As a child…
It was night. My best friend, Fabitin, and my cousin, Jesus, were engaged in a basketball that I found absolutely no interest in. While I wanted to play with them, I didn’t particularly care to take part in the game. As a 6 year old I was short, fat, and frankly much more interested in my little red T-Bird convertible than losing again to either — or worse, both! — of them. Of course, this time the court was my front driveway, which didn’t matter at all except for the slight, 5-degree incline between where I sat and the road.

The game had no timer, not set score at which victory would be declared, and no real rules other than the usual “no hitting, biting, or using weaponry”. Heck, there really wasn’t even a boundary, other than maybe the grass and the road. Realizing this, I decided to give the game an end point (after which I would most certainly gain two new playmates) and announced “OK, when the car rolls on to the basketball court the game ends. OK?” I presumed their lack of acknowledgment meant that they understood, and felt no need to waste time responding.

A few minutes later, having grown weary of watching them play (and of being alone), I triumphantly rolled the little red car down the driveway, did my imitation of that obnoxious buzzer at the end of basketball games, and watched as they both paid just enough attention to the car so as to not step on it. They just kept playing.

This was about the time when I decided that maybe they didn’t want to play with me, so I took my little red car, now parked safely on that little dip between the driveway and the road, and went inside to… well, I don’t remember what, I just remember going inside. (I was 6, remember? I wasn’t exactly remembering much those days.)

As an adult…
A few years ago, I was responsible for creating contests in order to increase readership at a few websites and a magazine. Unlike in the basketball court, the response was surprisingly… meager. Not only was the announcement not acknowledged, the contests were pretty much ignored. In fact, winners were usually that by default.

When I was given the position of Community Leader for the Commentary community over at 9Rules I decided to come up with a way to stimulate readership (and commentary) throughout the community by introducing a contest (The CCCC) where I could grant the best note over the course of a week in the commentary community three, then six points. (At that time six points could be considered a bonanza.) Having failed miserably so many times before, I was confident that I could come up with something now. I mean, you can only fail so many times before you succeed, right?

I spent a week studying similar contests with similar communities and eventually came up with a set of rules and regulations, none of which involved a plastic T-Bird rolling down my driveway. This one not only failed, it failed spectacularly: not one person entered.

You know, after writing this I sort of feel like the King of the Swamp in Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail, who related his history so: “When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.” Of course, none of my contests have yet stayed up, but I’m sure that’ll change. Eventually. If I just keep at it. Right?

If I can’t run one…
Anyway, so what’s the point in all this? Well, about a week ago, fellow 9Ruler Ben Gillbanks put up a contest on one of his blogs, Binary Moon, the Binary Moon Links Competition. The contest is simple: write a post about a Binary Moon post, then link it there. — which is exactly what you’re reading right now.

Now, Ben also runs a number of other sites, the most interesting of which for the sake of this post is Binary Joy. While the Ben’s contest has nothing directly to do with that site, indirectly it does.

Think about it: the guy runs a site where he writes news and reviews about games. He comes up with the contest which is not only incredibly simple, it’s also chock-full of rewards, for both him and the winners. (And if you don’t understand the reasoning behind that last statement, don’t worry about it.) What’s more, the contest is VERY well responded to. Why? Is it because he’s offering great prizes? Well, yeah, actually. But also because it’s incredibly, sickeningly simple: Write a post. Link it here. Tell me about it. You’re entered. Not many rules and regulations to follow, clauses and stipulations, legal mumbo-jumbo — nada. Just a contest. That’s it.

Why can’t I come up with any cool contests like that? Who knows, maybe next time I will. (And if you read my last post, I hope you saw what I did there.) For now, if I can’t run one, I might as well enter one.

[Edit: Didn't win, but was as a finalist! Thank you, Ben!]

Like always, if you like this post, bookmark it! You can also find more Le Linkage episodes in the Le Linkage section of Gnorb.NET.

How to Build a Profitable Home on the Web: The title explains it all. What it doesn’t tell you is that this is a collection of videos that show you what you need to do. Good way to start your journey into the world of blogging and search engine optimization.

What’s Your Web Page’s True Relevance? This is extremely helpful for anyone who is interested in increasing their overall sphere of influence. Unlike other similar tools, this isn’t limited to Google, but instead encompasses things like .gov and .edu domains, Del.icio.us, Yahoo! searches, DMOZ, and a few others. This is a fairly interesting tool which gages your overall strength, unlike the Google PageRank algorithm, which measures importance. According to this, my page strength seems to be at around a 3.5 for www.gnorb.net and 3.0 for gnorb.net. How do I unify those, I wonder?

How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines: This is the billionth article written on the topic, but its written by one of the best in the industry, ProBlogger, and one of the few people who can actually say “I make a living from blogging!” Besides, this was posted on my birthday, which gives it an automatic cool factor.

212 Sure Fire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch: If you’re entering the world of blogging with the intent of becoming at least somewhat famous, this is the post for you. Remember, however, that having great content and making lots of money aren’t always related. Sometimes — a lot of times — making money comes from creating lots of little crappy sites that generate a lot of traffic. Most bloggers write because they love writing about topics they know a lot about. (In my case, I’m an expert at my own interests.) If you’re writing to be famous, take a look at these tips.

Secrets to Beating the Sandbox: Ok, so you’ve gotten your blog up and running. Now, how do you get to Google quickly, since that’s probably where most of your traffic will be coming from? This tutorial teaches you the best way to cut your Sandbox time from months to days. Hint: interlinking with similar sites helps an awful lot. Interlinking with Google-trusted authority sites is even better.

Banned from AdSense? It’s Your Own Damn Fault! Once you start a blog, if you’re looking to make money, chances are you’ll start the way most of us do: by using Google AdSense. If that’s the case, make sure that you’re not doing anything which will get you banned: bannination = lack of payment. Sure, they don’t come down hard on you if you’re earning $100 every 18 months, but once your blog becomes successful and you start making thousands a month, that’s when you’ll really start seeing Google’s scrutiny. The basic lesson is this: keep it honest. Even if you are honest, read this to make sure you’re not accidentally breaking the rules.

Webmaster World: Finally, if you don’t know about this site, now you do. And you should, since it’s just about the best site on the Web for general SEO information. Other sites (including some I’ve worked for) have done a great job at playing catch up, but all in all, this is where the brain-trust lives. Read what’s here with a notepad on hand: you’ll need it.

Hmm… sex and violence… Interesting that while I work pretty hard not to include any of those things in most of my posts, in the end, those end up being the most popular. Maybe I should take a hint…?

Nah. Unless she did the weather every morning. “Today, it will rain… BLOOD!” *bites cameraman*. Then it’d be different. Somehow.

I plan to keep playing around with that tool (uhm… Google Analytics… not what you’re thinking… after seeing that picture…) to make the site better, but in the mean time you may have to “pardon my dust” to turn a phrase. If you see strange things happening with the RSS feeds and the site layout you’ll know what’s happening and why. I’ll keep off the whole “sex and violence” thing, though. Unless Square-Enix changes their formula for Final Fantasy, in which case… well, I’ll get off of that subject.

(By the way, for those of you not familiar with the image above, that’s the main character of the BloodRayne video game.)

A few days ago, I got another email from the same person. This email was written in the same frantic style, making my head feel again as if it was about to explode. “What,” I thought, “could have possibly gotten into her?!” I didn’t actually ask, since I didn’t want to offend, but I couldn’t help think that some form of parasite had burrowed into her brain. I’ll admit, I’m being a bit anal about this matter, but c’mon: I’m a writer and an editor. It comes with the territory. (Note: I know, I know — I don’t edit this blog as much as I could/should. It’s not meant to be that professional anyway. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. Hypocrisy be damned!)

Yesterday, I was at my parent’s place. My younger sister, who has her own MySpace page and circle of friends, was sitting at the computer writing an email to one of her MySpace pals. Being the cyber-quidnunc that I am (sometimes), I looked over her shoulder to see what she was writing.

There it was again: the writing.

hey…didnt c u at Amp last night… tell mel i’ll be flying in at 12… i dont plan on staying up too late either… yeah, I feel old too, but at least u’re already doing what older people are supposed to do….lol….responsibilities!! I will definitely keep u updated…

It seems like the Internet’s spawned yet another lingo: MySpaceTalk.

MySpace has always been a bit of an enigma to me. In fact, I hadn’t heard of it until about a year ago, when someone told me that it was “like LiveJournal, but different.” Yeah, real descriptive there, buddy. Other than that, I’ve pretty much ignored it until recently, when I began to hear that a lot of people were using MySpace as a way of getting in touch with old friends. “That’s not a bad idea,” I thought. After all, MySpace has something like 75,000,000 subscribed users (or about 10% of all Internet users world wide, if you don’t account for the myriad of users with multiple accounts), so I’m sure at least a few people I know are probably there.

After looking around for a bit, I decided to take the plunge and open up my own MySpace page. I figured it could help me network by helping people who may be looking for me (and who can’t find me via Google, which has Gnorb.NET on the second page for the search term “Norbert Cartagena” after a few meta tag blunders I made with this site when I revamped it), find me. Furthermore, I figured I could use it as a technique to drive visitors to this site while still allowing them to comment on MySpace if they should choose. This one I’m still a bit unsure about, but I’ll see how it turns out.

The one thing I still have to do…aside from setting up my MySpace profile…is work on my MySpaceTalk cos that way i can communicate with people and seem like im all busy…which i am so dont bother me…j/k hahahaha…. loves ya!

Check it out: W3C Markup Validator

Edit:Victory is mine! My entries are now starting to show up in Technorati! Huzzah! huzzah! Huzzah! I looks like after the clean up, the Technorati spiders were finally able to work with the site. Sadly, it took me having to remove my Amazon links to do it. (Drat!) However, I think I know how to get around that. (See the post More on Technorati Problems for more information.)

For more information, check out this WordPress forums link.

How can I produce better content for indexing?

Help our spiders find your content in its entirety by outputting valid markup for your web pages and feeds.

The W3C Markup Validation Service will help you identify and correct markup errors on your site. Modern spiders can work around some errors but it is best to provide as little work as possible to index your site and display all of your content the way it is meant to be displayed.

Technorati also indexes your feed to retrieve additional information and discern document structure. Feed Validator will help you verify the markup of your site’s syndication feeds and identify possible points of improvement.

I decided to check out the both the Feed Validator and the W3C Markup Validation Service pages to see whether or not the problem may have been coming from my end. As it turns out, it may just be.

From the W3C Markup Validation Service I got this result for Gnorb.NET’s home page. Nasty, nasty stuff.

Needless to say, but “ouch!” Talk about screwing up a perfectly good Web page. The results from Feed Validator weren’t any better. Heck, the tool couldn’t even recognize my RSS feed as a feed! Talk about something that’ll ruin your chances!

Although that first issue is mostly my fault (looks like there are a lot of Amazon partner issues I can’t really do much about), the second looks to be a problem with WordPress directly. Maybe it’s time I find an Atom feed plugin that’ll produce nice, clean code.

Looks like I have a lot of work this weekend. Between that, SEF’ing the URLs, creating sub-domains, and moving all content from all other system blogs to this one and only blog (big task, but worth it, I think, especially since my other stuff isn’t really being spidered), plus fixing phpBB — yeah, a lot of stuff to get done.

I guess it likes all that content.

The trick is to get it to spider the site, at least more than the front page. To that end, I’ll probably start using the miniblog (look at the bottom of the sidebar) to create some daily moving content on each of the pages. Maybe on a category-by-category basis, or maybe just an overall thing. The second thing I’ll see about doing is setting up the categories as sub-domains (books.gnorb.net, business.gnorb.net, games-and-entertainment.gnorb.net, etc). That way, the site will be treated as multiple sites, instead of just one. (Better to have one egg in 100 baskets than 100 eggs in one basked, to paraphrase J. P. Getty.) For that, I’ll need my sys-admin Nate’s help. Finally, I’ll see about doing multi-page posts, though I’m not sure I like that too much; personally, I think I might get annoyed with that. Heck, I probably would if I saw it on another site, especially if there are like 15 ads and not very many words per page. (Just about every two-bit computer review site I’ve ever seen does this. Good one’s, like [H]ardOCP or Overclockers.com, don’t.)

At any rate, I’ll study these logs more and whenever I find anything out I’ll put it here.

Edit:Man, this thing is still going! Wow… I guess it IS going deep. The question is how often will it spider?

As I logged in, I was expecting to see a lot of spam. To my surprise, there really wasn’t much there. (Hurray spam filters!) What I found instead was a couple of messages from would-be writing contracts and — to my surprise — a LinkedIn invitation from an old acquaintance of mine, Wayne H. Wayne is the owner of Blog Business World, a SEO/SEM firm based out of Canada. Previously, he was also a writer for a SEO website, which is where we met. (I used to be that site’s Chief Editor.)

It was surprising to see his name on my list of un-read emails, especially since it was there three times. The emails were invitations to join the LinkedIn network. Apparently, LinkedIn doesn’t take its invitations lightly. (I’m now glad they don’t.) Since it was Wayne who sent them, I said “What the heck. I’ll bite,” then went ahead and signed up with the program.

For those of you who don’t know, LinkedIn is basically a network-building tool. Looking for a job? Looking for an employee? Looking for someone with similar interests? Chances are that if you’re looking for someone to fit one of those bills, you probably know someone who knows someone who is looking to fit that bill. What LinkedIn does is that it helps you create a network and helps them create a network and helps them create a network, and by using all those network connections, eventually, somewhere down the line, you’ll be able to find someone via that network who fits your need at the time.

On its face, the service looks really useful for anyone trying to build any sort of business. After all, networking is at the core of just about every business relationships. 90% of all jobs come from networking. Sales is all about networking. And SEO is definitely a networking game. The service relies on the old sales adage that everyone knows at least 250 people, and those people all know 250 people, so your initial network is something like 62,500 people. (Can you imagine if each of those people spent only one dollar with you per month?!) Although that number may be a bit high (I actually believe it’s way low), the principle is still a sound one, relying on the six degrees of separation theory.

(What is “Six degrees of separation”? The six degrees of separation theory states that every one on Earth is connected to everyone else on Earth by no more than about six people. For example, let’s say you are a Florida resident, and you want to find out whether or not you’re connected to Vladmir Putin, the Russian Premier (President?). You think back to anyone who may have been in Russia. Turns out you don’t know anyone who’s been in Russia, but you do have a friend who’s met President Bush. That right there means that you are separated from Bush via two degrees of separation. President Bush has (very publicly) met with Mr. Putin. That means that technically, although you’re not likely to be able to access Putin this way, you are connected to Vladmir via three degrees of separation, your friend, who knows George Bush, who knows Vladmir Putin. Can you think of another international figure you may be connected to? And by the way, no, this doesn’t account for pockets of lost human tribes living in an undiscovered island in the middle of the Pacific. Stop being such a jerk.)

As I mentioned before, I’ve just signed up for the service and the more I look at it, the more I’m liking what I see. For now, it looks like I’ll be sending out a few invitations to people who may just need the connections. As a matter of fact, I know they do.

If you’ve ever had any experience with the service, or a service like this, I’d definitely be interested in knowing about it.

Lately — don’t know if anyone’s noticed — I’ve been looking for all kinds of ways to improve this site’s looks to better fit my tastes. What can I say, I’m an eclectic, and I’d like this site to reflect me in more ways than just my writing. (Though honestly, my writing has become a bit more comfortable.) I was hoping to find a good bBlog theme, something to give this site a little spark. Although my search yielded some results, I didn’t find anything particularly attractive. I found a bunch of stuff for WordPress, but not very many bBlog themes.

Frankly, I ought to sharpen my CSS skills, if for no other reason than to offer the bBlog community a few more themes. I guess I have a soft spot for underdog projects. Compared to WordPress, bBlog is definitely an underdog. But it’s sooooo SEO-friendly that it’s hard to give up! In fact, its search engine friendlyness is what promted this post, and a bit of a change of direction for me.

I was doing a search for the term “bBlog Themes” last night, when I noticed something odd: Gnorb.NET was on the front page of Google for the phrase “bBlog Themes”! I couldn’t believe it! I mean, sure, it’s obviously not a particularly popular search, but c’mon, that rocks!

I’ve been starting to optimize for the word “Stuff”, to see what I could do there. Yeah, I know — I have a snowball’s chance in hell. Still, the “stuff” challenge was one I couldn’t turn my back on. Not many sites are optimized for that word by itself, since it’s usually paired up in phrases like “free stuff” and “Stuff Magazine”. I never would have guessed that I could come up near the top in other phrases. Other than “Gnorb”, that is. I think I’ve optimized my site well enough for that.

(By the way, no, I didn’t remember that there was a magazine named Stuff when I decided to take on this challenge.)

At any rate, I’ve selfishly decided to capitalize on this opportunity and secure my spot at the top of the “bBlog Theme” rankings, all the while selflessly providing a service to the bBlog using community, by setting up a repository of bBlog related themes. (Besides, this means more content for this site. Always a good thing.) This repository will include screenshots, descriptions, and any development notes that I come accross. I will also include WordPress themes that work with the wpcompatible theme. (Not all of them do, daing it.) I don’t plan to house the themes here, but I’ll keep copies on this server, should those sites go down. All credit will be given to the right sources, including links, dwarven slaves, and a the fruitcake given to Christ when he was visited by the Three Kings and the Court Jester from the Orient. (You know who I’m talking about, the one who’s inexplicably missing from any of the Gospels. What, haven’t you read The DaVinci Code?)

Actually, my reasons for doing this aren’t so much selfish as they are born from frustration. bBlog doesn’t seem to have a lot of information out there, at least not as much as I’d like to see. With my background as a writer in the technology industry, I’m better placed than most to write up a whole load of documentation relating to the blogging software. The problem: I don’t understand the innards well enough to really be of any use to the bBlog development team. (Sorry about that, guys.) Sure, I go to the forums and help out whenever I can, but with my limited knowledge of PHP and Smarty — well, there’s only so much I can do. I’m learning, but if I can spur some aspect of development, be it technical or community-wise, I’d rather do what I can now.

For anyone who wishes to help out, you’re more welcome to drop me a line in these forums. I’m not looking for a loyal army of followers here, just a few people to dig through the various bBlog themes and document any changes you’ve might have made, or maybe make a few new CSS templates and share them with the rest of us. I have the feeling I’ll be doing most, if not all of this alone, but what the heck. If I don’t do it, will anyone?

First, I found the file README-URLS.txt in the bBlog main directory (…/bblog/README-URLS.txt, where “…” is the path to bBlog, for example “/var/www/html/website/stuff/bblog/README-URLS.txt”). The file basically states that the following conditions need to be met:

• Your server supports clean URLs. (This is an AllowOverride setting in Apache.) If settings need to be made here, make them, then come back to the rest of this tutorial thing.
• The file htaccess-cleanurls (found in …/bblog/htaccess-cleanurls) should be renamed to “.htaccess”.
• The file config.php should be edited, with the last three commented lines — all of which pertain to clean urls — should be uncommented. In other words, this:

  // Clean or messy urls ? ( READ README-URLS.txt ! )
//define('CLEANURLS',TRUE);
//define('URL_POST','http://www.example.com/blog/item/%postid%/');
//define('URL_SECTION','http://www.example.com/blog/section/%sectionname%/')

  (Note that in this example, the example website is “www.example.com/blog/. Change this to whatever your blog lies within your website.)

Important:You may also need to edit the CSS / image links in the templates to make them absolute (ie. ((website))/item/99, as opposed to ((website))/?postid=99.)

Once this is done, you’re ready to rock. After this, you might want to head over to Wallies.info/blog and check out this bBlog plugin which will automatically make a sitemap for you which can then be submitted to Google for spidering, thereby getting more of your pages into the SERPs, which is usually a good thing.

The Google Sitemap bBlog Plugin (click to download) is pretty simple to install.

1. Download the plugin to your local system.
2. upload each file to the appropriate directory:
   ((website))\gsm.php
((website))\bblog\bBlog_plugins\admin.googlesitemaps.php
((website))\bblog\compiled_templates\admin^%%-18^%%-1859512731^gsm.html.php
((website))\bblog\compiled_templates\admin^%%-12^%%-1206661952^googlesitemaps.html.php
((website))\bblog\inc\admin_templates\rssgsm092.html
((website))\bblog\inc\admin_templates\plugins\
googlesitemaps.html
3. Go to the Plugins section of your bBlog administrator pages and ‘Scan for new plugins’
4. Open the Google Sitemaps Plugin. (This plugin will appear in the menu.)
5. Generate your Google Sitemaps URL. To make a Sitemap URL, set all form options to ‘gsm’ and click the ‘Generate!’ button. Your file should be at ((website))/gsm.php. (Check this through your browser.)

   (The generated XML file is of the type <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>)

6. Finally, submit your Google Sitemap to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

That should be about it. More information can be found by visiting the following locations:

• For more information about this plugin : http://wallies.info/blog/item/131/
• For an introduction to Google Sitemapping : http://wallies.info/blog/item/132/
• For help or questions : http://www.wallies.info/forum/viewtopic.php?p=17
• Official Google Sitemaps Help page :

  https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html

I hope this was of help. The only concern that I have (and this was one raised by this bBlog forums poster) is that if your website has been around for a while and some of the content has already been spidered (for example, 51 pages on Gnorb.NET have been spidered, out of something like 200) then Google might mistake your site (or mine — eek!) for a spam site, with multiple instances of the same articles. (That would get you booted from the search engines.)

*crossing fingers* Maybe a SEO can give me some advice?

Updated 07-16-05: Here’s what happened with the bBlog Google Sitemap plugin: Apparently, in the Google Sitemap plugin for bBlog, there’s a problem with the code. The dates displayed come out as follows:

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 01:27:41 -0400414110

However, according to Google, the date format has to be something like this:

2005-09-24T08:47:21-05:00

In short, this means:
2005-09-24 — 24 September 2005
T08:47:21 — Posted at 8:47am (08:47h) and 21 seconds
-05:00 — Eastern Standard Time (-5 hours from GMT)

I put my sitemap up to Google and got an error because of the screwed up time stamping. Argh! I’ll start looking through the application to see if I can fix it. If I can, I’ll post the results here (and send the fix to Mr. Snapy Blue Things).

Whenever there’s a comment posted on this site, the system shoots out an email telling me there’s a new comment or trackback in “X” story. A few weeks after starting this site, I started getting replies to stories (from what I figured to be spam-bots) talking about online cas1n0s, p0r-no-graphny, and all manner of vile online-behavior. (I’ve masked the names so they don’t get picked up by web spiders.) the messages would have some text advertising their site and about 3 links (including a link in the name) back to their site.**

That was about the time I put the breaks on and decided “no comments containing links will get on this site without my approval.” For a long time, this worked out fine. Recently, however, I started getting trackback notices. (Trackbacks are used by blogs and other sites basically as a link exchange for certain stories.) That was cool, or so I thought. I started getting tons of them, all the time.

This got seriously annoying.

The trackback would contain the title text in the “Comments” section and — of course — a link back to their site with a specified name. (Most of these URLs were from Russia.) This wasn’t really bothersome until this weekend, when I got a TON of comment e-mails in my inbox. Either the Russians were suddenly VERY interested in my site, or some link whore wanted to boost their gambling site’s PR.

I deleted all the trackbacks and have therefore instituted a new comment policy: nothing gets posted without my prior approval. Luckily, this site’s small enough that I can do that without much hassle. Sorry if this causes any inconvenience.

** A quick Search Engine Optimization Lesson
Search engines determine how important a site is for both a given term and in general by calculating how many links there are to that site from other sites and what those links say. For example, if you were to link to Gnorb.NET from your site, and you did it with text that said A humor filled look at married life, Florida, open source technology and God, then search engines would pick up that link as a vote for me in two ways: first to determine how importat my site is overall (this is called the PageRank, but it’s really only applicable to Google), and how relevant my site is to the terms in the link. If you were to look for “Florida” in a search engine, and if there are enough links to my site with the tag “Florida”, then my site would come up near the top for relevancy of what you’re looking for. The formula also takes page content into context, but links tend to be more heavily relied upon for site relevancy and importance.

What these sites are attmpting to do is to put links to their on my site by putting comments on my site. These comments contain multiple links — with their chosen key words — to their site, making it seem as if I’m “voting” for them in the search engines. The biggest problem from that is that whenever I cast a vote for another site by linking to it, I essentially give that site some of my accumulated PageRank. In essence, these sites are trying to steal from me in order to boost their own rankings.

(If you’ve ever been on an Internet forum and seen one guy that posted nothing but “Yeah!”, “Cool”, “I don’t,” or other short, useless posts, then you’ve seen a forum spammer. Forum spammers spam forums and blogs in order to attain PageRank — or what Google uses to determine the importance of a site — for their site.)

There was a short article on this on ProBlogger.net in which I compared the abuse of the rel=nofollow attribute to theft. (In a comment, not in the article. I didn’t write the article.) The ethical considerations here seem to clash directly with business interests. If a website owner links to someone else, but puts the attribute in there, despite of the fact that it’s not spam, is that considered theft? I mean, the website owner is using the other site’s name (and possibly some small amount of content) for boosting their own site. In the Google economy, the PR the link gives out is equivalent to a royalty charge. “You use my name for your purposes, therefore you give me a little token of appreciation.” Instead, abusing this is like saying “I’ll use your link, but I don’t think you deserve any payment (PR) for it.” Is that considered theft or is it merely shrewd but smart business practice? (Load your PR up by having people link to you with PR for free, but only linking with PR to people that pay you.)

This could have a huge, long term effect on the Google economy.