To all my friends and readers, please be aware that due to some malicious people, there appears to be malware downloading onto computers that visit SEO ROI, or at least an attempt to that effect (some browsers seem to notify users and/or be impervious, eg Google Chrome’s notifications).

I’ve notified my hosting company and asked for their help, as well as posted a job to some freelancers I work with to see what they can do. So I’m hopeful to have this resolved by the end of the week. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

Also, thanks to everyone who dropped me a note about it – your concern and looking out for me are really appreciated.

Cheers
Gab Goldenberg
p.s. Another good reason to add my feed to your reader, ironically – that way you can read without visiting and exposing yourself to bugs and other junk.

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I’ve written some posts on A/B testing and split testing that have seen spam from people purporting to be from P*able. Personally, I find it surprising that a VC backed company would bother with poor quality blackhat tactics like such obvious comment spam, so I’m wondering if it’s not someone with an axe to grind against them. They’re not even in public beta yet though, so perhaps some marketing director there just purchased a really crummy SEO package trying to save some bucks.

Anyways, I hope someone responsible there sees this and adapts accordingly.

Update: I’ve had email followup from P’s founder and VP of Customer Development, Craig Bloem. After initially asking to speak over the phone or in person (impossible given my location overseas), he writes:

“I am not going to beat around the bush.  We had a community development manager who should have been writing more constructive thought provoking posts and engaging with the community in a positive manner. A mistake on our part that he was writing comments that could
be considered spam.  I take responsibility for that.  I appreciate you brining it to our attention and it is being fixed.”

Impressive, professional and responsible. I like it. I’ve removed the company’s name from the title of the post and from the body content so it won’t show up in search engines (or at least show up lower) and won’t cause them further reputation management issues.

For the record, I’m preserving one of the spam comments I got:

On a related note, I’m very impressed by the feature set of the shopping cart known as Pinnacle Cart. Anyone know if you can edit the shopping cart and/or split test it or MVT test the cart and other parts of their ecommerce site building system? E.g. Can I split test product or category page designs, for example? Can I MVT test the billing info page in the checkout? Etc…

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It’s a weird thing that some of the smartest affiliate marketers are also the dirtiest.

1 – Ever heard of “PPV”? Aka pay-per-view? I wish I was talking about boxing matches on TV. No, the larger ROI-centric affiliates are tending to move into “PPV” or “CPV” traffic, which many of you might know under its non-euphemism name, pop-ups.

The funny thing to me is that the dirtier you’re willing to play, the dirtier others are willing to play back. I was watching a TV show I like, and the site hosting it sells PPV traffic. Here’s an indication on traffic quality: the new ad page opens when you click play the first time. Yeah, totally what the visitor intended.

Bottom line is that PPV is the talk of the town in ROI-driven affiliate circles, and that’s a sad thing.

2 – The blackhat SEOs are tending increasingly towards the hacking side of things. In an SEO-driven version of a common scam, interruption marketing is used to make you think your website has bugs and you need to buy the virus “anti-virus” these helpful ‘warning’ providers are offering.

I’m trying to find the right reference on Ben Edelman‘s site, but it’s not surfacing.

Coincidentally, what does show up the overlap in adware makers [which serve to generate popup "traffic"] and phony anti-virus scams. All of which dovetail with Zango‘s jolly products.

3 – Annoying people and slowing their computers with your crummy software, plus hacking their sites … don’t think it doesn’t get better! Indeed it does. Phishers are going for AdWords accounts. Probably for the credit card info, firstly (the fastest cash), but I’m sure the campaign data can’t be something they’re possibly ignoring.

4 – Facebook application providers drive useless incentivized traffic. A whole lot of scaffiliates were pissed when Dennis Yu outed them on TechCrunch, but I’ve yet to hear them complaining about Farmville sending junk traffic to advertisers who will lower their payouts accordingly.

That’s what happened with cookie stuffing and other crap at eBay, until they dug into the data, booted the thieves and switched to CPC pricing based on quality. The good affiliates got paid more and the riff raff got the door.

We really, really need consumer advocacy organizations and Attorneys General to sue more of the big-time jokers for the benefit of the industry. Just a shame they can’t sue certain goons in the Kremlin who profit from this. Or, more optimistically, there are market solutions, as per Alex Rampel of TrialPay.

p.s. While I’ve almost never answered her [mostly unsolicited] emails, this interview with Emma Kupiak makes Neverblue sound like a good network to run traffic with. Almost – they still run the scammy junk like the rest of them… But at least Emma makes a good case about them being helpful to affiliates who want to be scammy! …

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…Hacked websites are really no big deal. Sit back, kick your feet up on the desk, grab your coffee and let me tell you a story about Mrs. Yona Sussnovitch and I.

Your Site Is Hacked!

I’d been busting my butt on a project for a few months now and we were slowly been getting results. I’d just recruited a new person to work on the project, and I find out – from this new person no less – that the site was looking odd…

I check it out, and see that it’s been hacked and defaced. So I dig around online…

Hacked By Some Iranian @^&%$

Turns out the hacker is some &%#^* supporter of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the so-called President of Iran. Ahmadinejad, for those who don’t know, is a man who truly deserves the label of evil, for denying the Holocaust and for advocating in favour of a nuclear genocide against Israel. This supporter of his was supposedly defacing a large number of sites to send a message to President Obama not to interfere in Iran’s affairs. As if the real, legitimately-elected President of the United States of America, was going to be intimidated by some Persian weenie with a computer.

(This is actually relevant to my story. It’s not just random politics, as I try to keep business and life separate.)

Once this happened, I hustled to contact Dreamhost, who are my hosting provider on every project I build because their support is usually really fast and good. I also asked my friends over Twitter for help. I got a few answers and tips from Jeff Richards (@jdrichards) also generously offered his help. My buddy Jeremy from Slingshot SEO, an Indianapolis Web Design and SEO firm, was also nice enough to RT it for me.

Following that, I emailed the people on the project to tell them to avoid the site for the moment being, as the hacker was apparently also interested in installing malware on people’s computers.

It also meant I had to tell people that the site was on hold for the moment, and NOT to link to it, to avoid sending visitors who’d get their computers infected.

As you can imagine, this was not very natural for me. “No, DON’T visit the site. We don’t want traffic! Don’t link to us…” Somehow, I don’t think many internet marketing professionals say that with any frequency.

Anyways, I spent a bunch of time on that as well as other business related issues that were pretty tiring. By the time I got to my salsa dance lesson this evening, I was in a crummy mood.

Things didn’t get much better during the lesson, as we started 5 minutes late (but still finished on time). To make things worse, the teacher had trouble communicating some issues, and also spent a good amount of time on issues she felt like teaching, but which I hadn’t intended to cover when I bought the private lesson. And the cherry on the sundae was confirmation (which I kind of knew) that my technique is still weak after months of [group] courses, as is my rhythm. Sigh…

So by the time I got on the bus home in the evening, I was feeling pretty sour. And that’s when I met Mrs. Yona Sussnovitch.

My friend Eli and I were standing in the back of the bus, chatting. Eli got a seat, and I was then standing until someone got up, and Mrs. Yona Sussnovitch moved into that seat so that I could have a seat too (it’s a question of how the seats are laid out). She happened to have a bag of groceries at her feet before she moved, so I picked them up and put them on my lap when I sat down, so she’d be able to keep an eye on her groceries, and so I’d have some legroom.

Mrs. Sussnovitch started talking to me, and telling me about her kids and grandkids. Many of our elderly are fairly lonely, and having an elderly grandaunt I haven’t visited in a bit, I could understand where she was coming from – not to mention I felt a bit guilty. So I decided to listen to Mrs. Sussnovitch and participate in her small talk.

As we got to Mrs. Sussnovitch’s stop, I realized her groceries were kind of heavy for a lady of her age, so I offered to lend a hand, since it would be a negligible effort and time investment for me, but really help her. And that’s where things got really interesting.

Who is Mrs. Sussnovitch?

(I know, I know. You’re thinking, “Wow Gab, it took you 700 words to get to the interesting part. Geez, way to bury the lead and write poorly…” Well, suck it up. I do more than my share of polished writing, and I’m entitled to relax a bit on my own blog.)

As we were walking and talking, Mrs. Sussnovitch pushed up her sleeve to show me the blue-ing number tattooed on her left arm. (It looked like A-986something? I didn’t have my glasses on so it was hard to read.) I’d seen one such tattoo before, so I instantly recognized what she was showing me. Mrs. Sussnovitch is a Holocaust survivor. A survivor of Auschwitz, to be precise. Two years in Auschwitz, if you can imagine how harrowing an experience that is.

(She volunteered all this info; I didn’t probe for it or anything like that.)

Like many other survivors, Mrs. Sussnovitch wondered why she had survived where others had died. She’d thought about whether it might not have been better to ‘have been reunited with her mother’ [whom the Nazis killed in Auschwitz]. Told me how she’d lost just about all her family in the camps.

At 14, she was sent home from school. When her father met with the school staff responsible to ask why, the staffer said the Nazis had sent him a letter to send home the Jewish kids. (I guesstimated Mrs. Sussnovitch’s age based on knowing that the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938.)

As Mrs. Sussnovitch put it, even though she didn’t have university schooling, her “life [experience] has been a real education.”

Aww, Poor Baby Got Hacked

Hearing Mrs. Sussnovitch’s life experience, hearing about how her husband – another Holocaust survivor who went miraculously lived through 5 years in Auschwitz – died 20 years ago at the relatively young age of 68, really put my day into perspective.

So I didn’t get to my readings for school this afternoon. At least I have the privilege of attending school. Of living in a ‘big, peaceful country’ as Mrs. Sussnovitch describer her postwar reasons for emigrating here, citing the description her father had given her of Canada before the war.

A site I’m working on got hacked? Not the end of the world. But considering who was behind it, it’s very much an appropriate occasion to be denouncing the scumbag “President” of Iran. The scumbag for whom another genocide would be only too sweet, and is even now pursuing nuclear weapons to that end. I’ll leave the political discussion at that.

(Political comments will be deleted, sorry.)

Epilogue

While I’ve felt a bit dissapointed on some of Dreamhost web hosting‘s support/billing work recently, today’s efforts really restored my faith. I just logged back into the wp-admin area as I write this post, and also found that the whole rest of the blog is back up. Additionally, Dreamhost communicated about the issue via their blog and responded to my support email pretty quickly, pointing me to the blog post by way of explanation. Good reputation management right there.

As well, as BrassCrest pointed out, Dreamhost don’t have to back up anyone’s sites or restore them according the Terms of Service

On the other hand, the fact that this hit their whole server suggests that it wasn’t a vulnerability with one particular site, but an issue with their machine. So if sites go down because of their machine, it’s only normal that they take care of getting them back up and limit downtime.

In any case, Dreamhost performed admirably, and fast, so I can’t complain. I still recommend hosting with them .

In any event, the site is back up and things were not as bad as I initially anticipated. Cheesy as it may sound, I’m living in an amazing situation with nothing really to be getting upset about.

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Actually, this post should be titled: “How did I cloak my way to lower rankings?!” Because the truth is that it was completely unintentional – as evidenced by it causing my traffic to drop like a rock.

I had been working with the awesome folks at Slingshot SEO (kudos to SEO moz for the connection) on creating a new plugin for WordPress SEO, to add functionality not existent in other plugins (including my own Internal Link Building plugin).

I also had All In One SEO Pack running on this site, and the clash between that plugin and the one we’re developing was terrible. Here’s what happened:

Notice the different URLs? So even though my pages had the links and power to rank … this accidental cloaking of all my titles killed my search traffic.

I’m not sure whether I was still ranking for all the phrases I had been (since the title obviously matters), or whether these irrelevant titles ‘just’ killed my CTR, but one way or another, my organic traffic was shot to hell.

Perhaps the funniest thing is that I didn’t realize that I was cloaking until John Mu – a Google employee – pointed it out lol! [Me: "Uhm... Oops?"]

Thanks to all the great folks, like John and Autocrat, who make the Google Webmaster Help Forum a useful place to hang out! (Kudos also to Barry from SE Roundtable for not running the story before I fixed the problem.)

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I’ve seen variations on this link building trick, but it’s the first time I see it producing additional links beyond the value you already have.

Version A of the 2-for-1 Link Building Technique

Step 1: Get a link, preferably from a site that can rank well for mid-tier or longtail keywords, solely based on its domain strength plus onpage optimization.

Step 2: Find a site that frames Google and figure out a specific query to just make your page and some non-competitive ones show up.

Step 3: Get said Google-search-results indexed. Recall that you don’t need a link to get indexed. See Andrew on indexing, which includes a technique I shared earlier.

The result? You get a second link, free. 2-for-1. In plain English, you increase the value of your links after getting them. Yet another reason PageRank is meaningless for link prospecting…

Version B of the 2-for-1 Link Building Technique

Step 1: Build a link on page X.

Step 2: Find a site that’ll frame anything. (Do you see where this is going? If you add my rss feed to your reader, you’ll certainly be one of those that do in the future…) Frame page X.

Step 3: Get page X indexed. (Then have it charged for first-degree spamming! That is, any search marketing technique that doesn’t make Google money.)

The result? You build 2 links for the effort of 1.

by hymedom As you can imagine, this is not Google approved. See your thought-enforcement-official before trying this at home, and see your priest afterwards [for confession].

Then check out my other link building posts (includes whitehat tips) to get your jollies, or my grayhat and blackhat SEO categories. Finally part, you should also add my rss feed to your reader so that you stay appraised of the latest fun times in advanced SEO.

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by jalb If you’re using captchas to protect your forms, or other forms of logic, you’re probably finding that you’re still getting spammed despite the captcha.
Well, here is a new idea for you to beat those captcha cracka bots, and some ways to implement it.

In short, we’re going to give bots different instructions than we give to humans. The bots don’t yet recognize and decode audio. Likewise they don’t yet handle video. And presumably they don’t crack every image on a page. So what you can do is record audio/video instructions or draw some instructions that the bot won’t be able to figure out – only the humans who understand you will make it through your form.

Some possible implementations of this :
1. Include several captchas on the page and indicate, via an audio recording, which one needs to be cracked. If they’re all cracked, or the wrong one is cracked, you know a bot did it.

by herzogbr
2. Include captchas, logic questions and some other security device, and indicate via an audio recording that plays after a few seconds, which puzzle needs solving.
3. Again, include captchas but make a separate custom image/animated banner pointing to a random word or string on the page. The word or string is what needs to be entered in the captcha box.

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Aaron Wall, cuz I love reading his blog and in particular when he releases new fantastic tools like this. Even better when those tools let me gloat about my call on the trend towards  data commodification.

Then he also has a video of Matt Cutts talking about web blight, and the amusing phrase comes aroun 4:50~ :

“Email spammers just want a little home on the web.”

Which conjured to me an image like this:

On a more serious note, Matt’s video is really terrific and I encourage everyone to watch it for the sake of protecting your site(s).

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I was very fortunate with my Internal Link Building plugin to have many East European folks talk about it and give me links, but this time it’s a full post I’ve got translated. Now, by the looks of it, it’s probably done by machine and spammy crap… but if it’s not this is cool. Anyone here speak Japanese?

http://web-tan.forum.impressrd.jp/e/2009/01/13/4760

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Standard conversion advice says remove navigation from the landing page (at least for lead generation landers). Standard SEO says use links. The next best thing would be to put the navigation out of sight, in the footer, and have your calls to action above that so visitors won’t use your navigation to leave your page.

But if you put the nav in the footer, it might get less search engine trust, precisely because folks don’t use footer navigation. What’s a conversion minded SEO to do? Here are 4 options to play navigation peekaboo with search engines and humans to convert your SEO traffic better. Blackhats use some forms of this, but I think I’ve also thought of original twists too.

Cloaking Update – Since this wasn’t 100% clear, cloaking is disapproved in most cases by search engines. Use this at your own risk.

Step 1. Cloak the page to search engines and show them the navigation bright and early.

Step 2. Show humans the navigation waaaaay down the page, which they mostly won’t get to because your awesome calls-to-action are getting them to click before reaching the footer.

CSS

This avoids the risks associated with cloaking, but will likely hurt your conversion rate.

Option 1 Location Rotation: Change the navigation’s position on the fly depending on the referring source. If it’s a search engine, the links are where they should be. For everyone else, the navigation is in the footer.

Option 2 Camouflage: Have the navigation blend in with the background (e.g. white on white text) or else have the navigation “collapse” (e.g. what happens when you click minimize – the minus/dash/underscore – on a regular browser window) automatically when humans visit. I’d guess that the white-on-white can be easily detected by search engines though, so I’d be a little weary with that one.

Option 3 Peekaboo: Another possibility I just thought of is to use dhtml or complicated javascript (e.g. search engine illegible) to immediately place a background-blending graphic over where the navigation would normally appear. Kind of like playing peekaboo – you put your hand in front of someone’s eyes and then other people can only see your hands.

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Trademark Productions steal other people’s content, edit it for the sake of passing through search engine duplicate content filters, and try to pass themselves off as experts you should trust? They’re stealing from Aimclear, Clickz and others. See the Sphinn thread I just linked to for more info. This is non-ethical blackhat SEO, if one can even call it that (I feel like I’m insulting the truly creative folks like this blackhat seo or this blackhat seo by including in their ranks such a lowlife).

More info through AImclear’s take on TMProductions.com.

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Stephen Shankland blogs for CNet on Digital Media, and he’s a reporter who learns fast and understands search marketing pretty well, especially for someone who’s not immersed in it 24/7 like many of us search geeks. Yesterday, he wrote a post highlighting some of the recent controversies about Google’s guideliness, featuring quotations from yours truly and Matt Inman, amongst others.

Check it out: Want top search results? Tread Carefully.

For me, this is a nice feather in the cap and certainly something to highlight on my credibility and recognition page.

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Noticed this through Sphinn, and I have to say, Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design has really hit a home run with her recent series on hyperlocal blogging.

She starts by elaborating on 5 tips. Then continues with Hyperlocal Blogging Sonoma County, CA – More SEO Copywriting Tips; Today’s SEO Copywriting Tip for the HyperLocal Blogger in Calaveras County, CA; Copywriting Tips for the Mendocino County Hyperlocal Blogger; and finally wraps it up with For the Bay Area Hyperlocal Blog – 2 Copywriting Tips!

There aren’t many seo blogs that cover original material or break new ground, but I must say that Miriam certainly has done so here! In addition, she’s recently discovered a new element of G’s universal search – local personalization. Not only that, but these personalized results are location independent!

On a related note, my friend and noted local seo expert Mike Blumenthal has picked up on the latest piece of industrial-strength Map Spam at G. While he’s reported on these before, and would not otherwise be particularly notable, this story has two twists:

• The spam is being monetized in an original way.
• It relates to STDs and HIV, and makes you wonder whether you can trust some of these places providing health care.

If you like the piece, I’ve sphunn it and encourage you to do the same. The nofollow is to avoid that piece outranking the original, fyi.

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While I’m usually not the one to swear on a professional blog, there are exceptional occasions where it’s appropriate, and this is one of them. I’m waaaaaay overdue for a links post, and there are so many quality ones here, that I had to use my affiliate friend‘s expression.

Affiliate

First of all, one of the most brilliant minds in affiliate and search marketing, Diorex, has started his blog up again. Here’s a little jewel of a commentary that I’ll bet 99% of the search community missed on the introduction of the Google Affiliate Network and why you need to kill off your use of Google Analytics. First to sphinn it gets a hot story!

Diorex also pointed me to this bit by PunditX on making serious bank from Google Pack referrals. Impressive, and it shows how much work is required to succeed for real with this stuf..

I need to give a hat tip to Smaxor for sharing that Diorex was back up (Smaxor used to have his old posts hosted on his blog when Diorex’s blog turned the lights off). He’s also shared a little goody about Namecheap offering free SSL certificates with new domain registrations; it’s good for a limited time so get yours now! I’ve already got about a half dozen .

To give you an idea of how valuable that is, Godaddy sells their Turbo SSL for 24.99/year or 26.99 a year. It’s an acquisition strategy, and you better believe it’s working. I’m shifting my purchasing activity to Namecheap from Godaddy.

While nowhere near being on the level of the above mentioned elite marketers, I did come up with an original idea in a guest post for Jordan Kasteler on how to discover and nail your loose-lipped Affiliate Managers. It might get a few AMs fired if you use the technique and blog about it, but then, why were they AMs to begin with?

http://roguedomainer.com/ is a wonderful blog on search, affiliate marketing, and internet marketing generally (not in the wannabe “I’m gonna rank for this term despite only offering seo” sense, but the real deal). Know about being prepared?

AffSpy is now in public beta. Go sign up – it’s free !

Social

Perhaps you don’t know about being prepared, but did you know that affiliate marketing and social marketing can coincide? Have a look at the rogue’s guide to Yahoo Answers. Be prepared for some social engineering!

Personally, however, I think this is where people can genuinely claim that blackhats are unethical – they’re tricking folks into buying their products. I’ve said several times in the past that SE guidelines aren’t a moral code, but this has nothing to do with SE guidelines.

As far as being a thought leader and appealing to people’s higher senses, Leo Babauta does it the best. See this post uncopyrighting his stuff and letting others reproduce it anywhere free. Plus he’s aware of the potential SEO ramifications. Imho, he knows that others will give him credit and the good will will get him lots more links than if he just blogged regularly. Sheer genius.

While we’re on the topic of being a thought leader, I love when others lead the way down the wrong path so that you can learn from their mistakes and not screw up like that. It’s a sad story, but you must read this post-mortem on a failed vertical search / information retrieval company. Hat tip to my friend Ben Yoskovitz’s Twitter.

Did you know that email marketing is used for “customer relations management”? You probably did if you’re in enterprise marketing, but I didn’t. Sounds a lot like social to me, and in fact Sitepoint’s email marketing kit – a great investment I’ve recently made – explains some tips for that. In that spirit, I share with you 10 tips for better sign-up forms.

Why care about email? To build your distribution network for better content-based link building, right?

Socialize your lead gen, say Ion Interactive. An interesting twist on improving your whitepaper-based efforts!

Link Building

My friend Ann has either been analyzing the blackhat side of search or just getting really bright n creative on her own, but this post on managing social profiles, and the useful chart she includes, is a must read.

She’s been on a roll with some awesome posts lately, and another one is this wonderful, well-researched and presented ultimate seo tools guide. I’ve bookmarked it and so should you!

(On a related note, am I the only one who didn’t know that the Xs in the hub finder tool link to the particular pages a link is from, and that those show up in exports to CSV? I felt like such a moron when I found out, having wasted countless hours trying to discover the context of some links…)

SEO CO did a study on how the MSM links out / does not link out.

Why your linking tests suck – You don’t have to agree with it, and you can take the drama with a grain of salt, but reading this will definitely make you a brighter SEO.

Lyndon Antcliff shares some linkbait ideas. (Aside: I shared some linkbait ideas earlier, link here if you missed them.)
On the whole, I found them interesting, but wasn’t crazy about some of it:

Re: Payday loans linkbait – “If you can get pro and anti groups discussing on the same page you have hit payday gold.” Lyndon recognizes that these loans abuse people … and then [tacitly] suggests it’s a niche worth pursuing. Fake linkbait doesn’t hurt anyone, and I was actually cool with the kid-gets-hookers-plays-videogames story and honestly entertained. But working in a niche like that is something I find distasteful, to keep it in polite terms.

Roger “Martini Buster” Montti explains how India can work for you as far as link building goes.

Seth Godin This category needs to have its own post.

Miscellaneous

Google-knol-is-behaviorally-targeting-ranking-well

12 Shopping Cart Abandonment Mistakes via Palmer Web Marketing

SEO vs Social Media: Take the traffic quality test. Courtesy of James Duthie of Online Marketing Banter, some original research! Nicely done James. Though it could have been better had the social media traffic considered been niche-related vs general. My Sphinn traffic bounces much less than SU traffic, for instance.

Joost deValk gives us an absolutely wonderful, end-to-end resource on getting that pesky WordPress search working properly. I can’t wait to implement and report back!

For my Russian readers, Proother translated the Internal Link Building plugin – cool stuff guys! Anyone who wants to create another foreign-language version is more than welcome to it! I’m happy to acknowledge your work here and let my readers know. You’ll be responsible for updating as I update though, fyi.

How to turn lurkers into posters is a wonderful bit on creating and managing online communities. Also from Sitepoint, this time from the “iFroggy” network, comes this piece on managing violations of your community’s guidelines and documenting them.

If that’s your bag, you’ll probably like this forum for Community Admins, and this WSJ article addressing why many online communities fail and iFroggy network owner Pat O’Keefe’s comment on it.

Getting more into the techie side of stuff? Learn how to set up your own cron jobs (scripts run automatically on a schedule, with no need to turn them on/off) easily.

Are you getting your arse handed to you by your channel “partners”? John Andrews spills the beans on why small + local businesses need to think twice before partnering with Marchex, and why you need to be careful not to pay for others to develop footholds in your revenue streams.

This phone screening question for job candidates is golden.

Some of you know that amongst the seo services I offer are website valuing and buying. Well ebizvaluations have created a tool I long wanted to create myself: a closed-deal scraper / aggregator / valuator.

The idea is to collect the data in the market that similar sites have sold for and then appraise your site accordingly. I’ve seen that technique work extremely accurately at NamePros, and if this tool can be effective, I’ll be quite impressed.

On a related note, one of the first pieces of linkbait I designed was a suite of site appraisal tools at Website Auction Hub. Unfortunately the site’s owner broke off communication with me at one point and I had to stop working with them before we got to promoting the tools. It’s been over 2 years now, and I’d love to hear feedback from any of you who might use the tools. I honestly don’t think they’ll be as good as ebizvaluations though, at least based on the principles of their tool.

An interesting evolution in spam vs anti-spam, where the bad guys win, unfortunately. Old but worth reading.

A real spammer selling SEO scams.

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/07/15/rss-is-about-content-not-presentation/
A mini case study by the good folks at RKG.

Ideas on search and beyond – because building your brain is as important as building the bank account.

Google: the mother of antitrust battles?

The Five Big Mistakes That Changed My Life and How I Moved Past Them – SmartNow.com

Malwebolence – The World of Web Trolling

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The following has been sitting in my comment queue:

The purpose, imvho, is to find blogs with poor comment moderation practices. The goal of this comment spam isn’t linkbuilding directly – it’s finding linkspam victims to increase the conversion rate when the real spam gets dropped.

The concatenated spammer’s name is unique; Google’s index doesn’t have the s**b**g**** string in it anywhere. Likewise if you try searching for any series of words left in the comments. Random sites with one or more of the words show up, but nothing with any of the phrases you might make from that, and certainly not the whole thing. And Mashable is a reputable site, which happens to employ my friend and social media expert Tamar.

So how is this useful if the spammer isn’t repeatedly using the same ‘name’ or words in the comments? They can’t search for say s**b**g**** and find the sites they spammed, right?

My guess is that it all goes into a database. The strings are then pulled from the database by a program and searched for to see if the comment spam was succesful. If not, that site is eliminated from the list. If so, it’s added to a queue for additional spamming.

There may also be a variable to hit better ranking sites a few times to try and get through the automated filters if any and test the human admins; this was not the sole randomized comment spam I got. Wonder what XMCP, Matt, Nick, Nop, Rogue, Rob and the Dinkster might have to say about the technique?

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There are about 2.5 million executable files in Google’s index:
“Results 1 – 10 of about 2,470,000 for filetype:exe” – http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Aexe.

That’s pretty interesting, considering how these can be used for trojan viruses and other dirty work. Of course, not all .exe files are dirty, but this is pretty significant. In addition, there’ve recently been posts in the SEO community about how this type of file won’t rank / will be less trusted.

Kudos to Pete Wailes’ post for the filetype query inspiration:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-google-search-parameters

BTW, Pete’s comments are some of the most value added at SEOmoz, and his contributions are pretty sweet too. Kudos to this excellent online marketing services provider for sharing his knowledge!

If I had time, I’d dig around the top 100 results for that file extension query, see what they’re trying to rank for and whether there’s any patterns. That would be a fascinating research piece.

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See here for how to get links from Google by spamming:

In Google’s defense, looking at the source code those links appear to be generated clientside – I couldn’t find the string ‘vox’ (as in searchenginemarketingvox.com) in the page’s source code. So the links don’t count for SEO (yes, yes it’s anticlimactic, I know). Still funny that 3 spammers are getting links that human visitors can follow from an official Google blog. Hmm, maybe the Gmail team are part of a bad neighbourhood and they’re trying to hide it…

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One of my favourite things to do when browsing the web is take screenshots of interesting things I notice, particularly in the SERPs, but also on other sites. It’s an easier way of taking notes and learning from others. Featured below are some sites you know, like DoshDosh, Treatment Search, Sphinn and others.

There’s also the genuinely stupid Stupid.com, some much more intelligent Sphinn spammers who’ve carefully observed what tips us off to spam, and more. In the interest of load times, I’ve linked to some pictures rather than post them here. Enjoy!

Keywords and Search Demand/Volume per DoshDosh

I thought that taking a historical look at Maki’s most viewed posts would give us an idea what’s popular with the search engines, and what gets more transient attention such as social media love or being on the front page of his blog. Another possible explanation is that the effect of showing most viewed posts is kind of self-reinforcing, as more people view the posts by clicking the sidebar links.

Here’s a May 13 2008 screenshot:

Here’s another screenshot taken slightly over a week earlier.

What I pick up on is that Maki’s adsense posts are very popular. The search volume for them is probably greater than for social media terms.

If you find Maki interesting, you’ll probably be interested in this series of screenshots on…

Sphinn spam.

Kombucha tea bags and affiliate marketing on gas offers… lame! No avatars, no subtlety in the titles, just plain volume. I’m so tired of this crap. On a more humorous note, consider the irony of this guy’s Sphinn submission of domaining advice.

In the above Webkinz toys picture, the spammer had a short title, and a single vote. These probably attracted attention to his post as (i) being different from average Sphinn material and (ii) likely spam. But he also had an avatar and used a trusted domain (from which I exclude the subdomain, obviously), which make people speed over the submission and not notice the spam.

Finally, we get to the more sophisticated spammers.

They’re getting 2 votes to avoid being lumped with the 1 vote churn and burn spam submissions. They’re also using avatars. In particular, the Bangkok hospital one blends in with Sphinn’s dark green color scheme without looking like the newbie/spammer default green avatar.

There’s also some manual spam submissions. I’d bet that the Iron Man submission was done by a human because it goes to a legitimate news site. Probably a spammy SEO/webmaster who sold search marketing services to naive clients. Note also the avatar aimed at not being categorized with the rest of the spam. That one almost got by me because the title is typical length for Sphinn and there’s an avatar…Just looked like a meh submission (becaues of the single vote) by a newb who was making an effort to do well on Sphinn, until I read the headline.

Then finally there’s the really dirty affiliate free get-rich-quick-on-clickbank-and-adwords-ebook squeeze page aiming to get people’s emails. The only subtlety was making the title sound like it could be a review (e.g. inspire reasonable doubt in would-be spam reporters) and getting a vote.

Blogged.com Widgetbait Spam and other miscellaneous spam, like Submit Express’ link trading…

I blogged it earlier, and while browsing around, I found out that their “use this badge to show off your great rating” spam has met with some success.

Just before changing the topic, I’d like to share some other spam, including some link exchange spam by Submit Express, who happen to rank pretty well for SEO terms.

PPC

So with all these people spamming to rank for keywords, you’d think the people spending money (rather than time/server resources) for traffic would be careful. Turns out that buying ads for a page that’s gone/doesn’t exist is more common than you think.

Bupa International was advertising on my buddy Rishi Lakhani’s Treatment Search.

Unfortunately for Bupa, their PPC person/agency was sending traffic to this page that tells you the page you requested is unavailable.

You’d think it was an isolated incident. Stupid.com’s stupid PPC agency brought me to this page when I clicked an ad of theirs:

Sticking with the theme of stupidity in pay-per-click advertising, I’ve seen this ad to “increase Your Page Rank” on Search Engine Land. What happened to knowing your audience?

Another thing of interest were Israeli PPC ads I saw, in two languages and with two character sets.

Similarly, this is what Lyndon Antcliff’s Cornwall SEO organic site listing looked like to Israelis, back when it got hacked. The blue line of Hebrew text under Cornwallseo.com reads: this website might cause damage to your computer.

Furthere in the topic of original PPC ads is this one using a URL shortening service!

This clever fellow is succesfully buying two spots in the PPC results. Can you tell it’s converting well for him?

After discussing Google’s Expanded Broad Match with Andrew Goodman and Amy Konefal, I’ve got some ‘craptastic relevance due to Google’s Expanded Broad Match’ screenshots to share.

First, here’s a picture of GoToMyPC, Google and Goofbay showing up for a copywriting keyword. There’s actually more irrelevant ads than relevant ones – quality score my eye !

Then I did this search and poor Microsoft (yes, that’s an oxymoron) saw Google taking its money for “free search engine submission software.”

That ad came up when I tried to see if Google Expanded Broad Match would make this ad for Engine Land Inc (motors, not SEL) show up again.

Unusual Reputation Management Cases

Well, it appears that besides Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, Hermione Granger has a taste for stronger flavours. The caveat is that the beer drinking shot may have been photoshopped. What’s interesting here is that you need to do image SEO for reputation management here, and that not only do you need to deal with the universal SERPs but also the Image SERPs.

For those people who steal content, wouldn’t you like to know that the DMCA can get you booted from the SERPs and give you reputation management problems?

Feeds, IP Addresses and Other Miscellaneous Items Ranking in SERPs

Shawn Collins’ feed is showig up rather than his actual blog post. Sounds like a case for nofollow… And Shawn, if you’re reading this, I’d be happy to do SEO for Affiliate Tip .

Finally, one strange pic of an IP ranking for “Honda Civic.”

Odd.

I’ve got other cool pics, so check out my Flickr photostream (nofollow cuz Flickr nofollows outbound links).

You might find some retargeting after I tried booking a stay for SMX Advanced (I got accepted to speak on the Site Buying panel). Copeac’s also doing intelligent stuff with their email marketing to get inactive affiliates moving. Our national news network in Canada, CBC, is shamefully incompetent and biased in nearly all its journalistic endeavours, but at least they know to track RSS referrals.

And if you dig really deep, past my screenshots, I did some paid drink spam arrests (inspiration came from Chris Hooley’s Drinkbait). Arrestees included notably Miguel Salcido and Michael Gray, (eVisbility and Wolf Howl) as well as Sugarrae (Sugarrae), Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim), Rob Kerry (Evil Green Monkey), and Mike McDonald (Web Pro News).

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At the Domain Roundtable, Matt Cutts said that Google will cut down any sites that get sold back to zero ranking value. So after a site has built up SEO strength for a few years, the asset could be worthless on the search market because Google – which controls the overwhelming majority of North American and most Western search – makes the rules.

This is clearly unfair to webmasters. Not to mention that the Fortune 500 are again on a different playing field, because their purchases are just mergers and acquisitions, not “site purchases”…

Update: Apparently this treatment is reserved for sites that also change topics. The technique thus remains useful, but obviously the problem it resolves is narrowed to particular situations. Hat tip to Gustavo Cardial for pointing out the error.

Lady Justice, blindfolded with scales and sword by California Criminal Defense Lawyer Rob Miller.

In an effort to balance out the scales, I’m sharing a legal technique called “the trust.” My hope is that it will enable webmasters to buy sites and sell them without fear that their hard SEO work will go to naught.

Disclaimer: As I’m just a law student and not a lawyer, let alone an expert on trusts, please only take this as information, not legal advice, and please correct any errors you find.

What is a trust?

Trusts evolved through the [feudal] tax-evasion efforts of commoners and low-level knights in the Middle Ages. Before running off to rape and pillage in the Crusades, a person (“A”) would leave their property with a trusted friend (B) – who thus acquired legal title through an inter-vivos transfer – to the use of A’s family or kids.

(The reason this was tax-evasion was that higher up lords or the King would perceive taxes if property was transferred in a will. By transferring inter-vivos, you had no taxes to pay.)

Problems arose where the “trusted” friend tried to claim the property for his own use rather than be its custodian for A’s family. The courts of equity resolved them by holding that the “cestui que trust” (today known as the trustee) was bound to hold the property for the benefit of A’s family. A’s family thus had what is known as “beneficial title.”

The difference between beneficial title and legal title is that the former was created and enforced by the courts of equity (whose jurisdiction was more about morality) while the latter was enforced by the courts of common law. Today both courts are merged. But for reasons of history and lawyers having fun finding new uses for outdated legal mechanisms, the trust (the “use” ‘s modern cousin) is still around.

So the trust is by definition a devise of property to another party for the benefit of a third party. The devise, aka settlement, is made by the settlor (A). The person receiving the property is known as the trustee (B), and he holds legal title. B holds the property in trust for C, the third party designated by the settlor. C has the beneficial title and is thus known as the beneficiary. (A is left with nothing, though if a court finds that the trust “failed,” the property will usually return to him.)

Note: You can have trusts created by wills nowadays. It need not be an inter-vivos transfer. Which makes sense, since we no longer have the feudal tax system.

Why should webmasters who want to buy or sell websites care?

The reason I shared the history lesson was to make clear the distinction between legal and beneficial title. By taking advantage of that distinction, webmasters should be able to write contracts that transfer control of a site without getting it shot down by Google.

In essence, the contract simply states that the site’s seller is creating a trust in favour of the buyer, with the seller as trustee. The property in question would be specified as being the website.

The Result of Using a Trust?

The Whois record for the site’s domain will read that the property is still owned by the site’s seller, since he as trustee retains legal title. However, the beneficial ownership of the property passes to the purchaser. Thus Google has no way of knowing that the site was sold, afaik (if you know of other methods beyond whois, please say so in the comments.

Caveats On This Technique

You need to make sure that you draft the trust document very precisely. In particular, you need to show the three certainties:

• Certainty of intent [on the part of the settlor] to create a trust. If he meant it as a gift, lease, power of appointment etc. you might have trouble. Best to use the word “trust.” Obvious, but you’d be obvious how many people screw that up.
• Certainty of the subject-matter of the trust, i.e. the property. Is it just the domain? Hosting too? The backend? vBulletin licenses? Take an inventory of everything and specify it in the trust instrument (and in the contract specifying that you’re to have this trust created). Then make a clause that if you forgot anything, your intent was to include all things reasonably required for the site’s operation in the subject matter.
• Certainty of objects, i.e. the beneficiaries. Who exactly is getting the property? You? Your business partner? Your company? Note: If it’s your company, it had better be incorporated or else you get into really grey areas of the law. Good for your lawyer’s billings, not so good for you.

Penalty clauses for breach of the trust on the part of the trustee should be included and heavy, but not so harsh that a court would overturn them as unconscionable. This is tricky, and I know very little about these, so again, consult a real lawyer for advice.

If you’re buying a site without knowing the owner other than online, be aware that you run the risk of them “selling” the site a second time. As beneficial owner, you can sue the new purchaser to ‘trace’ your property and get it back, though you might have problems if they purchased it in good faith. Of course if it gets to this point, the site will have been sniped by Google and so you’re better off suing the trustee/seller for damages, since the rankings will be gone. This is probably the biggest problem I can see with the whole deal, since on paper (i.e. the Whois record for legal title), the seller still owns the property.

Finally, the last caveat is that if Google’s legal department gets jerky, they might argue that whois represents legal and beneficial title. It’s a weak argument, imho, but it’s there. And judges mostly don’t get the web (with some exceptions), so there you go… Rule #1 in law is avoid litigation.

Conclusions on Using Trusts to Beat Google’s Domain Demolitions

Whoa! Breaking Google’s rules can be legal and ethical? Shocking I know . More interestingly, I’m sure that jurists with more knowledge than me could find other areas of application for legal mechanisms in search (beyond trademarks). Incidentally, I think I’ve found an application for another legal fiction, and I’ll be blogging about it as the second part of this two-part “law and search marketing” series.

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I’d like to highlight that while I haven’t yet studied the civil law’s parallel mechanism, “la fiducie,” my understanding is that it should work the same way. After all, as you might have derived from the name, a “fiducie” is where property is held by a “fiduciaire” (French for fiduciary) for the benefit of another party. And trustees owe fiduciary obligations to beneficiaries, like website purchasers…

Update: As my presentation at SMX Advanced on the site buying panel was well received, and this is something I have an interest in, I now offer site buying services and consulting.

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You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. As I recently wrote about measuring and tracking social media, I thought this would be of interest:

Diorex – How to Measure a Niche Post

Communities are a growing interest of mine, and if business works out so that I can fund the project properly, I’ll be launching a forum (no, not an SEO forum) eventually. That’s a big if, and mostly in the wishful thinking stage for now, though. Doesn’t mean a guy can’t read up, though, right?

SBM Unleashed: Building a Community

How to Build Community on Your Blog

I’ve always said that building relationships is the best work you can do for linkbuilding. It’s vindicating to see that people I highly respect are saying the same thing. The popular technique at the moment seems to be linking out, as Todd Malicoat suggested in our SMX West interview.

Link Building & Development: Tune in, Turn on, Link Out

Afraid to Link Out? Think Again

The Role of Outbound Links

As usual, my friends have some great contributions to make:

7 CSS Tricks For Better SEO (SEO 2.o – Tad Chef)

The Secret SEM Sued for TM Violations and Breach of Fiduciary Duty (SEOmoz – Sarah Bird)

Google follows nofollowed links in seomoz comments (SEOmoz Jane Copland)

Let’s Talk Landing Pages (SEOmoz Rebecca Kelley feat. Closed Loop Marketing’s Sandy Niehaus and Lance Loveday)

Andrew Goodman (Page Zero) and Amy Konefal (Closed Loop Marketing) : interview on AdWords Expanded Broad Match

Slightly Shady SEO shares 7 Tips for Paranoid SEOs to Mask Their Intentions features a beautiful tip on linkbuying that is, imho, even sweeter than the disguising text links ads as AdSense trick.

Shady’s my favourite blackhat SEO, and I highly recommend subscribing to his feed (that’s a nofollowed link because the link goes to Feedburner, which is a Google property. It’s not nofollowed to try and play stupid games and ‘endorse him but not endorse him’ or what not).

And for you great folks who’ve had the patience to make it all the way here, I’ve reserved what is perhaps one of my favourite recent links from the awesome people at 10e20: How to Get Publicity in Major Magazines and Newspapers | 10e20 Blog

John Andrews is a casual email acquaintance, but we’re on friendly terms and this features some golden nuggets, so: What Matt Cutts Said at Domain RoundTable 2008 – John Andrews – johnon.com

Some social media stories never hurt, do they? Some of this is original thought, some more for the beginners reading this. It’s labelled accordingly so no one will get confused.

What happens when you apply TV to Social Networking

16 Great Ways To Approach Social Media Marketing – A Beginner’s Guide

Prove it or lose it: how social proof can kill or fill your blog

(The above is by my buddy Jon Rognerud, yet another great SMX networking contact. Which just goes to show what I said above, about relationship building being the best form of linkbuilding. I also recommend you check out his blog, and in particular this post which dissects what percentage of your audience will typically be interested in what type of material.)

In the big thinking category, we have the following non-search items (but if you can think creatively, these definitely apply to search, too).

Just say “NO” to crap!

Playing A Round; Life Lessons in 18 Holes of Golf

My Final Post: Top 9 Lessons In Awesomeness

55 Monumental Ways To Enjoy Life’s Greatest Pleasures

When it comes to copywriting, I think I’ve found the holy grail. Sorry Brian, but I need harder drugs (I do love Magnetic Headlines though!). Drumroll please…

Clayton Makepeace’s Copywriting/Direct Marketing site, The Total Package. See his

Interviews with Top Copywriters

Conversation with the Legendary Copywriter Gary Bencivenga Part I

There’s also some cool things I found indirectly through there, such as this copywriter’s lead gen site a la SEOmoz services marketplace. Copywriter Catalog | Find Freelance Copywriters

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