Jon Cooper writes about an interesting negative SEO tactic: fake link removal requests. I have particular interest since I think I got one of these, recently.

As I emailed Jon:

“I recently got an email from someone supposedly asking for me to take down links to their company site. The weird thing is that the address was actually a company one. I wonder if it’s not some former angry employee? When I wrote back asking why, I got no response.”

I’m having trouble finding it in Gmail but will update this post later (hopefully Sunday) with the email.

What’s the tactic?

Basically you’re adopting the MO of a phisher (bank impersonating website trying to steal financial info), but your goal is to persuade the people linking to competitors to drop the links. I can see this being used against very high value links, but not as a standard tactic because it’s just too time and work intensive, when you could spend the time on building your own links.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Does your competitor have some sweet old links you wish they didn’t have?

Well, here are two sneaky ways – one’s even sly and nasty – to get your competition’s links dropped.

1) Run their site through your favourite backlink research tools.
2) Use something like Xenu Link Sleuth or your favourite link checker to look for 404 pages on your competitor’s site that have links.
3) Contact the webmasters linking to said 404s and use broken link building to get the link for yourself instead.

If the link is on a hub page that links to many pages in the field, you don’t even need the competitor’s page to 404.
1) Run the hub page through a broken link checker.
2) Write an email to the hub page’s webmaster with a large list of the broken links – but don’t send yet.
3) Add your competitor’s link into the list near the end.

Q: Why would the webmaster remove your competitor’s link if it’s not broken?
A: Laziness and trust – if the first dozen links were all broken, the next dozen are probably broken, too. Why keep checking all of them?

While I think it’s fine for you to do the first to competitors, the second approach isn’t ethical. It’s an approach to be aware of though, so if you have a link management software like Buzzstream , follow up with the appropriate webmaster if a link dissappears. And of course, monitor your 404 errors in Webmaster Tools and server logs.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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My site was hacked for a few months now, in what was mostly a benign, but nevertheless annoying way. The hacker injected spam pages onto SEOROI.com about debt and financial products, which you can still see in Google’s cache. Only Vaultpress was able to remove the hack…

(To be 100% clear: there was no malware. Google detected none, McAffee detected none, CodeGuard detected none and so you weren’t at risk by visiting my site.)

The backstory…

Anyways, as I had once previously had a site hacked, I tried what worked last time – I hired someone from Odesk, for $100 one-time fee. The person in question successfully removed the injected pages… but the hacker outsmarted him and had a script that automatically replaced the injected pages within a day or two.

I then hired another person from Odesk, explaining what happened previously, but again this contractor could only delete the pages and not permanently remove the vulnerability.

In both cases, these contractors had previous experience and positive reviews in their Odesk profiles regarding site cleanups. But this hacker outsmarted them, and as we’ll see, Google too. (Not in terms of malware detection.)

The light at the end of the tnnel:

Finally, exasperated, I turned to the guys at Vaultpress. They offer a security service for WordPress whereby they

• Scan your site for vulnerabilities
• Recommend action to patch the vulnerabilities
• Remove hacks and other crap, including if it comes back
• Backup your site in 11 different places in the cloud, so accidental deletes or screwups aren’t fatal

And they delivered. I installed their plugin, gave them FTP access, and they cleaned up my site. (Also my sister the makeup artist Maya’s site.) Not only that, but they went above and beyond, doing miscellaneous stuff that wasn’t part of the official package, because I’m not tech-savvy enough to do it.

Their basic service including cleaning up your site starts at $15/month, but that doesn’t include security monitoring for the future, just a one-time cleanup. Ongoing security costs $40/month and it’s the plan I’m on, because it buys me peace of mind and stability for my business.

I highly recommend Vaultpress for WP security.

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This is a guest post from Everett Sizemore, who is an eCommerce SEO consultant operating off his 38 acre farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. He enjoys gardening, collecting eggs and tackling tough SEO problems.

Want to fight the scrapers outranking you with your own content post-Panda?

Google is losing the war against content scrapers and we’re the ones paying the price. It has gotten even worse since Panda, despite efforts to fix the problem. I know of several dozen websites that are being outranked by scrapers.

While Google might hope we’re going to do their job for them with tags like rel canonical, and rel author, this problem isn’g going away any time soon. You know things are bad when powerhouses like TIME.com are outranked by sites like this.

Fortunately, there are many ways to keep sites from scraping your content, including easy ones like simply asking them to remove it, or bureaucratic messes like filing a DMCA complaint and reporting it to Google. But neither of these options is practical when your’e dealing with more than a few sites or a few dozen pages of content.

In looking for an effective strategy to combat scraper bots you should consider a multi-faceted approach that is scaleable, and then pick up any that get through the cracks using cease and desist letters and reports to Google and/or their host.

The Multi-Faceted Approach To Fighting Scrapers:

#1 – Due Dilligence
First, make sure your message is heard loud and clear. Have your copyright visible in the footer of every page, and include something like the following on your Terms page, as well as in an area commented out within the body copy code:

<!– COPYRIGHT NOTICE: The content of this page is owned by MyWebsite.com and is protected under copyright law. All rights are reserved. Using this content in any way is forbidden, except when permission has been given explicitly in writing from MyWebsite.com. Any use outside the given permissions constitutes copyright violation and will be prosecuted within the full extent of the law. All access to this website is logged. –>

While that probably won’t stop a lot of scrapers, it provides you with the first line of defense and shows that you have done your due diligence from a legal perspective should you have to file a DMCA report.

#2 – Robots.txt
Disallow any bots that you don’t want accessing your site from your robots.txt file. While a lot of scrapers will ignore your robots.txt file (more on that later), many of the popular tools used to scrape websites do respect this file. As an example, you might consider these two lines:
User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 1.0 Disallow: /
User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 2.0 Disallow: /

Disallow a specific file and then record any traffic that accesses the file, which should also have a robots noindex, nofollow tag on it. For example…
Disallow: /do-not-open.html

#2.5 – Bait the Trap
Now link to the disallowed file from within the body area of every page on your site. It can just be an href tag, or you can put the link around a 1 pixel image if you like. All of the “real” search engines will respect your robots.txt file and not visit that URL. If they don’t respect that file then you can bet it’s a rogue bot, even if they are “spoofing” Googlebot’s user-agent.

#3 – Htaccess (Or your Windows server equivalent.)
You should be recording which IP addresses, referrers and user agents access that do-not-open.html page, whether with a script or just by viewing the log files. The next step is to block all of those from accessing your site. You have some options here. For instance, you could deny them access, send them to a custom page (like ScrewYou.html), or get a little tricky and redirect them to their own IP address, which has the benefit of crashing some bots by sending them through an infinite loop. Eventually they’ll get the point and just stop coming to your site.

You can try and get a head-start on the process by blocking the scrapers that are already on blacklists like…
Referrer blacklist by Perishable Press
User Agent blacklist by Perishable Press

For more technical instructions, including the code to use in your htaccess file, see this great post on PerishablePress.com: Eight Ways to Blacklist with Apache’s mod_rewrite

There are probably as many ways to deal with content scrapers as there are ways to scrape content, including several WordPress plugins that mostly just ensure the scrapers give you a link by embedding them into your RSS feeds. What are your favorite methods and why?

[Editor's footnote: Conversely, if you have legitimate uses for scrapers, here's an article on three web screen scrapers for SEO. And if you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader! ]

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Fellow Canadian SEO, Melanie Nathan, recently wrote an interesting guest post for Search Engine People on the reciprocity approach to link building. This method is the traditional approach of pointing out 404s, links going to malware-infected sites and so on.

Melanie mentioned in passing that links to sites with drive-by-downloads of malware were some of the most valuable to identify.

People take these the most seriously and are especially grateful for having them pointed out. No one wants to send their visitors to sites where they’ll get viruses.

But how can you do that without visiting each site in turn? How can you speed up the process?

1. Introducing the Dr Web Anti-Virus Link Checker. It’s a Firefox extension that tells you if a page you’re about to load is dangerous or not. (Hattip Mashable’s security extensions list.)

2. People with Kaspersky subscriptions can click a red K icon in the upper right corner of their Firefox browser, and Kaspersky will scan all the links on the page. I don’t know what happens if they find one, or if they only alert you if they find a dangerous link, but so far I’ve yet to be alerted to anything…

3. On a similar note, you can do roughly the same with this anti-phishing extension that warns you of potentially harmful sites posing as legitimate ones. It tips you off before you fill in their forms, preventing you giving bad people your usernames and passwords.

Like this little bit of creative thinking? Get my book’s free chapter or add my rss feed to your reader.

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Do you know how spammers find your site to share their delicious comment spam with you?

The same way anybody finds anything online – they search.

(Specifically, they search for footprints. If you remove footprints, you cut your comment spam.)

Some new sites I launched recently are getting comment spam already – which signals great news. I’m indexed . I don’t know about rankings, but they can’t be too far off, at least on easier terms…

Yay illegal warez promoters and other goofy businessmen!

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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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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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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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.)

If you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader.

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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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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.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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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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• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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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• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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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Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.