Syndicate Your Content For Search Engine Domination Is Google Giving Away Free PR8 Links?
Want to Learn How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog.. for FREE? CLICK HERE Now to Find Out How!
Here’s an interesting question we thought of today. Toying with our iGoogle account, we were browsing through the RSS feeds we’re subscribed to to see if there was anything interesting going on in the blogosphere. We love our own blog so we’re subscribed to that too and what we noticed when we hovered over our latest feed links, was that it was showing the full link to whatever post we were looking at. Not the usual http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed crap. Courtesy of the FeedSmith plugin.
Your Google homepage has a PR7 when you’re logged in and it does not have any nofollow attributes. We didn’t get any red highlight we usually get when there’s a nofollow tag implemented somewhere (SEO for FireFox plugin). However, this doesn’t mean we’re getting any PR7 link juice from Google since this iGoogle homepage requires you to login. The Googlebot probably does not have permission to crawl in there.
So what’s with the PR8 links you’re talking about stupid cow!
Well here’s the thing. If you log out of your Google account and go to google.com/ig , which is the same page but accessible to anyone without having to log in, you can still add a blog’s RSS feeds there. Again, you’ll need a plugin that will translate your “www.johncow.com/feed” into “http://feeds.feedburner.com.johncowdotcom” and you need to change the links that are going out from you RSS icon and subscribe now buttons into the “www.johncow.com/feed”. Once you’ve added the feed to Google without logging in, you can then expand the widget to show the latest 9 feeds. Plus it will have your main URL in the widget’s header.
There’s no nofollow to be seen and we see 10 absolute links to your homepage and latest 9 posts. It’s not a permanent link but if you publish one post a day, you will be on that PR8 page for at least 9 days per post. Now here’s the question for you experts; Will this pass on any form of link juice? Granted, it’s a dynamic page but it doesn’t require any login and there is no nofollow implemented. But looking at Google’s robot.txt, the bots are allowed to crawl the google.com/ig page without any restrictions.
Did You Download Your FREE Copy of "How to Build a Business NOT Just a Blog" Yet? Click Here Now to Get Your Copy!
Did you happen to eat some of those funny mushrooms growing in the corner of the field?
Seriously Igoogle doesn’t give you any links but there are ways to get links from Feedburner who are owned by Google (lots of juice)
1. Your feed is housed by them, and give some juice back from a different domain if you allow it to be indexed.
You either have to use their SEO friendly tracking, or preferably remove the click tracking for clean links
2. If you are part of a subscription network link “Blogging Chicks”, then the page for that netwok gives juice.
3. Create feedflares - when you tag them on delicious you get a temporary listing on one page on Feedburner, and eventually they might also list them on a PR6 page
4. Feedburner has a forum that has quite a bit of juice for the links, because it is relatively quiet - you can have links in your profile and sig on the forum.
So can you back up your statement that iGoogle will not pass on any juice? Didn’t Google invent the nofollow to prevent juice being passed on? Why would they not use it themselves?
There isn’t any path for the engines to follow to that page that is unique to you and the links on it. It is just served up by the database when you are logged in.
Igoogle is counted within your Feedburner stats, so you should make sure all your herd of followers has you listed there and in all their feed readers, but it won’t give you any juice, or even milk.
You could in theory fudge a get request with your login details via a URL on another page to get the robot to your own personal IGoogle page.
Would only work if they aren’y using some form of cookie auth though.
The data you see depends on some cookie values stored in your browser. Clear your cookies, and your iGoogle preference will vanish . You will have to configure it all over again. Further the pages are driven by JavaScript and are hence invisible to all bots.
In case Google crawler supported JavaScript and subscribed to your feed, then you would have got the link juice
.
All this SEO stuff confuses me
However I have managed to get one of my search terms showing up as No2 on google
(still haven’t quite worked out how i did it). 
Cool post Mr Moo, could you explain how you add your feed to the igoogle page when not signed in, I had a little play around with it, but cant get it to work.
Us too, that’s why we asked Andy to shed some light on the subject. It’s simple, make sure you’re signed out of Google, then click the feedicon on our blog for example, choose the “add to google homepage” option and it will appear on your http://www.google.com/ig
Seriously, SEO confuses anyone who thinks about it, even the experts.
There was a recent quiz published on SEOmoz with a list of questions and the answers you would expect to be known facts.
I have seen maybe 30% of the answers disputed by one person or another.
However one thing is certainly true, if a web page con only be accessed when you log in, the search engines don’t know your password, so they can’t see it.
It is slightly a grey area for some forums which allow search engines in via a back door, but otherwise search engines are not allowed access to your private data in the same way as public pages.
Indexes of things like your email in Google are private to each individual.
Cool thanks Mr Moo, that worked
cool, now if only the mybloglog widget worked. It hasn’t updated for hours.
Mine was exactly the same yesterday, it didn’t update for about 6 hours, it seems to be working ok today though.
Very interesting. Although I have not seen their site come up when I’ve checked where I get my PR from. I wish my blog PR would be updated. I think google is doing something with PR and they’re not telling us.
Sorry but this is absolute crap. The crawlers will never see your personalised homepage. Common - figure it out. When I login to my gmail account my inbox has a pagerank of 8 - so does google give out lots of juice from my inbox. No it doesn’t.
I don’t think you understand the technology well enough to write this article. http://www.google.com/ig (when not logged in) is a generic page that remembers whats there using cookies. Sure it’ll look like it should even if you log out. But only on your machine. The crawlers would simply see the default page.
Did you really read the article? We’re asking if it would work. We’re not telling you it is.
We don’t think you understood the post well enough to have written that reply.
Thanks for your answer anyway.
Lol cow, your answer tickles
I won’t go in to why (unless you want me to, in which case I can and will :p) but no, this isn’t a free PR 8 link. Won’t work.
Sorry
Please do go into why!
The page you are seeing isn’t actually a page on the site, as it’s being dynamically populated for you specifically. As such, the content you see doesn’t actually exist as a physical page anywhere, so when Googlebot comes along, the link simply isn’t there for it to spider and thus pass on linkjuice.
The same is true for any such dynamically populated page, where the content is pulled after some form of selection process from the user. In this case, the user logs in and that sets what’s being pulled in. In other cases it might be selecting from a list or menu that determines what content is pulled in. In any case, because there’s nothing there normally, it won’t work.
Hope that helps
your iGoogle is different to someone else’s iGoogle. That means that spiders won’t see your one. They will only see the login for it.
Guys!
google will not give a link juice as big as that one! If I put myself to google I will certainly think of that. Many will benefit on that without any effort.
Nice tought.
But there is one problem, the crawler cannot store a cookie.
When you’re adding your feed to google the link is : http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/JohnCowDotCom
At that page, google adds a cookie to your computer with the feed. The Googlebot cannot store the cookie, so when it crawls the google.com/ig there is no feed.
This all seems irrelevant anyway since johncow.com has a PR of 0! Do PR and Alexa rankings still matter? Seems to me the popularity contest comes from places like stumbleupon or digg or other social networking sites.
I don’t really know where to start to answer this - which is probably why Jon Cow didn’t try. First: toolbar-displayed PR is not the same as Google PR. John Cow does not have a PR value of 0. They are constantly updating PR values behind-the-scenes but haven’t made them public for about six month.
Second: a Google PageRank value is still the best single method of assessing a website’s age and/or authority quickly. Sure it is worth looking at Alexa, Technorati and others too, but those are far more easily gamed.
Finally: social media popularity brings in temporary traffic (over 1/2 million visitors to Web Urbanist in the last month alone) but even more valuable: backlinks which help you come up on Google searches and boost your PR and readers who stick around and make or break a site in the long run.
nice try!
I also am sure it wont work, but I am not an SEO expert
So I guess the answer to the question in the post title is:
No.
I get the feeling that you knew that and this was written so you could ask the question in a variety of forums/e-mails and get a whole bunch of hits coming through? Would you be that evil?
Never.
The sacred cow even managed to get some tips out of me
We’re not gonna get billed for that are we?
Only if you charge me for the extra bandwidth your readers will be using reading it
You wouldn’t be that evil though.. would you?
Us evil? You must be confusing us with that chow guy
This is kool stuff, will try it ASAP.
Definitively, you will not get any benefit in pagerank with this method, and about the winner congratulations for being the best stupid cow
sorry I can’t add any info to this discussion, but I’m grateful for the information!
You will not get any value of those links because its only showing to the user who create the links using cookies on the his/her local machine so Google bot wont see the links and wont pass and value.
How’s the weather in Dubai ?
whats the connect? we’re talking about seo dude!
oh ok, what’s the weather like in seo?
Well the weather is just fine here in dubai
Was this link bait? If so, how well did it do?
Its very hard to search for pr8 webs even by google.