Blogs, Attention Markets, & Link Building Opportunities

"Blogs will save democracy." - random blogger

While there are many blogs about blogging, and in general the concept is overhyped, blogs do present a solid marketing opportunity.

Gaining unrequested links usually takes a good bit of effort. You have to be one of the leading resources in your field, you have to provide something that others do not, you have to give others a reason to want to link to you. Some people try to buy their way in, but of course that eventually backfires.

With blogs you can just whinge on about whatever, and so long as it is usually on topic some people will read it. Sometimes the smallest things, like mentioning a 20 pound AdWords coupon can get you multiple free links from other regularly updated channels, and the attention of people who read those channels.

If you are looking for resources to cite you can use a tool to look at topical trackbacks (which also point links your way) and help get you noticed by some of the leaders of your community. Of course you can go too far and be labeled a spammer so you want to use some caution / restraint.

Some systems, like PubSub, also show you how citation data / linkage profiles change over time. If someone is linking at a competing channel then you can ask them to link to yours, or reference them, or make a useful comment on their site which is likely to get them to click through to your site.

Some bloggers also tag their content. Some have suggested using tagging systems for keyword research, but tagging is sloppy, narrow, and somewhat self reinforcing IMHO.

To me the real value of tagging is in linking opportunities and attention markets.

You can tag your content to work yourself into the tagged channels. Some people track certain terms, so you can almost guarantee they will read what you write if you tag it with the terms they track.

Of course, if tagging systems get too popular they will get heavily spammed. Technorati tags: , , , , , , etc etc etc

For link building you can find people who are tagging things that interest you, make a good personalized proposal, offering something they are interested in, and get the link :)

Stuntdubl has a list of social bookmarking tools here.

Erosion of Value: Small General Directories...PUNT!

BobMuch keeps promoting directory lists over at SEW forums (which frequently inclde 5 of his own directories), but many scrappers sites have recently been given a hand job, and DaveN says of directories:

whats stopping someone just scraping and building directories, using the same footprint

DaveN

added oops they all ready have

If scrappers are a big burdon on Google (and they are), and

  • they pattern themselves after directories; and

  • most of the small general directories are not much more than glorified link farms

Then it makes sense that small junk directories are on their way out.

Marcia also mentions identifiable link networks, staying below radar, and how many directories appear as link farms:

There are some that are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, visibly identifiable as being part of linking "networks" - either networks of likeminded directories interlinked and cross-linked with the same business model in mind, or quite visibly as SEO networks.

Unfortunately, trying to emulate BH techniques without following the basic rule of BH, which is to stay off the radar, isn't what so many of them are doing. Publicizing and soliciting business for them right at SEO forums, right where search engineers can and do read, is exactly the opposite - it's putting them right on the radar and it's only been a matter of time before the ships either float or sink.

and

A good, substantial, vertical directory that's well established and gets inbound traffic for the relevant keyword set will do that, but those are a far cry from many of the little directories being thrown out there daily, both independently and as part of networks, that hope to monetize by selling text adverts or footer sitewides, even though, as pointed out, in many cases they're literally undistuishable from scraper sites

For a while I tried to help promote some of the directories, but almost all of them have turned out to be quick buck operations, and I will not be sad to see that business model erode.

What have you seen of Google and directories? Are they becoming less effective?

Evil SEO Business Models: Hate Site Networks & Mafia Styled Ranking Manipulation

So like Google's motto, usually I try not to be evil. Sometimes I think of random evil thoughts though. I can't help it, sometimes I forget to wear the tinfoil hat... ;)

I have been contacted by an increasing number of corporations who want me to bury negative websites. Some general feedback sites with good root authority have inner pages which are ranking for a wide variety of business names.

What would happen if a person set up a network of sites to collect feedback about various companies, knowing that they would get mostly negative responses? Throw in a dash of promotion and a link to us reminders and you are ranking for many business names.

Have someone else inform people of the hate sites and maybe there is a subscription SEO business model burying the bad news. If they stop paying for your services you go about removing links for some sites and build a few for the negative site.

Of course if the businesses are too well connected and some stuff is sold in the wrong way I think it could be extortion or something, so I am not trying to promote that.

There has to be a way to make money leveraging the ability to bury bad news. Then again, depending on what bad news you were trying to bury that could be evil too.

Personalized, Targeted, & Relevant Search Spam

Search spam is ready for the next level...DaveN appears to like the new Google personalized search. :)

I hope to be interviewing DaveN shortly, and will post the interview online when it is done.

DaveN also thinks that useless small directories might be on their way out.

Link Harvester Updated Again...

So my friend Mike just updated Link Harvester again (be cool and grab your source code here).

The newest version of the tool:

  • strips the www. off of filtered domains such that both the www and non www versions get filtered out in one swoop

  • allows users to manually enter domains to filter. This works well if people have links from various subdomain URLs like Every-Town-in-the-Country.Spam-Site.com. Just enter Spam-Site.com and it will filter all of them.
  • links into the Whois Source data for DMOZ and Yahoo! listings
  • added # of c block IP addresses and URLs for the filtered sites section
  • still has all the features the old tool had

Anyone have any more feature requests for it?

Cache Crawler... New SEO Tool Idea

Feature requests... feature requests.

So recently Waxy held a contest for creating a tool to visually see the history of a Wikipedia page. The winning programmer got like $200, which in terms of SEO spend is not much money for a tool that many people could use.

While search engine APIs may have limited longterm value I am hoping that they last a while and are not too evil with their TOS. If they are of course more people will just scrape the data. They may try to block scraping, but tools and spam techniques evolve with the engines.

I am thinking our rate will usually be above $200, and I don't want to make the price something where people place the lowest bid. We will just come up with a price and then throw the idea out there and see what comes back. I can pay for the tools, or if it really takes off and others want to support some of the ideas they can help donate too.

If people would be willing to program decent SEO tools for a decent price I could probably think up at least 50 tools to be programmed.

With that in mind, I think the SEO community should have a mass cache tool, to know when stuff was cached. Here are the desired features (so far):

  • works with the Google API

  • checks Google's cache feature (cache:www.example.com) for cache date.
  • the tool should have three main modes it functions in:
    1. allows bulk upload of a list of pages and returns the cache date of each page, also informing users of what pages are not cached.

    2. allows you to enter a URL and return the cache date from the first 1,000 URLs.
    3. allows you to enter a URL and returns which pages are freshly cached. also allows you to set a fresh date to return URLs spidered since then when you do a bulk upload of URLs.
  • If it is possible return if the page is in the supplemental results.
  • The data should be easily exportable to CSV for further manipulation.

Is this a good tool idea? Bad idea? Have any feedback on how to make the idea better? Ideas on how to market it? Suggested award amount? Did I use too many vowels in the post? please give feedback :)

Trackback Search - Sure to Tick off More than a Few Bloggers

So I have noticed trackback spam is much heavier on the weekends. This weekend some kind souls have been promoting bestiality and hentai in my trackback section for me. I always wonder why there is the need to promote those types of topics, when it is just as easy to be relevant (but then again there probably are not too many hentai bestiality bloggers, and I can't see why a person would want to market anything else).

I just got an email from a guy named Jim promoting a free tool called Trackback Search. I have not yet asked how the database was created and the like, but am emailing him right now.

Most people using a tool such as Trackback Search would probably use it to create low quality automated spam, but there are probably good ways to use it, Technorati, BlogPulse, PubSub, Feedster, Blogdex, Daypop, and many of the other tools to help find useful blog type content to cite in meaningful ways.

Interesting to see free automated tools building topical relevance into their systems. Having looked at a number of searches it appears as though the topical relevancy is not perfect, but it does return many relevant sites, and most of them are from rather new posts.

The nice thing about a tool like Trackback Search is that it automates part of the research process, but still allow you to manually write posts, and manually integrate the data such that the people you are referencing do not see you as a dirty trackback spammer (like the hentai and bestiality people are).

Tools are tools, and I always adovcate looking at your long term goals and the potential outcome of using any tool prior to using it.

Even if search engines did not count the trackback linkage data trackbacks could still be a great way to help integrate yourself into a topical community, but you don't want to do it in a manner to where experts on your topic are hating you unless you are creating a crash and burn site.

As time passes more and more tools and sites will continue to blur the line between spam and useful remixing.

Free £20 Google AdWords Coupons for New Advertisers

Not sure how long they will last, but here is a free 20 pound Google AdWords coupon at services.google.com/marketing/links/UK-OA-NETCRAF found on SearchGuild.

Update: here are some more recent coupons

AdWords Logo.
Google AdWords:

  • You can get a free $75 AdWords coupon here (or here or here or here or here or here or here) ... many options linked because some of their coupon offers expire over time & we update this page periodically. The Google Partners Program also offers coupons to consultants managing AdWords accounts.


Bing Ads: get a free Bing coupon today.

White Hat SEO...Cesspool? Dirty? Useless? Does it Work?

So a new thread over at SEW (which always has the best ethics / white / black / gray / green / orange hat SEO threads), is questioning whether or not white hat SEO techniques are still relevant.

Most successful sites do not need to practice SEO, but is it worth doing low risk SEO stuff? If you are not going to be agressive about it why even do SEO at all? How do you define the line between what is risky and what is not? What is SEO and what is not? In the thread Jill Whalen made it sound like marking up page structure is not SEO. What is? Research papers dating back at least to 1998 show code structure is used to help determine relevancy (Marcia added the link to the SEW thread).

The thread also mentions that some of the White Hat SEO practices sometimes get nuked by more aggressive marketers. Interesting that at SEW some people also recently asked to hire SEOs who did not have arbitrary ethical hangups. Even Doug is realizing the end is near.

I do think the whole white vs black thing is a bit silly. I like Tim Mayer's knife to a gun fight analogy much more.

Literal vs Useful Sales Copy - Keywords, Writing Densely, & Conversion

So a while ago I was really bad at making uber literal content. Being literal and easy to understand is a good thing as it makes it easy for people understand what you are doing, but if you are too literal you miss the fact that conversion is driven from emotion more than logic and your copy may convert like crap.

I just rewrote a bunch of page titles and meta tags for a client (I did not write the original ones, but the original titles looked like something I would have wrote a couple years ago). In the past I would do things like create a page about SEO Book FAQs. I would then title the page SEO Book FAQs. Much more commonly people would search for things like Best SEO Book or SEO Book Reviews.

When people are new to SEO with limited marketing experience it is easy to be too literal, focusing on arbitrary stuff like keyword density or keyword repition, and miss out on the end goal of the page. Because there is so much search volume, and maybe only a few billion pages in most of the major search indexes pages will come up frequently so long as you are writing about a popular subject and build a few links into your site.

A big problem with the web is that stuff spreads quickly and success is self reinforcing. A website can be uber sloppy and generally messed up and still make a living.

When you are new to the web it takes a bit of time and effort to figure stuff out, but after you gain a bit of experience it is not that hard to make boat loads of cash, since on the whole the marketplace is not that competitive and most websites are garbage.

As you read more marketing books, sales letters, and web pages learning how to write better sales copy just kinda comes naturally.

Search engines are still a bit stupid. You don't want to write for them and forget your visitors. It is easy to write a bit more naturally and conversion oriented, and then just build a few more links to boost your relevancy.

Some search algorithms may eventually look at conversion metrics to help determine relevancy (ie: Google Wallet, Google buying Urchin, Overure & Google offering free conversion tracking). Things that convert are also more likely to be things that are recommended or cited frequently. Even if more people try your stuff and hate it that means that there will still be more people talking about you, linking to you, and giving you feedback on how to improve your products or services.

I guess the point of this post is don't be too literal, as I think it is a problem I had for an extended period of time. I still probably do it to a bit, but nowhere near as bad as I once did.

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