2007-06-25

A post lifted from Undiggnified.com

Since undiggnified.com is no longer being updated (if anyone is interested in taking it over, let me know) I figure I should probably take some of the better posts from there and move them over to here!

And so, here is a post from Unidggnified.com on gathering EDU backlinks:

So everyone who knows about SEO also knows that google and the other big search engines love .edu backlinks.

Unfortunately, .edu backlinks can be a bitch to find and keep if you aren’t the blackhat type to spam blogs and forums with millions of links.

Well, you’re in luck! I have a solution!

Try doing a simple google search like this:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aedu+OR+site%3Agov+%22Discussion+Forum%22

This looks for .edu or .gov domains that have the terms “Discussion Forum” in their content.

I often modify this search term with a keyword relating to the site Im trying to get links for.
Let’s say it was a site about art, then I would modify the search to say “Art Discussion Forum”.
You get the idea.

What this does is spit out a list of potential places for you to place links back to your site! Now you could just spam the hell out of every page returned by this search, but your links are more likely to last longer if you pick your sites carefully and only make posts that have relevance to the site you are linking back to. That said, I ain’t gonna tell you to not spam…I’m not that kinda guy. Do whatever the hell you feel like.

2007-08-07

(Or more! The sky is the limit with this one)

Greetings!

I hope you have all been paying attention over the past week, because today I am going to build on last weeks database revelations and tell you all how to use database content to make serious money (and build serious traffic) through Google Custom Search.

Now, I have been making decent bank with Google Custom Search for a while now, and having recently amp’d up my efforts in a big way, I feel confident enough to make the claim that you should all be able to make at LEAST Fifty Dollars a day using the techniques I am about to outline.

Google Custom Search came on the scene back in late 2006 and it really didn’t make the splash that I expected it would in the SEO scene. Google Custom Search, in good Web2.0-Mash-Up style, gave me a brand new way to inter-link and cross promote my diverse network of niche sites, and I thought that was pretty cool. In fact, most people thought that was pretty cool, and that was about all we really heard about the launch of GCS.

But let’s stop and examine three things that make GCS especially cool for us SEO’s and Affiliate Marketers, shall we?

1)      GCS engines can be highly targeted, returning extremely relevant results. This means that we can create a GCS that will satisfy the search needs of our site’s users based on their specific interests; and a satisfied user is a loyal user.

2)      GCS engines allow us to return results only from the websites we choose. This means that we can set up a GCS to promote only those sites within our network. So if we have a mini-network on home development, our GCS can be set to only return those relevant results from sub-sites within our network. For our mini-network on home development our GCS might return results from sub-sites that provide mortgage offers, information on concrete polishing, or how to select granite countertops. This allows us to cross promote the sites within our network instead of having visitors turn to our competitor for more in-depth information.

3)      GCS is made to be monetized. You can display your Adsense ads in your search results and thus can profit from the increased impressions when people use your GCS.

From an SEO point of view, GCS is solid gold because it lets you bypass the usual google.com search completely and in so doing, you bypass your competition! Of course, as I’m sure many of you who have played with Google Custom Search have already realized: your search engine is only as good as the number of users you can funnel into it. Meaning, if you have a GCS that only does 10 searches a day then you are really not going to see any tangible benefit to having it setup on your website.

The hardest part about making a profitable custom search is getting traffic to it. Often people add GCS to their website as an afterthought. Maybe they just feel like it is a cheap & easy way to provide search functionality and increased accessibility to their users. That is all well and good, but we aren’t just trying to make our site more accessible, we are trying to make some extra money, and this implementation of a Google search is rarely profitable because only a small percentage of your websites visitors will ever use it.

As of this post, I am running a HUGE amount of different GCS engines. I have a GCS engine for every single niche I am involved in. Every time I start a new niche, one of the first things I do after going online is to create a GCS for it. I constantly maintain and update my GCS’ settings and configuration, adding and removing websites from each niche network. This is a lot of work, but depending on the subject matter for each niche, the profit returned from the GCS alone can rival the profit I make on the niches individual websites themselves.

But still, we face the same problem. My many GCS engines are useless and won’t make a cent unless I am providing them with a sufficient volume of visitors performing searches. I can’t depend on people to use my search engines just by visiting the website and then typing a query into a box. There are too many distractions on a website, too many places to click and things to see. Because of that, you will find that only a very small percentage of your websites visitors ever actually use your GCS.

Rather, what we need is a way to take every one of our users interested in a given niche and funnel their attention directly towards using nothing else other than our niche’s GCS to find the answers they need. This is where things start to get interesting.

The secret here is thinking outside of the box. Sure lots of websites offer inline search functionality, but how about offering a search-based service outside of a proper website? How about getting people to search for answers in your niche without ever even visiting your website, and without ever even knowing your website exists in the first place?

What I am referring to here are desktop widget platforms like Google Desktop or (my favorite) Windows Vista Sidebar. Even web-top widget platforms like Netvibes, Facebook and more. For the sake of this post, I am going to focus solely on Windows Vista Sidebar.

Out of curiosity, I installed Vista on a partition just to take a peek at it, and one of the first things I started messing around with was the sidebar widgets. They have made it incredibly simple for people to create and publish their own widgets to the Windows Live Gallery website for other people to download and use. Also, Windows Vista Sidebar widgets can be very lucrative since not many people are creating them yet! Now is a great time for you all to get a slice of this action before the whole world eventually ports to the Vista OS.

A Vista sidebar widget is comprised of simple HTML and an XML file that acts in many ways like a PAD file does in as much as it identifies your widget and its provenance. If you know how to copy-and-paste and some basic HTML, then you can easily create a desktop widget.

So here is what I do:

Finding the proper niche is key to doing large search volume. Be SPECIFIC. For example, one of my most high traffic search engines was one that enabled people to interpret their dreams.

Realizing that people love to know what their dreams mean, I did some brief research and compiled a database of dreams and their meanings. Then I created a website around that database and did all the usual SEO stuff on it, got it indexed and laid in some Adsense ads just for good measure.

Next, I went to my Google account and set up a custom search engine. The setup interface allows you to target your search engine to a pre-defined list of websites or to have to search the entire web. For my purpose, I made the custom search engine return results from ONLY my website that I had made around the dreams database I compiled. That way, not only do I stand to profit from the ads displayed in the SERPs but since all the SERP results are for pages on my site, I am funneling traffic into my site which in turn shows more of my ads.

After going through all the setup steps, Google spat out the code for me to copy-and-paste into the HTML for my Sidebar Search Widget.
I am not going to go into detail on how-to create your widgets as it is extremely easy to do and you will be able to figure it out with just a little research on your part.

So I designed my little search widget with nice clean interface and a snappy title and then I published it to the Windows Live Gallery website. Within one week, over 1000 people had downloaded my widget to their desktop sidebar. Getting that kind of desktop real estate on peoples computer screens is something that most internet marketers would KILL for. My search box is on their screen every day and it continually sends their requests to my website.

The important part is repeating this process on many different subjects. The more subjects you cover, the more search volume you will pull. The beautiful thing here is the sky is really the limit. If you want to pull in that $50/day I’ve been talking about, then you better be prepared to create a GCS for every niche you are in. And you better be prepared to present each of your GCS’ in a different widget for each platform. Ie: Create one widget for Netvibes, one for Vista, one for Google  Desktop, etc, etc. Once you get the hang of it, you will find that you can create a simple template for each platform and then just plug in the different GCS code into each one. After a while, you’ll be creating new search widgets at an amazing pace.

 
Now, remember how I said that this post was going to build on the previous posts about Google Hacking? I wasn’t kidding.

Take a sec to peek through the Free Downloads section of the website and think about how you can build websites around the databases provided there. How about creating a database of Bible verses, and then creating a Bible Study search widget that funnels all searches into that website? How about creating a website of food and drink recipes and making it searchable via a desktop widget?

The databases provided give you an excellent leg-up in creating websites with large amounts of information that are perfectly appropriate for Google Custom Search widgets.

Here are some other ideas to get you started:

• Video Game Cheats Search Widget
• Myspace Layouts Search Widget
• Baby Names Search Widget
• Restuarants Search Widget
• Celebrity Gossip Search Widget
• Product Recalls Search Widget
• Lyrics Search Widget

In parting, here some more food for thought for all your Affiliate Marketers:

Instead of just relying on Adwords for profit, how about a desktop search widget that returns Amazon Books with your Affiliate Link? This is where the real money is.

2007-09-12

Oh god I can't believe Im linking to Matt Cutts

I never thought it would happen....but Im about to link out to Matt Cutts blog....the very thought is giving me indigestion.

*burp* 

There, I did it.  I can't believe I just did that....At least I've got a good reason for it:

Cutts just wrote about a very useful Google search feature that lets you return results for a given term sorted by recency. I won't go into it too much because I'm in the middle of a hundred other things, but click the link to Matt's blog to read more about it.

Here is an example that returns results for Seocracy added to Google's index within the last 24 hour: Last 24 hours of Seocracy

Why is this so useful? Well it gives me a much easier way to chart the success of my link building and indexing strategies. I can now tell exactly when the links are coming in and sort them by the date they were added to the index.....

'nuf said. 

2007-09-27

More obvious, heavy-handed, and gratuitous advice

Someone sent me a question today over on Wicked Fire asking me:

sorry for all the ????'s - i'm just about to dig into some of this database stuff... or TRY to.... and:

I have a site that I originally purchased for song lyrics. It's a pretty sweet/memorable domain name and that's what I would LOVE to use it for. But, I'm afraid the lyrics market is way oversaturated and it will be too difficult to gain any ground/traffic.

I thought about using the site for bible verses or poetry instead. Probably better competitive ability but not as fun. Do you have an opinion on what might be best?

My reply:

I think lyrics sites can still pull well if you get the newest lyrics (which is alot of work to stay on top of)
If you consider combining your site by say using a celebrities wallpaper database with a lyrics database you can spin content and make it relevant AND unique.

But you are right, lyrics is a competitive niche....it wont hurt you to throw something up and take a stab at it....best way to learn is by fucking up...right?

Poetry and Bible wont pull as much traffic as lyrics, so really the truth is that it is all relative. Ya dig? You might have more competition in the lyrics niche, but the keywords in that niche will pull more traffic per keyword then youd pull in the smaller niches....

Id go for the lyrics and try to make my lyrics offering stand out by combining wallpapers, or screensavers or fucking myspace backgrounds for each song lyric.

Good luck.

The reason I  wanted to post this is because after I sent that reply, I realized there is alot more I wanted to say to this guy and all the other folks who have been asking me similar questions. What I really want to say to everyone is:

Just Fucking Do It.

Sometimes you can be your biggest obstacle when it comes to starting new niches or other ventures. I have always found that I have learned best by doing things wrong the first time. Whenever I have an idea, I don't put it off and waste time asking questions that have no answers. I just dive right in and learn while doing.

2007-09-28

A little blackhat to brighten your day.

2007-10-01

Ask yourself this before you invest in dedicated proxies

I'm sure you can all relate to this sentiment:
Proxies are a pain in the ass.

Am I right?
If any of you are anything like me, you've spent wasted a bunch of time trying to find free proxy alternatives. You might use Tor or a CGI/PHP Proxy for web browsing. You probably scour the internet for public proxy lists and then scour the net again to find programs to test those proxies for connectivity and anonymity....

I've spent so much time and energy on finding free proxy alternatives that I figured I might as well list a few here for you all to benefit from. My hope is that I can at least save you all a little time and money. Here goes:

Palary:
When doing referrer spamming, you dont have to use much bandwidth or make multiple requests for each target. All you really need to do for each target is make one call through a proxy using a fake referrer.

For referrer spamming, TOR will suffice. Its free and stable and anonymous, but not super fast. It can be a bit tricky for newbies to figure out how to install TOR, and many of you might not have dedicated or VPS hosting on which to use TOR.

So if TOR isn't an option for you, I suggest you try this:

https://palary.com/main/load_page?sfrurl=http://www.targetsite.com&sfrReferer=http://www.fakereferer.com

Using the palary browser, you can send a fake referer request! Can you believe it? This works just as well as using TOR or any other proxy and it doesnt require any setup, installation or any of your server resources!  

Beyond using it for referrer spamming, Palary is a fairly good all-round solution for anonymous browsing, so check it out.

Translation:

This one is pretty obvious. Online website translation tools make for pretty decent proxies. I wouldnt depend on them for high-anonymity, but they can do the trick for quick and dirty tasks. Here are some examples:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=ko_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.TARGETWEBSITE.com 

Also, check out these website translators:

http://www.worldlingo.com/
http://www.transparent.com/
http://www.tranexp.com/
And of course, Google.

Externals:

By externals, I am referring to websites that allow you to open up external websites from the current sites. They aren't at all a sure thing, so be sure to test them first by going to whatsmyip or some other IP checker website. Here's an example:

http://www.netvibes.com/proxy/xmlProxy.php?url=www.TARGETWEBSITE.com

So there you have it. Those are just a few examples of the kind of things you can look into before you decide to go spend a bunch of money on proxies.

To tell the truth, you really cant beat having your own dedicated & private IP based proxies, but until you can justify spending some money on them, make sure you look at all the free alternatives available to you. 

UPDATE: I removed a bunch of exmaples that didn't work properly. This is what happens when you write posts without paying proper attention. 

2007-09-19

Some solid traditional advice

We’re all in this game to make money. Am I right? I mean, some of you might read this blog because you find it interesting even if you don’t make money on the net, and that’s fine. But truth be told, this blog exists to serve those of you who are trying to make money online. Even myself, for whom this blog is only a side hobby to compliment my already successful career, it’s still all about the money.

Because of that obvious fact, I thought it would be pertinent to take a second to write something a bit out of the ordinary. Instead of discussing code, or black-hat techniques, or get rich quick schemes, let’s talk about something simple and eschew regular discussion of internet and technology all together: Let’s talk about wealth.

The concept of wealth applies to all of us, whether we are considered ‘wealthy’ or not, and regardless of where and how we accumulated said wealth. Personally, the overwhelming majority of my wealth has been made in the real estate industry, not the Internet. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. A wise man diversifies. And for me, the Internet has been one of my ways of diversifying.

Here’s the thing: Becoming wealthy ain’t complicated. Determining the air-speed velocity of African Swallow is complicated. That sort of thing involves all sorts of mathematics and calculation. Becoming wealthy, however, requires little more then a solid knowledge of the basics: addition & subtraction.

Granted, I am oversimplifying for the sake of argument. One must always have that tipping point idea before they can begin to start adding to their wealth instead of constantly subtracting. But bare with me here. Given the claim that the accumulation of wealth requires little more then the ability to do simple math, the reason more people aren’t wealthy is simple: they don’t know when to add, and they don’t know when to subtract.

The secret to wealth is this: Spend less than you earn.  

The more you earn and the less you spend, the richer you become.

This sounds like basic common sense right? If I have two apples and I give Suzy one of them, then I’ve only got one apple left for myself. So why don’t we have more wealthy people? Why is the Canadian national savings rate so low? Well, it’s for the same reason that last years gross personal expenditure on consumer goods topped 880 billion with a gross personal income of 782 billion.

It’s because people don’t actually want to be wealthy. People want to appear wealthy. People want to make their friends and neighbors jealous. People want to live beyond their means.

It’s this overwhelming need to appear rich that keeps people from actually becoming rich. This is one of the top reasons why people aren’t wealthier. They get caught in this crazy cycle of spending and consuming, they fall for the marketing, buy the latest trends, need the newest cell phone, and guess what?? I bet those people have no clue of what their net worth really is, or even how to calculate it. These are people who will never become wealthy.

Another reason, especially applicable for all you internet marketers out there, is the idea of being able to get rich quick. The idea of getting in, scraping major cash, and getting out is a massive communal pipedream shared by millions of people. It just doesn’t happen often enough to base a business on it. If you were to pitch me a business plan that hinges on winning the lottery, or a perfect hand in a game of cards, I’d be tempted to smack you in the face. Why? Because you need to wake up to the fact that it ain’t gonna happen. I haven’t crunched the statistics, but I feel confident in saying that you stand a better chance of getting struck by lighting on a clear cloudless day then you do becoming rich quickly.

You can’t bank on luck, and you can’t expect luck to pay the bills. Saving is the only surefire way to become rich. But it ain’t that glamorous is it? Today’s internet entrepreneur who has had a taste of success doesn’t want to save, he wants to spend more to make more; he wants to gamble.

Eventually, this will bite him in the ass. You see, the beauty of saving is that it doesn’t matter what you do with your money as long as you don’t spend it.  Further, the beauty of saving is that every month, the more you save, the richer you become. It’s a system of accumulating wealth that is literally free from danger. It’s foolproof.

To truly become wealthy, you must develop a strong balance between saving your money, and living a quality of lifestyle that works for you. Once you’ve developed that healthy habit and have stopped consuming products that you don’t need, well, you’ll be way ahead of the majority of the population and at that point you’ll understand what wealth truly is.

Wealth isn’t your car, your clothes or your phone. Wealth isn’t how you spend your money; it’s how you save it that counts.

 I hope you guys enjoyed this post. I know it's very out of the orindary for me, but I have alot more to talk about then just scraping and spamming (even though I do love scraping and spamming!!!) Leave a comment and let me know what you thought. I promise that next week I'll get back on it with some more technical SEO stuff.

2007-10-20

Marketing to Facebook - exponential potential

OK, thats it. I've had enough.

I've been watching the shit storm that is "facebook" swirl around me for long enough without actually saying something. So now it's time. It's time to start delving into Facebook tactics.

I plan on making a few posts about this over the next few days. I'd like to launch into a few different tactics and methods on how to leverage the viral qualities of a network like Facebook.

The beauty of Facebook is that it allows you to inject memes/events/groups into the network and it actually encourages people to "spam" their friends by recommending that they 'share this app with others!' or 'invite your friends!', so the little meme rolls into a giant snowball and what starts with you promoting to an audience of say 200 people, next thing you know you've got a meme that has 100,000 members.

 Think about that. Let the numbers sink in. If you can forseeably snowball into a 100,000 strong audience with a catchy idea, image the marketing power. Imagine if all those people were interested in one certain niche - perhaps that is the reason they joined the meme - Imagine, for a second, that you were the person who started the group "I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who hate George Bush". Imagine being able to send a legitimate marketing message to 1,000,000 people interested in American Politics, and encouraging them to join a specific forum or visit a website. 

Yeah. That's the potential of Facebook.

So over the next few days, I want to start talking about ideas to harness this sites potential. 

Because I ain't stingy, I want to throw out one little idea right now:

Proxies.

Come onnnnnnnnn!

Come onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn! 

Ya'll remember the social proxy game! You know that Unblock Myspace stuff! So what Myspace didnt let you do is actually leverage its network to promote your proxy...at least, it wasn't geared towards letting you do that.

Well check this out:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=7594721412&ref=nf

Event: How to access Facebook from school
Number of members: 62,186

Well damn, there's one way to get the word out about your proxy. 

2007-10-24

Some book recommendations

I recently moved into a new house.

It was an asbolute NIGHTMARE that I can't even begin to describe. All I can say is that I'm thankful to have alot of helpful friends, because I couldn't believe how mcuh stuff I have accumlated over the years!

One of the biggest pains for me to relocate was my library of books. My collection of books is so vast that ive had to split it in three...some with my brother, some in a storage locker, and the rest with me at my new home. My library could probably fill the volume of a typical office cubicle. What can I say, I love to read!

And no, they're not all Harry Potter and Dan Brown novels either. I read alot of material rooted in academia, and stuff that people might be surprised to find someone like myself reading. Currently on my bedside table there are three books:

1. "Belief or Non-Belief" by Umberto Eco and Cardinal Martini
   
2. "Webbots, Spiders & Screen Scrapers" by Michael Schrenk
3. " McLuhan for Managers" by Mark Federman

As you might surmise from this brief list, I read alot of different stuff. What can I say, I'm a bibliophile.

I want to take a moment to share some selections that I consider important reads for anyone involved in the Marketing game, wether it be Search Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, or anything else.

(and no, I wont use affiliate links :P ) 

A Theory of Semiotics - Umberto Eco

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols. A basic tenent of semiotics is the idea that all human communication is esentially made up of signs. Any sign itself is composed of a material signifier and a material sign. An understanding semiotics and the inherent material signifiers present in various communications can really help faciliate clear and concise marketing communications.

The Brand Gap - Marty Neumeier

This book is pretty. And its thin. Two things I really like in a book. Plus, its not heavy handed. The Brand Gap talks about brand building and brand politics. it also speaks broadly about branding in a technological world. If you are a brand manager, a graphic design, or a communications enthusiast, you should definately read this one. 

Practices of Looking - Struken & Cartwright

This book takes everything you `think` you understand about mass media, and, ripping it the shreds, it builds your understanding back up again. This book teaches critical consumption of advertising and consumer messages. It imparts how to go beyond the surface of the media and really understand the deeper social-political-economic currents at work. 

The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan

I'm Canadian. I love McLuhan. I can't help it. This book is legendary. I really cant say anything about it other then what is already said in the Amazon.com review. You should own this book. Your dinner conversation will be so much more interesting once you've read it. I promise.

11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding - Ries

A bit out of date, and the title is a misnomer: I don't care what anyone says; there is no such thing as an immutable law on the Internet...everything is in flux. It is still worth checking out.

Anyways, there you go, five excellent titles for you to look up. Go on, get your learn on.

2007-10-26

A great post I found on assertica.co.uk

<?
$bots=array('googlebot', 'yahoo', 'live', 'msn');
$y=0; for($i=0; $i<sizeof ($bots); $i++) if(strstr(strtolower($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]), strtolower($bots[$i]))) $y=1;
if($y){
  include('your_links_file.html'); 
}
?>

2007-10-27

isn't that what everyone says?

Well I just got in from the Aesop Rock concert here in Vancouver. (it was incredible, by the way)

As I logged on tonight, I noticed that there's a new pagerank listed for seocracy.com.

Now, I can't really be bothered about Page Rank, but bear with me here:

My whole site was previously PR 0. My downloads page received a PR 2....that page isnt even fully accessible to the spiders as it requires a login, so clearly the ranking wasnt based on content relevance. Nor is that page receiving any extensive degree of inbound links. It is getting no great push from inner linking amongst other pages in the site, at least not compared with the databases page, which by the way, received a PR 0 still.

What's weird about that is that the database page has all the elements one would expect to find in a well ranked page. It receives in bound links, it has nice structure, healthy accessible content which is actively updated.......yet it still received PR 0.

Anyways, when it comes to page rank, I say: fuck it. Really. I do. I read so many heated conversations on the topic of pagerank, and what it all means.....and everytime I read about it, I think to myself: "Fuck it.......I have never experienced a dramatic increase/decrease in traffic based on visible pagerank."

Listen, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you something. The truth is, obsessing over the little grey pagerank icon on your Google toolbar? It's an unhealthy habit.

It's........well..........it's like masturbation.
It's self serving. It's repetitive. And it's addictive...........
It's time you kicked the habit.

2007-10-30

It's like "Copyright Infrigment Lite"

Look at you, you're a mess.  You're bland, and pale and white, and completely boring....

....you scrape, you steal, you 'borrow' other peoples intellectual copyright, you engage in trackback spamming, you manipulate technorati and the SERPs......

...Hell, I bet you'd step over your own mother for a backlink......

...I mean, look at you! Just look at yourself; living on the edge of the internet; you're a scofflaw! A hooligan of the interweb! A digital ner'do'well!

How do you sleep at night?!?!

Oh, what am I saying...I know you sleep well, because you're an aggregator.

You sleep SOUNDLY, because what you do isn't wrong. In fact, what you do is encouraged in web 2.0 web-two-point-oh.

You're a purveyor of content, a go-between for readers and publishers! You're the grease in the cogs of the blogosphere! Huzzah!

Oh, ectio.us, I don't care if you slam adsense ads into every one of your 172,000 pages in Googles index, I love you anyways.

2007-11-22

Why you should always look a gift-horse in the mouth

Why is it that people never question a freebie?

Is it because people, in their greed and haste, don't take the time to do proper research? Perhaps it’s because there are many people who are just naïve?  I think it’s a bit of a combination of both.  Regardless, it seems to me that when you give away something for free, people rarely consider what strings might be attached.

Think of all the millions of searches happening everyday with “free” or “download” in them. There are millions of people out there looking to get something for nothing. And in response to this worldwide demand for hand-outs, there are ample numbers of suppliers filling that demand. But stop and think for a second, and ask yourself, “What’s in it for the suppliers?”

No business model succeeds around giving something away for nothing, hence the old adage, “what’s the catch?” Sometimes the catch is obvious, like getting a piece of software for a free trial month before paying full price. And then, sometimes the catch is not quite so clear. For example, why is Facebook free? Well beyond the obvious fact that if it wasn’t free it wouldn’t be nearly so popular, there’s another underlying reason: They want your social data. Their business model is built on advertising to users based on the collected social data. Another example would be the slew of Google applications out there that are free to use…Google Analytics, for example, provides free statistical analysis of your website traffic. The catch to Google Analytics is the same as Facebook: they want your data. Now to what extent Google actually leverages the data provided from Analytics is an ongoing topic of discussion that I won’t get into here, but the fact remains: Nothing is truly free; there is always a catch.

Now, to many of you, Facebook and the like using your data for their own purposes is neither a startling revelation, nor a contentious issue; it’s simply a fact of life on the internet. There are, however, many others out there who seek to use people’s naivety for their own gain. I touched on this oh so briefly when I posted 18 nasty ways to get backlinks.

At the end of the post I threw out the idea to package and distribute free Wordpress themes with a small piece of code in the footer that would disguise backlinks to your own moneymaking sites. Concepts such as this are great for easily securing large amounts of backlinks with little effort on your part. All one really has to do is recognize a niche where people demand freebies, and then find a way to exploit that demand.

This is quite an old practice, but people are still falling for it! I’d like to use a reasonably dated case for an example, as I don’t want to out someone who hasn’t already been outed by others….My goal here is to educate and enlighten. I am certainly not interested in messing with anyone’s profits. Lets look at the Buy Viagra SERPs, for which the top position has been occupied - for most of this month - by studmed.com. One could write an entire thesis on the various salient elements of the site, but for the sake of this post, let’s just focus on the backlinks.

Going through their links, we see a bunch of seemingly unrelated yet high quality blogs. One might be tempted to think that these are all part of a sophisticated blog farm, but upon a close inspection its clear that these are in fact legitimate blogs who have been fooled by their own haste and greed into supplying backlinks to studmed.com. How?

Let’s look at the source code for a few of the blogs:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.statcounter.com/counter/counter_xhtml.js"></script>
<noscript>
<div class="statcounter">
<a class="statcounter" href="http://www.studmed.com/">
<img class="statcounter" src="http://c33.statcounter.com/3025045/0/e31a3548/0/" alt="buy viagra"/></a>
</div>
</noscript> 

A little research turns up the blog of another fellow who was taken in by this little scheme and later caught on to what was happening. He posts: 

“…so I did a quick “view source” on my blog and sure enough the offending code was tucked away at the bottom on my HTML, right after my footer…. The root of the problem is that apparently TemplateBrowser.com, where I got my theme from, is injecting themes with this additional, unwanted code…”

And there you have it. TemplateBrowser.com (which is now showing just a parking page) seems to have been the delivery point for at least some of these doctored templates.

There is absolutely no reason why you can’t use this lesson to your own advantage. Find a niche where people demand freebies, and then exploit that demand to your own benefit. 

2007-11-28

OK, this is just a quickie post I wanted to get out while it was on my mind.....

I'd never heard of TagSum before today, but came across some interesting stuff they are doing to manipulate the SERPs.....

I was doing an unrelated search today and came across pages from: www.facebook.automotivearena.com...I was curious enough to click through and see what the site was, but it jumped me directly to tagsum.com

Obviously TagSum is doing some cloaking and redirecting....

Check this search 

Now click any result. You'll see it redirects you to tagsum.com

Go back to the SERP and copy and paste any of the urls into your location bar and instead of getting hopped to TagSum.com you get a page with the stereotypical:

This Account Has Been Suspended

Interesting eh? So they are recognizing clickthroughs from Google and are jumping those to TagSum.com whereas other traffic gets shown the This Account Has Been Suspended.

For more insight into what they are doing, take a look at the google cached snapshot for any one of those pages.

Someone should tell them that by dumping a bunch of links to their other cloaked domains in the footer, they are literally handing google their cloaking network on a silver platter. At the very least, lump in links to your other cloaking domains in the body where they're harder to recognize amongst other legitimate links.

Now that I write this post, I think to myself: Should I feel bad for outing these guys? Am I just a pilthy little nark?  I don't think so. All I know is that their cloaked pages are competing with some of my niches by displacing some of my high ranked pages. So fuck 'em.

***UPDATE: Apparently someone from TagSum.com paid me a visit because they've stopped jumping all their cloaked domains to TagSum.com. Wow....I never realized people actually paid attention to what I write here. 

2007-12-14

Getting free backlinks from viral videos

Yo! I want to turn out a quick post on a good place to score some easy back links.

Here goes:

viralvideochart.com

A) They automate backlinking for simply posting a youtube video on your blog. This is so easily automated and abuseable that I get all giddy and fuzzy inside just thinking about it.

B) They know jack about HTML (or, most likely, are just as sloppy as I am with coding....) and have therefore buggered their nofollow tags.
    ie:  <a rel="”nofollow”" href="http://www.seocracy.com">

Double quotes on the nofollow attribute = fucked.

I discovered this by pure accident when I posted a youtube video a while back.  I've since tested automating a scraper to grab youtube video embed code and put it in a blog post...usually within a week I was credited with a free backlink for each video. Once I erased the video, the link still stays.

So, say you were to set up a scraper blog that pulled youtube vids and posted them, and then once you got a ton of links, just 301 the whole thing to your money site. Well...if you were to do that, you'd be pretty darn cool. 

2008-01-31

I saw this adsense block today while playing Scrabulous and I thought it was devilish.

Take the ability to target your adsense channels, and combine it with great copy like this and you're sure to do well.

In other news, looks like google bombing still works, at least in some cases!

I'm sure many of you have heard of this already, but for those of you who havent, Danny Sullivan wrote an excellent piece on it over at Search Engine Land

I've started the second round of invites to Datapresser today, so if you haven't already, head on over to Datapresser and get your name on the wait list! 

2008-02-22

I want to write a post about picking the most effective search strategies to achieve desired results. Further, I want to talk about whether one should go about acheiving those result by employing whitehat practices, or blackhat practices.

The problem is, I refuse to enter into the blackhat vs. whitehat debate and sound off as an advocate for either side. The two terms have become so clouded in ethical debate that its impossible to convey the concepts that they actually represent. So, it's therefore impossible for me to write the post that I want to write.

Unless you agree to a proposition......

I propose we approach a specific SEO problem, and that for the sake of this post, we consider whitehat seo as “organic search manipulation”, and blackhat seo as “artifical search manipulation”. I propose, for the sake of this post, we approach the problem while forgetting the word “spam”; we forget all moral, ethical and professional objections we might have to artifical/organic search manipulation.

Instead, we'll simply think of the following: Goal, Result, Consequence.

Let's say we have a Real Estate lead-generating site which has a variety of high converting landing pages that target particular communities and geographic areas. These leads are later sold on, for a premium, to realtors/developers in those areas.

Our problem is this: The landing pages on the site don't rank well for their respective targets because there isn't much content and the entire site lacks authority. Let's also assume that we want to be certain that the moneymaking site itself doesn't appear questionable and therefore doesn't have a lot of keyword stuffed content.

So our Goal is: Deliver quality traffic to each lead generating landing page without relying on direct search engine traffic.

For this example, we need to funnel both link juice and quality traffic to those pages through intermediary sites. These networks of sites are the middle-man between the search engine and the money making site. Their job is to rank in the search engine and pass traffic onto their respective landing page targets.

So, there are two ways to approach this, organically or artificially.

The organic approach is to create many legitimate sites with content written by content writers; each sites content to be targeted to its respective landing page. These sites have quality design, nice imagery and generally look entirely innocuous. There should be many links on the site that point to the target landing page (save for a few barely noticeable outbound links to related quality sites), also including onsite advertising (banners etc). This way it becomes pretty hard for the visitor to NOT end up at your lead generating page.

Normally the artificial approach would differ from the organic approach in that we wouldn't be hiring content writers, but rather, we'd be mass generating content that would target our keywords broadly. For the sake of generating Real Estate leads, we know that won't cut it, because we want to deliver high quality leads that convert into sales. Besides, since we know how well these leads can pay, we can still afford to hire content writers. So, in that sense, the artifcial approach to this situation is much the same as the organic one in that we create sites with targeted human written content. But that's where the similarities end. Instead of creating sites that please the human eye, we employ IP delivery. We show bots a bare bones site with our targeted content. This site also has some respectable outgoing links and some images and a basic layout, so as to appear legitimate to the algorithm. When the site receives hits from IPs not identified as being bots, they are immediately transferred over to the lead generating landing page.

So, those are our two approaches. Now, how about the results?

The results for the organic search manipulation might play out something like this:

For every 1000 uniques to the organic intermediary site, we might achieve 500-600 visits to our landing page. At that point, how well they convert into leads depends on the performance of our landing page. These people who convert will be people who A) resonated with the search result displaying our intermediary site, B) resonated with the content of our intermediary site enough to click on something instead of bouncing and C) resonated with the landing page enough to fill out the lead form. That all adds up to very targeted leads. They've passed a three filter process and we've successfully funneled them into our database.

For the results of the artificial search manipulation we can expect that for every 1000 non-bot visitors to our intermediary site, we will achieve 1000 visits to our landing page. Once again, how well those 1000 convert into leads depends largely on the landing page. Whereas above, the people passed a three filter funnel, the artificial approach passes visitors through a two filter funnel: they resonate with the search listing and click, and then they submit the lead form. These leads will be less targeted than the leads generated organically. That said, there are many more leads generated through this approach.

The consequences of the artificial method, in this case, are poor leads (if we care about our business reputation, we must deliver quality leads), and potential penalization for violating ToS. The costs and time required are relatively low compared to organically building site networks, but don't fool yourself: the degree of effort required is about the same.

The consequences of the organic method, in this case, is that we spend way more time playing grounds keeper to our farm of blogs (which definitely require upkeep!) but we at least deliver higher quality leads. We pay more out of pocket for the upkeep of our farm, and we have a much much reduced, but still present, potential of being penalized by Google. (face it, they're out to get'cha)

At the end of the day, the choice is yours. Perhaps you can cheaply pre-qualify your leads before reselling them and so the artificial approach makes financial sense. Perhaps you deem the risk of penalization to be too big of a threat to your business, so you decide that the organic approach is for you.

What's important is that we place all our options on a level playing field, and choose the one best suited to our goal, with the most desirous results, and least negative consequences.

2008-03-05

As most of you know by now, I <3 Twitter.

I use my main twitter account for legitmate purposes, but I've also been tinkering with ways you can exploit twitter for your own gain. You see, Twitter is easy to automate because their API is so easy to use. There are TONS of different sites and services out there that leverage twitter, republish tweets and so on. 

A good example is twemes.com.   Twemes aggregates tweets that employ the same phrases preceded by hashtags - also known as an Octothorpe, thanks Luc :) - for example, right now a really hot tweme is #SXSW.

And you know what? Twemes doesnt use nofollow tags for their links. 

 
You might consider leveraging this site as a link dump by creating a handful of different twitter accounts and creating new memes for yourself along your keywords. Your tweet might be something like, "#leathershoes this site is awesome http://www.leathershoes.com" then if you were to goto twemes.com/leathershoes, guess what, there's your link. I made an example here.

This is just the first of many different ways you can exploit twitter for your own devious results. I'll try to write more on this topic in the future.

Later! 

PS: I should mention this one last thing: When I create a new link, at twemes or anywhere else, I like to promote it to the SE's. Everyone has a different approach to this...personally, I use SQUIRT. When promoting the twemes linkdumps, I like to use the mobile page (m.twemes.com/yourpage) because there is less crud for the bots to choke on.... 

2008-03-11

OK, let's continue on in the same vein and talk a bit more about Twitter. Specifically, let's talk about using Twitter to amplify your Blog, or (better yet) your blog farm.

If you're using a tool like Datapresser, then you already have a healthy blog farm that is autoposting content and links for you.

Let's say we've got 100 new pages of content going up everyday, and everything is running smoothly. Of course, we're always interested in ways to get easy links to our new content, aren't we?

Well, using Twitter and Twitterfeed.com, we can automatically get a twitter account to tweet each post as it gets published, for each blog in our blog farm. That, in itself, is no big deal: it's precisely the intended use of Twitterfeed.com. But, it gets interesting when we consider the implications of last wednesdays post on leveraging Twemes.com for backlinks.

Here is a screenshot from the Twitterfeed setup page. This should describe what I'm getting at:

As you can see, by using the filter option, we can use Twitterfeed to have our twitter account for the keyword 'leathershoes' tweet any post that has 'leathershoes' in it. Further, every tweet that gets sent out will have the Twemes hashtag for #leathershoes, which means it will be reposted to m.twemes.com/leathershoes

Now, here's where the idea gets kind of wonky. Twitterfeed makes your Twitter account tweet the Title, Description and URL of your new content. Unfortunately the URL is a Tinyurl link, which is bogus as far as Googlebot is concerned. You won't get any linkjuice from this link. The way I see it, there are a few ways you can make this work.

My principal suggestion is this: Twemes will publish a URL in the body of a tweet as a live link This means you can set Twitterfeed to tweet just the description of the post and uncheck the box for including a link. Then you just include your own link by making sure the URL for the post is the first thing in the description.  

Your other options are:

1) If you can create a small enough Tweme - eg: #baby - you'd then have 15 other characters to squeeze in your url which would link back to your blog (Obviously this is kind of limiting).

2) It's not always about linking, sometimes its just about getting traffic & getting clicks. I almost shudder to suggest this, but you can always tweet into the most popular Twemes at the time, like #SXSW. You'll start pissing people off and getting your scheme and network noticed pretty quick. I really dont suggest you do this.

2008-03-27

A discussion on how best to generate content to pass Human inspection.

I just read two blog articles echoing the same sentiment.

One by Mark on Digerati, and one by SlightlyShady. These two articles both highlighted the most obvious epiphany one could glean from the Google Spam Docs: The algorithm cannot be perfect. Google needs a huge team to catch the spam that fools the algo. They need humans. And as SlightlyShady wrote "Humans are easy to fool.".

There are many aspects of a website that might indicate it is spam: design & layout, imagery, links (and linking patterns), site architecture, age, TLD, and of course, content. Content is probably the greatest stumbling block when it comes to creating sites that can pass human inspection.

We know how to create content that can fool the algorithm, but how do we create content that can fool Google's army of Monkeys at typewriters?

We can't expect to get away with markov content or synonym replacement; not for any respectable period of time anyways. After a while, if our sites eventually rank high enough to warrant human intervention, even scraped content is easy to detect as being duplicate.

A basic directive of the Google Spam Wranglers guidelines is to pare away all the scraped content and if whatever is left is just ads, then its most likely spam.

So how do we take content generation to the next level?

We need to create legible, syntacticly correct content that a human can read and make sense of. The key to this is taking small distinct chunks of data and splicing them together with joiner words or phrases. Yes, I'm talking about madlibbing.

A madlib script can create legible content and have thousands of different iterations. It takes a lot more creativity to create a madlib script than it does to set up some feed scraper blog, but the extra time is an investment in the future. This content has great staying power over the long term, and if executed properly, it will never result in your site getting banned.

If you are really worried about the time and creativity required to write madlib scripts, hire a writer. Think of it like this, you could pay an article writer $5 to write a great article that you can use once. Or you can pay an article writer $10 to write a great madlib script that you can use to create 1000 different articles.

Of course, there are more things than content to consider when planning to create spam that passes human inspection.

How about page Design?

You always need a template to spin blogs from, but you really kind of need an `un-template`; something highly versatile. Wordpress does this well.

Wordpress works well because you can easily switch themes. Create a wordpress install package that you can use on all your servers, include a whole bunch of different themes. Also think about including a plugin like this for rotating header images (hxxp://mhough.com/wordpress/2007/header-image-rotator-plugin/) this way, you can always have a different image that is not the themes default image. Be sure to include a whole bunch of different images in your package!

I imagine the truly intrepid among you will rewrite the code for the default blogroll links in your install package.

Remember Google's directive of paring back content to see if just ads are leftover? Well here's a revelation: How about you don't include ads? The decision is really up to you, of course. You have to ask yourself why you are creating these sites...ad money or linking power?

And don't forget linking.

To quote an old post Birds, Bimbos, and Blog Networks:

I'd suggest breaking your network of blogs into chunks of say 5 -10 blogs, assigning an independent IP to each chunk. Consider interlinking the blogs in a chunk if each part of the chunk seems relevant to the others. Obviously, don't link to other chunks/other IP ranges. If you want to take caution a step further, be aware of not cross promoting links on each chunk; by back searching a sites links, your network can be laid open to public view.

Now that I read this quote, I'd also add that sometimes you actually want to link 4 or 5 chunks to the same URL, because you are going to need more linking power then just one chunk can provide. As long as you are sure that you aren't interlinking your chunks en-masse, you can quarantine off parts on your network for other uses.

At any rate, these are just a few extraneous thoughts off the top of the dome. What I'm really focused on right now is the content angle, not so much the other factors. I have many more thoughts on the subject of creating content, and specifically on how to use the technique to maximum advantage. For now, though, I want to ask you guys: What do you think is the best way to create content that passes human inspection? 

2008-04-08

Google's AppEngine is an incubator for innovation. But is that really a good thing?

If you're an avid blog reader, chances are you've already read the news of Google's new AppEngine somewhere already this morning. Probably on TechCrunch?

I don't want to bother rehashing what other people are already talking about. All I want to ask my readers is this: Doesn't the idea of handing Google your code make you a little bit nervous?

Call me paranoid, but here's how I see it: If you are a small startup, you don't have alot of assets. All you have is an idea, and your code. Your code is, in fact, one of your greatest assets. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but your code is what brings your ideas to life. How you implement your ideas through your code is what sets your business apart from others.

Google has already demonstrated an immense desire to invest in startups with unique ideas and the right code to implement them. By storing your code with Google, what is to stop them from just peeking in? By using the AppEngine, you basically give Google a back door into your startup.

Now, before you all think I'm sitting here wrapping tinfoil around my head, let me quote some passages from the AppEngine Terms of Service:

6.3. Except as provided in Section 8, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content or the Application that you create, submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Service, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content and the Application 

 

8.1. Google claims no ownership or control over any Content or Application. You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in the Content and/or Application, and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying the Content on or through the Service you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Content for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy. Furthermore, by creating an Application through use of the Service, you give Google a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide you with the Service in accordance with its privacy policy.

Now, I'm far from an expert at legalese (so please correct me if you think Im off base here), but what this basically says to me is that Google won't be claiming owneship of your application. They are reassuring you that your appication does indeed remain under your ownership. That said, they are stating that they do reserve the right to adapt, modify, publish, and distribute your application. 

I've been in business long enough to know that a company must adhere to its contractual obligations in a public setting. But internally, a company will do its best to find some wiggle-room within its legal obligations; especially when it stands to benefit from doing so. Google could never get away with just blatently reproducing your code under its own brand. There would be a huge out-cry from the public if they were to do that. But nothing is stopping them from looking at your code and learning from it. Nothing is stopping them from evaluating your startup's potential at an extremely intimate level; because you've already pulled down your pants and given them access to everything: code, content & userbase. It's all stored in the Google cloud for them to see.

If Youtube had been built on Google's AppEngine, do you think Google would have shelled out such major bucks for them? They might have shelled out less, or they might have shelled out even more; it all depends on how valuable they thought Youtube was after having unrestricted access to their backend.

And that's the crux of what I'm getting at: Google AppEngine is an incubator. AppEngine makes it easy for Google to evaluate the potential of a startup before it even publically expresses an interest in acquiring it. They don't have to deal with the legal hand-wringing that goes along with trying to evaluate a potential acquisition. They just look into their cloud and decide: is this something we want? If so, how much do we want to pay for it?

By using AppEngine for your startup, you let Google see your cards. There is no room left for bargaining, because Google will come to the table and already know everything they need to know.

I'd like to discuss this with you readers. If you have an opinion, please feel free to lay it on me by posting in the comments. Am I way off base here? I don't think so, but maybe you disagree.  

2008-04-29

Leveraging the conversational web for keyword focused content

At this exact moment, there are a staggering number of conversations taking place on the web.  People are talking, man! And they're talking about STUFF! Real STUFF! Like Cars, and Toothpaste, and Shoes, and Credit Cards!! AMAZING, eh?

OK, so maybe it's not totally amazing, but what IS amazing is that you can leverage all these free conversations for content.

For the sake of this post, I hacked up a quick and dirty sample that scrapes summize.com to deliver keyword focused chunks of content for you to use however you see fit. This is programmed in Ruby, using the Mechanize Gem (my favorite gem for scraping).

Let's say we're promoting an offer for a credit check, or something of that nature. Naturally, we'll want some content that is focused around the keyphrase "credit check" 

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'

agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = "Windows Mozilla"

query = "credit check"
doc = agent.get("http://summize.com/search?q=#{query}")

messages = doc.search("div.msg")

for message in messages
message.search("a").remove
content = message.search("span")
puts content.inner_text
end

 

And the output from this little chunk of ruby coolness?

Having a crappy Saturn experience.  Salesperson won't check other dealers for cars.  Won't let me fax credit ap.  2 hrs to pick up the car?
I always lose the new activations to the credit check.
pending credit check.... im fucking moving!!!!!!!!!
Audio Visual: No credit check contract mobiles sony ericsson,nokia,samsung,motorola order online at..
After waiting 3 fucking weeks my $50 check from ACE credit group. Gave $10 to Teresa since I owe her and kept the rest.
My credit union's web site is back up. Sadly no rebate check. Didn't really expect it today based on my SSN.
I'm debating wether I should walk up to Court St. to drop off a check at the Credit Union....
I'll check out the Wings over Col. next week, new month, new credit card bill. ;) Shade on the Canal in Canal Win. has good wings
Boo.. just short of getting my rebate check today...I really wanted to stimulate the economy by lowering my credit card debt too...oh wait..
cash or check only.  they don't take credit or debit.  we found that one out the hard way.

 

Yup. Free content. 

This content shouldn't form the foundation of your sites text, but it is the perfect kind of stuff to put in a sidebar. This is good content to round out your existing pages in a relevant and unique way. I'd suggest putting this sort of content in a side bar, and making it look just like some kind of widget.

BTW, I should have mentioned: Summize has an API. http://summize.com/api