Blogstorm

Updated I posted this before Aaron Wall had a chance to reply to my email, his response is now included at the end of the post.

Most people will be aware by now that John Chow no longer ranks for his own name (and many other terms) on Google. This is most likely due to a manual penalty by one of the Google web spam team as a result of his violation of the Google webmaster guidelines.
John left a comment the other day stating that you can’t submit a reinclusion request for a site that isn’t banned. This is incorrect.

Here is what Matt Cutts has to say about reinclusion requests:

What’s a reinclusion request and why would you want to do one?
If you’ve been experimenting with SEO, or you employ as SEO company that might be doing things outside Google’s guidelines, and your site has taken a precipitous drop recently, you may have a spam penalty. A reinclusion request asks Google to remove any potential spam penalty.

After JC left the comment I thought it would be interesting to see what advice some professional internet marketing consultants would offer to help John regain his rankings. If you have a theory please feel free to comment below.

Professional Advice for John Chow

Patrick Altoft, BlogStorm.co.uk, The paid links in the right sidebar earned $1500 in June so removing them totally should be a last resort. John should try to remove any paid links that are unrelated to his site and see if that works first.
Next I would suggest JC writes a post asking anybody that links to him already to alter the anchor text they use to something neutral like johnchow.com or another phrase of their choosing. One of the main problems is that sheer number of bloggers that took part in his link exchange scheme using anchor text like “make money online”.

Finally he should submit a reinclusion request stating that he will never participate in link schemes designed to increase his site’s ranking or PageRank.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz,
It’s hard to say whether that process would get John back in. I think his drastic flaunting of the “paid links” advisement by Google has made them very suspicious and possibly forced them to make an example out of him. My guess is that a Google engineer said “we can’t have this guy who’s getting tons of publicity by selling links without nofollow inspire others to do likewise, so let’s penalize him.”

And they did. I think John might have to literally go through all his past posts and place a “nofollow” on every one that’s paid, make a post stating he’s done that and he wants to stay current with Google’s guidelines, then issue a re-inclusion request through Webmaster Central in a very humble, groveling way.

It’s possible they’ll lift the penalty anyways and that they just wanted to make a quick example so others wouldn’t think it was OK, but if I were him, that’s what I’d do.

Dave Zuls, Hawaii Online Advertising, I believe Google just needed to Bitch-Slap the guy as an example because he was arrogantly and openly selling links. This helps to promote FUD (Fear uncertainty and doubt) about Google and their ability to punish people who buy and sell links.

I don’t believe the Link-Back promotion was the real problem. You might get into trouble if you link to “Bad Neighborhoods” since a malicious competitor trying to sabotage your rankings can not link-out from your website. However…. The posts where he reciprocates do not seem to link out to “Bad Neighborhoods”.

Check them out for yourself.

Here is a quote from Matt Cutts:

“Google does reserve the right to take manual action on spam” … “You can do absolutely anything you want on your site. But in the same way, I believe Google has the right to do whatever we think is best (in our index, algorithms, or scoring) to return relevant results.”

(Go ahead punk… I’ll Bitch-Slap yo’ lazy ass)

(IMO) John Chow might benefit if he were to stop selling links and then post something about it. He could point out exactly how he was selling links, where they were and demonstrate how they are now gone. Also… It wouldn’t hurt to humble himself for being so arrogant in the way he was selling links and admit to making poor decisions.

Aaron Wall, SEO Book,I think he is playing it smart by publicising it, so he gets more links and trusts out of it. If he is popular in real life (in the minds of many people) then eventually Google will have to rank him for at least his personal brand related terms (like his name), or risk eroding the value of their own brand.

Conclusions

Some great opinions here and certainly something for John to think about. John clearly wants to make money from his blog and isn’t too concerned about ranking well in Google so the key issue is, will johnchow.com make more money violating the Google guidelines or by grovelling to Google and asking for his rankings back.

What do you think? Should John grovel?

Most internet marketing consultants will tell you that getting links from related websites is the best way to improve your rankings on Google. The problem is that the majority of these related websites are your direct competition and are unlikely to want to link to you.

Obtaining links from your competitors is almost impossible unless they don’t realise you are a competitor. Some websites are willing to exchange links but you need to be a really good resource and a trusted site for them to want to exchange links with you.

The best way to use your competition is to set up an extra site that isn’t associated with your main site.

For example if you are selling MP3 players you would start up an MP3 player retailer directory and fill it with good content and articles and exchange links with all the other retailers.

You can even add your competitors links if they don’t want to exchange links – the key is to create a valuable resource. Make sure it is all done under a fake name and that its not hosted on the same sever as your main site.

Once the new site has taken off and attracted lots of natural links you simply need to implement some sneaky cloaking so that your main competitors see normal links but the search engine spiders see nofollow links. Don’t nofollow all the links on your site, just the ones to your nearest competitors.


if((preg_match("/msn/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) == 1)

The beauty of this tip is that even if Google finds the cloaking and bans the site they have no way of associating it with your main website.

I will try to make the Sneaky SEO Tactics a regular column so if you have any tips please send them in.

Incorrect SEO information is one of my pet hates and Go Daddy seems to be pushing some pretty bad advice on their website today.

When you try to register a domain they offer this “helpful” tip:

Why should I register more than one domain name?

• Drive more traffic to your Web site.
• Enjoy more opportunities to market to–and be listed in–search engines.
• Provide customers more ways to find you when searching the Internet.

Using more than one domain is generally a bad idea. Using extra domains to try and get traffic from the search engines is almost always a bad idea. I know Go Daddy are trying to sell more domains but giving people the wrong information isn’t the way to do it.

Sometimes a second domain is a good idea for example if you want to launch a version of your site in another country or if you have a major new product that doesn’t fit your existing site.

You should always try to buy misspellings and country specific versions just so somebody else can’t use them. Just redirect them to your homepage.

Everett over at First Page Fitness has an interesting post today about why every brand needs an affiliate program.

Basically the idea is that affiliate sites are more likely to write positive reviews about products that they can make a commission on. If your product is up for review against another product that doesn’t offer an affiliate program it’s clear which one the affiliate site is going to recommend.

Whilst this is great for brand and reputation management the main reason you need an affiliate program is to get links.

With Google cracking down on paid links it is becoming almost impossible for commercial sites to build links outside the normal directory type of sites. If your site has an affiliate program you give sites an incentive to link to you. The best thing about these links is that they are not usually sitewide and often come in the content area of high value pages.

Do affiliate links count?

Yes and no. Some affiliate links will not help you at all. For example if you manage your affiliate program using Commission Junction the links will not pass weight. Google has probably created an algorithm to devalue most affiliate links from major programs such as CJ & Trade Doubler.

The best way to make sure your affiliate links pass weight is to manage your own program and to make sure you set it up in the right way.

For example if the affiliate link uses the format www.mywebsite.com/index.php?affiliate=1234 then it would be quite easy for Google to spot that it is an affiliate link. My suggestion would be to use something like www.mywebsite.com/index.php/1234 and use htaccess to rewrite the page to the first version. I won’t go into detail about how to do the rewrite as it will vary too much from site to site.

The next key issue is to make sure you redirect the www.mywebsite.com/index.php/1234 page to your homepage or whatever landing page you want to use. That way you are building links to the homepage rather than creating a load of extra pages with referral id’s at the end.

Before you redirect to the homepage you would need to set your affiliate cookie otherwise the sales won’t be tracked.

Loads of links

An affiliate program makes it so easy to build links its scary. You can send out emails to people saying “Please link to my site, we will offer x% commission on all products sold via your link” and get almost a 100% success rate if the emails are targeted enough.

Not sure why this isn’t common knowledge but you can set the maximum and minimum prices of the items that show up in your Auction Ads.

For instance I sell a fair few phones and use Auction Ads to monetize a very small amount of spare traffic that isn’t suitable for my normal affiliate programs. In the past a keyword search for phone brought up loads of cheap phone chargers and phone covers but if you set the minimum bid to $50 it gets rid of these items and increases your commission.

The way eBay works is that the bids increase near the end of the auction so if you can send somebody to an auction that’s about to end you will get impulse purchases.

Here is the code:

auctionads_ad_kw = "keyword minprice:50";


Replace minprice with maxprice to set the maximum price.

Did everybody else know this already?

Launching a new website is the hardest task a webmaster has to face. Weeks of sleepless nights culminate in a launch day which might only see a handful of new visitors and a feeling that you’ve wasted your time.

Of course the key is to have several other people beta testing your new site and offering opinions throughout the design process but that still often leaves the promotion of the site down to one person – you.

The first rule of launching a new website is to know your target market. I’ve been involved in internet marketing for a few years now and have become well known on some of the forums and blogs as well as having a few industry contacts who are happy to offer some help on occasion. Unless you can list the top 50 sites in your new niche pretty much off by heart then you are really going to struggle to be able to connect with your target audience.

Thanks to SEO agencies and digital agencies for the help on this.

Of course if you are launching a new website for a bricks and mortar business you might be able to leverage existing relationships with customers, partners, suppliers and even the press to build links and traffic but I didn’t have that luxury.

Phase 1: Cool Content

Building a website is so easy these days that you really need to have remarkable content and linkbait if you are to succeed. On BlogStorm I wanted to have a lot of content to back up the tracker so I sat down and wrote some in depth posts on subjects like Google Analytics. In addition I started keeping a note of my ideas for future blog posts so that if ever the inspiration dried up I would have a list of ideas ready to write some posts.

As it turned out the Google Analytics tutorial was widely read and linked from a lot of popular sites and it really helped kick start the BlogStorm blog.

Phase 2: Emailing Bloggers

Once BlogStorm was ready for action and had been seeded with a few popular blogs I sat down and sent out a few emails to bloggers who I thought might be interested. For the first few hours after the emails were sent I didn’t get any replies and started to wonder if my emails were not working. The tracker tool is clearly a cool service but was it cool enough for somebody to actually sit down and write about it on their blog?

Luckily the emails worked and the site was featured on the likes of TechCrunch and ProBlogger in the first couple of days and received lots of other positive press. There is nothing better than having your new site featured on somebody elses blog and I really appreciate those who took the time to write about the site and link to it.

This works in any niche, I’ve launched websites selling party supplies and even gas fires using this technique.

Phase 3: Social Networking

Hopefully your website design included social networking buttons on the relevant pages. It also helps if you were a user of various social networks prior to launching your site so you know how to use them to your advantage. In the case of BlogStorm the only thing I did initially was to give the site a thumbs up on StumbleUpon and vote for the story on Digg after somebody else submitted it. The best thing about having really cool content is that it promotes itself. Sometimes you can go away for a few days and gain thousands of links without even trying.

Phase 4: Using Forums

After the site was already gaining traction I continued to create some good blog posts and started to use the Digital Point forums to drive some traffic. People on webmaster forums are in general the least spam tolerant and most web savvy group you will find so forum marketing has to be approached with care.

In the case of BlogStorm I created a couple of threads stating that I had a cool script/guide that I wanted to give away for free and received around 500 replies and private messages asking for the details.

It should be noted that using forums only works if you can deliver on your promises. If the products I was giving away were low quality or didn’t help people then my reputation would suffer. As it stands I think that most people were impressed and certainly a good number have become readers of the blog.

If you want to check my 10,000 links you can do so at Yahoo. The figure is 10,000 at the moment but it might change at any time. The actual figure doesn’t matter so much as the fact it is quite a lot for just a few weeks.

This post was about the number 3

I had already drafted this post when I saw that Daily Blog Tips were holding a contest for bloggers who posted about the number 3 so this will count as my entry.

Any questions?

Great content is nothing without effective promotion. The key to maximising the effectiveness of your link bait is to make sure it gets seen by as many webmasters & bloggers as possible.

Start off by sending a personal email to a few bloggers who you think might be interested in linking to you. Most people will have a list of people in mind already but if you don’t then you might need to skip this step – there is no point sending emails to people who are not interested in what you have to say. If you really have no idea about which blogs are likely to want to write about your content then you might want to monitor sites like Digg, Netscape & Del.icio.us for a few weeks and subscribe to all the blogs that appear to be related to your site. Once you have a feel for what the popular bloggers in your niche are writing about it is a lot easier to create something cool for them to link to.

The most effective way of promoting your content is to use social networking. Unless you are a well known user at some of the social networking websites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Netscape and Stumble Upon it is highly unlikely you will be able to publicise your link bait effectively using these channels so you are best either waiting and hoping somebody else finds your content and submits it for you or taking a gamble and submitting it yourself. Don’t bother trying to scam these services, most have very effective filters for spam and will ban you straight away. Emailing a couple of friends and asking them to give your site the thumbs up on something like Stumble Upon and certain other sites is a good idea just don’t go overboard with the emails.

One tactic that works very well is to give your site the thumbs up on Stumble Upon first and then visitors from there will like your site and submit it to some other social networks themselves.

Thanks to John from Digital Production Agency for helping me get started on this.

If you are struggling to gain any traction and your social media campaign is a non starter you should step back and spend a month monitoring the social media sites and submitting content from other peoples websites so you can gain a feel for what people like to read about.

Responding to your link bait

Assuming your link bait takes off and starts attracting some discussion in the blogosphere and in social media sites you need to be prepared to accept comments and criticisms and quickly take appropriate action.

For instance if you realise the script you released had some bugs you would need to fix them and then post a response to alert users to the fact that you are listening and have fixed the problems. Don’t be afraid to make changes to the link bait but remember that controversy is a good thing – don’t start editing blog posts just because somebody didn’t agree with you.

Sometimes the comments made in response to a successful article or tool can inspire you to create something even better and more useful to your readers. My first Google Analytics tutorial raised a number of questions and I was able to create a second post and even a third post answering the questions and hopefully helping some of our readers on the way.

Further reading: Beginners guide to link bait

With thousands of low value web directories available, choosing a decent one to submit to is a hard task. A lot of webmasters decide to submit to 500 free ones but unless you have a lot of natural links to counteract the unnatural directory links you might find yourself with a spammy link profile.

The value in submitting to directories is to gain some high PR links and co-citation. Decent directories have a lot of incoming links and PR so will help your site get more pages indexed. This is of particular importance to affiliate sites as it can be hard to attract natural incoming links.

The key issue is to find a few (less than 10) decent places to get your links from. The first 2 on my list are Yahoo and Business.com. For me they are a great starting link for affiliate and commercial sites. If you are running a blog you can probably get enough natural links to not need to submit to these but for most other new sites they are a must have link in my opinion.

If you do get accepted to the Yahoo directory make sure you use the NOYDIR tag on your web pages otherwise Yahoo might use your directory description in the normal search results pages.

My next favourite directory is the Aviva Directory. The reason this stands out is because the owners have been linkbaiting. 99% of directories don’t have any natural links but Aviva has even been on the front page of Digg a few times so has more trusted links than most of the other directories put together.

I’m not going to discuss any other directories by name as there are plenty of other lists on the web already. The best way to find a few more is to search Google for directories in your niche. Use search terms like “cell phone directory” or “cell phone add link” if your site is about cell phones.

Other good methods include searching for all the places your competitor’s sites are listed. Use Yahoo site explorer to find links to the sites and search Google for all the places their url’s are listed.

A big issue for me with directory submission is knowing when to stop. Once you have been listed in about 10 decent directories there really isn’t any point in getting any more of these types of links.

For more details on how to choose a directory Aaron Wall has some discussion about checking the cache date to see how trusted the pages are. Trusted pages are crawled more frequently than non-trusted ones.

Last Monday TIME magazine released an article titled “25 Sites We Can’t Live Without”. The article was, not surprisingly, widely read and linked from a lot of popular blogs as well as getting over 2500 diggs.

It might come as a surprise then that TIME has now removed the article from their website barely a week after releasing it. The page now redirects (badly) to the TIME homepage. Doing a Google search for the article title brings up an almost identical article from 2006 so clearly TIME has simply recycled old content for this latest version and had no intention of keeping the new one live.

Here is how they do the redirect:


<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.time.com">


It seems TIME needs to learn how to properly redirect a web page.

Linkbait is the art of creating a piece of content so good that lots of people want to link to it. TIME have clearly achieved this part but in removing the content after only a few days they haven’t maximised the number of links they can get and have damaged their credibility at the same time.

I will be removing the link from my blog as there doesn’t really seem much point in linking to the TIME homepage, they have quite enough links already.

Thanks to Tim from web design agency leeds for the tip!

Manik from Webcosmo has coded an ASP version of the BlogStorm Tracker script so that anybody who runs ASP rather than PHP can get a piece of the action.

The script can be found here.

You still need to follow the instructions for getting a Yahoo API key first.

Thanks Manik.

Linkbait is the act of adding content to a website with the aim of attracting links from other sites. The content can take a variety of different forms from a unique tool or a breaking news story to a well written article or controversial image.

Sometimes linkbait is intentional but quite often the best linkbait is conceived quite by accident. Continue reading »

Yesterday I spotted that John Chow was no longer ranking for the search term “John Chow” on Google.

I didn’t want to post about it until John had chance to comment and try to figure out what happened.

Quite a few people search for John Chow, our Adwords ad set up 24 hours ago has had about 400 impressions so far.

Now as a John Chow dot com reader I think he deserves to rank. The blog offers loads of information and Google is being a bit harsh to apply a penalty.

What I think happened

Here is an extract from Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Matt Cutts has more on paid links but you get the general idea – Google doesn’t like people buying and selling links.

Although Google hates paid links they are still very effective and will continue to be effective as long as you follow some simple rules when you buy and sell them. This is where John Chow has gone wrong I believe.

The paid links on the right hand side are totally unrelated to his content so stand out like a sore thumb.

Buying and selling links

If you want to buy and sell links you need to make sure the links are related to your site. If you start buying links from a page that is selling links to casino and v!agra sites then you are asking for trouble. If your site is about mobile phones and you are selling links to p0rn sites then you are going to get a much harsher penalty than if you sell to other phone sites.

When you buy from a good text link broker you can choose the exact pages your link is going on and look at the other outbound links. When you sell links via a broker you can accept or reject the links as you wish. Don’t just accept all the links.

How John Chow can get his rankings back

The best way to get his ranking back is to go through the Google Webmaster Guidelines and solve any issues he can find. Once the site is clean then he needs to submit a reinclusion request in Google Webmaster Central.

Obviously nobody except Google really knows whats going on here, and they aren’t about to tell anybody. If you have a theory please let me know in the comments.