link building

LinkVana - the other blog announce network

Marketing Fan — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 08:42:58 +0100

As you might know (or not know) some of the private label content clubs provide "announce blog networks" that allow you to post some content including your links to your sites for a relative low fee (or included)... and there your links are - among the neighbourhood of the other 500 members trying to power their thin adsense site with links from even thinner announce blog network links... well - as you can tell, I haven't been impressed with those offers ...

in fact you'd better NOT put your links up there as the negative effect of bad links became evident in the past 6 months... Yes, I've seen sites tank because of bad links!

And thanks to you own ad network detection tools that I wrote about here as well, it didn't take long for me to spot that several of those blogs are not only available to members of the network (ie ArticleUnderground's network) but are also member sites of Text-Link-Ads, PayPerPost and other big scale, WAY ABOVE THE RADAR ad networks that are all being cracked down ... hand's off!

...and then there's LinkVana - the below-the-radar blog link network

One "blog network" I recently tested is called LinkVana which is run by the "famous SEO Dave Kelly"

Well, LOL, did you ever hear of this guy? I'm not even close to recognizing this name, and googling him brought me to a stoneage actor, some singer from the late 70's, and even a gonzo speaker (wtf? :) ... sounds like he picked that fake name to stay below the Google radar :-)

Anyway, regardless of the name issue, what caught my attention are some pretty familiar, for clients not so comfy business rules he set up for this network

blog post urls will NOT be revealed - not even after placement

wow - how cool is that? You buy links and NEVER get to see them - not even after placement...

Additionally they

control the timing of blog posts (even those YOU wrote) is done by their system
- so they try to vary link placement speed, avoid people overdoing it etc
- you still have a way to decide if you want max 1-3 posts per day or less or more ...
offer outsourcing of the annoying blog post writing can be outsourced at $2 per 100 words blog post...
- that's a quite ok rate, given that you hardly find freelance writers doing 100 word posts for you at that rate...
- the problem with the content outsourcing service is
  - boring talk - it's averlage to low quality content
  - copy cats - which means many phrases are just copied from other places on the web...
  - production time - and they took almost 2 weeks to complete around 20 posts of 100 words each.. better write your own posts - I can write that in two hours!
promise to never reveal all the sites to a single user, so merely cycling a percentage of their sites thru for their users... need yet to see that

So while I wouldn't endorse blog link networks in general,
I'm giving LinkVana a try with some test sites ...

The "we don't show off our stuff" (aka not revealing the placement urls) is what I've been practicing for over 2,5 years now, and clients value it as well.

So I'm in there now, been testing for some weeks.

The posts are getting indexed, and of course you can google them with their post text, which is a good thing, as it means the pages are juicy.

I suggest to give LinkVana a try, too - I'll update you on it's progress and mail Dave about the content quality issue now.

Strongest Subpages Suck! Where you should really get links from!

Marketing Fan — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:40:41 +0200

Doing link building is a hard and cost-intensive job – whereby costs can be man hours, pizzas or USD you waste, now matter what – you PAY for building links in the one or the other way.

The question is – where do you spend your link building resources on?

Lesson 1: Strongest Subpages suck

Just look at these stats below, of different pages I could get links on

These are pages of one site, the homepage and different sub pages – immediately you see that the homepage is of course a PR5, but getting a link on a better themed sub page would be much more beneficial, and more feasible. That site just doesn’t give us a homepage link.

But looking at all those sub pages we realize, they’ve got different cache dates and most importantly, only ONE sub page has external links on it which in turn MIGHT be a reason for it not getting supplemental. Well, with the right tools for checking if a page is supplemental we immediately notice that only the homepage is really juicy, i.e. is not supplemental and ranks for stuff it carries on.

Looking closer at that “Juice” column we also notice, that some of the subpages are indicated as DEAD – this means while they are cached, they don’t even rank for obscure and long terms found on the page.

Looking even closer at that “Juice” column we also notice that the ONLY page that has external links, and others, ranks for their stuff – together with TONs of other pages on the web… that means, they are duplicate content – and in fact lost the battle against other sites carrying the same content…

Now if I were Google, I would penalize those pages, too – duplicate content is a sure way to the supplemental index – or out of the active Google index at all finally…

In any case, NONE of the possible sub pages on that site are relevant for linking. Not even the “strongest subpage” as it’s spit out by Jim’s or SoloSEOs tool for finding the strongest subpage on a site (based on the number of links).

So, just pass this one on – move ahead.

Lesson 2: Paid Links suck

I’m sure you read all that yadda yadda about paid links, and Google “suddenly” saying paid links are evil just because they clarified their webmaster guidelines … In fact Matt Cutts & co spread the paid-link propaganda for at least THREE YEARs now (I might be wrong, maybe it’s four… not sure… but before that it was GoogleGuy, Matt’s alter ego)

Are paid links bad?

Yes, they are – if they are easily detected as such.

Just look at my browser toolbar for the next link prospect …

What do we see here? Ok – Apparently this site sucks anyway, because the juice indicator tells me it’s a dead meat page anyway, which means it doesn’t rank for ANYTHING (while being unique content! note that!)

But most important, we see that even my stupid little firefox toolbar understands that this site is part of the link inventory of Text Link Ads.

That is a paid link network.

Yes, one of the many paid link networks, and I definitely want to emphasize, that Patrick’s company Text-Link-Ads is the best link broker network on the market, first for being the first, second for being the biggest and third for being the company with the best business ethics one can think off.

BUT, it’s apparent that at least THIS site of the inventory is compromised. Any another of my secret inhouse tools (that I cannot give away, just because it’s my own competitive advantage PLUS eats a lot of resources once again) is able to identify this site as a Text-Link-Ads site.

And so Google’s engineers are able to detect this site as a “paid link site”. It might well be, that this is the reason this site ranks for nothing.. but that’s just pure speculation.

Again, no hate about TLA – they are just the biggest company, so it was easiest for me to find a sample site :-)

Summary: Where to really get links from

Obviously getting a link on the strongest subpage won’t help you much … at least not it all cases.

And neither will paid links help you if a little secret inhouse tool of CEMPER.COM will already display on the browser toolbar that the site you would buy a link from belongs to a link network.

What you need are

links that you get/buy below the radar (of google & competitors)
links on pages on established and trusted sites
links on pages on those sites that pass juice and are not marked “paid link” or can be easily detected as such
links within those pages content – if they are relevant to you… (else simply forget it – what do you want with german cooking content on a french plumbering site?)
links that stay up – for a long time… don’t even think about “boosting your site” with a link to take that link away again some months later

What’s your take on links that work?

Why Removed Supplemental Index Labels are good for my business

Marketing Fan — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 12:50:18 +0200

Earlier this week Google has removed the “supplemental index” labels from the SERPs, and as with every major poops from Google the whole SEO scene freaked out on this!

Me too – because I have to thank Google for giving me – and my clients a new competitive advantage.

Why do I thank Google for removing interesting signals?

Well, until last week every wannabeo-seo and his mother could see (in the SERPs, see grandfathered sample below)

if a page had a problem with ranking…

There have been huge posts by Jim , Halfdeck and Halfdeck again and a lot more on what/why/where supplementals are. Even I posted about Supplemental Hell and one PayPerPost link buying penalty bringing pages into the to supplemental index.

Today however…

People need to put more effort into detecting if a page has problem due to being in the supplemental index.

That means a certain (large) amount of SEOs just won’t be able to do this in their everyday job.

Halfdeck has his own Supplemenal Detector which is a fancy JAVA application that is in fact a “pagerank emulator” – ~~and all pages below a certain threshold are marked as supplemental. I encourage you to download this data scraper, and I’m sure it works nicely – but haven’t tried it.~~

After playing with Halfdeck’s Pagerank emulator I must say that it’s a great way to simulate how the “link juice” flows thru your site and where you are actually wasting precious link juice (i.e. on useless stats pages). Halfdeck even implemented a “backlink emulator” where you can judge on the effects of an additional PRx link to any page you like… pretty cool tool – it just lacks TBPR live queries, but I hope he can add that in the next version.

But, in fact I never cared much about the TOTAL number of supplementals, but always if a single page is in supplemental. Why that?

Well, I guess Link Ninja Master Jim Boykin knows why – it’s because you don’t want to get links on pages in the supplemental index because they won’t get crawled as often.

Jim’s recent explanation on finding if a page is in supplemental pretty well details how to detect if a page is “healthy” at all – i.e. ranks for obscure terms.

If a page does not even rank for an obscure terms on it, you don’t need a link there.

So you ask again, why is this cool for your business?

Because the way to check if a page is worthy to spend time to get a link on it has just become a bit harder. You will need more work, time, effort, unless you automate it. Just as we do here.

And this is the perfect situation to use an “internal tool” (as many SEOs have) as a competitie advantage to get more and better links in a shorter time… heck – some link builders might spend another couple clicks on each page to find out if it qualifies for hunting for link.

We Don’t :-)

In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” on top of our brower toolbar bar when we visit a page.

In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” label as it used to be printed for ALL google users in the past, nicely embedded in the SERPs.

And in fact Google has bought itself now 10-20 more Google queries per SERP page my Link Arbeiter team screens when looking for links – plus we are inflating the pageloads of all those sites we screen by one…

Do you think that hurts Google? Nah – enough resources.

Do you think it hurts me? Nah – just got a bunch more proxy IPs to make up for the bigger Google scraping load.

Do you think it will hurt the SEO scene building links? Well …

I would assume a huge bunch of people won’t even notice a difference – after all even SEOmoz de-classified 70% of SEO companies for not knowing the SEO basic

Furthermore a couple of smaller equipped companies will struggle as they will need to do more a lot more work (as per Jim’s description) to get the same results…. and I mean – A LOT MORE.

Now this moves the benefits to larger scale companies (as Google is) that DO have an intact SEO infrastructure for their daily SEO work.

But the small scale link builders will first have to build that infrastructure, browser plugins and knowledge to make visible what Google has just taken from the public.

Thanks Google !

100% unethical and useless .edu link building tactic

Marketing Fan — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:32:09 +0200

So today I came across this guy here posting about another 100% ethical way to get .edu backlinks ...

And he was even mentioned by Aaron on the SEOBOOK blog…

Just a week after the big How to spam .edu blogs ethically for free (what great products you can buy for $7 … ) I find that Hybrid guy having tons of links and cheers for his irritating suggestion to post jobs to university job boards… fake jobs 99% of the time I guess (altough he didn’t suggest that, it’s an obvious consequence)

So again, his idea might be OK if you REALLY got a job in the area of that university…

but HOW MANY of those mass-linkbuilding (spamming) teams will really take care about THAT requirement?

I foresee a HUGE mass of fake jobs getting posted onto some .edu job boards, misleading all sorts of hopeful students … oh well.

But you know what’s best?

That whole great and “ethical trick” is a big useless waste of time. For the link builders, the clients and of course the frauded students looking for a job.

These job postings are removed after 4 weeks. Just as on craigslist.

so the ONLY thing you can use this for is to put your spam links in there and then SPAM this page to hell, just as some other .edu spam works only via a lot more spammy links pointing to it.

BECAUSE, this “fake job post” page you create has NO pagerank and NO inbound links – unless you start you blog comment spam bots to put links to it to “copy” that cialis spam meme that “Joe Whyte” came across and used as a sample for the “trust” of his fake job pages.

And then, worst of all, I found this “trick” even featured on WebProNews.

I think – it’s NOT ethical – and IT’s a waste of time.

Pretty retarded – What do you think?

PS: read those blog comments to find link builders cheer in like “one of the best methods where we can start building links and I think it is very cost effective also. Smart piece of work.” ... LOL.

How to get 10 to 15 .edu backlinks per hour (review)

Marketing Fan — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:27:27 +0200

So I just shelved out whopping $7.00 for an “outstanding” e-book of only 11 pages long (1,243 words) explaining me the “secret sauce” of

how to get 10 to 15 .edu backlinks per hour! SOLD!

( this ebook is also being promoted as
“20 .edu backlinks in $7.00” )

from the sales pitch:

Why Should You Buy This Report?

1. It’s only 11 pages long (1,243 words). In 10 minutes you’ll be

done. Then, go!

2. It’s simple. The language is clear. Examples are provided.

3. It’s completely, totally 100% ethical.

4. It’s easy to implement. No special software or tools are required.

5. It’s repeatable. You can do this again and again and again.

6. Any person, in any niche, in any situation can use the method.

7. It’s a fast way to get .edu back links with very little effort.

Well, as you can imagine $7 doesn’t buy you a real secret.

In fact it doesn’t even buy you an ethical method description.

All that they tell you is, that you should

1. Search for .edu blogs and forums
(and make sure they are somewhat relevant to the topic)

2. And add relevant, good comments in there, with a link back to your site

That’s it.

The remaining 1,100 words are just some samples of complex Google queries

and re-assurance that blog-comment spamming is ethical as long as you try to add real value to the blog post… well – that might be true, as long you REALLY provide some value to the blog.

But I assume 90% of the buyers will be happy to find out about google operators, as they introduce with

Quote:

Here are the first two secrets:

site:

inurl:

LOL. What a secret.

Then finally you’ll also get a good query sample very similar to

complex query wrote:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -“comments closed” -“you must be logged in” “your own keywords”

so you make sure you find pages with “blog” in the url (you can vary that) on .edu domains where you can post a comment and the comment-auto closer hasn’t yet closed those comments…

Hum, no news at all for somebody been looking for links for a while already, and you see these query samples all over the web…

Once again it was the “too good to be true” promise combined with nice sales letter language that sold what is actually common knowledge

some nice phrases on the sales page

1. very clearly explain how to get .edu back links

2. completely, totally 100% ethical.

3. a couple of nice testimonials

4. and of course a price point where most people won’t even bother to complain (note that I’m not complaining but like to analyze this as a sales letter case study)

Still, I am missing the typical “risk-free” on the sales page,

but you have the refund option as usual.

Well, you end up finding blogs that are already pretty much exploited by spam bots (sure you can automate all that) and got links to porn, pills and casino. So you if you don’t have a problem being co-cited with that bad neighborhood – go ahead and leave your “valuable” comment :-)

How to get 10 to 15 .edu backlinks per hour (review)

Marketing Fan — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:22:50 +0200

So I just shelved out whopping $7.00 for an “outstanding” e-book of only 11 pages long (1,243 words) explaining me the “secret sauce” of how to get 10 to 15 .edu backlinks per hour! SOLD!

from the sales pitch:

Why Should You Buy This Report?

1. It’s only 11 pages long (1,243 words). In 10 minutes you’ll be

done. Then, go!

2. It’s simple. The language is clear. Examples are provided.

3. It’s completely, totally 100% ethical.

4. It’s easy to implement. No special software or tools are required.

5. It’s repeatable. You can do this again and again and again.

6. Any person, in any niche, in any situation can use the method.

7. It’s a fast way to get .edu back links with very little effort.

Well, as you can imagine $7 doesn’t buy you a real secret.

In fact it doesn’t even buy you an ethical method description.

All that they tell you is, that you should

1. Search for .edu blogs and forums
(and make sure they are somewhat relevant to the topic)

2. And add relevant, good comments in there, with a link back to your site

That’s it.

The remaining 1,100 words are just some samples of complex Google queries

and re-assurance that blog-comment spamming is ethical as long as you try to add real value to the blog post… well – that might be true, as long you REALLY provide some value to the blog.

But I assume 90% of the buyers will be happy to find out about google operators, as they introduce with

Quote:

Here are the first two secrets:

site:

inurl:

LOL. What a secret.

Then finally you’ll also get a good query sample very similar to

complex query wrote:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -“comments

closed” -“you must be logged in” “your own keywords”

so you make sure you find pages with “blog” in the url (you can vary that) on .edu domains where you can post a comment and the comment-auto closer hasn’t yet closed those comments…

Hum, no news at all for somebody been looking for links for a while already, and you see these query samples all over the web…

Once again it was the “too good to be true” promise combined with nice sales letter language that sold what is actually common knowledge

some nice phrases on the sales page

1. very clearly explain how to get .edu back links

2. completely, totally 100% ethical.

3. a couple of nice testimonials

4. and of course a price point where most people won’t even bother to complain (note that I’m not complaining but like to analyze this as a sales letter case study)

Still, I am missing the typical “risk-free” on the sales page,

but you have the refund option as usual.

Are won links = paid links?

Marketing Fan — Thu, 10 May 2007 13:03:45 +0200

You know there’s a weeklong “paid links” debate that Matt Cutts started last month … nice link bait and a couple of people gotten pretty frigthened…

Sorry, I’m just too lazy to link to all those posts pro & contra, but somethink made me think today.

The sweepstake for my survey on online community motivation research that I run on Digitalpoint gives away text links and presell pages that you would have to pay $4,500 for, unless you win one of the prizes.

So,

1. they do have an incentive for participating in the survey (after allyou have to click thru those 25 questions)

2. they would HAVE TO be paid, normally – but they are not

3. the links you win will still be suject to manual review and approval by the brokers Text-Link-Ads and PresellPageMan

Are these essentially “paid links” in Google speak?

What’s your take on this?

Just because others pay $4,500 – you might not… How does Google tell the difference?

Are your old links rotten, or are they your goldmines?

Marketing Fan — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:08:19 +0100

Imagine you got that cool site developed for years,

an e-commerce site. You are selling stuff, let’s say it’s printer equipment like toners and such.

Then imagine you’ve been investing money into the site as well as paid links from all over the internet for the last three years. You spent BIG money, but you made BIG business

You are actually on the frontpage of Google for many branded terms like

Xerox toners

Canon cartridges

etc.etc… generic search queries, bringing you tons of traffic, leads and of course – sales.

Would YOU go out and remove old links in the favor of new links… just because the prices you paid for links 3 years ago where a lot higher than today?

How much do YOU think is a PR6 link worth today? if placed a month ago.

Versus a PR6 link on a page that was PR6 three years ago already, and your

link was on the page for all 3 years??? plus you had some subpage links for a couple of long tails there too (no sitewide)

My opinion is, that a 3yr aged PR6 link is PRICELESS.

You cannot buy the strenght a PR6 link has developed with ANY money today.

Not even those PR9s that are flocking around between $500 and $1000 per month will give you the same relevant link juice as those aged links IMHO.

What’s your take on this?

Text-Link-Ads' links with NOFOLLOW ?

root — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:04:53 +0100

Just in the last minute I came across a pretty bizarre patch-suggestion for the module integrating the Text-Link-Ads links (the links that you PAY for , those that Google does not want you to use !) into Drupal

inactivist wrote:

From a SEO standpoint, web admins may (should?) want to apply the rel=“nofollow” attribute to outbound link ads that have been purchased and placed on their sites.

Failure to do this may cause Google to reduce the ‘trust’ level of the your site having the paid outbound links. See: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/ for an explanation of why Google and other search engines may penalize your site for failing to differentiate between editorial (natural) and paid links.

Search engines like Google judge the quality of your site based partially on your outbound links, and in order to avoid penalties, they want you to differentiate between “editorial votes” (natural linking) and purchased links – and the way to do that is by applying the rel=nofollow attribute to the purchased outbound links.

As of right now, the only way to do this in the textlinkads module is to hand-modify the theme_textlinkads_ads() function, or supply a theme-specific replacement for the non-trivial theme_textlinkads_ads() function. If you have multiple sites, this can be quite tedious and error-prone.

I propose that we add a settings option (checkbox) that allows the site admin to specify whether or not to apply rel=nofollow to all TLA links, and that option should be enabled by default.

What a bizarre idea…

frankly, the only reason people are buying links 99% of the time IS because of the link juice you get from the links. that’s it.

And if publishers just start putting link-condoms on the links they sold previously without, they are definately violating the contract with TLA and of course frauding their advertisers…

So guys, uf you fear the big bad google text link selling bot penalizing your site for selling links, I suggest you shouldn’t even think about selling links.

High Quality Link Building

Marketing Fan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:33:54 +0100

The last days a couple of great resources for link building were released, so I think it’s time to round-up and put some of them together – completed with my thoughts and comments on the various sources

For novice link builders

SeoLogs Father’s link building guide —- Badi Jones put together a nice roundup to start explaining your old daddy how to build some traffic to site … worth a read and a digg, and while it’s not 100+ ways to build links it’s something you can READ and talk about easily to non-SEOs

Why Link Reciprocation Kills your Ranks is a bit lenghty but greatly detailled post about why doing recip link exchange not only is worthless but can kill your rankings

Linking out is important and was just confirmed again by Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin as they took care of where their users link out to .. Jim re-visited the whole co-citations and outlinking as he already explained it in big detail last summer… now everybody should be aware that outlinks are important for a site’s trust rank ... the times of page rank hording are really over, I agree with Jim

For advanced link builders

Blog post services not detectable is the common sense of Rand’s post about a Chicago session… well frankly that’s only true for THOSE blogs that are REAL blogs and not only setup to feed PayPerPost, blogvertise and other “pay per blogpost” services

Aaron chimes in suggesting to get high quality reviews at ReviewMe – a service I still have to try.

Quality Score the new pagerank – thoughts about publishing the Adwords Quality Score to advertisers… that’s the next big thing in Link Valuation IMHO... and I agree with Aaron that the Quality Score is influenced by the organic results… Amazon and ebay DO pay less for advertising their products than any PPC arbitrager … makes sense to me

Indirect linking is a concept I’ve been talking about for months to my clients – and since Chris want’s to talk about better natural link building anyway, I felt can talk about this idea in public anyway … after all the audience of this blog is pretty limited anyway – so enjoy if you haven’t already

Domain Trust concept vs. page trust – with presell pages on .edu domains being sold for some time (and I heard they sell like hot cake) it becomes obvious that the concept ob using an old domains trust to power your younger site is some that simply works!... Aaron Wall thinks the concept of domain trust will be lowered or narrowed down pages on those domains that are REALLY old and got a lot of links…

Aaron Wall wrote:

I think Google is going to have to reduce their weighting on domain trust and place more on how well the individual page is integrated into the site and integrated into the web as a whole.

Well frankly that’s how it already works today – the more links the better, the older the page, the better it is if you get a link there… I think Aaron’s point is (and I agree) is that the overall influence of an old domain is SO strong, that it creates a real incentive to buy old sites as Jim and others do on a large scale

Getting links from .edu and .gov sites is a very valuable thing, as even the SEJ talks about recommendations for .gov link hunting —- however I wouldn’t call using pages like this and this for paying money to get a .gov link under the radar ... I’m sure none of these sites pass any link value

For the black hats

Forum spammer software – while I don’t link to it, you should know that there’s software out there that cracks captcha security , fakes user accounts by auto-registering that on free-mail services and of course does all that crap via 100s of anonymous proxies … and that’s just the start … oh – and of course blog spamming software that cracks CAPTCHAs and other protection is out as well – but IMHO there’s more attention on fighting blog spam than forum spam… does PHPBB and Vbulleting have an akismet plugin? I assume no.

Forum Private Mail spammer software – the end of spam free forums is near – software to send out MASS-PMs to all registered users is available and it’s the same principle as with email spam… send out 1,000,000 PMs to get 10 or 20 buys…

Video spam – again something I won’t endorse with a link, but the cat’s out of the bag that posting stuff on YouTube helps your rankings – no wonder – it’s a great trusted domain … getting a link from there is like getting a link from Yahoo or an old .edu site… and if it’s not for the link juice, it’s for human traffic… there are companies out there selling this service already

(note – all these blackhattish things won’t result in high quality links, despite the title… it’s more a high-tech armed link spamming toolkit I would put such stuff into … DO NOT USE SUCH STUFF AT HOME OR GET YOUR SITES BANNED)

New link Builder tools for all

Of course you have to checkout Jim’s new updated SEO tools

Michael provides a couple of handy bookmarklets – reminds me I need to reveal and update my own “SEO Bookmarklets”: once again (heck I couldn’t even find the page they are located on… how could YOU ? ... TODO)

If you ever wondered about the perfect link then Jim’s team member wrote a little story about his experiences with Jim’s take on it… :-)