Okay the most widely anticipated event in search is now upon us, we have waited months for it… No, not the PageRank update, I am talking about…

The SEOmoz Comic Strip

Rebecca Kelley of SEOmoz does comics good and her newest comic strip does not disappoint. I have made my comic strip debut in them! Sweet, you can see to the left how pleased Lisa Barone is about it.

Here it is, the SES San Jose comic strip.

If you haven’t read them yet, here are the comic strips for prior search conferences

I think this fact has been overlooked.

I have often been critical of the way that Matt Cutts has distributed information on “nofollow” and paid links in the past. It is hard to be critical now, he defined it.

Most people concerned about this issue are concerned not in the sense of a debate, but more in the sense of “How can I promote my website, and how can I do it in such a way that I do not run the risk of losing rank?”

If you want to promote your site via paid links, but do not want to risk being penalized by Google, here is what information Google put out during this session.

Google does not have a problem with people purchasing links if those links are providing clear and machine readable disclosure that they are paid links.

Buying such links is within the Google webmaster guidelines.

What are machine readable links?

Matt Cutts put up a slide providing examples of linking methods that provide both “clear disclosure” and is also “machine readable”.

The four examples provided were…

- redirect through url blocked by robots.txt

- redirect through url that does 302 Javascript

- rel=”nofollow” on individual links

- <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” /> on entire page

Google provided actual names of organizations where you can buy links from.

Another slide stated that “You can buy links within search engine guidelines” and listed some examples

- Adbrite

- Quigo

- IndustryBrains

- adCenter, YPN

- any site that doesn’t pass PageRank in links

The slide also states explicitly…

“Buying paid links that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines.”

There was a time when one of the biggest complaints about Google was that they were not providing enough guidance. The information provided in this session was impressively clear and transparent. It defined well what actions are and are not within the Google webmaster guidelines as far as Google is concerned.

For those seeking to follow the guidelines, there was ample information provided to make actionable determinations about your linking strategies. I appreciate it always when Google defines so clearly their position.

I feel it is also worth noting that this information is important to anyone selling links as well. It would be very nice to have your company listed on a slide by Google as a place to buy links. I will be getting into the link selling arena, and plan to do so in the way recommended by Google.

My personal, random observations on this session…

- With knowledge comes responsibility. Often when Google expresses something so plainly, they start enforcing it more. Worth a thought.

- There are enormous benefits to links that do not pass PageRank (there was an internet before PageRank) and whatever side you fall on this debate, seeking links for traffic rather than PageRank is a tried and true method that works.

- As a publisher, I do not deal with ad networks that violate the Google webmaster guidelines. It seems short sighted to believe that authoritative publishers will do so for very much longer either. They have interests to protect and rank to maintain.

iGoogle home page usage represents the newest, most underdeveloped, and I think under appreciated source of traffic and advertising. I pointed out in an earlier post about how Google was using promotional links inside their own official Google gadgets.

As iGoogle usage grows, some very basic changes will take place in the way gadgets are used for advertising. Google gadgets will represent one of the most targeted and influential advertising spaces on the web.

To illustrate her point she used Sphinn…

Danny will be so proud. It turns out that all the comments on Sphinn are in Ajax, rendering it invisible to search engines. Her point was that even the most savvy and knowledgeable can easily fall victim to poor site architecture. In the case of Sphinn, all the user generated content is invisible. This is naturally being worked on and corrected, but it was a great example of some of the potential pitfalls are, and the “back to the basics” type of things, like making sure you content is visable to your users if they are not using java script.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t going to go because of some serious lack of planning (with just a dash of “I broke up with my girlfriend and I’m not in Canada anymore”). I actually can only be in San Jose for about 12 hours, literally (which sucks), but I hope to see all you crazy people there.

I want one of those t-shirts dammit, and will howl like a wolf till I get one

Give me t-shirts.

If any of you are link builders… here is how it works, you give me a tshirt, I give you a link. (just don’t tell Matt).