I’m probably telling you nothing when I tell you (some of you yet again) disassociated.com is a blog without a niche. I don’t write steadily or consistently on a given topic.
There’s no specialist focus or theme here. So, not quite a ship without a rudder, but something like that.
In fact I have a very Jackson Pollock approach to blogging… I simply do it because I like it. I throw words at you like he threw paint at his canvases. It is an end to itself. I do it for the sheer joy (most of the time anyway) that comes with the writing experience.
As well as, occasionally, the challenge of trying to convey an idea with the written word.
And while, more often than not, my posts have no plan or schedule, I do have an idea of where I’d like them to end up. If that makes any sense.
I started thinking about my blogging “style” while reading a few threads over at Authority Blogger Forum yesterday. A discussion about John Chow, apparently getting himself into a spot bother with search engine Google, intrigued me.
It seems JC has been linking to apparently “non contextual” sites and blogs, and also selling links which is apparently another no no, mainly because said links point to “non contextual” places.
And now Google have “shut him down”, or something to that effect.
It’s the “non contextual” thing that gets me though.
John Chow writes a blog about making money online. And he links to, say, me (which actually happened by the way). disassociated.com is not a blog about making money online. That must therefore be a “non contextual” link, I suppose.
But what I if link to John Chow (as I just did then)? A personal blog, with a wide focus, linking to a blog about making money online. Am I posting a “non contextual” link?
If “anything goes” here (to an extent, the extent of what interests me, that is), when does something become out of bounds? Just what is “contextual” as far as disassociated.com is concerned? (How’s that for an oxymoron, by the way?)
Does my “widely focussed” personal blog have a limit somewhere though. Will linking to a certain website one day be deemed crossing the line of “contextuality”? (Bear in mind though there are certain websites and blogs that I wouldn’t be interested in linking to.)
It strikes me there is a certain paranoia regarding the who and hows of linking. One “SEO” blog said pages should have no outgoing links! Doing that, you see, would improve their (wait for it, wait for it) pagerank.
It was the feeling of this particular SEO blogger that outgoing links reduced the “value” of incoming links, thus reducing a blog’s pagerank.
Well, ok, but I’m not going to link to any page that refuses to link back out, so where does this guy expect to procure incoming links from?
I’ve often wondered if I’m too old skool for today’s web though. A web where “handing out” links is frowned upon, it seems.
When I put my first website online in 1997, links pages were as commonplace, and expected, as an about page. We used to call them “starting points”, where links to all sorts of weird and wonderful sites were posted.
You could go from one “starting point” to another and see all manner of things. If you liked a site, whether or not it was of the same genre as yours, you’d see if the owner was up for a link exchange.
Links make the web go around don’t they? By interlinking word gets around. Your traffic increases. It made (or makes) prefect sense to do so. And I’m talking actual, real, websites. With content. “Quality” links, dare I say. Not the splogs that are about today.
I’d surely be blacklisted if I tried that sort of links page nonsense on today. Oops, too late, I already did.
But I think I have been “blacklisted” anyway. Of the last 500 hits here, just 27 were referred from a search engine. 26 from Google and 1 from MSN.
Ordinarily I’d say “sandbox, sandbox”, but disassociated.com predates the damn sandbox.
The answer is in fact far more simple. What the hell is there to search for here anyway? This a blog about anything and everything, so trying to locate something specific is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.
But if the search engines want to be the 2007 version of the “starting point”, which is what it seems like, they’d better include me. If not, they’d better not “penalise” me if I want to do my own thing.
But I wonder, if less than half of one per cent of my traffic is sent in via the search engines, is being “non contextual”, and “paying the price” going to be problem for me anyway? That figure again: 27 visits out 500.
I think the 500 figure is the one to watch, not the 27.
I think that being confined to contextual links would be extremely limiting. The best ideas often come from unexpected places. It’s the cross-pollination that makes the Internet such a powerful tool.
John Chow’s situation is a bit different because he has been so openly soliciting links. That’s just Google being Google and making an example for the rest of us that this is not the way they want things to work.
In my humble opinion links are still gold. While personal sites, link blogs and tumblelogs will always struggle for high SERPs, the value of your links to other sites will not be diminished. The way I’ve read the literature is that G! identifies context for links is by the text around the link.
You are definitely right to care about more about unique visitors as well as comments and incoming links more so than search engine visitors. Google is a bitch of a master.
I just wish the GoogleBots were smarter. The problem as I see it is: Google sees non-contextual links and assumes (and is right in the case of JohnChow.com) that some of those are paid links and not organic. Also: given the sheer number of sites out there Google has to figure out, without being smart enough to understand the content, which websites are authorities on which subjects. To do that, it has (unfortunately) taken to looking for sites that post mostly about a limited subset (hah!) of things. That being said, latent semantic indexing is supposed to be taking over which will greatly improve the situation. In a nutshell, as I understand it, this will mean that Google looks at a page or post and sees whether the words used *within* that page/post are of the same ‘family’ so-to-speak. So instead of keyword density it actually starts to figure out whether you know what you are talking about, even if the page/post isn’t related to the rest of what’s on the website. We’ll see.
Standards are merely personal preferences, in spite of what anyone would tell us. If one is an independent blogger, one must please oneself primarily, albeit with a consideration given to one’s readers. When we place too much emphasis and importance on statistics and referrers and such, then the blog controls us rather than the other way around. At that point, blogging ceases to be satisfying and becomes instead a dreaded chore, a race almost impossible to win.
Love your minimalist look, by the way. Wonder why ~;-)
You know I don’t even care about that on my view of it Blog but on the one I am trying to learn how to earn with I work on that kind of stuff. The one I don’t work on has a a much higher page rank than the one I do..sigh
@Jeane – it’s all about cross pollination – exactly what I think :)
@Anthony – you sure can’t miss John Chow’s links campaigns! What I was reading on the Authority Blogger forum suggested his use of “non contextual” links also played a part in his predicament though. You’re right links are gold, and people are still arriving here, which is the main thing – search engines notwithstanding!
@Kurt – that sounds like a far more sensible method of indexing – it’ll be interesting to see the results…
@Anne – thanks for the compliment! Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks “less is more” :) You’re right, being “reined in” by your blog would be defeating the purpose of blogging in the first place!
@Carol – there would ways to take advantage of that higher PR though, wouldn’t there?
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