Blue Hat SEO-Advanced SEO Tactics

So a couple months ago I went on a frantic article submitting fest for one of my sites and now I’m looking back on the results of that adventure. As far as promoting my articles I did a good job getting them out there. Really pushed them to a ton of article sites and they were high quality articles that received a very high acceptance rate. However now that I’m looking at the benefits I’m shocked to find very little. Even Yahoo (which even tends to ignore nofollow tags) shows only about 9 unique links from sites that posted my articles. Might I also point out two of which were scraper sites.

At this point it got me wondering so I started searching for terms related to those articles that normally would result in my site being one of the only ones. On average 1,500+ results from article directories with MY ARTICLES. Even though I’m still on top for most, I’m wondering why I should even be competing with these guys? They are obviously not helping my site out by giving it a valid link with the article. Eitherway an assumption can be made from looking at the number of inbound links gained from submitting and the amount of competitors I just gained for my unique phrases. That assumption is that I am going to end up screaming “THESE FUCKERS ARE STEALING MY TRAFFIC!” Way to ruin the business people!

At this point I’m not going to recommend everyone quit writing articles and submitting them solely because there is too many people that would argue against me on that, and a few would probably even have quality data to prove I am wrong. However I can assure you that I am going to quit doing it myself.

Side Note: Just to clarify to the curious, I submitted about 12 articles.

When it comes to using the www. in front or your domain, It doesn’t really matter which one you decide should be the forefront of your linking campaigns. However it’s a good idea to make sure that you are consistant with it. As a policy I make sure ALL portions of ANY linking campaign I do promotes the www. version of my site.

I’ve seen a few questions about this and I won’t bother answering the whys. Just know its a good idea. If you are fiding it difficult to find all the sites that link to you with the non www. url you can always search on msn using the
linkdomain:BlueHatSEO.com -linkdomain:www.BlueHatSEO.com
search string. This search string also works in Yahoo and will successfully return a list of all the sites that link to the non www. version of your site.

Update: hehe yeah arbitrage right…old post

I can’t help but notice that PPC ads are getting increasingly competitive. It’s no secret that affiliate marketers are beginning to look at PPC as a solid method of investment. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what I am talking about I’ll explain real fast.

PPC To Affiliate Marketing Basic Strategy
The idea is find an affiliate program that results in a PPA (Pay per Action) or PPL (Pay per Lead). Lets say for instance you find one that will pay you $4.00 for every visitor you send that ends up filling out a form for auto insurance. The next step is finding a good PPC campaign to generate your targeted traffic. At this point many prefer PPC Engines while most prefer Google Adsense. You then develop and write a few targeted ads and bid for your clicks. The idea is to generate enough leads to not only pay for the clicks but to pull a small profit. For instance if one in every 10 of your clicks on average complete the form to get their insurance quote, and you pay $0.30/click. You spent $3 and made $4. Therefore you profited a dollar. The art behind making the real money this way is to of course write quality ads that convert high while paying as low as possible for your clicks while generating as many leads as possible. Did I just make that complicated? I’ll iterate my point. If your making a dollar on your three then it may be worth it to bid slightly more per click and lower your profit dollar in order to make more leads/day.

Now that most of have quit reading because you already know this…
I wanted to point out a cool change up to the system I saw today. Someone was advertising on Adsense in the serps and directing the traffic to a PPC site.

Here’s a picture of his ad in the SERPS

Nice ad eh? If you click on it, it leads you to this page http://www.hometheatredirectory.com/Results.aspx?query=Home%20Theatre

I thought this was a pretty unique idea. Buy clicks at low prices, convert the traffic, and sell for higher on other engines. This would be obviously stupid to do this backwards with Adsense ads, because Adsense ads don’t allow you to pick which ads show up on the page. Therefore you cannot guarantee that the clicks made on your site will cover the costs of buying that click.

For those of you who are wondering why this is showing up for terms like “home theater” I can only say I’m not surprised. I know from experience that expensive terms means expensive PPC costs. If you were going to truly experiment with this sort of investment, might as well go high so you can properly measure the results.

There have been a few discussions lately on why Google does not police the Adsense scraper sites. Even when you click the report button on an obvious Adsense spam page Google seems to do absolutely nothing.

An Adsense scraper site is a site that has no useful content. It may have several random paragraphs of “content�? in order to provide Google Adsense with keywords for the contextual advertisements. In other words it scrapes other sites of their content and keywords.

These Adsense scraper sites that do not rank well in Google due to their devaluing rank very well in MSN and Yahoo. The theory is that Google in essence allows the Adsense accounts to stay active so that MSN and Yahoo indexes become overpopulated with “Adsense Spam�?. This makes their indexes less useful than Google’s.

Even these spammed “Adsense Pages�? provide Google with two things. They provide a free advertisement to webmasters to join the Adsense fun, and they push down the relevancy of their competitors SERPS. Facts be faced Google was the inspiration behind this web spam trend. The more it becomes a seemingly unstoppable force the more it appears that Google will profit the most from it.

This article was contributed by Rob from WebmasterRadio.fm Chat

Neat tool by Google if you haven’t seen it already.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

If you click on Site-Related Keywords and put in your url, it will analyze your site and return it’s keywords and even give you competition levels and popularity of the search terms to scale.

One thing I’ve always been curious about is the origin of doorway pages. Who originally invented them? I’m not niave enough to believe I was the one who first thought of it but I do have an interesting background story for whoever is interested.

It was my freshman year in highschool around spring/summer of 1996. I had some weird entertainment/wav file website (kegger.com - and no I dont’ still own that domain). Back then Webcrawler and Altavista ruled the search engines. I was reading a lot on the limited world on how search engines worked when I thought “wait a minute why should I ruin my page by putting this crap into my pages why not just create separate pages that are perfect for these keywords that I want and have them forward to my main site.” So I manually made about 20 of them and they worked so damn well that I started making more and more and more. Before this time I’ve never heard of this being done and never seen it(althought it probably did exist it just was so private i never got to see it). Eitherway they worked extremely well and was producing a ton of traffic for me on every keyword I would use. It wasn’t long before I ranked for one word terms like Music, MP3(the hottest new craze at the time), download, and software to name a few. Which of course by today’s standards; my site would be worth millions if I ranked for any one of those terms. They were so great I started calling them my “hitwhores” (haha..hey i was only 14 at the time. gimmie a break). After a couple weeks I recieved an email from Altavista asking me whats the deal with these pages that were ranking well for extremely popular words like music and download, yet they didn’t do anything but forward to my main site. I told them what they were for. They responded and told me I need to take them off my site and that my site would be banned. I told them in words less professional to get lost and that if they did I would just copy the files over to a bunch of other servers like Geocities. They emailed me back and said they would sue. I told them go ahead, and by the way I’m only 14 and all my stuff is located on servers in other countries. They didn’t respond.

Then about two days later I noticed on their url submit page they had a link that said “Attention webmasters don’t do this or you will be banned”(or something along those lines). I then clicked on the link and it described perfectly what I had done in detail, they even changed my wonderful term for it into something more politically correct like doorway pages. Infact those idiots basically posted instructions to the world. I emailed them and told them they were idiots for doing that and now everybody was going to do it. They never responded. Needless to say it wasn’t too long after that, that it became a big popular thing and ruined SERPS for a long time after.

Anyways thats my story, I rarely tell it since no one would probably believe it. Eitherway thats my story and I’m sticking to it. I know the saying that says no idea is an original one. So I’m sure someone else thought of it and did it before I did, but it’s nice to think that I at least helped make it popular.

If anyone else has any cool stories about the origins of blackhat techniques or things that became Internet standards I would love to hear them.  Please post them in the comments or in the forum.

For those of you into blog pinging here’s a small master list of places to ping. Feel free to add to the list via comments.

(more…)

I got a featured article in my email the other day from SEO News written by Gary McHugh from Web Reunited. Normally I don’t put down other peoples’ articles, but this one I will make an exception for simply because I’m seeing more and more of these types of articles popping up.

In the jist the article basically protests the whole SEO practice. It’s point in case is that search engine traffic doesn’t convert as well as link partner traffic and is a waste of time considering how much effort goes into it. I have to agree with Gary on a few points. SEO is hard work and doesn’t pay off for everyone. I won’t bother arguing whether or not search engine traffic converts better, because one quick look at his site will show you 2,000+ links on an automated link directory script and only 53 people signed his petition. The point is already made for me.

My point is simple and I don’t intend to pick on Gary’s particular article. There’s plenty of these type of articles out there urging people to quit trying to optimize their site for search engines because it’s not worth the investment, whether that investment be time or money.

DON’T LISTEN TO THESE ARTICLES! They are not written by marketing experts. The people writing these articles will never receive job offers from Sony to join their marketing team. Why? Because marketing is based off of an extremely simple concept. It doesn’t matter what your return on investment is with your marketing efforts as long as it is profitable.

When I first started my brick n mortar business a lady from the local radio station came in to have a meeting with me. She asked me how I currently advertise. I told her my primary way was flyers in the newspaper. She wanted to know how much I spent on my ads, and I let her know it was $X,XXX /per ad. She wanted to know my return, and I pulled my figures and said $XX,XXX/per ad. She was shocked. She told me that if I quit advertising with the newspaper ad and switched to radio I could run an ad for a whole month for the same money and since radio has such great demographics I could make a larger return on my advertising investment.

This essentially is the same thing these people are trying to sell you. Sounds reasonable right? I just have one question about it? If I KNOW that every time I run a newspaper ad I will generate a profit from it why would I ever quit running the ad?That would be stupid. I can still try radio as long as the budget fits, and if the radio really does turn out a larger ROI than the newspaper ad. Great, I’ll simply do both!

I’ll make my point. Search engine traffic is free. Even if you are not great at SEO or your attempts completely fail, you can still pull in some traffic from the search engines. The traffic is consistent. The traffic converts. No matter how low the conversion rate may be, a sale is a sale. Why turn it down.

Keep optimizing your sites people, and for fuck sake authors, quit wasting your and our time by writing articles on ways NOT to market our sites. All they mean to us is one less competitor.

Side note: For those of you who are wondering, the radio ads converted about the same. Also, I didn’t put the x’s to hide anything from you or to give any advice about newspaper/radio investments. I’m just not comfortable disclosing private company information and the actual numbers were irrelevant.

Just so no one gets confused I want you all to realize that I do not always practice what I preach. There simply isn’t time for it all. Whenever I create a new site I decide in a written plan what techniques and practices will make me the most money with the least amount of effort for the longest amount of time. Although I have many sites that are over 2 years old, I very rarely put daily promotion work into any of my sites that are over 6 months old. I put a lot of effort into the first six months of a site and then let it perpetuate its own promotion (which is coincidently about when I start getting REALLY sick of staring at the site). This allows me to not only keep my sanity, but to prevent myself from putting too many apples in one basket (I think that’s the way the saying goes). This practice however tends to put a vice over my head when it comes to search engines and that vice is called Trust Factor. One of the greatest strengths you can have in business is knowing your own weaknesses so I’d like to use this article to help us all speculate about what I consider my biggest weakness and possibly yours in SEO.

Factors of Trust Rank
Here is what factors I think the search engines possibly use to determine your trust factor.

• Age of Domain
• Keywords in domain
• Inbound links from sites that compete for the same keywords
• Age of Inbound links from sites that compete for the same keywords
• Stickiness of anchor text of inbound links
• Ratio of inbound links from sites that don’t compete for the same keywords to sites that does.
• Links from authority sites
• Stickiness of links from authority sites
• Percentage of pages on your site that are on topic with the main page.
• Outbound links that result in a page competing for your keywords.
• Site being available in the Google directory.
• Also note that I believe there are boosts available in trust factors for the size of your site as well as meeting a goal of inbound links.

Using these twelve factors lets assume that they are all presented as equal. Therefore we can derive an algorithm to determine an estimated trust factor for our own sites so we may see how we fair to a scale.

The algorithm

#Age of domain factor
If (Age_Of_Domain > 5 Years) {
+10 Trust
}
Elseif (Age_Of_Domain > 1 Year){
+5 Trust
}
Else {
+0 Trust
}

#Keywords In Domain Factor
If (Keywords_In_Domain = All Keywords) & (Keywords In Domain <5) {
+10 Trust
}
Elseif(Keywords_In_Domain > 1 ) & (Keywords In Domain <5) {
+8 Trust
}
Else{
+0 Trust

}

#Inbound Links From Competing Sites Factor
If (Inbound_Links_From_Competing_Sites >= 100){

+10 Trust

}

Else {

+Trust = Inbound_Links_From_Competing_Sites / 100

}

#Average Age Of Inbound Links From Competing Sites Factor
If (Average_Age_Of_Inbound_Links_From_Competing_Sites > 100 days) {

+10 Trust

}

Else {

+Trust = Average_Age_Of_Inbound_Links_From_Competing/100

}

Stop!

I will stop the algorithm right here because by now you’re catching my point. If anyone actually feels like making a tool of this PLEASE LET ME KNOW! Once you read the algorithm you realize the possibilities. When you are finished there is 144 points possible. If you take your number of points and divide it by 10 and remove the remainder you get a scale of 1-14. Assume that 11-14 points mean you are classified as an authority site. This leaves you with a scale of 1-10 of search engine’s trust factor in your site.

From here comes the leg work and yes I’m just as, if not more, guilty than the rest of you of not putting enough work into this as needed to be done. Taking a look at the assumed factors and putting them to scale; +10 being the best you can be or at least well above the average. +0 having none of the factor. We can at least use this to judge how much search engines trust us.

I would really like to talk to some experts on the matter and have them maybe shed some light on this subject for us. Until then I am forced to listen to who I know best………me.

I found this interesting article the other day that I thought you might like. It talks about Poison words. In the jist it is the introduction to an experiment being done about words that cause search engines to flag your site as a “low trust” site. Since I didn’t get permission to post it (I was too lazy to ask). I will just give you the link so you can check it out for yourself.

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001538.shtml

I am actually very interested in how this experiment will go. I have always made sure to filter out any words I thought was words Google wouldn’t like, but it would be nice to actually have a list.

Here is my current list:

links (for outbound anchor text)
Gambling
Viagra
poker
adult
dating
singles
high rankings

note: I do realize I put these words as text on my own site. I simply don’t care. Besides maybe I’ll start ranking for Viagra