I can see how the archived entries would have relatively little value, although I suspect it is way higher than 1. They are each only linked from 3 pages, but those three pages are linked from every page on the site.

Not all of them. Most of the summary ‘pages’ are actually multiple pages, of which only the first is linked from every page.

But even if it were true that there was just one big summary page for each classification, and that page had a high pagerank, it would also have a humungous number of internal links, giving very little juice to each.

As you point out below, site organisation can’t increase the average page juice above 1. Only an excess of incoming over outgoing juice can do that.

I’m not sure about the comment side bar effect. There seems to be speculation that google’s actual page rank calculation ignores redundant links. I don’t have any idea if it is thought that redundant page links with different anchors would count as redundant or not. If they do, then the comment side bar only gives 1 link to each commented post.

I don’t know either. But if not, then the comment sidebar produces as many internal links as there are active stories, and as many external links as there are active commentors with homepages not otherwise linked.

The frequency with which the “how to sell a wedding dress” post makes it back onto the side bar, when it is simply an archive page, suggests that archived entries still have a lot of google juice.

That page is the top google return for the search string “sell a wedding dress”. It’s not top for even minor variations on that theme.

However even though it’s currently off the active comments list, Google hasn’t caught up with this. I’ll keep an eye out, and see if the page ever loses its top slot.

Bear in mind that pagerank isn’t the only factor which determines which page gets top rank in any search.

While it is true that Alas gives itself hundreds of internal links per page, compared to the single inbound link per page that other blogs give it, it is still the inbound links that give Alas its value. If Alas had no inbound links, the worth of the average page would be 1, and Alas is not set up to magnify and focus that page rank, but is instead arranged to spread it evenly.

On the contary, it focusses the juice onto the several hundred pages linked to from every page. You’ve not demonstrated that the average juice across all pages is greater than 1.

As I pointed out earlier, Alas blogrolls about 70 external sites, many of them very small, giving each of them the same amount of juice. Let’s call that quantity 1 Alas. In order to make that up, it needs to get 70 Alas’s worth of juice from external sites. Show me the 70 sites, as big and impressive as Alas which blogroll Alas.

As I pointed out, if it were Alas’s structure (and not the inbound links) that made it valuable, the SEO optimizer would merely need to mirror wikipedia to get something far more massive (and perfectly legitimate).

I don’t know. I’d heard that there are many mirrors of wikipedia, but a search on random text from that site turns up just two – one at answers.com and one at opentopia. I suspect that Google may be downgrading ’spammy’ copies, or perhaps the spammers copy only parts of it.

Spammers do scrape the blogosphere. (warning: porn link, but scroll down.)

I’m not sure about the comment side bar effect. There seems to be speculation that google’s actual page rank calculation ignores redundant links. I don’t have any idea if it is thought that redundant page links with different anchors would count as redundant or not. If they do, then the comment side bar only gives 1 link to each commented post.

The frequency with which the “how to sell a wedding dress” post makes it back onto the side bar, when it is simply an archive page, suggests that archived entries still have a lot of google juice.

While it is true that Alas gives itself hundreds of internal links per page, compared to the single inbound link per page that other blogs give it, it is still the inbound links that give Alas its value. If Alas had no inbound links, the worth of the average page would be 1, and Alas is not set up to magnify and focus that page rank, but is instead arranged to spread it evenly.

As I pointed out, if it were Alas’s structure (and not the inbound links) that made it valuable, the SEO optimizer would merely need to mirror wikipedia to get something far more massive (and perfectly legitimate).

I’m just going by eye here. I admit that I may be off from what the actual calculations would show, but I’m not convinced by you going by eye, either.

Since pages pass on 85% of their PR to the pages they link to,

Not 85% of their PR (Toolbar PR according to the paper you cite). They pass on 85% of their google juice (Real PR). It’s not clear what the relationship is between google juice and PR, but it’s certainly not linear. Logarithmic as as good a bet as anything.

but will have similar rankings for every other page (or so I get from here.

The explanation in your cite is correct (or at least, it accords with my understanding of how PR works), but you’re either not understanding it, or not fully understanding its implications. Almost all pages will gain most of their juice from pages which link to them, but that doesn’t mean that sites gain most of their juice from other sites. The juice available to an entire site is (number of pages in site) + (juice incoming from other sites) – (juice outgoing to other sites). As you know 85% of a page’s juice is transmitted to other pages. If, on average, half of the links on a page are to other pages within the site, then instead of the site losing 85% of its juice to other sites, it looses only 42.5%. On Alas, the ratio of external to internal links is much less than this. There are about 70 permanent external links that appear on every page – mostly “Other Blogs by Alas Contributors”, the Blogroll, and “Real-life friends”. In addition there are a varying number of external links in the list of recent comments, which also appears on every page. But that list of comments also contains a huge number of internal links, which come on top of “Alas-Related Links”, “Pages”, “Archives”, “About the Bloggers”, “Authors”, “Categories” and “Meta”. I haven’t counted, but there must be hundreds of them.

On the other hand, consider incoming links of a typical page on Alas. It was likely posted several years ago. It’s no longer on the front page, nor is it being actively commented on. It’s incoming links are an archive page, an author page, and one or more category pages. It may have some incoming links from other sites, but the linking pages are also likely to be old, and no longer active.

Most pages on Alas are like this. They have less than 1 juice, and are individually worthless. But there are thousands of them. But where does all that juice go to? Not offsite, we’ve shown that, but to the few hundred pages which they all link to.

Here’s another way to look at it. Imagine another site identical to Alas which blogrolls Alas. Tthat site gives Alas one link from each of its pages. Alas gives itself hundreds of links from each page.

I think you are mistaken on the page ranking of internal pages. Since pages pass on 85% of their PR to the pages they link to, a heavily intermeshed site will have higher rankings for the pages that have the most in-bound links (www.amptoons.com/blog), but will have similar rankings for every other page (or so I get from here.

I also think you are mistaken about how much Alas would be worth if it did not have in-bound links (a little, but not very much). It would be easy to generate a site that had way more heavily interlinked pages than http://www.amptoons.com/alas (just create a mirror of wikipedia, add ads, and you are done). The hard part is to get the external inbound links to feed in outside PR to get spread around and amplified.

I’m pretty sure that it is indeed the inbound links (and particularly the blog side bar links) that give Alas its PR value.

I finally went looking around the reviews.amptoons.com site, and I now understand how it works much better. People had mentioned sites like bangbus.com and 8thstreetlatinas.com as the sort of sites that reviews linked to and, looking up the PR of those sites, they have huge PR. However, looking around reviews, I see it actually links to a bunch of small-time imitators with crappy PR. I can much more easily see how sites with PRs of 1-4 can benefit from this sort of scam.

It sounds like you already have a basic understanding of how it all works. In particular, you have correctly apprehended that rich internal linking reduces the value of the outgoing links. This is true also for the sites that link to Alas. Most of them are blogs, most blogs have rich internal linkage, and most have an extensive blogroll. So they give only a tiny proportion of their juice to Alas.

When we say that amptoons is highly ranked (pagerank 6 as it happens) we mean that the front page (www.amptoons.com) is pagerank 6. Maybe a few other pages, such as http://www.amptoons.com/blog are also pagerank 6. Others may have lower, but still respectable ranks. The vast majority of pages will have rank 0, but there are thousands and thousands of them, all linking to reviews.amptoons.com. In addition, all of them link to the high ranking pages under of Alas, which link to reviews.amptoons.com. Indeed it is they more than the incoming links, which are the cause of the high rank of those pages.

The bottom line is that it is the thousands of pages on amptoons which give reviews its rank, both by directly linking to reviews, and by linking to many other pages on Alas with link to reviews. The blogroll of an external site will link to one page at Alas, so even if that external site had exactly the same number of pages as Alas, each with exactly the same pagerank, its contribution to reviews would be much smaller. Of course, most blogs have nowhere near as many pages as Alas.

The SmackDog Chronicles: Intermission Special: The “Alas, a Porn Portal” Controversy

Personally, I think that Amp got too much grief, since it’s still his blog to do with what he pleases….but I do understand why so many would be so hurt and offended and feel betrayed..and he should have been a bit more open and forthright at the beginning. The attacks from the Radfem Antiporn Caucus, however, are and still remain completely out of line.

But, that’s only my view.

Anthony

Reading through some of the posts you link, I noticed that (on Rachel S.’s post) you commented that you intended to write up a post on how the SEO scheme actually works. I’ve been trying to puzzle that out for myself, but still have a number of points of puzzlement, so this is just a note to say: please do write up an explanation!

Why delinking wouldn’t matter (as you mention in your comment at Rachel’s Tavern)is one of my major questions.

Whether this scheme is one that google will view as unacceptable, resulting in 0 PR for amptoons.com is another (I assume yes from the maxspeaks.com case, but others have argued no).

Also, how can the 1 link (1 out of roughly 60 external links that appear on each page) from a PR 6 site really be worth all that much, particularly since heavy intralinking within a site reduces the amount of PR that external links are worth, and the recent comments and archive links would seem to make Alas highly intralinked?

Your thoughts greatly appreciated.

Angry and Queer’s post excerpted below, Turned Out to be a Unicorn After All,  is, I think, really good:
Because Ampersand was the author of the Male Privilege Checklist, this situation is dripping with irony.
Feminism will never be a profitable…

Please could you take my post out of the ’supportive’ category! Expressing a few concerns about the situation does not constitute support. That post is there to explain why we are de-linking our blog from Alas. If you don’t think it’s strong enough to be called critical, I don’t mind you putting it in the ‘other’ category, but we do not in any way support what Ampersand has done.

Other is for posts that neither criticise nor support. Shelly is the only feminist there, and if you check that post out, you’ll see that she’s complaining about how the thugs are treating Shelly, not how they’re treating Barry. The other posts in that category are all by outsiders, some having a laugh at y’all, some just considering the wider implications.

If you want to put on a show of support for Barry, feel free to post one. I’ll file it as I see it. Reindeer has two posts listed, one in each category, and I’ll happily do the same for you. But other than that, I’m in a “can’t please all of the people” position here.

I tried really hard to keep my own opinions about his decision out of the matter, and concentrate on what I thought was important — the issue of the current situation and how that affected my blog.

Unless I rejig the classifications (or abandon them completely) I don’t see where better to put you.

*I’m aware of the etymological irony in this word.

Thanks for the link, although I’m not sure I’m 100% supportive of Barry’s choice,…

The classification is not that you were supportive of Barry’s choice but that you were supportive of Barry. As I said above, some posts are both. I’m doing my best here.

I’m just a little disheartened by the malicious “me”-ness of some of Barry’s detractors.

Yeah, me too.

Belledame — Amp has a donation button on his site…

I misread that as “Amp has a detonation button on his site…”. Yep, and someone pressed it.

and Daran, no need to link to the comments, just wanted to note myself in that column here as well.

Belledame — Amp has a donation button on his site (or at least I’m pretty sure he does, as he has one little character on his sidebar yelling “DONATE”; I’ve never clicked it though). Besides, it’s hard to rely on donations to help fund a popular blog; the costs can be so expensive that there would be no way to completely defray the costs through the generousity of others.

Besides — Barry was also worried about a financial problem in his personal life. It’s hard to solicit donations from your blog to help you pay your rent.

I had noticed your posts, in particular the “lets eat some puppies” one. Had a good laugh at that. I’m sure Barry appreciated it too.