rho

Broken link – the URL is missing an l at the end.

Oops. Fixed. Thanks.

Not I, said the fly.

I nominate you as a google bomb for CERN, though. ;) Or maybe "encyclopedia." Or "physics textbook"? What appeals?

But "how's that, said the rat" would be so much more apt for you...

And for me, I'll just be happy when I start moving up the rankings for "rho" ahead of all the fraternities.

I read that linked post, and I'm still not seeing the connection between free users getting subdomains and google bombing.

As far as I'm aware (and it's very possible that I'm wrong), google considers subdomains of any domain in the same way; foo.livejournal.com gets equal consideration to, for instance, foo.co.uk. So, now if lots of different users link to, say, rho then google is now going to see the links as coming from lots of different domains rather than just the single www.livejournal.com, so having much more influence on how google sees things. I think.

rho's answer is essentially correct, and I think I'll reword my entry to add a bit more explanation; I know what I'm talking about but unless you're studying SEO techniques, well...

I've had this confirmed by one of the best SEOs in the business BTW, it's going to be even more fun when all the new subdomains get out of the Google 'sandbox'.

Of course the odds of this silly attempt working are minimal, as the articles I'm competing with are pretty highly ranked and linked to, but, well, it gets the point across...

I just like the way that their offset for paid users is to give me more of something I don't use anyway.

It's lucky LJ didn't have to give paid/perms anything, anyway, and were more giving it in the hope that people wouldn't bitch.

I consider free users getting subdomains to be a perk to me as a paid user, since I never used my subdomain because it looked inconsistent with all the other links on LJ.

Oh, google bombing in memes.

It'll happen. And as it becomes more prevalent, Google will be forced to do something about it and fix the algorithm. Hopefully.

In the meantime, 3 months(ish) till the sandbox opens up, then all hell breaks loose. Fun fun.

Actually, Google pagerank is calculated on a page-by-page basis, not by domain or subdomain. This means that googlebombing will be no more (or less) successful now than it ever was, except for the fact that talking about it might get more people trying.

The only reason domains and subdomains are generally considered to have an effect on a site's general pagerank is because most links on many websites are internal links, 'trapping' the pagerank in the site (pagerank is shared equally between all links on a page)

However on sites like LJ where the majority of links on a page are links to the same journal (the links which automatically appear to link to individual posts/comments etc) each journal effectively becomes its own mini-site. This is the same whether the format is livejournal.com/users/name or name.livejournal.com

http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/ has the best explanation I've seen, if you can stand a bit of maths

So, I don't know if you take requests, but a friend (donna_c_punk; you'd like her) and I would sure appreciate an entry explaining string theory for lay people, as only you can write such things. I'll throw in a "pretty please," in case it's needed (can't remember which side of the cheesecake camp you fall on just now).

The sites that say they'll explain it... they break our wee brains. :)

Thanks, and love and cookies!