I just wanted to wish everyone a great holiday season.
I am working on several posts regarding Blogger, Niches, Adsense Optimization and a few other topics I have been asked about but won't be posting them for a few days. I am in the midst of bundling up the family for a short vacation but will update the blog as soon as we are settled.
This blog turns 1 year old tomorrow and I just want to thank all my readers and friends for your support this past year.
Have a great 2008.
Back soon,
Griz
Since introducing Blogger Unleashed to my readers I have been inundated with several emails regarding Vic's methods and what my view is about them and why I do things differently. The email below best sums up most of the questions asked;
Hey Grizz,
I have been reading your blog for a while now and read Vic's blog like you suggested and I have a few questions. His little trick to get indexed instantly is really cool but it only works for terms that no one will ever search for. How does this help make money online? I notice your system involves getting a link from a PR site to get indexed right away - why do you do it that way? And finally how do we use this info to our advantage meaning making money? Also sorry so many questions Vic's Adsense site is a lot different than the way you do it - which is better? Thanks so much for your help and sorry to keep bugging you.
Adam
In regards to doing things differently keep in mind that there is no one way to do anything - we use different methods depending on our targeted audience and what our niche is and what we are monetizing.
Adam is right - Vic's trick to get indexed instantly works for terms that no one searches for - so how does this help? The point he was making wasn't for getting traffic it was to show you how to just get indexed. Once you are indexed then you can start adding keyword targeted content that will then be crawled and indexed as well. This simply allows you to start building indexed content right away and having the chance to start getting traffic without fear of being sandboxed by Google.
Now I said this gives you a chance at getting traffic sooner. If you add competitive keywords to your site you will get indexed for those terms but most likely you'll be listed deep in the serp bowels. This is why I have said to go and submit your link on a high ranking PR site like Squidoo, Yahoo Answers, Propeller etc. If you add this extra step then you can skip the never searched for keyword that Vic uses and insert your main keyword in your anchor text thereby getting a high PR link to your site which in effect states that you are an authority for your main keyword. This will get you listed higher up in the serp's and for a term that is actually searched for. It will also get a brand new site indexed in short order - maybe not in minutes like Vic's example but usually within a few hours. High PR sites are crawled several times a day by the Google bot and your link will be found on the next crawl. Sometimes you will get lucky and get indexed in a few minutes.
If you are targeting niche traffic and you do not have a lot of competition using a high PR third party will often land you on page 1 of the serp's for your keyword and you are in business - targeted traffic will start showing up on the same day that you started a brand new blog. If you don't hit page 1 then competition is rated by how far back in the serp's your PR5 link landed you. If you are on page 2 you will only need a couple of more high PR links to get to page 1. If you are on page 10 then you are going to need a lot more links and more importantly a lot more keyword rich content.
I use this method for starting new white hat blogs that I intend to nurture into long term money makers.
Adam mentioned Vic's Adsense Blog was different than mine. I assume he means Vic's Bu.bulicio.us site compared to this blog.
There are several methods for making money with Adsense and this is 1 of them. Vic's site is what I call a full out assault - produce tons of keyword rich content and get tons of traffic. This method is probably the surest way to make a lot of money with Adsense and I'll explain why.
Vic is trading off CPC for CTR, in other words he knows that every 1000 visitors he gets he will make a steady income. If he makes $10 per 1000 visitors then increase your visitors to 20,000 a day and you will earn a good income. And - I can hear you thinking - how the heck do you get 20,000 people a day to your site?
You do what Vic does - he writes tons of new, unique, and keyword specific content and here is the secret, he writes about current events - new stuff that has little to no competition and is being actively searched for by thousands of people.
Go make some money now.
Maybe the best way to learn this is to just do it.
Vic uses one site to generate a lot of content on a lot of different topics. I use lots of blogs centered on one topic each. Both systems work but I do things my way as I am a lot lazier than Vic. I really admire Vic - he posts a lot - huge amounts actually and I wish I had the drive he does. I don't though so I look for ways of making money with the least amount of work. I am going to show you a blog of mine that exemplifies crap - it is ugly, devoid of any meaningful content, amateurish and looks like I spent a good 2 minutes designing it which I did. It also makes me a daily income and nobody anywhere could have done less work or designed a poorer looking site than this.
Do any of you remember Antonella Barba? She was the bombshell who had all sorts of racy photos leaked last year as she was competing for American Idol. Do you know how popular American idol is? Do you realize how many teenage boys spend their days looking for n*de pictures of female celebrities?
Lie and lie some more.
I hate showing you a seedier side of making money online but it's out there and it works.
Here is a blog I put together last March called celebrityn*dephotos.blogspot.com. Don't worry there are no n*de photos - Google will ban your Adsense account if you post n*dity so never do it - just lie and say you have the photos. I built the blog along with others to post stories about whoever was hot in Technorati Tags at the time.
Check the stats on the bottom of the blog. Over 31,000 hits since March. The blog only has 14 posts - all crap and scraped with a little editing. Must have spent a good minute on each post.
Here are some of yesterdays stats for the keywords used on Google to find this site.
(Click images to enlarge)
If you search for "Kelly Pickler N*de" this is what Google will return;
On any given day 100-200 people search for "Kelly Pickler N*de".
You'll notice I don't have Adsense on the site. This is because the ads generated by this niche are all low paying $.01 - $.03 per click ads. Using Adsense I only earned $2-$3 a day but I was smart priced which meant that all my Adsense sites became smart priced.
Important: If any of your Adsense pages becomes smart priced it effects all your Adsense pages - even those on different sites. This means that your best Adsense sites will suffer lower CPC as a result of 1 poorly optimized site. Only use Adsense when you can provide highly optimized content which initiates highly optimized Adsense ads. If you ever get public service ads or the "blogging" ads then you are being smart priced and my advice is to pull Adsense off the blog immediately or all your other sites will suffer lower earnings.
I have used ROI rocket ads for the site as well as fake ads which lead to affiliate pages and outright affiliate links. The types of visitors to the blog don't give a damn about affiliate links and will never substitute their own - they don't know what an affiliate link is. They just want nude pictures and when they can't find any on my site they start clicking ads. I have found that teenage boys are easily hooked on the idea of making money online.
Are you ready for the best part?
This crappy stupid blog that took maybe an entire hour of my life to create and then totally ignore (only 1 post since May) makes about $30 a day in affiliate sales and /or lead generation fees. Everyday one or two visitors buy something... everyday... day in day out... I do nothing. This is how I like making money online.
I have over 100 of these types of blogs. All Blogger blogs that cost nothing and were set up in minutes. All the content is scraped but re-edited to be original. The only other work I do is muster up a few links to get top spot in the indexes and with most topics that get hot there isn't a lot of competition.
If you want to try this just pay attention to what is happening around you - here is a small list of some of my best producing blog subjects this year.
Virginia Tech Massacre, Antonella Barba, Kelly Pickler, Mel Gibson, Britney, Paris, OJ, iPhone, Eva Mendez, Joost, Sanjiya Malakar, Stephen Colbert and the list goes on...
Now here is the reason Blogger kicks ass - if you are fast you can usually create a brand new blog with your subject or keyword in your url. On any given day someone gets the media spotlight and people will search for info about the person or event. There is little competition on a new story so if you are quick and manage to get a blog setup fast then you will see traffic. Once you have the traffc you have to figure out how best to monetize it. Sometimes Adsense works best, sometimes affiliate links and sometimes you use the blog to redirect people to a different site (bait and switch).
When Antonella Barba hit the scene I was getting about 20,000 hits a day to each blog I had created about her. (I had 6 blogs - you don't need to just create 1). For the first week each blog made between $50-$90 a day in Adsense - not bad but I was dissapointed because I was getting over 100,000 visitors daily and only making $300 bucks. That really isn't very good for 100,000 people. The second week I dropped the Adsense and created a bunch of fake ads - "Click here for a free Antonella nude Calender". One link took the visitor to a sales page for Free Music Downloads. Another link directed people to an affiliate page for Acne remedies. Remember who my visitors were - teenage boys.
I made over $15,000 in commissions over the next two weeks until Antonella was booted off American Idol and people forgot about her. Kelly Pickler hasn't been forgotten it seems and unlike most of these blog blitzes she still makes me money.
Note: Antonella was a goldmine and I don't want you thinking you will get the same results - that was the best two weeks of my entire online career - her popularity was an oddity that hasn't been matched since. If I can get 1000 visitors a day I'm happy. These blogs are usually only short term and die when interest drops off. Some prove to be more long term like the Pickler blog - 100-200 people a day. You make small amounts multiplied by the number of blogs you set up. Over time it all starts to add up but don't expect unrealistic numbers from any one blog. The more you experiment though, the more chance you have of finding the next "hot" subject.
Yes this is deceptive, scummy, deceitful and exploitative but it is what marketing is all about. I have said this before - if you want to make money online you will have to examine your own ethics at some point. I'm not proud of these tactics but I am online to make money and I will do what it takes short of hurting someone. You will have to make your own decision on how far you want to go.
Oh... I just checked the stats on Kelly for the past hour as I wrote this post.
Sex, Celebs and misery always has an audience folks.
One last thing and I have said this countless times before - quit creating "make money online" or "how to blog" blogs. I have this site for only one reason - to see if my SEO is good enough to take top position for the term "make money online" and not because I thought there was lots of money to be made in this niche - there really isn't. Think about this - I made $47 yesterday with this blog which takes up a lot of my time and the throw away Kelly Pickler blog made 2 affiliate sales for $40 and I don't do a damn thing with it.
Spend your time wisely and stop and think like a marketer. What are people interested in right this second, how do I attract them and what are they likely to buy. I have discussed how to target and rank well for keywords at length previously and now use that knowledge to start targeting the "Right" keywords. When you combine these two lessons you will start seeing the money.
Till next time,
Griz
I have been having a little fun the last few days with Vic Franqui of Blogger Unleashed. Vic is a former black hat gone straight - well that's not quite true, once a black hat always a black hat - and he has decided to open up his chest of black arts and show bloggers the tricks that people like Vic use to make money online.
This isn't for people looking for fame, it's 100% about making money and he cuts to the chase - do this, do that and this is the result. The best part is you can test out his methods in real time and see for yourself if it works. Yesterday he described how to get a page indexed in minutes and then did it. His readers then jumped on board and tried to get instantly indexed themselves. They all succeeded and before the day was done Vic's name was popping up on Blogs far and wide.
Check out Monika's post Blogger Unleashed - An Introduction or Costa's post Can A Low Traffic Blog Make Money. Terry gives a nice summary of his results using the method on his post Can I Work at Home for Mony. If that's not enough I found several more great posts about Vic and Blogger Unleashed; Blogger Unleashed Review, Ouch! It Hurts! by Markk and Frank Carr's More Entrecard Sucks Madness. If you've got a few minutes I would read the articles and get to know a little bit about Vic Franqui. He is a unique character that you haven't seen the likes of before and I suspect he is about to become quite well known.
Vic has started a contest and will give away a fully optimized PR4 blog to the winner - if you are interested and you should be you can get all the info here: So you Want a Free Blog? Or What?
If you are trying to make money online then do yourself a big favor and give Blogger Unleashed a visit. You won't be sorry.
Griz
Does any one know if Ants scratch there ass?
Vic Franqui from Blogging Zoom is an old Black Hatter that is busy revealing secrets that few people are aware of and to prove his point he just posted a lesson asking his readers on Blogger Unleashed how he managed to get indexed and ranked number 1 on Google for the term "Do Ants Scatch There Ass".
If you have any interest in SEO then check out Vic's Blog and find out how he managed to get "Do ants scratch there ass" indexed before he even finished his article.
He did it the same way I did it but he did it in 6 minutes whereas I took 7 minutes to do the same thing.
Since Vic was faster I think I'll let him tell you how to do this - only fair.
Seriously though - Vic is one of the few people I have met that really knows his sh*t and I highly recommend all my readers take a few minutes and check out Vic's new blog "Blogger Unleashed". When black hat experts start talking about how to make money online the rest of us should really pay attention.
Griz
If you are a first time visitor you probably won't even read this - what on Earth would a cheesy looking blog like this know about making money online. Most first timers take a quick look and then hit the back button and are gone. A percentage leave by clicking a link somewhere on the page. If you are still reading this then chances are you are one of my readers that has got past the cheese and knows that I actually have real content on these pages - the vast majority of it really does explain how I make money with this free no frills Blogspot blog.
In a nutshell I make money with this blog by explaining the SEO techniques I use to target terms like "make money online". I make money by simply ranking high in the serps for terms related to making money. That's it. I don't even need a single person to read a single word of a single post on this blog and I still make money. Good money too.
This blog will be a year old on December 23.
I have spent the past year writing posts that optimize various keywords that I have chosen based on the amount of traffic those keywords generate on the search engines. I built this blog without ever expecting or caring if I ever had a real audience of readers. My goal was simple - generate large amounts of search engine traffic and convert that traffic into Adsense clicks and affiliate sales.
I have had to modify my tactics somewhat from my initial plan due to the fact that I seem to have built up a small but growing readership and in deference to them I have had to shelve my affiliate sales pitches - you won't appreciate me hawking products designed to entice the unwary blogging newcomer. I haven't totally given up on this revenue stream yet it's just I haven't figured out a "Reader Alert" system to warn my regular readers when they should simply ignore a post logged for the purpose of affiliate sales. I will work it back into the mix at some point as there is just too much money sitting on the table with affiliate sales for me to ignore. I know because the first six months I made a decent buck from affiliate sales by optimizing this blog for those types of keywords.
The loss of affiliate sales has been mediated by the sharp increase in Adsense revenue as my main keywords have slowly climbed Google's search engine rankings.
For all of you that think Adsense is crap and doesn't pay much I have news for you... it is still the single easiest and best source of long term income online. If you haven't made money from Adsense it's because you don't know how - not because it doesn't work.
I now rank in the top 1-2 pages on Google for all the main "Make Money" keywords. This past week I finally hit page 1 for several highly searched terms and before I show you what this has meant I want to show you a few of those rankings.
I have yet to reach page 1 for my Prime keyword - "make money online" - but I am on page 2 of Google.com (The US region)
Note: I reached page 1 in February, 2008.
(click images to enlarge)
I have however hit page 1 for "make money online" in most of the smaller Google regions like this serp from a query originating in the Netherlands. 
There are a couple of things I want to point out as you look at these and the following screenshots. A week ago there were about 170 million competing sites in Google's index. Today there are only about a 10th of this amount.
Google has just quietly cleaned house once again and eliminated millions of sites that are deemed irrelevant. Not just in this niche either - I have noticed this across all my niches. While this will have little effect on most of you, I point it out for interest sake as it is just one more step Google has taken recently to clean up its rankings. For those of us making money online this just means less competition and that's always welcome.
The other thing you should notice is the frequency of Blogspot.com blogs listed on the top search pages. People love bashing Blogger for all sorts of reasons but primarily because it doesn't look as professional or as nice as a self hosted wordpress blog or it is limited in many ways that wordpress blogs aren't. This is all true but when it comes to making money online all those nice looking Web 2.0 blogs aren't in the same ballpark.
Making money online and producing a reader friendly A-list style blog are not the same thing. Every time I hear a Web 2.0 blogger put down Blogger I cringe. People who haven't made a dime online are busy telling other people who haven't made a dime how to make money online by creating fancy looking social network friendly blogs. That is not how you make money online - that is how you try and make a name for yourself. Making a name doesn't mean you make any money. Ranking on top of the search pages does.
Keyword: "how to earn money online"
3 Blogspot blogs in top 10
Keyword: "how to make money"
3 Blogspot blogs in top 10
Keyword: "how to make money online"
4 Blogspot blogs in top 10
Keyword: "making money online"
2 Blogspot blogs in top 10
(BTW - how many A-List blogs did you see in the top ten?)
And...
What has making the first page meant in terms of earnings? Until last Saturday I was receiving 10-20 visitors a day each from Google for most of these terms. I was on page 2. Since Sunday I have seen up to 10 times the traffic for some of these keywords.
See my Feedburner search engine keyword stats up until mid afternoon today.
A week ago I was averaging $10-$15 per day in Adsense revenue.
Check out my earnings since Sunday.
Not a bad increase at all. Guess what? All my niches have gained traffic in the wake of Google's housecleaning. I mentioned a few weeks back that I had finally broke the $200 a day barrier for Adsense earnings.
Look at yesterday's total earnings for my entire network.
Kinda blew by the $300 a day barrier - almost anti-climactic.
A word to the wise for all of you Web 2.0 bloggers - keep your nice blogs and play with them to your hearts content but don't expect to make money with them. If you want to make money online do yourself a favor and learn two things; stop complaining about Google and learn why Google is important and then learn how to SEO.
Think about the fact that once you do the work it just keeps paying you day after day and you don't have to worry about readers and posting schedules or spending all day stumbling and digging. I haven't done a damn thing in three days and the money just rolls in.
There really is an easy way to make real money online and I have just shown you what it is.
Adsense.
In my next post I will tell you why there are so many high ranking Blogspot blogs and then go over some little known tricks and tweaks for optimizing both search rankings and Adsense.
Griz
How to Make Money Using Targeted Traffic - Payday Loans
I have been targeting the term Payday Loans for the past few weeks. If you are just joining me you can catch up by reading the "Adsense lessons" posted in my sidebar. The purpose of this experiment is to make page one on Google's index results for the keyword "Payday Loans". This is a high paying keyword for Adwords users and as an Adsense publisher I want to attract people who will click the Adsense ads.
I started out with a single optimized post and then sat back and waited for visitors to show up. I collected the keywords used by each visitor and then added these terms to updated posts. Since the last post I have collected several more terms listed below with search engine rank after the term;
payday loans work from home 10
payday loan business opportunity 38
how payday companies loans work? 4
payday loan no need to work 4
roi payday loans 15
payday loans seo 6
how does pay day loans work 6
payday loan content 10
payday loans (AOL) 84
make money payday loan 2 and 3
tips for marketing loan companies 13
payday loans canada 41
no faxing payday loan 22
does google loan money 10
make money online selling insurance 1
~no faxing payday loan 20
links+payday loans 10
I have now added more related keywords to the ever growing list of "Long Tails" that searchers have used to find my blog on Google. I have gone from 1-2 visitors a day in the beginning to 10-15 a day presently. Not large numbers but enough to confirm whether this campaign is worth pursuing. I have been able to confirm a few clicks from the "Payday Loan" crowd and was pleased with the results.
I won't go into all the gymnastics of figuring out what page my ads were clicked on (I don't use Google Analytics - another story) but I will say that you can never be sure exactly which ad has been clicked so the best you can do is ad up the circumstantial evidence and make an educated guess. I happened to be up on two occasions when Google rolled past the witching hour and I was able to isolate the stats on my first clicks of the new day.
The screenshots below told me that someone had clicked a $0.95 ad. I was able to track down both clicks shown to my Payday Loan page which displayed Loan ads in the sidebar Adsense block and regular "Make Money" ads in the Lead or Top block. The "Make Money Online" ads typically pay $0.30 - $0.40 per click but have fetched over a dollar at times. Using my statcounter stats I was able to determine that I had a visitor to my payday loan page at the time the click occurred and coupled with smart pricing guidelines I am pretty sure that the click came from the targeted traffic.
(Click images to enlarge)
This is the query used to find my payday loan page.
This is the $0.95 click recorded on my Adsense account.
These are the ads I was displaying on my page at the time.
On a second occasion I matched this query...
... with this result. A $1.80 click. Bingo! - this is definitely worth pursuing.
Now it is possible that the targeted traffic didn't click the ads and someone else did but not likely. To get better paying clicks you have to meet a few Google guidlines which are best understood by explaining how Adwords works.
An advertiser using Adwords allows Google to manage what sites it displays the advertisers ads on. An advertiser wants conversions and doesn't want an ad appearing and getting clicked on a bunch of sites that aren't likely to convert. To increase the advertisers ROI Google instituted smart pricing which basically states that they will charge less for clicks that are less likely to convert and more for highly targeted clicks.
A crude and simplified example of how this works.
If someone queries Google and finds my site using the term "make money online" and then clicks a Payday Loan ad, is this targeted? From Googles point of view this click would be considered less likely to convert as there is no connection between what the visitor was searching for and what they chose. In short if one of my "make money" searchers had clicked the payday loan ad I wouldn't have received the high payouts. Conversely you can see direct relevancy and how a searcher looking for "payday loans" would be more likely to convert for the advertiser. In this case Google charges the advertiser full price and I get top CPC by providing a highly targeted visitor to the advertisers site.
If this is confusing just think in terms of a relevancy trail. If everything is relevant then you get paid more and if you have people dropping in from stumbleupon and clicking the odd ad you will get paid pennies because that type of traffic is not targeted and is not relevant to the ads clicked. Large amounts of social traffic also bugger up your CTR and invariably if you draw social traffic you will be "smart priced" by Google and only paid pennies for all the Adsense ads. This is the reason most web 2.0 or A-List style blogs don't make any money with Adsense - they don't draw the right type of traffic and draw lots of the wrong type of traffic (from a money making standpoint only).
To make money with Adsense you only want large amounts of "targeted" traffic and basically nothing else.
The shot below lists the latest keywords or queries used to find my blog on the search engines. 90% of my total traffic comes from Google and these are the typical terms used to find me. 
In essence I know exactly who my visitors are and what they are looking for - and so does Google.
Because I have optimized all my posts for specific keywords Google sends me highly targeted traffic and then puts highly targeted (the best converting) ads on my blog for the visitors to click on. I am not smart priced and get the better paying clicks. This is the reason that page optimization is so important - your content and how you optimize it determines how targeted your traffic is. If you can't provide targeted traffic then you can't make money either with Adsense or with Affiliate sales. Selling ads is also hard if your traffic while large, is diffuse. To make money online you have to provide the people paying you what they want - converting traffic.
To summarize the "Payday Loan" campaign I have been tracking my index rankings for all the keywords I have collected and have made good progress in climbing the serp's but my main keyword has stalled out at a rank of 36. This appears to be as high as content and my PR5 can take me. From here on in I will be adding backlinks with highly targeted anchor text to boost my rankings.
It is at this point that many of you can't do what I do. I have access to a lot of sites that I can use to link to my pages. If you are just starting out then you will find getting backlinks more of a challenge and you won't have enough PR to target the competitive niches. This is why I have recommended starting out by targeting niches that you can overcome with content and a few backlinks that you can get using articles and services like Yahoo Answers and Squidoo. As your PR and content increases you will be able to target better keywords and build a successful Adsense site over time.
At some point you will be faced with the "ethical" dilemma of whether you should or would cheat. By cheating I am referring to the practice of buying links. I am not advocating anything but I will tell you that every successful niche marketer buys links - they have to. If you want to make any serious money online then you will be faced with this decision at some point. Just thought I would mention it now.
Before I leave you I want to address an comment I received recently. The writer mentioned that she had read that it wasn't a good idea to rely on Adsense for all your income online as Google can take it all away in an instant. This is true and I should mention that this is not the only way I earn an income online - it is just one of the ways. I have found that some niches are ideal for Adsense and others are better suited to affiliate sales. Lead generation has become my main focus lately and I have found learning how to make money with Adsense is a great way to hone the skills needed in generating leads. At the moment lead generation is dominated by the Black Hatters and you may find the article below illuminating if you are wondering just how far you can take a niche like "Payday Loans" and make money from it.
This article will give you a good idea of the kinds of people you are competing with online and the tactics experienced marketers use to make money. I have not used hypertext as I don't want to link to this site - black hats don't make good link partners.
http://oooff.com/php-affiliate-seo-blog/affiliate-marketing/
making-big-easy-money-with-google-local-search/
(I have broken the URL to fit the page - cut and paste both lines as one long URL)
Thanks to Paul for bringing this article to my attention unfortunately he didn't leave a link. The only thing missing in the article is how the lead generation sites managed to rank high for the Payday Loan terms they targeted. The answer is using the same optimization techniques that are used for Adsense.
Now that I know there are profitable clicks in this niche I will continue to add links over time - slowly - and work my way up the "Payday Loan" serp pages. I am already adding income to my bottom line and I'm not even ranking that well yet. I will update you when I get enough payday loan traffic to have a significant effect on my daily bottom line. At the moment my daily earnings on this blog fluctuate between $10 and $15 - when I start seeing higher earnings I will know that the payday loan clicks have started to accumulate.
Cheers,
Grizzly
Update Below
Follow along with me step by step as I show you how I pick a target and then optimize my blog in order to make money with Adsense.
I outline my "Payday Loans" experiment in sequential order below.
Payday Loans
Payday Loans Review
Payday Loans and Adsense
Payday Loans - Adsense Update
Payday Loans Update
- Griz
Over the past few days Blogger has changed it's comment form to exclude links pointing back to the commenter's site. There was no announcement made and once again Google has caused people to scream and flail. Google owns Blogger if you are wondering what the connection is.
The gist of it is only links to other Blogger blogs will be displayed in the comments. If you have a blog elsewhere you can still leave a comment but there won't be an outgoing link to your site. 
People using Blogger are understandably irate as this just adds one more reason why others won't bother commenting on Blogger blogs. Conspiracy talk has already begun and cites this as an attempt by Google to undermine all the other Blogging Platforms by removing all outgoing Blogspot links and the PR associated with them.
It should be mentioned that you can still get an indirect link by setting up a Blogger account and listing your other blogs in your profile. When you leave a comment on a Blogger blog the reader would have to follow your link on the comment back to your profile and then access your blog from there.
I want to discuss the ramifications of this but for those interested in a good summation of what has been done see Blogger.com No Longer Allows Links to Non-Blogger Sites in Comments by Windyridge. Read this post and then come back and listen to my take on this - it concerns everyone that is currently using do-follow.
What is Google up to now?
Each time Google acts there is swift condemnation from the blogging world. The general theory is that Google is a monopoly and everything they do is centered around eliminating competition - competing advertisers in relation to the crack down on paid links and now we will hear how they are trying to take down other blogging platforms like wordpress.
If you are one of the people who subscribe to this view then please hear me out.
If Google's prime objective was to control all advertising on the net they could do it overnight. If they wanted to end all the other blog platforms online they could wipe them out in the blink of an eye. How?
Think on this for a bit. Google controls most of the traffic on the net. They are just one search engine among many and yet most people choose to use them when searching for something. Google can list whoever they want for whatever reason they want and if you don't like the results they give you then you are free to use another search engine. You can not call in the District Attorney or the Attorney General and ask that Google be sued for violating anti trust because they didn't index your blog or because they took away your PR. The legal minds would quickly inform you that you can use a competing service if you aren't happy with Google.
The point is that they are NOT a monopoly - there are lots of competing search engines. What they are is successful and all because people CHOOSE to use them and not because people HAVE to use them.
Now for the real shocker - Google could simply decide that only Blogspot blogs will be listed in their index. They could also decide that any site displaying any advertising that they don't own or control will be dropped from their index as well. They haven't done this but they could and there would be nothing wrong with this.
Google's index is no different than you or I publishing a list. Take a popular site like 45n5.com which lists the top 100 "make money online" blogs according to Mark the owner. Now for some reason, in spite of several requests to include me in the listings I have never heard back from the site and haven't been added. Do I have the right to sue because I haven't been added to the Top 100 index? No. It's Mark's index and he can do what he wants with it. (But if he were to add me and hopefully he has a sense of humor, I would be overjoyed to remove the no-follow on my link - hehe maybe blackmail will get me in.)
The point is Google can do everything people are accusing them of if they wanted to do what they are accused of and they could do it instantly without all this playing around. They haven't though and that's because they aren't trying to eliminate advertising competition or other blogging platforms. The only competition they would like to eliminate is other search engines and they are doing this by being the "BEST" search engine.
It is ironic that people have been claiming that Google is no longer "valid" since the latest slap reduced so many high PR sites to ashes. Do they really think this invalidates Google? Google eliminated one of the top avenues that people were using to artificially inflate their PR - people were buying PR from sites openly selling it. Does stopping this practice make them less valid? Would you rather see a site listed on top of the serp's because it was able to buy the most reviews on the net or would you prefer to see the site that has the most authentic PR?
The end result is that Google only takes action in order to make their search results more valid. Getting rid of a portion of the paid links problem increased their validity, it did not diminish it.
Google and the The Do Follow Movement
When I first heard about the Do Follow movement my immediate reaction was that this won't end well for the people using it. Like paid links nobody stopped to think about Google's reaction to it. If you depend on Google for your traffic then you really should think about Google before proceeding down one path or another.
So, how do you think Google feels about Do-Follow?
Let's ask what is the point of Do-Follow?
If you are a blogger then you have convinced yourself that this is a legitimate way of inducing comments from your readers. More people will comment if you offer them a link that passes PR back to the commenter's page.
Do I really need to tell you how Google sees this?
This is simply another way to game the search engine. Before you protest just think of how many sites publish lists of Do-Follow blogs with high PR. What are people being told to do? If you want to increase your page rank then leave comments on all these high PR blogs. Does this allow a blog with poor quality content to inflate it's PR? You bet it does. If you are using Do-Follow then you are still selling PR but instead of money you are doing it in return for readership and comment content.
It doesn't matter if you don't think there is anything wrong with what you're doing. In fact Google doesn't care what your reasons are because you are ultimately allowing others to game the serp's even if your reasons are pure and unselfish.
Like paid links the people who will be penalized will be the ones allowing the links - not the ones receiving the links.
I mentioned a penalty but I am only guessing. It seems to me that Google is sending a clear message in regards to removing links from the Blogger comments. If anything it probably means that comment links will or are now being ignored by Google although I have no proof. It makes sense for them to follow this path though. What possible reason could allowing comment links help Google in ranking sites? Almost none that I can see. They know that all these links were not created by the PR owner and that the owner is passing on PR indiscriminately. Why should they accept the link as valid?
Just a hunch but I think comment links play an important role in Google's algorithm.
Google's latest move is puzzling because they could simply decide to ignore these types of links without anybody even knowing so why the change to Blogger. It seems obvious that the changes were made to stop people from removing the no-follow tag on Blogger comments. All Blogger blogs are automatically no-followed and wouldn't pass PR normally and Google would have no reason to change the linking structure. That they are eliminating links to the outside altogether has to mean it's the only way to stop do-follow links. This sends the message that they don't like do-follow or at least that is how I am reading it.
The thing is that if do-follow is causing them concern why not just ignore the links on comments all together? Why bother sending a message trying to get everyone to eliminate the do-follow links?
I am totally guessing but is it possible that Google uses the amount of comments a blog gets (by counting links) to help rank sites on it's index? It certainly would be a somewhat relevant factor in deciding which sites are seen as an authority. This certainly isn't conclusive but in general the more authoritative sites do tend to get the most comments.
As I said, just a guess but it would explain why Google can't ignore the links and why they want no-follow used. If they have been using this metric in the algorithm then you can see how do-follow would dramatically skewer the rankings.
So why not tell everybody they use comments to aid their rankings? Because then we will all be spamming our own sites with comments.
I might be completely off here but it pays to wonder when Google starts making changes. My hypothesis may be wrong and there could be other reasons for these Blogger changes but I know that Google does not like the Do-Follow movement and you can be sure that they will have a plan to eliminate it. This alone should make you think about being involved in it.
Cheers,
Grizzly
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