At what point does a site get too powerful?

I spent a good amount of time with Digg because it’s a great source for backlinks. Sure, I don’t make any money off this blog, but rather use it for experiments and giving back to the community. I occasionally post tutorials or reviews, building a small reader base and gaining decent weight in search engines, which becomes invaluable when I launch new products such as Desktop Nexus.

Most of my backlinks come from articles on Digg, but at what point does a supersite like Digg become too powerful? When does it gain wikipedia-like velocity, where no matter what happens, there’s no end in sight. I recently had an article hit homepage about Ubuntu Wallpapers, which received over 500 diggs. The problem, however, is after Google updated and reshuffled it’s results, the Digg article was crowned in the top space for ‘ubuntu wallpapers’ and number two (below) for ‘ubuntu wallpaper’, with my site below it at number five:

So Digg, receiving all it’s content from the community, has achieved such mass in search engines, that they themselves rank higher than the sites they promote. Should Google make adjustments to it’s algorithms, allowing less heavy sites to rank higher, based on the link structure? If a page has 50 backlinks, all pointing to it with no outgoing links from it (ie, no link exchanges), how can Google’s logic place one of the backlinks higher than the page being promoted? Common sense dictates that looking at a link structure such as that, Google should be able to decide which page is the source, and which are references.

However I’m tearing on Google mostly because they’re my main source of traffic, however Yahoo is even worse. Yahoo ranks both the Digg article and the DuggMirror on page one, but my site doesn’t come up at all in the first 10 pages. MSN, being clueless as usual, doesn’t rank the Digg article or my site at all.

Google is a great search engines, the best online today in my opinion, however I believe they’re over-tweaking their results. They’re degrading their overall quality by watering down the accuracy to help filter out spam.

Anyone else have any examples like this?

I was just scanning through the Cingular Terms and Conditions found here: the cell phone service that brings sunshine to my day

And I found a paragraph that actually made me laugh out loud:

How’s that for SEO? Legally prohibiting anyone from linking to their homepage with any negative associations. My favorite part was “This limited right may be revoked at any time”… so they could suddenly decide you’re not allowed to link to their website anymore, and sue you? Hah

Edit: Wow, it seems Verizon is even worse:

Google is famous for their light-hearted attitude in an often boring corporate world. They regularly slip small easter eggs in their systems, like the Pi Symbol in Google Personalized Homepage, or an actual answer when you search for answer to life, the universe, and everything (if you don’t know, don’t ask)… however here’s another one in Google Maps I’d never seen before.

1. Head over to maps.google.com.
2. Click on “Get directions”
3. For the first textbox (where you’re coming from), enter “New York, NY”.
4. In the 2nd textbox (destination), enter “Paris, France”.

You’ll notice the map looks a little…. well, take a look for yourself (screenshot):

Then if you scroll down on the directions, take a look at number 23:

Oh Google, you’re so silly.

- Thanks to my amazing girlfriend Laura for pointing this out to me. I’m the computer guy, and she’s still showing me things on the internet I’ve never seen before.

7Search is a hugely popular 3rd tier search engine with buying PPC traffic for arbitrage. Now, 7search has a mass-keyword submission page, but the catch is, if you don’t want to enter your keywords one by one, they won’t let you bid under $0.03. I personally go for some very long tail keywords, and I could rank with only paying $0.01 for them.

7Search was kind enough to leave a small hole/flaw in their system however. They only check the minimum bid via javascript client-side. And as such, there’s two very easy ways around this, which will allow you to bid $0.01 for your mass-added keywords.

Both of these methods have been tested on Firefox, but since I’m running Ubuntu Linux, I can’t test them in IE. I’d appreciate any feedback in the comments from people who’ve tested this in other browsers…. however in theory, it should work on all of them.

Method One
You could essentially overload the Javascript function. While you’re on the mass keyword adding page, enter this in your location bar (as if it were a website URL), and press enter: javascript:function validateBid(a){ } This essentially runs a bit of Javascript on the current page that wipes out their validation function. From here, you can set the bid to $0.01 and it will submit successfully.

Method Two
The second method is a bit more sneaky. It’s just a matter of cheating the order browsers parse the page. First enter your entire keyword list first, leaving the bid as $0.03 so it doesn’t complain. After you’re done, click up and change your bid to $0.01, leaving the cursor in the textbox (it complains as soon as you click or tab away). With your cursor still in the bid box you just changed to $0.01, click directly on the Submit button below your keywords. It will complain that the bid amount is too low, but then it’ll change pages and submit them as $0.01 after all. Simple.

I’m sure they’ll fix this soon, so enjoy it while it lasts. Good luck!

With all the recent RegisterFly problems going on… I’m getting a little worried on a personal level.

I currently have 99 domains with them and about $44 on my account balance. While I realize there are people out there with much larger stakes than this, it’s still something to mention. This just goes to show that ICANN accredited means nothing… if it takes this much to lose the badge, and a company as low-life as RegisterFly can obtain it… how is that supposed to make customer feel about accredited companies? It’s meaningless.

I’d give RegisterFly another month before they’re completely 404′d.

Seven ways, because lists of ten are overdone, and seven was all that was needed (without losing quality, or having to think really, really hard).

1. Over-monetizing

Sure, everyone wants to make thousands of dollars a month from their blog, but that parallels elementry school kids saying they want to grow up and play professional football. It could happen, but the odds are stacked against you. People come to your blog for information. Without good content, there’s no reason for them to stick around. Blogs are much more useful to use them a promotion medium. Use your blog to gain weight in search engines and recognition in the community. That’ll help you much more than a few dollars a day from Adsense. For instance, if you build a blog up, then use it to promote a new product you launch down the line. You’re already starting ahead, since you can use your blog’s weight to give your new website a jump-start. Think Google… first build a quality site people will use and benefit from, then the monetizing aspect comes later on. One of the internet’s few exceptions to this rule is John Chow. There’s a man who monitized his blog inside and out, but still maintained a high level of quality.

2. Attention Whoring

There’s a few sides of this that tie together. First off all, there are those who attack a well known player in the industry for no reason other than the quick burst of attention and controversy they’ll get. Bad idea. The blogsphere exists through friendships and trust, and if you are blacklisted, it’s near impossible to grow your blog’s influence. Another side of this is people who brag or gloat on their blogs. There is a level of confidence that’s required, but we don’t need to read a 10 page post about how your name was mentioned in Hicksville’s Newspaper last week. Readers are selfish and greedy… post about what information they came looking for and they’ll be much happier (and maybe even keep reading your blog). On the opposite side of this, one example of an attention whore who can get away with it is, of course, Shoemoney. From the famous picture of his Adsense check, to his latest MyBlogLog drama, it’s hard to deny Shoemoney loves attention… but with a blog as interesting and high quality as he has… he deserves it!

3. Personal Life Rambling

A blog is a public tool that is not supposed to be used as a diary. I couldn’t care less that your fish turned four years old today. Don’t constantly clutter my RSS reader with irrelevant posts, as there’s no quicker way for me to drop your feed. Obviously, an occasional post about a major landmark in your life is fine and interesting, but a large number of blogger have gotten their blog confused with a diary. They market it as an Internet SEO and SEM blog, but they make one post a month about SEO. There is about 50 blogs I read everyday (through Google Reader), and one of the quickest ways to get nicked from my subscribed list is to consistently post about unrelated material. A perfect example of this, however one who can hardly be criticized for it, is Google’s own Matt Cutts.

4. Not Updating

One of the biggest aspects in distinguishing a successful blog from a dud is a fairly large readerbase… and readers can’t read your blog if you never update. This is one we’ve always been guilty of at one point or another, especially when first getting started, but if you take up the responsibility of writing a blog, and you actually want it to be successful, you can’t neglect it. Depending on your niche, at least one or two updates a week should be the barebones minimum. There are a few blogs I consider exceptions to this however… who rarely post, but when they do, I make a point of reading every word of their posts our of pure respect for the authors. Among those are Boogy BonBon and Lee Dodd.

5. Posting Junk

Following the previous point, no one is going to subscribe and read your blog if there is few posts of real quality. Sure, posting quick jokes or interesting websites can be fun on occasion, but without good, solid content, what do readers get out of your blog? If they can spend the time to read your blog, you can at least spend a little time yourself and give them something worthwhile to read. One example, is the blog I setup to post whatever junk I don’t want to post here, Decomprehension. Separating the impulsive posts from the quality posts allows me to be get more out there, and maintain the integrity and quality of this blog.

6. Limiting RSS to Snippets

As the number of quality blogs online increase, it’s becoming more and more popular to keep up to date with your favorites via an RSS reader. One of the biggest things I can’t stand about blogs are people who are so scared of giving away free content, they truncate their RSS feeds to a quick blurb. My style of reading blogs is skimming the RSS, then if an article seems interesting, I will usually open that post’s page in a normal browser window and read the entire thing plus comments. However when an author limits it to three to four sentences of a three page post, it’s near impossible to tell if the article is worth reading or not. For those worried about duplicate content, Google is very good about snatching up new posts via RSS (or HTML, depending on how much Googlebot likes your site), and flagging you as the content originator. It is extremely rare for Googlebot to make a mistake in a cross-site duplicate content issue. If your reasoning behind limiting RSS feeds is because less people will see and click on your ads, reread item number one… it’s much better to get a loyal reader than to make a few extra cents. One example of a blog who does this, however is an exception to the rule, is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. He drives me crazy with his handicap RSS feed, however I still make a point of reading his every post.

7. Not Being Unique

There are millions of blogs out there (55 million according to Technorati), and every one is fighting for readers and rankings. What sets you apart? If you just syndicate every popular story to hit Search Engine Watch or Slashdot, what sets you apart from the other 54 million doing the same thing? Of course, occasional story quoting (with sources cited and your own personal thoughts appended) is fine, but blogs that do nothing but this everyday will have a difficult time getting themselves known. Don’t misunderstand me, by all means reference other bloggers and engage the community, however I’m speaking of blogs that syndk8 99% of their content and show no original, provoking thought or creative effort. To truly shine in the blogsphere you need to consistently write high quality, unique posts. Instead of copying all the time, you should be the one aiming to be quoted and linked.

This wouldn’t have normally bothered me, since thousands of people experience it on websites like MySpace everyday, but I just performed a search on Ask.com and it came up with a “Too busy” error message:

It seems in an industry as competitive as search theses days, a major player like Ask should have more than enough server power to handle any spikes in traffic. Turning away searchers is losing potential ad money and losing a little of that person’s trust. If Google started throwing up these messages, every blog in the blogsphere would be all over it… but people rarely notice a site like Ask.com. I suppose that’s why it’s no surprise Google is number 1. If Ask wants to compete, they need that same level of near-perfection Google has developed, especially on an infrastructure side.

Jon F (aojon.com), owner of WickedFire.com, one of the biggest affiliate (and sometimes borderline spam) communities online, just confirmed MySpace launching lawsuits against over 20 different affiliate-based spam companies. Most of the companies are exploiting the bulletins system in MySpace to send spam to millions of users.

MySpace is choosing to prosecute these companies in California where the anti-spam laws are more harsh and penalties are steeper. for each around $20 to $75 million…. with CPA Empire at the top, being sued for $75 million.

Here is Jon’s entire post (link):

Well, while I sit here typing this, I’m pretty shocked by the news. Here at ASW in Vegas, spirits were high for the last 2 days, but have since been shattered by Myspace’s announcement to sue at least 20-25 ad networks that many of you know all too well. Some really big ones, others are small to medium sized. Basically, they aren’t just going after the big guys in this one, they are obviously doing this to make a point the first time around.

This news is coming from 3 different trusted sources, who gave me the thumbs up to leak the news (even before some of the companies on the list will find out they are on it) but would prefer to remain anonymous. Who can blame them either, eh?

I’ve got a bunch of confirmed sources on the story as well.

Here’s what I know for sure:

Myspace’s lawsuit against the networks are to ban them, and their owners from visiting the myspace.com site.

Myspace is seeking punitive damages from $20 million to $75 million PER network.

Myspace is using the strict California state anti-spam laws as basis for the punitive damages cash amount. These laws are meant for email, not bulletins, but for some reason, they are using this as the reason for the crazy damages suit.

I have a list of 6 confirmed networks and 14-17 unconfirmed networks, but will hold off on releasing the names of them until I am absolutely sure they are involved. I was debating on releasing the names, but seeing as this is one hell of a blow that will most likely kill off a network, I think it’s safer to just wait a bit and see who is really on the list and who isn’t.

The biggest network being hit is CPA Empire for a staggering $75 million.

I’ve been saying this for a while now, Myspace was actively monitoring the spam-friendly haven forum known as Screennameforum.com. The list of networks being sued reads like a shopping list, because they all, at some point or another drafted known Myspace spammers and phishers into their programs to promote their offers, even AFTER cease and desist letters were issued to them by Myspace.

It really sucks that this is happening, but at the same time, I don’t blame Myspace for their actions, nor do I blame them for doing this and using the networks as an example of their anti-spam rules. This should act as a warning to the entire industry, that spam, no matter email or social networking, is probably not the best route to pursue.

And his later follow-ups:

If this does in fact happen, and the confirmed networks are found guilty, we’ll be seeing a lot of people filing for bankruptcy. Shakeups like this are good for the industry in the long run. Kills off the bad ones and only keeps the good. I do feel bad for the networks on the list I have, because I’m pretty good friends with all of their owners and a lot of their AM’s, and would hate to see them close shop and disappear.

It’s 3am here in Vegas now, just got off the phone with 2 more network CEO’s that have confirmed that they are indeed being sued, and both are in the $20M-$30M area. Insane.

When he’s talking about ASW or Vegas… he’s referring to the Affiliate Summit 2007.

The news of MySpace launching lawsuits towards all these ad networks comes in the heels of an official announcement that MySpace is seeking damages from the infamous spammer Scott Richter (source).

However this time, by targeting all sized ad networks, from small to massive, MySpace is clearly trying to send a message through the industry that they’re tired of the abuse of their network… quite possibly the most heavily spammed website on the entire internet.

I don’t think I’ve done any plugs on this blog before, but I have to say, I’ve never been so impressed with a keyword service before, as I am with Wordze. Levi (boogybonbon.com) dedicates countless hours night and day to building this service up, always messaging me to check out his latest additions and newest features. It’s a service that truly listens to customer requests, and acts on them.

But beyond customer support, the quality of the system he has in place is extraordinary. You can query a single keyword, and in a fraction of a second get back a hundred thousand highly-relevant keywords. And with the API it’s easy to tap into your current operations… then using it’s flexible search options… you can always find the exact keyword lists and keyword research (!!!) you’re looking for. Comparing Wordze and his competitors is like comparing apples to oranges. Sure, the other services have been around longer, but there is no doubt in my mind that the outstanding quality and flexibility of Wordze, Levi will easily surpass them in the future.

Check them out: Wordze Homepage - Wordze Tour

I recently was fixing up my blog to begin using it again, and one of the tweaks I wanted to add was a Digg Vote button on every blog post. After a little searching I found Digg This by Aviran Mordo. Great! I installed it and went on my way.

However about two hours later my email box was flooded with messages saying “Your post XYZ was dugg!”. My thoughts went chronologically somethings like this: “Nice!”.. “Uh oh, the digg effect”.. “Wait, that can’t be possible.”

I looked into it and, realized all the Digg buttons that popped up on all my posts were to someone else’s Digg story! Being a programmer myself, I dove into the source code to see what could have happened. It turned out, Digg This, while a great plugin, had some major security flaws” namely blindly assuming the referrer wasn’t spoofed by a hacker or spammer (as in the case that hit me).

I immediately began hacking the script apart, hardening the security behind it, as well as fixing a few other bugs I found. If the script received word (via a referrer) that the post was Dugg, my patched version doesn’t just assume that is accurate- it actually goes to digg.com and reads the story itself, checking if your link is actually the target of a story. If not, it blocks the hacking/spam attempt.

Essentially, what a very clever spammer did, was search for blogs with that plugin installed (not hard; it’s very popular), and sent fake hits to every post in your blog, forging the referrer to look like it came from a Digg article. Only instead of your article, they linked to theirs, causing a Digg button promoting their story to appear on every one of your blog posts! So if one of your visitors liked your article, and clicked the Digg button, they are actually benefited from the vote, not you!

My version is working great on my blog now. I called my updated, patched version Digg That, and you can download it from my Digg That - WordPress Plugin page.

There are a lot of WordPress blogs out there with a vulnerable Digg Vote button on them, let’s spread the word!

Study shows people view websites in F-Shaped patterns. This means web developers can have the highest impact by designing with the top left, top right, and bottom left content as the most interesting, to entice the reader to stay on the site. Here are some heatmaps from the study showing where the visitor’s eyes became fixated:

read more | digg story

Great article explaining how to optimize a website for high-traffic enviroments. From compression to MySQL tweaking, it’s a great reference.

read more | digg story