Author Archives: Ryan Clark

About Ryan Clark

I'm the CEO of Linkbuildr Marketing and the brains behind our branding and blog content. I specialize in effective marketing strategies for hotels, luxury brands and real estate. If your brand is in need of a boost then don't hesitate to contact me for a free proposal. Follow me on Google+: +Ryan Clark Twitter: @Linkbuildr on Twitter. You can also come ask me a question on our Facebook Page.  

Comment SPAM From 94.102.60.150 – 94.102.60.153

19 Comments
November 12  |  Black Hat  |   Ryan Clark

I’ve noticed a HUGE increase today in spam coming from these four IP’s(94.102.60.150, 94.102.60.151
94.102.60.152, 94.102.60.153) which are originating from Amsterdam. To me it looks like someone is testing out a new comment spam tool and it’s now being reported across the Internet. I’ve already seen some active topics about this spammer from other bloggers and I’d like to here if any of you are experiencing the same thing. All the posts are generated from a random name and email but all are producing a weird “hash” mixed with numbers and letters.

My guess is that this person is gather a giant list of all the spammable WordPress blogs and we will soon be hit with an even larger comment spam attack. I know that the digital world is just coming over the hump of Xrumer spam, but I hope you all block these IP’s within wordpress to avoid getting dropped into some spammers comment list. You can use your .htaccess to block IP addresses, and if you don’t know how to do that click on this link for a tutorial. I’ve got over 20 postings just today from the same three ip addresses so it seems like things are heating up.Here are a few blog posts on the topic as well another good look at some of the SPAM;

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/217088

http://newyorktraveler.net/getting-spammed-like-crazy-today/

http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/blog/wordpress-comment-spam-from-amsterdam/

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Build Links To Your Social Media To Dominate The SERPs

3 Comments
November 12  |  Link Building, Social Media Sites  |   Ryan Clark

One thing I haven’t noticed a lot of people talk about is building links to your social media content which can do wonders for both your flow of link juice, but also within the top 10 rankings. I offer this to my clients during a link building campaign and I’ll tell you what I tell them. Unless they have unique and quality content this won’t work out so well, or will look badly. Keep in mind that all the content in forms of words you put out there on social media sites, make sure it’s unique to avoid the ever so dreaded dupe content penalty.

Most social media sites will rank for most long tail keywords, and even for a highly competitive keyword if done right. This can be a powerful method because if you’re launching a new service or product within a tough niche, you can at least start grabbing some top search engine spots with your social media while you wait for your main site to develop some trust. A lot of these sites allow you to obtain a one way link which helps in the long run greatly. If you think about it you’re getting that link within content that’s on topic and coming from an authorative site.

Gain More Than One Top 10 Ranking:

There are so many social media sites out there I suggest you stick with the best to begin with, then venture out into the web 2.0 web and find more social sites that perhaps are designed around your niche. When I’m working with clients on a contract basis it usually involves me using social media to get information about them or their product within the top 10-20 spots in Google. This can be as simple as creating a Youtube video and naming it after the keyword you’re targeting, hell, make a few videos even. Another method is getting a Flickr picture ranked well by again titling it with the proper keywords and then doing things like sharing the picture with Flickr groups and other social photography sites. There are so many other posibilites such as the ever popular Squidoo and Hubpages which if done right can rank easily.

Facebook has recently allow business’s to create pages which I’ve seen starting to rank well for a lot of keywords. Getting your business listed with the Yellow Pages can also get your company listed in the business listings that show up at the top of a Google search page, as well within Google Maps. I’ve even seen a lot of people target their Craigslist ads with the right title and keywords which ranked very well for a lot of juicy keywords.

So you can see that the benefit of having quality content up on these sites for not only links but exposure. Now not all of the social media content you create will make it within the top 10 or even 20 spots in Google. So this is where some well crafted and cautious link building can be done to push the already weighted link up in the SERPs. Depending on where and what type of media you’re pushing you’ll want to approach the link building in a smart manor. Lets go over a few of the social media sites in the next bit here.

Building Links To Your Social Media:

Youtube – Youtube usually has little to no trouble ranking for most long tail keywords and hard to rank for terms. It’s no secret that Google loves video, owns Youtube, and it’s starting to have the same love as Wikipedia once did. Youtube videos ranks are also influenced by the rating on Youtube, and Google can tell when a video is quality and original. You can do a few simple things like social bookmarking your video to give it an extra link juice boost. Incorporating your video within your Squidoo pages, Hubpages and other social media will help bring up its quality as well give it a few links.

Squidoo – Squidoo pages are great because you can create a content rich page with not only articles, but with other forms of social media all tied in. Link Building for your Squidoo Lens is worth the time and has an abundance of different options. First off you can submit your Lens to a number of sites designed to promote Squidoo Len’s which I’ve already blogged about. This alone will greatly help with the ranking of your Lens.

Flickr – Flickr is an amazing site that is love by Google and Yahoo(I wonder why :) and provides a great way to bring some targeted traffic. Make sure to appropriatly name your photos and then join related Flickr groups to share your pictures. There are several photo sharing sites and blogs, and if you can create some photography that is not only showing off your business or product, but viral in nature. A great picture can go a long way and attract visitors from places a lot of businesses are not tapping into. A client of mine managed to attract a lot of business by taking a lot of great photo sets of a conference he went to which lead to that album ranking well and attracting a lot of search traffic. This is just one great example of how this can work for you. And if all else fails throw a few social bookmarks to the picture page to speed up the indexing process.

RSS Feed Sites – RSS feed sites have been popping up all over the place and RSS Link Building has become a great tool to gain more exposure and links. A lot of the more popular feed sites like RSS Hugger and MillionRSS are great places to have your feed profile ranked within the search engines. This is an added bonus because you’re already getting links and feed subscribers from these sites! There are also RSS based news sites that also provide another way for your media to sneak up in the search engines. Two great examples of sites like this are Aide RSS and Toluu which both give you links and their feed profile pages rank well in the search engines.

Well I hope this has given you folks some more to think about and I know I’m doing nothing but creating 10x the work load for you. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments on what you think or especially from anyone doing this in their link building campaigns.

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Link Building The Basics And Beyond Video

4 Comments
November 12  |  Link Building Videos  |   Ryan Clark

Link Building: The Basics and Beyond Speakers: Rhea Drysdale – Less Everything Loren Baker – Traffic Blends Brian Chappell – Ignite Social Media

Here’s a really cool and in depth(47 minutes) speech from some of the industries most notable consultants and bloggers. There is a shortage of link building videos on the web but this one so far seems to be the cream of the crop. Folks from SEOmoz and Search Engine Journal are in this video covering everything from the basics, to ethics and finally some advanced techniques. If anyone actually saw this live can you let us all know what conference this was from?

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Blog Commenting Link Building Case Study

8 Comments
November 12  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

I picked up on a really interesting article written by fellow blogger Danny Cooper which covers his blog comment case study. The study takes place over a month and Danny goes over all the areas of his website in detail that benefited from the experiment. I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t done a whole lot of blog commenting, mainly due to being lazy, but from what I can see here I now have some motivation to get in gear.

When I first started this experiment my main aim was to use blog commenting purely as a link building tool, and report back to you guys.  Since then I have learnt that blog commenting is soo much more! You’re probably think what could blog commenting achieve thats worth more than the thousands of inbound links from big bloggers? I’ll tell you what, networking.

I can say from experience that I’ve been more inclined to post about something, or at least notice someone when they’ve left a comment on my site. A lot of the friendly and informative posts have also lead to some great friendships and business opportunities. Getting your name out there can only lead to positive things as long as you’re positive to begin with. Remember when blog commenting to leave a useful post that is information rich and dead on in regards to the topic at hand.

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Link Building & RSS Distribution With Toluu.com

4 Comments
November 11  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

I’ve been waiting to get my hands on an invite code for the new Toluu service which is currently in Beta and looking oh so sweet. I should be getting my invite within the next few days and with that comes an invite for 3 other people, so if you’re interested get in touch with me and I’ll be sure to send one your way. Toluu is an RSS news site that organizes the feeds you love, and after getting to know your reading habits, it will feed your more news from sources that are very similar in taste. The site already has been growing at a rapid rate and has tens of thousands of indexed pages in Google, a nice page rank of 6 and a bunch of inbound links. The feed/news pages you can create are all do follow which is great for a link, but it also looks so good you might not want to leave the spot! They have done an excellent job with the look and feel of the site, and adding feeds could not have been done easier. This is a great resource to build links if you have a “quality content” site as well bring in readers that are truely interested in your niche. If you want to keep up on how the development is going they have a Toluu Blog which is updated regularly with indepth updates on what’s going on. I’ll leave you with a link to a Toluu page for the user nerdflood so you can see just how the feeds are layed down.

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Loren Baker On Expanding Your Linking Niche

1 Comments
November 11  |  Link Building Videos  |   Ryan Clark

Gain a competitive advantage by identifying verticals which attract like minded users and expand your vertical linking to include these types of publishers.

Here’s the first post under the Link Building Videos section which will start bringing in more social elements to the site. I’m a big fan of Search Engine Journal and I was pleased to see quality videos coming from one of my favorite authors over there, Loren Baker. I’m going to be situating the Link Building Podcast on the new tube site for Internet Marketers called IM Broadcast, and you can check out Loren’s User Profile for more videos.

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This Week In Link Building November 11th 2008

1 Comments
November 11  |  TWiLB  |   Ryan Clark

Let me start off by remembering to stop today and think about our Veterans and what they’ve done for us in the past. Most of you are off from work today, but knowing myself I can imagine a good chunk of you will still be on the grind. It’s rainy and windy outside so what better time to round up all the past couple weeks worth of link building material. There has been a lot of great articles lately and this weeks post will be chalk full of goodies to keep you busy for most of the day. Let’s start this post off from another awesome comic from Kevin & The Googlebots.

I reminded myself to find some new RSS feed directories and came across Daytimenews.com. It’s basically a RSS feed directory but with a very updated and fresh web 2.0 feel. Submissions are reviewed by a human so you cannot submit crap to the site…so admin if you’re reading this approve Linkbuildr please and thank you(lol). The site is relatively new so don’t expect much in regards to link juice just yet, but be thankful for the help it gives your content to stay in the index. They will spider your site constantly once approved and it hopefully will bring you some new readers to your blog. I don’t have any data yet on the site so I can’t tell you how well it performs, but if anyone out there is listed please let us know in the comments! You can head on over to their site and submit your RSS feed.

I’m sure most of you folks have heard about, and even used PRWeb.com’s press release distribution services. Using a press release to get the word out has long been an effective way of marketing your brand or product, and even more so it’s a great way to get some very powerful links. I’m currently writing a post entirely dedicated to free press release sites, so I thought I would get this out of the way first.


PRWeb Press Release Newswire - Sign Up Now
I always recommend to my clients to get the 200 dollar package they offer because it covers all your basis such as SEO friendly links and distribution to all the places that matter. You will get some kick ass links from places such as Google News and Yahoo News plust a whole host of authorative sites. Another thing to think about are the sites that scrape and use for news to blog about which can bring in a whole other set of links you wouldn’t have otherwise expected. All in all if you want an effective link building campaign this is really not to be overlooked!  Let’s take a look at all the various packages PRWeb has to offer.

With all the crazy web 2.0 sites coming out these days, and yes the ones I’m finding to link build with, it gave me the idea to write this post. If you have your own web 2.0 app to promote you have many options which luckily will bring in some very juicy links! I’m currently helping a client promote his web 2.0 site and found an abundance of resources to get your site listed. Some things to keep in mind here are the quality and uniqueness of your web 2.0 site because a lot of these places I’m going to list have a strict quality control. Click here to read Link Building For Your Web 2.0 App.

Here’s another niche link building strategy guide that is similar to what I can put together for your company, or blog. I picked the health niche because it is so vast and this will make finding a lot of resources to write about much easier. If you would like to have me map out a custom link building and social media marketing campaign for your website feel free to contact me.

Although the healt and fitness niche’s are heavily competative, there are still a lot of new ways to market your product or site. These new methods should also bring in strong, healthy links from niche related social media sites, forums and more. We’ll  first take a look at a few health directories that would be worth the time spent submitting. I usually don’t like wasting my time on these, but because it’s so competitive you don’t have much choice! Click here to read Link Building In The Health/Fitness Niche.

FeedBees is a really cool, well laid out and designed RSS Feed Directory. The feed directory was started up early this year so it’s relatively new in regards to great link juice, but already has well over 40,000 pages indexed in Google. You can submit your feed absolutely free, and to get an idea of what you’ll get, take a look at someone’s feed page. I also wanted to mention they make use of Adsense for RSS so you can enjoy 100% of the ad revenue shown in your streams.

Well I’ve got so many clients to track keywords for, most of which don’t have a blog so I cannot use the WordPress plugins that would make this part of the job easier. But thankfully a fellow Linkbuildr reader and now friend, Will Reinhardt, gave me access to his SEO Keyword Ranking tool.  I asked if I could review it out of the kindness of my heart, so this in no way influenced by money what-so-ever(so f%$! off Google :).

This tool is for one thing and one thing only…tracking your position in the search engines. I’ve used a bunch of free tools, paid tools and doing it by hand but the simplicity of SEO Keyword Ranking takes the cake. The tool tracks all the major search engines and provides reports on a time schedule, depending on how you want it. The reports are handled two ways, one within your account and secondly, straight via email all packaged in a nice and easy to read report. This is great because I can send my clients the reports automatically without worrying about it, and if I ever need to review them they’re only a few clicks away. Click here to read the rest of the review.

Ann Smarty once again has bee very active writing more and more quality articles that make doing this weekly roundup so much easier! Her article is titled Link Building Reports That Make Your Clients Happy and this is a topic I’ve never seen covered anywhere else(shame on me). Some clients could care less about seeing where the links were from, but more and more I’m getting a lot of SEO savvy clients and theyre more than happy to get the low down. One thing I wanted to bring up here just incase you miss it in her article, but that’s the free link building report offered by SEOmoz. Ann Smarty also wrote another great article called Firefox Addons To Explore Backlinks In Google Webmaster Tools and pretty well explains itself.

Link Building Best Practices recently wrote a piece An SEO Is Not A Link Builder which defines what we do a little clearer. As the link building industry continues to grow it has been increasingly defining itself in its own digital world and no longer means adding a few social bookmarks and directory links.

Most SEO’s agree that there are three components to higher search results; 1) good content, 2) onsite optimization and 3) quality link building.  However, in my opinion, most SEO’s are not link builders and most link builders are not SEOs

I’d like to congradulate Collin Lahay on his 1 year blog anniversary as well mention two great posts he’s written last week. First up was his post on Link Building With Ning which is an SEO friendly social networking platform which allows anyone to create a social network on their domain. Another social media site on the same sort of page as Squidoo or Hubpages is Qassia and he covers how to get do follow links in his post Link Building With Qassia. Last but not least was yet another great post that covers getting links on a new web 2.0 classified site called iList, click here to read Link Building With iList.

Shaun from Hobo Web wrote a great post on the length of anchor text, and as link builders we should all be aware of what is in our realm. I’ll admit I usually just had a made of number in my head of how long an anchor text should be, but since he mentions the safe length is around 8-9 words I’m still in the clear. Click here to read his post on anchor text length.

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Kevin & The Googlebots

3 Comments
November 10  |  Link Building, News  |   Ryan Clark

I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with a full time link builder and cartoonist extroidanaire. He goes online by the name of SEOKevin and can be seen here in the comments. He is responsible for my now favorite comic strip of all time(sorry Calvin & Hobbes), Kevin & the Googlebots. The comic is based around many hilarious scenarious mixed with real life mixed in with a whole lot of well thought out SEO humor. I know if I showed this to my normal friends they would most likely not enjoy this as much as you folks. IF anyone from one of the bigger SEO sites such as Search Engine Journal see’s this comic then I’d urge you to get it on as a weekly feature…this is one form of comedy not to be missed. Here’s a taste of Kevin’s work and if you like what you see, get in contact and let him know you enjoyed it so he keeps putting them out!

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