Bait and Switch: Gag Video Issue

File under Bandwidth, Blogrank, and Rank-poison...

Video, like "widget fever", reduces blog readership.  I noticed last year that putting new "widgets" onto the blog reduced views.  That, I believe, is a bandwidth issue.  Since a small but important part of the readership is coming from Africa, I think the widgets and video additions are slowing the page load.

I've enjoyed reading and writing posts with video and music embedded.  Like the one at bottom... hilarious "switch gag" video.  But the post it had been embedded in was one of the most important I wrote that quarter.  I was looking for a reference, and found that the post was 25% lower in readership, despite being important.  So I had to switch out the video to improve the pagerank / SEO of the profound-er post.

Speaking of SEO and tricks...  Someone is posting "spam" comments which have links to google-statistic red flag targets.  That link, even in the comments field, might reduce google page rank to this blog.  I've chosen to leave some up, because Google is aware of this use of comments to link to negative-page-link farms.    I'm taking the chance that loss of page rank is worth preserving the evidence of the activity.  Google is aware that comments to blogs can trigger the "nofollow" algorithm.   The people leaving the "punish host" comments are trying to say very bland things so that they cannot be tracked.

The "red flags" are innocuous approvable comments, with a link back to a site with zero (google-nuked) pagerank.  Not just to low ranking, but to one already tagged as pagerank poison.

"Interesting site.  Your blog is thoughtful.  I will watch this important issue"


The simplest explanation is that the blogpoison is simply someone trying to improve their own page rank by making this blog "link" to it through their comment field.  But these are to "poison" sites, so it can reduce the ranking of THIS blog.   Does this come from the "watchdog righteous" adversary, or the business shredding adversary, or the anti-secondary market interests?  Or is it my paranoia?  A combination of paranoia and people actually being out to get you is statistically relevant.

From "googlerank.com" blog (an SEO site)

"They are words that are known to decrease your pages rankings if Google finds them in the title or in the url. They don't cause any kind of banning, yet, but they are known to penalize your positionings.
Sample poison words are the following:  Bookmarks, Links, Resources, Directory, Search Engine, Forum, BBS, in their singular and plural forms are known poison words. UBB, BBS, Ebay, and all variations on the pa-id to surf program keywords."
It may just be that the "false flag" nofollow is just someone trying to get advertising to their ad farm.  But google punishes "links" which resemble the linkfarms and referrals used by pros to game their ranking system.




The posters are choosing to de-googlerank (poison) specific content and blog posts which does not appear to me to be random.  I had thought it was just attraction to high ranked blogs, but over time (I delete about 80% of them) I have noticed certain patterns.   In this blog there are about 760 posts, the adfarm comment links do not appear to be distributed randomly or by popularity.

This partnership with Google investigation is also leading to fewer musical embeds and videos... it's a sensitive subject.   Thom Yorke (Black Swan) would probably give me a fair use pass, for now.

Below is the video about bait and switch.  It's still hilarious.  Sorry, African readers.  I'll put it "below the fold".Paranoia only really hurts you if it causes you to do something negative... so while I cannot assume a political angle, it's possible.  One company I caught leaving dull off topic comments backlinked to their own "ewaste" company website is known to think highly of its own "social marketing"... promoting their people to do things could lead to taking these kinds of reputational risks.   This is a policy blog, we aren't selling widgets and using black hat tactics to de-rank or rank-poison policy discussion is playing with a hand grenade.   I don't care the NUMBER of readers this blog gets.  I care how SMART they are.  

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