SEO Shadow

Sunday night and I’m tearing through a whole pile of work that’s been stacking up like no other, but i thought I’d get a little something out there for the Black and Gray Hatters as promised.

I hope some of you had a degree of success with the voucher poaching by the way. I’m well and truly stocked for the new year! So sorry in advance to anybody who plans on grabbing a copy of .Net magazine in Farringdon this month. I’d be surprised if there’s any freebies left that aren’t sitting in a nice pile on my work desk.

Anyway, I thought I’d cover a subject that’s been known to ruffle a few feathers in the past. Hell, it took me a little while to work out that I was being targeted by it, and then I sat back in mild admiration at the sheer efficiency of it all.

Phantom referral URLs!

Come on, we’ve all been there. You launch a new website and monitor it’s progress obsessively through your analytics tool of choice. The links are coming from where you expect. The odd Google long tail result mixed up with some Digg submissions and a forum sig. Then suddenly an unknown URL pops up in to your referred URLs inventory. What’s the first thing you do? You check it out! Who’s linking to me, man?!

Hey, you never know, somebody might be spreading positive words about the site. My ego’s never one to stay deflated so I nearly always click through to check what’s going on. Yet when you get to the referring URL, there’s no sign of your link on the page and it’s ultimately quite a flacidating experience. Am I getting too involved?

It’s not in the main content, it’s not in the footer. It’s nowhere to be seen and you’re probably scratching your head at how somebody managed to get from the mystery site to your own in one swift click.

The reality is that they probably didn’t.

This is all managed through a Firefox extension, and a very helpful extension for spammers at that. The execution is simple but brilliant. You define what gets sent to a website in your HTTP Referrer key and this will be logged whenever you visit a page. So if I’m visiting Joe Average’s website and I’ve set my HTTP Referrer to be logged as http://www.fiendish-link.com/awesome-sites.html, the next time Joe Average loads up his web stats, he’s going to have a rather unusual referring URL on display.

The natural reaction will be to click through and see why his site has received a mention. Of course, we didn’t mention Average Joe. We’ve bombed our referring URL on every single page that we’ve visited while using the Firefox extension.

The extension is called RefControl and is available to download freely from the Mozilla website. Once you’ve downloaded the add-on, you’ll notice that several options become available in your RefControl settings.

This is all you need to worry about:

Replace the link with the page that you want people visiting and sit back to watch on as an endless stream of mystified webmasters click through to see their site getting some non-existent rep.

Now, what - you might ask - is the bloody point in all of this? Why do we want webmasters to click through? Surely they’re only going to close the window and never return?

Maybe so, but it’s worth noting that many web stats are displayed publicly and so we can hop on the PR gravy train with a few completely effortless backlinks.

Another thing to consider:

Say, we don’t link to our own site. What if we link to an affiliate product? Or what if we game the system in to spamming our way up the social bookmarking sites?

It only takes a click.

Hey, guys. I thought some of you might enjoy this! I strolled in to W.H Smiths today and grabbed the latest copy of .net magazine. And what did I find inside? A nice £30 voucher for Google Adwords!

The voucher is loose, so it can be fished out with ease. I managed to walk away with £210 worth of Adwords clicks stuffed in my pocket. That might add up to me being a complete and utter bastard, but hey, charity starts at home!

The magazine you’re looking out for is Issue 179 of .Net.

Grab the vouchers and off you go - quite a nice freebie for testing a landing page that you didn’t want to otherwise spend money on.

It’s not completely free (you’ll have to pay £10 to kick-start a campaign), but this money goes straight in to your advertising so as long as you’re not a complete SEM retard, you should be in the money.

I’ll be back with some Black Hat profit-burners later in the week!

 

Fresh from our look at Black Hat affiliate bombing, I thought I’d take things back to basics and focus on some squeaky clean White Hat traffic optimization techniques.

Now when I say White Hat, I cringe a little bit inside. The truth is, these ideas shouldn’t even be classified one way or the other. They should be seen as good business sense.

The more you know about your target market, the better equipped you are to sell to it.

Lets drill that thought in to our heads before we go any further. Making a sale doesn’t have to be rocket science, but you’ll find your chances of converting become infinitely greater when you know just who in the hell you’re targeting.

The problem with selling on the web is that it’s a faceless, all-too-typically linear experience. If I want to sell a dieting package, for example, I have to design with all segments of the market in mind. Not to get too complicated, but there are many differences in the way that I’d promote a dieting product for women (looking good, medical concerns, staying healthy…) and the approach that I’d take when selling to men (chicks love it, optimal performance, good for sports…).

Selling is about appealing to the needs of the customer. We have to cut out the crap and get to the root of what they want. And if they NEED it, well, that makes selling a dream.

So looking at the web, what tools do we have at our disposal?

1. Referring URL

Every time you click on a link, the referring URL gets passed on. This doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own. But when you consider that it’s possible to capture the exact search term somebody used to reach your page, the possibilities are endless. What if we could dynamically adjust our content to match the user’s needs as given away in the search string?

Take this referring URL for example:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cheap+dieting+products+for+men

What can we say for sure about our customer with this piece of information?

• It’s a man.
• He wants to diet.
• He doesn’t want to spend a lot of money.

Using some basic logic and PHP knowledge, we serve up the three cheapest dieting products in our database. We then call on the men keyword and dynamically alter our image references to display only pictures of male six packs and world famous athletes. And if it’s a woman searching? Land your pitch with photos of successful businesswomen, slim adored housewives and health conscious imagery.

We can go as far as serving different snippets of copy that are written specifically for one audience over another.

Split testing is fundamental to any successful affiliate campaign. But it doesn’t always reveal the true facts of your marketing success (or failure) – why? It’s because we’re altering the entire shape of a website when we split test. Either this works or that works, but we never think about who it works for. We could potentially be missing out on dozens of sales. The real success lies in handling the variables that matter to each segment of our target market.

2. Geographical IP mapping

Welcome to the next big thing in Internet marketing. I say that, but porn websites have been making a dime on this information for years. It’s only recently that more orthodox websites have started to catch on.

Every time you visit a website, your IP is logged. If you’ve spent any time meddling with analytics software, you’ll be well aware that geographical data for our visitors is stored. This makes it possible to see not just where our traffic is being referred from, but where in the world that user actually is.

If you’ve visited any dating or adult sites recently (hey, it ain’t a crime to look), you’ve probably bared witness to one of the most effective marketing strategies of the last two years. And you probably didn’t even notice it.

Sign up now to chat to Jessica, 18 years old from YOUR TOWN HERE!

When you visit the page, your IP address is mapped to the nearest city and displayed as Jessica’s hometown. Caught between star gazing at the fine young woman and wondering whether she lives just down the street, it’s easy to see how some non-tech savvy users could be persuaded in to signing up under the pretences of getting some action tonight.

Now, this is only one example of how IP mapping can be used to focus a product or service on the consumer’s needs. I can see this technique becoming extremely popular in mainstream Internet marketing although it’s still very much in the primitive stages as far as your average affiliate website is concerned. Conjures some creative possibilities, don’t you think?

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Alright, guys. I’m gonna run you through a technique that I’ve used for the mass production of Black Hat affiliate websites. The beauty of this trick is that it’s actually quite lateral in its scope for use. You can take it as far over to the dark side as you want, but it’s equally rewarding to modify it for your White Hat projects.

I’m going to cover the White Hat side in the next post. For now, we’re going to veer in to some deep end Black Hat SEO.

The Black Hat essentials

We’re going to need a content generating script or some kind of mechanism to rewrite chunks of text. Now, as you’re probably aware, quality rewriting softwares are few and far between on the web. Thankfully, we don’t need something that’s going to read like a white paper. We just need to slot our pages in Google’s index and let them grab some keyword traffic.

We also need a little PHP experience, or a touch of knowledge when it comes to dealing with referrers and search strings. I don’t have the time to dedicate an entire blog to PHP - or indeed, any other language - but I’m going to trust that you’ll be able to find a script for what we need. It’s foundation stuff.

The root of the problem

What is the number one problem that we’re faced with when trying to sell an affiliate product? Assuming that the product is legit and presented tidily, it’s not about the volume of traffic. It’s about directing the right people to the right offer.

Affiliate websites are generally prone to pitching too many products at too many audiences. The number of web hosting affiliate sites I’ve seen trying to cross-sell bargain shared hosting, alongside private virtual servers and premium packages is enough to make my eyes bleed.

It’s a mistake that new kids on the block make all the time. We dip our feet in the riches of the affiliate pool and try to sell every last offer, every last bargain and every last scheme. The more the better, surely? The greater the chances of success?! Well, no. 

The result is a mish-mash website lacking focus. Mr. Megabucks lands on your pages wanting to buy a dedicated server but catches sight of your shared hosting bargain range. He immediately gets confused and travels elsewhere to splash his cash. If you’d just had a way of knowing that he wanted a dedicated server, you could have drawn his focus to only those offers that were going to make him part with his credit card.

Well, we’re not going to focus on information architecture until the next post, so let’s cut to the chase and address this problem the Black Hat way.

Give your customers what they want (now that’s not very Black Hat!)

Every time somebody lands on your website via Google, the search term they used is logged and accessible in the search string. We can get to this string dynamically and capture the search terms that are bringing traffic to our site.

Great, you already knew that. You’ve had Analytics for the last six months so I should stop patronizing you.

But have you thought about what this information means? You can SEE what the user came for! 

Let’s propose that a user gets to my language product site with the search term cheap discount Italian courses. If the user lands on a page that is promoting premium top-of-the-range Italian courses, it’s likely that his stay will be a short one. You might think about skirting this issue by making a page for cheap Italian courses, a page for premium courses, and a page for just about every other keyword variation.

Feel free, I’ll see you in a few weeks.

What we need is a way to grab that search string and dynamically output the exact offer that our visitor is looking for. We’re so much more likely of capturing their attention and making a sale if we immediately present them with their exact requirements. And here’s how.

Do your market research

We need to set aside an hour and draw up a list of all the keyword variations that correlate to the products we’re going to be promoting. I would suggest you find a niche market which offers a variety of budget offers and premium solutions. Now what are the customers going to be searching for? Using our example of Italian courses, here are some secondary terms to consider.

Cheap, bargain, discount, quality, excellent, best, top, number one, in USA, in the UK

All of these phrases are interchangeable. For example we could have somebody searching for Italian courses in the UK, and another after quality Italian courses.

Now we do some more research. Scout out your market and draw up a list of products that you can promote. Analyze the product and decide for yourself what category it falls in to. Is it a bargain course? Is it an advanced premium package? Is it restricted by location?

Note down the URL of each product and plug it in to a database or a simple holding script.

We want to start drawing direct connections from our keyword terms to affiliate offers.

So I might have a list that looks like this:

cheap italian course  —  http://www.cheapcourses.com/italian-product.php?aff=myaff
italian courses in the uk  —  http://www.ukstudy.com/our-italian-course.php?aff=myaff
quality italian courses  —  http://www.bestcoursesonly.com/premium-italian.php?aff=myaff

Naturally, if you’re using a database, things are going to be looking a little different at this point and you’ll be relying on tables and IDs.

The execution

We’re going Black Hat so the last thing we want to do is pull together a website with endless pages of hand written copy. We just want to grab some content that ranks, spin it a few times, and output it with the same keywords in tact.

Get your hands on a functional content rewriter. It won’t pass you any English Lit exams (and if it does, I’ll be the first in line to pay for it), but as long as it scrambles the copy enough to be untraceable by Google - we’re sitting pretty.

Now the last thing we want to happen is to click Start on our rewriter and watch it go through and replace our keywords with utter nonsense. If I’m rewriting an article to target cheap Italian courses for sale, I don’t want my robot friend replacing the term with, oh I don’t know…easy Italians in corsets for hire. That’s not the kind of search traffic that I’m looking for.

So do be careful when spinning your content and make sure that your key phrases remain in tact. We couldn’t care less how it reads - we just want it to get chomped up by Google’s spiders and thrown in to somebody’s search results.

Now, the clever bit.

Using our PHP script, we place an include on every page and grab the search string as soon as the file is requested. Your visitor isn’t even going to see the content. We simply match up the key phrases that they’ve searched for to get to our site. We scan down our list and match up the most relevant affiliate offer based on those keywords. Now all we have to do is redirect the user to the closest matching offer and send them on their merry way - towards something that we KNOW they’re going to be interested in.

The only way anybody is ever going to find that you’ve been rewriting content is to access the site directly (and who’s going to if we only ever link to it from non-related sites?!). 

Alternatively, if somebody gets to the site using a search term that isn’t in our catch list, we can still send them somewhere generic. Just add a simple else if to the PHP script and sit down in unusual delight that absolutely nobody is visiting your site!

As for Google…well, Google doesn’t get to your site using any search strings. It will simply spider the rewritten mumbo-jumbo content and process it for ranking.

Turbo charged success…with limits.

This is an effective way of busting out websites for quick profit. Don’t expect them to pay your pension many moons from now. It’s incredibly likely that somebody will nark you out somewhere down the road. Of course, the swaying factor of success is that we can produce websites like these in mass volume and send fantastically targeted traffic towards our affiliate offers. It’s fast. It’s effective. It’s downright easy.

In the next post, I’ll be showing you how to convert this method for White Hat websites. I’m sure you’ve already worked out where we’re heading with this one… 

In the first part of our authority link building series, we spoke about the challenges of getting linked directly by a .edu site. We concluded that although a front-page Harvard backlink would get Google interested, the costs and likelihood of making this happen are somewhat unrealistic.

Well, it’s time to get our hands dirty and plunge in to some rule bending link building with authority websites as our prime target. Now I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this method isn’t going to win a Noble prize. It can however, if done correctly, send some strong link authority to a money site. And we all know how beneficial that can be.

As we’ve already seen, .edu sites with linking potential are few and far between. Restricted mainly to educational institutions, we can expect a hard fight in getting our site repped on these closely monitored networks.

I’d like to introduce two alternatives - one which may seem riddled in difficulties, and one which you probably haven’t heard of unless you’re UK based.

The domains I’m talking about are .gov and .sch.uk.

Now, as you’re probably aware, .gov is reserved for the highest breed of authority websites on the net - government websites. The less documented .sch.uk is basically the UK’s answer to .edu. They’re not quite a carbon match since university websites in the UK are generally marked with .ac.uk.

Still, we’re going to target .sch.uk. These websites benefit from a Google sized authority boost, but they’re about a thousand times easier to get links on. You wonder why? It’s because most high school homepages are built by junior webmasters and maintained by IT departments that don’t have the slightest clue about the intricacies of Black Hat SEO.

Let’s open up Google and run a basic search.

*sch.uk

This will return every last .sch.uk website in Google’s index. Now we can do a bit of side research and build up a list of school homepages that we’re going to target.

You’ll soon notice that most of these websites are built with the industry rulebook of 2003. Most of them have a Useful Links page. A closer look and we can get an idea of the types of websites that the school is prepared to link to.

That’s all well and good, but how can we convince a busy IT department that our commercial website deserves a mention on their homepage? 

There are a huge variety of methods for making this possible, but all require some underhanded tactics and a little good will hunting.

So, we’re going to build a brand new White Hat website from scratch and hyper-focus it on a cause that a high school IT department wouldn’t think twice about linking to. Let’s say, oh I don’t know, a campaign against bullying?

We start phase 2 of our authority link building and construct a glistening clean White Hat website to draw our targets’ attention. We don’t need to go overboard, but a clean corporate layout and some happy smiling kids’ faces wouldn’t go amiss. 

Our niche is going to be a completely fabricated campaign against bullying. We’re going to supply fake contact details, fake phone numbers, a made-up story about our campaign, and some genuinely helpful information on how to combat bullying.

Remember, this is all in the name of a good cause. We need to offer something that’s going to be seen as worthy link-bait to a high school webmaster. Don’t even think about selling anything commercial on the new site - it has to be spring clean and 100% inoffensive.  

Now that we have a convincing on-topic site, we need to put together a convincing email pitch to get our link placed on the .sch.uk sites. I’m not going to advise you here. If you can’t write a good email link pitch, pay somebody else to do it for you. I’ll give you a clue though: sympathy sells.

Just make every effort to weld yourself in to the high school’s good books. Explain why you’re seeking a link to raise awareness of your cause.

Hell, you can go all the way and create little “I’m in” link buttons if you really want to be ruthless in your campaign. Now that we’ve established a few backlinks from authority .sch.uk websites, we let our project settle.

Leave your anti-bullying site for a couple of months and wait for any skepticism to pass. When the time is right, run a simple 301 re-direct and funnel the link juice towards your money site. Only the shrewdest of webmasters will pick up on the trick, and you can always fall back on the excuse that you purchased the campaign domain after it expired! Worst case scenario, your link will be removed, but we can deal with that.

You’ll have to use a little creativity and some of your imagination to come up with a niche cause that works for this method. I’m also going to leave you to consider how you might go about getting a link from a .gov site.

What do government sub-sites link to? You might assume that they stick to other similar .gov sites. You’d be wrong.

I managed to slot my link on a PR8 .gov website and it proved so successful, I had second thoughts about ever re-directing it. Such was the search engine performance boost that came with the high authority link. You have to treat these campaigns as the short term traffic injections that they are.

Don’t get greedy. Don’t gain 20 authority links and re-direct your site within the first 48 hours. Chances are, somebody will open their email a few days late and wonder what the hell happened to your good charitable cause.

The best thing is - if you’re really smart - using this kind of opportunist site building, it’s possible to gain an astronomical amount of backlinks simply by focusing on a niche that is of high public relevance. We just need to get our link bait out there in the first place.

To help you in your quest for .gov links (and any other), I’ll give you a good starting point. Think of current issues that are dominating the public eye. Now, I don’t know what’s hot on the news in your part of the world. But where I am, websites on green issues, knife crime and racism are sure to offer opportunities for those quick enough to pounce on them…

Over the course of this two part article, we’re going to take a look at the facts and fantasies of acquiring a link from a .edu domain. I thought it might be worth simplifying something that’s becoming one of the great time and money wasters in the SEO world. 

Now, as you’re probably aware, .edu is a top level domain reserved for educational institutions. It’s favoured by American universities. You’ll find it slapped on the end of your Harvards and Columbias. Despite this, a small handful of generic websites were successful in registering their .edu domains before it became a part of Educause - who subsequently shut up shop on new domain registrations.

What you have in theory is a small group of high authority websites, dominated by universities and education societies, with no leeway for spammers. And us marketeers, forever looking for trends in the SEO business, we assume that sites with a .edu domain are on the receiving end of a rocket sized Google boost due to those closed doors. It’s like a quality control, if you will. The very opposite of a mass-purchased .info domain.

If a site gets a link from a .edu domain, the chances of it being laundered or spammed are far slimmer than they are for your average public domain. Now while some cashed up Harvard professor can probably be heard laughing all the way to the bank as you read this, the .edu clampdown is something that we have to work around if we’re looking to establish our profile of high authority backlinks.

Or do we?

You see, the trouble with getting links from .edu domains is that they’re so closely monitored in the first place. They’re incredibly hard to get and there’s little or no place for inappropriate websites. By inappropriate websites, I don’t mean your Redtubes and casinos. I mean everything that isn’t painstakingly crafted on the topic at hand. Harvard simply isn’t going to link to your commercial website unless you can offer something which is of use, legitimate quality or in the dual interest of its audience. And if we could all offer something along those lines, it’s unlikely we’d be resorting to these means to get links!

So if we can’t get links from Harvard, what do we do? We naturally take a step down the ladder to see what else we can find. Where can we inject our link on another .edu domain and get away with it? The reality is that most universities will ignore your link request without so much as opening the header. 

There is, however, one opportunity we can seize upon, but it’s likely to prove expensive. Universities often grant an online space to their students where they can post blogs, portfolios and general updates on their social activities. It’s become quite apparent to Google that increasing numbers of students are making a quick buck by selling links on their part of the network. 

You could place your link in a student’s university blog and potentially funnel some link juice through to your money site, but how much of an impression are you really going to make on the search engines?

Most of these student subpages are a few directories deep and distinctly lower in Pagerank. You might argue that the .edu domain counts for more as Google loves its authority websites, but can we really prove that it’s any more helpful than a front page link on an authoritative .com?

No, we can’t. 

One of the greatest myths about .edu link building is that one-way linking on a buried subpage will do untold wonders for your search engine performance. The only thing that’s going to send Google through the roof is a top level link from a respected .edu site. If you land on the Harvard homepage, your sales go up. That we can guarantee.

The difference between link juice for a student blog on a .edu domain and a student blog on a .com domain is open to debate.

It’s highly unlikely that Google decisively cares whether the domain ends in .com or .edu. Google cares about authority. It’s merely coincidental that so many .edu domains are packed with authority. Of course they would be!

I can tell you that Harvard would be a brilliant place to get links from even if it was placed on a .info domain. We should be looking at legitimate link authority rather than a desirable domain, if we truly want to leverage our link building campaign.

All that said, I’d be an absolute mug to turn my nose up at a genuine high quality .edu link. None of us can say for sure, but we can make an educated guess that there is indeed some extra link juice to be gained.

But it’s important to remember that:

• Not all .edu links are of high quality.
• The authority of the website is determined by more than a .edu domain.
• The financial rewards for an authoritative .com or .org domain are just as great.

I’ve heard of many instances where low quality .edu links have been sold at ridiculous prices. Hell, to purchase one of the original unsanctioned .edu domains, you’d now be expected to pay thousands of dollars. Maybe even HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars.

Don’t pay over the odds for a .edu backlink. In fact, don’t pay anything at all until you’ve read Part 2 of this authority backlink series.

That’s where we’ll be looking at competitive alternatives to the .edu domain, as well as the coup to end all. I’ll show you the Black Hat technique that’s allowed me to build a link profile featuring a small handful of PR7 and PR8 .gov sites.