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.

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.

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.

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.

This guest post is by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services. We met at SMX West a few years ago and he recently got back in touch to see about guest posting… I suspect this technique is how he found out about me taking guest posts !

ScrapeBox kicks butt for link building. It has dramatically sped up my link building process more than any other tool I’ve used. This post will show you exactly how I use ScrapeBox to find dozens of high quality guest blogging opportunities – in minutes instead of hours.

What the heck is ScrapeBox?

ScrapeBox is a powerful tool that’s popular with affiliate marketers and those who like to push the boundaries of automated blog commenting and trackback posting.

But don’t let that scare you away.

ScrapeBox can be used to speed up regular link building tasks too. I’ve found it particularly handy for uncovering good guest blogging opportunities.

How? ScrapeBox lets you harvest a list of blogs that accept guest posts, then gives you the ability to sort that list by PageRank to identify your strongest targets.

Let’s go through the step-by-step the process I use. This is a real example of how I used ScrapeBox to find guest blogging opportunities for Adwords articles I plan to write.

Find Guest Post Opportunities with ScrapeBox

1. From the main ScrapeBox screen, enter your keyword (adwords in this example) in the first box and “guest post” in the second box. Use quotation marks around guest post to make it an exact match search.

2. Select the search engines you want to scrape. In this example, I’ve used Google.com, but you also scrape Yahoo, Bing and AOL. You can also manually add the Google CCTLD of your choice, to help you focus on your target countries.

3. Click the “Start Harvesting” button and ScrapeBox starts to do its magic. Depending on the speed of your proxies (and you’ll want to use proxies to avoid getting blocked), the scrape can take a few seconds or a few minutes.

4. Now you have a big ole list of URL’s, 991 in this example, but you need to clean it up a bit. So using the Remove/Filter drop down in the Manage Lists options, we’ll remove Duplicate URLs.

5. Get the PageRank of the Domain using the Get Domain PageRank option in the Manage Lists section. I’m interested in the Domain PageRank, as opposed to the URL PageRank, as it’s a better gauge of the link value your site will receive from your guest post.

6. Click the Import/Export URL’s & PR Export drop-down and select CSV. This will export the URL list with PR values into Excel.

7. Open the Excel document. Filter out the N/A PageRank values, and then sort from largest to smallest PageRank. Now you have a list of blogs that accept guest posts (or have run guest posts in the past) that you can target, ranked by their PageRank.

Granted, not every URL will be a good guest posting opportunity. But with a few minutes of refining, you can identify dozens of high quality opportunities. Here’s a sample of the Adwords guest post sources I found:

This is just one example of how you can use ScrapeBox for link building. If you’re not using ScrapeBox now, I’d highly encourage you to try it out. Its $97, but you can easily find coupons for a $40 discount.

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.

This is a guest post by John McElborough, a [ed: awesome!] freelance SEO from Brighton, England who blogs at johnmcelborough.com

There’s been a lot of talk in the SEO world of late about the idea of ‘content farms’-  sites which exist principally to attract mid to long tail search traffic through large scale content generation.

Several high profile SEO’s have been pretty critical of sites like ehow, mahalo and livestong who use these tactics. Personally if a sites earning that much cash through SEO I’d rather learn from it than criticise so for my first guest post here on Gab’s blog I want to take a closer look at long tail tactics and share some practical tips for how pretty much any site can cash in on their markets long tail potential.

Step 1: Long tail keyword research

Although essentially the concept of long tail keywords implies that research isn’t necessary I would still recommend starting any long tail campaign by researching keywords. This research will help to inform your decisions about what new content you can create and how you can best optimize existing pages for new keywords. It will also give you a better feel for how people search so if you’re producing content you’ll instinctively use the language of the searcher and drop in long tail combinations without even thinking about it.

Personally I use Wordtracker here because, despite the anomalies it throws up it makes it easy to identify low competition long tail keywords using its KEI3 scoring system. Start with a few seed keywords on a topic of your choice then sort the results by the KEI3 score and pick off all the keywords which you think you can use in your campaign.

If you’re already getting a fair bit of long tail traffic you might want to try out Hittail- its come along quite a bit from when it was first released a few years back.

Step 2: Add content to existing pages

One of the best ways to start your long tail campaign is to identify pages on your site which already rank and expand on their content to introduce more long tail keyword combinations. Although to really max out on your long tail potential you’re gonna need to be developing new content pages eventually at first what I like to do is to identify thin content pages on my site where I can add extra words and introduce more long tail combinations. The good thing about this tactic is that if your sites newish and lacking trust you’re not diluting your pagerank by creating lots of new pages to soon.

To do this I start by getting into analytics and looking for a few pages to work on. Here I want to find pages with the most search traffic but fewest keywords- the logic being these pages are likely to be performing for short tail keywords but not driving much via the long tail. I you’re using GA you can do something like this…

You can also use the top pages on domain tool (or just webmaster tools) to identify your most linked to pages and then running a word count check on these pages to pinpoint where you’ve got strong pages with low content. The fact these pages are well linked to means you should be able to bulk out the content and they should start immediately ranking for a bunch of new keywords and driving more traffic.

It should probably go without saying that you need to apply some common sense when doing this. Fill a landing page with a load of copy and you run the risk of damaging conversion rates so tread carefully if you’re doing this with key sales pages and make sure you’re measuring your conversion rates so you can measure the profitability of this tactic.

Once you have these pages identified look at the keywords which are already sending them traffic and search for related terms.

Here’s a quick example…

Webmaster tools tells me these pages have a few links pointing to them:

But right now those pages are pretty thin, lets take the Playa Den Bossa page as an example….

Check out the entrance keywords for that page – only 51- that’s not many. If we double the content of this page it could easily double the number of referring keywords and the traffic it receives. Not to mention there’s an opportunity to turn that page into a better resource. On a crude level a page with 600 words is probably more likely to attract links than a page with 300.

So with that page identified all I need to do is to reshape the content of that page to include these extra combinations. This sort of work should be real bread and butter stuff for a decent copywriter. I’ll talk a bit more about some content strategies later.

Step 3: Optimise under performing pages

Basically this is about flipping the process above and looking for pages on your site which should be driving long tail traffic but aren’t. Usually this will either be a case of tweaking the keyword strategy or boosting the page up with a few links.

To find these pages again go to Analytics and export a list of pages which get low traffic from natural search (use your own judgement what ‘low’ is for your site).

Remove pages like your privacy policy or contact page which are likely to be in there then go through and select the thick content pages which you think should be doing better. As a guide if a page has got 300 words or more on it I’d expect it to get at least a trickle of long tail traffic in most cases. Here’s a beauty…

There’s 3 things you can do with these pages, ideally do all 3.

1. Tweak the copy to include new long tail keywords from your keyword research.
2. Increase internal links to the page – ideally link to it from a page with some decent PageRank like your homepage or a top level category.
3. Build external links – if it’s a case this page is in the supplemental index it should only take one decent link (or a handful of crap links!) to lift it out. I still fall back on article marketing in many cases to link to pages like this.

Step 4: Create new pages

Like I said before to really reach your sites full long tail potential you’re gonna need to be injecting new content rich pages into it. It’s best to approach this in a complimentary manner to your other search activity so don’t just look at keywords but try and structure these new pages in a way that they have a decent chance if attracting organic links as well (link bait) and offer good value for returning visitors.

The biggest challenge here is pumping this new content into your site without damaging conversion rates or diluting the PageRank distribution of your existing pages to a point where it disrupts your rankings. Where those big ‘how to’ sites do well is by using a really efficient publishing structure so they can add hundreds or thousands of new articles a day and they all get indexed quickly and get enough exposure on the site and internal link juice for them to rank very quickly. If you look at most traditional publishers like newspapers and magazines, many of whom churn content at a similar pace, where they let themselves down in many cases is by having a poorly optimized structure so old content gets pushed down the archives and eventually drops out of the rankings.

When you’re planning your content campaign think about how new content can be integrated into your website structure. A blog is probably the simplest option although you should think about the type of content you’re going to be adding and whether it lends itself to the blog format. Q & A’s, FAQ’s, tutorials and glossaries all work really well too.

Once you have the ability to publish on your site in a scalable way you can pull together your content plan. Turn your keyword list into a list of article titles, then write a brief synopsis of what each article will contain. If you know the subject turning keywords into titles should be pretty easy, failing that ezine article has a pretty cool little title suggestion tool which I use a lot. Some of the suggestions it gives you are pretty mental but you usually get a few good ones as well…

At this stage you can either get busy creating this new content or you can just outsource it. I’ve used services like textbroker, content customs, content now and a few others in the past. The results are mixed but what I can say for certain is having very tightly focused titles and detailed article synopsis’ greatly improves the quality of work you’ll receive from this type of service.

Nowadays I prefer to hire a writer directly who actually knows the subject and can work off their own initiative. If you’re an affiliate or a business with a lack of internal resources for this type of thing I reckon this will probably be your most cost effective option.

Step 5: Dynamic content creation

This is where we get a bit more clever and take the campaign into overdrive. You’ve probably heard stories about adsense millionaires who’ve made their money with auto-generated sites? You’ve got to be pretty hardcore to make a go of this sort of thing and it doesn’t work as well as it used to, but there’s a lot you can learn from it. Here’s a few techniques which might work for your site…

Tagging & dynamic page generation

By converting your long tail keyword research into tags and gathering all the information you’ve got on your site for a that keyword you can quickly create lots and lots of new pages.

Boilerplate or macro content

I’ve talked about this before in my post on ecommerce product page optimization. Basically you take a paragraph of text and a database, like a product database and use database values to fill in blanks in the paragraph, this lets you create lots of semi unique pages.

Spinning & rewriting

Gab’s talked about this one before. It’s a bit dodgy but if you think about most of the articles demand media churn out they’re basically just rewritten from other places (actually most of the information in the world is if you think about it!). Spinning multiple versions of the same article onto your own site might not be great for user experience but it will help you target more long tail keyword variations. Why else do you think ehow would have 6 articles on cooking a damn turkey!

Content feeds

These days if you try to fill a new website with duplicate content off a feed you probably won’t get very far but established sites with strong domains still make a killing off copying other peoples content and pulling together feeds from different sources.

This page on mahalo – http://www.mahalo.com/stub/rye-bread is a nice example, a hundred words of copy rewritten from wikipedia then Google images, Youtube videos, Amazon products feeds, Twitter search results and a whole lot of ads. If you can’t beat em, join em!

Transcription

Transcription of video and audio content can be a really cost effective way to boost your long tail. Just look how much content SEOmoz get out of one of their whiteboard Friday videos. Although you need a real person to do proper transcription you can also do it with software.

UGC

Plenty of people have talked about UGC before. Reviews, comments, forum threads, answers, anything where you get other people to write stuff for you is going to boost your long tail massively.

Dynamic keyword insertion

Nothing too sophisticated about this one. Basically you take all the keyword variations you want a page to rank for and spit them out on the page under the guise of something like ‘Searches used to find this page’ like this one:

I hope this post has given you something to think about and take away. In my opinion exploiting the long tail is the biggest opportunity in natural search at the moment (and has been for a while actually) so if you can get your head around streamlining the process of long tail optimization you’re onto a winner. Please leave me a comment to let me know if this was useful, or to share your own tips.

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.

I recently spent $200+ testing out a text link ad broker who promised a big network of blogs, without footprints. This link broker sells on a monthly membership basis that ended up auto-renewing for a few months, partly because I was too busy to test immediately when I bought it. Lesson #1: Avoid buying on impulse.

This text link advertising network has a 3 step process.

1) Upload an article, and pick categories it fits under.
2) Add your text link in along with other innocent links.
3) Finally, the text link broker sends the article out to some blog they run.

When I finally got around to publishing some articles, I was in such a rush to see results already that I clean forgot step 2.

To keep itself discrete, this link broker doesn’t tell you what blogs the links are published on. So I couldn’t do a backlink lookup with a backlink research tool, nor could I get any reporting from this broker. (Except that the pieces were published, if memory serves.)

Forgetting to add in the links turned out to be a good thing, I saw later, because my article got posted on a wholly irrelevant blog. And not even an impressive one, that’s well maintained by humans etc. This was an obviously generic creation with no soul. “Take me to the Wizard for a new heart,” it whimpered tinnily.

(Lesson #2: If they sell text links based on automated distribution of articles, and you can’t see the broker’s inventory (to avoid Google smacking it all down), publish some articles with unique phrases in them.

Then Google it and see where it ended up.

Depending how relevant the resultant sites / pages are, you can decide whether to include your links in future articles.

[This is really just the grayhat parallel to the blackhat SEO's comment spam swing dance].)

text link ads on irrelevant websites coming next.>

Now, I know that my point about offtopic sites sounds contradictory to other advice I gave recently, about how it’s the page that matters. Isn’t it irrelevant what the site is about, and only the page relevance matters in determining the link’s value/relevance ?

It depends. It depends on some conditions. Imagine this as a spectrum of relevance.

- If the site is about nothing in particular, like a personal blog, news site or other generic publisher like About.com, then no, it doesn’t matter. The link counts if the page is topical.

- If the sites’ topics have 0 relation, but somehow the page manages to bridge that gap, it’s ok. SEO has no relation to dentistry, but it’s a clean link when I link to my dad’s dental related business from here, because he’s my dad – it’s normal and accepted that I should link to him. And before anyone jumps to conclusions, this text link broker trial was for an affiliate site of mine, not my dad’s business.

- If your site topics overlap and the page is offtopic, it’s not grand (both in terms of traffic and link value), but it won’t hurt.

- If the sites’ topics overlap and the page is relevant, it’s better, simply because the traffic quality will be better. Traffic I get from my guest-posts at Wolf-Howl is pretty good, because our audiences are mostly interested in the same thing.

- If the sites are exactly on the same topic and the page is relevant, it’s money.

- (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) offtopic pages that (iii) don’t bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that don’t count.

- Also, (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) relevant pages that (iii) don’t bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that don’t count.

The latter type is what I encountered with the text link broker, and it’s why I cancelled the subscription. I dipped my pinky toe in, saw there was an oil slick in the water, and called the President got out.

Finally,

- (i) Offtopic sites with (ii) relevant pages that (iii) DO bridge the topic gap with the site they’re linking to = Paid links that DO count.

So yes, links from offtopic sites do count, including paid links from offtopic sites.

It just depends…

As they say, the devil is in the details.

Liked this post on text link brokers? Check the pros and cons of buying links, pre-published vs post-published text links, 101 tips on discretion in paid link purchases.

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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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A: When you rank for coupon terms plus your brand. A guest post by yours truly at my friend Dean Chew’s site, Chewie.co.uk .

Some other recent guest posts of mine:

-Wordstream: ppc-workflow – My PPC workflow and mistakes I’ve made

-Wolf Howl: youre-all-wrong-paid-links-from-offtopic-sites-do-count/ So long as the page is relevant, you’re good!

If these posts are interesting to you, add my RSS feed to your reader already! Enough with the refresh button . Also, have a look at my advanced SEO book, featuring neat principles and tactics.

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.

Reading the curiosity-arousing article on SEL, “The Phone, Calling,” I noticed that the use and presence of call tracking numbers, toll-free numbers and other non-main-line phone numbers could cause trouble for search engines.

“First, these numbers throw a monkey wrench in business identification. Second, they could expire, inadvertently creating a dead-end for a consumer. Publishers today struggle with how to accurately identify an actual business when many phone numbers are involved.”

The easiest solution, imho, is to show humans one thing (the non-main-line phone number) and search engines another thing (porn, viagra, and all the good content [read: auto-generated] search engines love).

“But that’s evil blackhat, Gab!” Actually, all I mean is to recommend mediocre usability and coding in this exceptional case.

How?

In a image-editing/creation program, you type the phone number that you don’t want search engines and local listings publishers using. And then you post it – without alt text – on your site.

If you’re really paranoid about search engines using fancy optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract the phone number from the image, you can go further.

Step 1: Create an html frame.
Step 2: Block search engines from accessing it with Robots.txt and any fun cloak-and-redirect set up you want.
Step 3: Place the image of the phone number in the frame.
Step 4: Embed the frame wherever your phone number needs to appear.

If you liked this local SEO / greyhat seo tip, you’ll probably enjoy my upcoming advanced SEO book, which teaches the principles of such creative/critical thinking and offers 30 advanced tactics. Download a free chapter here. (There’s also a link to the download page in upper left, if you browse away from this 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
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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.

The situation: Your competitors have inbound links that are broken because of typos, changes in URL structures etc.

The common link building commentary: Most SEOs who’ve been around the link building block will tell you that it’s an opportunity to ‘build links’ for free – to pick low hanging fruit. Just drop the site owner a little email and voila – good as new. More juice for you!

The link-arms-race commentary given by sneaky [and helpful!] SEOs:

“Dear [webmaster],

My name is John Doe and I’m writing because I ran into a few bugs while browsing your site. Namely, there are broken links.

It’s a shame that your otherwise use[less/full] list of sites in your niche should be hampered by broken links and that they’d slow your visitors [Googlebot, and myself my broken link checker] down. So I thought I’d point out those broken links I found for your [annihilation/removal/hexic cleansing].

[Insert list of broken links, first or second amongst which are the competition's.]”

For bonus points:

 Use Virante’s clever PageRank Recovery tool – based off the SEOmoz API – to find all the pages/links on your competitors’ site that are problematic like this. Hat tip to Rand’s post on 30 SEO problems and tools to solve ‘em post.

This reminds me of similar tactics I came up with over 2 years ago in response to the common question, ”Should I buy links if my competitors buy links?”

If you liked this post on link building and such competitive sneakery, add my rss feed to your reader for more!

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.

This is a guest post by Brandon Hopkins, a freelance Fresno website designer who blogs at Brandon-Hopkins.com

The most common way to buy links is to find a site that shows up in Google’s index, then contact the owner asking them to add your link in exchange for monetary compensation. What is often not considered is that published pages don’t change very often.

If you have a page that was published 6 months ago and the only change that page has ever see was adding an < a href... tag, isn't that a red flag?

I know it would be to me! Since this is content that is already online, we'll call this a post-published link purchase.

So a better, but often overlooked way to buy links is in pre-published content.

Buying links on pre-published pages takes a little extra effort because you have to contact the site owner/webmaster/blogger based on their past articles, but ask for a link in an upcoming article.

Since this content hasn’t ever been seen by Google it won’t raise a [why-is-this-otherwise-stable-content-suddenly-changing-] red flag when the post has a link to your website.

A few concerns with this method:

1. Posts with a single outgoing link are dangerous. Experienced link buyers know that you can quickly get in trouble if your link is the only outgoing link on a page.

Make sure the pre-published page has a few outgoing links in addition to yours.

2. Paid link outers. Just with any link purchase, you’ll encounter a few people who like to use Google’s feedback form to report your site.

You can easily get around this by not telling the site owner which site you own, and explain that you want a few links. Give them 3 links to include in the post. Your link, and two links to trusted authority sites that are not direct competition.

[Ed: You might also consider buying links "for" the competition and ask to have yours included as well to keep things under the radar.]

3. Time and labor. This is a labor intense method. You have to suggest topics for a post that your link will fit into. For many bloggers/webmasters, they don’t know what they’re going to post about so you might have to coach them on appropriate topics that would match the anchor text for the links you’re buying.

The only way around this is to outsource the labor (which adds a hard cost) or to by pass the individual blogger and go somewhere that accepts most links (like a regional web directory or niche directories).

4. Poor post quality. Knowing that they’re writing the post for the purpose of linking to you could lead the blogger to write a lazy post. A poorly written post won’t earn many links so you’ll have to rely on the strength of the main domain to provide some juice to your post. This completely depends on who’s writing the post.

A good way around this is to write the post yourself and offer it as free content. You might be able to get around spending money this way. [Editor's note: Brandon's implying in this context that you pay the site owner and provide the post. Obviously it's not a paid link if you just offer a guest article, like Brandon's doing here.]

Here’s to staying under the radar and on top of the SERPs!

If you liked this post on buying text links, add my rss feed to your reader!

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.

If you could find out your competitors’ top converting ads when you enter a market, you’d save a lot of time optimizing campaigns, wouldn’t you?

It would be like knowing where the jelly is in a jelly donut – you’d bite right into the good stuff and skip the mostly-dough areas.

The principle that applies in this case is to look at the length of time an ad has been running. Duration is indicative of ad performance.

The problem is that when you search for a given keyword, you only get a snapshot in time of competitors’ ads. So you don’t know if what you’re seeing is tried-and-true copy that converts well or if it’s the flavor-of-the-month split test.

Fortunately, SpyFu (aff) has two new products that enable late-comers to catch up quickly, and for serious optimizers to get premium competitive intelligence for instant inspiration.

SpyFu’s Ad History tools – Domain Ad History and Keyword Ad History – provide you with data on competitors’ copy going back 12 months.

Domain Ad History focuses on a  single competitor’s keywords and copy for those keywords. It shows you changes over time. You can see if they keep returning to the same copy, and thus what is working best for them.

Keyword Ad Historyshows you all competitors’ ads for the past year – but on a single keyword. This way, you can quickly identify patterns between competitors’ copy on your primary head terms. Take your top 100 keywords, plug them in, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what benefits and what offers convert, and which don’t.

The bottom line is that that these tools let you learn from others’ mistakes, which saves you time and money on testing. For $59/month, the subscription is well worth it for anyone doing PPC!

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.

If you could find out what competitors’ conversion rates are and you can estimate the traffic value to your competition? Surely the PPC pros could use that conversion data…

Well, it turns out you can get a pretty good idea about competitors’ conversion rates.

At SMX Advanced, Addie Connor shared the tip that you could bid for traffic to your competitors’ pages. Why do that? To find out their quality scores.

The catch is that such a technique won’t tell you what they’re converting at. You still can’t access their analytics.

Let’s think about this critically.

(I’m writing a little book on advanced search marketing (mostly SEO but some PPC too), and one of the main themes is that you can get really creative if you think logically and break things down into manageable pieces of logic.)

The argument we have is as follows.

We don’t control competitors’ pages. Therefore we don’t control what analytics code is on those pages. And if you don’t place your own analytics, on the page, you can’t read the reports!

Suppose we did control the pages. We could then place our code on them, right? And we could read the reports, right?

Now I’m going to share a little secret.

Don’t go sharing it with everyone, because this is really just an inner-circle thing among elite programmers.

…

The secret’s called “View Source.”

Right click, and select “view source,” to view your competitors’ html. Then duplicate your competitors’ page and host it yourself, with your own analytics embedded.

Caveats with finding competitors’ conversion rates in this way

1) For Trademark law reasons, you can’t duplicate competitors’ branding. This obviously affects conversion rate.

2) Similarly, you can’t use their domain name in the display URL (legally), or in the destination. This affects CTR and consequently conversion rate (since the mix of traffic is different).

3) This would be a hell of a lot of work for any sizeable ecommerce competitor. It’s easier to do this with simple landing pages or paths.

If you liked this post on competitive intelligence, add my RSS feed to your reader, or subscribe to get my posts delivered by email. I’ve got 2 more posts on competitive intelligence for later this week, covering how to find competitors best performing keywords AND ad copy, as well as how to muddy your backlink tracks so competitors have a harder time duplicating your efforts.

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.

As my friend Mike Gray pointed out at SMX Advanced, RTing is a great way to get people’s attention and build a relationship with them. The difficulty is getting people’s attention when they write a really popular post that gets RTed 100+ times.

So here’s the greyhat solution. 1) Create fake accounts.

2) Have them RT your RTs with a “via @YourUsername” appended.

The blogger whose post is being widely shared is now much more likely to take note of you. You not only RTed their post, but engendered multiple RTs.

3) Once you have enough followers for this to happen on its own, you can cut out the fake accounts’ RT activity. Until you make it, you can fake it.

As with most greyhat tactics, there’s a whitehat version, too:

Instead of relying on fake accounts, just have a group of friends RT each other’s RTs.

Reciprocal voting happens throughout social media like Digg etc., so it shouldn’t be difficult to extend the concept to Twitter.

What do you guys think of these social media tactics? If you liked the post, as either practical knowledge or entertaining creativity, add my RSS feed to your reader.

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.

SMX West’s video SEO panel taught me that the number of embeds your video gets is important to having it rank better at Youtube, and potentially in Google’s universal search results. So why not speed things up by buying a few installs and links for your video?

If more embeds means better SEO, there seems to be an argument for buying installs, just as there is for buying links in normal SEO. An embed is when someone copy-pastes the html code from Youtube to put a video on their site.

Buying embeds or links for a Youtube page is all the more interesting since there’s less risk than buying links for your own site.

• It’s hard to see Youtube get penalized by Google, so your chances of wasting your money are less.
• Even if a Youtube page is penalized, you can always reupload the video with some slight modifications and try again.
• It’s not like you burned a website, with the associated expenses in time and money…

The problem is that it’s easier said than done.

Youtube Video Data Patterns

Quantitative Data: Embeds, Links…

There’s likely a pattern in the data in terms of the ratio of views to embeds and links. If a video has 100 views, it probably won’t also have 100 embeds.

Additionally, there’s probably a longtail curve in terms of what videos get the most embeds. A few videos with hundreds of thousands or millions of views get astronomical numbers of embeds.

The pattern also likely varies in accordance with the quality of the video or audio. For example, an amazing song will likely rack up more embeds per thousand views than an average track.

Qualitative Data: Video Star Ratings, Saves, Favorites, Adds-to-Playlist

There’s probably a large range of variance in the quality of videos. If that’s the case, the ratings look something like a bell curve: most ratings on most videos fall somewhere in the middle, and a few great / awful videos get extremely positive or negative ratings.

What The Video Data Means For Link And Embed Buyers

You’re likely to stand out from the pack if you buy links or embeds disproportionately to your video quality and popularity. This is especially true if you have very few impressions (eg under 1000).

One possible way around that is to buy traffic to send to your video. You can buy StumbleUpon traffic or you can even buy traffic from Youtube’s own sponsored video ads. See also Barry Schwartz’s screenshots.

But again, you may not have sufficiently good star-ratings, enough saves-to-favorites-and-playlists or other quality metrics to legitimize your embed buying and link buying.

One possible workaround is that the same way people sell Diggs, Stumbles etc., there’s likely an underground market for people who will manipulate Youtube quality metrics. Think of them as your own army of Google quality raters!

The bottom line is that there are some interesting opportunities here if you have a budget for experimental tactics.

You’ll probably need to do a fair amount of testing to get around Google’s data beasts. But if you can find a quiet spot under the ratings bell curve, and in a midrange area of the tail, you might pull in some nice video rankings.

If you liked this post, please add my RSS feed to your reader. That way, you can read more posts from me on link building, greyhat SEO and watch videos I create.

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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.

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

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:

• 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.

Gray Hat Hacking - The Ethical Hacker's Handbook

by Trond Viggo Håpnes

Should I disclose the risk for potential penalties in Google to people who I’m approaching to buy links? This is something that’s been bothering me, since I’ve started buying links.

I’m not concerned about “competitive differentiation” as an “ethical whitehat” – that’s a stupid notion that confuses search engine guidelines with moral codes… particularly dangerous considering the search engine guidelines are motivated by profit. I’m a grey hat, and proud of it – it means I can think outside the box and get creative.

My concern is that I may be treating the potential link sellers in an unfair way, and my personal happiness depends on being able to see myself as a fundamentally ethical guy.

Here are the arguments I’ve come up with so far, for both sides.

For disclosure of potential link selling penalties:
1) Do unto others as you’d have others do unto you. This one seems like the strongest to me – I know that I’d like to be told about the risks before engaging in such a sale.
2) If people find out later on their own, they may feel like I took advantage of their ignorance. This could lead to either
a) Further requests for money to leave the link up and/or with a dofollow tag, or
b) People adding a nofollow tag without telling me, and which I’d only find out on the next audit of links I’d bought to date.

Against disclosure of link selling’s consequences w/ The Borgle:
1) Why should I be responsible for what The Borgle chooses to do with their website? If I had to be responsible for third party sites’ behaviour, then I shouldn’t buy [non-PR-passing] banners ads on blogs that could generate sales for me, if I know that the top bloggers in that space won’t link to any site with banner ads on it.
2) Sure, the Borgle may send these guys each some traffic. But when was the last time the big G put money into these people’s pockets? I’m willing to bet that was never. I’m arguably doing these people more good than Big Borgle is.
3) The prices I’m offering include a risk premium (for the potential search traffic loss) above what I really want to pay for the link. The risk is accounted for in the price.
4) I’m buying links on relevant pages where the direct traffic could realistically be expected to convert. If that’s so, then isn’t that a link that should count for search relevance? This argument isn’t about trying to make myself seem like a whitehat following Google’s webmaster guidelines, but rather that the sites selling the links shouldn’t be penalized for linking out in relevant ways.
5) If this were 1995 and I didn’t know Google, I’d still be placing these ads for the likely direct ROI. Why should I now handicap my efforts at what amounts to a media buy, when I wouldn’t do so in a world where search engines don’t exist?!
6) I’m mitigating the risk for the link sellers, making the risk of any penalties from Google rather low.

What arguments have I left out? Is there a way to reconcile doing unto others as I’d have them do unto me without neutering my link buying efforts? The golden rule seems to be the strongest argument so far.

If I do go the disclosure route, how can I phrase the risk clearly and succinctly, yet still overcome the possible objection to selling me links? I don’t know that people will read all the way down my email if I make a long argument, so I want to keep it short and sweet.

Some related issues/questions that have come up and may be interesting to address in your answer:

1) Why would someone want Google traffic to their site?
2) What if someone has their site penalized?
3) What is a fair risk premium for selling a link?
4) Does it make a difference if a site is commercial/non-commercial? What if it’s a commercial hobby site? How about if it’s a serious site that’s garbage except for this page?
5) Would your answer change if the likelihood of penalization were 100% certainty? I spoke to my folks about this and they felt it mattered.
6) When should I disclose such penalties, if I do? On the first email? The second, once they’ve indicated interest?

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.

Update: These are no longer being offered; I got an immediate response and booked all the spots. Link building inquiries with budgets for the service are still welcome, however.

While I’ve been doing online marketing for a while now, I’ve had little to do with the link buying aspects of link building so far. That isn’t to say I haven’t read about it or even shared some new ideas on disguising text link ads … but my clients to date and my own sites have been able to rank using Google-approved tactics. Not to say I haven’t done it on my own test sites, but I’m admittedly short on experience here.

Well, between Jim Boykin and We Build Pages quitting the link buying game, and my growing interest in learning how to buy links properly, it seems that now is as good a time as ever to learn the trade. Therefore, I’m making this ridiculous offer to the first 3 takers: I will handle your link buying for free, for 3 to 6 months (up to you how long you’d like the engagement to last). Considering that my retainers typically start at $5000/month, that’s a pretty good deal.

You’ll get my high quality link building reports – which are pretty popular based on the 1000+ downloads my report template got over just a few weeks worth of promoting – every month. Any traffic or sales generated from my link buying is yours to keep.

What’s the catch on this paid link management for free stuff?

1) You have to have a minimum link buying budget of $1000/month. The higher the budget the better. I will aim to spend as much of it as possible, obtaining as many quality links as possible.

2) You have to have the stomach to risk your site on my skills. I take no legal responsibility, express or implied, and make no warranties or any of that other legal mumbo jumbo.

The fact that my services are free reflects my relative inexperience with link buying as well as the risk allocation we’re agreeing to – namely my time and your site.

3) Your site can’t be penalized already … not a problem for most sites.

4) You can’t be promoting/selling stuff that I find objectionable or sketchy. No porn, pills, gambling, etc.

*) This one’s a star because it’s not a catch – I won’t be working through any text link ad networks/brokers like TLA so you needn’t worry about that.

Let me know if you’re interested – write to “gab” at the domain this site is hosted on (without the quotation marks around gab). You can also call 514-483-2535 and leave a message.

Update: Some frequently asked questions as to the specifics of the paid link management:

- Will these be permanent links?

Yes, they will. I’m not interested in monthly rentals. On rare occasions we might do a yearly-buy, but I’d run that by you first if anything. The point is that I like permanent links best, they’re better for ROI and that’s what I’d be purchasing.

- Would we get the added benefit of any regular SEO advice (the site in question could use it).

I might answer some simple questions or offer tips, but I won’t be redesigning your navigation (“site structure” or “architecture” for those who like buzzwords) etc.

- Will you be disclosing any of our website info on your site or just general info as you report on the progress?

I won’t be disclosing the info. If I blog anything, I’ll let you see it before it goes up so you can suggest edits beforehand. I’m not interested in burning the sites any more than you are – it would limit the educational value for me.

- The site I’d be interested in working with you on is an affiliate site.  Is there any way for you to guarantee that you won’t be duplicating our site/offers, etc.?

Tell me the industry and I’ll tell you whether it’s a niche I’m in or preparing to enter. If I’m not already in it/preparing an entry, I won’t copy your site/offers.

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.

Have a look – yours truly is in a Web Pro News video on buying sites, and at SEOmoz‘s Whiteboard Friday, where I shared some local search stuff!

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.

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