Sometimes watching television can be frustrating and I don't mean because of the silliness of CSI awesome computing and forensic capabilities No what I find silly is the way advertisers try to leverage the web. So I would like to introduce you to a case example.

Park Hampers – Park Hampers are a Christmas saving scheme based in the UK they work by you paying for your hamper in the weeks months prior to Christmas when it comes to Christmas time they deliver your hamper. Its aimed more at low income families or people who are terrible at saving. Their SEO team should be shot!

Their recent TV campaign tells you to visit park11.tv this is of course a redirect to a truly terrible landing page, but it is not the landing page that concerns me but the fact other then this URL there is no mention of Park11 or Park11.tv anywhere on there site this results in a Google Search for Park11 being:

Christmas Hampers? No. Parkisons disease for Christmas? No thanks

What has gone wrong for Park?

Park obviously want to track number of hits their TV campaign is bringing to their website so have created a unique url for that campaign the aforementioned park11.tv this I assume logs the user before redirecting to the landing page. Park have numerous other URLs leading to various landing pages and mini sites so this seems to be part of an overall strategy the problem is that as the unique url has diversified away from the core brand they haven't laid any foundation on their site to cope with it.

So they don't show in a Google search for Park or Park11 so what?

How many people put urls into Google not the url bar on a web browsers? I would suggest quite a lot especially those people who perhaps are not as web savy which are in part the customers Park Hampers are aiming at. So by having a sponsored listing they are simply losing traffic and what traffic they are picking up they are paying for via PPC. Not only are they paying for an advert on tv they are then paying to pick up the traffic from that advert!

In the case of Park they have a small reputation issue as well, while badly researched by them Park11 association with Parkinsons can't be helping as users arrive at Google but find no results for hampers they do read a pile of scientific jargon if that doesn't put the user off they may well visit the wikipedia page on Parkinsons. Which to be fair I think every one should so here is the link again.

How do you solve the problem

First off all sorting out the rest of Park Hampers site so that its pages are ranking, then reference Park11 campaign create a dedicated landing page for it with the keywords in use and at least internal navigation pointing to the site. Just to be safe surely you would optimise for keywords such as Park11 & "Park Eleven"

Park are not the only company not to do this, but since they are on tele right now advertising I thought they were the perfect example.

Update: Myself and Carolyn were bored over the weekend and so have been playing with look at Park Hampers redirect strategy to say its a mess is an understatement, they own park1.tv through to park40.tv and seem to be using most in various tracking, about 20 of the Google results for park1-40 actually have Park anywhere in the top 10, examples of other Park redirects include park5.tv and park15.tv. This itself wouldn't be that bad but in addition Park own another 8 or so domains including myparkmag.co.uk, gopark.co.uk etc these are not minisites but rather badly designed redirects. In short a mess, don't fall for the same mistakes.

At the time I first double checked our own bots don't do anything quite so stupid before suggesting that I thought it unlikely but would happily test it. Dave suggested a wager oddly enough one I never took him up on and I'm glad I didn't!

How we crawl robots.txt file

The need for speed is paramount when crawling a site, a bot is taking up server resources and you want it to complete its required action in as short a point as possible. If your bot follows REP (what's REP See Post notes for details )it's first action should be to download the available robots.txt file, on average these files are 2-4kb in size very small and take no time to download, however a file sent with a 404 is closer to 22-40kb assuming it also sends the associated html. a much larger size given the majority of sites do not have a robots.txt file this means if you are not careful your robot will spend more time downloading a useless file then anything else. The method we use is to simply ask initially for packets if the return is a status 200 we proceed to download the file, anything else and the status is stored and is ignored.

Is the way you do your crawler the correct way Tim?

There is no "official" recommendation within the RFC governing REP that covers how you should treat status codes and which you should follow to only follow Status 200 is by far the most efficient method but it comes at a cost as you could be ignoring the file! It also doesn't totally protect against downloading 404 pages as some servers send out a status 200 not 404 when a page can not be found.
A draft proprosal did suggest that other status codes should be followed including 3xx related to moved documents temporary or permanent it did not explicitly mention dealing with cross domains.
I have started to make changes to our own bots See Post notes for details

How does Google deal with cross domain 301 of a robots.txt file?

It reads the file at least according to webmaster tools, in Bronco follow up post they show Google Webmaster tools accepting bit.ly/robots.txt file nice should we be alarmed potentially though only if your allowing custom urls to your user at a root level on your domain with dots in them so if your running a URL shortener then yes perhaps something to check.

Did you do your own tests?

yes I had already done some tests last night which backed up what they did here is how I tested.

Experiment 1 Cross 301 oh please say this doesn't work!
We created two domains domain A and domain B with a robots.txt on Domain A and 301 to a file on Domain B the robots.txt dissallowed access to /test/ folder, a test folder was put on both domains and index file was put in both, each domain was given a root index cross referencing each and each of the test files.

If Google crawled the robots.txt then Domain A should have 1 indexed page, Domain B 2 when finished.
with a monitor attached to the logs doing reverse DNS looking for a Google IP so we could watch the interaction some links were thrown at Domain A.

Result: Domain A - 1 page indexed, Domain B - 2 page Indexed

In Webmaster Tools a status 200

Experiment 2 - Let's give google the benefit of the doubt
Ok so maybe they have indeed adopted the 1997 draft and are therefore obeying redirects it will ignore a Status 666 right?
Fresh domain this time our robots.txt file will be in the correct location but will send a http status of 666

Result: Domain A - indexed 1 page

In Webmaster Tools - status 200

Experiment 3 - given you a robots.txt file regardless
Ok so what if we tell you our server is broken i.e 500 but we give you a correct robots.txt file?
Fresh domain, correct location but headers sent are http 503 - Service Unavailable we are telling it we are not available the server is buggered in effect.

Result: Domain A - indexed 1 page

In Webmaster Tools - status 200

Tim - If you think about this it actually supports the belief google have actually programmed in the ability to follow 3xx as otherwise it would have for the 3xx returned a 404 or a 200 and blank file

Experiment 4 - I'm not here even though I'm here
Final test send http status 404 but also a valid robots.txt file what you going to do Google!

Result: Domain A - indexed 2 page

In Webmaster Tools - status 404

Only in the final test did Google behave as if it was paying the blindest notice to http status codes, can we assume 404 is hard coded and it will accept anything else?

Why should you care?

While the potential for abuse is small unless you run something akin to a URL shortner what happens when your site is producing an intermittent 500 error. From playing with status codes it would seem Google if shown a invalid or unreachable robots.txt will continue to use the old file could this be a potential for abuse what about a sneaky redirect only google on a 301 from your robots.txt by a very mischievous hacker. food for thought, and I'm glad I didn't take that bet of with DaveN.

What you want more? Seriously I mean what do I need to tell you?
I will be running a seminar on Profiling website users, looking at life cycles and a huge pile of tricks and ideas to get the most out of your users. Want to know if colour effects genders differently? Want to know how to estimate gender in website visitors?

Then you should be attending this seminar! What's more its free well sort of, its actually free to Think Visibility attendees everyone else its £50 but of course what this really means is if you buy a Think Visibility ticket at £99 and use my discount Coupon TIMNASH the price will drop down to such a level that you got to ask yourself why not come to both

I'm afraid while this seminar will be filmed it will be only for internal use and not available for purchase, if it's a success I might run a future seminar and film it.

If you are interested in improving your conversions, or even just curious as to what it is that I find more interesting then SEO (or if your into SEO why what we do is so much more then the normal) then come along for the afternoon it's free, simply register to confirm your place at the behaviour modelling seminar.

• Several of the best SEOs in the country
• Wordpress and CMS experts
• Social Media experts
• A true accessibility expert with hands on experience
• A guy who has been sued by well everyone!
• oh and me

Check out the full list of speakers and the schedule and if you haven't already buy your ticket, using the discount coupon TIMNASH

Important - would you like a more indepth seminar the day before?

I'm seriously thinking about running a free or very very cheap seminar for attendees on the friday if their was a charge it would be to cover costs for hiring somewhere. If you would be intersted in attending this seminar which would be on the Friday afternoon then please let me know if there is enough interest then I will organise one.

What I would be covering, metrics, human behaviour modelling and identifying patterns (including some nifty ideas for SEOs out there) as I say nothing concrete but either use the comments here or email/contact/tweet me (yes I'm now using twitter @tnash)

This seminar would only be for Think Visibility Attendees basically I'm offering a £500 half day course for free if people want it.

Oh don't forget to buy a ticket!

Why is timnash.co.uk changing now?

Well to be honest I have gotten bored of people pigeon holing me as an "SEO" its not a title I have ever been comfortable with and as far as I'm concerned there are less then a handful of true SEOs in the world the rest are failed web designers who need to convince people that rather than do a real job they should be paid to fix bad code mistakes and write crap to gain links. Don't get me wrong many of these people are my friends and some are incredibly talented writers, programmers and developers but virtual none of them are "Search Engine optimisers" as an industry there is little or no understanding of what a search engine is, the mathematics or logistics behind large scale information retrieval or even the process of crawling, retrieving and indexing. This is not a problem for me and I think its on a whole a good thing certainly has been for our clients, while the industry sits in the mud throwing its own muck at each other a silent group have just been getting on with the job but I just don't want to be associated with the mud slinging. Some say change should come from the inside but lets face it a quick look at SEO cesspools such as Sphinn will quickly show that it's not going to change soon. Plus as my personal interests shift away from SEO to different aspects of information retrieval and data analysis I find it harder to be interested in the day to day politics and winging of the industry I have already stopped attending or speaking at SEO conferences with the exception of smaller ones such as Think Visibility and then I pick and choose based on what other things the conference is bringing.

Venture skills is a data analysis company

We really are and always have been! We act as a trouble shooting think tank, we collect, measure and report data sets making recommendations on how to proceed, be that on helping clients optimise their sites for search engines, improve conversion rates or predicting the spread of flu within a region. We work both online and off with a clients as diverse as the government through to high street stores to online businesses. Venture Skills will no doubt continue to brand itself as an Information Architecture firm we believe ultimately that is what we do, but we shall put a renewed emphasis of the IR and data analysis side of what we do. In part to help this we plan on introducing a new website though we will not be including a blog the current Venture Skills blog will remain live but not be updated after this week. The new site will introduce what we do and why hopefully will answer the age old question what exactly is "stuff" I'm sure we as a company will put some sort of press release like thing out as unlike certain organisations this is my personal blog and not a mouth piece for Venture Skills so until its announced officially this is just here say.

What is to become of timnash.co.uk?

It will evolve the SEO course, Q&A section will be taken down, the front page will no doubt have newer text and I am slowly introducing new ideas (such as the additional post notes which are in the side bar, you can see them being used in this article) to be honest the content probably won't change to much. Recently I have been discussing profiling, metrics and analytics more then SEO and this will continue with my goal to make these more accessible and hopefully open peoples eyes to this fascinating aspect of data analysis. I will also be introducing some more programming and examples (even if I have to fake the data to protect clients privacy) what this blog will not become is a "how to make money online" blog tried that it's boring! Occasional articles on how I have improved conversions on one of my own sites maybe but I'm not going down the internet marketing guru route.

Will you be offering SEO consulting services?

Nope timnash.co.uk will not offer dedicated SEO services, all the courses,Q&A pages will be removed though I will be introducing a "have Tim in the office for a day" option for companies that need a total boost and change of perspective. The idea comes from the original idea for Venture Skills, rather then money introducing Skills into a business and while the company never went down that route it's something I have always thought was worth exploring. I still have to think about how best to implement the idea but more to come soon.

Will the new timnash.co.uk feature the old picture what about old features oh and the mannequins?

No to the photo since I have gone through age regression I feel no shame in updating the photo with the younger, beardless, hairless person I have um become In addition I have a few new idea, including a calendar I promise to keep up to date with which events I will be at and what I'm doing maybe even before I go to them! Finally while I will be updating the look the mannequins will be staying and may even become more prominent if anyone has any 3d skills and once to help me create some more then get in touch!

Tim Nash you said SEOs are crap I hate you!

cool, bye!
I no doubt I will loose a couple of subscribers but lets face it I have never been in the cool club, I was always the person you came to when everyone else had said they had no idea best go and ask the geeky ones in the corner. So if you feel where I'm taking the blog and hopefully you is not somewhere you want to come then farewell, I hope you found the previous posts useful and will still pop by occasionally. I doubt the move will bring in new subscribers going from a niche to a tiny niche but hey if I wanted subscribers I would write top 10 lists!

I don't want this post to be overly negative or personal within the "SEO Industry" I have made some great friends and while my opinion of the industry is harsh that doesn't mean I think any less of those people nor does it mean I have had a bad time I have enjoyed debating, testing and sometimes arguing with people and for that reason I want to say:

So long SEOs and thanks for all the fish!

For those still wanting to carry on this journey then you can always subscribe to the RSS feed and you can find me on Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter
Please note: if I don't know you I'm not likely to accept a friend invite on Facebook and if I do and your attached as a limited profile don't get to upset so are most people

This article is the opinion of Tim Nash not Venture Skills see footer for details

For those that are not sure what this is about, Adobe and Google claim Flash is now "indexable" of course since most SEOs are sheep they spent a lot of time cheering even those who were sceptical still clapped liked penguins. For those of us who have an interest in Flash Google announcement was nothing more then a minor update to farcical heap of dung. But lets ask some very basic questions:

• Is Flash indexable?
• Does Flash Rank for terms?
• Is a Flash Link Followed?
• Does a Flash Link pass juice?

So back to the original tests....

Back in February I updated a post (Flash the SEO Devil?) from previous April discussing a set 30 tests over 4 domains to see what information the search engines saw from a Flash file.
It looked like...

Source:http://www.timnash.co.uk/02/2008/swf-seo/

Flash SEO Now

Not pretty basically ignore Ask and they all could manage to do something, but none of them could really deal with anything complex such as converting text into a symbol. Also multiple screens and points on timeline caused lots of problems, and then we got to passing link juice it just didn't happen.

What's it like now

So 6 months on and a major announcement later...

Drum roll please
yes you have guessed it nothing has changed!

Actually that is not true Google now doesn't index 2 of our test files but it does find 3 extra lines of content in one of our files. So lets taker a closer look at Googles implementation of the Adobe Search Indexing Solution:

Flash Indexing Today

Is Flash indexable?

Yes. Generally text elements held in a single screen or scene within a Timeline that uses limited actionscript can be full extracted. Complex actionscript can cause some problems but on the whole textual content can be got at but when it is extracted no positional (within the timeline) information appears to be passed.

Flex Indexable?

Yes, because of a change in the Search SDK to call SWF within a player and allowing it to make its calls first most Flex applications can be indexed this is actually a pretty big thing if the rest of it had been sorted. But Server Side Flash is the one area where improvement has been made.

FLV Subtitles Indexable?

Ok this was never going to happen but we can only hope.

Flash Paper

Well this died when Macromedia were bought by Adobe and was a bit to close to PDF for comfort however if I was given the choice of PDF or Flash Paper, PDFs are indexed and links followed so are probably preferable from an SEO point of view.

Does Flash Rank for Competitive terms?

Not without a serious amount of external links and it never will until Adobe stops pandering to Flash Designers desire not to have to change their habits, for more information why see Adobe You Just Get Search. But Lets look at the factors that help rank pages, excluding external links...

Is a Flash Link Followed?

The original SDK would find all the links in a Flash file and put them in a text file minus anchor text for the search engine to do what ever they wanted to. The new version appears to do the same thing, which means that links do not appear to be followed.

Does a Flash Link pass juice?

Do I have to even comment if the links are not being followed then they can't pass any link juice, but if the new Search mechanisms work in the same way as the old SDK then the link would be stripped from its context anyway so even if it was followable it wouldn't pass any serious juice.

Other Flash Ranking factors

Well given Adobe has not provided a mechanism to mimic heading tags etc this is pretty much none. However this is the place where Adobe and Google could work hand in hand and truly make Flash and more importantly Flex searchable but it does require changing designer habits.

Flash SEO Tests next generation

So now its time to think of some of the problems flash will face even beyond those we initially posed (and which it failed) So here are some of the current tests I am running and will return with the results in part 2.

• If an SWF is embedded using the embed tag but not linked to will it be indexed?
• What about the current crop of Javascript Players?
• If in robots.txt file the Flash file is blocked but the embedded page is not is it indexed?

Yahoo and Flash

Always the bridesmaid never the bride they seem to have been missed out of all the major announcements yet they also have access to the new technology (unlike Microsoft) but it would appear have yet to implement the new features as of writing.

Wordpress 2.6 guess what your going to upgrade!

Yes its that time when Automatic demonstrate they truly are a useless company and once more have punched another nail into Wordpress already rather stuffed coffin when it comes to enterprise deployment. Don't know what the fuss is about well wordpress.org sums up their entire philosophy in 2 lines.

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade. source:http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/

So expect a major security bug some time this afternoon to hit 2.5 to help encourage take up after all the article goes on to say...

1,984,047 downloads of the 2.5 series, the fastest growing release we’ve ever had!

Which was not in anyway influenced by the 3 major security bug scare stories going on at all.

Good Wordpress News!

In case you have been living under a rock... Your Members the Wordpress Membership Plugin was launched! Cheer for joy and go buy it, preferably in that order.

Also Sean who has been so busy working on YM that he forgot to speak to his other half for a week has released a rather handy stat plugin which keeps a list of recent visitors its incredibly lightweight and while won't replace Google Analytics any time soon is great for seeing who is on the site right now. Check it and his blog out at sean-barton.co.uk

Money.co.uk

Yes its not enough they besmirch the name of Cornwall SEO by pretending they didn't know that cunning baiter was telling stories now they have got into the widget game... But look who's promoting ah mr Chow how nice of him...

Just a thought though money.co.uk haven't we been here before, with the whole viral widget thing?
Hat tip to Dark SEO Programming.

Total aside but Melanie from Pro-Webs is offering a free white paper on landing pages that convert you never know it might be of use.

Stompernet goes lazy

Oh and in exciting news Andy Jenkins is going to tell the Stomper Newsletter if Traffic Secrets 2 is any good... Yawn I will save you the suspense he will say its absolutely amazing and you must buy it because he was blown away yada yada ultimately a rather pathetic attempt at encouraging sales which is a shame because the Stompernet team are normally a lot less obvious and tend to put time or at least perceived time into their marketing and promotional efforts.

Last couple of bits for more serious reading, Yahoo Patent on Link Anchor text relevancy (SEO by Sea) while Mr Harry is doing Research into Diversity of Link Profiles .

Hopefully I will return with something more serious in a while, but I leave you with this...

If my first link is described as a fruit while the second a computer but both arrive at the same location am I a fruit, a computer, or just unclassified juice?

Adobe Flash Search SDK...

For those who don't know Adobe already (did) have a Search SDK for Flash, indeed I have it on my machine now and Google have been using it for some time, so is Flash SEO Friendly? (answer no)
So I was a bit surprised to see an announcement and went to look for the original and presumably base code for their amazing technology guess what it gone walkies!

Dear Adobe, Removing whole swathes of your website because you have withdrawn a product doesn't work we can still see it via Google Cache! A cynic might think this new announcement is a publicity stunt and the reason for the vanishing old product might be a rehashed relaunch.

But Why is Flash inheritable unsearchable

Adobe and before it Macromedia just don't get Search they never have this continued quest to make SWF files searchable is as much about them trying to appease a bunch of consumers who equally don't get search. But why is the mammoth task a problem?

A Website contains several pages with each page having its own content both contextual, semantic and binary (words, tags, images) and each page is linked with others both on the site and off.

A SWF file contains data not as a collection of pages (which it could do with scenes and screens) but as a single page with different content at different points in time. Just think about for a moment imagine taking all the content of a swf file and lumping it together into one big unjustified paragraph welcome to SWF Searching. The Old SDK could only extract a limited amount of information the new Adobe Indexing system uses a modified Flash player presumably to help counter the time and space issue.

If the Adobe Indexing software works like its predecessor the next step is to extract all the links from this big paragraph and separate them! So now we have a big ball of text and a list of URLs, what do you expect a search engine to do with that?

Search engines are stupid they need to be told what is important (heading tags) they need to know what context a link is (anchor text) and generally they are very single minded (1 page per topic) all of these things make any SWF Indexing (while very technically possible and always has been) unlikely to succeed any more then before. So why the announcement?

Adobe needs Flex to work!

Forget your typical Flash website, this is not the reason for Adobe new desperate measures but turn to its hybrid XML, Server, Action script child Flex. Desperate for a slice of the Web 2.0, web service market the guys at Adobe ploughed a lot of cash into a pretty large white elephant and while Flex is very cool (I use it for a couple of internal projects) it was never designed to go near a search engine.

So how do Adobe fix this mess?

They could withdraw their only real project, make a big announcement declare Google will do all the hard work hand them back a modified version (maybe they will attempt to contextualise links hmm maybe not) and run away. At least from the outside this is what it looks like, from Google point of view they are stuck between a rock and a hard place there is a very easy solution give substantially more weight to SWFs and change the balance of inbound links, relying on the inbound links to provide hints to the importance of the SWFs own internal keywords. Alternatively they can turn round to Adobe present them with SEO101 and tell them to generate code that has comparable information to html tags. Guess which is more likely?

[update] it was inevitable...

Both Google and Adobe stressed to me that this is a big win for both site owners and searchers and that it should improve relevancy in search results. They noted that Flash developers don't have to do anything in their applications to make this new technology work for their sites.

(Emphasis mine)
Vanessa you really should know better!
[Update 2] Google Webmaster Blog has provided an overview guess what it does nothing new and all the old problems remain! You are I'm sure shocked!

It is no secret I have become deeply disillusioned with the search marketing bloggers recently, and tend not to pay attention to them as a whole. Then Quadzilla wandered in with the excellent Link Bait all advanced SEO is blackhat!

I don't believe in hats

I have the concept of lines in the sand, my line is somewhere beyond the Google Guidelines but even further away from a jail cell. So for me advanced SEO can't be blackhat as blackhat doesn't exist in my world. But this leaves a bigger question is there anything that is "Advanced SEO"?

Advanced SEO?

I want to reach a consensus of what Advanced is, so here is a list of our day to day techniques and activities, which is advanced if any?

1. No Follow for page sculpting
2. SERP Hijacking
3. htaccess redirects
4. REP
5. Regex
6. IP Content Delivery
7. Link Mapping
8. Link Analysis - Link Worth
9. Crawl Spiders

They are some of the activities we do on a day to day basis, we build crawl spiders, develop IP content delivery systems and Map link data layers. Ok, maybe its the skills and knowledge needed that is advanced perhaps these could be where the "Advanced SEO" is?

1. Programming - PHP, Python, C++
2. Database programming
3. Unix system programming
4. Statistics gathering and analysis
5. Discrete mathematics
6. Numerical Analysis

Ok that some of the skills and knowledge we use but perhaps the "Advanced SEO" is the assumed knowledge, maybe it's the experience that makes a person an Advanced SEO?

I want to leave you with a question...

Does something exist if your not doing it?

Is the reason that some question the existence of different levels and skills required in SEO because they themselves have never achieved them. It's something to think about, how I help my clients is by bringing them the best information I can, through techniques that I think most people simply do not do but are they advanced? I don't think so but I wouldn't after all I do them everyday!

What is the value of a link?

A link is a link is link, a common mantra but not all links are equal, indeed inbound links from the same page are not always equal. Most Search Engines recognise this and provide a means to not only weight a page but the links on the page. While I'm not going to bore you with the maths we use and remember it's the math we use not the search engines, “Link Worth” is very much an internal calculation method, I will cover some of the factors and how they relate to each other.

Link Worth is not Page Rank

You never know “Link Worth” and Page Rank may have many factors in common but they are not the same beast (pun intended for regular readers oink oink) and deal with very different problems. Page Rank deals with page and “Link Worth” an individual link on a page. But the biggest difference is that “Link Worth” is a numerical value of weight and not a probability score.

Weighting Factors of Link

For a given link the following are factors reflecting its weight;

• Number of Links on the Page
• Type of Link
• Number of links inbound to the page (and type)
• Associated on page factors

Number of Links on the Page

This is a simple one as a links value is depreciated the more links there are on the page, if you think of pages as containers of liquid with a number of holes punched in the side the amount of potential liquid that passes through a given hole is decreased with each additional hole. Of course the position of the holes have a huge impact on this analogy which is just as well as we will cover that in a moment.

Type of Link

So simple Block Segmentation Analysis it was new and cool, but I have a confession, while we might not have been using the terminology the ideas behind that post all be it on a smaller scale have been in place for a couple of years. So please bare with me, if the terminology changes in this section a little bit but:

A Link block, is a cluster of links internal or external on a page which are separate from the immediate topic of the page. Such blocks, navigation, Blog rolls, paid links (sorry informative links) could be viewed in our container model as being of less value then links within the content and so are further up the container their potential spillage is less.

Now as these blocks repeat across the site (a common navigation for example) their position in any given container remains the same this position has some influence on Link Worth but is in this case more related to “Risk Level”

Next in terms of type of link is if the link is no followed or Javascript, we know such links still have a value even if the eyes of a search engine this is significantly reduced, you can think of these as holes in container with corks in them, a little liquid still however has the potential of escape!

Links to the page of the link

Keeping with the analogy the amount of liquid heading to the page with our link on it is dependent on the number of links, their type and location within their respective container. Therefore a huge factor in how much “Link Worth” a link can pass on to a page is inbound links. This does create a catch 22 situation when it comes to first starting the ball rolling, as our ranking mechanism is totally reliant on other links already having a value. Given we are not Google and do not have the ability to map link worth on the scale we have to force values into the system. When determining “Link Worth” of a given link as a practical measure we take the link and several layer deep links to it as an isolated sand box.

Side Note - Link Limitations
For us using the system this limitation has been an interesting problem one suggestion put forward and experimented with once developing a probability or link potential score, today we normally just inject as our starting values a range and then average out the results. Still maybe the potential other methods would make a good post.

On Page Factors

Using a simplified block analysis it is easy to identify tags held within headings, near headings, within content, and the anchor text relationship to the page. In many ways this is a sub section of type of link rather then a weighting factor of its own. But there are some on page factors that weigh in such as headings.

What we don't factor into Link Worth!

Traffic

While the amount of traffic a Link has passing through every day is and should be a major factor it is also one hard to measure every link has the potential of bringing an unlimited amount of visitors. For example pages years old which may not have brought a visitor in years can be Dugg! Most services like Compete or Alexa rely on traffic across the domain as opposed to the page and so from a practical point of view tracking visitor potential is difficult anyway.

Relevancy

The relevancy of a topic is not a simple one to determine and we are not talking LSI here. What experiments we have done has been limited to clustering folksonomies (tags) into groups but this only works if the inbound link are tags and the page has some tagging system. Obviously this is a potential point to work on but for now relevancy is well irrelevant to us.

Risk Level within Links

For some of our activities we have a different index score which runs along side Link Worth and that is the potential risk of a given link. Now risk is an odd concept mainly based on the assumption you are doing something which holds some element of danger. When we assign risk to a link, like “Link Worth” it is made up of a number of factors:

Paid Links on the page, this is a pretty obvious one and while creating a paid link detector based on content relevancy is pretty hard to do, identifying paid links based on link analysis and the psuedo authority like effect that occurs on a site buying links means that it is a lot easier then most people think to identify sites which are in turning selling links. Obviously links from such sites have a potential risk associated with them, even if its guilt by association.

Negative Link Worth, sometimes the value of a given link is actually a negative number, this normally can only occur in truly massive links pages though top 100 lists are a good example where the link is so diluted and so many other factors that the link is in the “link worth” system worthless, in such cases it may also be related to a potential risk.

Practical Examples

So how do we use it? Well here is a few of the things we do related to “Link Worth”

Link Analysis

Simply the value of a given link, we get link exchange, requests people offering to sell us stuff all the time it's nice to know the value of the link being offered along with the risk. While we do not offering Link Building services one of our planned projects is to map known directories and provide our third party partners with the list weighted.

Link Mapping

This is a huge part of business creating models of sites both those that exist and those in the planning stage and model how links will interact and how to maximise some pages. This has loads of names in the industry though most do it through trial and error rather then planning. By simulating links adding, removing, changing how link blocks work we can generate more efficient layouts while still keeping the usability.

Once a site is off the ground we use Link mapping along with risk analysis to create simplified link models, to identify holes in an SEO strategy through to spotting our competitors SEO tactics and paid links. Finally the technology is great for quickly accessing new or potential clients existing sites allowing us to make suggestions on why some pages may be under performing.

Google Reconsideration requests

Want to find those spammy doorways or large link silos? Not a problem we have designed a map pattern specifically to work with “Link Worth” to help us spot those potential issues. Nothing replaces going through a site by hand which is what we do with all new clients who come asking for help in this matter, but it's still handy tool.

This was a quick intro to what we are doing, it is not what Google is doing and I don't want people to go away think of Link Worth as the next buzz term. But next time you are offered a links stop and think how much is it worth?