google

Common Forward Links Tool - get Super-Authority links from sites that have authority back links

Marketing Fan — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:17:26 +0200

What the common forward link tool does

The common forward links tool finds those super authorities that a bunch of other authorities or important sites link to.

And you then just go out and get links from those!

This means if you have a set of valued authority sites (e.g. the top 20 marketing blogs) you just ask the tool where these sites link out to in common and try to get on the linked-to sites… thereby having all the inbound trust from the initially entered authority sites.

How the common forward link tool works

Enter a list of authority sites that you have researchede well, and already believe are authorities in your niche, i.e. the top 20 SEO blogs
Tool looks at all the forward (outgoing) links those sites link to and finds common patterns
Tool lists the commonly linked to urls and domains (along with JUICE, Age, Inbound links, Cache date and other important metrics)
You go out and try to get links from these super-authorities that are linked from what you considered an authoritive site already…

So by using this tool to extract the sites linked FROM all those sites you entered we find a common pattern of sites aka super-authorities that are important to ALL the sites you entered. And obviously Google & co will love the inbound links you get from these super-authorities,but you need some upfront reserch to find the input list.

Nice that after having the idea in October 2006, we finally got to implement this using MSN’s linkfromdomain command

This is another twist to finding common backlinks of your competitors and trying to get on those, but I like it so much better, because it actually makes your competitors link to you – indirectly.

MSN’s linkfromdomain

Almost two years ago MSN introduced their “linkfromdomain” operator and I came up with three great uses for the linkfromdomain command

Today, after reading Gab’s post on Cheaply retargeting I realized that what he was doing was looking for common forward links (i.e. links out of a set of authority sites) and try to buy ads on those sites. Which in effect are authority sites in that niche to improve your brand visibility.

Well, apply this to good ole link building and you come back to the “common forward links” tool that I mentioned 2 years ago.

What do you think about this approach to get on super-authorities?

Please note, this is a post about the methodology,

this tool is not (yet) public

as we only use it for our own work and premium consulting services just like our JUICE tool and Ad Network detector

But with enough people interested (i.e. links, comments) I might let the one or the other guy allow to test it for his own stuff if I get to hear a great reason to do so :-)

PS: You can even even enter all YOUR competitors (hint hint) and make them indirectly link to you !

Let me know your thoughts!

Top Google Ranking value (german version)

Marketing Fan — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:12:01 +0200

Last week we published a german version of the Google Ranking Value document by Aaron Wall titled Was ist ein Top Google Ranking wert?

Thanks to Aaron for providing this quality-document with a lot of great pointers and suggestions.

Google Update Dewey

Marketing Fan — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:52:23 +0200

Google somewhat confirmed an algo update,

and I can confirm this myselves…

Google changed the way the return results for some queries.

Google changed the way they filter results for some queries.

Google changed the SERPs for some queries.

Seeing some clients rocket up the SERPs … good thing, eh?

Have a good weekend!

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.

Adwords QS impacted by Page Load Times

Marketing Fan — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:38:02 +0100

Now it’s offical – the Adwords Quality Score will become influenced by your page load times !

Now it’s time to start tuning your sites not only for visitor stickyness, reducing abandonment

but to effectively increase your bottom line…

per WMW thread here the AdwordsAdvisor confirmed

AdWordsAdvisor wrote:

Landing page load time will become an additional factor in determining landing page quality in the near future. An exact date has not been determined.

A Inside AdWords blog post has always been planned to announce this in advance, to explain why it is occurring and outline the potential benefits to users and advertisers.

At some point following the blog post, landing page load time will begin to be reported on the Keyword Analysis Page.

Then, following that, several weeks will pass before load time starts to actually be factored into the Quality Score – so that advertisers will have time to make adjustments to their pages if they wish.

As an aside, now that the page load time initiative has been mentioned in this and other public forums, the Inside AdWords blog post is likely to be posted sooner rather than later – perhaps as early as this week. Once it has been published, although the WebmasterWorld terms prohibit me from linking to it, I will post the text of it here.

So now it’s really time to enable the CSS compression in Drupal and get rid of extra load on pages…

Keyword Conversion Tracking Tools

Marketing Fan — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:40:30 +0100

Hey, time to post again, since I recovered from my PubCon jetlag (good to see it took even Brett 1,5 months to post a recap), recovered from X-Mas, recovered from my vacation jetlag (Diving etc. in Mexico)

Since I’ve been doing quite a bit NON-seo areas like domaining and PPC arbitrage recently, I spent an hour today to research on some more or less obscure solutions to perform click tracking measure keyword conversions. Some of that does have to do with PPC arbitrage, so there’s quite some money to loose or win.

Instead of keeping the list of products found in secret I thought I’ll just list what I came across today, including my thoughts of Pros/Cons

Google Analytics

well obviously this is the most popular package supports tracking your conversions, but I haven’t yet found out yet

how to track the conversion of a “click” on an Adsense/YPN or otherwise PPC style ad unit (which IS the conversion when arbitraging)
how to import keyword traffic data from other sources than GAW, i.e. YSM to track … and you WANT to see that!

Xtreme Conversions

Xtreme Conversions is a clickbank product I found today, haven’t used it yet and promises to track your conversions by keyword level. As usual the sales page is full of mumbo jumbo “you’ll get rich stuff” and makes this offer look a bit fishy at least, especially since I haven’t found any specific feature list on the page.

Their claim “The Entire Conversion Tracking Process Is Automated!” sounds to good to be true but I doubt it highly so. They say that “Xtreme Conversions will work with ClickBank and CJ and any other merchant that allows you to put tracking code in the affiliate URL.” so the steps that will be required at least will be:

uploading your keywords to THE tool
generating a destination url list with keyword ids
uploading the keywords with keyword id tracking codes (manually to GAW since I don’t expect them to have an API access)

any other solution wouldn’t work at all.

It seems they require some PHP include on the top of each page to track keywords, and their sales page talks about tracking ClickBank only. Now well, that’s not very tempting.

But since they offer Clickbank-style refunds for 56 days this will be a sure signup so I can update you on that later. And I returned “Affiliate Elite”: to Brad Callen after 1,5 months because I couldn’t find any good way to use it (due to the lack of server power in HIS new backend mainly)

Affiliate Radar

This is one of the most comprehensive campaign tracking tools and I’ve used it for some months back since last summer to run a campaign in the dating market. As it seems I’ve already been buying into one of the better tools with that back then already, and the monthly charge of $97 speaks for that (as opposed to single payments with software tools)

Looking at the process diagram they we have above (from Affiliate Radar) you will see that it’s pretty well integrated – as long as you are fine with importing and exporting of data to/from Google,Yahoo,MSN ... and the affiliate networks. This can become quite a tedious job and I found quite a few data conversion problems in the process which urged me to fix these CSV files in the text editor to make it run…

Summed up this means that you’ll never ever be “up-to-date” with your tracking but have a tedious “batch-style job” to do … at best on a daily basis… but at least AR offers “some kind of” support for 100+ affiliate networks reports, which doesn’t seem to be the case with Xtreme Conversions (I wonder if I want to spend any minute on that one still)

SeoSemTools

This clickbank product titled Pay-Per-Click (ppc) Search Engine Keyword Tracking Software promises keyword level conversion tracking, but I highly doubt this can be any good. Just take a look at their sales page. While it’s fine that they don’t try to run me thru a multi-foot-long sales page with sublimal psycho-tricks I hate that they don’t even show a feature and requirements list – and that for a recurring service to charge you $47 on a monthly daily basis.

No idea on those, but given that they offer CB refund style I might try that as well

KeywordXray

KeywordXray is another tracking tool, this time by the Rich Jerk and a freaking nice designed web site. It’s a hosted service, and again this means relying on somebody else to a) keep your campaigns and sites confidential b) providing the server power you reqire.

This tool is a $47/month service for the lowest volume and I guess this would require a longer trial as I haven’t found detailled specifications or even screenshots of their application. Any NO, def. NO, I don’t think that fricking sales videos with talkative ladies can make up for a detailled product specification. (damn, why does the whole web think professionals love to watch videos when they can get the required info by skimming some detail feature lists?)

Summary

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, am still not where I’d need to be to not feel like a donkey doing monkey work and still losing money…

Even AR which had quite a bit of good understanding what is needed finally frustrated me with the inflexibility to sync campaign with GAW and especially to weed out non-performers or make structural changes (YEAH – you’d actually had to resetup everything within a new adgroup structure if you wanted to do that …)

What could you recommend?

Which keyword conversion tracking method do you use?

Adsense clickable area - and publisher earnings reduced

Marketing Fan — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:42:41 +0100

Google anounced that the clickable area in any Adsense block will be reduced from

the whole ad to only the link text and url.

Blogoscoped has put up a nice picture to

show the differences between before and after.

Now I this this is one of the most major change rolled by google for it’s prodcts in the last years…

Apparently this will corrupt a lot of adsense scraper spam business models.

On the other hand this will def. increase the value of a click as it should avoid those “accidential” clicks

from ad pages with 3 huge ad blocks, and in turn increase the overall value of the Google Adwords program for Google.

SpeedPPC - PPC campaign setup automation tool

Marketing Fan — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:53:03 +0200

So I came across the new tool SpeedPPC which promises roughly 72,000 % speedup in setting up campaings on Adwords & MSN ... well – sounds too good to be true, or?

What it does offer:

permutations of keywords (like all 50k+ cities) thru your keywords, ads and landingpages
generation of proper ad groups (Google Adwords only allows 2000 lines per group, so if you are bidding broad,exact,phrase that means no more than 666 REAL keywords)
a datafeed script that allows you to populate your landing pages with product info from merchants (good if you are to promote video recorders or other retail productc)

Thereby a close to perfect match between

Keyword >>> Ad Text >>> Landing Page

which in turn means a good CTR (click thru rate) to your ads and (jopefully) a better QS (quality score) on Google Adwords (GAW).

SpeedPPC also allows tracking on the keyword/ad/landing page level…

What it also promised is to lifts conversion rates by dynamically changing the landing pages based on the original search keywords used. That means injecting the keywords into the landing page – which isn’t new or hard to do at all. but still.

For roughly $ 500 this tool is not cheap.

For $ 500 you can buy nice things, but keeping in mind that this is a one-time investment (compared to subscription based tools) this new SpeedPPC could offer a nice all-in-one-solution for stomping out full “long tail campaigns” and this would be perfect for things like bidding on “lawyer in ~~city~~“ ...

I read, that SpeedPPC has a promotion for $497, which implies that they want to raise the price, so maybe today is a good day to buy that tool… give it a shot!

Update Feb’08 : I came across Efficient PPC today and it looks like it offers the same functionality minus datafeed integration as Speed PPC

why no YSM? because you need a gold account for importing files, that means you have to spend 500+$/mo

Google Bowling via Proxy

Marketing Fan — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:00:22 +0200

So with SES San Jose just around the corner, Dan Thies put up a great post detailling all the headaches that a website owner could get when looking at his serps a bit closer or with the right tools to do so …

Dan calls this “Google Proxy Hacking”, but frankly, we are not hacking any of Google’s proxies – so I’m talking about Google Bowling via Proxy Sites – related to the older black hat term “Google Bowling” for buying too many / bad links for competitor sites to knock them off the serps. Yes, it IS possible to knock a competitor site off the SERPs, altought Google says= there is ~~nothing~~ almost nothing a competitor can do to harm you (yeah, right – the Google folks weakened this message some months ago, because the “nothing” was plain wrong – and they knew it).

If you read thru Dan’s post you might get headaches just like this guy from all those details and the partly wrong promises for a cure for it with two solutions that BOTH address only the outdated part of the problem.

So I though I have to illustrate to you what’s going on and how Google Bowling via Proxies actually looks like

The above results are returned if you search for the unique phrase

which is was only found on my company site cemper.com … (ok – now it’s also found on this marketingfan.com

blog and on marketingfan.at as soon as we translate it)

But WTH is Proxy Dust ???

As you can see this unique phrase which should id if my page is healthy does not show my own site but “one of those PITA sites”: run by a guy called Matt Twine from the UK (if that IS his real name…)

and as you can image the url http://www.proxydust.com/index.php?q=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jZW1wZXIuY29t has an EXACT copy of my company site’s home page there…

Did I hear Spam Report? yadda yadda – don’t bother – the Googlers don’t seem to care, because I submitted that 2 weeks ago…

But it get’s worse

Now clicking that “filter=0” to reveal all search results we see this HUGE list of pages – cemper.com coming second…. as a filtered result right after that proxy site used for google bowling…

[... pages cut out here … ]

But also we have a couple more scumbags stealing my content and trying to hijack my site…

In fact only the ProxyDust copy wins big time over CEMPER.COM because … believe it or not…

that fricking domain registered in January 2007 got a Wikipedia backlink

And my site does not.

I currently think that’s the main reason why Google chose them over my own site – which is from 2000, not heavily SEOed, but I bet a handful more trusted than this Mark “Thief” Twine’s site.

Well, it might well be that Mark has NO CLUE about what he does, but all those ads plastered around my site indicate different.

In fact it appears the whole strategy of running those proxy sites is to earn money from the ads placed on other’s content and cashing in on their work…

What we (legit webmasters) can do…

Frankly, I love Dan’s general post as an introduction to this post, because I would have hated to explain it in all length as he did. ~~But what he points out as “solutions” are somewhat old school methods to identify bots that pretend to be Google, Yahoo or MSNbot….~~

Dan’s post ALSO contains the 2nd method for sending ALL visitors a “noindex, nofollow” that do NOT

1) Identify as spiders

2) Pass a “valid IP address” test

Pretty cool – I think that might work – and will test this ASAP, in addition to my own method of blocking those scumbags.

What about you?

Has YOUR site been hijacked? Do you know?

How you could know? Just follow Jim’s post to find if a page is in supplemental … but actually make sure you look at the results closely… because what you might find is that somebody is stealing your content….

You should do that for EVERY PAGE of your site – best case – if you got the right tools for it…. but it costs a lot of resources either way – by hand or by machine tool.

Let me know about YOUR hijack experiences !

(and I’m sure people should talk about this at the SES in San Jose , however I fear they won’t too much…)

Update: You could of course get around the initial problem of having too less trust in Google by getting real juicy authority links using MSN’s linkfromdomain command by effectively even letting your competitor link indirect to you ... obviously you still want to make sure you get only the juicy pages and not spend your time with dead meat.

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.