Penalty!

In the past if you were penalized by the most popular search engine Google, it was pretty much a death sentence.

You could completely clean up the site, file a reinclusion request and own up to the various methods you’ve employed to try and gain an advantage over your competitors.

Things such as inflating your link popularity through excessive link exchanges, buying links, cloaking, hidden text or hiding content from your visitors, and the list goes on.

Your site may be added back to the index after a review and you served some time in the penalty box, and you might even get some of your toolbar PageRank back. But the site would never really enjoy the traffic and rankings and that it could have pre-penalty phase even if you weren’t coloring outside the lines.

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If you own a directory using one of the off the shelf scripts you might notice that there’s a number of short comings which may make some of your editing tasks a bit more challenging.

Some will permit you to ban certain words from the titles, URLs or descriptions and automatically delete those submissions or there are mods that you can add to the back-end that will do the same.

This saves quite a bit of time as you don’t have to delete the undesirable submissions for pharmacy products, adult entertainment or other sites you choose not to list.

Most of the scripts don’t handle foreign languages very well and you can get inundated with spam from certain European block countries. Another short coming of the majority of these scripts is that they allow automated submissions which by-pass the captcha and write to the data-base.

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Looking forward is always fun, and some of the SEO predictions for 2011 circulating are fantastic and I love them.

Some lean heavily towards Social Media optimization since Google and Bing have confirmed that links shared via Twitter or Facebook are considered as a signal of quality and do affect the rankings, and how much may depend on the social authority of a user.

Social authority is probably defined or calculated by the number and quality of people you are following and the social status of your followers; and I’ll also guess that the number of re-Tweets could very well contribute to one’s social authority.

This is a great example of why no-follow links are important. 😉

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Comment ClownsSo there’s hasn’t been a full fledged toolbar PageRank export since the first quarter of the year, and everyone’s wondering when Google will update their toolbar PageRank.

There have been insignificant PageRank adjustments here and there since April, but nothing major. New pages have gone from PR N/A to PR0 regularly, but have not gone beyond that.

Google has recently updated their version of DMOZ’s directory as they usually do just prior to a toolbar export and backlinks have been updated as well. The RDF dump is from sometime prior to November 15th, but I’m not sure why they’ve chosen to use a dump that is over a month old.

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Comment Clowns

So I’ve been pretty busy off-line since the beginning of August and haven’t had much spare time. I’m hoping I can get back to a more leisurely pace after the holidays.

I did however have some time to review many of the comments left and wasn’t really surprised by the crappy comments left by the comment clown brigade.

What’s surprising is that there are blogs where these types of comments are getting published. I guess if they weren’t getting published, the comment spamming would diminish.

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