Finding the Blogetery Blogs in Your Industry

After searching around the internet for ways of finding all the 70,000 blogs which have gone missing I stumbled on the piece of text which is added to the page title of all Blogetery blogs (Just another Blogetery.com weblog)  Google is showing 2.8 Million results for this phrase.  So I started to break down the results by industry, here are some of the ones I found

Car Insurance - 218 results
Real Estate - 2,550 results
SEO - 8,360 results
Personal Injury - 7,580
Christian - 3,680
iPod - 1,860


With British phrases such as "personal injury" it is clear that many UK SEO companies have been using Blogetery as an easy way to gain links to their sites.

Using Google's "inurl:" command...

inurl:Blogetery.com - 287,000 results (This includes some non Blogetery sites)

...we can see that if 73,000 blogs were taken down then on average only 4 pages were being indexed per blog.  Taking the top result for the inurl:blogetery.com command we can see that Smartech had 771 pages indexed.  This can only mean that thousands of the blogs were either not indexed by Google at all, or perhaps just had one page.

The startling thing for me is that out of the 2.8 million pages that Google lists only a small percentage seem to be optimised for specific industries.  The SEO result above was the highest I could find, even gambling sites and adult sites don't seem to feature.  I can only assume that the majority of the blogs were personal blogs by real every day people. 

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70,000 Blogs Taken Offline after FBI Investigates Terrorist Links

Blogetery, a company providing a blogging platform to over 70,000 bloggers has been taken offline by its hosting company following investigations by the FBI.  Although only a tiny percentage of the bloggers had posted illegal material, the hosting company Burst.net took the whole platform down.

Implications for SEO across the world could be dramatic as the number of links disappearing from the net could number in the millions.

The offending blogs contained lists of assasination targets in the US, bomb-making tips and messages from Osama bin Laden.

There was no prior warning and many bloggers who had not backed-up their personal blogs may have lost their entire blog archive.


Read more...

Friday Round-Up - SEO's Biggest Mistakes and McKeith vs Goldacre

Rand Fishkin lists five of the biggest SEO mistakes he has ever made in this week's Whiteboard Friday, including recommending that clients update all their H1's to include keywords and phrases which later proved to have no more effect than including the same keywords in normal text or bold text at the top of the page.

The rumours about Google's potential new 'Facebook Killer' called 'Google Me' are gaining momentum with the news that they have been conducting focus group research into social networking. Digg founder Kevin Rose was the first to break the news on Twitter and since then the evidence has been mounting.

There have been some interesting discussions this week about a patent issued to Google in 2005 concerning the use of mouse movement in search relevancy.  The movement of the mouse into specific areas or hovering over specific results for certain periods of time may indicate greater relevancy and in turn boost the ranking of a page or website.

And my favourite of the week, a great lesson in how not to use social media.  Paul Carpenter has posted an excellent summary of the public spat between Gillian McKeith (from the TV program "You Are What You Eat") and her arch-nemesis Ben Goldacre (a regular Guardian columnist and author of "Bad Science")  McKeith's use of Twitter is good lesson to all public figures about how social media can be a double-edged sword and that once information has appeared on the internet it is very difficult to remove it without leaving traces behind! 

Read some other summaries here including a hilariously titled one from Cubik’s Rube.

Zynga to feature in Google Games?

Techcrunch report that Google has contributed a substantial quantity of money toward the $500 million capital that Zynga is raising for their new ventures.  Zynga Games are expected to feature prominently in 'Google Games' which is due to be launched in late 2010.

Zynga were formed in 2007 and in three years have cornered the market in Facebook games.  Their first half revenues are expected to be in the region of $350 million.

SEO News This Week

SEOMoz have been asking the question What if My Competitors Point Spammy Links to My Site? And can paid links be used as weapons in the search engine results?

Matt Cutts is inviting Google users and the SEO community to submit a new round of webspam reports and ideas.  He is asking people to suggests aspects of spam that Google should be working on over the next year.


WebProNews have been talking about Google's recent advice on how to gain quality links to your website.
According to Google, engaging with your community is a good way to get links and build credibility, which in turn leads to more links. 

Magento have launched Magento Mobile, which allows eCommerce sites to be viewed and administered on multiple mobile phone platforms.

Search Engine Roundtable are talking about how many users have seen a dramatic increase in inbound links that Google is acknowledging in Google Webmaster Tools.  Many thought it was a bug, but Google have confirmed that it is related to the Caffeine index update.