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.

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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