It won’t have escaped your attention that eBay is the ultimate location to watch money change hands every minute. A place where thousands of Traders frantically compete for Bargain Hunter’s Cash.

SEO is simply expanded as Search Engine Optimisation, which is popularly used in internet marketing in today’s online world. It’s basically a process of enhancing the volume and quality of traffic to …

Using forums to market your own website is a natural way to drive targeted traffic. Not only will you reach a lot of actual forum users, i.e. real people, you can also improve your search engine rank…

There are thousands of free affiliate marketing opportunities available on the Internet today. Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world are making money online as affiliate marketers.

One r…

Where To Find Affiliate Products

As an affiliate marketer you get paid to sell other people’s products. One question that does come up is where do you find affiliate products to sell. Here are a few …

When you take your first steps into the world of Google AdWords it is all too easy to grab your list of keywords and dive straight in. However Google allows you much more control over your keywords an…

People surf the internet everyday by the thousands and many of them are seeking ways to earn extra money. This ultimately creates questions regarding internet affiliate programs as one of the ways to …

Great article in the NYT over the weekend about an ad arbitrage directory named Sourcetool, which Google punted from the AdWords program. A couple quotes:

When I pressed Mr. Fox about Sourcetool, he refused to tell me why the algorithm had problems with the site. When I asked him why the business.com site was in the algorithm’s good graces but Sourcetool’s wasn’t, he wouldn’t tell me that, either. All I got were platitudes about the user experience. It wasn’t long before I was almost as exasperated as Mr. Savage. How can you adapt your business model to Google’s specs if Google won’t tell you what the specs are?

Business.com…

• sells links (yes they have editors, but when they were interviewed about a year ago by Aviva Directory they only had 6 editors managing 65,000+ categories…many of the listings not only included aggressive anchor text, but also allowed the use of up to 5 spammy sub-links with each listing)
• used nofollow on many of the free editorial links (while passing link juice out on the paid links)…this was corrected after we gave them a proper roasting on Threadwatch
• uses a funky ajax set up to hide work.com content in a pop up (but makes it accessible to the Google crawler)
• scrapes Google search results as “web listings” and in some cases Google ranks these pages! (Google is ranking a Google search result surrounded with Google AdSense ads, branded as Business.com)

Any one of those 4 would be enough to kill most websites, but because of Business.com’s large scale, strong domain name, and brand they can do things that most webmasters can not. They are given the benefit of the doubt because Google can not clean up all arbitrage without hurting their own revenues - and Google’s job it easier if they have to police a few thousand companies rather than millions of individuals.

Google also told me that it never made judgments of what was “good” and “bad” because it was all in the hands of the algorithm. But that turns out not to be completely true. Mr. Savage shared with me an e-mail message from a Google account executive to someone at another company who had run into the same kind of landing page problem as Sourcetool. The Google account executive wrote back to say that she had looked at the site and found that “there seems to be a wealth of valuable information on the site.” Consequently, her team overruled the algorithm.

Want to learn what the algorithm thinks? Read Google’s remote quality rater documents. They tell you what Google wants and how the algorithm really works.

Algorithms (and under-waged third world employees labeled as the algorithm) often make mistakes. If a mistake is made when Google passes judgement against your site, is your site good enough to recover? If your site was deleted from the Google index would anyone other than you notice and care?

There is a black hole forming.

A few of them, actually.

These black holes aren’t the result of the CERN Hadron Collider. They are forming for two reasons: the desire to keep people on site longer; and to hoard link juice, in order to dominate the SERPs.

Increasingly, top-tier sites are becoming cagey about linking out. They are more than happy to be linked to, of course, but often the favor is not reciprocated. Check out this post by SEOBlackhat.

What Does A Black Hole Look Like?

• Uber-black hole, The New York Times, seems reluctant to link to anyone but themselves. This is especially annoying when they write about websites.
• Wikipedia no-followed their links some time ago, thus forming a PageRank variant of the black hole.
• The mini-me black hole, as practiced by TechCrunch. Rather than directing you to a site mentioned in an article, TechCrunch would direct you to their own CrunchBase entry instead, thereby keeping you on-site longer, and passing link authority to their own web pages. As a result, a search on Google for a sites’ name may well bring up the CrunchBase entry. To be fair, TechCrunch does also link out, and there is an explanation as to why TechCrunch aren’t as bad as the New York Times here.

The result is a link-love black hole. Sites using such a strategy can dominate the rankings, if they are big enough.

So if you wanted to create a blackhole, what would you do?

• Don’t link to anyone
• If you must link out, then No-Follow the links, or wrap them in scripts
• Direct page rank around your own site, especially to pages featuring your competitors names
• Buy a motherlode of links
• Become a newspaper magnate

Now, if you’re an SEO, you might be feeling a tad conflicted about now. Why wouldn’t every SEO do this? What if you owned a black hole? Isn’t that the ultimate SEO end game?

In the long term, I doubt it.

If this problem becomes too widespread, Google will move to counter it. If Google’s results aren’t sufficiently diversified, then their index will look stale. If you search for a site, and get third party information about that site, rather than the site itself, then this will annoy users. Once confidence is lost in the search results, then users will start to migrate to Google’s competitors.

I’m not certain such a move will be entirely altruistic, however. After all, what is the point of Knol? No, really - what is the point of Knol?

The Advantages Of Sharing The Love

Consider what you gain by linking out.

• Webmasters look at their referalls, and may follow the link back to check out your site
• Outbounds may count for more in future, if they don’t already
• Your users expect it. Don’t fight against their expectations else you’ll devalue your brand equity
• Any site that looks “too-SEO’d” risks standing out on a link graph
• There is social value in doing so. Black hole sites start to look like bad actors, can receive bad press, and risk damaging their relationships with partners, suppliers, and communities.

Create More Value Than You Capture

Tim O’Reilly put it well:

“….. The web is a great example of a system that works because most sites create more value than they capture. Maybe the tragedy of the commons in its future can be averted. Maybe not. It’s up to each of us”.

Update:
The phrase Black Hole SEO was used by Eli on BlueHatSEO.com over a year ago to describe various aggressive SEO techniques.

I recently asked Matt Mullenweg if he would be up for doing an interview via email. He said sure, and here are his answers to the best questions I could come up with. Thanks again for doing the interview Matt!

How did you get into web programming? What made you decide to start working on WordPress?
I had started off pretty badly with Frontpage and Dreamweaver. Later I started to use things like guestbooks and forum scripts and light modifications of those for sites I was working on. The breakthrough for me personally, though, was a book called Mastering Regular Expressions from O’Reilly which inspired me to start writing my first code from scratch.

I think my first code contribution to any Open Source project was a set of regular expressions that would “curl” quotes to make them typographically correct, and it was accepted into the b2 system.

Did any early setbacks make you want to quit the WordPress project? If so, how did you work through them?
Since I was just doing it for fun and my own personal usage there were never any problems that were *that* big a deal. There were plenty of times that were tough around security problems, spam links, or community splits, but most ended up being learning opportunities.

When did you know that WordPress was going to work out?
When Zeldman switched.

How did you get beyond wanting to do everything yourself?
That’s a tough one - I’m a perfectionist. I think it was that I eventually met folks who were as passionate as I was about the product and were clearly more competent. I think you have to know someone is better than you at something before you can truly let go.

One of the things that blew me away at Elite Retreat was how deeply you grasped the web. Who were some of the major influences in shaping how you perceive the web? What are some key articles and books that you think programmers and marketers should read?
Books:

• Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman
• Design for Community, Derek Powazek
• Everything by Philip Greenspun

Links:

• Freedom 0, Mark Pilgrim
• Cool URIs Don’t Change, Tim Berners-Lee

Do you think the strategy of “I’m happy to ship a crude version 1.0 and iterate. I find my time is more effective post-launch than pre-launch.” applies to bloggers and content producers as well as software producers?
Not as much - for an individual atom of content you don’t have ongoing usage, you have a single chance to make an impression on someone. For a site as a whole the iterate approach is good, but for a given post or article give it your all.

At Elite Retreat you mentioned the concept of a “personal newspaper.” What does that phrase mean to you, and do you see that concept spreading far and wide as the web ages?
I think Google Reader has the best chance of doing this. Basically there is a ton of interaction data I produce every day about what I read, how long I spend on different types of content, what I buy and gadgets I own, what topics I’m actually interested in, what topics I aspire to be interested in… There’s no reason all of this couldn’t be used as a filter on the torrent of news and information available every single day.

Blogging has become perhaps the leading information distribution format online. Have you been surprised by the growth of blogging? Do you envision blogs leading onling publishing for a long time? What other formats could gain significant traction?
I was pretty surprised by the growth of blogging, so I’m not going to attempt to make predictions about other formats I know even less about.

During past interviews you mentioned that you liked to “stay small while creating a lot of value.” With powerful open source software tools & large community sites that may be possible, but what lessons should traditional niche service based business models and publishers take from successful open source software programs like Wordpress.org and communities like Wordpress.com and apply to their businesses?
I think one of the most important lessons is that you have to let go and let the community or your customers guide your direction, bet it around development, pricing, or direction. The extent WordPress has been successful thus far is directly correlated to our responsiveness to our users.

At Elite Retreat you mentioned a meta tag change that dipped the traffic to Wordpress.com. What happened and how long did it take to figure out what happened? How long did it take traffic to recover?
We had changed the meta description on permalink pages to basically be an excerpt from the post. This was less effective in SERPs than Google’s auto-generated excerpt and so traffic dipped as a result. It probably took a month or so to figure it out, but traffic came back pretty quickly after we reverted the change.

Wordpress.com is one of the leading user generated content sites on the web. What are some of the leading strategies you have used to entice quality content creation? What strategies are key to detering the creation of spam?
Well one thing that has certainly helped is the lack of user ads, which removes people’s direct financial incentive to create content purely for Adsense. Second I would say we take a very proactive in watching out for people trying to take advantage of the system to spam or drive traffic back to other sites inorganically.

Akismet says that 89% of comments are spam. Have you been surpised by the growth of comment spam? What seems to be driving the logarithmic growth of comment spam?
I think comment spam growth has mirrored what happened in the email world, and will probably continue to. The growth seems to be related to the low cost to spammers of just flooding everyone.

Someone used an automated bot to register an account on my site and post a contextually relevant comment about splogs being a problem. They then referenced a post on their blog, which was stolen as their blog was a splog. That splog had 60 subscribers on Feedburner! I have also caught a comment bot sequence that conversed with itself on one of my blogs. As spam gets more sophisticated will central systems like Askimet become more powerful?
I sure hope so.

I imagine that comment spamming on MA.TT is a quick way to get into Askimet. As online marketing gets harder some people are willing to do negative marketing for competitors. What steps can brands take to help prevent being listed as a spammer if someone else tries to ruin their reputation?
Akismet is pretty sophisticated and can usually detect that type of bowling, but of course if there is ever a persistent problem you can contact Akismet support 24/7 on the site.

At points in time I think many bloggers hated SEOs (probably for associating the field of SEO with all the comment spam they got every day). What do you think of the field of SEO? Does Wordpress employ key SEO strategies by default, and what modifications, if any, do you recommend?
I’m conflicted - on one hand there are certain things you can do to make your site more accessible to search engines that should be a baseline that everyone does but on the other hand search engines are just trying to deliver the best results to their users, so if you just focus on users and their experience the search engine should be able to figure out you’re the canonical resource for a given topic over time.

WordPress’ SEO I think is largely the result of focusing on other goals that also happen to have SEO benefits, like well-structured semantic markup, sane URL structures, meaningful title tags, and such. That said, people far more experienced with SEO than me have lots of suggestions of things we could do better and we listen to those closely. Ideally I think it’s something WordPress users should never need to think about.

I imagine that many of the comment spammers have to be targeting high value keywords and niches. Have you ever thought about opening up some of the Askimet spam data to create a great keyword research tool? Doing that adds some opportunity cost and might dis-incentivize some of the comment spamming.
Nope.

You probably would be disappointed in me for this, but I had a number of Wordpress blogs where I have not updated the CMS in years. About a week ago one of my blogs got hacked where someone added spammy credit card links to it. I was surprised with how easy it was to upgrade Wordpress. Do you forsee Wordpress.org ever doing automated updates? If someone gets hacked and temporarily removed from Google what are the quickest ways they can find out what went wrong and where the spam is?
We’re working on making updated easier than it is today, and a number of web hosts have already integrated tools that make upgrading a one-click procedure just like installs are.

I’ve heard from people that were removed from Google that contacting their support or webmaster tools describing what happened is a pretty good way to get re-included in the index. They understand that this new wave of SEO hackers is pretty malicious and it’s not your fault.

If there was no Wordpress and you were starting from scratch on the web today what areas would you focus on? Where would you start?
An email client or a cloud-synced desktop text editor.

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Thanks Matt! Check out Ma.tt to read more of Matt’s stories, see his photo galleries, and keep up with Matt’s latest travels.