If you are not a real charity and desire my ebook (but not enough value to consider paying for it) I recommend grabbing a dated version of the ebook from a file sharing network.

This may sound a bit harsh, but I am trying to keep up my ability to support legit charities as long as I can...and for that to happen some things need to change.

My charity support is going to require more effort from the charities. In the past I have done lots of work trying to help anyone and everyone, but I need to take a little load off the inbox.

If I try to make myself freely available to everyone and they expect fast responses for me giving them my business model free then I am setting up a piss poor value proposition. There needs to be some effort put in on the end of the charity so that I am not a charity verification service and so they value what I am giving them.

Earlier today I got this gem of a comment:

We are an Embassy of India School in Moscow, Russia and requested per your post "If you are a certified non profit, charity, church, open software developer, or school I can provide you with a free copy." for a free copy. It is now more than a week and we are still waiting. If you don't intend to send for free, than do not post the crap about sending free on your site.

And generally I am pretty quick with email, but sometimes I miss a few (and now have about 700 in the inbox to sort through - and get around 100 a day). With the charities I sometimes ask for verification. Based on the initial emails and the lack of follow through with some of them I would estimate that over 50% of the charity requests I get are fake.

Some people have went so far as trying to spoof their sent from email address. Others have created near similar sites and done bait and switch website techniques.

The number of demanding fake charity sleazeballs eating up my time is unfortunate. They are a scourge on my ability to learn and help good people and I am not going to let them change my perception of legitimate good causes. I will simply not waste my time servicing the fake ones.

Going forward for a charity to get my ebook free they must email me the following:

• my name (if you use dear sir expect sir to be synonymous with spam bin, because that is where it is going)

• an email with an address that matches the URL of the charity site (if you are an outside consultant helping a charity and you think it will really help you then it should not be that big of a deal for you to set up an email address)
• some sort of verification that they are a legitimate charity. (ie: see we are referenced by Network For Good here... or something like that...wherever they are referenced that MUST link through to the charity site matching the email)
• Most legitimate charities create a site and get no traffic before they even realize they could use something like SEO. If you have no website and outside verification then you can get that sorted before contacting me.
• you must also email me a URL from the charity site where there is a contact form or email address listed that I can mail back access of the ebook to
• if you have a charity registration number that also helps

Other requirements to get a free ebook:

• you do not have to be a registered charity if you are a legitimate good cause. If a site like World Changing wanted my ebook and was not an official charity of course they can have it free, but they would need to have content that made me feel like they were a good cause to me and possibly others stating what a good cause they are on their website.

• Legit open source stuff, legit schools, and things that I just think are cool qualify as well.
• I am uncertain as to what religions are right or wrong, but I believe many organized religions cause more harm or conflict than good. I feel like I am being fake if I help spread things I do not believe in to promote myself. Thus going forward the only religious institutions I will offer my ebook to for free are those which represent interdenominational institutions (ie: those that accept all types)...and it should say so on your site...you should point me to where it says this.

If you send me a charity request email and it does not comply with any of the above do not expect a reply.

Mail requests to seobook@gmail.com

Love it or hate it please let me know your thoughts :) or :(

I always noticed that some blogs and sites like Threadwatch got uber tons of comments while this blog did not get many.

I recently bought Threadwatch, and the last couple days I have put far more effort into that site, but have noticed a good number of comments on this one as well. It sorta goes to show that sometimes by changing your perspective you can appreciate stuff more.

Thanks to everyone who has been commenting and whatnot.

Now another thing that is a huge difference between this site and that one is that in the past I think I spent lots of time thinking about and analyzing stuff to the point where few people would want to comment on any of the posts (ie: if you already say it all then there is nothing left).

On Threadwatch the audience, editors, format, and whole system is more geared around an infoporn mechanism. Find cool stuff and let others comment on it. Try to find at least 1 or 2 things every day that make readers become smilers and most likely writers.

If you want others to comment sometimes it is easy to leave a bit out. If you work really hard to say both sides of a story it is much harder for readers to quickly add something than if you mostly highlight one side and give people easy things to add.

Shorter is typically better as well. As far as social interaction goes short sweet and funny will typically beat out comprehensive and perhaps being a bit overly wordy.

I still need to work out lots of the mechanisms for the social stuff, but that is one hell of a site to be able to learn on and while I hope it does great even if I hosed up I think the experience is worth so much money. Thanks again for the opportunity Nick and all the readers / editors / writers at TW.

There are many problems with running multiple similar brands in parallel.

• It splits your focus

• you end up cross posting stuff where it does not belong

I am going to consolidate many of my domains in the near future. SeoBook and ThreadWatch will remain unique channels, at least until some tells me that I am screwing up majorly bad and it should be otherwise.

The key for me to do well with them is to respect them for what they are...ie: this site is supposed to be about actionable SEO tips, and ThreadWatch is about rumor and stuff that is fun and interesting about search / technolgy / SEO.

I also recognize that some of the people posting comments at TW have been in the game far longer than I. In the past I would reference some of the comments that I thought were great, and I will keep doing that going forward.

So I recently set up a bunch of new websites and wanted to link out to a few authoritative sites right off the start. I added various numbers of outbound links to each channel, but after setting up a number of them I got pretty quick at researching where I should link at, even when I did not know a topic that well.

Outbound links are like a gimme in SEO. It's fairly hard to get the right type of people to link at a new site unless you bribe them or it's a great site, but just about anyone can improve their web community by linking out to some of the better resources on their topic.

Terms like PageRank leakage and bad neighborhood have made some webmasters become greedy or paranoid with their link popularity to the point where their sites become harder to link at because they are islands.

How do you find the best resources to link at?

What do the Various Major Engines Like?
My first port of call is Myriad Search. Search for the core phrase your site is focused on, synonyms, and phrases slightly broader in scope than your keyword phrase.

If you are in a hyper competitive field MSN tends to bring up some fairly spammy results, but sometimes seeing the results mixed together gives you a nice flavor of what they all like and sometimes you will find a nugget ranked at #7 in Yahoo! or #6 in Ask that all the other engines missed.

Unfortunately I am a fairly default searcher (primarily just using Google) but using Myriad helps me get an idea of what people can get away with (as far as content quality goes) in some of the engines.

Some people recommend other meta search engines, but like Berkeley, I think most meta search engines have way to many ads in the content area to be of any use.

Research, Research, Research!
Yahoo! Mindset allows you to bias your search results toward commercial or information result. Tilt that puppy full on research and see what sites they think are informational in nature.

Is that Page Created by the Government?
The Yahoo! Advanced Search page makes it easy to search just .gov or just .edu resources (or both at once). Sometimes this will be a miss, but I have found many great resources using the Yahoo! Advanced Search page.

Directories:
Many directories have picks or a star on favorite sites. DMOZ and the Yahoo! directories are the two most well known directories. You can also browse the Open Directory Project organized by PageRank using the Google Directory.

Don't forget some of the smaller higher quality directories created by librarians. LII is a killer site.

Vertical Authorities:
If you run a finance related site odds are pretty good that you can find something good at Fool.com, MarketWatch.com, Forbes.com, etc.

If you run an automotive site it is easy to link at Edmunds, Nada, Kelly Blue Book, etc.

To drill down go to a relevant vertical authority site and do a site level search for information related to your topic.

Broad Authorities:
When all else fails I like to link to sites with great overall authority scores if they have relevant pages or channels. Some examples include:

• Yahoo! Directory

• DMOZ
• Wikipedia
• About.com

Other sites which have content on a wide array of topics like Answers.com, Topix.net, HowStuffWorks.com, and Britanica.com et al are also easy to link at.

I believe this site lists some of the top .com's.

That is about as far as I have gone with most of these new sites, but sometimes you may want to hunt further if you have an uber spammy topic like cash advance or are trying to go further in depth on a topic that is already well covered. Some other ideas...

Local Search:
If your searches are local in nature you may some of the best information by using regional search databases.

Filetype:
Don't forget that you can specify filetype. Spamming is a game of margins, and on the whole the average .doc or .PDF is going to be of higher quality than the average web page.

Search Engine Showdown has a good chart of search engine features.

Related Sites / Pages:
When you find a good site you can see which sites are related to it. Use a tool like the Google related search or the Touchgraph Google Browser.

Social Bookmarking:
There are a variety of social bookmarking websites which can help you find that key resource you need to reference to complete an article. De.lici.us is probably the most popular.

Link Socially: Tip for Blogs:
Technorati, Feedster, Daypop, Ice Rocket, and Google Blogsearch and Yahoo! Blogsearch are a few of the more well known blog search engines.

If you are running a blog or some type of a topical channel do not forget to use ego stroke techniques in your content and citations. Even if your idea is better than someone else's, or your read their idea after you came up with yours still give them a bit of link love.

Sometimes mentioning a prominent blogger (saying they are so right, they are hosed, they are normally spot on but are messed up on issue x) equates to a quality link back and many secondary links from various non clued up ditto heads :)

Matt Cutts posts on some blog and ping RSS Announcer. A few months ago I also stated my disgust with some of the blog spam salesletters.

For those thinking of investing in blog spam software or other useless related crap, search engines can look at far more than the [delete this pink text] and other obvious software footprints. The Link Spam Detection research paper stated:

A number of recent publications propose link spam detection methods. For instance, Fetterly et al. [Fetterly et al., 2004] analyze the indegree and outdegree distributions of web pages. Most web pages have in- and outdegrees that follow a power-law distribution. Occasionally, however, 17 search engines encounter substantially more pages with the exact same in- or outdegrees than what is predicted by the distribution formula. The authors find that the vast majority of such outliers are spam pages.

It's funny to see the star internet marketing crew being too lazy to even change out their bogus testimonials. But at least in the short term there is far more money is the following model:

• launch a shitty software product

• use hype affiliate marketing and joint venture opportunities with internet marketing expert hucksters
• opt in list
• then email spamming (either directly or via affiliates)
• repeat process

than in creating real value. Maybe eventually people will get a clue.

On the web there are a large number of people who will try to help you along to doing well, and then there are hollow middle men who want to take your money to shit down your throat. Since it costs virtually nothing to make most software or sites you see far more of the latter in the internet marketing realm.

There was recently a WebmasterWorld thread about why people hate Google and other successful companies. Some chalk it up to jelousy, but I just think it is disappointing when sleeze marketing and / or other dubious business practices bring better returns than honest ones.

Here is a perfect example. So about a week ago I gave away one of many copies of my ebook to a charity and recently got this response:

Hi Aaron,

Great book, I finished it a few weeks ago and now need to take notes on all the highlights. And WOW, with all the resources you have, that was in itself would be worth the price of the book, oh wait, it was free for me, :) lol

I have read quite a few books over the last 1 1/2 years on internet marketing, etc, and I really believe you are one of the few guys out there that truly want to help others and not just try and milk their list, as I heard one big name internet marketer say and that's exactly how I feel when im on his list. It really came through in your writing and the fact that you update the book on a continual basis says enough.

I would like your opinion on http://www.xyz software.com/ from what I can tell, it appears to be a great piece of software but I always like to get a 2nd opinion before I buy. (btw, I was referred to this by one of the guys I consider that will sell any and everything, every week it's a new cant miss product some of these guys are hawking so its sometimes tough to tell the gems from the duds)

I responded (roughly):

Hi Name
thanks for liking the ebook

xyz software = crap
here is why...

-qpw ($30 or so) is great
-you should mix stuff up
-sites that accept automated type submissions will tend to be
bad neighborhoods

see also
http://www.search-marketing.info/newsletter/articles/trustrank-company.htm
http://www.martinibuster.net/2005/11/link-development-is-dead.html

FYI, I recently was bogusly sued and my lawyers are raping me, so if
you feel like you got tons of value out of the ebook donations are
accepted
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001130.shtml

Cheers,
Aaron

From that I got no response or donation. Give a guy your business model and your knowledge and get nothing in response. That's pretty useless considering I just saved him $97.

I find people that have no money to support people who help them but want to spend money on the latest interent marketing scam software to be greedy and/or stupid. It's not uncommon for business people to take the low road though.

Traffic Power Sucks saved people over a half million dollars and did not get much in donations from the people they helped when asking for donations to fight the bogus lawsuit they got.

I have about 700 emails in the inbox and I likely will be changing my charity policy soon to be more accomidating to paying customers. I don't expect to profit from helping charities, but the semi shady charity requests weigh on my time and spirits. And I still haven't said thanks to all the people who have helped me fight off the internet marketing scam that is Traffic Power :(