Many publishers hide additional information sections that they want people to be able to select viewing if they show interest in the topic. For example, each of Think Progress's navigational sections are expandable, and some publishers have more information or other informational cues to make additional page content visible. These can be used deceptively, but if you have a strong brand and are trying to use them with the end user in mind, I doubt search engines will think the intent is bad.

AdSense Section Targeting:

As search has taken a larger and larger piece of the web search engines have given us ways to mark up our pages to suit their needs. AdSense section targeting made it easier for Google to target content ads to your site. That sounds like a good idea, but they also offer tags that offer publishers no value.

Google's NoFollow:

Nofollow was originally recommended to stop blog comment spam, but it has morphed into a tag that Matt Cutts wants you to use on any paid or unnatural link. What makes a link unnatural? In one form or another almost everything is paid for, by giving away value, exchanging currency, or nepotism.

Do You Trust Yourself?

If a page has many nofollow tags on it isn't that another way of saying that the publisher does not trust their own content? If a publisher says that they don't trust their own content or their own advertisers then why would search engines (or savvy webmasters) want to trust them?

The Machine is Broken:

Bob Massa recently highlighted how absurd the current use of the nofollow attribute is:

Mr. Cutts, speaking on behalf of Google presumably, made the comment, "if you want to buy links just for traffic, totally fine just don’t do it so they affect search engines".

This concept is completely flawed. This self serving philosophy is also at the very core of the problem. When the machine attempts to modify the behavior of people to satisfy it’s own ends, the machine is broken. What people do should not be seen as affecting the search engine. What people do should be the very reason for the engine to exist in the first place. If the search engine is being affected by the actions of people, is any logical person going to honestly assume that it is the people that are broken? That is exactly what is happening here.

Yahoo!'s Robots-Nocontent Attribute:

Search engines have got better at identifying duplicate content. Some search engines may boilerplate strip obvious navigational elements from pages. Some may place pages with too much duplicate content in supplemental results. Some may sites with too much duplicate content in reduced crawling status.

There are all of these ways to fight off content duplication and Yahoo! offers a robots-nocontent tag. One of the first people to comment on the news was Google's Matt Cutts, who said:

Danny, can you ask how Yahoo intends to treat links in the "robots-nocontent" section?

Don't Use the Robots-Nocontent Attribute:

It might be easy to add class="robots-nocontent" to some of your divs, but should you? I think it has little value. Sure you could use it in a sneaky way, as suggested by Jay Westerdal, but the problems with that are:

• it looks sneaky

• you are removing content from your pages (and will thus rank for fewer phrases)
• there are easier and more effective ways of changing the meaning of a page without looking so sneaky...like just rewriting an article, adding a spammy comment that looks like it came from a third party, or adding a few additional words here or there.

Yahoo! is the top network of sites on the web. Internally they have publishing teams and an SEO team. If their search engineers can't figure out how to use their own internal traffic stats and other relevancy measurements to refine their duplicate detection algorithms they deserve to bleed marketshare until they no longer have relevancy in the marketplace.

How to Change the Focus of a Page Without Using Robots-Nocontent:

If you want to change the focus of your pages here are some of the best ways to do it

• Ensure your page title and meta description are unique. Do not place the same words at the start of every page title on all the pages of a new website.

• Make your h1 headings and subheadings target a slightly different word set than your page title.
• If your page is thin on content, add more additional relevant unique content to the page. The solution to not getting killed by duplicate content filters is adding more unique content, not stripping out obvious required duplication (such as navigation and advertisements) that search engines should be able to figure out.
• If your site has comments or consumer feedback you can post or encourage feedback that targets other keywords. Comments offer free text. A 500 word page with an additional 1,000 words in the comment section may rank for 2 or 3 times as many search queries. Don't throw away the free content.
• For those who are really aggressive and have crusty links that will never be removed, consider placing your commercial messages on one of your highly trusted high ranking pages. People buy and sell websites, who is to say that the contents of a URL can't change?

The .TV relaunch was not very successful because the premium domain name prices are yearly recurring fees (which may increase beyond that price buy some unknown amount). People who would create great content and later stumble into a business model are not likely to do so on a premium .tv name...which means most of those domain names won't have high quality content on them. Those that do may see thin profit margins because they have no control over their domain names...as they make them more valuable the registrar can increase prices without mercy, and when the registrant can no longer afford the domain names the registry gets to keep or sell any brand value the registrant built up. John Scott had a great post about people feeling guilty for buying links:

If you feel guilty about buying links, you’re probably feeling guilty for a reason. Perhaps your guilt comes from the fact that you are trying to rank a site for a keyword it doesn’t deserve ranking for. If that’s the case, stop trying to rank it for that keyword, and get you’re business in order. Get the site and your business to the place where you can honestly say that your site deserves to rank #1 for that keyword, and your business deserves to be #1 based on the merits of your business.

Yesterday at a market I bought this terrific soap with my girlfriend. The problem is that the packaging has a URL on it. No need to go to the vendor again. It is hard for the end vendor to get any traction as the supplier sells directly, has pricing control, and is more convenient to order from.

If you are too dependant on any one supplier or any one source of leads then you need to re-evaluate your position to decrease your risk profile and come up with ways to build your brand value.

Forbes recently wrote an article about Google's supplemental results, painting it as webpage hell. The article states that pages in Google's Supplemental index is trusted less than pages in the regular index:

Google's programmers appear to have created the supplemental index with the best intentions. It's designed to lighten the workload of Google's "spider," the algorithm that constantly combs and categorizes the Web's pages. Google uses the index as a holding pen for pages it deems to be of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results.

Matt Cutts was quick to state that supplemental results are not a big deal, as Rand did here too, but supplemental results ARE a big deal. They are an indication of the health of a website.

I have worked on some of the largest sites and network of sites on the web (hundreds of millions+ pages). When looking for duplicate content or information architecture related issues, the search engines do not allow you to view deep enough to see all indexing problems, so one of the first things I do is use this search to find low quality pages (ie: things that suck PageRank and do not add much unique content to their site). After you find some of the major issues you can dig deeper by filtering out some of the core issues that showed up on your first supplemental searches. For example, here are threadwatch.org supplemental results that do not contain the word node in the URL.

If you have duplicate content issues, at best you are splitting your PageRank, but you might also affect your crawl priorities. If Google thinks 90% of a site is garbage (or not worth trusting much) I am willing to bet that they also trust anything else on that domain a bit less than they otherwise would, and are more restrictive with their willingness to crawl the rest of the site. As noted in Wasting Link Authority on Ineffective Internal Link Structure, ShoeMoney increased his search traffic 1400% after blocking some of his supplemental pages.

Nearly anything that is trustworthy and profitable has cheesy scammy alternatives that follow the path they created. In many trades the associated conferences bring in more ad revenues than print adshttp://blogs.mediapost.com/research_brief/?p=1422:

According to a report from American Business Media president & CEO, Gordon T. Hughes, the face-to-face events industry is a rapidly growing, critical part of today's integrated business media environment. Face-to-face revenue has surpassed that of its print counterpart for the first time: In 2006, business media trade shows accounted for 36% ($11.3 billion) of industry revenue; magazines accounted for 35%. Events are the third-fastest growing segment of business media, surpassed only by digital and custom media.

Simon Chen recently posted about how unimpressed he was with the pich fest that was the first day of Ken McCarthy's 2007 seminar:

You see, when you come to “trade shows” like these, the speakers (or Faculty) are featured and marketed as leading practitioners in their field. You would like to think that if folks are forking out good money on the actual tuition or entry fee, airfares, hotel accommodation, average coffee and time away from their family, that the seminar organiser would insist that his faculty deliver content.

But this is where the basic model of these events is flawed. You see, the speakers all need (or want) to be compensated. So their sessions are platforms whereby they are supposed to deliver content to the audience and then gently mention that there are options for investing with them - by either buying their product or service.

In true US capitalistic fashion, some presenters get carried away. Instead of following the creed Content Is King, they get out of the gate quickly and go straight into sales mode. Hard. Pushy. Aggro. All the things that are old sell.

That conference is well known and Simon said the second day was better, but even amongst good content providers there are people who sell without mercy and without intent to provide any value, which is sad.

As bad as that may be, some people take it one step further by creating conferences that actually charge the speakers to speak. Talk about guaranteed sketchy content!

Scams emulate the format and structure of things that are real. Any format has its associated ups and downs, but anything that is wildly successful will also have outlier questionable versions pop up.

Paul Kedrosky recently mentioned a report about how all markets are a bubble. In the report it states that the two conditions that cause a bubble are strong liquidity and a great outlook. The report also talks about how success kills itself

There is nothing that suppresses the success of a brilliant new idea more completely than having 12 nearly identical start-ups.

Everything is a bubble. If you are successful people will emulate it. If you create and aggressively market a half dozen sites in the same vertical you not only compete with yourself, but you also create a new type / system / format / category of spam that others will emulate and authority systems (such as search engines) will work to reduce.

Just how people learn to ignore ads, they also learn to ignore abused content formats. Andy Hagans destroyed Digg.

What keeps Google strong is not their search relevancy, it is their ad formats and their ability to shape public perception.

Search engines also redefine what they are looking for by benchmarking information quality. Do search engines really want to promote a bunch of thin content sites that are easy to spam? Not likely. These sites act as testbeds for features that search engines clone, but eventually most of them will die.

Content and advertisement formats are not the only types of information bubbles. All of this rides on how people use language, from spam filters, to ad targeting, to the perception of fair use, to syndication guidelines, to deceptive offers:

Stanford Group this week issued its own bulletin, stating "we believe the FTC is investigating deceptive Internet advertising by several companies, particularly relating to offers claiming or implying "free" products."

right on through to general public deception, ala Frank Luntz:

Luntz was quizzed on his prior advocacy of the term, 'climate change' as opposed to 'global warming', given the emotional nuance of the latter term.

You'll see that both terms are used by Australian Internet users, but 'global warming' is by far more referenced. Further search analysis is telling, revealing that searches for 'climate change' are more likely to result in visits to News & Media and Government websites; while users more commonly visit Education and Environment online industries when they search for 'global warming'. Could it be that 'climate change' is in fact now the more emotional term, given its prominence in the media?

If you know everything is a bubble, and are building for the long-term, it might make sense to look beyond the current fashion.

Stock market was BIG... everyone became a broker trainee... it crashed.... real estate was BIG...everyone was a realtor/trainee/mortgage broker... it's crashing....what's next?

What is out of favor now will likely come back in fashion at some point, as noted by Alan Meckler:

I still contend (even with the heavy push for user generated content) that high quality, wholly owned content still has a major role to play on the Web. When you own content as we do, then opportunities continuously present themselves. Great content also provides an environment to create new lines of related business.