Often I can’t believe my eyes that some really bad SEO ends up with contract for big corporate clients. Big corporations doesn’t understand the web very well for the most part and a lot of people are making a killing selling them bullshit. But worst than that, some company have their reputation damaged and search engine ranking ruined because they hired the bad SEO company. I was checking my spam e-mail when i’ve found something pretty funny.
Hi,
My name is Sophy Jhonston. I’ve just visited your website (
go-referencement.org ) and I was wondering if you’d be interested in
exchanging links with my website?. I can offer you a link back from my
Cars Guide website which is (http://www.wooricar.net)with page rank 3.
Your link will be placed here:
http://www.wooricar.net/Car-History.html (It`s a Cars Guide website
with page rank 3)
If you are interested please add the following information to your
website and kindly let me know when it´s ready and I will do the same
for you in less than 24 hours, otherwise you can delete my link from
your site.
TITLE: Honda Accord Estate
URL: http://www.honda.co.uk/cars/accordtourer/
DESCRIPTION: Estate cars from Honda UK – The Honda Accord Tourer.
Or you can use the following html code:
<a href=”http://www.honda.co.uk/cars/accordtourer/“>Honda Accord
Estate</a> – Estate cars from Honda UK – The Honda Accord Tourer.
I hope you have a nice day and thank you for your time,
Sophy Jhonston
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A SPAM OR AUTOMATED MAIL , IT’S ONLY A
REQUEST FOR A LINK EXCHANGE.IF YOU DON’T WANT TO RECEIVE MORE MAILS IN
THE FUTURE JUST ENTER TO THE URL: http://saftapp.com/contact-us.html
AND PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES FOR CONTACTING YOU.
So if i understand well, that girl named Sophy Jhonston want a link from a blog I’m collaborating on (Go-Referencement, which talk about SEO and Web Marketing in general) to point on Honda.co.uk (definitly a client). In exchange, I will get a link from a sub-page on a PR3 MFA. Deal of the Century ! Go-Referencement being a PR5, even that, I don’t give a dam about PageRank, but why in hell would I want a backlink from an english cars Made for AdSense spammy website ? My guess is she (they) are using good old spam to find fish in the ocean that will accept the deal. If your email tell me it’s not spam, it probably is. If I would have hired this SEO campany and being somewhere responsable for the internet marketing of Honda in the UK, I would be scared, very scared …
PS. All links are on No Follow, sorry but I don’t appreciate being spammed
It’s been a while since i’ve wrote in this blog. I know I should write more often but writing in english is a PIA for me, I’m always thinking I sound often like a retard because of my broken engrish… First big news I have to write about is the fact that i’ve registered my own company, for my personnal consulting clients (usually SEO and PPC) and to avoid paying too much taxes on my websites revenues. I’m allready paying more than my share of taxes so I see no point of paying more for absolutly nothing except avoid some paperworks. So if you need Internet Marketing services, you can now hire me directly throught Rafale Média.
I took vacation at the beginning of January in the Riviera Maya in Mexico, I’m almost going there every year, I feel like it’s home away from home for me. I took the time to bring some good books with me. I like to read on the beach, way more relaxing that anything else in this world. I’ve almost finish Web Analytics an hour a day by Avinash Kaushik. Awesome book by an amazing analyst, a must read by anyone who have to work with Web Analytics. And I wanna take the opportunity to thanks him for the Google Analytics Beta functions access. And this guy write a very good blog with posts like Measure Latent Conversions & Visitor Behavior that definitly worth the read.
The other book i’ve read during my vacation is Always Be Testing, a book about Google Website Optimizer. I had never used that tool very much before reading that book and after almost one month of tests, I have to admit that is one of the best book i’ve read in a while. Using Google Website Optimizer and testing the right stuff can greatly improve your conversions and you can even win a shirt from Google ! I don’t know if this is the same one that I got at SES Toronto last summer but anyway you can’t have enough Google t-shirts if you are a fan boy like me.
So I’m leaving for Cuba this week-end, planning to read more relaxing books (probably the Twilight series) and try to forgetthe snow and cold of the Quebec winters. See you in a little more than a week !
If you’ve managed a couple big Google AdWords campaign in the past, you can say if you’re good or not at it. Some people catch up how to make money with AdWords really quick and others will lose tons of money without being able to improve their campaign. What I’m gonna say is something that look evident for the most of us but could help some people out there. One of the easiest idea you can implement to make some money is an unbiased review blog/website for products. Whatever the products is, you need to find something you like and that have an affiliate program that pay well. so here is the plan.
Choose a affiliate program
Use CJ or Pepperjam or whatever program you prefer. Find a product where the competition isn’t that hard (avoid mortgage, insurance, financial products well find something original). Find a affiliate program that payout at least 20$ a sale. That a minimum. You don’t want to be forced to have a very high convertion ratio to make decent money. You need a program that allow you to target individual product.
Build a blog/website
Use WordPress or the CMS you prefer and use a nice template. No need to spend a lot/any of money of the template, especially at the beginning. Just make something that is decent looking and doesn’t afraid future customers. After, take some time to write decent reviews of the products. If you don’t like to write content or just not good at it, hire someone to do it for you. You can find some very decent copywriters for cheap those days. Be sure to add a picture of the product and use affiliates links to make some money.
Do a keyword research
Do a keyword research on your products using Google Keyword Tool from AdWords. You want to use the long tail to get cheap trafic that can convert well, using a large group of keywords versus using the keywords with the most traffic.
Start your AdWords campaign
Send this traffic to your blogpost using the best keywords relating to your products. Pause the campaign if you don’t have a convertion after 2x the commission amount. If you are making some money, try to optimise the campaign to become profitable asap. Once the campaign is cleaned, you have a cashcow that gonna bring money everyday, all you have to do is to track the campaign properly and pull the plug if it’s becoming non-profitable.
I’m sure you have heard about the new link buying scheme from Text Links Ads, InLinks. What i’m not sure if it is a good idea to buy links from them. Not that I do not think they are effective, they are for sure. My problem with them is I don’t like the idea of renting links. Sure it can be a quick fix if you need instant result but you are risking a lot. This is for sure against Google guidelines, that even if I don’t like them, we still don’t really have the choice to follow them most of the time. Not that my advice is to follow them 100% of the time, it’s just that everytime you don’t respect them you take the risk of getting burned by the allmighty Google BanHammer.
So you can use paid links, but do it under the radar and that my main problem with inLinks, it’s easy to find which website are part of their blog network. Let’s say I would like to rank on my first name, Francis. I make a quick search on inLinks wonderful search engine and than you see the results. My problem is the quick Snippet of text is enough to track back the original blog where the content is from. All you have to do is put the snippet between quotes on Google and tadam, you have the blog. In case you have several results, you have several pointers to find one which one is the original blog (think PageRank, Alexa Rank, Date of the blospot).
If i’m able to do reverse engineering on inLinks, I’m sure that Google can do it too. So, even if they tolerate inLinks for a couple months/years, they day they will decide to push the ban button on all the website that are selling links will come, one day or another. So in the best case, investing in inLinks let you rent a ranking for a couple months/years, which is not bad at all. But if it is your major strategy, you, my friend, are in trouble.
Often we are tempted to use shortcuts to do our linkbuilding work, but I can guarantee you there is way better place to put your money than rented ranking. Even if it will help you make some money short term, think long term. Never forget that dinosaurs will die, and that day, you will be sitting on as stable as a one legged stone chair making you tons of money.
I don’t write as often that i would want here, but it’s hard for me to find the time and the ideas to do it. I try to stay at least a little interesting so I just don’t do a boring post to fill out me blog with content. My english is definitly not getting better soon so you better be used to read some crappy engrish here 😉
Ok, so first I was in SES Toronto a couple weeks ago with a bunch of co-workers and friends from NVI, Go-Referencement and Mintbirdy. I wanna take the time to thanks them, had a great time even if we don’t learn that much from conferences, it’s a great place to network. I want also to thanks Yahoo and Epiar for the great party at the Ultra Supper Club. And another special thank you to Nick and Sabrina from CasinoCoins (don’t worry, I’m contacting you soon) , all the people from Acquisio and also to the people from Workopolis. Had a great time with those people and the people from n49.ca, Mediagrif and everyone i met there. And a last thanks to Byron from SEO-PR for the conference pass.
Ok so enough with the thanks and let’s go with that puppy thing. By the way, this is the puppy I received as a gift from my girlfriend for my birthday. It’s a nice husky/malamute girl named Rafale. And she is gonna teach you some good seo strategy.
SEO optimization should start on a website at the early stage of development. Like a puppy, it’s harder to fix wrong habits than training them to do the right thing since the beginning. So at the beginning of any website project, developement people should sit with the SEO folks to understand what they should do to make the website more optimized from a SEO point of view at the beginning of the website construction process.
Train your dev people to learn seo a little, at least the part they will have to do. Give them some kind of reward for doing so, like puppies, all people aren’t motivated by the same things. But if you do, you will have a nice future with your dev team, because beside fixing bad habits problem, you will be able to make them learn some more advanced tricks.
Here is an interview I’ve made with Eric Morris from Google for the french seo blog Go-Referencement.
We’ve decided to put the original version of the interview here, so people can read the original interview.
1) How often do you come across industries or niches where the Google search network is not effective?
I’ve been at Google for nearly six years, and have never come across an industry or niche where Google search marketing is not effective. In my experience, search marketing always works — it’s really a
matter of how well it works compared to other online and offline channels. That being said, effectiveness can vary industry to industry, and marketer to marketer. Give two companies the same keywords, same creative, and same bids, and campaign performance will vary. The search click is an important part of the equation, but other factors like landing page content and design, strength of the marketer’s brand, and criteria for measurement also impact effectiveness.
2) How savvy would you judge large advertising agencies (working with Google) to be? Do you find they have their heads wrapped around the modern world of interactive advertising, or is it often the case that they think too traditionally, perhaps slowing or limiting their ability to take advantage of the medium?
Large ad agencies in Canada are making changes, and quickly. Interactive marketing teams within traditional agencies have more people and resources, and more clout both internally and with clients. These days I’m not seeing many ad campaigns planned from traditional agencies that don’t have an online component. With regard to search, many traditional agencies in Canada have moved toward an in-house search manager, overseeing all search strategy and executions. Traditional agencies have been instrumental in shifting the focus of online marketing from not simply direct response to more traditional marketing objectives such as brand building and awareness, and in understanding the value of online in the context of broader marketing objectives.
3) The news that Quality Score will now include load time as a variable is making the circuit – do you think this is truly relevant in anything other than extreme cases?
Broadly speaking, Google believes that an excellent experience on the advertiser’s site is essential in earning the continued trust of our users. Users value ads that bring them to the information they want as
efficiently as possible. Fast load times benefit advertisers as well, since users are less likely to abandon a site that loads quickly.
4)How much of the ‘optimization’ and fine-tuning of accounts do you do for major advertisers? Do you act more like a full-service agency might, or do you make training a top priority?
Our role with major advertisers has evolved over the last few years. When our Toronto office first opened, we provided full Google support to nearly every advertiser— from keyword selection to creative recommendations and campaign summary reports. For most major companies we work with, their search traffic is simply too important not to have other stakeholders — in-house search managers and/or
agencies — involved in campaign changes, creative testing, and close measurement. As a result, our role has evolved to more of a training or support role — providing the latest industry-specific research, case studies and best practices, and training. Training is important for a couple reasons. First, it empowers marketers and their agencies to do more — and typically, the more you put into your search campaign, the more you get out of it. Training is also embraced by the marketers we work as search engine marketing has become a core online marketing skill and tactic — and can open up new career opportunities within in an organization or elsewhere.
5) With the slow up-take in attracting television and radio advertisers into the Google system, what plans does Google have for the future of these channels? And what channels are you tackling next, and which hold the most potential in your opinion?
Google Print Ads, Google Audio Ads and Google TV Ads are advertising programs
designed to bring new efficiencies and accountability to the buying and selling of traditional media. All three of our offline programs are currently available to United States-based advertisers. However, Google is a global business so we are always looking at how we can scale our programs and add value for users, advertisers, agencies and partners worldwide.
6) Word on the street is that Google recently farmed out its largest Adwords advertisers to a handful of GAAC partners – what motivated this move, and do you feel a more egalitarian approach could have been taken?
Our Google Analytics Authorized Consultants (GAACs) offer tailored professional services to businesses of all sizes, including but not limited to Google AdWords advertisers. Since Google is not a professional services company, we engaged our GAACs to help Google Analytics customers implement the product in the way that makes the most sense for their businesses and their objectives. More information is available on the Google Analytics website: http://www.google.com/analytics/support_partner_provided.html
7) If you have to give one piece of advice to a company starting to use AdWords, what would it be?
I’ll give three pieces of advice:
1) Identify your marketing and search marketing goals: are you looking for website traffic? sales? leads?
2) Measure your results: Google Analytics is a free tool we provide to help you measure which sources of traffic, and which clicks, best achieve your marketing objectives
3) Start broadly: Market more than one product or service. Test different keywords and creative. Ensure bids that rank your ads competitively. Run as targeted a campaign you can, but ensure you also generate volume that produces results and impacts your business.
Eric Morris will be one of the speaker at SES Toronto June 16-18
If you are like me, you probably track a couple pharm related request on Google to understand more about BlackHat Seo strategy that are really working . I’ve came across this article in french where the author, a french blackhat, explains a discovery he made looking at the results in Google for a viagra related query.
This webpage (http://sf.lm.gov.lv/CMS/modules/EReditor/jscripts/tiny_mce/
plugins/filemanager/files/esf/in/buycheapviagraonlineukwr.htm)
is on one of the webservers of the government of Latvia and definitly not putted there my government officials. If you were visiting this URL from Google, you were redirected to a pharm affiliate site. If you we’re visiting this URL directly, you we’re redirected to a porn site. The redirection is made using encoded javascript like usual. Once he decoded the javascript, we can see that the redirection is made using this URL. (You can see the code in the original article if you want to see it)
http://www.finance-leaders.com/feed2.php?keyword=”+ escape(”188″)+”&feed=8&ref=”+ escape(document.referrer))
The website http://sf.lm.gov.lv/ have a security problem that anyone can exploit right now.
The important point is that anyone can modify the javascript to redirect the traffic to the page they want. (No point of doing that now, first it’s illegal, and second, the page isn’t indexed in Google anymore.)
All you have to do is to go on
http://sf.lm.gov.lv/CMS/modules/EReditor/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/filemanager/
frameset.php?a=b&js=mcFileManager.insertFileToForm&url=/CMS/modules/
EReditor/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/filemanager/files/esf/in/
buycheapviagraonlineukwr.htm&initial_path=mce_clear&initial_rootpath=
mce_clear&remember=true
and now going in the sub-directory /esf/in where the page buycheapviagraonlineukwr.htm is. You can edit it, delete it and replace it with whatever you want (so basicly changing the redirect to your own affiliate account). Google isn’t able to understand the encoded javascript but see the keywords filled page.
Something the original article don’t talk about is how the blackhat that made that page linkbuilded it.
What we can learn using yahoo is the number of links pointing to the page is very low and was linkbuilded using the usual blackhat pattern of spamming guestbooks and forums. But what is weirder, is that domain have been linkbuilded by the blackhats accoring to yahoo linkdomain. And looking at those URL, you can find plenty of vulnerable webservers that are used to spam the hell out the search engines.
And because the blackhat cannot protect is work (sure, he hack those webservers and cannot patch them), anyone can go and switch the affialite code. By the way, this page was 11th on one of the biggest keywords.
2008 is the year where Blackhat SEO met Hacking on a larger scale. This is just one of the proof.
It’s been a long time since i’ve writed in this blog, was really busy and didn’t have time to update it. I will try to update this blog way more often in the future. On a more personnal note, i’ve bough an house in a rural area (yeah i’ve a real milk farm in front of my house with cows and everything) and i’m taking a week off the job to clean the place who is still looking like a big piles of boxes everywhere. I may not post very often in this blog because I’m allready contributing to many blogs (NVI’s one, who also need to be updated more often, Go-Referencement and MazNetwork where i post in french) and many others on various subject excluding SEO. I’m presently building a project involving the new Ebay affiliation, gonna be huge but i’m not disclosing any details in public because i don’t wanna create more competition in the niche I’m targeting, but moving from CJ was the greatest thing Ebay could do, even if they still a not really good company. I guess I’m not the only one having tons of projects in mind but so little time to do half of them, it must come with the seo / webmaster job. And bu the way, please don’t complain about the horrible quality of the english on this site, it’s not my first language so it’s sure i will make mistakes.
Anyway, have a good day and let’s hope the Canadiens win the cup this year !
I will explain here one of the easiest strategy to make some money with the paid blogging stuff. It’s not very hard to do, require almost no skills and on the top of that, it’s not time consuming at all. In a couple easy step, you will learn here how to make a good amount of money without doing much effort, and even better, it’s recurring.
This post have little to do with SEO, but it’s more focused on a global marketing strategy.
Ok, first you need to buy expired domains with a good PR on http://www.freshdrop.net/. You wanna grab them here because they are cheap (5$ + registration cost) and they will keep their Pr because they are not deleted, only transfered. You may want to try the one with Fake Pr but I would prefer real PR. Also, you can go on the original GoDaddy domain resell site to get some more expensive domains with PageRank. The only point of the PageRank anyway is to be able to charge more by blog review later. You need to buy a lot of domains to make it worth it, so buy at least 15-20. Buy at least PR 3 and more.
Cool, so now you have 15-20 domains with PR3, you need to install wordpress with a theme (you can grab free ones, just search on Google for free wordpress templates or something like that). Now that you have all your domains and blogs installed, you need some content on each one.
Hire some cheap writers, you don’t want to pay more than 5-6$ an blog post. you will need a lot so you can ask for a discount. You can find some good cheap writers on forum like WickedFire or any webmasters forums. Buy at least 5-10 blog post by domain, so you need something between 75 to 200 blog post. Yes it’s start to be a little expensive but don’t worry, if you are short on cash on can start with less domain, it will only take more time to make some good money. Let’s say you have invested in 20 domains at 10$ each + 5$ for the auctions. You have now pay 300$ for the domains and you have filled them with 10 articles each at 5$ each, so you have paid 300$ for the domains and 1 grand for the content. So you have now spended 1300$ to get ready for the next step.
Register on a website like Sponsored Reviews , who pay bloggers to write for their advertisers. There is others services like that, just look on Google. But i strongly encourage you to use SR, they are harder to catch so you blogs are less likely to be penalised/banned from Google.
Now the fun start, add your blogs to SR, get them approved and than, be sure to have your cheap writers ready for a lot of action. You want to bid on every single advertiser request possible. You want at least 15$ per blog reviews, after the SR cut, you will have 9,75$ minimum. If you can charge more, do so. The maximum price yo ucan charge depands on a couple criterias, but PR and a good Alexa rank should help. So, if you pay 5$ maximum per blog review and you get minimum 9,75$, you make a wonderful 4,75$ of pure profit. Don’t forget you hav 20 blogs, so 20 x 4,75 = 95$. and there nothing retaining you to do only 1 post per blog a day. So let’s say 3 post a day = 95 x 3 = 285$ a day ! Start to sound good no ? So, with a 1300$ investement, you are now making close to 300$ a day. And closer than you think, you can add let’s say Google AdSense to the blogs, making maybe 0,10$ a day each (or way more, depands of the traffic but we are guessing almost none) so you add 2$ a day here from your 20 blogs. And if you like to live risky, you can sell links on all of those blogs for a couple hundreds/thousands more a month. Not bad for a 1,3k investment no ?
Also, because you want to create some real traffic to the blogs and have them well listed in the search engine, you can make a post yourself from time to time sending contextual links to your others blogs from one of yours. It’s better to do it this way than link them all together to avoid Google Penalities.
Also, you can build up a directory with all your blogs in it, plus others websites you may own, and use it to send some linkjuice to your blogs. And finally, you can use them to make some three way link exchange for your regular websites that making you money too.
I was thinking about blog comments spam for hard to cover niche (adult/casino/pharm) an others stuff like that where you can’t just put a URL like www.extracheappokerchips.com because you are gonna for sure being filtered by plug-ins like askimet or manually deleted by blogs admin. But there is a strategy you can use that could pass most of the filter.
First, you need a domain name that sound “legit” and that you don’t really care about. Once its registered you have 2 strategies you can use to bring some trafic / links to your domain in a harder to spam niche.
First strategy, you simply 301 the new domain to your harder to spam domain. This way you get all the links and trafic directly to your domain and if the blog admin don’t take the time to click the link (and only see something like www.mypersonnalboringblog.com ) he will probably don’t filter it. So you will get the backlinks and traffic directly to your money domain, cool no ?
Second strategy is kinda the same than the first, but a little more evoluated. You just put up a real website/blog on the temporary domain than when you have the amount of links/traffic you want on it, you 301 it to your money domain. you can using this way add a couple social media frontpages and backlinks to the domains using word that you want backlinks on it without looking like a let’s say casino domains. So you make a post about “chips” (as in “poker chips”), a post about russian roulette (as in roulette) etc… Than when you will 301 the domain to your casino website, all the links will sill be targeted 😉
Don’t abuse those methods but they are very hard to track black hat seo strategy that can give awesome results.