Demandez le gourou seo

Stop trying to get a link from everything and start adding something of value to anything and you’ll be way ahead in the online marketing game. <<<<<< quote for the day

The year was 2002 and in just the previous 12 months or so Google had become the global SEO obsession. Every update from shift to shineola was affectionately given a pet name like it was some webmasters first car. Mine was named Shasta. Shasta have gas, Shasta have oil, Shasta have tires, Shasta have lights, new seat covers, horn, turn signals, -----

All of sudden Yahoo’s directory listing stopped being the holy grail of traffic generators and now webmasters couldn’t click fast enough to download the Google toolbar and start tracking EVERYBODY’s PR. Handing over info you wouldn’t disclose to your mother about every site you worked on when and how seemed a cheap price to get to dance at the Google Linkers Ball.

I wasn’t the first guy to pimp link love but I did pretty much give birth to a cottage industry of link brokers, fantomaster.com. A few savvy serp jockeys had already been selling it, buying it, trading it and living off of it when a lawsuit was just a glimmer in the eye of this litigious linkdemon, but I became as blinded by the green bar as anyone and saw it as a way to raise desperately needed capital when I read a post on webmasterworld, ( http://www.webmasterworld.com), by fellow Old Fart SEO, Brett Tabke,(http://www.searchnengineland.com) assserting that a link from a PR 8 site was worth a quarter of a million bucks, http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165111).

Yowza! That’s enough to make anyone a believer!

Back then, one link from a PR 9 brought your site to a PR8 within 2-4 weeks tops. A 6 gave you a 5 and an index page with a 5 gave almost all your interior pages a 4. Easy peasy. Algo busting wasn’t too tough because it wasn’t hard to figure out that in the serps, a 9 beat an 8 and an 8 beat a 7 and so forth. Man, the PR gold rush was on!

Well, it didn’t take long to see that the complexity bar had to be raised before every porn, pills and casino site had a PR 9. And rise it did. That coupled with the FUD being propagated and paid for by Google in various forms including, but not limited to, the legal bitch slapping given to yours truly, it did little else other than to increase demand. So I guess I can’t actually claim that I started the link brokering cottage industry. Google did a much better job of promoting the value in that industry than I ever did.     

That was over 5 years ago. I was just a pup back then. Young, dumb and full of people willing to pay $800 for a single link from a PR8, (for some crazy reason, they’re still out there).  

That was then, this is now.

When I’m hired by clients, they’re the boss. I never argue or even try to change their minds unless they specifically ask for my advice. I assume these are intelligent businessmen, (or they wouldn’t be calling me right?), and they know what they want. If a client pays me to secure a PR 8, then I do my best to secure a PR 8. However, due to my experience and my ability to articulate the intricacies of premium organic search engine placement, most clients simply want increased visibility and traffic and are happy to let me select the best way to achieve that.

Chasing and paying for links just because they have a high page rank is NOT the way to increase visibility in the organic results anymore. Well maybe I need to re-state that because links, virtually all links, do have some value. Maybe a more accurate statement would be,” chasing and paying for links just because they have a high page rank is NOT a smart investment of time or money”.  

I’d like to offer a little collateral evidence for the purpose of illustration. While the evidence I offer here may be only circumstantial, it is certainly more substantiative than pure conjecture and mere opinion stated as fact which makes it considerably unique.

A PR 9 Link for Everyone with $1500 Cash

Back in 2002 one of the first  PR9 sites to jump on the hey-we-can-make-a-boatload-of-money-fast-off-our-page-rank bandwagon was a site that to this day has some 2,700,000 inbound links. Link pimps lined up to gladly pay $1500 a month for every 3 -5 word text link they could peddle. Within 60 days, this site had over 300 completely, totally, glaringly obvious, take-anyone’s-money-who’ll-pay-us text links enhancing the quality of this popular site.

It ran the gamut of morally motivated editorial review from A to B. There were no links with any of the 7 words you can’t say on TV, (http://www.lyricsbox.com/george-carlin-lyrics-the-seven-words-you-can-never-say-on-tv-268qwb7.html), but outside of that, it looked like pretty much anyone with 1500 bucks passed this crews censoring policies.

I’m referring to a site anyone in this biz as long as I’ve been, (if there is such an animal), would recognize from WMW. I’m talking about Wunderground! http://www.wunderground.com

Today it sits at a lowly PR 5, (which pretty much illustrates the usefulness of todays’ toolbar PR with the 2,700,000 inbounds it has), which even after all the SEO bitching and bashing discussions seems to still be high enough to generate revenue from some 30+ ROS text links. These are of course much more relevant to the theme of checking global weather conditions than they used to be back then. Such as the plastic surgery ads because of course if you are going to the Bahamas you may wish to take some new tits with you. I can see that.

All the vacation and travel stuff makes sense too as does the internet service providers and the VoIP ad ------ I gueeeessssss they are targeting people who are preparing to travel to the Amazon and may want some new fangled mobile technologies to take with them as they paddle a log dugout into the rain forest. Sure I can see that.

But I struggled a little with the bankruptcy attorney ads and the tax preparation stuff until it dawned on me that someone may be wanting to skip the country without paying their taxes or ex-wife and while checking the weather predictions in Costa Rica why not give them an opportunity to check out some good deals on financial services. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the ticket. Targeted ads, yeah.

Well, it doesn’t work like it used to. Today, you can check all the text links off the page and struggle to find a PR 4 from the juice being squeezed out of the pr5 of the wunderlink. PLUS I took a few of those sites at random and they must all be getting good traffic from such targeted placement because I didn’t find a single one in the top 10 for a search for the anchor text of the links to justify paying for the link.

I didn’t check them all and you’re free to check for yourself but I checked enough that I’m convinced whether you are or not, that was then and this is now and it’s a whole new ballgame being played in the old link stadium today.

The dirt Guru, get to the dirt!

Nowadays, blog posts and authorities sites will rarely give links to ANYBODY because links are now internet gold. Emailing reciprocal link requests nets about one link from spam sites for every 30,000 emails, so what's a webmaster supposed to do? If directories have been devalued, article directories are busted and we can’t buy text links unless they have a no follow tag  what's left?

The answer is so simple you are going to hate it. You are going to struggle hard to resist accepting that improved serp positions could be so easy. But it is.

I’m going to tell you now EXACTLY how I have trained my staff to get virtually any keyword target to move up fast and dramatically.

I wrote a blog post recently titled

 Squeezing The Juice Out Of The Low-Hanging Fruit

In that post I said:

As long as a web page, any web page, is being spidered, given sufficient time and motivation, I can generate CONVERTING TRAFFIC to a target web page for ANY keyword or phrase with nothing more than search engine placement. WITHOUT PAYING FOR LINKS!

In that article I wrote that nothing I did you could not do as well. Mind you I did not say you will rank #1 for hosting or home based business. If that is what you think I said and you intend now to run out and get rich from ranking top 5 for hosting there is only one conclusion I can make with one of two possible outcomes.

Either you’re an idiot and you are going to get your ass kicked and lose a lot of money until you quit

OR

You’re an idiot and you are going to get your ass kicked and lose a lot of money until you learn what you’re doing.

 I said I could generate converting traffic without paying for links and so can you!

Today I’m going to give you the secret which like most things SEO is really no secret at all. It's just work.

It involves nothing more than accepting two broad concepts, a simple procedure and a guiding philosophy.

Concept #1 – Personal Rank

Page Rank has long ago shifted more to trust rank and now we are seeing it shift to personal rank. What that means, in a very broad sense, is that a link from Mrs. Consumer on her favorite forum or among her circle of friends wherever she hangs out can move a specific url for a specific term faster and farther than a high PR link from an authority site for specific people searching for specific terms.

You still want those authority links because it is in the process of changing but authority links still carry a lot of weight. It’s just that they are getting so difficult to get that sometimes just getting them can attract suspicion. They are getting so difficult to get that getting them is in itself a little unnatural.

Try to think like a search engine for a moment. Why would a 7 year old authority site with a PR 7 give a link to a site that is less than a year old with a PR 2? Maybe it’s perfectly 2 legit 2 quit but maybe it’s worth taking a look. See what I mean?

So how do get Mrs. Consumer to give you that link? Well, I don’t mind telling you where I think the gold is but you’ll have to do your own digging. BUT, it is no more difficult than it was getting those links from an authority site last year and the year before.

Concept #2. - Eliminate the Toolbar

The little green bar means noting in terms of placements or in terms of establishing value for a website’s juice. Plus the fewer people you tell about where, when and how you get your links the better off YOU are.

I make sure that when my people start a linking campaign, (without specific instructions from the client and even then it is only a select few top people who undertake those tasks), I take extra steps to make sure that they do it without benefit of toolbar.

I realize this is a tough one but it really is important enough that you should try it at least on a few links. Remember the toolbar doesn’t tell you anything about context, bad neighborhoods or whether the target site has any placements. You’re used to looking for that kind of stuff without the toolbar anyway, or at least you should be unless you’re one of those people still willing to pay big money just to get a link from a PR 8. 

Finally, to discount any page just because it has a PR 0 or even an N/A is a mistake. I look at probably a thousand searches/webpages a week and have for a LOT of years and I can guarantee you that a link on a page with a PR0 that makes sense for your link to be there, can move your page up in the organic results. If you are stressing out over whether this page is linked to a bad neighborhood or is passing PR, then you are not putting your time and efforts to the best use. For one thing, almost EVERY site has links to something somebody wouldn't like. I know, I've looked. And for another thing if the page looks and feels like spam crap then it doesn't make sense for your link to be there in the first place and you're already blowing it. 

Procedure – Keyword Plus

We’ve come to the part you’re really going to hate. It is so simple it’s hard to accept that it works so well.

If you are like most people you’re just trying to get a break and run your business. You have read and followed so much advice from so many posts and threads and tweets and diggs and stumbles and crapnoratti that you have downloaded, uploaded, autogenerated submissions to 40,000 directories and paid for classified blasters, forum bombs, blog busters and joined networks, web rings, friends dingers, power pingers, traffic masters, marketing maidens, co-op builders, PR networks and friends helping friends until you have forgotten to just slow down and think for yourself.

All of that stuff has been done to death and if you’ve done it and you’re not getting any traffic, then do us all a huge favor and try something else for a change.

Go to any search engine you like and type in your keyword + directory

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=educational+toys+%2B+directory&btnG=Search

There is  464,000 pretty good shots at getting a link that will move your site up in the Serps for that term

(at least for some people) 

or  keyword + article submission

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=leather+furniture+%2B+article+submissions&btnG=Search

There is 151,000 pretty good places to look for a link

Or Keyword + forum

570,000 hot spots.

I could go on but I’m guessing you get the point.

I bet you’re saying DUH! We all know that Guru.

Ok, fine so you already knew that huh?  If you were happy with your placements, you wouldn’t be reading Ask the SEO Guru blog now would you?

Kids you don’t have to believe me but I’m telling you the truth, stop trying to get a link from everything and start submitting something of value to anything and you’ll be way ahead of the game. 

And now to the final piece of the entire puzzle. The Guiding Philosophy that brings it all together.

Guiding Philosophy – – Put Your Link Where it Makes the Most Sense for the Most People

When do other people WANT to accept your link request, publish your article, run your press release or accept your submission?

When it does something for them.

Either it makes them money, saves them time, provides added value to their visitors or they believe it makes them look good or smart or benevolent to their visitors, their peers, their friends, their relatives, to the search engines, award sites or just about anyone that can make them a buck or stroke their ego. 

So, the absolute best chance you have of getting that link is to cover as many of those bases as possible at the same time. When you can satisfy some need, want or desire of the webmaster, the visitor to the hosting site and it makes the search engine look smart, BINGO. You just hit the SERP buster hat trick!

Hitting any one of the bulls’ eyes will usually do the trick. Hitting two out of three will bring you double the response from just hitting one and hitting the hat trick can bring close to 90% success.

Don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself and THEN tell me I’m wrong. The next time you get ready to hit the button on another 500 “personalized” emails all saying, “I’ve been to your site {insert url here}, stop and take just the first one and THINK about what you could say that would illustrate real value to THEM if they placed your link.  If you find even one real benefit to them,(assuming they even open your email of course), you will start seeing about a one out of 4 success ratio as opposed to 1 out of 4000 {insert url here} emails .

Take the exact same approach when you submit to directories, or submit articles, or any other technique you choose to use to secure links. The site giving you the link wins, the visitor to the hosting site wins and the search engines win by looking smart.  But the big winner is YOU!

You’ll get the most links by slowing down and thinking of ways to give the most value to the most people every time.

Related suggested reading.

Thanks to Ann Smarty of Search Engine Journal for the inspiration. She’s one smart cookie. Hey, I just got that one.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/natural-seo-reciprocal-linking-and-interlinking/6533/

Stoney DeGeyter get the Guru's viote for blog post of the week! Good job SG preach on brother.

http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/think-beyond-the-link-how-exposure-build.php

SEObook is always a safe bet but ironically enough, this just got posted yesterday.

http://www.seobook.com/personalized-free-professional-help

Debra Mastalers post here
http://community.seobook.com/link-building/538-tnx-net-whats-your-opinion.html

NOTE
{you may have to be a member to read the community.seobook.com page. If you're not already a member you should come join us. It's well worth the investment because that's where we tell you the REALLY good stuff !}

Peace y’all

G

If you leave that bicycle in the driveway again I ain’t pickin it up! I’ll just run over the damn thang and see how you like walkin to school.

                                 Who Looks Better Naked? Veronica, Betty or Jughead?

I enjoy cruising seo forums as much as the next unemployed, errrr, I mean SEO, but to be brutally honest it may be the LEAST effective way to get better placements in the SERPs.

Killing time in forums and telling yourself you’re researching is not completely void of value mind you. Without seo forums I probably wouldn’t know to call the list of urls returned for a search --- SERPs.  But in all honesty, outside of being able to use cool sounding, industry specific jargon to try to convince my mom I really do have a job, calling stuff SERPs and watching dogs “do it” pays about the same.

I’ve made the biggest time consuming mistakes of my online career following the unsubstantiated observation of some unemployed, errrrr, I mean seo, who said something that sounded logical even though I knew in my heart it made as much sense as arguing over who looked better naked, Veronica or Betty or maybe even Jughead.

                                                          Quote for the Day

Many’s the time I wished I could have the last hour of my life back that I just spent reading circular debates posted by members of the ignoratti.

I’m certainly not downplaying the importance of staying informed, but I am suggesting that there are ways to gain better positions in search engines other than spending all your time in forums and on social media sites looking for where you can squeeze your avatar in. Without making a genuine contribution or at least having a set objective,  that is NOT staying on top of your game. That is simply wasting time and avoiding work.

                                                       Ever Had an Epiphany?

Some of you may have noticed that you rarely see my name in a forum or blog that wasn’t put there by someone else.  It’s just that about 5 years ago I had a minor epiphany. (I’ve liked that word ever since watching Dr. Huxstable’s daughter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Bonet) do the nasty with Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092563/). Hubba hubba).

The epiphany wasn’t how much worthless crap was littering the net and how difficult it was to find anything where the signal to noise ratio was at least 50/50. It was that I far too often was only contributing to the crap.

I made a personal commitment to myself that from then on I would only post when I genuinely felt I had something that would contribute to the site I was posting at or to the community at large. That was the day I decided I was going to stop posting just to hear the sound of my own fingers clicking the keys. It was also the day I resigned as moderator from SEF.

*******************************************

{sidenote}

                                                        Knowledge is Power

The point is simply that the reason I don’t post much is because I try hard to speak less and say more out of respect for the industry, the internet and the people I admire. That philosophy does not apply to my blog of course. I believe on a man’s own blog he can make the noose as long as he wants. Then it’s up to you to put it around your neck.

As I started reading more and saying less, I noticed by avoiding pointless discussions that offered little return, I was able to spend more time actually learning. I also started using the extra time I had been wasting to start reading more real books and documents and thinking about what I had read. It didn’t take long to notice that placements were coming easier. Knowledge is power.

                          Why Historical Reference Is Such a Powerful Tool For an SEO

One of the primary reasons you want to conserve enough of your valuable time to undertake the often tedious task of reading documents that offer a return, even the technical documents that get released, (or exposed), from the engines themselves,  is to gain an understanding of historical reference.

Maybe historical reference doesn’t matter much to you as an seo when we’re referring to a quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Even though that quote is related to the US entering into WWII which led to the national paranoia and interment of Asian Americans which led to increased funding to the NSA and CIA, (and other various spook gangs), which helped lead to the cold war which made the American military scared of having communications knocked out by Russian spy satellites which led to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPAnet), which led to the internet which led to Google and ended up here with this post.

But what DOES matter is what that quote illustrated was a shift in direction in the minds of decision makers. Once a direction becomes an executed policy, it becomes embedded into the fabric of all the related policies that come after it.  Without question things change and nothing stays the same BUT the changes are typically on top of the primary underlying foundation which means the more things get piled on top, the more difficult and expensive altering those foundations become. Usually, the founding principles can be traced back through historical reference to a defining moment. That moment gives you insight into the basic driving force of whatever it is you’re trying to get a handle on.

                           How Some Things Change and Some Things Stay the Same

In the context of Google and gaining an advantage over your competitors through a better understanding of how Google works, let’s look at just one example.

In the book, The Google Story by David A. Vise, (http://www.amazon.com/Google-Story-David-Vise/dp/055380457X I recommend the hard cover as you’ll want to refer to this book more than once), on page 56, and I quote:

As Larry Page revealed a bit more about what made the Google search engine better than others, the Stanford students and professors hung on every word.

“Whenever you query with more than one word, we’re looking at the distance between words {on a Web page}, “ he said.

That innocuous statement was made in 1998 to a small group of intellectual elites. What it illustrates is that very early on as the algorithm was first being developed, the importance of the distance between words for a multiple word query was embedded into the foundation of the algorithm. After a year or two or three, and with something that was growing as fast as Google, to go into the core of the program and remove or alter this aspect would be incredibly difficult and expensive. So it can be assumed that the distance between words is a factor even a decade later.

All right, let’s take a look at another example that had an influence on how I have sites built that has resulted in better positions.

[0002] Grouping users into clusters is done for a variety of purposes. To achieve user personalization, for example, one of the well known techniques, collaborative clustering, involves clustering users and recommending to a user items that other users in the user's cluster have expressed interest in. Conventionally, a user may have been taken to have expressed interest in an item in various ways, e.g., by clicking on it, purchasing it, or adding it to a shopping cart. The recommendation can take a variety of forms, e.g., presenting to the user as part of search results, showing as news stories the user may want to read, identifying items the user may want to purchase and so on.

I added the bolding for emphasis.

That is just one paragraph from  Google Patent # 20070038659 (http://www.arnoldit.com/lists/google-patents/pat20070038659.pdf)

This paragraph is the one that got me to see that there is still a natural progression in the evolution of a quality score assignment to links. It convinced me that inbound links are as important as ever in terms of ranking but it is becoming more about trusting the historical references assigned to an individual as well as calculating the quantity and quality of inbound links to establish authority sites. In other words, Mrs. Consumer who doesn't know a toolbar from a  titwilow can simply mention your site in her favorite diapers-for-less forum, (or gmail), and place you in the top 10 of results for more people LIKE Mrs. Consumer than a PR 8 link from an authority site.

This also validates, (for me at least), what I have been saying for years. To get top placements, it helps if you realize you are not dealing with a relevancy finding machine and accept that you are dealing with an ad delivery machine. That is why making Google look smart is so important.

( http://massa.techndu.com/default,month,2008-01.aspx#ab01586ee-9401-47ea-8f5f-cb6b13d8ff53)

One final example I would like to point out and then I’ll let you go outside and play with your friends.

Aaron Wall published a post a few days ago publicly releasing a Google manual meant only for Google quality control personnel.

Full Text of Google's General Guidelines for Remote Quality Raters from April 2007

http://www.seobook.com/full-text-googles-general-guidelines-remote-quality-raters-april-2007

While it lacked any technical details and it pretty much covered the basic, common sense kind of stuff, the significance for me was in exposing how the upper level engineers think about quality and relevancy.

When you take the time to read and understand what the underlying concepts and effects of the documents mean, you can start seeing patterns that can be applied to how and why you should apply specific techniques to improve your sites visibility. It is not about beating Google as much as it is about understanding them and working with them. --- kind of.

And consider how your reputation points will go up when you start posting in forums about Google books, Google patents and Google documents. You could quickly become recognized as a well-read professional as opposed to looking like just another twitter gitter.

So, you want better placements? You really want to learn something about SEO? Ok, then go get this this book and read it:

The Google Story by David A. Vise, http://www.amazon.com/Google-Story-David-Vise/dp/055380457X

Then go read the Google patents here:

http://www.arnoldit.com/lists/google-patents.asp

Yes, all of them. But I’ll give you a little tip. If you’re not a mathematician, then reading all the equations probably won’t do much good. It doesn’t help me much.

So reading the first 5 or 6 paragraphs in depth and then just glazing over the entire document is probably sufficient. Certainly better than not reading them at all but still giving your opinion in forums anyway.

Finally saving the easiest for last, read the SEObook post:

Full Text of Google's General Guidelines for Remote Quality Raters from April 2007

http://www.seobook.com/full-text-googles-general-guidelines-remote-quality-raters-april-2007

download the pdf and read it all and not just the spam guidelines stuff. There are some real gems in there.

It’s work I know, but if you’ll just do the work, you will see the impact on your success with your own eyes. If you are not that serious about your craft, no problem. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean you have to sphinn another twitter ditty.

Peace Y’all

G

Damnit! There’s kids in China who’re starving and you don’t like Brussels sprouts.
Well, you’re going to sit there until you finish everything on your plate!