you earned thousands of dollars by blogging to get known

71 – 80: Blog SEO and promotion

71. Contribute to blog communities like the ones on LinkedIn or BlogCatalog

72. Tweet your blog posts

73. Ping Technorati and Google Blog Search (default in English WordPress)

74. Use WordPress 3.+ as it’s already SEOed to the max out of the box

75. Link out to others to get linked, do not engage in link exchange, link buying or selling or any automated link schemes

76. Do not use keywords like “california real estate” as your name when commenting unless it’s your blog’s name

77. Don’t overdo conventional SEO on your blog, it’s in most cases counter productive

78. Do not write content – write articles, reviews, interviews

79. SEO is not Spam, Blog SEO is not trackback spam

80. Do not automate your blogging efforts

81 – 85: Getting Subscribers

81. Display a (big) orange feed icon where everybody can see it

82. Use Feedburner to enhance your RSS feed

83. Let people subscribe by email via Aweber or Mailchimp

84. Offer a full feed not just excerpts

85. Explain what RSS is for people new to the concept and offer a choice of the best RSS readers

86 – 90: Branding

86. Create a personal brand. Don’t blog as “admin”

87. Get a unique and remarkable name for your blog

88. Get a short and easy to remember name for yourself, Tadeusz Szewczyk = Tad Chef

89. Use your blog URL and/or avatar throughout the Web

90. Trademark your blog name

91 – 101: Miscellaneous

91. Do not offend people for being different than you

92. Be open minded, let anything and everything inspire you

93. Treat your readers and other bloggers like real people, with respect and compassion

94. Explain stuff that you know, there are always some people who don’t know

95. Be different but stay true to yourself, do not pose as somebody else

96. Do not overload your blog with ads

97. Do not use Google Adsense or Text Link Ads unless you have to or depend on it

98. Become an expert in your trade, be a specialist for your topic, don’t try everything at the same time

99. Do not try to do everything or be everywhere, concentrate on the stuff you like, prefer and are good at

100. Cooperate with others, altruism is the best egoism

101. In short: Practice SEO 2.0

I want to thank five bloggers who have inspired me to write this post: Smashing Magazine, Vandelay Design, Skellie, Social Networking Articles and this SEO blogger.

Originally published October 29th, 2007. V2 republished August 14th, 2010. Last updated July 3rd, 2011.

* Image: Spreng Ben.

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Image: Brick Obama by ~emeph

Immediately after Barack Obama has been sworn in as the new president of the United States

the Whitehouse.gov website has been relaunched.

Some of the most important aspects of this change are:

• It has a blog
• It’s valid “XHTML 1.0 Transitional”
• It’s robots.txt file is one line long
• It uses the by now industry standard jQuery JavaScript library
• It has a Spanish version
• It focuses on public good, just read the notice on gifts below the contact form

Besides that we recognize some common sense best practices like

• Very content rich
• Clean URLs and directory structure “/agenda/civil_rights/”
• user and search engine optimized HTML titles like “civil rights”

Of course there are some drawbacks here too

• Some too small font sizes, especially in the menu at the bottom
• The homepage is more than 1 megabyte in size, mostly due to scripts and images
• No direct social media connection
• No 302 URL redirection of old documents, they result in a 404 not found error

Nonetheless we clearly recognize that change has come to WhiteHouse.gov, when will it come to your website?

Technology is at the forefront of change, use it accordingly, in a SEO 2.0 manner like Obama does, or get left behind.

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Ignore this by Reeuwijk. The main message of many designers’ websites.

Are you a graphic, industrial or web designer? Do you want your website to look good? Do you ignore, hate or forget SEO and usability? Well, I can help.

Designers often do not implement the simplest website tweaks and do not employ the easiest marketing methods that can drastically improve your performance in Google and bring you more clients.

Here are the 10 simplest website tweaks for designers, 2 of them actually off site.

1. Change your page title from your name or portfolio to what/where/who or in other words [offer city - name], example: “Graphic Design Atlanta – John Doe”, use descriptive titles for each page
2. Use CSS or image replacement like sIFR, Flir and typeface.js for navigation, headlines and links instead of pure Flash or images
3. Rename your navigation links from works, portfolio etc. to web design, print design, logo design etc. Use your name instead of about me
4. Do not display solely one image per page, nobody clicks 10 times. Make lists of 10 images per page and create a page for each image. Forget thumbs, clients who can’t afford broadband probably can’t afford design too.
5. Display your content right away, don’t make me think or click (no “enter” pages, navigation only homepages), every links costs you visitors
6. Display contact information right away and every page, a form is best, a phone number, email and IM at least
7. Display your name and/or URL on your images so that when they get redistributed the still advertise for you, best example Glennz
8. Join a community like Behance to share your work and to to spread the word
9. Submit your well designed site to CSS galleries (or mixed ones if you’re into Flash)
10. Start a blog and link out to all your friends and people you admire for their work

Stop ignoring SEO and usability both of which are two sides of the same coin. Design is not about fancy graphics it’s about findable and usable interfaces.

You want more of this? Check out my posts on URL design, CSS SEO tricks and findability crimes this post is a follow up to.

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Besides using such obvious Firefox add-ons and toolbars like those for StumbleUpon, Delicious and Browzmi (the StumbleUpon, Twitter & Mixx combination on steroids) what does a holistic SEO 2.0 aficionado like Tad Chef use daily or very often? Here are the top 10 Firefox extensions for search, website optimization and SEO I use:

googlebar
The original googlebar for Firefox without the call mothership function thus not to mix up with the Google toolbar

Customize Google
Allows me to nuke all that unnecessary and distracting Google Ads in search results among a plethora of other options.

Search Status
This one makes me see who kills which links by nofollow attribute and to take a look at Penis-length, sorry PageRank of sites etc.

SEOpen
This toolbar is just basically a set of short cuts to online tools but nonetheless very useful.

Rank Checker
Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker helps me obsessing about rankings in Google when I feel like SEO 1.0

SeoQuake
This extension is both a toolbar and a search results enhancement. I use mainly the latter for SEO research determining who my competition is and how strong

Linkdiagnosis
One of the best backlink checkers on the planet, especially due to its design gets even better with the extension.

Social Media for Firefox
You can quickly check how popular a web page is in the most popular social media.

CSSViewer
For SEO and website optimization indispensable but also very useful for average web development tasks.

Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool
Take a look at the bare naked website as if you’re blind or a search engine bot, maginificent for all 3 design, usability and SEO.

Any other suggestions? I recently disabled or uninstalled more than half of my Firefox extensions due to them slowing or breaking my Firefox installation so please suggest only the best of the best.

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Crime scene by Cati Kaoe.

Web designers & developers often focus on web standards, table-less layouts or CSS effects like styled lists or sidebars e.g. All these things are perfectly OK unless they are executed at the expense of findability.

Yes, findability is the orphan of the web design industry and thus often forgotten, overlooked or plainly ignored.

Those who do not heed findability in many cases without even pondering it manage to make a website useless for a client as it won’t have many users or if some appear, they won’t find what they seek.

Here I collected the 10 worst findability crimes committed By web designers & developers you should avoid:

1. Cool HTML titles
For years web designers used “cool” HTML titles for their websites, the more special characters, the less decriptive keywords the better: —===###///Name///###===— Also imagine a book cover with only the author’s name but with no title, many web designers won’t disclose what they do or offer. Some obviously only offer portfolios. Many sell “work” or “projects”.

2. Mysterious links
Why tell anybody what you do when you can make them guess? “Profile”, “projects” is much more mysterious than just writing “web design”, “graphic design” or “programming”. Let them click to find out or bounce if they are not patient enough.

3. Fancy JavaScript menus
Since at least 1999, the more complicated JavaScript menus you used, the better, many of them are still not crawlable by search engines, also most people won’t click hidden menu items.

4. Hidden headlines
While HTML offers 6 headlines tags, h1-h6, web developers started using divs and spans for headlines artificially making them bigger using font-size: 600% e.g. while the Google bot did not even know that it’s a headline.

5. Bizarre URL structure
Many high profile websites still use URL structures that are unstable, seemingly random and unreadable for both humans and robots. They probably never heard of the term URL design.

6. Obnoxious fonts and font sizes
A few years ago Flash pixel fonts were en vogue but so small that only hawk eyed youths could decipher them. With the dawn of the web standards movement the opposite was the case, the bigger the better so that simple text becomes unscannable or sometimes unreadable due to sheer size. Also ugly Verdana headlines still haunt me sometimes. Why not find a middle ground?

7. Duplicate titles
When every page has the same title how am I supposed to find out the differences? Google thinks so too. Every page needs it’s own title.

8. Multiple meta tags
Many websites still use at least a dozen meta tags while they get ignored by Google and people can’t see them anyway. They just clutter the code. Meta description and meta robots are perfectly sufficient.

9. Multiple meta keywords
The meta keyword tag is a relic of the dark past of the pre-Google era, unfortunately webmasters still assume that you need dozens of keywords in there. You can skip the tag altogether.

10. Excessive Pagination
Do you think people click 3, 5, 10 pages just to see some images? Some do, but you lose a large part of your audience with each click. Also those who only scan the page will leave instantly.


Simply avoid these hideous crimes against findability to get along with the search engines and the online population.

Don’t make people think, be straightforward.

Web design and development is not an artform. You want people to buy your services, don’t you? So first they must find you and then find out about them.

All these issues seriously interfere with this objective. These CSS findability guidelines might be a good start.

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• Firefox/IE7 inconsistencies
• unstyled forms (argh!)
• too large fonts
• redundant clutter 
  
• useless information (SEO 2.0 is not a group blog so it does not need the author displayed each time e.g.)
  

So I reduced it to the max and now my customized Press Box WordPress theme looks already really simple and neat. It still has some issues I want to deal with but it already makes me feel better after ther change was overdue. I really feel better. Also I decided to unclutter my own redundant stuff, I removed almost everything. All the widgets and boxes I used had some additional annoyances:

• The lijit search widget didn’t find many of my older posts due to using Google customized search. As Google deindexed my older post lijit did not find them.
• The Feedburner subscribers counter always annoyed me by showing the numbers of “readers”. Anyone new to this must assume that I have currently 775 readers online or something not subscribers. Also the fluctuations on weekends just show that the numbers are inaccurate: People do not unsubscribe over the weekend. People are just offline but Google Reader and other services prefetch RSS feeds while you are browsing, that means they make you subscribe without you knowing about it. When you end up one day in Guantanamo and they ask you why your subscribed to this Al Qaeda blog you know why…
• The Feedjumbler dynamic blogroll was nice but I had the impression that it didn’t work as intended. It was meant to encourage others to link to  my feed too but nobody ever did and the feeds of the other SEO bloggers just weren’t relevant enough or updated frequently enough. Adding others would require me to create a new feed group each time instead of just adding… Linking friends is nice, but only when they are truly relevant with a particular post.

I finally decided to tell Google that SEO 2.0 is a blog, a SEO blog. Google still fails to grasp that unless you write in big letters (h1 heading) and the title tag so I spammed both with the relevant keyphrase and voila I’m at #35 in Google.com for SEO blog viewed from the US. On the other hand I cleaned up my categories which were partly very specific as I also bowed to Google’s pressure there to rank but didn’t anyways although keyword combinations like financial independence are not that competitive. Anyways I simplified my categories too. I added findability and I changed:

• Financial Independence to just Independence
• Freelancing Tips to solely Freelancing
• Improving Productivity is Productivity now
• Reputation Building changed to just Reputation
• Self Empowerment is “only” Empowerment now

You can see the categories on the right of the single post pages, not on the homepage which focuses on the last 20 articles without displaying them in their entirety. Instead Press Box will display a thumbnail image and a teaser. I like that, less scrolling… but more clicking, let’s see if this increases the number of my pageviews…

Right now I’m wondering where I can add the about me etc. menu or section. Also you have probably noticed that the cool Mexican with the white hat is gone for a vacation. He might return to his newly renovated home though, I’m not sure yet where his room will be.

Now is this change or simplification OK with you? Can you live without the Mexican sombrero wearing guy on top? I already miss him somehow… On the other hand now neither Google nor you will have any problems with understanding that this is a SEO blog.

P.S.: I was also tempted to hide categories and archives altogether. They look so 2001!!! What do you think? Do you ever click them? They are only good for spreading PageRank, but my blog is about SEO 2.0 and not PageRank sculpting among other SEO 1.0 practices.

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1. Less is more, do not use more code than necessary
2. No inline CSS or scripts, try to separate content from appearance and behavior
3. No huge styles and scripts in the head, externalize (use external files) everything as far as possible
4. Use semantic code, make headline headlines (h1, h2, h3 etc.), make important terms bold, citation blockquote etc.
5. Don’t use any redundant meta tags (only meta description is a must)
6. Use Microformats to make your site machine readable by e.g. telling robots your name and address
7. Use tables only for table data (like for basketball scores)
8. Use bulleted or numbered lists, or use lists without displaying them as such.
9. Use only degradable JavaScript (no JavaScript links)
10. Do not load important content via Flash or AJAX, always use plain HTML

If you liked this article you will probably also like my Flash SEO overview, the AJAX SEO article and my list of CSS SEO tricks.

Last updated: September 22nd, 2011.

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CNN adds Mixx buttons, 5 of them! Couldn’t resist it ;-) Screenshot taken with Firefox 1.5

Join us at our SEO 2.0 group at Mixx before it’s too late.

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Website findability is the new and better SEO so to say or, on-site SEO without the bad rep of the SEO industry if you adopt the definition from Building Findable Websites.

Basically Aarron Walter says that building websites for findability encompasses not only SEO but a holistic approach with usability and web standards etc. in mind, a position I can fully support. One thing that Mr. Walter attempts to tell us though is:

SEO is bad, findability is good.

This is a good move from a marketing perspective as nobody likes SEO of course, the term is a stain in itself or at least is perceived by the majority as such.

When we go back to what Peter Morville wrote in 2002 we discover that findability and SEO are not contradictory but basically twin brothers. He acknowledges how

SEO contributes to a websites findability along with usability and other important aspects of information architecture.

Now that might be the problem of it not generating enough hype so that Aarron Walter took a more aggressive approach.

Also Walter reduced findability to websites build with web standards while Morville’s definition extends to the real world. Morville uses examples like looking for long term parking or restrooms on an airport which strike home very convincingly. Jakob Nielsen used the term in 2006 for the first time as far as I can see. Nielsen also limited it to website findability without denouncing SEO though.

Now am I angry at Aarron Walter for being explicit about SEO? No, I’m glad, glad someone makes a strong point on renaming the “whole problem”. In this sense I took the wrong approach with attempting to redefine SEO and having to deal with it’s reputation problem.

Using another, better term is the by far more effective way of redefining something.

Sadly it’s mostly used by political think tanks to manipulate the public usually. In this case the outcome of the manipulation is a positive one. People will acknowledge best practices and put them in use.

I don’t care how do you call it, SEO, findability or like myself probably SEO 2.0 as long as we have the same goals. Our goals match while the methods do just partly as findability refers in web development only to the on-site or on-page factors of SEO which is not enough to be found, especially in the Web 2.0 environment, but they match.

The single most positive aspect of website findability is the teaching aspect:

Findability teaches designers, web developers and information architects what they’ve condescendingly ignored for years, making websites findable.

Now as I am the garbage man of all these lazy designers, web developers and information architects and had to fix crap websites for years, I’m sick and tired of it. I want to do the real thing, the content, the SEO 2.0 fun stuff.

So clean up your websites yourself guys and don’t rely on the poor Mexican migrant worker wit a sombrero to do it.

That said, I still prefer the approach of Peter Norville. So do not only read Aarron Walter’s book but also, or at first Norvilles “Ambient Findability”.

Btw.: Building Findable Websites only covers the on-site SEO basics, adding some Microfomats and the likes, if you really want to do web design for findability you need to read the Web Design for ROI, a book that will change your professional life forever.


Findablity resources:

• The Age of Findability – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
• Ambient Findability
• Digital Web Magazine – Ambient Findability
• O’Reilly Media | Ambient Findability
• findability.org – by Peter Morville
• DonnaM » Blog Archive » Usability testing for findability
• A List Apart: Articles: Ambient Findability: Findability Hacks
• Use Old Words When Writing for Findability (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• A List Apart: Articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
• Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond
• Findability Bliss Through Web Standards | An Event Apart New Orleans April 2008
• Findability and Exploration: the future of search by Stijn Debrouwere

From now on please refer to me as a findability expert, maybe this way I can outsmart the SEO haters ;-)

Last updated: September 26th, 2010.

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