Quite shocking to read about Danny leaving SEW. Bad move Incisive Media.

Nobody in the search marketing field has the credibility or connections Danny does. And, if that were not a big enough loss, Danny works amazingly hard, has done so for over a decade, and is probably the kindest and most approachable guy in the industry. People are loyal to great friendships with him, and will go wherever he does. I can't even imagine the SES conference without Danny. Many others can't, either. Jakob Nielson recently published an article stating that using old words is key to SEO. A person like Danny not only can use old words, but has the authority to create new words, and to shape the framework upon which people discuss search. The real value with niche publishing is being able to own ideas. How much has Adaptive Path gained in mindshare and link equity for coining the term AJAX? How many ideas has Danny gave the market over the last decade? Danny can and will move the market without SEW. I don't think SEW will do that very long without Danny.

I wish you the best whatever you do Danny. Thanks for all the hard work you have done thusfar and all the help you have given me.

SEO Question: What's the best way to determine whether Google has history of a domain - and considers it an old domain?

SEO Answer: Andy Hagans once posted that a site which is getting crawled fairly regularly has at least some trust greater than nothing. The Google Toolbar gives you and outdated exceptionally rough estimate of authority, but beyond just having many pages indexed and cralwed regularly it is a bit more abstract to determine how well a domain is trusted, especially if you do not yet own it and are not able to manipulate its contents to perform testing.

What you can do is back solve for some clues of trust. For example, a domain that does not rank #1 (or near the top of the search results) for the keywords "mydomain" is probably not as well trusted as one that does.

If a domain name ranks for its core unique string then you can see if it ranks well for the keyword phrase "my domain". If it does then you can assume that it would have more trust than one that does not.

Beyond that you can see how well the domain ranks for unique text phrases on its pages or more general keywords. Essentially as you modify your searches (testing shorter or longer word phrase sets and/or wrapping them in quotes or dropping the quotes) you are just testing what chance the domain may have of ranking for various different phrases (and thus its potential ability to rank for other phrases).

Another way to look at a domain is to see how old the domain is in Archive.org. Google crawls the web more efficiently (and likely more aggressively) than smaller search services that are not based on running / being supported by such a large ad network. Thus if a domain has been indexed for a while in Archive.org then it most likely has also been indexed in Google for a while.

Another thing you want to look at in Archive.org is to see if the domain has had a period of inactivity, or if porn webmaster or a pay per click domainer owned the domain for a while. If the domain was inactive for a while, or spent a period of time being abused then it may have had some of its authority stripped at some time.

You can also query Yahoo! for linkdomain: or link: to see what some of the most important backlinks are for a domain. See if those links point at documents that still exist. See if those links point at documents for the same purpose that they originally did. See if the site still serves the same purpose it originally did.

In one of his SEO videos Matt Cutts stated that it was legitimate to redirect a site to a new location so long as the purpose of the site is the same as the original site was. If redirecting a site's authority is legitimate then one could assume that buying or selling a site to use it for its same original purpose is also legitimate as well. If you are going to leverage a site for off topic purposes though you increase the risk that many of the people linking at the site may pull some of their links, and you also increase your risk profile such that a competitor may out you or a search editor may want to remove your site from the search results.

Back to the backlinks...

With the current Google anchor text no longer matters anywhere near as much as it once did, although variation is still a plus.

When looking at the backlinks of a site you can see how long some of those links have been in place by looking through the Archive.org history of the page linking into your site. Links that have developed naturally over time or that have been in place for a long time may carry greater weight than brand new links.

One of the nice features of SEO for Firefox is that it can give you a quick glimpse of the link profile of a page or domain. While some people discount extra weight being placed on .edu and .gov links than other links I would not be so quick to discount that theory. Generally links that are harder to influence are going to be sources that search engines would want to trust more. Either through directly trusting them more on a per link basis, or by creating a version of the web graph which starts near (and places more emphasis on) some of the core trusted authority sites. Since the web started largely in .edu and .gov type environments and those types of pages are often fairly pure in nature and easy to link at it makes sense that their link voting power would be highly represented in the search results.

When valuing a domain you have to look beyond just the link and age related equity it already has built up. How self reinforcing are its key attributes? Would it be easy for someone else to steamroll over your key widget by throwing a bit of ajax on a similar tool? Does a newer competitor have a richer community driven environment that is picking up steam? Are your links next to impossible for others to get? How official or legitimate does the name sound? Will you be able to build it into something that can continue to gain traction and authority? Or is it going to be a site surviving on past popularity until it withers away?

There are lots of things to consider when valuing a domain. Small changes in ad positioning or monetization method can lead to doubling or tripling earnings. And you can also drastically increase the earnings and traffic potential of any site owned by a person who is not savvy to marketing, SEO, or business. Earnings is one important factor, but do not forget to consider the value you can add to a site when trying to determine what you can afford to pay for it.

I meant to update this a while ago, but I have been doing way too many things recently. My lawsuit ended a while ago, but about a month ago the TrafficPowerSucks.com
lawsuit was ended. Thanks to all the people who donated to help me out.

Not in German, but a bit of a focus on Germany in this 29 minute Matt Cutts podcast interview.

Google recently updated Google Base to display impressions, clicks, and CTR.

Each time an item is part of a Google Base or Froogle search, the item gets an impression. Each time someone clicks on an item on a search result page, the item gets a click. Each time someone clicks on the URL of an item hosted by Google Base, the item gets a page view. (This might be from a search results page, a URL in an email, or any of a number of other ways.)

...

And here's a tip: if your offer has many impressions, but few clicks, spruce up its title and add detailed attributes, images, etc. to make it more appealing and easily searchable by users.

That sure sounds a lot like a free copywriting environment, and I have seen a good number of affiliates in that market. Is it worth putting a bit of time into listing a few items? If they advise you to spruce it up where do you draw the line between sprucing and spamming?

When you do a Threadwatch site search in Google most of the pages are filtered out due to having duplicate meta description tags.

If you have complete duplication of any element (page title, meta keywords, meta description) across your site then it is at best a wasted opportunity, but may also hurt your ability to get your site indexed or ranked well in some search engines. Also, if you have the exact same information in the page title, meta description, and meta keywords areas then that onpage duplication across elements through the "eyes" of a search engine at best makes you look like an ignorant webmaster, but might also be a sign of low information quality or spamming. If you have a huge dynamic site and are forced to chose between having duplication across major elements on a page or duplication from page to page or just yanking an element (like the meta description or meta keywords tag) then you are usually better off just yanking the element until you can find a formula that allows you to dynamically generate somewhat unique page level information.

I think sending duplicate information is in many ways far worse than showing nothing at all, and Matt Cutts recently stated similar in a TW comment. I will yank the meta descriptions from Threadwatch pretty soon.

Many content management systems (like MovableType - which this blog uses) make the onpage header and page title the exact same as one another. In an ideal world you could have the option to make them different to help mix up your on page optimization (by allowing you to focus the page on a broader set of keywords) and your anchor text (as people often link at things using the official name as the link).

If you have a small hand crafted website then it is probably worth taking the time to try to make your content as unique as possible from page to page and element to element within those pages. Any time you have the chance to show that your content is hand crafted and unique that is a valuable opportunity, especially as the volume of search spam increases and spamming techniques evolve.

Does how much money you make matter? Some people keep score of their success in terms of dollars, but I still prefer to measure how I am doing in links over money because I think that having a large reach and fast feedback loop will lead to more learning, opportunity, and economic stability than just having a chunk of cash in hand.

The amount of cash you can make from a market is largely dependant on the size of a market and how scalable your business model is. Search works with just about everything and is pretty damn automated. And thus Google is worth about as much as Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon.com, Ford, and GM combined. I have a site about academic stuff that is comfortably over $100 eCPM. I have another site in a different niche in that vertical and the site makes next to nothing for the traffic it has, sporting a completely worthless $15 eCPM. SEO Book does decently well on the financial front (especially because it leads to a ton of indirect revenue streams), but most people do not want to learn SEO. Beginners to the market prefer a tool that provides some alleged secret advantage and established people think they know everything already. For as aggressively as I market this site, how much time I spend on it, and its level of market saturation the site makes nowhere near as much as some of my other projects. I partner in other ideas that have far more potential because they are far easier to scale and/or are in markets that are much larger in nature.

Some people looked at the $132,000 AdSense check that Shoemoney posted a picture of and asked how is that even possible. The thing is, for as well as he is doing there are still others that are even doing way better. In a few years he will probably be making way more than he is today. After you get beyond self sustaining it is all just an issue of scalability, market value, and market depth. And testing and tracking of course, if you are seriously scaling things out.

When I saw Shoemoney post that check I believed it was true because I have seen pieces of so many markets and kinda understand the whole scalability concept. I also have made thousands of dollars by accidentally misspelling a casino name. Some markets just have a boatload of money in them.

I chat with Jeremy from time to time, and one day he decided to show me how easy it was to make money from ringtones. I gave him my AdCenter login and $5,000 to play with. He let me pick a domain name out of a small list. I thought KingOfRingtones.com sounded the spammiest, and thus chose it. :)

He guaranteed that I would make money and said he would reimburse click cost and split the profits in half. In the month the test was active the spend was $1,500 and at the end of the month I got a check for $4,721.60.

Of course the value was not in the cheesy landing page, but in the ~ 200K keywords he uploaded to the account. It takes some serious resources to gather that much market data, but if you can create a way to gather relevant search queries and bid on them before the competition saturates your market you can make great profits. Having unique data sources is like having great link authority. It provides you a business advantage that is hard to replicate and highly profitable in high value verticals.

By Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans.

Link Building... Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it's still the trump card for higher rankings.

Many of us have been hoping that it would go away. In Brett Tabke's 5/18 Robots.txt entry, he echoed a sentiment that many, many webmasters hold on to as a hope:

What happens to all those Wavers that think [i]Getting Links = SEO[/i] when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in various ways? Wavers built their fortunes on "links=seo". When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to.

The pertinent questions:

1. Will link building still be very important for rankings in the medium term?
2. When will link popularity be devalued in favor of other algo elements (that are less tedious, from a webmaster's point of view)?

The answers:

1. Sorry, but link building is still going to be the SEO trump card for the foreseeable future.
2. I wouldn't hold your breath for search engine algorithms to place less importance on link popularity until the Semantic Web arrives, or maybe when HTTP gets replaced by a new protocol. Because links are still the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. And for the forseeable future they're going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.

What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn't count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors.

But please, don't fool yourself. Links that should count are still the key to rankings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo! are only a few short years behind). In that spirit, Aaron and I have created our 101 Ways to Build (and Not Build) Links. (Yeah, it just so happened that there were exactly 101!)

Oh, and mad props to our inspiration, 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies, one of the original authority documents on link building. It was just getting a bit rusty, that's all ("Host your own Web Ring"?). Anyway, enjoy the update.

71 Good Ways to Build Links

Love for Lists

1. Build a "101 list". These get Dugg all the time, and often become "authority documents". People can't resist linking to these (hint, hint).

2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.

3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).

4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.

5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an "authority".)

Hire Help

This list is of course quite long, because there are many ways to build links & link building can be a tiresome, expensive & arduous task. If you have plenty of cash but are scarce on time outsourcing all or part of your link building campaigns can prove to be a quite profitable business strategy.

6. Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned 'PR' (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Paul Graham wrote a great article titled The Submarine which highlights how PR firms get media exposure. Be warned that many PR firms can be quite hit or miss with their promotions & even some of the "successes" may not stick around long. If permanent links are your main goal, make sure that is clearly articulated to the PR firm in advance, as some PR firms sponsor temporary payola content that disappears about a month after your check clears. ;)

7. Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good. If you want low-risk high-quality links Jim Boykin's Internet Marketing Ninjas& Garrett French's Citations Labs are probably the only SEOs firms doing it at scale. Their link building packages start at $5,000 a month and up. If you can't afford to fully outsource your link building, you may want to hire Debra Mastler to train your in house staff.

Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link At

8. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It's an accessibility thing.)

9. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

10. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Building Tool

11. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

12. Syndicate articles to trusted blogs & business news websites like Business Insider & TechCruch. Also consider promoting your content on niche industry websites & on social sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn & SlideShare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic. (Update: about a half-decade after publishing this article many of these article directories were penalized by the Google Panda algorithm & Google has grown to take a more dubious view of these sites as link sources - even though Google still syndicates their ads to these very same sites.)

13. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

14. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc. While many press release sites now add nofollow to press releases, you can also compliment your press releases with media centers on your own site & have custom graphics, data and features on your site so that people who see the release may link directly at the associated pages on your site.

15. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

16. Trade articles with other webmasters.

17. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

18. Write about, and link to, companies with "in the news" pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

19. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links. Even if you do not have a "feel good" angle, you can still get mentions by leveraging data from your surveys as a hook for a story. When we surveyed searchers the survey was later mentioned by an important governmental body. Services like AYTM and Google Surveys are quite affordable.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking

20. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

21. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

22. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

23. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.

24. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.

25. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site. Or if you track companies which are frequently covered on meme trackers you can send a tip to the TechMeme editors and get a thank you mention of your Twitter account.

Local & Business Links

26. Join the Better Business Bureau.

27. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

28. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

29. List your site at the local library's Web site.

30. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

31. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other's business cards. As an example, we've worked with Wordtracker to promote a co-produced keyword strategies guide.

32. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional "normal" links from people asking about your site on social media and web forums.

Easy Free Links

33. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

34. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers or Quora and provide links to relevant resources.

35. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

36. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. Getting added is only half the battle. Make sure you regularly monitor your page for zealot editors who may decide to arbitrarily delete it. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

37. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.

38. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

39. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide links; unfortunately, some will not).

40. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products. The key is to be relevant and have links seem more incidental or complimentary rather than having it look like you are posting just for the links.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

41. Most smaller businesses are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

42. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

43. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

44. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

45. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority. Amazon looks at reviewers who are well liked by other Amazon customers & offers some of them the opportunity to get free products to review via their Vine program.

46. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

47. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

48. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

49. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

50. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN (now Bing), and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

51. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

Design as a Linking Element

52. Web 2.0-ify your site. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX, then promote these features on design blogs.

53. Validate and 508 your site. This (indirect) method makes your site more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental sites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant sites.

54. Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

Link Trading

55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks which are full of low quality sites & hide the links section in a back alley nobody (other than GoogleBot) sees.

56. In case you didn't get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

57. Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads was the most reputable firm in this niche when we originally published this list, but Google has certainly cracked down on paid links over the years.

58. Rent some high quality links directly from Web sites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from sites not actively renting links. Don't ask to buy links, ask to advertise.

59. Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart.

60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your site.

61. Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link profile, and link it to your own site, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

Use the Courts (Proceed with Caution)

62. Sue Google.

63. Get sued by a company people hate. When Aaron was sued by Traffic Power, he got hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal.

Freebies & Giveaways

64. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

65. Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think rankings for terms like football betting odds, keyword tool or mortgage estimator are worth?

66. Create and release open source site design templates for content management systems like Wordpress. Don't forget the "Designed by example.com" bit in the footer! To mitigate some risks one can point links at a page other than the home page.

67. Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

68. Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your site which people can link to.

Conferences & Social Interaction

69. It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) "celebrities" in your industry make great link bait.

70. Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem "real" in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

71. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.

30 Bad Ways to Build Links

Here are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

Directories

72. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid directories (averaging $15 a pop) that send zero traffic and sell offtopic run-of-site links.

Forum Spam

73. List 100 Web sites in your signature file.

74. Exclusively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

75. Post nothing but "me too" posts to build your post count. Use in combination with a link-rich signature file.

76. Ask questions about who provides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET] is an item that you sell. From the same IP address create another forum account and answer your own question raving about how great your own site is.

77. As a new member to various forums, ask the same question at 20 different forums on the same day.

78. Post on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website.

79. Sign up for profiles on forums you never intend on commenting on.

Blog Spam

80. Instead of signing blog comments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords.

81. Start marketing your own site hard on your first blog comment. Add no value to the comment section. Mention nothing other than you recently posted on the same subject at _____ and everyone should read it. Carpet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

82. Say nothing unique or relevant to the post at hand. Make them assume an automated bot hit their comments.

83. Better yet, use automated bots to hit their comments. List at least 30 links in each post. Try to see if you can hit any servers hard enough to make them crash.

84. Send pings to everyone talking about a subject. In your aggregation post, state nothing of interest. Only state that other people are talking about the topic.

85. Don't even link to any of the sites you are pinging. Send them pings from posts that do not even reference them.

Garbage Link Exchanges

86. Send out link exchange requests mentioning PageRank.

87. Send link exchange emails which look like an automated bot sent them (little or no customization, no personal names, etc.).

88. Send link exchange requests to Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Tim Converse, Google, and Yahoo!.

89. Get links from nearly-hidden sections of websites listing hundreds or thousands of off topic sites.

Spam People in Person

90. Go to webmaster conferences and rave about how rich you are, and how your affiliates make millions doing nothing.

91. Instead of asking people what their name is, ask what their URL is. As soon as you get their URL ask if they have linked to your site yet and if not, why not.

Be Persistant

92. Send a webmaster an alert to every post you make on your website.

93. Send a webmaster an email every single day asking for them to link to your website.

94. Send references to your site to the same webmaster from dozens of different email accounts (you sly dog).

95. If the above do not work to get you a free link, offer them $1 for their time. Increase your offer by a dollar each day until they give in.

Getting Links by Being a Jerk

96. Emulate the RIAA. When in doubt, file a lawsuit against a 12-year-old girl. (Failing that, obtain bad press by any means necessary.)

97. Steal content published by well known names. Strip out any attribution. Aggregate many popular channels and just wait for them to start talking about you.

98. Send thousands of fake referrals at every top ranking Web site, guaranteeing larger boobs, a 14-inch penis (is that length or girth?), or millions of dollars in free, unclaimed money.

99. Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car while talking on a cell phone or reading a book. When you run into other people say "excuse you, jerk".

100. Spill coffee on people or find creative ways to insult people to coax them into linking at your site.

101. Sue other webmasters for deep linking to your site. Well, this is more "hilariously dumb" than it is a "bad linking practice".

Calls to Action

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Some people call Noam a conspiracy theorist, but I tend to think that just a label used to discourage institutional analysis, which is exactly something Noam states in Manufacturing Consent, an institutional analysis film about mainstream media bias. He also wrote a book by the same name that I still need to read.
Some of the underlying ideas that Noam frequently conveys in many of his interviews are:

• Creativity is a fundamental need for humans.

• The military (among other purposes) is in many ways an extension of technological institutions.
• Authority should be challenged as to its necessity. If it does not prove useful it should be discarded as a source of power. Self regulating positive and negative market forces will keep most market aspects range bound and organized. This line of thinking is mentioned many times in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.
• Power sources which are largely funded by a small group of people will be biased toward promoting the interests of that small group of people. Self preservation is a key goal of any institution.

He then goes into a bit of information about thought control

• In a totalitarian government you do not need much public support to do whatever you want. In societies with more freedom you must set up a framework for controlling thought which makes it easier to control the people.

• "Democracy requires free access to ideas, information, and opinion." When you hear politicians pushing laws to regulate the web to save the children make no mistake that first and foremost they are pushing to create a fragmented, filtered, and imperfect information source and network which keeps power in the hands of those who are already powerful.
• Controlling people requires "necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications." This is part of the reason there is a left and right side to a story. Create these arbitrary pigeonholes for ways people should think and attach their identities to and hopefully they will not think beyond the categorization that already speaks and thinks for them.

Media shapes public opinion via

• selection of topics

• distribution of concerns
• emphasis
• framing of issues
• filtering of information
• bounding of debate within certain limits

He then talks about the concentration of power and bias of interest toward businesses associated with some publishing formats:

• Most large distribution news publishing formats are owned by a small group of elites who are tied to other large business interests.

• The AP and a couple other traditional news sources have an oligopoly over the mainstream news market. Some newspapers, like the New York Times, distribute a brief of the contents of their next day's paper to other newspapers to help set the daily agenda.
• Many (perhaps most) newspapers consist more of ad space than news (and thus in many ways the advertiser is more of a customer than the reader). While the web and search allow individuals more opportunity (you would never be reading anything I write without them), search engines struggle with balancing this same issue, and are favoring old media by doing things like trusting certain sources to seed vertical search and overemphasize core domain authority in their algorithms. Google has also recently started paying large traditional content providers, including News Corp., MTV, and the Associated Press. They also purchased a portion of Time Warner's AOL. The WSJ recently published an article highlighting that Google believes content partnerships are a key to longterm growth.

Some types of information are created or promoted because they teach people not to think or to not question authority, or to rally behind a common pointless cause.

• Sports and many other forms of news and entertainment are useful to help drive the masses away from
  issues of importance to their life and help build "irrational attitudes of submission to authority."

Some publishing formats (like 30 minute television shows) work great because they segment audiences and require answers to fit in a 20 second window.

• Distribution via channels segmented via concision require you to convey thoughts quickly.

• In limited time slots, it is hard to break new ground or get beyond conventional thought patterns previously formed by others. If you say things outside of the normal realm of thought you do not have enough time to state your reasoning behind your words, and thus can be misquoted or taken out of context and made to look like an idiot.
• If you say something outside of the norm, like "education is a system of imposed ignorance" then you have no time to explain what that means, and end up sounding like you heavily bought into education. ;)

Noam Chomsky then went through a startling example of clear and overwhelming media bias.

In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor. The story of East Timor got a bit of press because the business community was interested what it meant for the Portuguese empire. As the killing reached genocide level in 1978 the US mainstream media coverage of the story dropped to zero. The US provided Indonesia most of their arms for the mass human rights violations and mass murders.

A declassified memorandum of a July 1975 conversation between President Gerald Ford and then-Indonesian President Suharto demonstrates clearly the extent of US support: Ford asks Suharto bluntly, "How big a Navy do you have and how big a Navy do you need?"

Around the same time the US heavily bombed Cambodia. The civilian deaths were not given strict numbers in the media until the Khmer Rouge gained power, at which point the US mainstream media started throwing out words like genocide and numbers like 2 million dead within a couple weeks.

People manipulate systems (as an SEO that is sorta what I do). In much the same way that most people are kept in the dark about SEO or public relations the same is true for just about any type of publishing or marketing business model. But, as Upton Sinclair would say:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

I like learning about power, authority, and publishing business models because

• if you know flaws in other business models it is easy to build business models that eat at their flaws or revolve around markets they would never want to be in

• on the web everything is so scalable that if you have a really great idea it can go far, especially as people learn to trust software programs and other consumers to help them make decisions which once relied on friends or traditional intermediaries.

The AOL data release story has been circulating for a while now, and in spite of tech bloggers being quick with stories people are still getting a bunch of links for it. Here are some of the link opportunities around the idea

• data was released

• privacy concerns
• data was removed, here is a mirror
• free online keyword tools
• creepy searchers and creepy searches
• the searcher covered in the NYT
• CTR by position
• most likely? other statistical analysis

If you see an idea that is quickly spreading on the meme trackers there may be many additional link opportunities if you can give the story a unique spin or see other related ideas that people may think are important.

Yahoo! recently announced they are moving some of their link queries over to Site Explorer. The problem with that is that now there is no way to get .edu and .gov backlink data from Yahoo!

I had my programmer update SEO for Firefox to pull linkage data from MSN Search. In addition, he added some of the features that are in SEOpen and SearchStatus, such that you can highlight nofollows on a page and right click on a page and pull in some of the relevant link and other SEO related information.

After Yahoo! (hopefully) restores the ability to sort linkage data by TLD we will re-enable Yahoo! as a data source. There might be a few bugs in the newest version of SEO for Firefox as well...like if you query MSN Search automatically too quickly they may end up blocking your IP address.

I searched to see if the movie An Inconvenient Truth was playing in a local theater. Google not only showed the Movie OneBox result, and offer a movie search feature, but they also rank the Google Video trailer in their search results and are caching the movies result page. Loren recently posted an in depth article showing how much Google is doing to add interactivity to and exposure for Google Video.

As Google adds features and consumer generated media to Google hosted vertical content pages many review sites and thin sites in high margin verticals will lose a good portion of their value, link equity, and traffic. A big thing that places Google ahead of most review sites is that they will not only collect and structure their own feedback, but their knowledge of language and the web graph makes it easy to access some of the best review information on other sites.

In a couple clicks I can go from reading feedback on Google to reading aggregated feedback snippets from other sites to reading some of the other best reviews on the web. For example, it takes little effort to see the official site, the contempt some sectors show the film, a more objective review, and a speech which inspired the creation of the film.

Recently Google allowed you to link to an exact minute and second of video. They also give each page of a book its own URL.

The traits which caused you to be teased as a kid may be the same traits that cause you to be successful as an adult, if you let them.

Good theory, or bollocks?

Not really directly SEO related, but I have been going to lots of conference parties of late, and it is quite interesting to view the social interactions that occur. Some people are really good at schmoozing, while others are average, and some linger in a corner hoping nobody will talk to them. Friends = recommendations = links. I still wouldn't describe myself as being a great schmoozer, but I know lots of people who are, and I think the most common traits of people who are successful at talking to and meeting new people are:

• they are confident and comfortable with their identity and state of being

• they are not afraid of being rejected or trying new things
• they make it easy for others to laugh, and also laugh at themselves
• they make eye contact and mirror body language
• they tend to largely focus conversations on the interests of the people they are talking to
• they can anticipate conversations, but do not skip ahead of those they are around
• they tend to make the people they are talking to feel comfortable with their identity, and important for being a great person or doing a great job at what they do

The more you know about a person than what an average person off the street would know about them the more likely they are to find you interesting.

I think the feeling of love is when other people feel more complete, happy, or as a better person when they are around you. If you can do things which create those sorts of feelings in other people then they will reciprocate, and (link) love is all you need. :)

For consultants SEO is probably more about sociology, psychology, and healthy social relationships than algorithms.

What good schmoozer traits did I miss?

SEOMoz ... obviously most everyone here probably already reads that, but I like the mixed personalities of the various authors of their blog (other than MM), and it was fun hanging out with everyone from there tonight :)

Dreamhost...what other company of that scale (other than Victoria's Secret, Hanes, or Fruit of the Loom) can get away with showing underwear on their site, or attack a perceived weakness and describe it in a way that makes you want to trust them and buy more? And how quality are the pics in this post?

Silent Bob Speaks...a bit crass for some no doubt, but that is clearly part of the appeal.

I recently have been given about 1/2 dozen books on blogging. I hope and mean to read some of them soon.

Update: After reading Alan Greenspan's book I realize that not all central bankers are bad, but I still believe there are a lot of dirty people in international banking.

Even markets that seem like they should be somewhat honest and forthright are not. Consider the Federal Reserve - a deceptively named private bank which holds a monopoly over currency supplies in spite of likely having no actual reserves. All the evils of a corporation heavily exist in a privatized for profit central bank. Some of the past US central bankers, seeking to keep their power, have stated things like:

Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on the congress...Our only safety is pursuing a course of steady restriction - and I have no doubt that such a course will ultimately lead to restoration of the currency and a recharter of the bank. - Nicholas Biddle.

Shortly after Nicholas plunged the US economy into a deep depression he was caught making comments like the above in public. Back then the media was far more honest (ie: less sold out and owned by bankers) than the current media, and Andrew Jackson won enough support to pay off the bank and prevent it from being rechartered. Shortly afterward there was an assassination attempt on Jackson's life. The assassin bragged that rich bankers from Europe put him up to the test and promised to protect him if he were caught.

After President Garfield spoke out against private bankers he was assassinated.

The civil war may have also been largely caused by powerful bankers from Europe. Slavery was not a major issue prior to the war according to Lincoln. Lincoln, who opposed a privately owned central bank, was assassinated only 5 days after Lee surrendered to Grant.

After the civil war the US was quite prosperous, but powerful bankers pushed congress to contract the money supply
1866 - 1.8 billion in circulation - $50.46 per capita
1867 - 1.3 - $44
1876 - 0.6 - $14.6
1886 - 0.4 - $6.67

The tightening of the money supply caused deep depression.

Through cycling interest rates and money supplies central banks can create false markets then extract the profit from the work of others when they re-tighten the monetary supply. The boom bust business cycle is used for central banks to exploit profits from citizens and companies alike. The bankers in the Federal Reserve more-less have insider info on how to bet for or against sectors of the economy (on top of having a 100% profit margin plus interest on the central bank credits to the government).

The Federal Reserve pays for government bonds by the issuance of electronic credits based literally on nothing. How pathetically inept is the US government to allow an arbitrary 3rd party to have 100% + profit margins on creating the currency needed to run that government?

England was at war for 56 of the first 119 years after the bank of England was created. Many banks finance both sides of a war. Many times the loans are placed with the guarantee that the winner will pay the debts of the loser.

Nathan Rothschild had started selling English stocks and bonds after the defeat of Napoleon to misdirect the market while he secretly started buying assets at a fraction of the price. As Napoleon Bonaparte stated:

The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain.

Ernest Seyd admitted that in 1872 he was set to bribe US congressmen to demonetize silver. By 1873 gold was the only accepted form of coin money in the US. Since gold was quite scarce and monopolized, putting America on the gold standard allowed the owners of gold to manipulate the markets.

In 1933 private ownership of gold in the US was confiscated by the government (for the price of $20.66 an ounce). After most gold was turned in the price per ounce was raised to $35, but only foreigners could sell gold at the new higher price. Then over the years gold was likely smuggled out of Fort Knox to wealthy foreigners associated with international bankers at cheap prices. In 1982 Regan commissioned a group to study the feasibility of going back to a gold standard. They reported that the US treasury had no gold at the time. This is a perfect example of why true patriots chose to fight or ignore bad laws.

In 1891 the American Bankers Associate sent out a memo stating that on September 1st 1894 they would cause a deep depression to seize assets at pennies on the dollars. And it happened.

There has been a nongovernment ran US central bank at least 4 times. In 1913 the current one was put in place. WWI occurred a year after the federal reserve was created. Within the first 25 years of its existence the Federal Reserve caused 3 major economic downturns, including the great depression.

In April of 1929, Paul Warburg, the father of the Federal Reserve, sent out a secret memo to friends stating that "a collapse and nationwide depression was certain." In August of 29 the fed began to tighten money. Rockefeller, JP Morgan, and others just happened to be lucky in getting out of the stock market in 1929. On October 24th, 1929 big New York bankers called in their 24 hour broker call loans. That day was known as black Thursday.

After the crash, instead of lowering interest rates the fed continued to contract the money supply by 1/3 from 1929 to 1933. While America was suffering in depression 10s of billions of US dollars were sucked out of the US economy to prop up Germany (which had assets largely owned by international bankers that bought them for next to nothing after WWI).

All the above obvious market manipulation shows that privately owned central banks do not breed any sort of stability (and in fact just the opposite), which shows just how useless they are.

Money is not a finite commodity but a means to barter. Since I was a little kid I went back to the town that I grew up in and noticed so many payday loan stores that never existed when I was a kid. Why are all of these scammy loan businesses popping up?

If you want to learn more about the economic fraud that is the Federal Reserve (and if the 16th amendment may even be illegal) check out The Money Masters - where many of the above points came from - (also on Google Video here and here).

The US is now in a persistent war that will most likely only end when economic incentive for it goes away or the public cares enough to force the powers that be to end it.

How pathetically inept is the US government to allow an arbitrary 3rd party to have 100% + profit margins on creating the currency needed to run that government? Why are so many countries and individuals living in a state of persistent debt to arbitrary sources when money is not a finite commodity but just a means for barter? Money is usually created from nothing and based on nothing by arbitrary for profit companies.

Shouldn't the debt of most men be to their children more than to a few opulent sleazeballs who arbitrarily inherited a large portion of the world's wealth based on voodoo economics?

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild

This is probably quite an absurd post for an SEO blog, but it is just a reminder that markets can sway at any given time, and even allegedly valuable and trustworthy standards of value are heavily manipulated and can erode quickly. Smart business owners make their businesses fluid enough to be able to ebb and flow with large powerful market forces.

I used to work on a submarine, and one of the biggest design criteria for the sub was redundancy. Many businesses fail because they bank on one channel working forever. That is rarely the case.

Patrick Gavin recently offered an insightful post about keeping a spare website or two just in case an algorithm update whacks your site.

or at least most people in this thread think so. But then in other forum threads I have been referred to as a genius. I am glad someone believes in me more than I do ;)

If you find a good book (like A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History) sometimes you are not paying for what is in the book, but also what biases or other information are not included in the book (as any author, business model, or information format carries biases).

I think one of the biggest reasons many people fail is they try to satisfy everyone. Average people suck. Experience is the best trainer, but people discounting the value of other things typically tend to start from the framework of thinking their time is worthless. And so it is. Everything is overpriced. Until you die.

Andy Hagans has a great post about getting a new domain indexed and ranked.

Now a new domain probably isn't any better than the other one we had, and I wanted the launch to go right, dang it. So I grabbed it every trusted link that I could (quickly) -- Dir.yahoo.com, Sbd.bcentral.com, Business.com, a hosted adverpage on an older domain, and an in-content link from an old, ranking (trusted) related site that a friend owns (Thanks mate!)... Two days later, bam! 28 pages in, four days later, 160 pages in.

I wonder which friend gave him that trusted link ;)

The trend to ranking in Google is moving away from just get more more more more more more to getting less but higher quality links. After you get enough trusted links you will probably automatically pick up a few spammy links, but the value of actively building low quality links is diminishing daily (at least, if you care to rank well in Google).

Occasionally you will see people say that paying $300 for a link in the Yahoo! Directory is a rip off, and a couple years ago the economics leaned more toward getting many low trust links. But over the last few years there have been tons of bottom feeding business models which have sprung out of a link = a vote line of thinking to where Google needed to obfuscate the market and increase the cost of low cost links.

Indeed the concept of link = vote will still be sold for a great deal of time (similarly to how people still sell search engine submission software and services). Most of it is not honestly valuable, but if it is profitable and scalable and there is a market people will keep selling it.

Keep in mind that if many search spammers follow the same recipe then the relevancy algorithms might get rebaked, but for now

• for Google, with links less is more
• the cost of some trusted links (in terms of time, money, and/or editorial review processes) makes many of them prohibitively expensive for certain spam content models

In one of Matt's recent SEO videos he also mentioned the value of soft launching.