Seo for your living

Looksmart has released its new publisher platform. The new publisher ad platform works much like other search engine publisher platforms, whereas ads are easily displayed on sites, and generate revenue per click.

Through LookSmarts AdCenter you can sell online ads directly on your site to advertisers, and actually determine your own CPC’s. This approach helps publishers grow direct relationships with advertisers.

LookSmart allows you the opportunity to white label AdCenter solutions. The hosting, sales, and service are fully hosted through LookSmart, and pricing is fully determined by you.

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How to Rent a Half Million Links & Stay Below Google’s Radar

Google tries to scare you away from renting links, but their paid link detection algorithms are at best laughable. Which is why Matt Cutts puts so much effort into trying to scare you about bought links.

_________.com has repetitive and near machine generated sounding content, like

Loan calculators are made of different calculation types. In fact, for calculating the same type of loans, a large number of different calculator programs exist that will help you think about your loan and analyze your loans from different angles.

and that QUALITY content ranks in Google for thousands of search phrases. It looks like someone rented hundreds of thousands of links, with sitewide links on _______ and many other high authority sites.

I thought about making this post, but then decided it is bad karma to out the site I menioned, so I edited out the identifying details. You understand the lack of validity of Google’s paid links scaremongering techniques by reading Jim Boykin’s great post about quality sites never getting penalized for selling links and by looking at some of the places sketchy links are popping up.

If Google is deceptive, misleading, and self serving with the data they share (which they are) why should we expect anything different with their general advice for webmasters?

Yahoo! releases Slurp

Yahoo has released a new search crawler. Meet Slurp, a more efficient website visiting engine. Yahoo has estimated that website owners will see a 25% reduction in the number of requests coming from Yahoo servers, thus decreasing bandwidth.

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Major Yahoo! Ranking Changes

Yahoo search normally moves rather slowly with small changes, but I just saw some pretty big shifts in Yahoo rankings, including

• botching part of a sitewide 301 redirect that they had followed for months - now both sites rank, but each ranks well for some portion of the queries
• a bit more weight on domain names

What are you seeing?

Comcast Fined for Syndicating Fraudulent News

Any time a big media company writes about publishing ethics, just remember how much fraud is baked into their business models. Comcast was fined by the FCC for displaying fake news about a sleeping pills. Direct to consumer drug marketing wrapped as fake news. Can a company get any sleezier?

MSN Revenues Decline
Looks like Microsoft might be a little behind in earnings compared with last years revenues. ClickZ has reported that last year MSN hit $598 million, and this year at the same time they are at $580 million in revenue.

This is supposedly mostly due to to the large amounts MSN has been dumping into the Live.com search property, adCenter, and MSN search in general.

MSN has stated that it is transitioning into home grown ads with MSN’s adCenter as opposed to its previous sponsored ads. Microsofts CFO said in a conference call with investors that they are aiming at having 100% of their business targeted on adCenter. Thus Microsoft is planning on spending over $500 million in developing its online services portion of their business. Including Live.com, and Search.

MSN does not expect to be profitable in 2007 due to these spends on investments.

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Understanding the Value of High Quality Editorial Blog Content

With an ever increasing number of ways for people to share content and an ever increasing number of competing channels the easiest way to estimate the value of a blog post is to look at the people citing it. Citations lead to new readers and subscribers…and more citations. If your posts are well cited it does not take many posts to get thousands of subscribers.

With 12 days left to go in an auction the NorthxEast blog is up to $5,500. Their blog only has 33 posts, and is a blog about blogging, which is a topic that is notoriously hard to monetize. Typically freelance bloggers get paid anywhere from $5 to $50 a post. If this site goes for $10,000 then it will be a valuation of $300 a post. Where was that extra value created? It is in the number of inbound links and number of subscribers. Over 700 bloggers link at that site and it has a couple thousand subscribers.

If you paid a freelance writer $100 or $200 per page think of the type of quality content you could create. If you value your time at $20 an hour and take 8 hours to write a post and 2 hours marketing it think of the potential return from a link perspective. You can rent average quality links for $10 to $20 a month, increase your risk profile, and get links saying nothing about your company, or you could pour that same money into getting people talking about you. If you know your topic well writing is an easy and cheap form of marketing.

If a site can go from nothing to being worth ~ $10,000 on 33 blog posts, imagine what that link equity and subscriber base would do to your brand and search rankings. If that same effort was used to market a #12 ranking site, suddenly that site might be in the top 2 or 3 and see a 10x increase in traffic.

What do You Call Yourself?

Google can’t catch most paid links. They can’t even catch large malware networks that have existed long enough to be reported in the mainstream media. But they can go after business models they do not like.

As Google tries to shift the web to improve user experience AND extract as much profit as possible, certain classes of information and information formats are rendered useless and/or unprofitable.

Web Directories

There are a lot of web directories that recently got hit, and those hand penalties are not the only way directories are being penalized. Google has been fighting off parasitic (or low value) link sales web directories for years by crawling them less deeply and caching their pages infrequently. Cache date is the new Google PageRank.

You can analyze changes and beg for forgiveness from Google, but they don’t care about you or your site. They are only interested in improving general web trends, search usage, and their ad driven profit. This is not to say that analysis is bad, but sometimes we chose to analyze the wrong things rather than shift our approach to marketing.

An Alternate Name, Classification, & Approach

Domain names are worth so much because people tend to refer to you using what you call yourself.

Google’s recent hate toward directories does not indicate that all directories are junk, but if you were to start a new web directory today what benefit is there in calling yourself a web directory? What if rather than charging $20 or $50 for a link, you charged much more and listed a real formal review on the site? Why not be a web review guide or a social bookmarking service or something else that is more in tune with the general direction of the web? Mahalo is worthless, but due to the different classification “human powered search” and associated public relations hype, it is much stronger than most directories.

Leverage New Information Formats

Ebooks are another concept that has got abused. So are many of the other classes of sites Google is going on record as saying you should avoid. The same types of information that appears in ebooks can be displayed using something like Sketchast, and be called something different, that is yet to be abused.

If you are in a competitive market your site should not be static. Even DMOZ created a blog.

Not All Arbitrage is Made Equal

If you are starting a new business it is best to tie your name and brand to a memorable, likable, and press-worthy topic. If you run a thin arbitrage type business the name and labels you use to describe yourself may be more important than the quality of your user experience. Spend upfront or pay later with limited exposure and/or a risky rebrand.

If you are serious about search engine optimization, Google Analytics is NOT for you. I know it s tough to look past the (non-existent) price tag, ease of use and conversion tools but trust me when I say that Google Analytics is a flawed program for your needs. #1 - Limitations of Technology The first trouble […]

Major Yahoo! Ranking Changes

Yahoo search normally moves rather slowly with small changes, but I just saw some pretty big shifts in Yahoo rankings, including

• botching part of a sitewide 301 redirect that they had followed for months - now both sites rank, but each ranks well for some portion of the queries
• a bit more weight on domain names

What are you seeing?

Short Term Opportunism & Online Economic Trends

Many financial and social markets are destroyed by short term opportunism. Because the web is virtually limitless, it is easy to make sales pitches that sound like everyone gains. But that is rarely, if ever, true. Every clean traffic source gets gamed. So do the dirty ones.

A recently launched blog Ponzi Scheme has more holes in it than swiss cheese. What kind of desperate people get in on the 5th tier of a Ponzi Scheme? Does it benefit your credibility to recommend low quality sites or have ads for your site seen on their sites? What type of readers do the low quality sites have, beyond the robotic community? No reason to link out to those sorts of sites, and you can probably use AdSense to buy ad space on their site for about 3 cents a click, if it even has that much value.

The reason many reciprocal link networks stink is that some webmasters marketed low quality sites they intended to get burned. Anything that has you trading with anonymous unknown parties has you trading your time, attention, and exposure with a spambot of some sort. Your site is better than that, and your time is worth more than that.

Many more programs will come out telling you how to get something for free, but if it is market exposure be leery. When I started on the web I did arbitrage on some smaller pay per click search engines and never paid me. Digging deeply for the deals has you focused on bargain hunting when your time would be better spent building value. The deal diggers keep getting made obsolete by increasingly efficient markets. The people creating real value keep making more money as the market gets more efficient.

What I have come to appreciate is that it is easier, cheaper, and more sustainable to associate with the people you want to be grouped with. If you want to link out to a bunch of other sites do it in your content, and hand select the content you reference. I have showed some projects to friends who asked “how the hell did you get X to be involved with this?” I simply asked them. Aim high, not low.

Medical and Nursing Scrubs Designer Seeks Internet Marketing Leadership with SEO Services (PRWeb)
Blue Sky Scrubs, the leading medical and nursing scrubs designer, unveils is new internet marketing initiative by hiring SEO 1 Services, a Dallas based internet marketing company. (PRWeb Sep 29, 2007) Post Comment:Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/TWFnbi1GYWx1LVByb2YtTWFnbi1UaGlyLVplcm8=

Why Google Hand Editing Seems Random

Many people wonder why Google hand editing seems random or incomplete, and why some of the best channels get edited while worse stuff is left untouched. Here are some of the reasons Google does a poor job equitably policing the web:

• The web it too large to police and engineer time is expensive.

• Policing certain segments produces unwanted blowback. How often do large corporations or influential bloggers get policed? (It is rare, and when it happens, it is sold as a side effect of feature for users.)
• When issues become popular they get prioritized. Many times Google won’t react unless they feel they are forced to. Sometimes they will lie and say they care, and then do nothing. Back in April I highlighted the Netscape search results in Google. Matt Cutts thanked me, but guess what…those Netscape lolita preteen search result pages are STILL ranking in Google, along with a bunch of other search results.
• If they edit in an incomplete or random fashion they evoke fear
• It is easier to control people through fear than to create a perfect algorithm
• They have no need to hand edit the worst offenders. If they are competent programmers the algorithms should take care of those sites. They sometimes edit a leading sites in a field to send a signal. They may throw in a group of other sites if they need to create cover, but their goal is to send a message and alter behavior.

To appreciate how hard it is to police the web read Eli’s recent post on how to create an SEO empire. How can Google compete with that?

Jein. - Die Frage bei dem vServe…

Re: Big List Of Valid Anonymous Http Proxies?
[quote author=chide link=topic=1…

Google Patent Triggers Mobile Rumors
Call it the story that just won t die. The idea of Google creating its own smart phone to compete with the likes of Apple and more conventional companies in the industry keeps growing under its own steam. A patent filing by Google which was made public only recently has been adding fuel to the fire….
The Very Best in Pairwise Test Testcover.com - Compare our test case efficiency, response time, and ease of use. Simply the best!

Back-to-school SEO (CNET)
Every SEO can benefit from a periodic refresher of the important elements of every site. Sometimes it is the simplest things that slip by and trip us up.

Privacy Takes Center Stage Online
Concerns about user privacy online have been expressed for years. Many companies have been known to share information about individuals sometimes in aggregate with third parties with or without the consent of the owners. Google and Facebook made headlines because of how they have been handling the privacy of their users recently….
Refurbished and Used Networking Equipment Network Liquidators sells refurbished and used networking equipment for up to 95% off list, with a 1 year warranty. We buy and sell top brands like Cisco, Extreme, Foundry, and more. Call us for best pricing.

The New Digg & What It Means For SEO (Search Engine Land)
Last week Chris Winfield did a great job reviewing the new Digg . Today, I want to discuss how the changes affect SEOs. We all want to get on the homepage of Digg because it can bring in thousands of links, but the recent changes made it both easier and harder to get stories promoted. Here’s an overview of the changes and what they mean for SEO. Click to continue reading… …

Re: Big List Of Valid Anonymous Http Proxies?
What's wrong with proxy.org? To…

Re: Seo Newbies - Learn real seo and end up with a site that has some longevity
I seriously doubt that this proj…

Re: Salutare tuturor!!!
Stie cineva ceva de vreun forum …

New York Times’ Marshall Simmonds: Poster Child Of SEO Success (Search Engine Land)
Marshall Simmonds of the New York Times is, to me, the SEO of the hour right now. For an industry often mischaracterized as doing nothing but blog spamming, Marshall’s work as chief search strategist to institutionalize SEO as part of the regular editorial production at the New York Times lead directly to last week’s news that the paper was opening up its archives without charge, since it …

That chick with my space templat…

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el s bado 29 de setiembre 07, o …

Re: Seo Newbies - Learn real seo and end up with a site that has some longevity
Still possible to apply here? An…

Re: Welcome to Genbucks
Bompa, spacash made me an accou…

The New Digg & What It Means For SEO (Search Engine Land)
Last week Chris Winfield did a great job reviewing the new Digg . Today, I want to discuss how the changes affect SEOs. We all want to get on the homepage of Digg because it can bring in thousands of links, but the recent changes made it both easier and harder to get stories promoted. Here’s an overview of the changes and what they mean for SEO. Click to continue reading… …

Privacy Takes Center Stage Online
Concerns about user privacy online have been expressed for years. Many companies have been known to share information about individuals sometimes in aggregate with third parties with or without the consent of the owners. Google and Facebook made headlines because of how they have been handling the privacy of their users recently….
Refurbished and Used Networking Equipment Network Liquidators sells refurbished and used networking equipment for up to 95% off list, with a 1 year warranty. We buy and sell top brands like Cisco, Extreme, Foundry, and more. Call us for best pricing.

FullPress.it una testata di informazione tecnologica! (Full Press)
IAB Forum: WebRanking presenta il SEO come soluzione naturale ai costi crescenti del canale sponsorizzato, durante il workshop dedicato al Search, gioved 9 novembre ore 16.00 sala Blu 1.

It s not too late to do a good job on your SEO for 2 7 and prepare yourself for a banner year for 2 8. Gary Beal also known as GaryTheScubaGuy to regular visitors to our SEO Chat forums has put together a list of 21 SEO tips. They re too detailed to run in a single article so we ll be publishing them in parts. This is the first part of the series….
Grow Your Business Through Search Marketing Learn how search engine friendly design can tap into free traffic from search engines -SES @ a4uexpo

Privacy Takes Center Stage Online
Concerns about user privacy online have been expressed for years. Many companies have been known to share information about individuals sometimes in aggregate with third parties with or without the consent of the owners. Google and Facebook made headlines because of how they have been handling the privacy of their users recently….
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Re: Which affiliate programs does this guy use?
[quote author=DjiXas link=topic=…

MyBlogLog - Still Relevant? (WebProNews)
Late last week MyBlogLog updated their sign in process to require you to use your Yahoo ID when logging into the system. What surprised me most about the change was how it seemingly went unnoticed or unreported in the SEO community. I m curious if you still use MyBlogLog and how relevant you think it is as a social site? If you haven t logged in for awhile the next time you do you ll be …

Podcasting: Why Bother?
Podcasting is being touted as the newest word in the dictionary as search engines like Google and Ask have incorporated the distribution format into their search engine ranking pages SERPs . It can help businesses create great brands and forge new and more intimate relationships with their clients as the clients listen to audio podcasts and watch videos with feeds syndicating both blogs and podcasts….
Refurbished and Used Networking Equipment Network Liquidators sells refurbished and used networking equipment for up to 95% off list, with a 1 year warranty. We buy and sell top brands like Cisco, Extreme, Foundry, and more. Call us for best pricing.

Back-to-school SEO (CNET)
Every SEO can benefit from a periodic refresher of the important elements of every site. Sometimes it is the simplest things that slip by and trip us up.

My flight leaves tonight to go get married. I will be back in the last week of October. I might post again before then, but I might not. I wish you well and will be back soon(ish).

BTW, Compete.com search analytics launches tomorrow. It is exceptionally affordable for its value. Be sure to check it out.

International Search Engine Marketing and Arbitrage

Limited Competition in Secondary Markets

I recently took the AdWords professional exam again and the section I failed was international search. It is easy to do that because if you are primarily focused on the US market there are parts of search you can’t appreciate until you see them. When I was in Canada about a month ago I noticed PageRank 4 pages dominating search results where you would need at least 100x the link equity to compete on Google.com. Some of the most valuable US keywords only have a couple advertisers in Canada.

In The Slums of Search, Gord Hotchkiss wrote:

At Enquiro we actually did studies and asked people why they were reluctant to click on sponsored ads. The most common response was that they didn’t trust the advertiser. They felt that by clicking on the link they would end up on an affiliate or spam site and may get caught in a never-ending cascade of pop-up windows. Searchers were very wary. In the US, this attitude began to change as known brands began to adopt search.

If Google can’t attract the right advertisers that also means that the organic search results in that geographic market are likely easy to manipulate. In many underdeveloped markets around the world, PPC offers greater opportunity than SEO because their is virtually no competition, but as the markets mature and margins get squeezed, doing SEO and owning a brand becomes more profitable than PPC. Either way you approach it, if you can compete on Google.com you should be able to dominate foreign markets. The only issue is scale.

Estimating Market Scale

Google offers an ad preview tool to show you what ads look like in various markets, and you can take advantage of their traffic estimator tool to estimate the size of a market.

If you are in a market dominated by engines other than Google (like China and Russia) then of course you have to use tools other than Google to estimate the size of the market.

How to View US Google Search Results

If you are international and do not want to get redirected to your local version of Google you can view Google.com’s results by going to Google.us. While on Google.com you can append &gl=us to see the related US targeted ads. Another option to view international Google search results by using this Google global Firefox Extension or use Joost’s plugins that turn off personalization.

How Google Makes Lazy US Only Advertisers Buy Foreign Traffic

While in the Philippines I have noticed that some $20 keywords (in the US) have few advertisers here, and many of the ads are for garbitrage websites. For example, one page advertising on student loans went to a page with stolen content, and had a page title about mesothelioma. If an advertiser choses US only search distribution but opts into the content network they are probably paying for exposure on that page.

When I switched Google to only search local pages the number 1 ranked page for online degrees was an off topic forum thread. Limited competition means great opportunity for those who understand the local culture and are able to gain international recognition.

Sponsored Content Hosting & Renting Subdomains

Ads becoming content is not only true from a thin affiliate site perspective, but also on larger more traditional ad buys. Selling content hosting is going mainstream. About.com has been selling custom branded sponsored content for about a year. This WSJ page hawking Accenture is a PageRank 4, and this BizJournals lead generation page is also an indication of where sponsored content hosting is heading. How long will it be before you can log on to the WSJ ad platform and just buy a topic and upload a page?

A few months back Threadwatch had a post about Yahoo selling subdomains. Yesterday I stumbled across an AdSense ad for a company selling subdomains that they forward to other sites. I don’t believe it is smart to build a big site on someone else’s domain, but if you wanted to fling up a bunch of spam or create a single targeted ad page that goes after a competitive phrase why not leech of their authority and let them assume the risks?

There are no search engine guidelines on hosting advertisements for third parties because it is not an idea Google wants people thinking about or talking publicly about, and they can’t edit out WSJ.com if they will want the WSJ to spread their public relations messages and business interests.

Gary Beal well known to SEO Chat forum members as GaryTheScubaGuy came up with 21 excellent tips for SEO for 2 7 to turn the remainder of this year and of course 2 8 into one of your best. He went into massive detail for all of his tips which is why we re running them in parts. Yesterday we ran the first part which featured the first two tips. Today s article is completely devoted to his third tip which is all about podcasting….
Grow Your Business Through Search Marketing Learn how search engine friendly design can tap into free traffic from search engines -SES @ a4uexpo

Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool Blunder

Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.

The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbra, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.

Off to Get Married

My flight leaves tonight to go get married. I will be back in the last week of October. I might post again before then, but I might not. I wish you well and will be back soon(ish).

BTW, Compete.com search analytics launches tomorrow. It is exceptionally affordable for its value. Be sure to check it out.

How Will Viral Advertising Change the Web?

The web has long been rich in social and viral marketing elements. Email this to a friend, social bookmarking, blogging, etc. So many services have popped up that now there is a Social Media Firefox Extension and Andy Hagans is planning his fake review optimization service.

Ultimately the communities that are focused on a niche and editorially biased will be successful while aggregator websites that are nothing more than a feature that Google can add to their suite of services will die. Google quitely launched a Digg clone, and is aiming to create the underlying platform that powers most social networks. And they might bid on wireless spectrum in the US and UK.

As the leading portals collect more data they will be able to add value to more transactions and disintermediate middlemen by employing creative individuals to do jobs that were once done in offices. If people get paid for results then the quality of work goes up. Think of portals as television stations vying for a bite of your attention for as long as they possibly can, and looking to pay you for your attention with relevancy, and cash if you are really motivated.

There has always been a wall between editorial and advertising. Viral self select ads rip that down. Kevin Kelly recently posted about how he sees the new Google Gadget ads changing the face of advertising.

What happens when publishers can see what is hot right now and can create commercially oriented content targeting it in near real time? What happens when they are encouraged to track and test their results and can see the results of other ideas simply by the frequency they see it? Many current arbitrage opportunities are going to die, but others will thrive on this new opportunity.

The more third party platforms optimize revenue streams the more profitable niche attention based publishing will become. Generalist sites will be less profitable than highly specialized niche publishing. Results based distribution across large networks will force advertisers to give publishers a larger cut of revenue.The key is to scour through the ads and format them in a user friendly way to where they are looking at relevant content. You can’t beat relevancy algorithms without bias, brand, focus, and strong editorial.

Every SEO can benefit from a periodic refresher of the important elements of every site. Sometimes it is the simplest things that slip by and trip us up.

Popularizing Forums GH way?
Been working on some forums and …

A Taste of Top SEO Tips for 2007 (SEO Chat)
It s not too late to do a good job on your SEO for 2 7 and prepare yourself for a banner year for 2 8. Gary Beal also known as GaryTheScubaGuy to regular visitors to our SEO Chat forums has put together a list of 21 SEO tips. They re too detailed to run in a single article so we ll be publishing them in parts. This is the first part of the series….

Network Solutions, a leader in providing online services to small businesses, is partnering with ECMTA and PeSA to present a Search Engine Optimization Seminar on October 3, 2007 in San Francisco, California. This seminar will educate small business owners on the importance of SEO and how it benefits their online business.

3 Ways to Get Screwed by Social Media Marketing

Since linkbait is recommended by search engineers as a good strategy to market a site, it is probably pretty safe, right? Not always true.

The link bait advice is a bit disingenuous. Not only is linkbait expensive and unpredictable, and sometimes undermines the brand value of the site publishing it, but there are also times when sites get penalized for being too successful with it. Brian Turner mentioned that viral links could kill your Google presence, and I though it makes sense to share a couple specific examples of how linkbait can leave you looking (or at least feeling) like a sucker who took the bait.

Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Too Successful

Months ago one of my friends created and marketed a piece of content that got thousands of mentions. It made the Digg homepage, was referenced on a site as big as Wired, and made Life Hacker. This sounds like a linkbait gone perfect, right? Nope.

It got too much exposure relative to the link growth rate and link profile of the 5 year old site. The blog portion of the site associated with said article is no longer indexed in Google. For a while Google allowed that one linkbait page to get indexed and show PageRank, but it never ranked for its own title and it doesn’t pass PageRank through to the rest of the site.

Before launching said linkbait, this blog section of the site actually ranked for a few keywords that it no longer ranks for. Now in Google it is as though the blog does not exist. Virtually the equivalent of when Google accidentally nuked their own AdSense blog.

It doesn’t matter if this was done algorithmically or by hand. What matters is that if your viral link marketing is too good you are going to get screwed unless you have a way to keep attention and have enough leverage to make Google decide it would be best to relist your site.

Successful Link Bait Marketing, But Now You Are a Reciprocal Link Spammer

Many months ago another friend created and marketed a piece of linkbait. It was successful beyond her wildest dreams. Because of how it was structured, that linkbait linked at many of the sites linking back and the idea did not spread beyond the sites linked to on the page. Thousands of inbound links, but to a search relevancy algorithm it probably looks like a spammy reciprocal link farm. That linkbait was even offset by getting mainstream media exposure by targeting the media with AdWords ads, but it was not enough, as the site does not rank anywhere near as well as it should.

Successful Link Bait Marketing, But We Don’t Like Seeing YOUR Site Ranking That Well

Another friend spend ~ $100,000 on linkbait creation and marketing. His site got exceptionally successful, aggressively grew for about a year, he hired a bunch of employees, then a leading Google engineer hand edited the site out of the search results.

Linkbait can do a great job of helping you build high authority citations, but it still needs to be offset with directory links, community links, media links, and any other type of quality link you can get.

AltaVista is a Leading SEO Site, According to Google

As noted in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Google is reshuffling top ranking sites for single word queries (and shuffling their understanding of language and word relationships). I recently searched Google for SEO and was surprised to see the search engine Altavista coming in at #8 [screenshot].

Darren Rowse also emailed me to let me know that he saw the Matt Cutts blog ranking at #4 in Google for blog. As Google gets better at understanding word relationships even more traffic will go to the large authoritative websites.

Re: ranking in Live/MSN
[quote author=flak88 link=topic=…

International Search Engine Marketing and Arbitrage

Limited Competition in Secondary Markets

I recently took the AdWords professional exam again and the section I failed was international search. It is easy to do that because if you are primarily focused on the US market there are parts of search you can’t appreciate until you see them. When I was in Canada about a month ago I noticed PageRank 4 pages dominating search results where you would need at least 100x the link equity to compete on Google.com. Some of the most valuable US keywords only have a couple advertisers in Canada.

In The Slums of Search, Gord Hotchkiss wrote:

At Enquiro we actually did studies and asked people why they were reluctant to click on sponsored ads. The most common response was that they didn’t trust the advertiser. They felt that by clicking on the link they would end up on an affiliate or spam site and may get caught in a never-ending cascade of pop-up windows. Searchers were very wary. In the US, this attitude began to change as known brands began to adopt search.

If Google can’t attract the right advertisers that also means that the organic search results in that geographic market are likely easy to manipulate. In many underdeveloped markets around the world, PPC offers greater opportunity than SEO because their is virtually no competition, but as the markets mature and margins get squeezed, doing SEO and owning a brand becomes more profitable than PPC. Either way you approach it, if you can compete on Google.com you should be able to dominate foreign markets. The only issue is scale.

Estimating Market Scale

Google offers an ad preview tool to show you what ads look like in various markets, and you can take advantage of their traffic estimator tool to estimate the size of a market.

If you are in a market dominated by engines other than Google (like China and Russia) then of course you have to use tools other than Google to estimate the size of the market.

How to View US Google Search Results

If you are international and do not want to get redirected to your local version of Google you can view Google.com’s results by going to Google.us. While on Google.com you can append &gl=us to see the related US targeted ads. Another option to view international Google search results by using this Google global Firefox Extension or use Joost’s plugins that turn off personalization.

How Google Makes Lazy US Only Advertisers Buy Foreign Traffic

While in the Philippines I have noticed that some $20 keywords (in the US) have few advertisers here, and many of the ads are for garbitrage websites. For example, one page advertising on student loans went to a page with stolen content, and had a page title about mesothelioma. If an advertiser choses US only search distribution but opts into the content network they are probably paying for exposure on that page.

When I switched Google to only search local pages the number 1 ranked page for online degrees was an off topic forum thread. Limited competition means great opportunity for those who understand the local culture and are able to gain international recognition.

Re: Free URL submition and Easy link exchange!
there's a SHYTload of directorie…

Understanding the Value of High Quality Editorial Blog Content

With an ever increasing number of ways for people to share content and an ever increasing number of competing channels the easiest way to estimate the value of a blog post is to look at the people citing it. Citations lead to new readers and subscribers…and more citations. If your posts are well cited it does not take many posts to get thousands of subscribers.

With 12 days left to go in an auction the NorthxEast blog is up to $5,500. Their blog only has 33 posts, and is a blog about blogging, which is a topic that is notoriously hard to monetize. Typically freelance bloggers get paid anywhere from $5 to $50 a post. If this site goes for $10,000 then it will be a valuation of $300 a post. Where was that extra value created? It is in the number of inbound links and number of subscribers. Over 700 bloggers link at that site and it has a couple thousand subscribers.

If you paid a freelance writer $100 or $200 per page think of the type of quality content you could create. If you value your time at $20 an hour and take 8 hours to write a post and 2 hours marketing it think of the potential return from a link perspective. You can rent average quality links for $10 to $20 a month, increase your risk profile, and get links saying nothing about your company, or you could pour that same money into getting people talking about you. If you know your topic well writing is an easy and cheap form of marketing.

If a site can go from nothing to being worth ~ $10,000 on 33 blog posts, imagine what that link equity and subscriber base would do to your brand and search rankings. If that same effort was used to market a #12 ranking site, suddenly that site might be in the top 2 or 3 and see a 10x increase in traffic.

As noted in a recent WebmasterWorld thread, Google is reshuffling top ranking sites for single word queries (and shuffling their understanding of language and word relationships). I recently searched Google for SEO and was surprised to see the search engine Altavista coming in at #8 [screenshot].

Darren Rowse also emailed me to let me know that he saw the Matt Cutts blog ranking at #4 in Google for blog. As Google gets better at understanding word relationships even more traffic will go to the large authoritative websites.