Matt Marlon, CEO of Traffic Power, who was recently profiled in the WSJ:

Mr. Marlon, 61 years old, filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy-court protection in 1996. In 1997, Mr. Marlon was indicted on charges of conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance. He later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, related to possession of a chemical used to make methamphetamine, and was sentenced to three years of probation, including six months of home confinement. The court record for his drug offense said he also had an alias, "Jimmy Ray Houts."

He recently had a fan site created at Matt Marlon.net. I wonder if he will send them a bogus lawsuit like he sent me.

If you are not a real charity and desire my ebook (but not enough value to consider paying for it) I recommend grabbing a dated version of the ebook from a file sharing network.

This may sound a bit harsh, but I am trying to keep up my ability to support legit charities as long as I can...and for that to happen some things need to change.

My charity support is going to require more effort from the charities. In the past I have done lots of work trying to help anyone and everyone, but I need to take a little load off the inbox.

If I try to make myself freely available to everyone and they expect fast responses for me giving them my business model free then I am setting up a piss poor value proposition. There needs to be some effort put in on the end of the charity so that I am not a charity verification service and so they value what I am giving them.

Earlier today I got this gem of a comment:

We are an Embassy of India School in Moscow, Russia and requested per your post "If you are a certified non profit, charity, church, open software developer, or school I can provide you with a free copy." for a free copy. It is now more than a week and we are still waiting. If you don't intend to send for free, than do not post the crap about sending free on your site.

And generally I am pretty quick with email, but sometimes I miss a few (and now have about 700 in the inbox to sort through - and get around 100 a day). With the charities I sometimes ask for verification. Based on the initial emails and the lack of follow through with some of them I would estimate that over 50% of the charity requests I get are fake.

Some people have went so far as trying to spoof their sent from email address. Others have created near similar sites and done bait and switch website techniques.

The number of demanding fake charity sleazeballs eating up my time is unfortunate. They are a scourge on my ability to learn and help good people and I am not going to let them change my perception of legitimate good causes. I will simply not waste my time servicing the fake ones.

Going forward for a charity to get my ebook free they must email me the following:

• my name (if you use dear sir expect sir to be synonymous with spam bin, because that is where it is going)

• an email with an address that matches the URL of the charity site (if you are an outside consultant helping a charity and you think it will really help you then it should not be that big of a deal for you to set up an email address)
• some sort of verification that they are a legitimate charity. (ie: see we are referenced by Network For Good here... or something like that...wherever they are referenced that MUST link through to the charity site matching the email)
• Most legitimate charities create a site and get no traffic before they even realize they could use something like SEO. If you have no website and outside verification then you can get that sorted before contacting me.
• you must also email me a URL from the charity site where there is a contact form or email address listed that I can mail back access of the ebook to
• if you have a charity registration number that also helps

Other requirements to get a free ebook:

• you do not have to be a registered charity if you are a legitimate good cause. If a site like World Changing wanted my ebook and was not an official charity of course they can have it free, but they would need to have content that made me feel like they were a good cause to me and possibly others stating what a good cause they are on their website.

• Legit open source stuff, legit schools, and things that I just think are cool qualify as well.
• I am uncertain as to what religions are right or wrong, but I believe many organized religions cause more harm or conflict than good. I feel like I am being fake if I help spread things I do not believe in to promote myself. Thus going forward the only religious institutions I will offer my ebook to for free are those which represent interdenominational institutions (ie: those that accept all types)...and it should say so on your site...you should point me to where it says this.

If you send me a charity request email and it does not comply with any of the above do not expect a reply.

Mail requests to seobook@gmail.com

Love it or hate it please let me know your thoughts :) or :(

I always noticed that some blogs and sites like Threadwatch got uber tons of comments while this blog did not get many.

I recently bought Threadwatch, and the last couple days I have put far more effort into that site, but have noticed a good number of comments on this one as well. It sorta goes to show that sometimes by changing your perspective you can appreciate stuff more.

Thanks to everyone who has been commenting and whatnot.

Now another thing that is a huge difference between this site and that one is that in the past I think I spent lots of time thinking about and analyzing stuff to the point where few people would want to comment on any of the posts (ie: if you already say it all then there is nothing left).

On Threadwatch the audience, editors, format, and whole system is more geared around an infoporn mechanism. Find cool stuff and let others comment on it. Try to find at least 1 or 2 things every day that make readers become smilers and most likely writers.

If you want others to comment sometimes it is easy to leave a bit out. If you work really hard to say both sides of a story it is much harder for readers to quickly add something than if you mostly highlight one side and give people easy things to add.

Shorter is typically better as well. As far as social interaction goes short sweet and funny will typically beat out comprehensive and perhaps being a bit overly wordy.

I still need to work out lots of the mechanisms for the social stuff, but that is one hell of a site to be able to learn on and while I hope it does great even if I hosed up I think the experience is worth so much money. Thanks again for the opportunity Nick and all the readers / editors / writers at TW.

There are many problems with running multiple similar brands in parallel.

• It splits your focus

• you end up cross posting stuff where it does not belong

I am going to consolidate many of my domains in the near future. SeoBook and ThreadWatch will remain unique channels, at least until some tells me that I am screwing up majorly bad and it should be otherwise.

The key for me to do well with them is to respect them for what they are...ie: this site is supposed to be about actionable SEO tips, and ThreadWatch is about rumor and stuff that is fun and interesting about search / technolgy / SEO.

I also recognize that some of the people posting comments at TW have been in the game far longer than I. In the past I would reference some of the comments that I thought were great, and I will keep doing that going forward.

So I recently set up a bunch of new websites and wanted to link out to a few authoritative sites right off the start. I added various numbers of outbound links to each channel, but after setting up a number of them I got pretty quick at researching where I should link at, even when I did not know a topic that well.

Outbound links are like a gimme in SEO. It's fairly hard to get the right type of people to link at a new site unless you bribe them or it's a great site, but just about anyone can improve their web community by linking out to some of the better resources on their topic.

Terms like PageRank leakage and bad neighborhood have made some webmasters become greedy or paranoid with their link popularity to the point where their sites become harder to link at because they are islands.

How do you find the best resources to link at?

What do the Various Major Engines Like?
My first port of call is Myriad Search. Search for the core phrase your site is focused on, synonyms, and phrases slightly broader in scope than your keyword phrase.

If you are in a hyper competitive field MSN tends to bring up some fairly spammy results, but sometimes seeing the results mixed together gives you a nice flavor of what they all like and sometimes you will find a nugget ranked at #7 in Yahoo! or #6 in Ask that all the other engines missed.

Unfortunately I am a fairly default searcher (primarily just using Google) but using Myriad helps me get an idea of what people can get away with (as far as content quality goes) in some of the engines.

Some people recommend other meta search engines, but like Berkeley, I think most meta search engines have way to many ads in the content area to be of any use.

Research, Research, Research!
Yahoo! Mindset allows you to bias your search results toward commercial or information result. Tilt that puppy full on research and see what sites they think are informational in nature.

Is that Page Created by the Government?
The Yahoo! Advanced Search page makes it easy to search just .gov or just .edu resources (or both at once). Sometimes this will be a miss, but I have found many great resources using the Yahoo! Advanced Search page.

Directories:
Many directories have picks or a star on favorite sites. DMOZ and the Yahoo! directories are the two most well known directories. You can also browse the Open Directory Project organized by PageRank using the Google Directory.

Don't forget some of the smaller higher quality directories created by librarians. LII is a killer site.

Vertical Authorities:
If you run a finance related site odds are pretty good that you can find something good at Fool.com, MarketWatch.com, Forbes.com, etc.

If you run an automotive site it is easy to link at Edmunds, Nada, Kelly Blue Book, etc.

To drill down go to a relevant vertical authority site and do a site level search for information related to your topic.

Broad Authorities:
When all else fails I like to link to sites with great overall authority scores if they have relevant pages or channels. Some examples include:

• Yahoo! Directory

• DMOZ
• Wikipedia
• About.com

Other sites which have content on a wide array of topics like Answers.com, Topix.net, HowStuffWorks.com, and Britanica.com et al are also easy to link at.

I believe this site lists some of the top .com's.

That is about as far as I have gone with most of these new sites, but sometimes you may want to hunt further if you have an uber spammy topic like cash advance or are trying to go further in depth on a topic that is already well covered. Some other ideas...

Local Search:
If your searches are local in nature you may some of the best information by using regional search databases.

Filetype:
Don't forget that you can specify filetype. Spamming is a game of margins, and on the whole the average .doc or .PDF is going to be of higher quality than the average web page.

Search Engine Showdown has a good chart of search engine features.

Related Sites / Pages:
When you find a good site you can see which sites are related to it. Use a tool like the Google related search or the Touchgraph Google Browser.

Social Bookmarking:
There are a variety of social bookmarking websites which can help you find that key resource you need to reference to complete an article. De.lici.us is probably the most popular.

Link Socially: Tip for Blogs:
Technorati, Feedster, Daypop, Ice Rocket, and Google Blogsearch and Yahoo! Blogsearch are a few of the more well known blog search engines.

If you are running a blog or some type of a topical channel do not forget to use ego stroke techniques in your content and citations. Even if your idea is better than someone else's, or your read their idea after you came up with yours still give them a bit of link love.

Sometimes mentioning a prominent blogger (saying they are so right, they are hosed, they are normally spot on but are messed up on issue x) equates to a quality link back and many secondary links from various non clued up ditto heads :)