Many people get stuck in the sandbox because they can't get high quality links.

The solution is to keep churning out mediocre content and build more junk links, maybe also rent a few decent ones. Sure aging can have an effect, but a large part of the ineffective SEO problem might rest within the fundamental techniques being used.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein

Many webmasters are stingy with their links, afraid to link out to other sites. Some people view sending traffic away to other sites as losing your visitors, but linking sorta works on a karma like system.

If you don't link out to anybody and your content is not amazing then most of the best sites are not going to want to link to you. Why should they?

Certain sites are not going to want to link to your site no matter what, but you can still work your way into their community by linking at them. As you cite relevent and useful resources your site becomes more linkable. More of the sites you want to links from will send you some link love.

Linking out freely and regularly is one of the cheapest and fastest forms of marketing available. Many new webmasters drop the ball on the concept because they feel they need all the links to point their way.

In the spirit of linking, I am linking at Jim Boykin's new SEO tool, which tracks who you are linking at: Forward Links (beta). Nice touch on the beta name Jim.

Currently the tool only shows the first 100 outbound links it comes acrost.

I think Jim might further explore the neighborhood concept next week, during his WMW speech. Google Touchgraph also does a good example of showing the neighborhood concept.

Are there any good sites I should be linking to which I have not yet linked to? If so feel free to mention them below.

What is up with Google indexing all the TypePad comment redirects. Clearly the robots.txt file says Google should not be indexing those.

Is ignoring the robots.txt file an accident, or a normal feature at Google?

I have a rather small blog, with about 1,000 posts on it. Google is showing 5,000 pages from my site in it's index. Some of my normal pages are already not being cached because Google is indexing my site less aggressivley due to seeing no unique content on the pages where THEY IGNORE THE ROBOTS.TXT PROTOCOL. Pretty evil shit, Google.

Now I need to figure out how to do some search engine friendly cloaking or somehow issue Googlebot 403 errors when it tries to spider those URLs. Way to suck Googlebot.

Perhaps this issue would have been noticed and addressed by a MovableType employee if they didn't have blind trust in search engines and think all SEOs are scum.

Many TypePad hosted sites & MovableType sites are being screwed / partially indexed due to this problem. MovableType owes it to their paid customers to ensure problems like these are not happening.

So some of my site targeted ads started running today.

Within the targeting there will be biases of the audience personality, and the bias of how well people know you or the product you advertise, but right now with the site targeting not having a ton of competition I can get a glimpse into how effective various AdSense formats and ad positions are, creating my own real world tested AdSense heat map.

Although I should, I do not have many AdSense sites yet. I have been pouring most of my time into this one.

Some markets are absurdly expensive in search, but poor in content.

Mesothelioma is a term which is so expensive that people joke about it, yet when you look at content pricing people end up making little off it. Why? Because many people want those large ad dollars, so there is a ton of junk mesothelioma sites, and limited ad spend to go around them, combined with a fear of click fraud.

If you create scraper sites then there is little sense spending time and money to test the markets. You can just put up a site and see how it works. If you are debating creating legitimate long term content sites the new site targeted ads is an excellent way to see how well certain niches pay.

Simply join an affiliate program or two, run a few ads, and see how much they cost you per impression.

So I got a call today from a person who wanted to automate a large link network system. They wanted to find a way we could work together, but I think the bulk automated links are not the way to go forward for most websites.

It is fairly hard to automate a scalable solution that:

• search algorithms won't detect and

• search editors won't detect and
• people would want to link at

Sure you do not need people to want to link at it to have some value, but if you can't create something that people would be willing to link at it is going to be a constant battle trying to look authentic.

• More and more of the cheap links get bought up by sites trying to be hollow middlemen. After they are bought up, buying additional links gets logarithmically more expensive. You can't grow with the web, at least you can't if you value your time. Thus the value of links from some link networks would diminish logarithmically over time.

• Search algorithms get smarter and devalue more and more of the cheap & easy links.
• Other webmasters hunt out the cheap and easy links, lowering their value and making them easier for other webmasters to find.
• People are going to start mass pirating large quantities of RSS content to create semi authentic looking keyword net sites and link farms which will require algorithms to get much smarter at determining which links are legitimate.

A while ago I wrote that I thought if you had enough junk links that it could place a penalty on your site, but I am not sure how well that idea scales.

In some industries you can't help but get tons of scrapper links by just creating a site. Instead of trying to asign much of a negative weighting search engines may try to just discount the junk links as best they can.

Also, if people scrape the search results and link to all the top 20 listed sites it will not have much of an effect on the relevancy of those top ranked sites since they are all gaining the same links.

When you think about how the web scales, most every well ranked legit site in a competitive market will have many junk inbound links. Need proof? Look at the co-occuring links pointing at the top ranked sites for generic terms in your field.

The biggest way where I think junk links will hurt sites is if they do not have enough legitimate links to offset the effects of the junk links. It is especially easy for that type of effect to occur if you have few links or have not been mixing your anchor text.

The key to futureproof link building is to get links that are hard to get from well trusted sites. Sure that sounds blatently obvious, but sometimes it is cheaper to:

• give away stuff; or

• give people something to talk about; or
• create content around linking opportunities

than it is buy ads, and that is a huge idea most websites seem to be missing out on. Instead of spending so much time figuring out what the latest spam techniques research is about many webmasters would be better off creating something people would want to link at.

Then again, some people who are uber proficient search spammers will always stay one step ahead of the algorithms. It is all about playing off of your strenghts and finding what you love to do.

In the past I did not write in my ebook about somethings I did not care for much. I never really mentioned Alexa because I did not view it as a big deal. An epiphany hit me that I should state why I did not care much for Alexa stats.

Over the last few days my Alexa has doubled from around 13,400 to around 6,800. Wow I am great. Not really!

If you looked at my actual server logs you would see that traffic has been fairly constant over the past week with only a small uptick in traffic of about 5 percent. Why the huge increase in Alexa rankings then? More new webmasters using the Alexa browser finding my site. The three things that helped boost the number of new webmasters reading this site are:

• mentioning the hidden links on FT - WebProNews linked to my site
• my site ranking for Corey Rudl's death, and his friends recently putting out a newsletter saying he died
• About.com WebSearch recently listing my blog as a top SEO blog

Many new webmasters get information from each of those channels. Just a few people from each browsing my site with an Alexa toolbar caused the rankings to nearly double, which is a huge change on a logarithmic scale for a site in the top 10,000.

Traffic has not changed much, sales are about the same, and if you looked just at Alexa things would look a bit brighter than they really are.

Here is what I recently wrote in my ebook:

Alexa is widely tooted as a must use tool by many marketing gurus. The problems with Alexa are:

• Alexa does not get much direct traffic and has a limited reach with it's toolbar
• a small change in site visitors can represent a huge change in Alexa rating
• Alexa is biased toward webmaster traffic
• many times new webmasters are only tracking themselves visiting their own site

Why do many marketing hucksters heavily promote Alexa? Usually one of the following reasons:

• ignorance
• if you install the Alexa toolbar and then watch your own Alexa rating quickly rise as you surf your own site it is easy for me to tell you that you are learning quickly and seeing great results, thus it is easy to sell my customers results as being some of the best on the market
• if many people who visit my site about marketing install the Alexa toolbar then my Alexa rating would go exceptionally high
• the marketers may associate their own rise in success with their increasing Alexa ranking although it happens to be more of a coincidence than a direct correlation

A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic, and the traffic drops off logarithmically. You can fake a good Alexa score using various techniques, but if it shows your rankings in the millions then your site likely has next to no traffic.

Alexa by itself does not mean that much, but it simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on. It can be spammed, but if a site has a ranking in the millions then it likely has little traffic. It is also hard to compare sites in different industries. For example, if I created a site about weight loss there would be many more people searching for it than a site about knitting. Also, you shouldn't forget the webmaster bias the tool has, which means my site will have a higher Alexa rating than it should.