Volume 3, Issue 14 (April 11, 2014)

April 16, 2014 by

In This Issue:

01) Link Acquisition Tip No. 79
02) SEO Question No. 141
03) Tech Tip No. 72
04) Seen in the Wild
05) Tech Tip No. 73
06) SEO Question No. 142
07) Proprietary Rights
08) Administrative Stuff

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* NEWSLETTER ARCHIVES *

SEO Theory now provides an archive of back issues (published in PDF format) that you can purchase at a discount.

http://www.seo-theory.com/premium/archives/

* LINK ACQUISITION TIP NO. 79 (Secret Article Giveaway) *

This is a variation on Link Acquisition Tip No. 1, published in Volume 1, Issue 8 (June 27, 2012). In that article I explained that you can wipe a site clean and start over with fresh content, but distribute old evergreen articles to other Websites. Just make sure there is a useful link someone in the content you hand out that points back to your new site.

If, like me, you occasionally find that other people are just coming in and grabbing articles off your Website without your permission and republishing them completely on their own sites you can sometimes leverage this theft to your advantage.

First run a few quality assurance tests on the other site. If they are just someone who really likes your article and they mean no harm they will usually write an introductory sentence or two explaining why they took the article. That’s a GOOD sign, but if they do this often that’s a BAD sign.

If you don’t find any other stolen content on the site make sure it doesn’t add “rel=’nofollow’” to the links or use “robots” directives to prevent robots from following the links.

Make sure they left your self-referential links in place.

Assuming this is just some enthusiastic copier who really loves your work, add a “rel=’canonical’” to YOUR version of the page and point the canonical reference to THEIR site. Your once internal links will now be legitimate external links.

Some people who find their sites are being scraped add “rel=’canonical’” directives to their HTML code in the hope that the scrapers won’t notice or care. That’s an acceptable practice for a site that is being constantly scraped but most so-called “scrapers” today are just using RSS feeds to aggregate content. You won’t be able to slip a canonical statement into your RSS feed (and this is why I don’t publish full feeds).

The idea is NOT to reward people who take your content but rather to get as much value from the theft as possible. You can only canonicalize to 1 Website at a time for any given page so if an article is scraped by several people you probably just want to contact them all and ask that they embed the “rel=’canonical’” tags on their copies of your article.

* SEO QUESTION NO. 141 (How Many Sites Can We Safely Use the Same Theme on?) *

“Michael, I want to build 5-8 sites for [keyword redacted]. I was thinking of using the [redacted] theme on all of them. Is that safe? What are the risks? I don’t want to get a penalty.”

I think this is a good question but not for the reason it was asked. Any time I see someone asking about “how safe” something is (for search optimization) I get the feeling they are trying to run as close to the limit of what is permitted as possible. And yet experience teaches us that a search engine may tolerate a practice on one site while it penalizes another site for the same thing. Why do they do that? Probably due to a mix of human judgment, serendipity, and mitigating factors.

__1] Human judgment may vary from spam team member to spam team member.
__2] Serendipity may mean your site is manually reviewed and mine isn’t simply because of pure blind luck/random chance.
__3] Mitigating factors may include the fact you’re a multi-billion dollar brand and I’m just some affiliate trying to earn a few dollars.

When you’re asking if what you want to do is safe, or how safe it is, I assume you are trying to be at least somewhat aggressive in your marketing. You’re looking for an advantage, even if it’s only some efficiency in your production process. Saving time and money is okay, but being sloppy gets a lot of people into trouble.

That said, I don’t know of any reason why you cannot use the same theme on 1,000 Websites. Some themes are used on 100,000+ Websites and people are not being penalized for using them. My partner Randy Ray and I try to use a variety of themes and design styles but we can each recognize the other’s work very quickly as “classic Randy Ray” or “classic Michael Martinez” design. We all have design preferences, biases, limitations, etc. that influence the way our Websites look. I don’t think that is being risky.

On the other hand, the question came with a little more information. That is, these proposed sites are being constructed around a very specific topic. I have to ask how you plan to populate those Websites and manage their presentation. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re not just going to publish the same content on all the sites; but will your editorial calendars be identical?

Even if you hire a different dedicated freelance writer for each site I think you run a huge risk of FAILING TO DIFFERENTIATE if you give them all the same topic assignments. If you don’t differentiate your Websites from each other then they are trying to poach each other’s visitors. A small portfolio of Websites can work together by covering different (sub)-topics or they can compete with each other for the same eyeballs.

Sure, you can dream about controlling all ten listings on the front page of a search result but you’re still limiting the size of your potential audience. And you’re asking for an algorithmic downgrade or manual review, in my opinion, if you just roll out cookie-cutter Websites. That’s a churn-and-burn tactic.

Many affiliate marketers follow a very basic, extremely rigid design philosophy for their sites. They use a brazenly ugly page layout and they put a huge table loaded with affiliate links near the top of their most important pages. Nothing screams “made-for-affiliate-referrals” more than that table. But it works. Some affiliates are making millions of dollars from this design style so you’re not going to get them to abandon it.

The page layout is not nearly as important as what you put on the page to differentiate it from other Websites. If you’re building several similar sites at the same time then I think it’s important that you differentiate them from each other. That improves your chances of differentiating them from your competitors’ sites, too.

Some cost-cutting is fine. Just don’t let efficiency in production make all the business decisions for your portfolio.

* TECH TIP NO. 72 (How to Win a Wikipedia Revert War) *

If you have ever made a change at Wikipedia only to see someone else come in and undo that change, you know the frustration of having to deal with idiots and an idiotic system. Wikipedia has a rule against anyone making more than 3 reversions on a specific change. So the first person to do a revert will always win.

When you’re trying to correct false information in Wikipedia the odds are stacked against you but if you know 2-3 other people (all in separate cities/regions) who have established Wikipedia accounts you can coordinate with them to out-revert someone who doesn’t want a change made to an article.

Each of you logs in to Wikipedia as normal and sets up a WATCH alert for the article in question.

Then 1 of you makes the desired change.

If a reversion occurs the 2nd person in the group reverts the article. With each reversion you leave an explanatory comment about the undesired reversion in the TALK page for the article.

If 3 or 4 people are undoing the reversion by 1 or 2 other people your team will win by virtue of superior numbers. If necessary you can also use Wikipedia’s system to complain about the people who are undoing the changes.

Just remember that:

__1] Your changes must be acceptable to Wikipedia rules in the first place
__2] Your justifications will be challenged and must be ironclad
__3] Each of the people on your team should be able to show that they have a legitimate interest in updating the article

This strategy works best if your team actually takes the article under its wing and makes substantial improvements prior to fixing whatever problem it is you’re trying to resolve. The most common issue in my experience is that someone has a reputation management problem.

You are not permitted to hide facts on Wikipedia. If someone robbed a bank and the Wikipedia community accepts the article about that person they are stuck with being the topic of a Wikipedia article. You may, however, be able to change the wording of the pertinent sentences that describe the bank robbery by removing or contracting the person’s name.

Wikipedia takes a dim view of marketers trying to influence its content but has a high tolerance for petty and manipulative article editing by people who have personal grudges and biases. Even with 3 allies you may in extreme situations find you are on the losing side of “good faith consensus”. The rule of thumb for any system that relies on good faith assumptions is that it is being manipulated by people with secret agendae, and Wikipedia has been widely manipulated by people with secret agendas.

* SEEN IN THE WILD *

Barry Schwartz spotted an interesting discussion in the Google Webmaster Forums (see Barry’s summary here: http://cli.gs/q1rve7r) where JohnMu said that Google is largely ignoring so-called “Web 2.0 links” from sites like YouTube, Pinterest, etc. Normally when John makes a comment like that I read it as he is limiting his meaning to the context of the original poster’s Website but this time I think I am inclined to agree with Barry, in that it looks like John means they really do ignore all those easy-to-get links.

In another Webmaster forum discussion someone complained that Google was displaying the HTTPS version of their site instead of the HTTP version in search results. We dithered around for a couple of days and then I looked at the site in question a little more closely. It became obvious to me that the site owner never intended to create an HTTPS version of their site. They are a Bluehost client and apparently accidentally set up an HTTPS identity that points at the same folder as the main site. After I pointed this out to the OP they had Bluehost fix the configuration. What I find interesting is that Google preferred the HTTPS version over the HTTP version, even though navigation for the HTTPS version was a little wonky.

So you have all probably heard about the Heartbleed security vulnerability by now but if you have been changing passwords you may be doing that too soon. Mashable has published a list of major service providers who were and were not affected by the OpenSSL vulnerability (Cf. http://cli.gs/3o3xtn9). Although it seems risky, you should wait a few more days if you’re using services that may be affected before changing passwords. I checked the security on my dedicated server and thankfully discovered that we are not vulnerable. Meanwhile, someone keeps trying to hack into user accounts at Vbulletin.Org (the support community for Vbulletin users). Members are receiving frequent notices of their accounts being locked out (I received three the day before I sent out this newsletter). It’s not clear if the hackers think that there is a connection between Heartbleed and user accounts on forums and blogs (there is NOT). The vulnerability, if it exists, is in your server software
or any application that handles its own security protocols (very few would do that).

Over at Marketing Land Ric Dragon published an interesting article (Cf. http://cli.gs/gxmhi98) in which he reported on the results of an experiment run by Will Critchlow. Critchlow’s company, Distilled, has seen some impressive results by publishing high-value content on a blog without using categories. What does that mean? Critchlow (one of the smarter guys in this business) thinks it may be time to do away with blog categories. Lisa Barone wrote a rebuttal (Cf. http://cli.gs/jjo86s4) on Overit. Here’s the thing: blog categories really DO earn less traffic than individual content pieces, but if you have configured your site to hide the categories from search engines then the lack of data will blind you to the reality that blog categories CAN and DO earn links and traffic. It comes down to organization, presentation, and the value you create for the visitor in your category pages. Many people install SEO plugins on their blogs — or use “SEO-ready” themes — that by de
fault NOINDEX category, tag, date archive, and author pages. It is really stupid to do that by default; but if you’re making a business decision on the basis of the data you see in your analytics, make sure you’re getting COMPLETE data before making the decision.

The botnet attacks on “xmlrpc.php” have become so widespread that at least one hosting provider is now advising its clients to use this plugin (Cf. https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-xml-rpc/) to disable the script. ”xmlrpc.php” is the script you need to use when you publish to your blog remotely (like from your desktop). The JETPACK plugin also uses it (1 time) to authenticate your site with WordPress.com when you activate certain features. ”xmlrpc.php” also facilitates pingbacks between blogs. Still, as recently as last month (March 2014) security experts have noted that as many as 160,000 WordPress blogs have been used in DDoS attacks by exploiting the vulnerability of this script (Cf. http://cli.gs/vnijlus). You should take precautions to protect your site from being used in DDoS attacks but you also need to understand what this script is used for in case you are actually using it for legitimate reasons.

Several wallpaper galleries lost a significant amount of Google traffic over the past 1-2 weeks. I did not look very closely at the Websites reporting the traffic losses but it appears these were lesser-known sites that may have scraped their wallpapers from other sources. One site owner complained about seeing traffic drop from 1.2 million uniques per day to 300,000 uniques per day.

* TECH TIP NO. 73 (Rebuilding a WordPress Media Library) *

This is a very common problem and the fact that a solution has been available for years without people knowing about it underscores just how hard it is to find good information on the Web. I have been running queries year after year looking for a WordPress plugin that will rebuild a media library. It turns out I was simply using the wrong queries and got lucky this time.

The problem: You have old articles on a blog and after moving the blog (incorrectly) your image links don’t show up any more. The images are right there in your “UPLOADS” folder but WordPress cannot see them.

If you’re using a plugin like “WordPress Importer” it doesn’t actually grab any images and upload them for you but it does have an option that reads like it does (it just repopulates the Media Library with data about images that are SUPPOSED to be there). If you don’t select that option when you IMPORT content then all your image links will be broken. If you DO select the option then — just to be on the safe side — the Importer will alter the image links so that “image.jpg” references become “image1.jpg” references. And if you move the blog twice without fixing the problem then “image1.jpg” references become “image11.jpg” references. It’s very annoying but with this problem you can at least go through your posts and change the image names.

But what do you do when you’ve got a library full of images you have used all over the place and the images don’t appear in the library? You can’t just upload the images again because your URLs are different (they go into the current month’s image folder, if you allow WordPress to compartmentalize your images like that).

There is a plugin called ADD FROM SERVER (Cf. http://wordpress.org/plugins/add-from-server/) that will allow you to “walk” through the directory tree of your UPLOADS folder and flag images to be added to the media library. So now when you restore an old backup you don’t have to worry about WordPress “forgetting” that it actually has the images being referenced. Sure, you can edit the blog posts and fix the broken image file names but if you want to reuse those images in the future you really want them to be shown in the Media Library. This plugin allows you to do that.

I did find, however, that people run into a problem with this plugin. This has been going on for years. An this week it finally struck me, too. No matter what you do, ADD FROM SERVER cannot add an image to the media library even though “it is RIGHT THERE”. The plugin gives you an error message about not being able to create a directory. The spooky thing is that the directory already exists. I found several discussions on WordPress.org going back for years where people could not get the plugin to work.

It turns out that if you develop a WordPress blog offline and upload it there may be something in SETTINGS==>MEDIA that shows a local hard drive path (or it could be an absolute hard drive path from a previous hosting account). When you move the site the chances that your new hosting provider will use the same file naming conventions on their hard drive are very, very slim. So naturally when ADD FROM SERVER tries to add an image to the Media Library it will try to create a directory it cannot find. The MEDIA setting is telling your blog to set up the library in a non-existent folder path.

Simply deleting the old path fixes the problem.

I can’t begin to count how many old WordPress sites I have had to update and move — knowing nothing of their history — only to find that upon finishing the move all the images are either not there or the references are broken and the Media Library is empty. I’m now to the point where I can pretty much fix these problems if I have to without too much effort.

* SEO QUESTION NO. 142 (The Case of the Quirky Freshness Factor) *

“Michael, we have an old article that used to do well but time has passed and it stopped ranking even for its title (which was a popular kw ph.). Last month we saw a spike in traffic. Some little blog had linked to it and suddenly we were in the game again. What do you think happened? This is a popular query.”

Looking a little more deeply into this I discovered that the query is one of those that probably receives “freshness” evaluation. I think many people assume that “Query Deserves Freshness” means Google is looking for fresh content. I’m not so sure of that.

The site in question had actually tried to reoptimize for the targeted query. They embedded links in old articles on “high PR” sites hoping that the additional anchor text would help but there wasn’t much of a boost. But suddenly along comes Little Blogger Polly and she links to the old article and POOF! there is a resurgence in traffic. And Little Blogger Polly just doesn’t have that much Toolbar PR to speak of.

It’s possible that the next time Google updates its Toolbar PR data Polly’s blog will see a boost — but in theory a Website could see a sudden spike in internal PageRank that goes away (maybe Google penalizes all the links) and then the Toolbar PR — when it’s finally updated — doesn’t change.

The article in question is dropping off in the SERPs again. I see this happen on my own sites. I don’t really agonize over it because people are constantly publishing new content about established topics. If you want to dominate the SERPs consistently your best strategy is to break new ground.

But what causes a resurgence of old content? I think it may be related to what sustains old content: new links. The newly crawled links are probably added to the crawl queues so an old article’s crawl priority may be temporarily adjusted when the search engine sees a new link pointing to old content.

The PR value of the Website provding the link may still matter — after all if it has too little internal PageRank the link won’t pass value. But if Google sees a new link, especially from a trusted Website, pointing to old content the old content may receive a little boost in crawl priority.

Does crawl priority correlate to QDF in some way? I don’t know. In the original QDF patent (Cf. http://cli.gs/4khx5us) Google wrote: “According to another aspect, a method for scoring documents is provided. The method may include determining an age of linkage data associated with a linked document and ranking the linked document based on a decaying function of the age of the linkage data.” In fact, much of the patent discusses how links pointing to a document can be used to evaluate freshness.

So think about it. You surreptitiously place links in old articles hoping for a boost. Eventually Google will come around and find those links and factor them into the link graph. But the query you’re targeting is looking for “freshness”. Yes, the links are fresh but the content is not — and if Google is not crawling those old articles very often then how can it know how long the links have been there? Also, the sudden appearance of new links in old content may trigger some trust filtering (or at least evaluation).

Whereas if a new blog is publishing new content often enough that Google crawls that blog often then it can detect a close correlation between the publication of the content and the link; hence, Google may be able to trust that link better in terms of understanding that it was probably an original link.

Where Freshness is a factor it is conceivable that Google wants to credit only links that it feels are legitimately fresh — not just recently discovered by its crawls but also recently published in tandem with the content hosts it (as verified by whatever algorithms Google uses to confirm such close correlation).

Judging a Website by the Toolbar PR assigned to its root URL is a very shallow way of evaluating crawl priorities and potential. The search engine may be looking directly at the leaf page where the link is embedded rather than at the root URL of the Website (after all, how many Homepage Backlink networks has Google taken down?). If the linking page is relatively new and there is no reason to believe the link was added later then the link may be viewed as editorially given.

Hence, a fresh/new link POINTING TO an old article for a topic that still deserves freshness may be seen as a sign of renewed interest in and continued relevance of an old article. This would match the pattern of behavior we have seen where Websites with an inordinate amount of links continue to receive an inordinate amount of new links — the so-called “rich keep getting richer principle”.

To compensate for staleness of content you could try rewriting old articles, leaving their URLs intact, and then acquiring new links to the rewritten content. The new links should be published in new content. This is a way of keeping a URL “evergreen”, if not the content itself.

But remember that some linking content may also be updated from time to time. For example, an “Interesting Links” page on a random Website may be updated several times a year. If the search engine sees new links added (and dead links removed) from that page over time it may be more inclined to trust those links than new links that suddenly appear in an old article.

This is all very speculative and hard to prove but think about what is EASIEST to achieve: that is most likely to be seen as SPAMMIEST (or LEAST TRUSTWORTHY) by a search engine. Just because a search engine doesn’t trust a link doesn’t mean it will be seen as spam; but if you create a lot of untrustworthy links then you’re probably going about it the wrong way.

Volume 3, Issue 13 (April 4, 2014)

April 16, 2014 by

In This Issue:

01) SEO Question No. 140
02) SEO Macro Case Study No. 4
03) SEO Strategy Case Study No. 26
04) SEO Experiment No. 35
05) SEO Tip No. 82
06) Tech Tip No. 71
07) Proprietary Rights
08) Administrative Stuff

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* NEWSLETTER ARCHIVES *

SEO Theory now provides an archive of back issues (published in PDF format) that you can purchase at a discount.

http://www.seo-theory.com/premium/archives/

* SEO QUESTION NO. 140 (How Much is White Hat SEO Allowed to do for Links?) *

“Michael, given all the recent changes in white hat SEO what do you think is the most we’re allowed to do for links? How do we avoid crossing the line in the future? Is this a hopeless quest?”

What is the most you’re allowed to do for links in “white hat SEO”? ASK FOR THE LINK. Nothing more.

Anything beyond that probably involves incentivization in some way, either through a restriction (all links must be “dofollow”) or some sort of quid pro quo (payment, reciprocation, 3-way linking, content-for-links, etc.). Of course, the search engines tolerate natural reciprocation.

But I disagree with all the people (perhaps the majority of Internet Marketers) who have been saying that white hat SEO has changed, is dead, etc. The penalties that the search engines hand out are based on the guidelines they publish. Sure, the guidelines change from time-to-time but most of the changes we have seen are the rationalizations people use to convince themselves (and others) that they are white hats to begin with.

There is no law that says you cannot push your rankings up with manipulative anchor text but be honest and admit to yourself that is what you’re doing. If you ask for a link and don’t care about the anchor text then you’re not being manipulative. If, however, you ask for the link and say that you want it to use an anchor of “vacation rentals” then you’re being manipulative because you’re chasing rankings with anchor text.

You might be penalized or you might not. But that kind of a link is never “white hat”, has never been “white hat”, and will never be “white hat”. Most people hem and haw and concede (grudgingly) that, okay, this is probably “grey hat”. Whatever.

Count me firmly in the camp of critics who have opposed all the “let me write guest posts for your blog so I can link back to my (client’s) site” strategies. Have I done that? Sure. But I don’t write crap articles and, as I have mentioned in the newsletter before, if I’m getting a link for one shoe seller I will probably include links to other shoe sellers. If the search engines are going to insist on treating my links as endorsements then I’m going to endorse as many similar sites as is reasonable and useful to readers. In other words, if I’m going to help my(self/ clients) then I’m going to help other people too. That’s only fair, in my book.

Search engine optimization becomes less optimal the more you rely on links — especially keyword-rich/keyword-targeted links — because a link anchor text can only help with a limited number of queries. When you compare a typical 7-12 word link anchor with a 2,000-word article, you had better be counting on the 2,000-word article to bring in more traffic than the link because that is what is going to happen.

On the other hand, although PageRank rarely has a direct impact on rankings it CAN help in other ways (such as driving crawl, building trust, determining which tier of the index a given article will be placed in, etc.). Attracting as much PageRank as you can through natural links is better than buying hundreds or thousands of keyword-targeted links because the natural PageRank flow will improve your site’s ability to help itself through its own internal links and on-page optimization.

I think that is really why Googlers usually talk about “manipulative links that flow PageRank” because after a while you cross a point where you realize a severe dropoff in the help that targeted anchor text produces (you can’t go higher than No. 1) and you start to receive much more benefit from the inflow of PageRank. You would probably do better to acquire 10,000 links with unique anchors than to acquire 10,000 links with similar anchors because at that scale the PageRank will provide more value than the anchor text.

Keep in mind I’m just using random numbers. I don’t know where the threshold is and, of course, that may vary by query.

In any event, white hat SEO (as best I understand the concept) is essentially the same thing today that it was when I started learning SEO in August 1998: you abide by the search engine guidelines, construct your on-page relevance to be useful to the reader, and only attract natural links (plus a very small number of reasonable self-placed links). Anything beyond that IS NOT, NEVER WAS, and NEVER WILL BE “white hat SEO”.

Frankly, when I look at Websites that were supposedly squeaky clean and should not have been penalized, I can usually find *SOMETHING* that violates search engine guidelines. Sometimes the violation is totally unexpected and naive. Oftentimes it’s just “manipulative linking” masquerading as “white hat SEO”. In all cases if the anchor text matters to you in any way other than acknowledging a relevant brand name/trademark you’re being manipulative with your links.

I think it’s fair to say that many people are too proud to agree with me on that point.

* SEO MACRO CASE STUDY NO. 4 (A Fake Twitter Account) *

A macro case study will be followed across multiple issues, although it may be months in-between updates. The difference between a Macro Case Study and a Micro Case Study with redux updates is that I intend and know in advance that I will be publishing follow up articles for the Macro Case Study.

It appears that someone has decided to teach me a lesson. Near the end of March I noticed a new SEO theory account on Twitter. Whereas the only authorized account for the SEO Theory blog uses the handle @seo_theory this new account uses a similar but distinguishable handle. Normally I wouldn’t care because people have started up SEO theory blogs in the past and they eventually went away.

This fake account stole my ugly little white+yellow+black SEO Theory avatar and copied part of the description from my header. I took the prudent measure of filing a complaint with Twitter about impersonation but their terms of service are full of reservations. Unless you have registered a trademark Twitter won’t try to protect it for you (under US law you can still defend an unregistered trademark if you do business under it). I would have to file a lawsuit and hit Twitter with a subpoena for user information in order to force their hand. At this time I don’t have any desire to spend that kind of money. Call me cheap.

Twitter did respond asking for a government-issued ID for my account. I pointed out to them that no government issues such identification; I also told them I would hold Twitter financially responsible if I am sued or charged with any crimes because of activity from the fake account. I doubt they’ll take me seriously until that happens and I hope I don’t have to follow through on the threat.

I blocked the offending account and reported it for spam. Around that time someone left a threatening comment on the SEO Theory blog. They used what appears to be a proxy IP address in Mexico and a fake email address (you@soon.com). The screen name was “See” so the message was: “See You@soon.com: no one likes a jerk. Calm down or you’ll get a visit.”

The “calm down” may refer to my flurry of comments last week in response to the SEO community’s panic attack over Google’s guest blogging penalties. This could also be a case of mistaken identity. Two years ago someone mistook me for another Michael Martinez in the SEO community and launched a hostile SEO campaign against me. Last year an irate baseball fan flamed me on Twitter because he thought I might be the player from the Dominican Republic who was upsetting all the Philadelphia Phillies fans. THAT Michael Martinez now plays for a farm team owned by the Pittsburgh Pirates. He does pretty well as long as he is in the minor leagues so I guess I’m okay with the baseball fans for now.

As I first wrote this article around the beginning of the week the fake Twitter account was attracting about 5 followers per day. It is doing this by published over 100 Tweets a day (obviously coming from RSS feeds on various marketing Websites). The quality of the articles is naturally pretty random. As I get ready to publish the newsletter I see that the follower account has fluctuated a little but now stands at 20.

I’m not sure how many followers my account attracts per day but as I have nearly 7,000 followers for now I doubt many people will be deceived. I did change my Twitter avatar. If he copies this one he’ll be telling people about the official account.

Since I can’t prove any financial injury from this fakery so far the only people who may suffer are those Twitter users who believe they are following the real SEO Theory. But he would have to do something more than what he is doing now.

What I find ironic about this is that Twitter has shut down other people’s accounts in the past for too much autotweeting. So far they are allowing it with the fake SEO Theory account. Either the rules have changed since I last had to help someone reactivate a Twitter account or this guy has figured out how to get past enforcement. It could also be that they just haven’t yet gotten around to suspending the account.

Until some clear fraud is perpetrated on someone there isn’t much I can do, so I won’t do much.

I did change my own avatar and reconfigured my Twitterfeed setup. I have been wanting to do that for a year anyway. I had 1 Twitterfeed account handling way too many feeds for too many Twitter profiles. I have now taken the time to break up that mess into multiple dedicated Twitterfeed accounts. The Twitterfeed user interface now runs much faster for me.

I received an offer of $50 credit from Twitter. I applied for the credit and was approved. I have no idea of where I will find the time to use it but I may try to set up a Twitter campaign. I’m not sure that will help with the fake account.

So we are now at the point where we start to play a numbers game. Assuming this guy cares anything at all about my response to his fakery he’ll be watching me. For my every move he’ll make a counter-move. But in the past few days he hasn’t done anything to match my avatar change.

On the other hand, he may just walk away from the account and allow it to siphon off as many potential followers as it can. I suppose in someone’s mind that is a way to hurt me. I don’t know.

My only concern is that he might become influential enough to dilute any message I care to send, in which case having filed an impersonation complaint with Twitter once I might be able to follow up on that. But they want a government-issued ID — and you can’t get such a thing for an account called “SEO Theory”.

Given the high tweet-count (about 200 a day) coming from the fake SEO Theory I doubt many real people will want to remain followers for long. But they might filter their feeds.

So far the only negative aspect to this is that the fake account has hijacked activity on my “#seotheory” hashtag. He is publishing 40-50 Tweets per hour. I have changed my default hashtags and will watch for what he does in response. I only used that hashtag on autotweeted posts anyway.

* SEO STRATEGY CASE STUDY NO. 26 (Four Sisters and a Wedding) *

I use this strategy sparingly, mostly because I burn out quickly. This is a link building strategy.

Choose a topic, any topic. Let’s say for this case study the topic is “Clown Suits” (NOTE: I have never worked on this or any related keywords; this is for illustrative purposes only). The goal is to provide links for a Website that sells clown suits. At a minimum you will get four links. If you feel lucky and push your luck you can get more than four links.

Now you’re going to build four Websites. They will be relatively small sites. They can be static HTML sites or they can be blogs. It doesn’t matter.

The first Website will be titled “Making Your Own Clown Suits”. I am sure you can imagine what kind of content goes on the site.

The second Website will be titled “Fancy Clown Suits from History”. This is largely a picture gallery Website but it should have at least 1 history essay on it.

The third Website will be titled “Famous Clowns from the United States”. You publish biographies of clowns.

The fourth Website will be titled “Funny Clown Moments”. You can publish videos, pictures, anecdotes, jokes, etc. It doesn’t matter.

None of these Websites will be comprehensive. You have no need to exhaust the potential for these sites (although you can always come back to do so). Your goal is simply to create interesting, entertaining, informative Websites. They don’t have to be very large — anywhere from 5 to 20 pages should be fine.

You do want these sites to feel COMPLETE. Anyone visiting these sites should be intrigued enough to want to click on at least a few pages before leaving the site.

If you’re feeling bold then use your social media accounts to promote the Websites. If not so bold, you can set up dedicated social media accounts for each site. It doesn’t matter. Social media may kickstart the process of bringing traffic to the sites or not.

Meanwhile, back at your clown suit selling site you’re still waiting for links. So now that you have built the four secondary Websites you want to publish four pages on your site. Each page should be relevant to one of the four sister sites. These are the “groom” pages and you’re going to marry them to the sisters. The grooms link out to their partner sites first.

In other words, MAIN SITE / ARTICLE 1 (Groom 1) ==> SISTER SITE 1.

Once you have published the four groom articles and used them to link to their respective sister sites you can find a place on your sister sites to link back to the main clown site.

So why do this? Isn’t this a classic “link wheel”? Not exactly. To form a wheel the sister sites would have to link to each other. What you are doing is creating the kind of content on four Websites that you would never feel comfortable putting on your main site. That is critical. You never publish anything on a sister site that belongs on the main site.

The four sisters complement the main site and provide it with a small coterie of “daughters-in-law” who support the main site.

Your first instinct — if you use this strategy — will be to wait for the hammer to drop. You’ll feel like you must be violating some search engine guideline somewhere. I don’t believe that is the case. If you execute this strategy correctly you’ll end up with five fine Websites and four of them just happen to link to the fifth.

Meanwhile, as your traffic builds up (and there will be some traffic if the content is interesting, indexable, and robust) you can add banners and widgets (RSS feeds, user toys, whatever) to the sisters/daughters-in-law that help drive traffic to the main site.

I first did this with my science fiction Websites but I long ago learned to branch out and do it for commercial Websites. I have never seen a penalty for any of these little families of Websites. The neat thing is that the sister/daughter-in-law sites usually earn their own links. I see that in the referral data for the sites.

Now, as I said you can do this with any topic but the four sisters are not always the same. Don’t think in terms of “oh, I need a HISTORY site, a GALLERY site, a HUMOR site, etc.” That misses the concept entirely.

Your main site is selling something. Whatever that site is selling, people will have a non-commercial interest in the topic. Examples of non-commercial interests include technical support, background information, related products, customer reviews, customer profiles, how things are made, the history of the industry, biographies of people behind the products, industry news, etc. The topics for the sisters/daughters-in-law have to be selected based on whatever your industry is. I would not expect a travel-related Website to have four sisters/daughters-in-law like the four clown sites I describe above.

You use the “groom” pages as bridge content. They provide segues between the main site and the other four sites. Yes, in some cases traffic will pass from the main site out to the other four — but you’re going to lose visitors anyway. Why not create a memorable experience for them so they think about coming back? They may search for your sites several times over before finally deciding to make a purchase.

What I advise against is trying to scale this strategy out. First because it takes a lot of work and the more you try to repeat the success the more likely you’ll start to make mistakes. Second because you really will struggle to differentiate more than four sites. Use this strategy once for your business and then you’re done. Do it as a way of testing concepts you felt uneasy about using on your main site (because they don’t bring in money). You can always merge sites later and replace one or more of the sister sites if you come up with a better idea.

In terms of traffic I have rarely seen the secondary sites compete with the primary site. There are usually orders of magnitude in difference. So if the main retail site normally draws about 10,000 visitors a month your four sisters will probably bring in a few hundred visitors a month. It’s hard to predict. Some of my secondary sites actually get a lot of traffic because I chose a topic that has a lot of interest and relatively little competition.

The fewer commercial topics you choose for the four sisters the easier it will be for them to draw traffic.

* SEO EXPERIMENT NO. 35 (A/B Graft/Splice Test) *

A guy came to me one time with two Websites. He felt they were about “equal” in marketing strength. They both generated about the same revenue. He wanted to add a new section of content but couldn’t decide which site to do that on.

Normally the content should fit one site better than the other but sometimes people have two very similar sites.

I suggested a 2-month A/B test. We published the content on one site and promoted it through “New!” widgets and other means. We tracked the traffic and conversions for a month.

Then we moved the content to the other site, tracking the traffic and conversions there for about a month.

It turned out that the second site did better than the first, I think because we used the first site to kickstart traffic to the content on the second site. However you could, in the day of “rel=’canonical’”, just publish the content on both sites and flip the canonicality after 1 month.

Do this back and forth for four months and you should have enough data to know where the content works best (although you might decide to leave it on both sites and just canonicalize to one site).

By allowing each site to run its own promotions for its version of the content you’ll also be able to A/B test different internal promotions. Just remember that “rel=’canonical’” is supposed to be use for identical or near-identical content.

You can also use shorter time-frames such as 1 week or 1 day. It might also be applicable to run this experiment across multiple languages or ccTLDs. In fact, I believe someone once did that (and that could be where I got the idea to do this in the first place).

* SEO TIP NO. 82 (Build a Wing Man) *

A “wing man” is a small Website or social media page that targets the same keyword as your main Website. Usually this is the main brand keyword but you can do this for as many brand keywords as you need to. I don’t mean for “BRAND WIDGET-1″, “BRAND WIDGET-2″, “BRAND WIDGET-3″ but rather for “BRAND ALPHA”, “BETA BRAND”, and “MAIN BRAND NAME”.

The purpose of the wing man is to “cushion” your listing’s visibility in the SERPs, to help fight off competitive sites that encroach on your most important keywords.

Wing man sites can be Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, Pinterest pages, etc.

Your main site and the wing man link to each other openly, blatantly, but only modestly (in limited fashion).

When done properly a wing man will appear in many SERPs related to its most important keyword. If you feel confident in your ability to create wing men you can build several of them and try to protect your main keyword’s first 10 positions. Just keep in mind that you should be creating true value for each wing man; and you need to support them from the main Website.

* TECH TIP NO. 71 (Save WordPress Plugin Data before a Change in Hosting) *

I had to move a lot of Websites this week (rather unexpectedly — an entire hosting account became inaccessible). Moving Websites is almost second nature to me but I ran into some unusual situations this time around because the sites I had to move included “core” sites in our network, REFLECTIVEDYNAMICS.COM being one of them. We do things on core sites that you won’t see on most of the sites we build for clients or as experiments, affiliate sites, etc.

One of the most important core site plugins we use is “Subscribe2″, which while it has some issues from time to time still works pretty well for sending out notices to people who want to know when we have updated our blogs. We also embed some advertising for our services in the notices.

Another plugin that we use not only core sites but many others is for managing redirected URLs. We don’t often find ourselves implementing redirects on secondary sites or client sites but I like to know the plugins are available if I need them.

And there are other plugins that collect and store their own data.

It turns out that when you download a WordPress XML backup file none of the plugin data gets backed up. If I had had to move SEO Theory I would have been VERY UPSET because it has a much larger subscriber list than Reflective Dynamics. But we lost all of the Reflective Dynamics subscribers and I have no way of getting them back.

I had to rebuild all the sites on new hosting from backups. In fact I still have maybe another 9-10 sites to rebuild after I send out this newsletter. We download ZIP archives of the PUBLIC_HTML folders, download XML backups for WordPress, and have some standard templates we use to construct .htaccess and other important files so getting a site back up and running is usually pretty easy.

But all the incidental data stored by the plugins is gone. It wasn’t included in the XML backups.

I’ll have to look for a plugin that saves plugin data in a backup/restore format but assuming that I cannot find one I’ll have to devise a procedure to follow when I move sites. We occasionally help people hand sites over to buyers. We occasionally sell some of our own sites. So now that I know the plugin data won’t be included I’ll have to make sure I save it somehow.

Another situation I ran into was that after uploading a backup to a new hosting account I was unable to get the site to load. After poking around in the folders and WP-CONFIG.PHP I noticed a leftover WP SuperCache reference in the config file. After deleting that I was able to get into the site. There were no other traces of WP SuperCache on the site so I have to assume the uninstall process for the plugin failed to complete at some point in the past.

Volume 3, Issue 12 (March 28, 2014)

April 16, 2014 by

In This Issue:

01) Errata and Corrections
02) SEO Micro Case Study No. 43
03) SEO Tip No. 81
04) Tech Tip No. 70
05) SEO Micro Case Study No. 42 Redux No. 1
06) Link Acquisition Tip No. 78
07) Seen in the Wild
08) Proprietary Rights
09) Administrative Stuff

+—————————–

————–+

* NEWSLETTER ARCHIVES *

SEO Theory now provides an archive of back issues (published in PDF format) that you can purchase at a discount.

http://www.seo-theory.com/premium/archives/

* ERRATA AND CORRECTIONS *

In the previous newsletter, Volume 3, Issue 11 (March 21, 2014), in the article titled “SEO TOOL REVIEW NO. 12 (WP Static HTML Output Plugin)” I wrote: “I don’t know if you could import them into FrontPage or a similar tool (I use WordPress when I work on static HTML sites).” That SHOULD have read “…(I use WORDPAD when I work…”.

* SEO MICRO CASE STUDY NO. 43 (Redirecting Googlebot) *

In Volume 2, Issue 48 of this newsletter (December 27, 2013) I mentioned an SEO blogger case study that showed Google is following 302-status redirects and allowing PageRank and anchor text to flow through them. In fact, Google’s own documentation states this to be the case (Cf. http://goo.gl/1nA5Nh) and as I mentioned in that newsletter, John Mueller had also confirmed as much in a Webcast.

So how did the SEO community not get the memo? I don’t know and I don’t care. :)

I suggested I would try to set up a different kind of redirect to see what happened. Alas! the Apache Web server does not allow you to specify your own status codes — which is probably a good thing overall. I modified a WordPress plugin to allow me to create a test URL that is redirected with a status code of my own choosing. I used Web-sniffer.net to fetch the redirected URL to see what status code was returned with it.

For any properly defined status codes I received the expected response. But as soon as I tried one outside of the documented range I receive an error 500. And I was unable to load that page in my browser.

So what do you do if you have built up a lot of spammy links pointing to content on your site? I used to advise people to implement 302-status redirects to “stop” the flow of PageRank and anchor text. That advice was inappropriate.

It looks like you’ll have to just stop any inbound traffic with a 410 status (permanently gone) or redirect offsite (say, to example.com).

These solutions work for anything but the root URL of a host (domain or subdomain). If Google would have continued to honor 302 the way we thought they would, we could fix penalized root pages by using 302-status redirects to deeper pages within a site.

You could, of course, think about targeted IP delivery (serving a 410 status to Googlebot) on deep content, but if a Googler comes in off one of their undisclosed IP addresses they’ll see that the page is being blocked only for Googlebot. I’m not sure what they would do about that.

Using a 410-status is not the same as blocking the crawler with “robots.txt”.

One other possibility is to use a robots meta directive on the page with “noindex,nofollow,noarchive”. That would not work so well on a root URL, unless you’re willing to promote some other page as your site’s “root”. To illustrate, instead of using “example.com/index.???” you create “example.com/mymain/” and adjust your navigation accordingly.

All inbound links pointing to the root URL will simply flow their PageRank into the ether….

Why do this? Because you screwed up your brand Website with a nasty link campaign and all the bad links are pointing at your homepage. If you show Google you’re willing to give up all those links and the use of the normal root URL, they may lift a penalty. I don’t currently have any clients in this situation (that I know of) so I don’t know when I’ll be able to test this solution.

* SEO TIP NO. 81 (Keep an Inventory of User Accounts) *

I run into this problem every 1 or 2 years. I have now run into it TWICE in 2014.

People allow their freelancers and employees to set up user accounts on various services without strict guidelines or monitoring. Sooner or later this comes back to bite you. Every account that your freelancers and/or employees create on your behalf for any Internet Marketing-related activity MUST be fully documented for you.

DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO USE THEIR PERSONAL EMAIL ADDRESSES

DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO DECIDE THE SECURITY QUESTIONS

DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO USE THEIR OWN CELL PHONES FOR VERIFICATION

I am working with two different situations this month where I am trying to get into accounts that were created by freelancers who in one case has vanished and in the other case claims he no longer has the login data. Both freelancers set up numerous accounts across multiple services that I have been tasked with updating.

In one project I have a list of old passwords and some of them are working. I am changing the email addresses and passwords wherever I can. This is basically hacking and I am at risk of tripping some hacking alerts as I wade through the mire of security questions, verification steps, and security setting changes. Some of the services have detected that I am trying to log into accounts from new locations.

If you hire someone, either as a freelancer or a full-time employee, to create blog or social media accounts for you, protect yourself in the following ways.

__1] Only allow them to use email addresses you control. Set up a special domain for this one purpose.
__2] Give them a “security persona” (don’t use the same one over and over again) with password & question preferences.
__3] Use a dedicated cell phone you control for verification (you may need more than one).
__4] Log into the accounts IMMEDIATELY after they are created from your own IP addresses.
__5] As soon as you sever a relationship, CHANGE THE PASSWORDS.

Never, ever allow anyone to create Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! accounts “on your behalf”. You can set up forwarding addresses through many different options so that you control where the emails go. Anyone who hacks into those free accounts can use them to take control over your Websites, social media accounts, and potentially other important resources.

Finally, make sure you keep at least two backups of your data in separate physical locations. If you use an external backup drive, use two and keep one offsite, physically separate from your computer. Switch them out weekly.

This may not seem like an “SEO” tip but trust me: the day will come when you have to optimize something and you will kick yourself for not having control over the right accounts.

When I create any resources for clients I hand over a spreadsheet with the service URLs, account names, passwords, and security questions. It then becomes the client’s responsibility to properly maintain the security for those accounts.

* TECH TIP NO. 70 (Publish Excerpts to Google Plus) *

While working on a BlogSpot blog recently I noticed an option to connect the blog to a Google Plus profile. That is, every time you publish a blog post a notification can be sent to your Google Plus profile so that people in your circles see the announcement. I did not test this but it occurred to me that you could combine that feature with the “Post by Email” functionality Google has added to BlogSpot.

Say you publish a blog on your own domain. If that blog has the ability to send out post announcements by email, you could republish those post announcements on a BlogSpot blog. The BlogSpot posts would then be sent to your Google Plus stream.

If the very first line in your BlogSpot post consists of a link to the full blog post on your own domain, you have effectively set up a “safe” notification stream to Google Plus.

Google warns you not to give your login credentials to any third-party posting tools.

This option is still a roundabout solution. Google is obviously reluctant to encourage people to auto post to Google Plus. I don’t know if making auto posts easier would change the service much. So far I don’t use Google Plus very much. I just don’t like the dashboard. But I do still log in every now and then to share links to new content on SEO Theory.

Frankly, though a couple of thousand people have Circled me on Google Plus, I get far more clicks from Twitter than from Google Plus. I think more people are sharing SEO Theory content on Twitter than on Google Plus, although it’s hard to tell (the search function on Google Plus is absolutely abominable).

As always, read Google’s Terms of Service before setting up any automated relay through Blogger. I don’t know if they have anticipated that kind of reuse and forbidden it. I did think it was worth mentioning, though. I can see people eventually aggregating notices from multiple BlogSpot sources in their Google Plus accounts.

* SEO MICRO CASE STUDY NO. 42 REDUX NO. 1 (My Blog Guest) *

There was a huge debate on Search Engine Land where Danny Sullivan called on Google to stop penalizing Websites that have been caught up in the MyBlogGuest controversy. One of those sites, DocSheldon.com, was penalized by Google for multiple guest posts (most people were only aware of 1 until Matt clarified on Twitter). Andy Beard suggested that Doc may have been targeted because he sponsored a guest blogging contest in which the writers were required to link to the sponsors. I’m afraid this discussion ranged all over the place and I would rather not try to link to all the sources. Much of it is comparable to hearsay anyway.

As part of that wide-ranging discussion Jennifer Ledbetter (PotPie Girl) wrote several articles on her blog, one of which included a video by Googler Maile Ohye from June 2012 (the video may have been recorded well before then — Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM). In the video (which was intended for new startups struggling to rank for their own names and brand terms) Maile advised Webmasters to use “descriptive anchor text” on both INTERNAL and EXTERNAL links. Jennifer (and other marketers) felt this was contradictory to Google’s reasons for handing out penalties. In the video Maile provides an example of an internal link using the anchor of “product specifications”.

I feel this is hardly a contradictory example, as “product specifications” is not (in my opinion) a very competitive keyword. Internally to a Website there is a very clear relevance and context for this anchor text; but if you’re out there linking on blogs back to your site with this kind of anchor it’s not going to do you much good (assuming your links would work).

Dave Harry recently did a write-up on the My Blog Guest penalty (Cf. http://cli.gs/j0tael2) in which he discussed spammy links in blogger profiles (author bio boxes and similar supplemental content for guest posts). He cites an example where someone he knows was handed a manual penalty for links included in an author profile on “a well known industry news site” (in the comments he says it was Search Engine Land). The writer’s profile was republished by aggregators and/or scrapers. Dave says “they reached out to a Googler only to find that it was some targeted anchors in their bio that was the issue.”

As I have mentioned here before, there are plenty of aggregator sites that republish my RSS feeds and I am not being hit with penalties. The difference between me and Dave’s unnamed friend, however, is that I am not putting “targeted anchors” into my author profiles. (NOTE: I do see fewer aggregators using my feeds this year and that may be a factor.)

A targeted anchor is something that looks like “and anyone with an interest in CHEAP VACATION DEALS should look at my other Website”, where the capitalized “CHEAP VACATION DEALS” is the anchor text of the link pointing to the cheap vacation deals Website.

I don’t have access to many blogs that participate in My Blog Guest but I did come across a couple of folks who complained that their sites had been penalized for links they published on other sites through MBG. I looked at their profiles and — sure enough — there were targeted anchors in all of them, even multiple targeted anchors.

So while the blog posts themselves were essentially squeaky clean the author profiles were not. I think this is a pretty clear sign that if you have been building relationships with an eye toward cramming targeted anchor text into author profiles, you should stop doing that (assuming you have not received any penalty notifications).

Ann Smarty announced last week that she would now allow publishers to add “rel=’nofollow’” to guest blogger bylines. I think this misses the point entirely. She needs to allow the publishers to decide exactly how to handle ALL the links, not just the links in the posts (MBG began advising publishers to use “rel=’nofollow’” on all links in the posts). Given the information that Dave and others have brought to light, I suspect it wasn’t the blog posts themselves that got everyone into trouble but quite possibly the author profiles. (UPDATE: Since first writing this paragraph I have learned that Ann has relented on allowing publishers to have the final say about “follow” status on links for articles they accept through MBG.)

To sum up: classic Page Footer link spam has evolved into Author Profile link spam. Marketers have not learned their lesson, yet.

But someone else commenting on Dave’s post also mentioned that his company earned a penalty after loading links into guest posts that were republished by scrapers/aggregators; so clearly loading up on spammy links ANYWHERE on someone else’s site is probably not a good strategy.

Danny Sullivan is very frustrated with the discussion but he is siding with the people who are angry at Google. He feels that Google has changed the rules and suddenly cracked down on Websites whose owners thought they were doing nothing wrong. Danny is once again asking Google to stop penalizing Websites and just ignore the links it doesn’t trust; he is also suggesting that perhaps the time has come for people to “stop building links”.

I am of the opinion that link building is okay within certain constraints; I am also of the opinion that most marketers don’t even think about constraining their link building. I would prefer that Google simply ignore the links it doesn’t want to trust, though. I am tired of having to deal with “rel=’nofollow’”.

* LINK ACQUISITION TIP NO. 78 (Co-authoring Articles) *

This is the kind tip you absolutely DO NOT want to share. You should not blog it, you should not mention it on forums, and you should even be reluctant to mention it to your friends via email. This is a relatively unused link building technique and its usefulness has not — to the best of my knowledge — been compromised by Internet marketers. However, I haven’t done this in several years so if you decide to screw yourself and everyone else I share this with — well, that’s no skin off my back.

Co-authoring an article is simple. You contribute enough content to someone else’s research that they give you a “this article was co-written by MICHAEL MARTINEZ” credit directly in the post (link and everything).

I guarantee you that as soon as someone shares this on a marketing blog or forum everyone will jump on the idea and say, “Hey! Editorial choice! White hat! Google doesn’t say you can’t do this! Go for it!” And in 2-3 months you’ll see Co-Authorship link research tools, Co-Authorship automation, and Co-Authorship exchanges.

Co-authorship credits are rare. If you want to use them in your linking strategies, do so. BUT KEEP THE CREDITS RARE.

Linking strategies turn into spam because people violate the Three Rules of Link Building:

__1] Always have a LOT of different link building techniques.
__2] Never use any one link building technique exclusively.
__3] Never share a link building technique you care about.

When you have many options to choose from you are less likely to feel so desperate that you beat any one option to death. But that principle alone is insufficient to restrain people who just want to blast their sites off to the top of favored keyword search results overnight.

If you implement co-authorship as a link acquisition technique, DO NOT ASK FOR SPECIFIC ANCHOR TEXT.

In fact, DO NOT ASK FOR LINK CREDIT. Leave it in the hands of the primary author to decide how to give you credit.

Just being mentioned on a blog that people actually read is important to your marketing strategy. Other people may link to you after reading what you co-wrote.

And in case anyone is curious, YES, I do care about this technique (otherwise I wouldn’t warn you not to share it). I care about every linking technique I share in the newsletter. You are paying me for premium advice, not fluff, so I am trying to deliver on that promise.

* SEEN IN THE WILD *

Google is discontinuing development of the Wildfire social media platform (Cf. http://goo.gl/5n43iu). Apparently they took what they wanted from the technology and incorporated it into their advertising platform, where advertisers can track social media mentions and activity.

Google X has bought so many robotics companies that it dominates the field in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DARPA = Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Google is trying to move away from the US military-industrial complex but has strong contractual obligations for now. Pundits agree that Google is positioning itself to be a robotics technology patron in competition with DARPA (for non-military purposes). Imagine Google Android running your household android. *shudder*

I have been toying with the idea of proposing SIO (Search Index Optimization) as a better acronym for what we have traditionally called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) because the search marketplace is becoming increasingly fragmented among multiple indexes that don’t always work together (despite whatever PR Google puts out each week). Feel free to use it if you like it.

I have seen reports of people recovering from MyBlogGuest penalties within 36 hours (nofollowing all outbound links and filing a reconsideration request). I don’t know how universal this is. I think it’s only publishers who accepted guest posts who are recovering for “Unnatural Outbound Links” penalties.

I jumped on YouTube last week and saw the usual array of irrelevant thumbnails on the front page (selected on the basis of my previous visits despite the fact I was not logged in). One in particular caught my attention because I know I’m not watching porn on YouTube: a thumbnail of two naked people in bed. The title was in Spanish (and, no, I have NOT been watching videos in Spanish recently although I sometimes do). Couldn’t help myself. Clicked on the link and scanned a “pelicula” that had absolutely no nudity or sex scenes in it. I don’t know what they are smoking over at YouTube but it must be some GOOD stuff.

Jennifer Ledbetter (Potpie Girl) discovered that if you add “rel=’nofollow’” to your Authorship markup and submit the link to Google’s rich snippets tool it kills your Authorship. Google does not actually require that Authorship links be “follow” links. In fact, you don’t even have to link to Google Plus to get Authorship credit. But since the Authorship team has been reassigned to other projects any bugs people find may be left in place for a while. The potential for abuse here is hard to gauge but I am sure someone will try to get someone else’s Authorship removed. I sent Matt Cutts an email about the issue but I doubt Google will do much if anything until abuse actually happens. Maybe they have the bandwidth for a quick check under the hood.

If you like speculating about the makeup of Google’s Panda technology then you’ll be interested in this article from SEO By the Sea (Cf. http://cli.gs/9stv1r). Bill Slawski found a patent naming Navneet Panda as an inventor. The patent looks like it could be related to the (in)famous algorithm but opinions are divided. People are (as usual) focusing on the linking aspects of the described technology, but reading patents and interpreting them is not easy. I have no firm opinion on the value of this patent in deciphering any of Google’s filters.

Google says all its Gmail traffic is now “fully encrypted”. Meaning if the NSA decrypts their email Googlers have another excuse to express moral outrage. Of course, if the NSA wants to read your email they can still do that rather easily (1 method: they can bug your computer and read what you read). This encryption is essentially meaningless but Google (and other tech companies), like the US government, is being forced to engage in some very spinny public relations to undo some of the harm Edward Snowden’s leaks have inflicted on them.

American jurist Richard Re (Yale Law School) has been publishing a series of articles on the Washington Post about “Exclusionary Doctrine”, which is used by US courts to determine when “unconstitutional evidence” may be used in prosecutions. Yes, friends, there are legal exclusions to Fourth Amendment protections. Mr. Re believes that “good faith” interpretation is heading in the wrong direction (or something like that — my ability to interpret legal gobbledy-gook is limited). This controversy may eventually have an impact on lawsuits connected with Internet technologies (including law enforcement use of personal search history, email, advertising activity, etc.). If you have the patience to read legal papers, you can download his February 2014 paper on the topic (Cf. http://cli.gs/8xv2c7j).

Twitter’s blogging platform (Medium) is now available for iPhone users.

Twitter improved its statistics reporting by adding “views” counts for Tweets. Eventually I am sure that — after much marketer complaining and perhaps an in-depth article or two from Danny Sullivan (love ya, man!) — they’ll start tracking “unique views”; and then we’ll probably have “bounces”, etc. So far these in-tweet stats are billed as “an experiment”. Hey, Twitter, 1995 called to say it’s glad you’re finally catching on to late 20th century marketing technology.

People are expressing grave concerns over Microsoft’s possibly censoring Chinese search results even more extensively than native Chinese search engine Baidu. I’m not sure what Microsoft thinks it’s doing in China.

John Platt, one of Microsoft’s most distinguished research scientists, recently confirmed that Microsoft has incorporated machine learning into many of its platforms over the past few years (Cf. http://cli.gs/18mmqot). That includes Bing and Xbox. They are looking at using machine learning to improve security.

Want free services from Microsoft? Look at what you can get from Bing Rewards (Cf. http://www.bing.com/rewards/redeem/all). Depending on how much you use Bing you could earn 1 year’s free storage (100GB on OneDrive) in about a week.

You can now search by image on Bing (upload an image or paste a URL into the search box).

DuckDuckGo announced it will be rolling out major updates to its service over the next few months. Can’t wait…well, I guess I have to.

Volume 3, Issue 11 (March 21, 2014)

April 16, 2014 by

In This Issue:

01) Errata and Corrections
02) SEO Question No. 138
03) Tech Tip No. 69
04) SEO Micro Case Study No. 42
05) SEO Tip No. 80
06) SEO Tool Review No. 12
07) SEO Question No. 139
08) Proprietary Rights
09) Administrative Stuff

+—————————–

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* NEWSLETTER ARCHIVES *

SEO Theory now provides an archive of back issues (published in PDF format) that you can purchase at a discount.

http://www.seo-theory.com/premium/archives/

* ERRATA & CORRECTIONS *

In the last newsletter (Volume 3, Issue 10) I wrote: “Maybe this all goes back to the confusion over the Hilltop and LocalRank algorithms that Google developed for GOOGLE NEWS in the early 2000s. They never implemented these algorithms in general Web search (and absolutely NEVER implemented them in the Fall 2003 “Florida” update as so many SEO Websites wrongly allege). These algorithms were designed to extract the best, more representative content from news and .EDU Websites about specific topics, rather than clutter up precious search results with replicative content. The fact that .EDU sites were considered for this kind of exclusivity suggests to me that LocalRank may have been targeting what became Google Scholar Search; but Hilltop (designed by Krishna Bharat) was always intended only for Google News (and this has been publicly confirmed by numerous news profiles of Bharat).”

Hm. If you follow the discussions on Bill Slawski’s blog (http://www.seobythesea.com/) then you may have recently read some comments where it came out that Bharat developed Hilltop while he was employed by DEC/Comcast and that he developed LocalRank for Google News in 2001. I have been telling the wrong story for years out of pure laziness because I have always focused on the SEO community’s misidentification of what Google did in Fall 2003. Anyway, I wrote the article with the above citation before I had that discussion with Bill on his blog and I forgot to update the article with the correct information. I will strive to keep the facts straight in the future.

* SEO QUESTION NO. 138 (Should We Do Like Getty Images?) *

“Michael, I’m sure you have heard about Getty Images opening up their archive. It looks like they are going to reap a billion links. Is this a good idea for everyone who wants to earn links? Can I just create an image archive and let people embed my images through iframes?”

If your name is “Getty Images” this will probably be a great link building strategy for you.

If your name is “Honest Mike’s Used Affiliate Referrals” I would advise against creating an image archive and inviting people to use your images in exchange for an iframe link.

Will we see an influx of free image embedding link schemes? Maybe. Will they work? For a while (maybe 2-3 years).

This question came up at SMX West in the “Meet The Search Engines” panel (well, a variation on it). Why does Getty get to do this and not everyone else? Matt and Duane basically said it comes down to THE INTENTION THAT THE SEARCH ENGINES INFER from the behavior they see. They may or may not make a correct inference. They reserve the right to change their minds at any time. We all make that reservation.

This is essentially a widget strategy and the search engines have already said they don’t like widget-for-links schemes. Getty Images has a world-class archive that has, I am sure, been struggling with IPR issues. Their need isn’t so much for links as it is for quid-pro-quo. I think they’re just saying that since people are using their images anyway they might as well get some recognition in return. For the time being I would say that Getty’s intention is pretty clear (to create a platform for managing digital rights, maybe to make money).

I often find people using my own content without proper attribution in ways that I would NOT use it myself, and they create value. I simply ask those people to give me proper attribution. It increases my visibility and helps bring in new visitors to my Websites. It also reduces the amount of time I spend filing stupid DMCA requests. NOTE: I leave it to the Webmaster to decide how to make the attribution. I don’t care if they NOFOLLOW a link or just say “Michael Martinez wrote this”.

If you want to pursue a Getty Images strategy, my advice would be to first create content that people want to use. Then figure out the licensing strategy. Earn visibility first.

As soon as someone on a popular SEO blog or forum explains to the world how they got a bajillion links by following in Getty’s footsteps all the zombie SEOs and Internet Marketers will stumble over to their strategy and start lining themselves up for a new wave of link penalties.

I have no desire to run with that crowd.

* TECH TIP NO. 69 (Time to Stop Using Bit.ly) *

Moz and Bit.ly recently signed a deal whereby Moz will incorporate Bit.ly statistics into their SEO tools. While this is actually a great move for competitive intelligence reporting, it leaves your social media and other shortened referral data vulnerable to external analysis.

I don’t know of any way to delete data from Bit.ly. Whatever links we have shared through Bit.ly in the past will now be exposed to Moz and their clients.

NOW IS THE TIME TO GET OFF BIT.LY. If you think it’s safe to continue using Bit.ly, you might as well put your referral data on the front page of your Website. Just tell the whole world where you place links and how many people are clicking through.

If you are a Moz tool user, milk this data for all it’s worth because I am pretty sure that every large company that has been using Bit.ly will abandon ship just as soon as they see what this deal means for them.

Bit.ly, unfortunately, is the best of the shortening services I have used. Some of them (like CLI.GS) don’t have a user dashboard with statistical reporting but they offer some API services. IS.GD offers a statistics view that you have to turn on for each link.

I set up my own URL shortening tool through 301r.us but a few people complained about Gateway Errors. I believe their ISPs were objecting to the hops but I’m not sure. Gateway Errors occur when your Internet connection cannot complete a URL transaction. Changing Web hosts for my shortener did not help. Also, I wasnt’t trying to track statistics through that shortener because I just wanted to see the referral data on the receiving sites.

I may still use 301r.us for some links but probably not for product and service links.

I cannot stress how important it is to protect your social media activity from competitive intelligence tools.

* SEO MICRO CASE STUDY NO. 42 (My Blog Guest) *

So we found out this week that the “large, well-known guest blog network” Google intended to take down was indeed MyBlogGuest. A lot of people are angry with Google. However, I think Google was moved to action by an article on VentureBreak (Cf. http://cli.gs/dkqtbjo) where the blogger got into a running battle with MyBlogGuest over his desire to add “rel=’nofollow’” to an article he accepted through the MBG service. Blocking the flow of PageRank was a violation of MBG’s terms of service and they banned him from the service.

Is this why you cannot find the MyBlogGuest Website on the first page for its own name? Probably not. Alex Graves, writing for Dave Naylor’s blog (Cf. http://cli.gs/qafgg7k), found a number of backlinks pointing to MyBlogGuest.com that probably violated Google’s guidelines.

In a post on her personal blog (Cf. http://cli.gs/0titv1i) Ann Smarty confirmed that the penalty from Google was about “unnatural, artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages” on her site. So the violation they nailed her domain for was for having toxic links, not for being the facilitator of content-for-links exchanges. Well, on paper that is how it looks.

In point of fact several MBG users publicly disclosed that their sites had received penalty notices at the same time as MBG — all for unnatural links so far as I can determine. I think it’s clear that Google’s Web spam team did indeed go after as many sites as they can and they simply used the unnatural links option to penalize them.

At issue for many people who rose to Ann’s defense (she is certainly well-liked in the SEO community) is whether the links were manipulative. In my opinion they were. Now, I have placed my fair share of manipulative links over the years. Heck, I’ve probably placed more than most SEOs would dare admit to. So I think I can speak at this table with the same credibility as anyone else.

People are stubborn, though. Clearly a lot of people were telling themselves that the MBG links were “white hat”, compliant with Google’s guidelines. But the fact that you have to engage in quid-pro-quo — an exchange of value (content for PageRank-passing links) — in order to use the content from MBG writers means that publishers don’t get the final say about how the content is to be managed. The final say lies with MyBlogGuest, who will ban you from their service for not complying with their terms.

If the exchange was simply content-for-visibility and/or content-for-traffic then no one should really care if the links are using “rel=’nofollow’” or passing through redirect folders that are blocked to crawlers, right?

So every writer (wink, wink) who used the service was using it for links. Maybe a few didn’t care if the links were NOFOLLOWED. Across the years several people have told me they joined MBG to get content and were not impressed with the quality they saw. This point was raised by a small minority of people in the comments I read on Search Engine Land and a couple of other places. But the quality of content is a subjective issue.

What was at stake here was the value passed by the links. Ann’s position has been that she wasn’t facilitating the sale of links. There are no “paid links” coming out of My Blog Guest, right? But if you look at Google’s link schemes page (Cf. http://goo.gl/fx4Du) and compare it to an archived version from last year (Cf. http://goo.gl/iQK7HD) you’ll see that they have forbidden “Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links” for far longer than since Matt Cutts delivered his “decay and fall of guest blogging” warning (Cf. http://goo.gl/aDwVON) in January.

Why did Google wait so long to take down the service? I think they probably did not have a smoking gun before the VentureBreak article was published. Until I read that article 1-2 weeks ago I was under the impression that publishers could decide how the links should be managed. THAT is (in my opinion) the way it should be. You’re welcome to write guest posts for my blogs only at my discretion.

I think the rule of thumb here is that whenever someone other than the site owner exercises editorial control over the management of link value then the exchange of value violates Google’s guidelines (and I am sure Bing’s guidelines, too). They don’t object to an exchange of value; they simply object to an exchange of value that seeks to manipulate their search results.

I’m not so sure there were that many innocent people who were directly involved in the service. One person did seem to imply (so I think) that maybe some of the SEOs who were using MBG to get links for their clients may have misled their clients. Perhaps the SEOs believed the links were acceptable all along. But clearly if the clients were not told that these links were manipulative — if they were told that these links were compliant with the search engine guidelines — then the clients were not well-treated by their SEOs.

I can believe there were innocent clients who may have been hurt by this link scheme. All guest blog exchanges are link schemes.

Why doesn’t Google take them all down? We can speculate until the sun turns red but maybe there are Google lawyers in the background imposing strict guidelines on the Web spam team. I remember when Matt Cutts publicly outed Traffic Power for being penalized (and getting their clients penalized). He did that because Aaron Wall, who had waged a campaign to expose Traffic Power’s abuse, was facing a steep lawsuit from Traffic Power. Google’s lawyers vetted Matt’s article.

Every link, whether you place it for (yourself/your clients) or not, has some potential to affect Google’s search results. They are all manipulative. There is a line that the search engines draw in there somewhere, a boundary between what they tolerate and what they will not tolerate. I don’t pretend to know where the line is drawn. I do my best to keep my self-placed links within reason.

For clients who demand a lot of links because they are in competitive verticals I think the best thing you can do is make those links such valuable content that people accept them as value content. Give the search engines a reason to like the links.

Pursuing exclusivity is, in my opinion, a high risk practice for Web marketers. That’s really not how the Web is supposed to work. We want to share information with others and links are a form of sharing. The MBG links were probably just a little too exclusive for Google to tolerate once the whole arrangement was laid out in the open.

Of course, one other lesson that some people may take out of all this is not to take your arguments into the open. Maybe the service was doomed as soon as VentureBreak outed them, but the argument in the comments only served to draw more attention to My Blog Guest’s terms of service. By defending their enforcement of those TOS the admins painted themselves into a corner from which there was no escape.

I have long suspected that Google (and maybe Bing) can worm its way into a blog network simply by looking for the random person who mentions (for whatever reason) that they are using a network. By examining the backlinks for that Website (as well as for other associated sites owned by the same person) the search engines can probably piece together a lot of connectivity between blogs. The more people who confirm they are using a service for such-and-such site, the more clues the search engines have to follow.

And given just how naive a lot of people were about the true nature of My Blog Guest’s links, I suspect a LOT of Websites were openly disclosing they were benefitting from the guest posts being distributed through that service. It took slightly less than 2 months to track down a large enough group of Websites to feel confident to send out a lot of penalty notices this week.

* SEO TIP NO. 80 (How to Scale Link Building Forever) *

I promise you this is not a black hat SEO strategy but I guarantee you almost none of you would be willing to do this. I’ll explain why you won’t do it after I tell you what to do.

Take any topic that you care about, passionately. Write 100, 200, 500 articles about that topic. If you cannot find 500 articles in your heart over the next 2 years, you don’t care about the topic. So whatever it is, if you know you can write 500 articles about it over the next 2 years, you have the perfect link building content for any vertical. The only requirements are:

__1] You write the 500 articles (all presenting unique, distinctive points)
__2] You publish each article on its own Website (no other articles, although you can include “About …”, etc.)

It will take you about 2 years to build these 500 Websites but you’ll have 500 links from Websites that you know are not spammed out, not selling links, not spinning content, not scraping content, not violating search engine guidelines.

You ARE allowed to place links to your own sites on any site you own. So if you have a single “money” site you can easily create 500 linking Websites. Each Website just needs to say something DISTINCT, USEFUL, INFORMATIVE, ENTERTAINING.

Think of these 500 articles as the best possible content that you would ever write. You’re not going to hire someone to write them for you. You pour your heart and soul into the process. You CARE about the topic.

You would publish these 500 articles on your Website if you had a blog. These ARE the kind of articles you want to share with people.

The only thing you’re not doing with those 500 sites is trying to build links for them. You build a site, get your link, and move on.

You can register domain names and host the sites yourself if you wish. You can register free subdomains on a handful of services, too. It doesn’t matter. You’ll still get 500 links over the next 2 years.

You see, it really doesn’t matter where you publish these articles. You can publish them all on pages that are blocked from search engine crawlers, on social media sites, etc. You can publish them anywhere.

And where will those links point to? Maybe your money site — maybe just your Google+ profile. Or your “About.me” profile. Or your money site.

It doesn’t matter. The links will still help you in more than one way.

A search engine has no reason to object to your publishing 500 truly useful, interesting, passionate articles on 500 Websites. There is not one single search engine guideline that forbids you from doing that.

Nor are there any search engine guidelines that forbid you from linking to 1 Website from 500 others in an appropriate manner (try not to use manipulative anchor text, though).

SO IF IT’S THIS EASY, WHY WON’T YOU DO IT?

Because you’re afraid to. Because you’re thinking, “I want 500 *REAL* links” (these ARE real links and they *ARE* natural links). You have dwelt in a world of “here is how to spam and get penlized” long enough that you think any easy solution must be fraught with peril.

And you’d be right. If it were really easy to set up 500 Websites and create unique, valuable, interesting content for them, everyone would be doing that. Just writing 500 articles in 2 years is a challenge most people never take on. I have done that twice (for my two most succesful Websites). It ain’t easy.

Spammers do not write hundreds of interesting articles. Spammers do not create useful, interesting Websites. Spammers don’t do much right but they do operate without fear. The reason why spammers get ahead of you is that they don’t care about the consequences of spamming. You do.

If you really want 500 links they are always within your reach. You just have to put some value into earning those links even if you are only earning them from yourself.

* SEO TOOL REVIEW NO. 12 (WP Static HTML Output Plugin) *

This plugin (Cf. http://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/) exports your published WordPress blog (including theme and other necessary files) to a set of static HTML pages. In other words, you can take a snapshot of your WordPress blog and save it as static HTML files. No more PHP.

Why do this? Well, WordPress is a very slow-performing platform. If you’re really not adding content to the site then you don’t need all that PHP running on your server, especially if your site gets a lot of traffic.

But even if you ARE adding content to the site, if you can get rid of the PHP overhead your site will run really fast. So you could install PHP and a Web server on your desktop PC, create your blog locally, and then upload a static image of it (via FTP) to your server.

The plugin allows you to change the URLs encoded in your static files. So in theory you could retire an old WordPress site from DOMAIN ALPHA by republishing it as a static archive on DOMAIN BETA, then wiping ALPHA clean and starting over from scratch.

The static HTML files can be edited with any simple text editor. I don’t know if you could import them into Frontpage or a similar tool (I use WordPress when I work on static HTML sites).

You could set up a WordPress site on any domain, use it to develop a static site for another domain, export the static files, and then start working on another site for a third domain.

Why do this? Because WordPress allows you to quickly and easily change themes and plugins. You can add all sorts of content to a site very quickly and then push that site to a new domain (or a subdomain — I tested this).

Most people are probably moving away from static HTML Websites, especially as everyone gears up for the mobile Web. But if you can create responsive static content mobile users will probably love you, too. The faster your Website renders for visitors the more likely they are to stay around and read your content.

NOTE that you will lose all interactive functionality that depends on PHP, so plan to implement Javascript solutions for any visitor-controlled functions.

* SEO QUESTION NO. 139 (Examples of Bad SEO Advice and Why They are Bad) *

“Michael, I’m not looking for any personal gripes here. You sometimes talk about the bad advice other SEOs share but you don’t provide examples. Can you give me some? And why is it bad advice?”

Advice is one of those two-edged swords we speak about metaphorically. It can be both good and bad, but not in all cases. At least, I would like to think not in all cases. For example, if you advise people on principle not to jump off a cliff, that seems like pretty good advice; but what about for people who want to go cliff diving? You can probably find an exception to every piece of “good advice” people share. And the same may be true for “bad advice”.

In SEO there are many different points of view. I might criticize you for sharing advice as if it’s the only way to do stuff when, in fact, there are other ways. I might disagree with you simply because I don’t know what I am talking about.

In SEO bloggery I used to anger people on a regular basis when I called out individuals for sharing advice that I felt was not appropriate. I got tired of people attacking me “for attacking everyone else”.

Frankly, on any given day half the SEO community is handing out “bad advice” and you can almost always include me on that. I used to tell people to use 302-status redirects to keep Google from following links — because I didn’t realize they had changed the rules. We can’t all know everything. The Web is flooded with forum discussions and articles I have written where I shared what I now consider to be “bad advice”. I can’t take it back.

But here are some examples of what I feel are just plain bad pieces of advice from recent online discussions (give or take a year or two).

On YouMoz a former Moz employee told someone asking a question to use subfolders/pages instead of subdomain because “subdomains don’t receive authority as easily as internal pages”. I have no idea of where that person came across that conviction, but there is no point to my charging in to that discussion to say, “Wait! Subdomains work just as well as subfolders BECAUSE OF THE LINKS.” I would guess (and for all I know I might be wrong) that the advice about preferring internal pages over subdomains might have some connection with how MOZ analyzes link structures. Now, they have some smart people working for them but their ideas about how to analyze links don’t represent either Bing or Google’s ideas.

BAD ADVICE: Don’t use subdomains (because you lose “authority”). Why? Absolutely no science behind the statement.

On Warrior Forum someone asked about “SILO Structures”. Various responses enthusiastically supported the use of silos. Most people refer to a Bruce Clay article as the goto resource for learning about “siloing”. Bruce’s siloing philosophy has been around for years and may have been his take on the original “Website theming” concept. The original concept was that a Website should only publish one kind of content (Xenite.Org blew that idea away completely but I digress). Theming was a concept I promoted for a while to help people FOCUS THEIR CREATIVE ENERGY. I kept running into people who jumped all over the topic map with no real concept of what they should do with a Website. At least if you said, “Dude, you have a site about dogs so create content about dogs” most people got that.

So Bruce’s Theme/Silo concept is built on choosing a main topic for a Website and then breaking that topic down into sub-topics. Each sub-topic gets its own corner of the Website directory tree. You can see how the keywords in the URLs might work together to form complex phrases, such as “EXAMPLE.COM/seo/links/building” and “EXAMPLE.COM/seo/links/analysis”. This is useful for organizing information but frankly if you try to structure a blog like this you’re going to shoot your brains out before the end of the day. SILOing is not appropriate for blogs; it IS appropriate for Wikis, directories, and other taxonomic-oriented projects. I hesitate to think of the mess people make out of Web forums with silos.

BAD ADVICE: Every site needs to silo its topics to optimize for search. Why? Absolutely no science behind the statement.

About a year ago there was a discussion on the Statcounter forum about crawlers clicking on Javascript ads. Webado, a moderator there (and one of Google’s product forum “Bionic Posters”) said at one point in the discussion “robots don’t click on ads”. The person to whom she was replying had significantly reduced the number of invalid clicks on his AdSense by blocking all traffic from Amazon’s AWS servers. In spite of the fact that his simple block shut down the robots clicking on the ads, Webado insisted that robots don’t click on ads.

There was a link to SEO Theory in that discussion and it was the referral traffic which brought it to my attention. I knew Webado was clearly wrong and so I wrote an article titled “Can Robots Click on Ads?” (Cf. http://www.seo-theory.com/2013/04/18/can-robots-click-on-ads/). Yes, robots do click on ads. Maybe not all robots, but SOME robots do. And that is why we have such a huge problem with invalid clicks (and fake traffic in analytics).

BAD ADVICE: Don’t assume robots are clicking on your ads. Why? Widespread evidence confirming that at least *some* robots do click on ads.

On Webmaster World there was a discussion about how to handle expired URLs for a job listing site. The participants looked at different options. The coversation tapered out with a conclusion that the original poster would/should publish new content on old URLs returing either a 404 or 410 status code. Such status codes would effectively tell crawlers to go away and NOT index that content.

BAD ADVICE: Use 404/410 status on new content for expired URLs. Why? Trying to “not trick Googlebot”. In fact, Googlebot doesn’t care. (And it’s not in the guidelines.)

An article published on American Express’ Website in December 2011 was titled “6 Common SEO Mistakes on Small Business Websites”. Item no. 1: “Building a Website on a free subdomain or social media site”. This advice is still repeated by many people today (and Jill Whalen often shares this advice on her own forums). The article author in this case justifies the assertion that it’s a bad idea to use a subdomain “because most free subdomain providers don’t allow you to 301 redirect your old site on their service to a new one”. While that is perfectly true, it’s completely irrelevant.

Assuming you move your site off a free-hosted subdomain you have other options, including deleting the content from all the pages and embedding links that say “this article has moved to [NEW URL]“. Some freehosts will still allow you to embed “robots” directives on your pages, too, and you may be able to use “rel=’canonical’”.

As far as SEO goes there are plenty of good reasons to use free subdomains — and lots of good reasons NOT to. It’s not an SEO decision, it’s a business decision. In practice many brands today now maintain a LOT of free-hosted subdomains/subfolders on social media services like Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Free hosting is here to stay and has only become more important to Web marketing than ever before.

BAD ADVICE: Don’t use free subdomains for Websites. Why? Absolutely no science behind the statement.

Volume 3, Issue 10 (March 14, 2014)

April 16, 2014 by

In This Issue:

01) SEO Question No. 135
02) SEO Question No. 136
03) SEO Question No. 137
04) SEO Micro Case Study No. 41
05) Seen in the Wild
06) Link Acquisition Tip No. 77
07) Proprietary Rights
08) Administrative Stuff

+—————————–

————–+

* NEWSLETTER ARCHIVES *

SEO Theory now provides an archive of back issues (published in PDF format) that you can purchase at a discount.

http://www.seo-theory.com/premium/archives/

* SEO QUESTION NO. 135 (How Do You Know When An Article Is Truly Evergreen?) *

“Michael, what do you think makes content evergreen? What makes it last so long? Can you provide some examples?”

We should probably set the pace with a smidgen of theory here. There are “Evergreen URLs” and there is “Evergreen Content”. The two may not be the same.

An Evergreen URL has brand-value. It’s relatively short, easy-to-remember, and probably accrues its own following in terms of social shares, links, citations, and advertising references. An example of an Evergreen URL would be “abcnews.go.com“. The Walt Disney Company bought Go.com many years ago. They bought the ABC Television network many years ago as well. For reasons I still cannot comprehend Disney decided to lump these two brands together.

I doubt most people think of “Go.com” as the official Website of the Walt Disney Company (but it is); instead, most of us probably just link to “disney.com” (which serves entirely different content but is nonetheless “the official home of all things Disney”). As for ABC News, they were shunted down to a subdomain on Go.com but everyone can get to them now and everyone links to them now. If you follow ABC News you know the subdomain.

An example of Evergreen Content might be the official profile/biography of one of the most beloved American presidents of all time: the profile of George W. Bush (he also holds the distinction of being one of the most reviled American presidents of all time). The official profile for George W. Bush has existed since he first took office in January 2001. However, the current URL for the biographical article has only existed since 2009 (the year he was replaced by President Obama).

Evergreen Content remains in demand regardless of whether its URL changes. Evergreen URLs remain useful regardless of whether their content changes. Some media Websites publish entirely new articles on Evergreen URLs every week, month, quarter, or year. Some very popular Websites move their Evergreen Content around more often than you can say “evergreen this”.

So, having said all that let me talk about “Evergreen Content”. I have a few examples from my own Websites that I can talk about.

For instance, there are a couple of articles on SEO Theory about using subdomains for SEO. These are not so much “how to” articles as “why” articles — theory, but theory that incorporates enough basic “how to” information that people continue to link to these articles from time to time.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that Ralph Tegtmeier (aka Fantomaster) reTweets one of them periodically. But the fact that he chooses to Tweet about one of my subdomain articles without any incentive or request from me just illustrates the value that people see in the content.

I also reTweet many of my own articles. I started doing so for several reasons, but one of the most important reasons (to me) was that culling the old articles on SEO Theory and other Websites for Tweetable URLs helps me see which articles have remained relevant. I maintain a spreadsheet of old articles that I promote again from time to time through social media.

Because there are nearly 1,000 articles on SEO Theory I have not yet reviewed them all for Tweeting. I am still somewhere in the 2007 calendar. I started writing the blog in December 2006. Although many of the articles are no longer relevant (they discussed things that don’t exist or happen anymore) I still find many articles that are as relevant today as they were when I first wrote them. I read the articles to see if I want to update them much. I also read them to see if they make me wince.

The oldest article from SEO Theory that I am still happy to promote is titled “Why Do Your Search Rankings Change?” (Cf. http://bit.ly/1dSzfqU from December 2006). Although I have written better articles on that topic several times since then, it is still fundamentally sound. Another good article from that month is “How Search Engine Optimization Works” (Cf. http://bit.ly/1by6NbY).

But those articles are only evergreen to me. I don’t see new links and shares for them beyond what I create myself. They get a little bit of traffic when I remind people about them through Tweets.

One page on SEO Theory that continues to receive steady traffic is the “SEO Theorems and Principles” page, which summarizes important points from my most theoretical articles. This is true evergreen content because it’s really not going to change and the URL is also very stable (Cf. http://www.seo-theory.com/seo-glossary/theorems-and-principles/). It’s long but I don’t plan to change it.

Then again, why does that page receive so much traffic? Most likely people come to SEO Theory and they click on the link in the navigation. So, yes, technically the content is evergreen because it doesn’t need to be updated but it’s not attracting much attention on its own.

When I look at the links that people give to SEO Theory, the majority tend to point to recent articles (which is to be expected) or to the root URL itself. But Eric Ward recently deep-linked to my link building category. The Internet Marketing industry, however, tends to live “in the moment” more than in a timeless age.

Among fans of J.R.R. Tolkien I see new links coming in to old articles all the time. People are constantly discovering Tolkien’s works and they inevitably ask many of the same questions over and over again at about the same points in their reading careers. Most of these deep links to old content come from Web forums where people ask questions and someone inevitably links to one of my articles to support an answer. I see these kinds of links coming from IMDB, Reddit, and many obscure niche Websites.

Being a subject expert in two very different topics gives me a little of bit of insight into how people reference long-lasting content. As far as SEO Theory is concerned the majority of recognition is bestowed upon the brand itself. People are constantly linking to the blog in general. As far as my Tolkien research is concerned people tend to link to individual articles more often, but some articles are more popular than most.

When I look at the kinds of articles I link to over and over again for myself, they tend to be well-written reference works. I know I should keep a spreadsheet filled with them (actually, I do have a poorly maintained spreadsheet of sites to link to) but I find myself searching for the same articles time and time again. There are a few Danny Sullivan articles that I almost always feel I should link to when I write about certain topics in SEO.

Randy Ray has a couple of Websites that I use as references, too. But I link to certain government Websites, certain Web directories, and certain medical references not so much because they are THOROUGH as I simply LIKE THEM. They are easy to read and informative but most importantly they are easy to find when I search for them again.

Findability is, I think, a very important aspect of evergreen content. We simply do not bookmark most of the stuff we like, but we’ll go back and search for it time and time again. I know I have spent many hours cursing myself, the search engines, and the stupidity of Webmasters when I could not get back to something I thought was important. Eventually I’ll give up looking for something but many times I have spent as much as 3 hours looking for a very specific article, refusing to give up until I found it. This always seems to happen right after I clear my browser history, too.

So, let me recap. I think content is evergreen because:

__1] It remains relevant across many years
__2] It requires little to no updating
__3] It is informative although not necessarily exhaustive
__4] It is easy to read, perhaps even well-presented
__5] It is easy to find again and again

The content may be a collection (like a blog) or it may be individual articles. Either way, it’s always good to have evergreen content that people enjoy and use and recommend to others. It makes your ongoing marketing a little bit easier.

* SEO QUESTION NO. 136 (Name 5 SEO Blogs You Read Faithfully) *

“Michael, I was curious about which SEO blogs you read. I don’t mean the news blogs you sometimes mention. Who influences YOU? Please explain why you like them.”

Five SEO blogs…five…”the minds behind every manipulative, innovative, and imaginative online marketing campaign…and you put them…in a room…with a PSYCHIC”. Sorry, I was having a “Serenity” moment there.

It’s funny because I don’t actually bookmark all the blogs I read. Asking me for five blogs that influence me is like asking me where I go to eat local cuisine while we’re on the tour bus. You got a problem with tourist trap SEO blogs or something? :)

Okay, enough stalling. Here are (almost) five SEO/Internet marketing blogs that, in my opinion, are pretty damn good and well worth reading just about any day of the week. In no particular order of priority of value, so please don’t assume I like one better than the others.

UNBOUNCE: http://unbounce.com/blog/
These guys get testing. They test, they analyze, and THEY SHARE. I hate recommending this blog because they share such good stuff. I would rather no one else knew about them, but obviously other people know about them. My friend and former co-worker Carlos del Rio has sometimes published articles there, but I love just about everything I read on the blog.

MARKETING EXPERIMENTS: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/
Wow. This is simply amazing stuff. I mean, this is some incredible data-oriented blogging about marketing experiments. I wish I had found this blog years and years before I finally did. I bookmarked this one for sure.

SEO REGULATORS: http://seotrainingdojo.com/
I can’t say they actually INFLUENCE me as the Regulators is a pod/videocast that just consists of 3-4 guys sharing their opinions on the latest developments in the SEO industry and related topics. So while they are not sharing “how to” tips, if you listen closely they often drop hints about all sorts of cool stuff. And how can you NOT listen to Terry Van Horne when he rips someone a new backdoor? I LOVE these guys, even if only for the entertainment value. They cover a lot of industry sentiment and sometimes share examples from their own client projects.

SEO BY THE SEA: http://www.seobythesea.com/
Bill Slawski digs up the patents and reads through them and offers his interpretation of what they are saying. No one in the industry has as much experience at trawling search engine patents for helpful insights into HOW SEARCH ENGINEERS THINK (rather than how search engines work). Bill is always careful to point out that the fact a patent exists doesn’t mean the technology is describes is being used or being used precisely as described. Bill is far less of a conspiracy theorist and more of a well-balanced analyst than most people who comment on these patents.

THERE IS NO NUMBER FIVE

I read a lot of marketing blogs and many of them publish at least a few articles that hold my attention, give me ideas to think about, and somehow influence me. But to pick one as “the fifth of five” would be impossible. There are certain writers whose articles I will always read, like Shari Thurow, Eric Ward, and Eric Enge. There are plenty of Google Webmaster videos I refer to for reference time and time again. I think anything my partner Randy Ray writes for Reflective Dynamics is well worth reading.

But to choose between all the writers and blogs I follow for a fifth slot is impossible. I just cannot say I follow anything that faithfully. That said: here is a list of blogs that I have found useful, helpful articles on from time to time (in no particular order):

Majetic SEO
http://blog.majesticseo.com/

Rimm-Kaufman Group
http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/

Vertical Measures
http://www.verticalmeasures.com/blog/

Mike Blumenthal’s Blog
http://blumenthals.com/blog

Jeff Bullas’ Social Media Blog
http://www.jeffbullas.com/
Not really an SEO blog, and I’m not thrilled with the guest posters he occasionally invites to share, but at least he keeps the content flowing.

Social Triggers
http://www.socialtriggers.com/
Not an SEO blog as far as I can tell but Derek Halpern shares real research in the videos. I should probably follow his advice more when it comes to selling stuff from SEO Theory but I stay pretty busy and don’t leave myself much time for tinkering with the Website (Derek Halpern would probably shoot me for saying that).

The fact I struggle to name SEO bloggers doesn’t mean I think all the others suck. There are many blogs out there that cover pretty basic stuff very well. I just don’t have much need to review their articles. If you are putting “seven tips to improve your SEO” as your title, I’ll most likely never read the article. I MIGHT (if I am in the right mood) stop to scan an article titled “5 ways to improve conversions” but conversion tip articles are very common (and usually not very informative).

People occasionally ask me what I think of such-and-such a blog. If I can remember the blog or blogger’s name that’s a good sign; I’ll go look at the blog again before forming an opinion and sharing it. If it’s a blog that I have never heard of I may scan it briefly just to see what it’s got but I can’t offer an opinion.

I actually depend on blogs like Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, Media Post, and a few others to review and vet the marketing blogs for me. If they publish a roundup of blog articles they have read I’ll scan the roundup and click on articles I think may be interesting. I also review the Websites that send traffic to SEO Theory and Reflective Dynamics and often check out their articles. Any random blogger may publish a great case study or document some new search behavior that hasn’t yet been integrated into the ongoing SEO conversation.

Beyond those resources, I occasionally check out blogs that people I know share on Twitter; and I sometimes follow the links in articles I think are interesting (that was how I found Social Triggers, for example, as well as Jeff Bullas’ blog).

* SEO QUESTION NO. 137 (What Is the Easiest Link You Ever Asked for and Got?) *

“Michael, love the linking tips but I can’t do a lot of that stuff. I know you don’t like ‘easy’ tricks for SEO but what is the easiest link you ever got? I am sure there is a story behind it.”

I must tell too many stories. :)

The easiest link I ever remember getting came from a Website that already linked to my content. This was back when I was writing for Suite101 about 12 or 13 years ago (back when they were publishing real content for people, not search engines). A “roundup artist” on a popular Website made sure he linked to my weekly articles. One week he missed my article. I was devastated. I sent him a very apologetic email asking if he’d modify his roundup article and link to my latest article. HE apologized to ME and immediately added the link.

It never hurts to ask people who have already linked to your content for another link, especially if you think they like the kind of content you are publishing. I don’t understand where Internet marketers got this crazy idea that you should only have 1 link from any given domain. That’s just plain stupid.

If CNN linked to your Website every week, would you really worry about a Google penalty?

Maybe this all goes back to the confusion over the Hilltop and LocalRank algorithms that Google developed for GOOGLE NEWS in the early 2000s. They never implemented these algorithms in general Web search (and absolutely NEVER implemented them in the Fall 2003 “Florida” update as so many SEO Websites wrongly allege). These algorithms were designed to extract the best, more representative content from news and .EDU Websites about specific topics, rather than clutter up precious search results with replicative content. The fact that .EDU sites were considered for this kind of exclusivity suggests to me that LocalRank may have been targeting what became Google Scholar Search; but Hilltop (designed by Krishna Bharat) was always intended only for Google News (and this has been publicly confirmed by numerous news profiles of Bharat).

The Internet marketing community’s fascination with “diversity” and “varying the anchor text” and “unique IP addresses” is pretty much a load of crap that has led many a Website down an expensive road toward penalties. If all that really worked as expected, thousands of Websites would never have been penalized or downgraded.

Normal, natural links come in clusters from the same sites. Not always, but every natural link profile I have examined (and I have examined hundreds in detail) was always dominated by a handful of Websites that linked more than once to the receiving site. Search engines expect this.

So if you have natural, unpaid links coming in from Websites and you want more links, try asking those guys for more links. They’ll create visibility for you AND credibility, and that in turn may lead other people to link to your Websites.

Volume 3, Issue 9 (March 7, 2014)

April 16, 2014 by

In This Issue:

01) Errata and Corrections
02) SEO Micro Case Study No. 40
03) SEO Question No. 135
04) Tech Tip No. 68
05) SEO Question No. 136
06) Link Acquisition Tip No. 76
07) Keyword Research Tip No. 11
08) Proprietary Rights
09) Administrative Stuff

+—————————–

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* NEWSLETTER ARCHIVES *

SEO Theory now provides an archive of back issues (published in PDF format) that you can purchase at a discount.

http://www.seo-theory.com/premium/archives/

* ERRATA AND CORRECTIONS *

In the previous issue, in the article “SEO Strategy Case Study No. 25 (Operation Clean Slate)” I wrote: “I don’t like throwing away PageRank if I can avoid doing so.” That should have said “I DON’T LIKE throwing ….”

* SEO MICRO CASE STUDY NO. 40 (Can Website Penalties Spread Like the Flu?) *

Any viral outbreak threatens a close-knit population because the virus is more likely to spread through the population before a defense against the disease is developed. In the 1300s and 1400s many European cities were devastated by the spread of plagues because people transmitted the disease (or the disease-carrying fleas) to each other so quickly there was little time to react. The people most likely to survive an outbreak of disease were those who fled to the countryside, or who already lived there, isolated from the crowded towns and cities.

Viral propagation theory holds that an infection (which does NOT have to be a virus) can spread across the globe within a matter of days or weeks once it reaches one of the main travel hubs (airports, seaports, railway hubs, etc.). People tend to congregate in large crowds in these areas, thus increasing the spread of infectious diseases. Fortunately for the general population it takes time for disease to reach the critical point where it becomes an epidemic and our modern medical infrastructure does a pretty good job of identifying and isolating disease outbreaks. Still, every year millions of people contract the flu across the world — and tens of millions of people contract colds.

So what does this have to do with search engine optimization? Think about all that link building advice you have been getting from the SEO community for years. Especially think about the old “look at your competitor backlinks” strategy for finding new linking resources.

When a wave of search engine penalties hits the online marketing world, many similar sites — varying in quality — go down like grass before a lawn mower. Because most marketers have focused on link acquisition for years, the penalties tend to focus on degrading or deindexing backlink profiles. Manual penalties and algorithmic downgrades may start kicking in for Websites that acquired too many suspicious, manipulative links.

And so when Google’s Blogacalypse (March 2012) began we not only saw thousands of link-selling blogs taken out of the index, many thousands of their customers received “Unnatural Link” notices in their Google Webmaster Tool accounts. They were all getting links from the same blog networks, so it was only natural that they should all receive penalties.

Some Websites escaped the penalties and downgrades, however. Conventional SEO thinking argues that these sites have larger “natural” backlink profiles that “absorb” the toxicity of paid links better. I think that’s a very weak hypothesis. The truth is that most manipulative links don’t last very long. All of the blog networks that I have studied share a few common practices, including taking down Websites that they feel are penlized. Yes, blog networks have been removing weak sites from their networks for years. The networks only collapsed when Google was able to penalize many times the previously normal number of blogs.

Even if you are not using subscription blog networks you may still be running with the wrong crowd — literally, a crowd. For example, many spammers still use tools to drop links on blogs (in the comments) and on Web forums (in profiles, signatures, and in forum posts). These spammers buy lists of Websites to exploit from a relatively small market of providers who disover the latest vulnerable blogs and forums; and there are, of course, link spammers who sell their services to anyone foolish enough to buy them. Finally, all of these link spammers use a small number of proxy services to get past the blogs’ and forums’ anti-spam filters — but the proxy services quickly change out the IP addresses because their customers overload them.

So when we talk about “dirty spam practices”, they are literally DIRTY — unhygenic — and they increase the chance that many users of these tools and services will all be penalized (or stripped of link value) around the same time. They are pooling their links on the same resources, and so any negative search engine reaction will affect them all at about the same time.

Spammers who isolate their Websites from the rest of the spam community are less likely to contaminate their backlink profiles through shared linking resources. But because spammers look for cheap, easy solutions their economic incentives are to cluster together around the same tools, proxies, and linking resource sites.

Less spammy marketers who spend a lot of time analyzing competitor backlinks nonetheless create a similar problem for themselves (and their clients). By focusing on the links your competitors have received, you’re more likely to get links from the easiest of their resources. It’s like dating all the prostitutes on the street rather than all the sheltered, spoiled rich kids who are very choosey about whom they keep company with. Any EARNED link will be more difficult to reproduce, whereas any self-placed or purchased link will be relatively easy to reproduce.

I have always criticized the practice of studying competitor backlink profiles because it’s EASY to do and SAVES TIME. In search engine optimization anything that is EASY and which SAVES TIME is highly likely to lead to a pattern of manipulation and abuse, which in turn will eventually lead to a change in search engine behavior.

The search engine algorithms look for clusters of signals because those are the easiest to identify. Clusters of signals will be most easily found across large numbers of Websites that are all acquiring links in similar ways from similar resources.

The more links you obtain from shared resources the more likely that you’ll eventually run into trouble with your backlink profile.

But it doesn’t stop there. Links are not the only thing that can turn your golden Website into a toxic turd. Cheap, spammy content has the same effect. And in today’s aggressive “content marketing” environment the demand for new, fresh content is greater than ever — even greater than before the Panda algorithm took down all the low quality content farms and factories. So now people are looking for highly recommended freelancers but they are not willing to pay professional rates for original, high quality copy (professional rates range from $0.10 to $3.00 per word). The freelancers who accept the lower pay have to turn out more copy and the more copy they turn out the less distinctive that copy tends to be.

The cheaper your content is, the easier it is to get that copy, the more likely it is coming from a production source that is used by many other people. The content creator will look for ways to reduce costs and scale up production; hence, every scalable source of content creates a pattern that becomes a potential signal for a search engine to target. Scalable, low-cost content may seem like high quality content at first but once it floods the marketplace a systematic downgrade is sure to follow.

In fact, we can look at two types of easy, scalable content production that led many sites into penalties and downgrades: RSS feed cannibalization and free article directory cannibalization. Websites that create content by grabbing RSS feeds from other sites may create real value with the right mix of feeds and user interface options, but in most cases they are just simple aggregator or scraper sites. Websites that rely on free article directories for their content produce little to no original content. In either case you end up with a LOT of duplicate content and sooner or later the search engines take a dim view of that.

A few exceptional aggregators (like Alltop) and republishers (like Business Insider) manage to create enough unique value to avoid the penalty box, but most sites that follow this content strategy eventually pay the price of using CHEAP, EASY content.

Doing what everyone else does for links and content IS NEVER OPTIMAL and therefor is *NOT* “search engine optimization”. You really need to isolate your link and content strategies rather than follow the crowd, no matter how many of them are whooping and hollaring over how great their sites are doing. They’ll eventually be accusing Google of trying to destroy their businesses.

* SEO QUESTION NO. 135 (What Should I Do About Forum Links?) *

“Michael, I am getting ready to disavow links and I see a lot of forum links in my GWT. I get traffic from some of these sites but I have always heard that forum links are bad. Should I disavow them?”

This is the crazy thing about disavowing links: everyone is so scared of (mostly imaginary) toxic linkage that people are shooting their neighbors and cousins in a complete state of panic, rather than calmly thinking through what they SHOULD be disavowing.

So, let’s assume that you really do need to disavow some links. What links (domains) should you put on that list?

__1] Domains where you placed manipulative links yourself solely for the anchor text
__2] Domains where you paid someone else to place manipulative links solely for the anchor text
__3] Domains where whomever previously owned your domain placed or bought manipulative links solely for anchor text
__4] Domains that you’re NOT SURE ABOUT but which COULD fall into one of the first three groups

You’re done. Nowhere in that list did I say “forum links”, “blog comment links”, or “nofollowed links”. I mean, MATT CUTTS LEAVES LINKS IN BLOG COMMENTS (Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDRlVSWTRY) and forums. And contrary to popular belief the Google Webmaster Guidelines DO NOT FORBID links in forum signatures (Cf. http://bit.ly/1bNdkAH). What they forbid are keyword-rich anchors in easily-spammed content (which includes blog comments, forum signatures, and even nofollowed links).

My two biggest Websites, SEO Theory and Xenite.Org, both get TONS of links from forums. I love these links. They drive traffic, they create visibility, and I couldn’t care less if they help with anchor text. Do the search engines know about these links? Sure. I use Google and Bing to find sites linking to my sites all the time — because I want to know what people are saying that drives so much traffic to my sites. So I know the sites are indexed. Sometimes I have to read the comments in the search engine caches because the threads are so active they scroll the links to new pages before I can get to them.

Now let’s look at the elephant in the room: what about negative SEO?

Negative SEO is very real. I have had to deal with it myself on several occasions, both for myself and for clients. I don’t dismiss negative SEO and I don’t doubt that it is happening today.

But negative SEO DOES NOT OCCUR at the ridiculous rate and scale most people’s paranoia has lead them to believe it happens. Negative SEO is not a surefire way to kill your competition. Trust me, it’s NOT that effective. And the people who can pull off a successful negative SEO campaign fairly quickly and easily DO NOT CARE ABOUT MOST SITES. They spend most of their time PROMOTING THEIR OWN SITES, not trying to kill off competitors.

You may have been targeted by negative SEO. If you have not been buying links and suddenly see a massive number of domains (not sitewide links, but DOMAINS) appear in your backlink profile, it would be prudent to file reconsideration requests with both BING and GOOGLE. Prudence protects you, paranoia sucks the life out of your business.

If no one is placing manipulative links, either to help you or hurt you, you have no reason to file a Disavow request. None. Nada.

Leave natural links alone. Just because people have destroyed their livelihoods with stupid link tricks doesn’t mean that when forum and blog comment links naturally appear in your backlink profile that you have a problem.

* TECH TIP NO. 68 (Reschedule Old Blog Articles for Future Publication) *

If there is one thing I hate, is how so many SEOs and Internet marketers pretend their content is “evergreen”. They do this by:

__1] Removing dates from their URLs
__2] Removing dates from their articles
__3] Pushing old articles back into the publication queue

If your content is truly evergreen it doesn’t matter that you have dates in the URL and copy and that the article hasn’t been pinged in 7 years. There are articles on SEO Theory, Xenite.Org, and other Websites that I published years ago which continue to receive plenty of traffic from both search engines AND recently placed natural links on other Websites. THAT is what true evergreen content does: it earns links over and over and over again.

If you don’t have evergreen content, faking it just makes you look stupid and greedy (in MY humble opinion)….

That said, it occurred to me that a common problem may have a quick solution in step 3 above. Oftentimes people move content from one Website to another. For example, you may have a blog you published on WordPress.com and now you want to move it to your own domain. You *could* just download all the posts from WordPress.com, upload them to your new blog, and then delete the WordPress.com account.

Over time the search engines will figure out where the content went and in a few months (depending on the size of your blog and how many new links it earns after the move) you’ll eventually see all your articles in the search results again. But who wants to wait MONTHS for that to happen? I know I don’t.

So here is one way to put that old content back to work.

__1] Download the XML export file
__2] Make a backup copy so that you have the entire file intact
__3] Open up the XML file in a text editor (I prefer Wordpad) — do NOT use an XML editor
__4] Use the text editor’s “search” function to find “<pubDate>”
__5] Edit the “<pubDate>” and URL (just above the pubDate) for each article, using a future date
__6] Delete all the articles that won’t make sense if they are published after today
__7] Import that file into your new blog (rebuild the media library and update internal links)
__8] Delete your old WordPress.com site (OR just delete the old posts and send people to your new site)

This will effectively schedule all your old posts for publication. Each post will ping the search engines. You should see your posts coming up in the search results pretty quickly.

The beautiful thing about this is that if you have dozens or hundreds of articles — although it will take a lot of time to edit the XML file — you have the opportunity to schedule the posts at a rate of 1-3 per day, and within about 2 weeks the search engines will have clocked your publication rate. You should see your posts start to appear in the indexes pretty quickly after that.

You can set up your new blog to encourage new subscriptions to your RSS feed and/or to email notifications. If you have enough interesting, evergreen content you should build up an audience pretty quickly.

Either way you’ll still have to wait for the search engines to show all your articles at the new location, but by scheduling your posts to be published again (culling the outdated content that doesn’t need to be there any more) you’ll quickly get the search engines recognize where your content SHOULD be and to expect it to come at a pretty regular clip.

This will also give you time to build up a backlog of new articles that you can schedule into the future AND/OR mix into your republication schedule.

But leave the dates in the URLs. I have everfake SEO. It’s just so unnecessary.

* SEO QUESTION NO. 136 (How Good are the Majestic Citation & Trust Flow Metrics?) *

“Michael, I was kind of shocked to see you take down Domain Authority. I hope it’s more trustworthy than the spammers claim. But what about Majestic’s data? Is that any better?”

I’m not trying to take down Domain Authority. I have no doubt the math behind the metric is very good. Moz is paying some smart people to collect and analyze their link data and other signals. However, a lot of people have been using Domain Authority as a proxy for Google’s PageRank and that has always been a bad idea.

Majestic SEO’s Citation Flow is their PageRank-like valuation, similar to Domain Authority. Their TrustFlow is similar in concept to the Yahoo!/Stanford TrustRank model that so many SEOs used to talk about (most wrongly believed it had been developed and put into use by Google for a few years).

TrustRank and TrustFlow are both designed to evaluate the link relationships between “trusted” (manually vetted) documents. The idea is that trustworthy documents (carefully watched over by people with integrity) tend to link only to other trustworthy documents. Therefore if you start crawling from a seed set of “trusted” Websites you’ll avoid crawling a lot of spam. The original TrustRank paper claimed this really worked.

The same team that developed TrustRank eventually published another paper that admitted it was all hogwash and nonsense. They spent a few years trying to fix TrustRank before giving up. There are several problems with TrustRank, the two most significant being that you cannot start out with a perfect knowledge of the Web (many trustworthy sites won’t be connected to your seed set) and as soon as an untrustworthy site gets into the seed set it poisons the crawl.

Like Domain Authority, I believe the math behind CitationFlow and TrustFlow is very good. Majestic SEO is paying some smart people to do pretty solid work. But their system is as isolated from Bing and Google’s data sets as is Moz’, so there is no reasonable hope of substituting Majestic’s metrics for any metrics that Bing and Google might use.

Every search metric only reflects the data from which it is derived. If your metric is not derived from data provided by Google, then your metric offers no insight into Google’s data. You GET ZERO INSIGHT from an external metric. Too many people believe in the illusion of substitution but it serves no purpose other than to sell subscriptions to SEO tools.

That said, if you’re faced with making blind choices about buying domains (or finding trustworthy link partners) or using SOME metrics to help you make your choices, you’re probably much better off using the metrics. Yes, we can easliy show that Domain Authority has been poisoned by the link spam community. It follows, however, that TrustFlow and PageRank and whatever metrics Bing uses have also been poisoned. We just don’t know how much or where the metrics have been poisoned.

Given the immsene size of the Web and the general assumption that link spam only poisons a fraction of that (maybe a substantial fraction), the metrics at least shine a little bit of light onto the link graph for you.

A perfectly good Website might have no Domain Authority or CitationFlow or TrustFlow simply because Moz and Majestic haven’t crawled their backlinks. Sure, they TRY to crawl a lot of backlinks but they cannot crawl them all. And there are even crazy people like me who make an effort to block SEO tools from crawling their sites (or client sites, or link partner sites). So I know the SEO tools are playing with less data than the major search engines.

At the end of the day you look at a Website’s backlink profile and you make your own choices. SEO tools may provide some insight into what that site has been doing for links, but these tools do not provide any insight whatsoever into what major search engines like Bing and Google KNOW or THINK about any given site’s backlinks.

I’ll concede this, however: If you see a high Domain Authority AND a high TrustFlow for a Website, the fact two different systems agree on the strength of the backlink profile is more noteworthy than if only one of them thinks much of a Website. 90Digital recently published a comparative analysis of these metrics (Cf. http://bit.ly/1mJy8xT) and concluded that there is (in their opinion) a high correlation between the metrics. If you enjoy reading Math/Statistics gobbledy-gook this article (Cf. http://bit.ly/1mJEDgO) explains that the R-squared value in the 90Digital study is provided without proper context.

This article (Cf. http://bit.ly/1cdTQpD) attempts to explain why R-squared can be good even if low and bad even if high (mostly in layman’s terms, with some illustrative charts). The 90Digital study hedges a little bit on claiming a strong correlation between Domain Authority and TrustFlow. I am sure the apparent weakness in correlation reflects the different data sets being used to compute the metrics.

However, Deep Web Interferometric Analysis (Cf. http://bit.ly/rxdFj3) WORKS BEST WITH POORLY CORRELATED METRICS. It doesn’t do you much good to compare the data curves of two metrics that are mostly measuring the same thing. Hence, high agreement between two weakly correlated metrics is more trustworthy than high agreement between two strongly correlated metrics.

When every metric in the room is shouting “HEY! LOOK OVER HERE!” you’re probably on to something. If only the smart metrics (or only the dumb ones) are shouting then there is probably not really much worth being excited about.

* LINK ACQUISITION TIP NO. 76 (Publish a Marketing Case Study) *

I should probably use this method more often myself but I don’t. It is a time+resource intensive link acquisition strategy but it can pay off well if executed properly AND AT THE RIGHT TIME.

Marketing case studies come in all shapes and forms. Your best bet for implementing a strategy like this is to publish a series of marketing case studies. You can do this with any kind of Website.

Where do you get the data for a marketing case study?

__1] From your Website analytics
__2] From your A/B testing (user engagement, conversions, etc.)
__3] From your advertising performance reports
__4] From your user comments and other user-generated data
__5] From your backlink profile
__6] From your sales history
__7] From your lead generation history
__8] From your efforts to get out of a search engine penalty or downgrade
__9] From a rebranding campaign
_10] From a social media promotional campaign
_11] From a traditional media advertising campaign

Regardless of whether you are a pornography affiliate or an online furniture retailer you are doing things with your Website that are similar to what other people both across your industry and in many other industries ARE THINKING ABOUT DOING with their Websites.

And because so many other people are thinking about doing what you have already done with your website, someone is always thinking about analyzing what has been. There are bloggers out there who are constantly looking for marketing case studies to share and discuss. These bloggers may be freelance SEOs trying to make names for themselves or they may be big advertising agency bloggers trying to identify the latest trends in online media activity.

Chances are pretty good that, if you spend any time looking at marketing news and analysis Websites, you have already seen at least one of these case study articles that talk about WHAT SOMEONE ELSE PUBLISHED ABOUT THEIR OWN SITES.

You can publish the case study as a downloadable white paper or as a blog post. You can publish the case study on your retail site or on a secondary site. You can present the case study at a conference or in a Webinar. It really doesn’t matter as long as you make your findings public.

You can also use outreach to share the case study with the right influencers. This requires effort and maybe a little blogger market expertise. It’s certainly not a path for the easily dissuaded and disappointed. But you can get some darned good links from analytical bloggers who feel your case study reveals something their readers will want to know about.

The downside, of course, is that you have to share proprietary data about what is happening with your (client’s) Website. Not everyone is ready to do that.

Still, I have seen some case studies trigger multiple link waves (I called these “echo events” in a December 2008 article on SEO Theory: http://bit.ly/1mJzusr).

* KEYWORD RESEARCH TIP NO. 11 (Leveraging Social Media Hashtags for SEO) *

Hashtags have now become almost ubiquitous in social media. Even if a service doesn’t support them people import them into that service, as happened with Twitter. Over the past few years online marketing blogs have proposed various ways to use hashtags in keyword research. There is also a fairly standard library of hashtag research tools that I see recommended over and over again. Unfortunately, there are several drawbacks to these tools.

__1] Some of them no longer exist (like Twemes) but you still find undated (everfake) articles recommending them
__2] Some of them require that you know the hashtag you want to research
__3] Twitter and other social media platforms don’t publish combined hashtag data in their APIs

Most of the tools I find for hashtag research are focusing on Twitter but I believe we can look forward to seeing more tools to help with Pinterest, Facebook, and maybe also some of the social video sites.

Over the past year I have found other people searching for multiple hashtag support; like me, they have not found any. It doesn’t help much to know how many people used “#internet” if you cannot drill down to the “#internet #marketing” or “#internet #gaming” sub-topics. The first company that cracks this nut stands to make a lot of money, in my opinion.

Here are four working hashtag research tools you can still use today.

__1] http://www.hashtags.org/
__2] http://whatthetrend.com/
__3] http://tagdef.com/
__4] http://hashtagify.me/popular

Seeing which hashtags are trending puts you behind the curve, as far as search engine optimization is concerned. These hashtags have outlived their usefulness as far as trending topics go because they will generally never be allowed to trend again. Social media platforms strive to feature new hashtags in their trending reports.

Hashtags.org offers paid analytics for hashtag tracking on Twitter but the service is very limited and relatively expensive. They also have an events calendar that is not used but if you want to coordinate a hashtag event in advance, you might be able to leverage their system into your marketing process.

WhattheTrend.com tracks contributors as well as hashtags. Some people use this service as a way to find “influencers”. You can write interesting case studies and blog posts about these people in an attempt to earn (passively) vanity links from them (assuming they monitor their names via alerts). I would not want to chase influencers for Tweets and other social media mentions but knowing who is the leading contributor in a popular topic gives you insight into what to look for when doing research for articles.

Tagdef.com allows users to submit definitions for tags. This is a service that can be abused by dim-witted marketers who think they are clever if they submit their own self-serving definitions but you’ll see who is tapped into actually sharing information by searching for hashtag definitions. Again, if you write about social media it’s important to have as much information about what the hashtags mean and who uses them as possible.

Hashtagify.me is, in my opinion, the least useful of these services but it attempts to provide you with a graphical node map of related hashtags (click on a hashtag in one of its period-based reports for top-trending tags).

People DO search the Web for information related to many of these hashtags. So knowing which hashtags are trending or recurring gives you an advantage over other marketers who don’t pay attention to hashtags that may be relevant to your niche. By tying your Web content to social media hashtags you’ll at least be included in the residual traffic that bleeds over onto Web search.

When you search on Google, they will show you which hashtags are being searched for just like any other query. For example, start typing “#seo” into the Google search box and you’ll see suggestions for things like “#seochat”, “#seotalk”, and “#seoul” (okay, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad).

People have begun using compound hashtags because they cannot track multiple hashtags, so you might see “#sfbatkid” but not “#sf #batkid” in the search suggestions.

What you really want, however, is to monitor which hastags are being promoted for upcoming campaigns. For example, an exact match query for “use this hashtag” will show you blog posts and other sources advising people in advance of which hashtags to use for social media campaigns. You can try to refine your searches by using the date range function (this UNDERreports results for the given date range, probably because of restrictions in PageRank) or you can add future dates to your query ala “March 14, 2015″.

Knowing in advance which hashtags will be used for social media campaigns gives you time to prepare content that will be there in the SERPs when people go searching for those hashtags. You can even participate in the social media campaigns by sharing your articles on the days the campaigns are scheduled to start, thus optimizing for both social and Web search.

Futuristic kitchen island design by Zaha Hadid

November 30, 2012 by

The Z.Island by Zaha Hadid is a concept work that shows how a futuristic kitchen island might look like. Besides the gorgeous looking design, there is actually quite powerful technology powering the whole system. It is currently for sale but will only by built on a case by case basis.

Corian®: a new form of malleable material

You will notice that the shape of the kitchen island has many curves. One the reason why this can be accomplished is due to a new material called Corian®, that is very malleable. It is tranlucent in nature and has a very smooth surface. More importantly, it allows designers to free up their imagination and create curvy designs that might not be possible in the past.

Kitchen island to be a multi media center?

Beside the futuristic material, the Z.island comes with all sorts of multi media capabilities. With a LCD screen, a mp3 player, a DVD player and 2 USB port, it can replace any computer devices for pure entertainment functions. We can imagine our wives playing recipe videos on the LCD screens while cooking their way to heavenly food. There is even a scent disperser to create the perfect aroma in the kitchen.

The touch panel screen

With the iphone, everything has to be gesture based and the Z.island is no exception. Featuring a touch panel screen, it allows the user to control not only the lighting for the kitchen but also the scent disperser. Behaving almost like a DJ music mixer, this touch panel can be used to set different moods and atmosphere for the kitchen. I wonder if there is any preset moods such as romantic, family, cosy etc that takes the pain of finding the right lighting to be used.