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 :P!

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).

Like this post of search marketing pictures? Subscribe to my RSS feed.

I’m not going to cave in and go to Feedburner. Or annoy you guys with ads from Pheedo. What I will do is set up my own click tracking script on my server and just run things that way. Anyone got a favourite free click tracking script that’s easy to install and easy to use? I’d like it to have a similar interface to Click Audit, preferably, if you know what that was like. Helpful suggestions for alternative scripts to track subscribers with in the comments will be rewarded with dofollow links in updates to this post.

Oh, FYI: I had 1300+ subscribers (or clicks on subscription links, which is how I was counting subscribership) as of yesterday. Feel free to subscribe (and let me know that you did in the comments, since I have no way of knowing now that Click Audit is gone..

Lesson to the wise: Be as independent of third party services as possible.

UPDATE: John of Z Scale Model Train Layouts (who sell PSW concrete abutment sets and a Blasted Rock abutment set) shared a free script that’s very easy to install and use. There’s almost all the functionality of Click Audit (there are no groups and no PPC cost measuring) and most importantly, you can install it on your own server! So I’m now using PHP Junkyard’s Free PHP Click Counter.

Update 2: In a further helpful comment, John highlights some problems with the database being text based,
such as it not being able to handle very high volume. Also, Click Audit appears to be back up for the moment. I’m sticking with the script for now. Also, for future reference, here’s a screenshot of where my sub stats stood as of May 12th, per Click Audit.

My understanding of total clicks is that it comprises those clicks coming from the same Ip within a given period of time (like 24 hours). So someone whose feedreader was slow to grab the click and turn it into a readable subscription might click a second time, for instance. That’s why I refer to the unique clicks count as my subs.

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

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

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

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

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

What is a trust?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Result of Using a Trust?

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

Caveats On This Technique

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions on Using Trusts to Beat Google’s Domain Demolitions

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

Like these tips on buying sites and using trusts? Subscribe to my RSS feed.

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

Rishi Lakhani, in particular, had a great suggestion in the comments, which were quite entertaining on the whole. Dofollow link for his Treatment Search site.

On a related note, Andy Murdoch had a great suggestion on fighting Sphinn spam. Dofollow link for Andy’s forum moderation services. Do weight in there too.

Finally, Sphinn’s reaction to that thread (or perhaps they were planning this independently) was this idea to fight spam, which I’m staunchly opposed to. Please tell the mods that you dislike the idea!

p.s. I’ll have the legal series up later this week.

Liked this post on Greyhat SEO and spam? Subscribe to the RSS feed.

For my first post, I will address how legal fictions in the common law solve the problem of having a website’s SEO strength reset upon purchase and transfer. (I’ve yet to grasp how the civil law handles this, though my understanding is that it has similar mechanisms.)

Everyone’s favourite competitive webmaster, John Andrews, recently liveblogged Matt Cutts’ presentation at Domain Roundtable . Matt explained that Google eliminates all or nearly all of a site’s value when it is sold.

Obviously this is not the case for corporate America (Myspace anyone?), which in any case has its own legal fictions defending it (News Corp bought Myspace Inc, and Myspace.com was just one asset…). But for your average independent/competitive webmaster, the situation is different. So hopefully this will be helpful to you search marketing folks without the benefit of Fortune 500 status to back you up.

Update: The post is live: Buying Sites? Use Trust To Avoid Google Domain Demolitions.

For my second post, I will show how another legal fiction enables the purchase of text link ads under the radar.

After my post on hiding/disguising text link ads as AdSense and other ad format, and Shady’s point on making paid links look like the result of linkbait , this tip is another tool in the link purchaser’s arsenal.

Google is broken: it gave up the original PageRank paradigm of valuing links based on the traffic they send in favour of some public relations notion of links as “votes” (next SEO that repeats that links are votes is getting their ass kicked by yours truly). Until Google fixes itself, buying links from craptastic sites with no visitors (the majority of link buys, imho) is going to keep working.

*”[B]lackhat tactics are […] illegal ways to game the system to your advantage.” - Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics an Hour a Day, p. 206; otherwise an interesting and educational read and one which I’ll be reviewing here once I’ve finished reading it. Note also: I spoke to Avinash before publishing this and he wanted to highlight two points of context for the above statement:

• First, he recognized that it was a mistake and poor choice of words. His point was merely that it’s unwise as your site might get banned (which is a more accurate statement and one I agree with).
• Second, he highlighted that he wrote that prior to working for Google, and thus it wasn’t a statement that they had him put out there. (That said, I’m quite certain their public relations department was more than happy to see that statement put out there.)

Liked this post on search engine law, greyhat SEO and Google? Subscribe to my feed.

Look at their site maps. Every valuable page on their site will be linked to from there, with desirable anchor text. You can basically copy-paste the code on that page into a file, then use CTRL+F to find all the links starting with the first one and then copy paste those into an excel file. If you can code, there’s probably a much easier way to do this, which my friends Shady, Gabriel Malca or the bright folks at RKG might be able to tell you.

How do you protect your own then? While I’m no expert in Site Maps, it’s my understanding that you can submit one without having a separate one on your website. If that’s the case, I would avoid making the site map if getting your keywords ripped off is a concern.

If you must have a Site Map on your site to submit one to the SEs, then this is where breaking usability convention is allowed. By all means hide it 5 clicks/folders deep and with misleading anchor text like “ugly fat bearded ladies.” Oh, and each folder should have 5 folders, each of them titled something really helpful, like 1,2,3,4,5. So to get to the site map, the person would have to know the “combination” to your “folder lock” e.g. 4-2-5-4-1. Bonus points for doing this all in Ajax so that they can’t use the URL to locate themselves unless they finally reach the site map.

(The folder tip comes from a high school friend who taught me how he hid porn on his computer. I never used it, of course.)

That said, any quality ecommerce and/or ecommerce SEO operation should be able to tell you what the valuable keywords are to begin with, beginning with product names and brands. So depending on who you’re up against, keep in mind that an experienced team is going to nail the right keywords regardless. But at least you can make it a lot more difficult and laborious if they try and take shortcuts to swipe yours. Besides, there’s no guarantee they’ll figure out all the keywords you’re targeting on their own.

I note that by carefully observing the standard navigation elements of a site, that you can figure out their keywords anyways. Nevertheless, it’ll be a more time-consuming process and they may not be thorough enough to get all your keywords. If it’s being done by scrapers, you can try and detect them and cloak for the scrapers to not find what they needed.

Linda Bustos pointed out to me that by using my Sitemap scraping technique, you don’t know which keywords are most valuable. Linda gave this example question to illustrate: “Should we target shower gels or body wash?” That’s an excellent observation, which my friend Dave Davis has an answer for: use PPC to determine what converts before optimizing (he says it in the context of typos, but it works anywhere) .

Spyfu (non-aff) is awesome and very affordable for swiping PPC keywords. Not only do you get your competitors’ list, but you also get the associated rank that Spyfu had them at when they scraped the SERP.

So it’s possible to make an educated guess about the most valuable keywords by looking at the ad rank of your competitors; the higher up they are, the greater value they’re probably placing on that keyword. The reason is that if you’re higher, you tend to get more clicks; ergo their ad rank tells you how much they value clicks on that keyword.

Caveat: With smaller competitors whose PPC strategy may not be very sophisticated, Spyfu doesn’t work as well. Their sweet spot is mega campaigns with hundreds or preferable thousands of keywords.

This also goes back to the tip I’ve given before: split your PPC campaigns amongst multiple domains to avoid the risk of losing all your keywords to a competitor in one swoop. Of course, that might be offset if one draws much higher CTR, but it’s a delicate balance…

On a related note, Compete offers you similar data, with the difference that its collection is more reliable than any of those laid out above. Their data is pulled from the search engine user’s side.

Compete has toolbars on 2 million people’s computers that track their internet usage and their search engine usage in particular. So you can see the queries that are referring traffic to given websites, and which websites are getting the greatest CTR from the SERPs.

So you can “Build better search campaigns by understanding the competition,” as Compete says, which I think is a fair positioning statement since their data is looking at traffic stats as opposed to what another SEO/SEM is trying to do (my technique and Spyfu). Here’s the link to get started (for as little as $20). (Affiliate)

Experienced direct marketers will tell you that 80% of their success lies in the ‘list’ of prospects they send their mail/email to; in search marketing your list consists of your keywords. (Enjoyed this? Subscribe to my RSS feed.)

Comment Love Update: Kyle Wegner of Automaticable had some intelligent criticism of this post’s idea. I responded with a rebuttal here.

Sharing a variation on the technique is Dev Basu, a friend and Toronto SEO Consultant.

Blogging on the main corporate domain

Pros include:

• Traffic can transit over to the blog from the main company site and quickly build up the blog’s authority, share its posts and ideas, and connect to the company through its blogger(s). This assumes you don’t ignore your blog, like Facebook.
• Links go to the main domain that you’re trying to rank, which is key given the importance Google places on authoritative domains.
• If your blog links to inner FAQ pages or other things on the same site, the look and feel will be the same; the traffic is less likely to bounce upon arrival to the pages you linked to.
• Centralization if you have multiple company blogs (they can all go on one domain), as opposed to spreading them out over a disparate number of domains.

Cons include:

• You could get an extra source of “external links” by putting the new blog on a separate domain (and hosting on a different C block of IPs, at least for Google’s algorithms; hat tip Wiep’s link roundup).
• People may be reluctant to link to a “corporate” blog.
• If the bloggers become popular enough, they can just leave and blog independently.

Blogging on a new domain

Pros include:

• An extra source of links to your new site. I say source and note just ‘more links’ because my own experience with my old Montreal SEO site and this one is that after the first couple of links, additional ones aren’t very helpful, unless they’re deeplinks.
• It’ll be easier to attract links to the blog, though if the blog itself doesn’t convert visitors (either from the links or from the search engines), the value of this may be questionable.
• You might have a more relaxed graphic design, like being in the company lounge as opposed to the company press conference. This could, in turn, attract links and positive attention from CSS galleries and help enhance your company’s “cool factor” with web designers.

Cons include:

• More traffic will bounce when it hits the company’s official domain.
• Traffic won’t transit over from the main site as easily (plus you’ll have more bounces there too), so you won’t have as easy a time spreading the word at first.
• Links don’t go to the corporate domain, so you won’t build up its authority as easily.
• Doesn’t scale as well, inherently.

At the end of the day, the domain authority/strength issue is the big differentiator where I’m concerned. If you check out Wiep’s piece on how he had Matt Cutts’ site (about search marketing) rank for one of the most competitive phrases around, you’ll understand what I mean. Matt’s page had a single inbound link whereas players in that space usually have a pyramid of tens of thousands of links backing them up; the ranking was mostly due to his site itself having so many links and being such a trust authority.

Update: Romela of Business Solutions has a good addition in the comments. So does Dave, of Zoekmachine Optimalisatie SEO.

So keep those corporate / company / business blogs on the main company website. If you liked this, subcribe to my RSS feed.

Dear SEO ROI Services author,

Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.2 score out of (10) in the Technology category of Blogged.com.

This is quite an achievement! [If you say so, then it must be!]

http://www.blogged.com/directory/technology

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. [So quality wasn’t a criteria? I guess I’m finally getting through to people how little quality content matters!]

After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.2 score.

We’ve also created Blogged.com score badges with your score prominently displayed. Simply visit your website’s summary page on Blogged.com:

[Badge picture was here.]

Click on the “Show this rating on your blog!” link underneath the score and follow the instructions provided.

Please accept my congratulations on a blog well-done!!

Sincerely,

Amy Liu

Marketing

amy@blogged.com

www.blogged.com

Matt Inman’s widgetbait for his new dating site got pre-emptively wrecked recently, in what most SEOs (see the comments on that post) thought was unfair punishment for someone starting out fresh in a legitimate, whitehat way. If we’re going to talk about widgetbait as spam [because it’s unsolicited and obviously worthless here], this here is the prototype example, not Matt’s fun quizzes and such.
Liked this? Subscribe by RSS.

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

Diorex - How to Measure a Niche Post

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

SBM Unleashed: Building a Community

How to Build Community on Your Blog

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

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

Afraid to Link Out? Think Again

The Role of Outbound Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when you apply TV to Social Networking

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

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

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

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

Just say “NO” to crap!

Playing A Round; Life Lessons in 18 Holes of Golf

My Final Post: Top 9 Lessons In Awesomeness

55 Monumental Ways To Enjoy Life’s Greatest Pleasures

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

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

Interviews with Top Copywriters

Conversation with the Legendary Copywriter Gary Bencivenga Part I

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

Like these resource posts? Subscribe by RSS.

1) Use the Google Global Firefox extension to see who’s ranking in different countries. You’ll often find very different results; since most business compete within a defined geographic area, they probably won’t mind linking to you if you’re in another country.

2) Search for your keywords with a typo. The pages that come up will likely still be strong and/or trusted, but they might not even show up in a top 100 search.

Like these linkbuilding tips? Subscribe to the RSS feed.