aaron wall

5 things I hate about SEO4FF (SEO for Firefox)

Marketing Fan — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 00:43:57 +0200

ok, that cat’s out of the bag… I hate SEO for Firefox…

Yes, I’m talking about SEO4FF – the cool plugin made by Aaron Wall/SEOBOOK which I higly respect…

but it just lacks some flaws which I already found sucky last year, and Jim told me he also had to limit it’s usage in his link ninja teams

Why? Well – SEO4FF just doesn’t scale. It’s made for one-stop shops, but doesnt help you when working in link builder teams

The main problems are

ONE user can easily soak up those poor max 5000/max 1000 request for Yahoo/Google [you HAVE to a private proxy farm to cure this, not to blame Aaron for this … if you want to know how to set that up – get some GOOD help]

Results are not CACHED ... what a mess… I bet Aaron won’t feel this on the 100mbit connections in the USA, but running on 10+ mbit here across the sea a couple times really sucks if yo have to reload all those crazy numbers just because you go back to a SERP page… Aaron – you should know that PR changes only every 3-4 months – cache it!

Results cannot be exported … ok – that’s an advanced feature, but still, if you employ a whole link arbeiter team of lin, hungry wolves then you need to make sure you can easily keep track of their results… and making the hand-write-down all the stuff into an excel sheet isn’t a very productive solution… a simple “SAVE AS CSV” feature is needed there

Customization option missing – parameter queries are hidden somewhere in Aarons code… damn.. I need to add my “secret link juice” queries nobody else should see… without bugging Aaron to bug his coder to implement it… heck – if I would have a chance I would fix those corrupt search queries myself

No on page results – whenever I found a page I want to see those numbers… still… or might want to lookup some of the parameters that I WOULD see in the SERPs if I had found it via a SERP and not a direct link… let me use the same tool from different angles

Luckily all those hassles are fixed now…

We switched to SEO Quake for the whole team of six people here…

and it solves ALL of the above troubles (excluding the proxy farm, which is an independent problem, which was solved anyways)

Thanks to those cool russian coders! you ROCK!

BTW: these are the same guys that built the funky SEODigger which gives a super long long tail result list for any site …

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.

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… :-)

3 great uses for the MSN LinkFromDomain command

Marketing Fan — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 11:43:18 +0200

The new linkfromdomain command available from MSN Live search for some days now is what I have been waiting for for YEARS now… why?

With this command you can easily extract linkage data the search engines got that you cannot get easily in another way (unless of course you spider websites with your own robots, which some existing scripts and tools have to do … :-)

First some thanks to Todd Marcus Aaron and Graywolf via the Threadwatch Community for pointing me to this feature some days ago – I definately forgot about posting about my ideas the last 2 days…

So – MSN LinkFromDomain – is this fancy new rocket science technology as one reader stated?

NO WAY ... Search engines got the web index spidered already since their first introduction of link based algorithms… the novel thing is that MSN is revealing this additional information (in addition to the backlinks) to the public.

Now what’s that new command useful for?

Just some ideas off the top of my head – I found some others having similar ideas and will reference to them

1. Bad neighborhood linkage analysis

everybody’s talking bad neighborhood linking – but how can YOU really find out where-to a site is linking to? Spider all of the site’s pages and even take a look at all those small

footer links and maybe even hidden links that only SEngs see and furthermore check all the domains in Google, Yahoo, MSN ?

No more needed – linkfromdomain:site.com and you see where they link out to … of course in case of Google this can be quite a lot

“Russ Jones of Virante” already launched a quick tool already for finding banned sites – it checks the first 100 links in MSN for your site and tells you if they are indexed or NOT by google (an indication of banning). check it out ..

2. Hub analysis is old – do Authority analysis

SEOs look at common inbound link patters to pages the they suspect to be hubs, e.g. using Aarons Hubfinder (that I need to mirror BTW)

The problem: you first need those hub pages you suspect – and probably find them by looking up existing links to authority sites – which again you suspect them to be authorities

so what the HECK is an authority site

Similar to comparing similarities in inbound link patterns for ONE site, you can now go and compare the OUTBOUND link patterns for a couple of sites… and that tool could very easily list a grade of authority by counting how many top ranking sites link out to that found site

WHY would you do that?

WELL, linking out is crucial to your rankings as mentioned by many others – which means you want to find the authorities to link to – and a GOOD PART of the SEO community already knows, understands and DOES this …

So NOW all you have to do is apply a linkfromdomain command to a site and – well – filter the results… actually every corelation of these results with the results of other top ranking sites should give you a GREAT idea of what to look for… Aarons old tool – the hubfinder should be fairly easy to modify to use that

So if LINKING OUT is crucial to your rankings and finding the sites to link out to can be so easy now by having an “authority finder tool” is required (which still has to be developed, I guess Aaron AND/OR Jim are already working on it, especially as Jim already has a related forward link tool ) then the MSN LinkFromDomain command is the key element to it :-)

Sidenote: Googles RELATED: operator gave you some ideas… until they crippled it some months ago – just like the backlink operator

Then looking at common inbound link patterns AND common outbound link patterns in an even more advanced tool will give you great ideas leading to real web graphs.

I’m amazed MSN is giving out so much info.

But then there are some flaws of missing data and even a suspicion of supplemental outbound link SERPs

3. FAST reciprocal link checker

well obviously recip link checking has become a lot easier – at least for that part of the web that MSN has indexed, spidered and is returning data for

You can use this in TWO ways

a) compare all inbound links vs matching outbound links for a domain

linkfromdomain:marketingfan.com linkdomain:marketingfan.com

b) compare all inbound links vs matching outbound links for a page

linkfrom:marketingfan.com link:marketingfan.com

So this last one only returns pages that marketingfan.com links out to, that are linking back to the homepage … you could do that with any other target page on your site (e.g. your hidden powerfull product selling page)

Russ again launched a reciprocal link percentage tool that calculates the percentage of reciprocating links for a domain… pretty interesting use

Flaws,Problems,Questions with LinkFromDomain

Some further observations of some linkfromdomain command limitations of the last days

definately NOT the whole MSN index is retrievable via this command… I found a lot of sites that are ranking fine in MSN, got link pop data leading to PR4-7 in Google that returned NO single result in MSN

the results seem to be geo-ip based, unless you add some locale-operator… e.g. if I look for Google’s outbound links then I get a ton of austrian sites (.at domain) linked from there… I assume the US guys start with .coms or US based sites

there’s a suspicion of supplemental outbound link SERPs – meaning some filtered links that MSN won’t show you

I am still trying to find out is – does it work with wildcards? – I mean some kind of keyword restrictions in those outbound link results

It would be great to have a command like

linkfromdomain:site.com *gambling*

this would be great to list all gambling sites a target site is linking to unless you are in gamling business you don’t want your link there, do you?

(YES: even if it IS a PR8 – who the heck cares about PR anyway???)

Anyway – Thank you MSN for this cool new operator!

PS: sidenote – MSN also got their new “search MACRO” feature that I missed until now… I think that’s one great thing I’ll have to look into next

Interesting links of the day

Marketing Fan — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 03:52:43 +0200

Tons of Interesting links today

Paris Hilton CD marketed on YouTube – new concept

Update – just came across a post by Andy Beal on this video, including the youTube movie

Database of 130,000 Public and Private Schools, Google-Mapped – didn’t know there are 130,000 public and private K-12 schools in the US. My estimation of 20k was based on the aprox. edu domain count

Corrupt DMOZ editor Daniel Kotarski – advertised to get you into DMOZ for $50 to $350 one time payment, depending if you want to wait a year or get in today… what a jerk… definately not “below the radar” :-)

Men of SEO – this is funny stuff … A fan blog devoted to the men of SEO. Making search engine optimization sexier and more entertaining. checkout the “Bearded Babes” post … thanks to Laura Lippay check her 360 profile for more funny stuff

11 Rising Barriers To Entry for Small Businesses on the Web – Todd putting together the mostly impacting 11 factors that make it harder to start on the web today – most important is the age factor impacting trust rank

Drug Marketers can ramp up their spendings because of changing federal drug marketing laws they can integrate more into content (presell pages???) and Aaron asks

Aaron Wall wrote:

How much money will emotions like depression be worth to publishers? Will people be able to find accurate information if traditionally well trusted publishers are leveraging their authority to create custom advertising opportunities for the people with the greatest profit potential in spreading misinformation or a biased view of the world to a desired audience one at a time?

MSN denotes spammy looking pages – VIPS and block level analysis is here

Huge Linkbaiting List collection

More than 80% of retailers won’t implemented Google Checkout !

Top 50 Search Blogs and the Top 76 Search Blogs

12 different Link Types and 101 ways to get them

Marketing Fan — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 21:18:51 +0200

There were quite some great new linking resources released in the last days

Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans released their famous 101 ways to get links on seobook last week… it already got almost 800 bookmarks on del.icio.us

But yesterday Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl released his 12 types of linking which is a way better structured document creating a typology of links that you could actually use to spin off another 150 types of getting links document or so :-) well, no – but I like his document even a bit more…

Note, that the SEO for firefox was updated recently to use the Yahoo API, the MSN API and the technorati API... a great thing, as a lot of people, including Jim boykin and me saw that ugly “Yahoo 999 Error” which translates to a temporary ban for your IP address…

Pubcon X - Photos of WebmasterWorld Nov2005

Marketing Fan — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 01:44:13 +0100

Just saw that Jim, who returned today - 2 days after me - already put up some pics, so I chose to upload few of the nicer pub pics ASAP

Jim Boykin CEO of webuildpages and me

Find another nice shot of us at Jim's and Dale's website

Dale, I'm hotlinking this superfunny one here for now... please LMK and I'll remove it asap / or host it here:

Matt Cutts and me

Aaron Wall / SEOBOOK , Caveman and Roger/Martinibuster

I broke my Ixus 750 after this event - but could download all the pics luckily - and I got a new cam already as of today...