The other day, the newsletter included a link to an article about how Google rankings work which included info about the effect of being included on the blogrolls of popular sites. I decided to send that link to skippy because he's been very involved in blogging about the blogroll purge. He posted the info on his site and throughout blogtopia (y!sctp!) including over at BooMan Tribune where BooMan partly rebutted skippy's post with this. (You'll recall that BooMan was very forgiving of kos after his site was purged from the Almighty dkos blogroll).
markos gave every diarist their own blogroll, thereby immensely increasing the number of bloglinks emanating from his site. i don't know how powerful those links are compared to the homepage, but it would seem he has greatly increased the potential for helping google rankings and taking himself out of the decision making process.
skippy, being the investigative kangaroo that he is, then contacted the author of that Google rankings article and has posted his response and it's not good news, nor does it support BooMan's suppositions - a fact BooMan is not very happy about. Nor should he be. (You'll notice that a kos defender™ has predictably shown up in that thread to stand up for King kos' now-tarnished honour. Those minions work so hard. I wonder what they get out of it - besides absolutely nothing from kos and egg on their faces).
In a nutshell, for those who are less technologically inclined, the shorter version of the author's answers is that there certainly is a big difference between being linked to from a blogroll on the main page of Daily Kos as opposed to being included in an individual's blogroll. In fact, the way kos and his technical team have things set up behind the scenes, the "bots" that search his site have actually been disabled in a way that totally obliterates the recognition of the blogrolls of individual Daily Kos members.
the diary owner's blogrolls are being disallowed to googlebot by the robots.txt files. the url structure of the diary owners' blogrolls is like this:
http://www.dailykos.com/user/username/blogroll
because of this line in the robots.txt file - "disallow: /user" - google isn't allowed to visit those diary users' blogroll pages, and index them, and follow the links upon them. in terms of ranking value for these user blogrolls, there is none, because google isn't allowed to visit those pages.
So, there you have it.
The individual blogroll compromise that was offered by kos after Blogroll Amnesty Day is worthless in terms of how your site might be picked up via a Google search. Overall, that does affect your site's rankings and your ability to use those rankings to do things like justifying a higher ad price if you're into the money-making end of the blogosphere.
And yes, skippy and others certainly do have the right to say "I told you so". Good work, roo. That's why you're skippy and others...are not.
