With the new trend of article sharing there has been raised concerns about duplicate content penalties.  So now that everyone is in a fuss about whether or not to use widely spread articles on article submission sites fears begin to rise as to how search engines will react to this. Well, consider this, the author probably submitted the article to a 100+ article directories. Plus, we’ll assume the article was actually used by a good 10 websites a month. By end of a Google update(3 or so months) thats 130 sites that have the exact same article as you do on your website.

This is bad for several reasons.

1) Your site stands much smaller chances of ranking for small phrases and keyword that aren’t used much, but bring good traffic simply because many articles = lots of potential phrases for people to search for. No matter how small the phrase that fits your article you still have 130 sites competing for it.

2) Possible duplicate content penalties. These are a gray area. None of the research I found has been able to accurately explain if or how search engines penalize a site for having the exact same content as another site.

3) You have to link to the authors site and sometimes the article directory you received it from. Search engines then know you are not the original author and they rank the article directories high and the author’s site highest. You get lost in the middle.

Question of the day: How do we get expert content that is truly fresh and not going to be used on any other sites?

This is so stupidly obvious I can’t believe it’s not already ragingly popular. Ask an expert! Can’t find one? Try using chatrooms like IRC. It’s easy to find a chatroom on almost any subject, and chances are if there are people in it. Not only are they bored, but they truly enjoy talking about the subject at hand. Ask them a long pointed question, that will induce a rant. I’ll give an example.  What dogs are most impressive in a dog show and why? A question of this manner will induce a huge rant and probably a debate. With a little editing and cleaning up you have yourself an unique expert article on subject.

This tactic is advantageous for several reasons.

1) The content is completely unique. You will be the first to have it. Chat room content generally doesn’t get posted on websites or forums. No one will have content like this.

2) With a little fact checking it will be useful and reliable content for your visitors. This helps if you already know a little bit about your field.

3) It’s MUCH easier than writing your own articles.

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So this sounds impossible right? Well it’s definitely possible it’s just really sneaky and underhanded. However to be clear, this technique involves your competitors WILLINGLY linking to you. This is a natural link and although a underhanded technique it is completely white hat.

First you will need some tools

1) A quality link exchange script (not a link exchange directory script). I suggest you use PHP Link Manager because it does a great job of reading your links on their pages without them having to be absolutely perfect. You will also need some knowledge of PHP because you will need to modify this script.

2) A proxy hitter that allows multiple domains. I would suggest you use one called Stealth Advertiser. Now let me get one thing straight. This Stealth Advertiser program is a WORTHLESS program that does not deliver on it’s promise of “Millions of visitors.” Don’t use it for its intended purpose! I will not give a link to the company that makes it because they are a bogus company. So if you are actually interested, read the readme file. Until then, we are going to use the program in a little more ingenious way to get what we want.

Step 1-Install the link exchange script somewhere on your site. Edit the code so towards the top it says something like this:

Random MYTOPIC Site

Link To Some Site

Then get the script to rotate through a few sites you’ve hand selected that are related to your site’s topic. No more than 10. Then below that; where the script displays the link exchanges put the heading as

Permanent MYTOPIC Links

Link 1

Link 2

etc….you get the idea

Then below that put the form they will use to add their site to the permanent links portion. This script MUST force them to already have a link to your site on theirs before they may submit their link. Otherwise the affect is lost.

Step 2– Install Stealth Advertiser and put in the url to the link exchange page you’ve just created as the referring url 61 or so times. Then remove all items from the list and click Add By Search. This will allow you to pull a HUGE list of sites that are directly your competitors in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Then add another site or something you own so you can test to make sure it’s really working.

Step 3– Click Start and let it finish. This will take several hours depending on how many competitors you have.What will happen?

This will pull your competitors website’s 61 or so times and make it look like it’s coming from your links page. When they view their stats they will see a large amount of visitors coming from your site to theirs. They will follow the link and see your links page. They will not see themselves on the Permanent Links section and will assume that all the traffic came from the random rotation. Even if they are a big site and normally have a no linking policy, I guarantee you this. The first thought that will go through their head will be “I gotta get on that permanent links section.” When they read the form and it requires them to have a link back they will decide that it is worth it and they will link to you.

This is a VERY effective technique. In fact, from my experience this works a hundred times better than personally emailing every one of your competitors. If you have a lot of competitors and/or a lot of bit keywords you compete for this will benefit you the most. You can gain a couple hundred to a thousand RELEVANT links within a day or two.

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1,200+ high quality one way links with no strings attached.

Am I kidding? Nope.

For those of you who don’t know; software is where it’s at. If you have a piece of software and a high quality submission software such as Promosoft (the best one) or Robosoft (Tedious, but works VERY well) you can instantly gain enough links to ANY page to give you an instant Page Rank of at least 5. Trust me, this is one of my most guarded secrets, and now I’m spilling it to you. You can turn almost any website into a piece of software and submit it to thousands of software sites that will not only post a full description and a link, but give you a dedicated page to your software product that usually pulls an average of PR3, which when combined with the hundreds of other one way links will almost guarantee you a Page Rank of 5.This raises an instant question. How do I get a piece of software to promote on my site? Turn your entire site, or content portions of your site into an executable with an installer. You can do this easily by searching on your favorite search engine for “HTML to EXE converters. ”

This will give you several advantages:

1) In my experience it will give you at least 1,200+ one way, high quality links.

2) Depending on your market, these sites can send you hundreds of their own visitors a day to your site!

3) A large portion of those visitors will actually download your software. Which allows you to place a permanent bookmark to your site on their browser(don’t put Adware. Just a bookmark. You don’t want to piss off your own visitors). Plus they get a always accessible link to your site and your content on their desktop/start menu.

Note: I give you this information out of confidence. DO NOT ABUSE IT OR YOU WILL LOSE IT! If everyone starts spamming software directories, we all lose. Use this only for high quality sites, and make sure the people who download your software will benefit highly from actually installing your software. Also, for god’s sake DON’T plague their computers with crap you know they don’t want. Make them happy and they will keep your software/bookmark on their computer for many years to come; generating you residual visitors for as long as your site stands.

If you like this article please place a link to http://www.BlueHatSEO.com on your site so more people like you may benefit from these techniques.

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For those of you who haven’t read the rivetingly boring but useful article on how pagerank works by Ian Rogers. You are missing out, or possibly have a girlfriend. Either way I suggest at least once in your career…fold up your girlfriend, stuff her in your front pocket and give it a good thorough reading. It gives some great insight on how Google calculates your page rank. How is this useful? It’s not. Except that you learn that ALL links to a single page affect your page rank including those inside your own site. So whats the best way to organize your site so you can gain the most page rank to your main page? The structure is simple and I’ll explain it to you, but first understand that the solution isn’t practical. If you organize your site this way your visitors will click on the red X faster than their Google toolbar can inform them how “important” your site is. Lets first look at what Google’s algorithm considers to be the perfect site, and then we’ll figure out a way around it.

Yes I rock at MS Paint. Quit denyin my skills biznatch!

For those of you who took my advice and read the article you will quickly understand the math behind why this model works the best. Unfortunately, if you have a 100 page site, it will take your visitors the rest of their lives to find the article they were looking for this way. So lets look at an alternative.

With this method each page will theoretically push one third of one third of it’s 1 page rank. Did this make sense? That means each page you add on to this structure gives your main page approximately 0.11 page rank points. So I suggest you try this tried and true method of creating a “mini articles directory.” Place as many articles that relate to your main topic(this is very important, you don’t want your site to be off topic) as you can in this structure. Then create a page that links to all the articles. Somewhere on your site(on a low level PR page) create the first page of the articles directory. Then create a way for visitors to submit their articles.

This creates several advantages:

1) Your site has useful articles on your subject. Consistently gaining in relevant content is always smiled upon by the search engines.

2) More entry points to your site that contain easy to find links to your main page

3) You get to advertise yourself to other webmasters as an article post site(you will get a few inbound links for this) .

4) For every article submitted your main page gains approximately 0.11 of a page rank point. Note: I say approximately because Google uses a delimiter in their equation and there is no way of telling for sure what it is at the current moment. Either way, you can use this technique to your hearts content. Search engines will love you for it, and you can boost your page rank in a method that is much more reliable than seeking inbound links.

Like all methods and techniques in SEO don’t rely 100% on one single method. Juxtapose this method with your current for a little extra boost above your competition.

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Although it’s rarely talked about it’s no secret that link spammers are increasingly pushing the limits on third site scraper pages in hopes of pushing those of us with legitimate sites down. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the practice; black hat seo companies are buying hundreds of domain names, putting them on separate servers and putting up scripts that read related keywords to a topic and write pages for those keywords that contain links to their sites. These companies are spamming thousands of pages hoping to gain thousands of links. In order to keep those pages from being detected as spam their scripts search Google for each individual word and link to the sites on the top 10 as well.

I personally believe the top search engines are well aware of this practice and are working hard to impliment algorythms to deaden their affects on a site’s rank. For instance, in the latest update Google has appeared to lessen the affects of multiple links to one site on the same domain. This, for the moment, seems to be the best way to control this aspect of spamming. They can’t after all punish any site for an inbound link, because that would open a whole can of worms with sabatoge.

I would like to offer those of you with legitimate sites and linking popularity practices the way to not only beat these spammers, but get thousands of them working for you by showing you my system for beating them and keeping me in the top 10 and them in the bottom 100. The trick these spammers use is quantity, they buy hundreds of domain names and hosting accounts on hundreds of servers. This costs them a lot of money, but in the end it’s worth it to them because they gain thousands of one way links.

So how do you beat someone with all this money to spend on spam promotion? Get them to spend that money promoting you. If you can get them to promote you as well as themselves then by all theory you come out equal with them. You get thousands of other spammers to do the same thing, they end up all equal, and you end up above all of them.

First lets look at an examplehttp://www.toshibatvs.com/wide-screen-tv.htmlas you can see this domain is setup for the phrase “Toshiba Tvs.” Which is then broken down to hundreds of small related phrases like “wide screen tv.” This particular page on the bottom left links to the top 6 sites that rank for that phrase in google. Mine is one of them. I do not own this spam site, they just link to me to look legitimate, so the link to their site will look legitimate as well.

Here’s how you do itUse their own tools. These scripts use overture keyword tool and google keyword suggestions to find thousands of small competition words for their spam sites to be based on. Look for your main keywords and let the tools break down to much smaller low competition phrases. If you have a legitimate site you can easily rank for many of these phrases simply by putting them somewhere in your site. The first thing I did was make a HUGE list of these phrases, all of which have very low competition. I painstakingly went through the whole list and took out all the ones that in no way pertain to my site. I then took all the remaining ones and scanned my site for those phrases. Anytime one of those phrases would not show up in one of my pages I found an appropriate spot for it that fits my content and I put it in. Boom! your now top 10. This won’t bring you much traffic, it helps, but not a whole lot of good will come from ranking for these thousands of keywords. Except for the fact of course that anytime some spammers script pulls those same keywords from a search using a bigger more competative phrase, you now get a link on their spam page. They spend the money for the domain, they spend the money for the servers and the hosting. They even put in the time to promote inbound links to their spam pages. Your the one that benefits equally from it. The great thing is, once you do this, you’ll instantly start seeing a couple spammers with their hundreds of spam sites linking to you, then more and more and more. This pushes the page their linking to into the top position they they get stuck competiting amongst themselves at the bottom 100. They get a couple thousand links, you get tens of thousands of links. The more spammers that come out of the wood work in hopes of conqueoring your keyword, the more you win.

I have recently starting putting this practice into many of my sites and most of them have skyrocketed above their black hat competitors in the serps for all keywords and high competition keywords. Remember, black hat seo companies will always be coming up with ways to beat the search engines. They may benefit for the short run but they always lose in the end. I stick by one rule of thumb that has always created success for me, “Don’t try to beat the search engines, you will always lose. Focus on beating the people beating the search engines because they will always lose.”

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