SEO Shadow

So it’s been a while since I last posted. Work commitments have kept me pretty busy but I’ve also been working on a number of side projects which I’ll be using as the catalyst for the next few posts.

Having been in touch with Rob over at Seocracy, I’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to test out Datapresser, his popular solution for content creation and mass blog management.

To fill in the background, Datapresser is an online suite offering integrated tools for managing your Internet marketing campaigns. Hold your horses though. This isn’t just some Google Analytics overview of your traffic with a few colourful graphs. The reason I personally took an interest in Datapresser was for the madlib content generating possibilities.

Now anybody who knows anything about link building on a grand scale (that is, a scale that makes money), will be aware of the riches that come from having a strong link profile to utilize. If you’ve ever wondered why your SEO perfecto White Hat site is getting whooped in the rankings at the hands of a seemingly basic turnkey site, it’s probably because the foundations to that number one ranked site are better thought out, better executed and better received by Google. Even if you don’t notice as much at first glance.

Madlib scripts are excellent for churning out pages and pages of relevant content to start building your own link profile. These are pages of essentially the same content, but dressed in synonyms with words swapped out for close match replacements. Imagine writing one great article, and flicking a switch to process it so that you can output another 99 near identical articles. We’re not so concerned about people visiting those 99 articles, in fact, we’d rather they didn’t. The real power comes from having Google index all of relevant niche content and linking it to your White Hat moneymaking project. Suddenly your money site seems a whole lot more trustworthy in the eyes of Google.

Datapresser takes care of both the link building and the content generation by introducing a madlib script builder that opens up a mind boggling number of marketing strategies.

Starting at just $25.00, you can gain access to one of the most impressive collection of tools that an affiliate marketeer can have at his disposal. I’ll admit that I’ve passed over similar tools in the past, but the stubborn streak inside me has always insisted that I’d be better at building my own custom scripts - especially when it comes to madlib site construction which is about as hands on as it gets.

Datapresser, however, makes a good impression from the start. The interface is nice and clean with several anecdotes littering an otherwise minimal design suite. You’ll find options divided in to two main groups, the content generation and the tracking statistics.

When you reach the main control screen, you’ll see a list of public madlibs that have been added by other Datapresser users. It’s a nice thought and makes for some good testing material, but let’s face it, if you stumble upon the magic money spilling formula - you don’t reveal it to fellow subscribers!

To go with each madlib collection, we have wildcard sets, keyword sets and link sets. All of which are vital to your madlib planning. Datapresser keeps it nice and simple to use (great for those who suffer from serial impatience, like me), and you can navigate between each in a breeze.

So what do they do?

Okay, let’s get down to the basics. Say we have an article that includes this carefully crafted gem:

Are you looking for Dating in New York City? Check out our brilliant dating profiles now and meet somebody tonight.

Let’s say we’re looking to branch out and appeal to more than the singletons of Manhattan. We can use the Datapresser wildcards to create a neat list of every city in the United States. Put the reference to that list in place of your city and your generator will take care of the rest.

Next, we mix up our phrasing so as to avoid the Google duplicate content red flag. Datapresser includes a synonym wizard for English drop-outs like myself who can’t be bothered to have the thesaurus handy. Drag and drop in to your custom madlib script. In just over the time that it’d take you to put together one quality article, you suddenly find yourself looking at the building blocks which Datapresser can turn in to as many unique articles as you so desire.

So when I tell Datapresser to get content spawning, it’s only seconds before I’m greeted with my generated pages. Had I gone through with the masterpiece above, I could have produced the following snippets instantly:

Can’t get enough love action in Chicago? Visit the juicy anchor link dating site tonight and find the lover of your dreams.

Seeking love in Miami? Come to our free dating network and start meeting new singles now.

Okay, so that’s two. Imagine I have every city in the United States included in my custom wildcards, and a shit load of calls to action to keep things unique. By using Datapresser, I don’t have to worry about the background coding that goes in to generating madlib content. I copy, paste, generate and publish. All in time for dinner.

And the best thing of all? I can save those wildcards to my Datapresser account for recycled use when I want to spread my wings and target a new niche.

Datapresser supplies the content in plain text file format, but you can also output madlib scripts to produce Wordpress posts that are ready to be imported in to your blog farm. It’s nothing that can’t be done with some skilled custom PHP coding - but Datapresser takes the pain out of the ass and lets you focus on the marketing strategies that don’t involve breaking a back on donkey work.

Setting up your blog farm is cool, but watching the newborn link power thrust your money site up the rankings is better. Datapresser lets you do just that by tracking each of your blogs over time.

Need to know how you’re performing compared to your rivals? Want an exact overview of your position in the rankings? Just add your site to the Datapresser tracking pool and forget about it. I particularly appreciate the “newest backlinks” feature which is a God’s send for other marketeers who are sick of trawling through 10,000 backlinks just to sniff out the newest entries. You can also see which methods of promotion are serving you best and track the number of backlinks that each site is sending you.

As you can probably tell, I’m pretty stoked about the hours that Datapresser has shaved off my previously tedious manual tasking. If you’re beginning to realize the scope of madlib scripts, you’ll surely want a suitable testing arena to focus your time and effort on the jobs that are making you money.

This is a great tool for any Internet Marketing wannabe. So head on over to the Datapresser website now and check it out for yourself. My thanks go to Rob for allowing me the chance to review it here!

Check back later this week for more on madlib content and how to make it bring home the cash…

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.

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.