Beware of Blog Carnivals | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Very well put Justin.

I think #4 is a point that is worth thinking over. While there may be some negative impacts of some of the Carnivals, I think there should be serious thought give to whether or not you disavow sites because they hosted a carnival you were included in. While the intention could be "good" I think it should give pause before taking action on something that isn't proven.

I don't think they're penalizing carnivals per se, but rather the types of links that are included in carnivals. That's sort of a semantic issue, but it's quite possible that they're categorizing those links as being crappy b/c they come from pages with tons of outbound links, they have highly targeted anchor text (most carnivals use post titles for that), and so forth.

While I agree that it's difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, I saw a clear improvement when taking a scorched earth approach and ditching them all. I could have sat tight for fear of throwing out good links with bad but, if I had, I'd likely still be suffering.

I will also say that I've seen many, many SEO facts laid out, as well. But very few are backed by data.

It was on the order of hundreds, not thousands. But the decline was over 90% and sustained. And the recovery was every bit as clear. This wasn't a random fluctuation. But if people want to ignore this, that's fine. I won't lose any sleep (or revenue) if others choose to maintain the status quo.

Id definitely be interested to see if anyone else can duplicate your success.

If anyone reading this experiences the same thing, please let us all know!

Having managed the Carnival of Financial Planning for many years and having had one of my personal finance sites dinged by the GBorg temporarily, here are my two cents.

I hand edited the CofFP weekly for five years and rotated its publication among personal finance bloggers, before working with Don (the tech wiz behind the Yakezie carnivals) to get the process more automated. I have seen the good and bad of carnivals over the years. And, oh yes, they have gotten more spammy.

My long term rules for submitting to carnivals:
* Avoid repetitive submissions. Change up the permalinks and the snippets of text.
* Avoid carnivals that do not rotate hosting across personal finance blogs
* Don't make carnival submissions your primary linking strategy

My long term rules for hosting carnivals:
* Slash and burn the spam & kill anything that is not germane
* Keep the total link count down to under several dozen
* Include any personal finance blogger who demonstrated reasonable effort

I agree with the comments above which have said that it is very difficult to assign cause and effect. The last two+ years have seen a series of changes to the Borg's algoritms, but there were many different waves of Panda, Penguin and other algorithm changes.

Cause and effect has to be muddied. Carnivals submitting should be a gradual multi-year strategy for a minority of your linking. Over the same period, the algorithm has kept evolving. If you get dinged and seem to be able to relate it to carnivals, is it because the link building strategy was too narrow and/or the carnival links were getting repeated (same sites, same anchors, same permalinks, same post comment snippets)?

About 18 months ago, I had one of my personal finance websites badly dinged by the GBorg, but my other five PF sites were untouched. All sites had used reasonably careful carnival submissions over the years as part of the linking strategy, but carnivals were only one-third the links. So why was one site singled out of six?

Answer: it was not clear. The GBorg is like Alan Greenspan-speak. Make public pronouncements, but be obscure about the rules and keep them changing to minimize the gaming of the fundamental linking algorithms.

Solution:
* Go to webmaster tools. If the Borg really is trashing your site for a violation of the code of conduct, very often you will see it spelled out. I had not checked the webmaster tools of months, but when I got there I found an old email saying that my site had been a bad boy. How the site had been naughty was not clear. I do not know why I had never received the email — spam box perhaps?
* List inbound links. Go over the webmaster tools list of inbound links and identify the sites that are likely to be lower quality. (Use a spreadsheet.)
* Decide which links to kill, without unwittingly killing the 20 links out of a thousand perhaps that really are probably giving you the most juice.
* Avoid extra work — go directly to the nuclear option and submit a banned site list.
* Don't bother with begging other webmasters to take down links. (Yes, I have removed any link removal request from other webmasters, but I did not want to waste all the time with the proactive emailing and the begging.)
* Then, politely ask the Borg for reconsideration. It is almost a religious process in that they actually ask you to write a confession when you ask for reconsideration.
* Get rejected. The Borg email sez the site is still a bad boy and still in violation.
* Rinse and repeat two more times, while waiting about a month in between each request
* Give up effectively after the third prostration to the Borg, but check back in a couple months later anyway.
* Magically find that my site was no longer in violation, but no email to that effect had been received.
* Search based traffic begins to rise back upward.

So, what is the answer? Carnivals per se? Probably not. Low quality in-bound links that could be the side-effects of some carnivals and other links that may have ended up on poor quality sites. Perhaps more likely.

What a way to make a (side) living. At least experimental lab monkeys and pigeons have rules to learn so that they can get treats to eat. Human webmasters get to play by rules that keep changing just when the old rules had started to provide a bit more than some paltry snacks.

Larry: There are many ways to offend Google. This is just one. But I think it's safe to say, with my experiences plus those of five or so others, that where there's smoke there's fire. This isn't to say that everyone who has ever submitted to a carnival is in jeopardy. But if carnivals have ever been a meaningful part of your link-building strategy, you might want to try disavowing to see if there's a benefit. You can always delete the disavow file it doesn't help (or it hurts).

Hi Barbara,

I do not remember the details, but I did search the Google webmaster tools forum and there was a lot of information. Hordes of bloggers have gotten swept up in these algorighm purges, and people try to help each other. If you poke round the forums you will find useful guidance.

Regarding the nuclear option and the submission of a banned site list, I think that this is called the "disavowal" tool. The guidance provided was that this should be a last resort, but I did not have the time for begging and pleading for link removals. I went straight to that tool.

Regarding finding inbound links, if your site is registered with webmaster tools, log into webmaster tools. Select the site, select search traffic, select links to your site. Then, choose show 500 rows, and look at the sites linking in. You can use the button provided to download the table and manipulate it in a spreadsheet. You can click on the inbound sites for more details. Then the process is to cull out all the good sites, because you want to end up with a list of "bad" sites to disavow. Be careful to not disavow "good sites". Tear out your hair because there are no rules. The Borg tells you that you have been bad, but not why. The magic 8 ball is as much help as the Borg is.

When in doubt go to the inbound linking site to check it. Since I think this whole process is relatively ridiculous, I have a cynical view. Should I be very harsh and kill a huge number of inbound linking sites and kill off the link value of some that really are not problemmatic? Either the Borg algorithms will screw me if problems remain, but I might screw myself if I am too aggressive.

Remember, there is no real knowledge about the rules when dealing with the wizard. Do you try to kill off all flying monkeys, or just give it a shot and kill some flying monkeys, submit a disavowal list to see if that is good enough. Many in the forum had to do the dance multiple times. For me it was three times, and the Borg told me when I was bad each time, but it never bothered to tell me when I was good.

Once you have a list of sites to disavow, copy and paste into Notepad to get a list to submit to the disavow tool. Also, before you start the process read about the disavow tool so you understand how to submit a list with proper syntax.

Larry

Barbara Friedberg said:

Could you elaborate on how to do these 2 steps?

go directly to the nuclear option and submit a banned site list.
find inbound links from webmaster tools.

Thank you,
Barbara

Barbara, if I'm not mistaken, I already sent you (via e-mail) explicit instructions on how to do this.

Larry, I really have to take issue with your approach to skip over the steps of actually trying to contact other bloggers and skipping right to the nuclear option that many others across the universe recommend as a last resort approach.

Hi Money Beagle,

Sorry, I don't mean to be flippant about this. So let me be more clear. (Now again, I was guessing about the Borgs rules and why they singled out one of my sites, because all of this is boxing in a dark room without any rules.)

When I disavowed, I was knocking out thin spammy sites, RSS copying sites, keyword factories, and non-subject matter germane sites. I have no idea why some of these sites were linking in. Some RSS content copy sites linked in because I used an RSS plug in that pointed back to my sites. Scrapers were doing this to several of my sites, but only one got dinged by the Borg. Go figure.

I did not disavow any personal finance carnival hosting sites, because I doubted that they were the cause of undefined problems that had the Borgs undergarments in a bunch. Plus, any site that is proactive enough to host a personal finance carnival is unlikely to be a spammy site, because carnival managers tend to be somewhat selective about who can host. Also, this whole process took three tries over about six to eight months. I did not even know if I had really fixed the undefined problem. However, I do recall the JCPenny was one of the violators who prompted all the this algorithm upheaval, and there were a lot of complaints about them getting off easy in about six months. Maybe just being willing to dance for the Borg can solve the problem. (Am I a cynical old blogger?)

Again, I was not worried, because I had been a relatively careful submitter to blog carnivals over the years in that I changed up a lot of things to avoid replication that my be easily machine detectable if the Borg decided that link fests were sinful. And, to be clear again I hope about my other comments on this tread, just because I personally do not think that carnivals were the cause of my problem, that does not mean that the Borg has not secretly decided to target link fests. My opinion is that of a confirmed agnostic. I have my doubts, but do not feel I have definitive evidence to prove or deny existence. To me this is a statistical problem without an adequate data set in an evolving environment. The parallels to investing are striking.

Since I hand edited the CofFP weekly for about five years and then distributed the HTML file to a rotating list of bloggers, I had a pretty good idea about how to identify the thin keyword stuffer sites that were submitting posts, but were not serious about personal finance blogging. However, even if a blogger was new and had not had time to build up a thicker site, but they showed that they were trying, I would include them. It was a bit nuts to do this for so many years, but it was my one hour of the week where I could take the pulse of the PF blogger community. I ran into a lot of excellent articles by doing it.

So, no you do not need to worry about me disavowing carnivals and/or legitimate PF sites. Because the economics are unattractive for most, I have a lot of respect for the staying power of so many PF bloggers. Therefore, if anyone else does not have the time for the emailing and begging for an unknown link removal link juice benefit and decides to use the disavowal tools, my strong suggestion is that you be kind to your fellow PF bloggers. They are probably not the problem, and if they are the problem then that means that the Borg might be have stepped over the do no evil line and become the problem itself.

Larry