Give It Up! SMX Advanced Seattle 2008
From Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008
As I noted previously in our SMX Advanced 2008 Seattle post, there was a 30-day embargo in place on anything learned in this “give it up” session. Meaning, you can’t blog about it for 30 days, and the search engine guys aren’t allowed to fix any loopholes uncovered in these sessions for 30 days either. So, consider this stuff old news and any loopholes fixed as of today.
Here’s what I picked up from the session:
Stephan Spencer – Netconcepts
Developed for WordPress: An seo title tags plugin will now allow you to mass edit URLs for optimization
Marty Weintraub
Go ahead & do reciprocal linking, but be a bad link partner: Set up reciprocal links, but nofollow yours so it looks like all of your “reciprocal” links are actually one-way. put it in the tos/policy of your linkexchange and leave it up to your partner to figure it out.
Has built a nifty tool that will crawl MyBlogLog & StumbleUpon accounts so it looks like your profile visits every day. This makes it look like he/they are always visiting your site. This encourages them to be flattered and like you–then, link to you.
Michael Gray
Discovered that Google’s quality score has nothing to do with the content of the landing page despite what they say. By duplicating a landing page on two different domains & running the exact same ad & keyword on two different accounts – he found that he was able to pay substantially different cost per click and had substantially different quality scores. Therefore, quality score = algorithmic trust score. Meaning – the ‘trust’ of your domain has a lot to do with your quality score.
EvilGreenMonkey
Tip 1: micro-site creation: control inbound links, anchor text, sell links, etc
- get free/cheap hosting
- avoid .info domains & dupe class C IPs
- choose a CMS (ie wordpress)
- don’t use the same WHOIS details
- don’t register domains on the same day/week
- don’t get links from the same places
- don’t use the same content on difft blogs
- don’t use the same templates & linking structure
Tip 2 – automate content development
- write an original piece of content (contentwriter)
- re-write each sentence 5 times to say the same exact thing
- get a programmer to create multi-source sentence arrays (instantarticlewizardpro)
- submit content to every article directory with embedded links
- check articles with copyscape
- randomize words within sentences (ie don’t = do not, pub = bar, etc)
- publish like crazy on all your domains
Tip 3 – on-topic spamming
- Run precise searches on google/yahoo (site:.edu +comment +”red wine” -you must log)
Todd Friesen
Tip 1: online rep management. See a result you don’t like? Sign up to monitor that page for uptime and once you get an alert that a page is down, submit it to Google’s URL removal tool. If they catch it down too – that page is gone for 6 months…
Tip 2: Hotmail addresses are recycled after a while. You find a blog (blogspot/tempger) you want to own that seems abandoned? You can try & reclaim an unused Hotmail address (assuming it’s abandoned too) then takeover the blog.
Rand Fishkin
Tip 1: Rand went through lots of advanced search operators – I didn’t have time to get them all down…
- Use the “related” search (related:sitename.com), find the top ranking sites then go get links from their related sites
- What’s popular in a particular realm? use wildcard * searches. try a product search “dell desktop *”
- linkfromdomain (MSN live search) – where does this domain link to?
- pages in order of importance “www site:sitename.com”
- anyone else want to add the notes you took down on advanced operators – go ahead & comment below. We’ll link to you.
Google Local Ranking Tips
- registration
- perceived closeness to center of city
- number of local reviews
- local link popularity (other places in gg local in the same city)
- local phone number
- participation in the online menu services (zagat, allmenus, menutopia, etc)
- quality of local review
- city name inclusion in anchor text
- local (non-google) directory listings
- keyword/city in business name
- domain authority/page rank
- address inclusion on web pages
- category. if google local’s categories don’t fit – disable them and let yellow pages categories do it…
- For a more comprehensive take on local search ranking factor – check out David Mihm’s “Local Search Ranking Factors Vol. 1“
That was all the notes that I took down – there were more nuggets to be sure. Add links to your notes from “Give It Up” below.
Ben Thanks for the review. It was nice to see you again in Seattle. Earlier in the year, SEMpdx was a highlight for me and it was pleasure to get to know Portland.
I think using the work “bad” in describing our clients’ link trading activities is not quite accurate.
I don’t want your readers thinking that you’re highlighting a scummy tactic.
To clarify, there are 2 different values to link exchanges: traffic/promotion and Google juice. They are very different. It’s true our clients’ link partners sometimes don’t understand the difference. It’s not our job to explain…still we go to lengths to be up and up by explaining well beyond the call of duty.
All conversation about naive trading partners aside, we negotiate straight up with our trading partners and specifically write them prior to encourage review of the written policy (posted on every page). THEN we write them again and encourage them to ask us with any questions regarding linking policies. There gets to be a point where it’s just not our fault if they don’t get it.
If our client agrees to a link exchange with sites that do no have near as much authority as our clients’(often), we have no qualms in equalizing the deal by negotiating both aspects of link value separately. Most of the time the traffic we send is worth way more than the link juice they give us.
No money changes hands. No links are bought and sold. No guidelines are violated. Google can’t have it both ways…either the value of a link is cut in half and we can share each half as we please, or let’s do a way with NoFollow.
Not understanding the multiple nodes of link value is why clients need to hire firms like yours.
Marty! Thanks for writing in & clarifying.
Good point, perhaps saying “bad link partner” was written a little hastily as I pounded out my notes.
I think you’re right in that it’s not your fault if your client’s link partners don’t get it and I think you were perfectly clear in conveying your responsibility and that you fairly negotiate… even if I didn’t write all that out.
On a personal note – I would like to see NoFollow done away with.
Good to see you again too Marty.
Thanks again for another insightful post. This is hands down one of my fav SEO blogs. Thank you.
Nice Information.