CpuBang’s future and things about Google
For those who do not know, CpuBang is bang for buck calculator that I made to give metrics on pc components so I could make "cold" buying decisions.
You may have noticed that I posted the April results of cpuBang on the 7th and then pulled them. This is because I had automated affiliate links for the processor names, and Google ranks sites down that have affiliate links(Only April's results had affiliate links, I decided to experiment).
The cpu bang for buck results literally disappeared from Google's search engine. Since nobody would find it, and it was doing harm(lowering this site's pagerank), I pulled it. Looking into why Google ranks sites with affiliate links down is much more interesting than what one would think on the surface.
Google has a webspam team, Matt Cutts is the head of that team. Now, if you don't know the basis for Google's ranking results, the gist is it works on trust. Trust is gained by reputation. Reputation for a website would be how many positive links are going to it. That would mean say an authoritative site links to this blog, it's trust would go up, and so would it's rank in the search results. Notice I said positive links, if you have a link from say a malware site, thats bad reputation, and will reverse the effects described above.
What happened is that people started posting comments on authorative blogs linking back to their own site, to boost rankings. Boosting one's rank in anything increases one's exposure, and opportunity. That is, people were creating pages with affiliate links, then driving massive traffic to those pages which through conversions turned into cash. This is the basis of all that spam you see on the web, "this mom found out how to whiten her teeth", "Get six pack ripped abs" and the "make money at home with google posting links" setups. The people who make these sites are getting money through affiliate conversions. If they can advertise on the sites that you go to, you bet it is working.
Now, with those kind of people posting links in comments in your blog, your reputation goes down. Matt Cutts is credited with creating the nofollow href tag, which means that when bots scan your site, the links with nofollow will not be evaluated. WordPress automated nofollow, so now people don't need to worry about spammers posting links to increase search engine rankings.
The thing is, use of nofollow essentially walls off sections of the internet from Google's search engine. This means that results from programs like cpuBang are essentially invisible. If I use nofollow, then there is really no content for the bots to crawl besides the math which will not rank for "bang for buck cpu" results. If I don't use nofollow, those links are counted against me and the post is banned from Google.
Here is a good page that explains the matter very well
This would all explain why I couldn't find an existing cpuBang like program and had to create my own. Some may have already existed, but were rendered invisible. As Korn says, "Even ghosts get tired and move on."
But I will prevail, building rep for cpuBang how reputation comes in the real world...through consistent excellent results.
-Rez