Now that the heat has been turned up on Digg, scrutiny is also spilling over to all the “up-and-coming” services who have decided to jump on the “justifiable framing bandwagon.”

One of those services is BurnURL. The concept of BurnURL is pretty simple: You input a url and it spits out a shortened version that you can then use for distribution. But like Digg, they do not implement a simple 301. Instead, they wrap your page in a frame bar.

Also like Digg, they recently published a “don’t worry, we’re not evil” blog post assuring everyone that they have taken steps to prevent any negative impact on publishers.

We’ve always been a very publishers focused company (both with Readburner and BurnURL) and we intend to keep it that way.  We, from the very creation of BurnURL, wanted to make sure the focus was on publishers and their content versus on us and we’ve put quite a few steps in place to do that.

One of the changes we recently put live was to remove the Sharebar when we detected the user-agents of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask (these four account for the largest portions of search traffic).  These crawlers don’t need to see the Sharebar (as they’re not going to interact wtih it), so we don’t need to serve it to them.  Instead we feed them a 301 redirect.  This tells them the URL that was burned is the original content owner and it should be listed in the index on that topic.  Our shortened URL effectively gets ignored.

While I am certainly an SEO who appreciates “bot only” technical solutions for SEO related issues, I still find myself wondering how/why the operators of sites like BurnURL don’t understand the “big-picture” issues.

So let me try and explain them one more time.

1. The SEO Value Isn’t the 301 Itself – Bouncing Googlebot through a 301 served from a url Google has never indexed does not generate the type of “juice transfer” people think. The bump from 301 based adtracking/affiliate programs has been on the decline for quite awhile. I won’t go into the specifics in this post, but the short version is that Google is getting much better at figuring out when a 301 is being used as it was originally intended, (moving content that they most likely have already indexed to a new location) and when it’s being used as a bounce.

2. The SEO Value is in the Preservation of the Destination URL – The URLs generated by traditional 301 shorteners in and of themselves are not going to contribute much to improving your organic visibility. But they do play a significant secondary role by making sure that EVERYONE ends up on the URL that the PUBLISHER intended the content to be viewed from. That is extremely important, because it is from that point that the viral distribution process actually begins.

The Bottom Line:

If you are running any type of service that actively encourages the viral distribution of frame wrapped content you do not own, you are a steaming pile of shit. Period.  There simply is no way for you to spin it as some type of “we’re here to support publishers” bullshit. The only reason you do what you do is to gain exposure for your company off the backs of others hard work. So stop being a pile of shit and go figure out how to create something of actual value.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been getting the urge to get back into blogging a bit. However, when it’s been awhile since you’ve attempted to construct a thought longer than a 140 character tweet, actually doing it is a bit harder than you regular bloggers might imagine. I keep finding myself sitting around waiting for a topic to come along that instantly compels me to start typing.

Well guess what? Today is the day. And the compelling topic turns out to be Digg’s new amazing DiggBar.  In cased you missed the announcement, here is the Digg’s explanation of what the DiggBar is:

“The DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And it’s presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services. In addition to finding it on all outbound links from Digg, you can generate the DiggBar using any of the following solutions.”

Here’s what it should say:

“The DiggBar is an incredibly clever framejacking tool disguised as a URL shortening service. The mass adoption of the DiggBar by the thousands of users who constantly distribute un-digg-worthy content through our most feared competitor, will allow us to generate millions of additional revenue dollars by injecting our ads in between our feared competitor and the destination url.”

Shortly after the release of the DiggBar, in an article about URL shortening services, Danny Sullivan wrote the following regarding the DiggBar:

“Like lin.cr, it does a 200 code. That means the page is actually on Digg itself – they’re making a page with the DiggBar and pulling in your content without permission into a frame. That’s not illegal, but it’s a tactic that died off years ago. It also means that if you use the Digg short URLs, none of the link credit passes to your page. It’s all kept with Digg.

There’s no need for you to give Digg all your link credit. If you want to shorten your URLs, use a service that does a 301 redirect.”

In response to Danny’s criticism, John Quinn Posted the following on Digg’s blog:

“Prior to launching the DiggBar, we reached out to Google and SEO experts to ensure we adhered to the leading best practices, as we framed and linked directly to source content via the DiggBar. This process involved gathering feedback from publishers to ensure the execution was as content-provider-friendly as possible. We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.”

He then goes on to add:

“We launched a few additional updates early this week to address some lingering concerns in the SEO and publishing communities around the infamous (and sometimes mysterious) search engine ‘juice’. We always represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes. For those of you interested in the technical details, we also include link rel=”canonical” information to indicate that the original URL is the real (canonical) version. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well. This is recommended by Google, Ask.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!.”

Sound’s great. (But not great enough for Digg to allow it on their site?)

But here’s the problem… Based on everything publicly published for us common folk, plus a ton of personal testing, I can tell you that the claims in Digg’s post are a flat out lie.

Lest’s start with the noindex part .  A page excluded from Google’s index either by robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag will develop juice, but it absolutely does not pass it. For that claim to be even remotely true, you would need to at least use “noindex, follow” (which Digg doesn’t) and from all my personal testing, that doesn’t work either.

Now for the canonical part. (aka RelCan)

From Google’s official blog post regarding the introduction of RelCan:

Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?

“No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com

Based on that, the big question is whether Digg is lying or a backroom secret handshake took place between Google and Digg which lead to Google giving Digg preferential treatment by honoring a cross-domain RelCan tag. I have no way of knowing because neither company is talking, but I did notice the the RelCan Digg uses contains a source tag at the end.

Could that be the secret code that tells Google to count it, even though they have been told to ignore the page? Maybe.

But lets explore the idea that Digg is just lying.

Think about it for a moment. You invest countless hours promoting your content. You get lucky enough to make the homepage of Digg, or you hit the Retweet motherload on Twitter. A certain percentage of all those people who see your content are going to copy & paste the link they land on into a blog post. (Thereby generating a link for your site).

Before the DiggBar, (and with legit shortening services) all those links would point to your url. Now, a large percentage of them are going to be links pointing to a page on Digg. Now if you are Yahoo, CNN, or the BBC, that isn’t really going to matter much. You don’t have to spend time thinking about building link equity, because you already have it. However, if you are a newer site struggling to build trusted link equity in the current black hole environment we live in, the mass adoption of the DiggBar is a serious issue.

I will be advising all clients to add some frame busting code to their sites so the DiggBar won’t work for the simple reason that regarless which scenario is accurate, they are both equally wrong.

Hopefully, others will do the same.

Update: 4-13-09

The DiggBar discussion on Twitter has been incredible. Here’s the most recent Tweets.

I spent 2 days in San Francisco last week at the Elite Retreat.  From the moment I got there it was an elite experience.  There’s just something about seeing a driver holding a sign with your name on it in the baggage claim area that makes you feel good.  Not only was there a driver there, but there was a limo to take me to the hotel, not just a car, but a limo…just for me.

The retreat was held at the brand new Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco.  I was very excited the evening before hand because I had been wanting to go to this for about a year now, so the fact that I was there seemed too good to be true.

In case you’ve never heard of the Elite Retreat, it’s a small group of people that are brought together to spend 2 days with some of the industries top names.  The size of the group makes it easy to learn and ask questions freely and since there is an NDA in place, there is not much left unasked and nothing left unanswered.

The environment at Elite Retreat is all about learning and networking.  The night before the sessions we gathered together for an informal networking event at the hotel which gave us an opportunity to talk with the speakers one on one.  The morning of the sessions we gathered once again to network and had more time to talk with the speakers on an informal level.

The speakers this year were Jeremy Schoemaker, Neil Patel, Aaron Wall, Brian Clark, Andy Liu, Matt Mullenweg and Guy Kawasaki.  So you can see that we had a range of experts that covered topics from affiliate marketing, funding, seo, social media and everything in between.  

If you’ve considered attending Elite Retreat, but were unsure of what to expect, I hope you attend next time it’s offered.

I left there with knowledge, new friends, new opportunities, amazingly cool shwag (ipod nano loaded with some of the greatest marketing books eva) and an experience I’ll never forget.  

Thanks to all the people that put this together (Tigh and Dave) and to all the speakers that took their time to give something back to the industry. 

My original post on the Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World contest generated quite a few comments. A good chunk of them were a couple of individuals talking smack at each other, but there were a few others that are worth discussing.

Towards the end of the comments, Paul posted the following:

Well I did notice that you are ranking number 2 for this contest. So does that mean you are in the fight to be the best real estate agent in the world?

And my response was:

If by “in the fight” you mean am I actively participating in the contest, then the answer is no. The only effort I’ve expended is writing this post. Where it ends up will be determined solely by the level of authority this site has. I can’t imagine that it will hold up in the long run because I haven’t recruited an army of friends to go out and drop anchor text on every spammy do follow blog on the web.

But the fact that this page is doing so well without all the effort being put into the other pages is actually a valuable lesson for most agents. Unfortunately, very few will get it.

After that comment, Eric Bramlett (the contest creator) responded with:

Come on, man…this is some great linkbait. You’re naturally garnering links all over the place by taking the contrary position. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s “write linkbait, not spam.” I’m sure your blog carries weight on its own, but you’re ranking b/c people are linking.

Come on Eric. Suggesting that my post is somehow winning the “link war” is just ridiculous.

As I write this, Yahoo is showing 869 links to my post (excluding pages on this site). The vast majority of those links came from my post appearing in the Bloodhound Blog’s Long List. That list is distributed to other sites via a php based (server side) widget. My post was written on the 13^th, and found its way into the Long List on the 14^th. (I didn’t submit it, nor did I ask anyone to submit it for me).

Because the widget shows only a set amount of the most current posts, the links eventually disappear. (In my case, that has already happened.)

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that distribution in the BHB Long List was in fact solely responsible for my post hitting #3.  869 links sure sounds like a lot, but it’s not really when you  take a closer look. The total number of links reported is due to the fact that the widget creates site wide links on all the sites that use it. But the total number of unique domains that show up in my backlinks is actually very small. That’s important, because we don’t want any agents reading this to walk away thinking that a high volume of links coming from a single domain is treated the same way as the same number of links coming from unique sites, because that simply isn’t true.

If you move on and look at the remaining links, you’ll see that many are either nofollow, or they use some anchor text other than “Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World.”

Now let’s take a look Eric Blackwell’s (The contest leader) backlinks. Yahoo is showing 3,240 backlinks.

Eric also has links from BHB’s Long List, but his are still active. In theory, those should go away by Monday. (But based on this post, plus a couple of private emails, I wouldn’t be surprised if it somehow found a way to stick around for a couple of months:)).

The rest of Eric’s links are a combination of various agent sites and pages on “free sites.” that are owned/created by the members of Eric’s “team.” Even if you take the BHB links out, he still ends up having far more links from unique domains, and virtually all of his links contain the exact phrase. With all that extra work you might expect a huge difference in rankings between the two pages, but there isn’t. His post is sitting a #1, and mine is currently #4.

So does that mean Eric is a bad person, or his SEO strategy is inherently evil? Of course not. Although I haven’t personally met Eric, everyone I know who knows him says he’s a standup guy. But the purpose of this contest is supposed to be teaching and learning, so I do think it’s valid to point out a couple of possible wrong conclusions a new agent watching from the sidelines may draw.

Strategy Viability – There isn’t really anything bad about Eric’s strategy as it applies to this contest. In fact, the “team” strategy is by far the most commonly use strategy in the history of SEO contests. But the problem is it just isn’t applicable to most real-world situations.  I mean seriously, think about how far you would get trying to ask a bunch of people to invest significant time for free, in exchange for a link that they will get only after you have achieved a #1 ranking for your money phrase for two months. I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t work that way. And even if a newbie agent realized that the contest examples are extreme, there still isn’t any place for them to end up other than the conclusion that the best thing to do is swap links. And that’s not a place they need to be.

Building Authority – I think much of the examples in the contest do nothing but reinforce the common misconception within the real estate space that dropping keyword stuffed links on some of the most spam infested domains on the web, somehow contributes to building authority. That’s a complete load of crap. Building authority involves investing the time necessary to develop a strong content distribution network powered by other humans.  Whether or not my original post was intended to be linkbait isn’t really the important point. The real takeaway is understanding that the success or failure of a piece of linkbait is directly related to the size, strength, and quality of your distribution network. And gaining links by pushing content through that distribution network never involves asking anyone for anything. 

In the end, the question you really need to ask yourself is where do you want to be down the road? Someone who operates a site where link building consists of pressing the publish button, or someone who has to constantly be asking for a helping hand?

No, this post isn’t a plug for my favorite real estate agent. This post is about yet another SEO Contest. “The Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World” contest is being sponsored by Real Estate Webmasters.  Having recently been released from Google jail, everyone in REW land is pretty excited, so why not celebrate by having a contest?

Upfront, it sounds like a fun exercise, and the prize package is actually pretty sweet. (A free site with lifetime hosting). But in the big picture, I don’t think it’s such a great idea. Especially considering the level of scrutiny the real estate space has been under lately.

The thing that most contest participants don’t consider is the fact that everyone is watching. (Including search engine engineers).  Once the contest starts, people get obsessed and start pulling out all the stops. Then, when everything is said and done, all those cool little tricks, and quite little places you use to power your own rankings, either vanish, or become so overrun with “real spammers” that they become totally useless.

During some of the more recent SEO contests, I saw complete networks of sites get torched because one guy was stupid enough to put links for his contest phrase on the same sites he was using to drive the rankings for his “money” sites.  

So the question to ask your self is whether or not winning a prize worth 4-5k is worth the potential negative impact that the site that puts food on the table might receive?

If you are 100% sure there are absolutely no skeletons in your link closet then you might decide that the answer is yes. But that isn’t the case for a huge chunk of the real estate SEO world. Almost everyone has dabbled in things that are now considered taboo. And there is a small underground community of real estate agents who are really good at SEO, which means they push the envelope quite often. If you consider yourself a member of that community, the best decision you could make is to “just say no.”

I try very hard to stay away from the drama that constantly engulfs Morgan Carey and Real Estate Webmasters. But this one is worth commenting on because it’s such a great example of what not to do.

Late last night, members of REW’s forum started posting that they weren’t finding REW in Google searches. This morning my inbox was full of emails asking if I thought they were penalized. After conducting a few searches on their most popular terms, it appears that they have been tossed in the penalty box. Not only are they not showing up, there seems to be an across-the-board toolbar adjustment as well.

Morgan’s reaction was to write a very long post that outlines his penalty assessment process. While discussing REW blogs, he quotes from his TOS the section that clearly explains REW’s strict stance on behavior intended to manipulate SERPS:

"Search engines: REW blogs perform very well in search engines – this is due in no small part to the fact that our authors write high quality (Unique) content that does not violate any search engines guidelines and is often referenced from other sources on the web. Our rules against link spam and other forms of search engine spam or low quality advertising posts ensure that REW Blogs are able to maintain their authoritative status by providing our readership with the highest quality (Unique) content possible. It is also very important that these rules and regulations are strictly enforced so that search engines can trust that they are indexing and ranking high quality "Human" contributed, edited and moderated content. Link schemes: Any attempt to artificially inflate page rank or link popularity is not welcome here. Search engines frown upon this kind of behavior, and it does nothing for the user experience – when a link is placed in any section of REW Blogs (In a post, in the relevant reading section, in the related links of a post) it should be done so for the sole benefit of the user, and NOT to send yourself link juice / page rank."

He also goes on to say:

Just to be clear directory aside – Real Estate Webmasters does not participate in any kind of link exchange (Solicitation or otherwise) on our domain http://www.realestatewebmasters.com. We do not sell links from our domain http://www.realestatewebmasters.com, we don’t buy links, we don’t spam comments with our links – in fact – we are so damn busy building technology for our clients that we wouldn’t have the time to go out and try to get links even if we wanted to – it’s the old "The carpenter’s house is in the worst shape in the neighborhood

By the time you get to the end, you walk away thinking that the penalty is definitely undeserved. But here’s the flaw in Morgan’s post:

He is making the assumption that any penalty that might be imposed would be directly related to guideline violations involving the REW site. It would be great if that’s how it always worked, but that just isn’t the case. (If you don’t think that’s true, just ask Bob Massa). Occasionally, search engines do issue penalties for general behavior that shows an overall disregard for the sanctity of their guidelines. And when that behavior is a direct contradiction to their constant flow of pro-guideline public spin, the penalties can be quite severe.

Here’s an example: (from an email being sent out by REW staff)

My name is Nick May. I am a Link Manager for Real Estate Webmasters. I am emailing you today to introduce a new, free system we have developed, based on contextual-quality links. This system is designed to put more focus on a fewer amount of links, as they would be located on pages full of content, relative to the site. Instead of having links placed in directories, 5 links will be placed on an already established contextually relevant page. Our format will be a bit different than the format you use. Your links, on our pages, will appear as comments and we will be using your keywords as the commenter’s name. You add 5 of our clients to one of your content pages and in return, we will add your site to each of those client’s sites, on a content filled page. This is just an introductory email to let you know a little bit about it. This system is working for our clients and I have some examples to show you, if you’re interested. Email me back and I will fill you in with all the information you need. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you will take part in this excellent new program.

(Emphasis Mine) 

OK, so last spring many of REW’s clients got in trouble for cross-linked directories. Now, six months later REW staff members are sending out dozens of these emails (and have been since last June) offering to create fake blog comments stuffed with your desired keywords in exchange for you putting back the links that used to be in the spam directories that caused all the trouble in the first place.

So how is it Morgan forgot to mention these emails in his public plea to Matt? Is this employee sending these emails without Morgan’s knowledge? (Maybe it’s the same employee that hacked into the PREN Forum?) Or maybe he thinks there’s no way Google would know about these emails? I have no idea for sure, but you at least have to give him some credit. It takes a lot of balls to stand up in public and declare to the world that your shit doesn’t stink, even when so many people know it does.

I haven’t had any time to blog lately because I’ve been buried with work related to PropertyTown.  We’ve been banging out a bunch of new features, and we’ve been swamped with inquires from agents interested in moving on to our system. All in all, the new year has been good. The only real problem is the fact that we don’t have enough manpower to handle the frontend design work.

We are in desperate need of freelance CSS designers who can crank out quality designs for our clients. Our system runs off of a single master theme, so there is no php work involved. We just need people who can take some static html and our master CSS file and turn it into something stunning. (ala http://csszengarden.com/)

We have several projects ready to go, and the number of inquiries we’re receiving is growing weekly, so we’re looking for people that are interested in a long-term working relationship.

If you are interested, please reply to (greg at 3dogmedia.com) with some samples of your CSS work, and I’ll follow up with you with more details.

With the end of the year approaching I wanted to take a minute to send my wishes out to all of my SEO friends out there.  I hope you enjoy this little video I put together.  Merry Christmas!!!!!!!!!!!!! or Bah Humbug, which ever fits.

I just received an email from the Administrator of Pro Real Estate Network informing me that their security had been compromised and that I should log in and change my passwords. According to their post, employees of REW logged in to the Pro Real Estate Network forum by using the password of a Moderator who is also a member at REW. (note to self: Don’t use the same password on multiple forums)

Once inside, they proceeded to delete any threads that talked poorly of REW or it’s owner, Morgan Carey. Now I have no idea how accurate this accusation is, but if it’s true, I think it’s safe to say that the concept of “Reputation Management” has been taken to a whole new level.

We’ve had a lot of great response to our DoFollow OPML project. While we work on compiling the list, I thought I would go ahead and release a new DoFollow plugin. We have been playing with several different plugins lately. Of all the ones we could find, we like the original by Kimmo Souminen the best. However, I wanted to have more control on a per-comment basis, so I had Dax add to it.

Once you’ve installed and activated it, you will be able add individual NoFollows or DoFollows from the comment moderation screen.

You will also find a new box on your editor that will allow you to add NoFollow to the comments of a single post.  

You can download it here.