Such news is also putting the fear of God in some legitimate commenters as well. Determining what is spam and what is not is a purely subjective opinion best left to blog owners and not an algorithm or a Google Webspam employee that may not like your comment.

For too long blog comment spam has been a problem. This blog also gets spammed to death daily, which is why I am tough on comments. If they are legit I will approve them. If the comments are on the borderline, I may just delete them. Flat out spam comments are reported to Akismet.

If you want to read more about Google’s new policy regarding blog comment spam, you can read it here.

As a blog owner myself, part of me sides with Google on this. But ultimately a website is the responsibility of its owner. If the blog has been spammed to death, it would be far more appropriate to devalue all the links on such blogs to 0 instead of throwing out penalties for blog comment spams.

When you think about it, Google is pushing the small webmasters into a corner when it comes to link building. We all know Google’s stand on how to rank well - build a multi-million dollar website that can crush Twitter and you will rank well when tens of thousands of people link to you. In the real world, that does not happen too often. And in many niches outside of the webmaster niche, it is difficult for new businesses to improve their ranks. Blog commenting is yet another concern for what are typically many small mom and pop websites.

Regardless of our opinions, Google has spoken. The comment spamming must stop, so Google says. When commenting on blogs, make sure your comments will not be flagged as spam. The last thing anyone needs is to be labeled a blog comment spammer in Google’s eyes and hit with a penalty!

This is a current problem I am struggling with. The site in question is what many would consider an authority. It gets good traffic, has plenty of natural backlinks, great organic search positions, and of course a significant amount of traffic. The problem is that the people visiting the page are not interested in the ads that Google believes should be displayed. The ads I think should be displayed pay ten times as much and receive twice the CTR when they are displayed. The problem is displaying them permanently.

For this issue, let me explain what I did try. Keep in mind I am trying to walk a tight rope here. I want Google to display the ads I want while still preserving my superior search engine positions. This is not an easy thing to do, trust me.

First, I of course applied the proper weight to the content I want Adsense to read in order to determine which ads to display. I enclosed the paragraphs with the comments below.

<!–– google_ad_section_start ––>
This is where content references to the ads I want displayed are.
<!–– google_ad_section_end ––>

Ok, this did not work. So I added some additional keyword rich content. Still no luck, but my search positions remained unchanged which was great. Then I decided to use my ability to ignore the content which was causing the too relevant ads to display. I used the code below.

<!–– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) ––>
This is where the content is I want ignored.
<!–– google_ad_section_end ––>

Unfortunately I still had no luck. Keep in mind that I am trying to preserve my search positions while still displaying Adsense advertisements that my users want. So I can’t change the page title, META Description, or a good portion of the other text which Adsense weighs too heavily in determining which ads to display.

In cases like mine, I truly believe there is a fundamental flaw in how Google determines which types of ads to display. Even if I can get appropriate Adsense ads to temporarily display, my CTR goes up and so does revenue. Unfortunately Google reverts back to the same ads that my users do not want to see. This brings into question the fact that Adsense advertisements that are too relevant actually may be counterproductive.

At this point I am faced with contacting the Adsense Team directly. Hopefully a human review of past data, from a Google employee, will support my claim that displaying relevant Adsense ads should be tweaked in this case. In the end, all parties would be happy including the advertisers, Google, my visitors, and of course myself.

If anyone has encountered this problem and would like to chime in with their opinions please do. If/when Adsense contacts me about the relevancy display issue, I will be sure to post back.

Let’s face it, Google is a master at analyzing data. From Google analytics to their own algorithm, Google does a pretty darn good job at crunching the number and detailing data. And part of their technology is devoted to identifying paid links. How does Google do it? Of course that is open to debate, but let me share some of my opinions and you make your own call.

I’ve seen it dozens of times in forums, a PR 5 or PR 6 for sale. Most of the time the seller says something like “only ten links will be sold.” This is your first clue that they are worthless links and you should avoid buying them. Why? Google can easily compare cached pages. You know, the history of the page so to speak. For years that page may have sat there with few outbound links on it then all of a sudden ten outbound links magically appear. This sends up a red flag and those links are simply devalued in most cases. Those that bought the links essentially paid for a link for some PR juice but in return get nothing.

Link placement is always a factor. Think of a page in sections when you look at it. You generally have a header, left side bar, right sidebar, the footer, and the body (where the content is). Outbound links in the footer tend to carry little value, especially if many are added all at once. The most valuable area of the page is obviously the body, where the real content is.

I could go into more details regarding paid links and placement, but that is beyond the scope of this post. My main goal is to educate the readers here and to save them money. If you are buying links from webmaster forums, consider the impact of 5, 10, or even 20 links appearing all at once. After a little thought, come to your own conclusion.

In the end it is the natural links that provide the best SEO benefit. This is why Matt Cutts specifically addresses this over and over. And to be quite honest, Google is very good at discarding paid links. Those with a paid link budget can actually gain greater SEO benefits by instead using that money to add the features and content that will make their site stand out from the rest.

There are a good number of people complaining about this algorithm update.  Apparently some sites have lost their ranks to more noteworthy brands.  This certainly could be the reason why so many webmasters think big name companies are getting preference in the serps over their more relevant websites.

To put some water on this fire, Matt Cutts has publicly acknowledged that a change was recently made to Google’s algorithm.  According to Matt, this is not a major update but one of the 300-400 minor updates they make yearly.  Matt also noted that the change would probably not even be noticed by the majority of webmasters.

If you browse the top webmaster forums, you will notice there are a fair number of people complaining that their ranks have simply disappeared.  This is especially true for their homepages.

Matt Cutts spoke on a video regarding this subject.  You can view this video below.

Over at Directory Blogger, they have recently posted some coupon codes to use at some of the Web’s top directories.  Some of these coupon codes expire soon, so take advantage of it while you can.

To get these coupon codes, simply go to Directory Blogger’s web directory coupon code page and get busy. 

If you know of any other directories that have coupon codes, please comment here.  Especially in today’s economy its always nice to save some money!

Apparently from December 11th, 2008 to December 18th, 2008 all Adsense accounts will have this feature enabled.  If its not in your account yet, be patient.

Unlike most parking providers, Adsense requires participants to create A name and CNAME records for each domain added to the Adsense for Domains parking program.  Providing your domain(s) are using your Registrars nameservers, this is not a big deal unless you plan to serve Adsense on a large number of parked domains.  Hopefully Google will decide to handle each domains DNS in the future which would certainly make the parking program easier for people to use.

For more information on Google’s new Adsense for Domains program, please visit this link.

How this new program will impact existing domain parking companies is anyone’s guess.  My gut tells me it’s not going to be pretty and will significantly cut into their bottom line.  These parking companies may ultimately end up serving mostly those that do not have an Adsense account.

One thing is certain.  It will be interesting to see how much money my parking provider was actually taking!

At first there was a lot of commotion about the 9/26/2008 PR update.  Many deserving Websites lost PR and new pages, not even a week old, gained PR.  After some thought, I wonder if the PR update we saw was Google’s internal PR being exported.  The evidence seems to point in that direction.

While many people say PR only matters if you sell links, that could not be further from the truth.  PR is a status symbol and one way to quickly determine the authority of any Website.

Google has taken a positive step in correcting last weeks toolbar PR export blunder.  There are some average surfers that use PR as a gauge to trust a Website or not.  And by doing this PR rollback, until the problems can be corrected, is best for everyone involved - including Google.

Here’s some highlights of the talk going on…

In this Digital Point post, a Website owner claims that he received a PR 3 on a page that he posted just yesterday.  He claims it is not even indexed in Google Search yet.

Also in the same thread, this post from another Webmaster claims he received a PR 2 from a blog post he made just days prior.

This post claims that an under construction site attained a PR 6.

Another post that claims they got a PR 2 19 days after they launched their Website.

But there is a funny in the Digital Point forum today.  One guy was complaining that he wants Google to lower his PR because the site does not deserve it.  Here’s the thread.  Make sure you also look at the last post of that thread on the first page. :) 

Some noteworthy sites that lost PR are Digitalpoint’s forum, which went from a PR 7 to a PR 6.  Also Namepros, another large forum, went from a PR 7 to a PR 5.

Some Web directories took a beating as well.  AuthorityDirectory.com went from a PR 4 to a PR 0.  Worldlinksdirectory.com, which is still advertised as a PR 6, is now a PR 3.  But if you are the bid directory owner in this thread, using a dropped domain, you are happy to go from a PR 5 to a PR 6!

From everything I have seen, it looks like Google’s PR algorithm is simply broken.  If that is not the case, then as a Google Executive I would be questioning employees about the apparent failure of this toolbar PR export.

While Webmasters use this as a gauge to determine the health of Webpages, there are quite a few average surfers that use the toolbar PR to determine if a site/page is trustworthy.  By Google giving PR to sites/pages that do not deserve it, Google is doing a disservice to the Internet.

I’m not going to name any URLs, but just visualize this.  Two PR 3 directories, which were created about the same time, each having a much different backlink profile.  I will take a look at these in more detail in this post.

The first PR 3 directory has a total of 905 backlinks reported by Yahoo Site Explorer.  Looking at these backlinks, I can see that none have any PR.  In fact, most of the links are from other directories.

The second PR 3 directory has a total of 64,000 backlinks.  The first ten backlinks all have PR 3 or 4.  And the kicker, this PR 3 directory has a backlink from the other one!

Now it does not take a mental wizard to figure out which directory is more popular or at least better promoted.  What baffles the mind is how Google can assign the same pagerank to both directories when one has 60 times the backlinks as the other.  And these backlinks are certainly of a much higher quality.

I understand there is a lot of variables that go into PR.  And one could say that the directory with 64K backlinks has paid links.  While that may be true, the directory is quite unique among the many other directories out there.  So it has a good reason to get these backlinks by natural linking.

On a personal note, most of my sites lost 1 PR point.  The funny thing is this blog, which I do not promote, maintained its PR 1.

With each one of these PR updates I believe Google is moving further away from providing a true gauge of each page’s importance.  It almost seems as if PR is becoming nothing more then a tactic to sway the linking patterns of Webmasters.

Spam is a huge problem for bloggers.  Just last week I received over 3,000 spam comments.  Fortunately I run Akismet, a plugin for Wordpress that is intended to combat the onslaught of blog spam.  The downside to this is that good/genuine comments can be returned as a false positive.

Last week I was doing some solid blog commenting for one of my sites and noticed that on most blogs I went to a blank page after submitting my comment.  Curious as to what the problem was, I decided to comment on one of my blogs.  I got the same result!  Now the detective in me came out.  I wanted to find out what the problem was.

I used a different variation of my name to submit a comment on my own blog.  I still went to a blank page, and the comment was not recorded in my admin.  I then changed my E-mail address, and the same thing happened.  The comment still did not appear in my admin area to approve/deny.  I then changed my domain, and presto!  The comment went through.

In normal situations, the post would just go into the Akismet comment section of my admin area.  But in cases where Akismet thinks you are a spambot, your comment never even hits the admin area.  With a little research, I found that Akismet dishes out one of the following to spambots:

delay a response
HTTP error 503 (Service Unavailable), showing a simple blank page.
HTTP error 403 (Forbidden), showing a simple blank page.
HTTP error 403 (Forbidden), showing a Drupal generated page.

Ok, now that we know Akismet thinks we are a spambot, can we fix the problem?  The good news is yes, the problem can be corrected.  The bad news is that Akismet is typically very slow to respond to “unblock requests.”  By slow I mean people have waited months to get unblocked.

If you find yourself in this situation, here’s what you should do.  Contact Akismet and provide them with the following information.

Your IP Address
Your E-mail Address
Your Website Address

When you contact Akismet, let them know that you are a human and are getting a blank page after submitting comments.  Also indicate that your blog comments are genuine and that you read each post before submitting a comment.

As I noted before, Akismet can be slow to respond to unblock requests.  To speed up this process, provide them all the information you can as noted previously.  You may find that they unblock you with a day or two.