Link Harvester Updated

My friend fixed the error in Link Harvester's code & updated the free source code with a few new features.

The new features are:

sorts .mil domains with the .gov domains.
added links to Google cache and Google cache text of each page

If you have not heard of Link Harvester yet, here is some background on it. Are there any other cool features you can think of? I might have a friend create another SEO tool tomorrow too if he has time. I will probably be adding features to Hub Finder soon too if I have enough money and my friends have enough time.

BTW, someone pointed out Search Lores in a comment at ThreadWatch recently. The site is so amazing I can't believe I haven't came across it yet.

Google Advertising Local Search Offline, New Yahoo! Search Patent

Spam Tools:
Ploppy gets evil

Paul Graham:
I think I link to every article he writes. his latest: Hiring is Obsolete, which says if you are the young & motivated type you can let the market determine your value by starting a startup instead of going to work for mega corp for lower than market value wages.

Free Book:
JenSense spots a new AdSense advertisement video which offers a free copy of Building Your Business with Google for Dummies.

Kansas City:
here I come. says Google Local ads, they are now advertising on radio and in the news paper.

Stock Market:

Dell put 99.5 million in Red Hat Linux
NewsGator Buys FeedDemon
THK (Think Partnership - runs the largest SEO firm) down like 15 - 20% on the day.

Yahoo! Adds Trends to Concept Analysis:
Barry notes a Cre8asite thread about a new Yahoo! patent. I have not read it yet, but Bill states:

Amongst other things, the patent application begins to explain how MyYahoo! information might be used to help the search engine create search results.

ClickTracks Hiding Links, Random Blog Posts, Censoring Search Results

Follow the Clicks:
ClickTracks hiding links on customers sites? Ouch. Seems a good number of companies are becoming a bit more carefree with their SEO techniques. What will search companies do when ethical SEO is seen as nothing more than an arbitrary label? DaveN suggests that traffic may well pattern how upcomming search algorithms view links.

Random Blog Posts:
Not sure how long this free random blog post tool will be online for. On the free content front, the US government has some free RSS feeds and so does the BBC.

Dogpile to World:
Meta search is still relevant. Of course, their Missing Pieces study (2 page PDF) forgot to mention that if you search for something like SEO 17 of the top 20 DogPile listings are paid ads, and you will still end up with missing pieces ;)

Their study may have been a bit more accurate if they compared pay per click ads, since those dominate the DogPile search results.

Scoble:
link spammer?

Normal Linking:
MartiniBuster issues 3 lashes with the cane.

Censoring Search Results:
Danny Sullivan on Google & Web Position Gold

Consider this. Until earlier this month, WebPosition was owned by WebTrends, in turn owned by NetIQ, a publicly listed company in the US. Now it's owned by Francisco Partners, another publicly listed company. The purchase was announced March 28 and concluded May 3.

Now you're an investor wondering about this sale. You decide to research some of the products. You turn to your trusted research tool, Google. You do a search for one of the products you've heard about, WebPosition. And you can't find the official site about it?

That's relevancy? That's serving the user? That's organizing the web's information? And that's defending Google because it somehow stopped all the other resellers showing up in its editorial results as well as the ads Google itself accepted?

302:
Google still having some problems?

ContextWEB:
shakey TOS

Search Spam, Marketing, Artificial Intelligence & Search Query Refinement

Search Engine Spam Workshop:
List of some of the presented papers. I will likely review some of those pretty soon.

What Every Good Marketer Knows:

People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and youâ€™ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

Review of Keyword Locator Keyword Research Software

Keyword Locator is new keyword research & monitoring software which sells for $87. When I tried to download it there were download errors, but Frenchie Sano was quick to reply and help me with the download. On to the reveiw... Features:

Like many of the other current keyword research tools on the market, it pulls keyword suggestions, search volumes, and bid prices from Overture.
Set which Google URL and Overture market you want to review ads from, and reports the number of competing ads.
Select Yahoo!, Google, Overture, or digging to grab your various keywords.
Easy data import and export.
Shows the number of competing ads in each engine.
Allows you to filter keywords by a term or select a group of them. After you select a set of results you can scroll through the URLs, ad titles, common words in ad copy, and bid prices by search engine. (please note Google AdWords does not give out ad price and search volume data).
By collecting and sorting the combined keyword data you can see what terms & emotional triggers people are using most frequently in your marketplace.
Has a character stripper and ad formatter. The character stripper could also be improved by letting you also remove character sequences by doing something like placing the phrase or character set in [] or something like that.
Tool also includes FindWhat & Enhance Interactive.
Can access data via proxy.
The format tool makes it easy for you to format keywords as exact match terms, phrases, or broad match terms. It would be nice if they added an all feature to that for those who may want to bid on all levels of relevancy matching.

Things that would Make Keyword Locator Better:
Many people access keyword data from the same sources. This means:

this data is going to be inclined to being spammed or thrown off course by automated bots and marketers.
These portions of the market are going to be much more competitive (and thus less profitable) than words from sources of unique or limited data.
Outside of good sex and choice narcotics almost nothing feels better than being the only bidder for a term which converts at 30% and only costs a nickel a click.

I like free access to data and information (I only sell my ebook because it is my main functional business model and I have not been creative enough to think of another yet), but sometimes paying for data creates a barrier which adds value to the usefulness of the data. It would be cool to see a tool like this interface with data from WordTracker, Keyword Intelligence, & Keyword Discovery.

I think Keyword Locator could also be improved by adding:

a term combination tool (like the permutator)
a misspelled terms tool
allowing users to set custom term operations. for example, I should be able to enter www.blah.com and output the terms:
- blahcom
- wwwblah
- etc
Interface with or link to other common keyword tools & ideas such as:

Overall Keyword Locator is pretty good software, but a few of the ideas listed above could make it a bit better.

If you spend signifincantly on PPC advertising it can likely help save you time and money, but some things can't be automated. Tools which show you what your competitors are already doing may not show you how to beat them (as you can't put think creatively into software).

Keyword Locator can help you as one tool to use with PPC campaigns, but you may also want to use other tools and research databases & techniques as well.

[Update: a WMW thread highlighted a potential problem with Keyword Locator]

Selling Content Articles...Smart Business Model

A while ago someone shot me an email about Constant Content and I forgot to post about it. I just remembered it again and thought to post on it.

From their site:

Constant Content is exactly what the name implies: A website where you will be able to find text to complete your website or project. This is a place to locate high-quality content at affordable prices. We will assist you in delivering the whole package, ensuring that the clients you service will be receiving a polished piece of perfection.

I have not bought or tested the content quality, but with the wide range of authors there is likely to be some real gems and some real duds in the mix.

Business model:
Constant Content is a database which keeps 50% of the funds received when people purchase the content created by authors who submit their articles to the site.

Some of the articles are free, while others are available for sale to use exclusively or to buy an individual license for. Constant Content also runs AdSense on some of their article abstracts to help create another revenue channel.

They already have over 600 writers, and it seems like it would be a fairly scalable business model, and is a rather untapped market.

Economics of Link Buying VS Submitting Articles:
If you buy them, even crap links can usually cost $5 to $50 each. You could likely buy one of these exclusive articles and submit it to a few sites to build a dozen or so links for the cost of one link.

Economics of Buying Ads VS Buying Content & Selling Ads:
To further appreciate the economics of this idea, a single click from Google AdWords on legal, health, insurance, and other high margin subjects can cost $2-$50, while you can buy the rights to an article for about $5 - $10 (usage) and $50 for exclusive rights.

As this and other related business models develop it sure can put another spin on the AdSense business model. With some of these articles you could buy them, place AdSense ads on them to get a 30% CTR, and after a few dozen visitors you would pay for the usage cost and be into the pure profit zone.

Similar Competing Business Models:
I believe the people at Traffic Logic / Article Insider also sell content. I doubt they could compete on the price aspect with how cheap some of the articles at Constant Content are. I also have found much of the Article Insider content to be a bit less than impressive.

Some auctions such as Elance allow you to bid on similar projects, but its hard to be certain of quality. The nice thing about Constant Content is you can request articles and bid without obligation to buy, even if a half dozen people make articles for you.

Disclaimer:
I don't think I know who is behind Constant Content. The post was fairly positive because it sounds like a cool idea. Whether or not it pans out, the business model seems smart to me.

HitWise Launches Keyword Intelligence - a New Keyword Research Tool

HitWise launches a new keyword research tool by the name of Keyword Intelligence.

Keyword Intelligence data is based on Hitwiseâ€™s sample of over 25 million home, work and educational Internet users worldwide and how these people use specific search terms across all search engines to find products and services online.

HitWise has partnerships with various ISPs and search services to track search and clickthrough data. Some of their products are a bit pricey for small webmasters (I believe starting at around $25,000 a year). The Keyword Intelligence offering looks like an attempt to break into the mid to lower market.

Keyword Intelligence has two different subscription plans starting at $90 and $190 a month. It allows you to subscribe to geographic markets and categories and do keyword research from there.

Thanks to Warren Duff for pointing me at Keyword Intelligence.

Link Harvester - Free & Deep Access to Link Information

Tool from Last Month:
None of the major text link analysis tools for sale allow you to check co-citation, or pages which link to multiple related resources.

Last month I had a friend create Hub Finder, which is a free on topic link analysis tool which looks for co-citation. I have not got much feedback on the tool yet, but a few people have said they found it to be useful.

New SEO tool for this month:
Another common problem with most link analysis tools is that they do not make it quick, easy, and convenient for you to be able to search past the 1,000 backlink barrier set by most search engines. What is the point of being slow to give you more details than you need, only to survey a small portion of the inbound links?

A friend of mine is a decent programmer, and I had him whip up a tool I call Link Harvester, which has a ton of cool features:

uses the Yahoo! API, so it is in compliance with their TOS.
free
makes saving and exporting data in CSV as simple as a click of the mouse
does not require any software downloading
quickly grabs the number of .gov, .edu, & .ac.uk inbound links while also listing each individual link.
quickly grabs the number of unique linking domains while listing them
quickly grabs the number of unique linking C block IP addresses while listing the C block next to each domain
allows you to check links pointing at a page or at a domain
displays the total number of links showed by Yahoo!
displays the total number of pages indexed by Yahoo!
links next to each domain that point at its WhoIs source information and Wayback Machine information.
if a site links at your site more than 5 times then it is bolded in the results and a checkbox is autochecked, which allows you to filter out that site and spider deeper through the link database. This harvesting action is how you can spider deeper than 1,000 backlinks and where the tool got its name from.
Link Harvester is open source. If you like the tool & find it useful you can add it to your site. Also if you can think of ways to make it better you can modify it however you please.

Why Not Look at Anchor Text?

I did not want this tool to spider websites.
I wanted this tool to be faster than anything on the market.
It is important to understand what anchor text variations people are using, but usually you can figure out how stiff the competition is just by quickly glancing through their backlink profile without necissarily looking too deeply into anchor text. The current off the shelf tools that monitor the anchor text only give you a small sample of backlink data.
This tool was not designed to be the comprehensive show all link analysis tool, but just something that was useful and quick and easy to use.

After you see enough linkage data you become aware of how competitive a site is and how you should go about promoting it. It is kinda like the thin slicing concept Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Blink.

Feedback:
Please let me know what you think about Link Harvester in the comments below.

Want to Host Link Harvester? Want to make it better?
grab the source code here.

WordTracker Easy to Spam? Questioning Keyword Research Tools...

WordTracker sells access to its keyword database based on the concept that meta search engines have data which is much cleaner than regular search results.

Regular search engines have screen scrapers, rank checkers, bid management tools, click bots, webmasters, and all sorts of interesting tools scouring through their networks.

WordTracker collects its data from Dogpile and MetaCrawler, a couple smaller meta search engines. The sales angle is that the keyword data is clean, but is it?

A couple problems with the WordTracker database:

As far as I know it does not store historical data (just the past two months search volume)
It has a small search database compared to the search volume seen on large engines. The small sample size means errors will be blown out of proportion.
Most people who know of and use the database are marketers, who surely could take advantage of the limited search volume by spamming it

Spamming for Profits:
A friend just recently searched and saw a particular SEO firm spamming a ton of fake search referals for their services. I guess that is fairly cheap marketing if you are looking for money from a bunch of naive webmasters.

Smokescreen Spam (Hiding Your Keywords):
Lets say you find out that the phrase gold nuggets is profitable. You run a search bot to search for golden nuggets. You do it over and over and suddenly golden nuggets looks like the money maker.

Your competition trips over each other trying to optimize for golden nuggets (where there may be little to no money), while you are headed to the bank to cash your check.

You cash your check and can afford to go buy more gold nuggets :)

Much like pay per click, some SEO markets are based on working the margins. If you can get your competitors to get in an SEO war in an area of lower profit then eventually they may get frustrated and quit or go after other markets.

Many people focus on improving their sites, but once you get near the top providing competing sites adequate amounts of disinformation may help keep you there. In SEO the only numbers you can trust are the dollars in the bank account at the end of the day (assuming they are not there from a fraudulent transaction).

LinkWorth to Sell Presell Pages / Content Hosting

From thee LinkWorth blog

Today LinkWorth is proud to launch its newest advertising product called, Billboard Link Ads. This new and exciting technology takes text link advertising to an entirely new level by allowing the advertiser to create a very effective write up about their product or service being promoted, embedding targeted linked keywords and/or phrases throughout the content and having the entire dedicated page hosted on one of our partner websites. So instead of buying a simple text link from someone, you are purchasing an entire page with up to 10 text links included throughout the content.

I am a bit surprised that nobody has tried to set up a marketplace for this until now.

As long as people have been buying and selling links for you would think that many more people would pick up on this idea. WeBuildPages has been marketing this concept, but the idea of being able to chose amongst an open marketplace makes the idea much more scalable.

I know search engines can probably pick up on more patterns than most webmasters realize, but many people selling links through LinkWorth link back to LinkWorth on their site using affiliate links, which likely makes it both easy and appealing for some search engines to give less weighting to links from those sites or decide to not want to count those ads.

LinkWorth should protect their inventory partners and advertisers better than that if they aim to create a longterm solution.

There are many affordable programmers and many marketers are sitting on stacks of cash. There should be more people pushing these types of solutions.

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