Who else is having problems with Gmail? Go take a look at Twitter search results for Gmail….I’m basically only posting this to get some traffic lol…lets see if it works!
News
Gmail Is Down
4 Comments
September 1 | News | Ryan Clark
Tagged gmail, gmail down, gmail server, google mail
Would You Pay For Link Building Resources?
August 28 | News | Ryan Clark
Just thought I’d drop this out there because I’m thinking certain things over. I know I sometimes get flack for releasing certain link building tips and sometimes I just can’t help myself. The blog has been lacking in actual tips lately and although I have 206 drafts with goodies waiting(please don’t hack me :), I won’t be releasing 3/4 of it to the public.
I have a huge Ecommerce SEO/Link Building/SMM post/book that’s awaiting release and I’m wondering if I should charge a fee to view the post or not.
So….would you pay for the goods or should I release it all for everyone to “exploit”?
Tagged Link Building
Connect With Me Socially
Comments Off on Connect With Me Socially
August 25 | News | Ryan Clark
I’ve been so bogged down with client work and my own Ecommerce project I’ve had little time to write a good post. I have a few in the works that are going to help a lot of you out there, and I still have an Ecommerce SEO/Link Building guide in the works. I’ve had to cut down on the resources in that article or I think I’d have to charge for the information :)
We setup an Ecommerce shop a little under a year ago and have come a long way in regards to the marketing aspects, so I hope to bring a lot to the table with my guide. Building links naturally for an online shop is a little bit tougher, and if you don’t have money to put into it, I wouldn’t bother trying to compete.
I wanted to take the time here to connect with you folks socially and become friends on the various social networks. If you have an account on any of the following feel free to add me as a friend, and if you like, send over some content you think I’d like to see.
Tagged linkbuildr, social media
Vertical Measures “Boost Your Juice” Contest
June 3 | News | Ryan Clark
I got an email from Arnie over at Vertical Measures about a pretty awesome contest they have going on. While Arnie was speaking at SMX this week I thought I’d help spread the word about the serious prizes and what you need to do. Let me tell you that the prizes are so good I was thinking of getting some fake ID and signing up. I could be Linky McBuildr or Mclinklovin :)
So they’ve called out all your business owners out there to create a small writeup of 200 words or less, or a 3 minute video stating why your business deserves 1st prize. If you win that you’re looking at $5000 worth of link building done by the team over at Vertical Measures. Second place is still looking to get $1000 worth of link building, and this could take your business to the next level.
The contest stops taking submissions on June 15th 2009, so you better get your ass in gear and submit your application. They have a great judge panel that you’ll need to win over and you can see the entire list on the contest page.
Tagged contest, Link Building, vertical measures
SES New York Worthy Workshops
May 11 | News | Ryan Clark
I don’t know how many of you are planning on attending SES New York, or any SES for that matter , but it should be on your radar regardless that they’re sponsoring my site. I don’t want to go into a sales pitch, but I do want to quickly cover the workshops of interest that related to link building. For those of you not familiar with SES I highly recommend click on the banners(affiliated with me) here and getting a feel for what they have to offer. Whether you’re a seasoned vet, or just starting out these events can be a great way to network and learn a thing or two. You’ll find that most of the information spoken about at these conferences is already widely covered on the web, but you’ll still find a few gems worthy of the admission.
Like most of their venues, there are both basic and advanced workshops and the New York series has a session at both levels. Regardless of the topics you’ll find a handful of skilled link builders from companies and other industries that you might not run into on the web. If you’re working for a company you most likely have the benefit of attending any workshop you like so lets take a look at both the workshops regarding link building this year in New York.
Basic Workshop:
Linking Strategies that Increase Rankings
After on-site improvements, gaining links from other websites is a critical marketing activity. Links are a primary factor in the search engine rankings, and making your site “linkeable” will build your rankings and relevance within your market. The session will cover types of links, linking campaigns and effective content-link strategies.
If you have barely any link building knowledge this should give you a great start into planning out and attacking a campaign. You will also come out of it with a good understanding of what to do and most importantly, what not to do. So many people get into some scary link building practices an although they may work, you might be putting your company at risk in the long run.
Advanced Workshop:
Social Media + SEO = even bigger results
Social Media has taken the internet to new levels of consumer-brand interaction. Advanced SEO topics will cover the uses of social media in your marketing efforts. Social Media is a vital part of building links, building rankings, and overall visibility for your website. Marketers must be aware of the potential for both positive and negative effects of social media. Developing a social media plan for your organization will build a prepared campaign and one that can also deal with negative PR.
This workshop is much more to my liking! I’m big on makin a social media splash while building links because the two are very much intertwined. Bringing in more business is all about networking and connecting with potential customers. Having a strong social media presence on top of building links is and has made my job easier, and it will do the same for you.
Content For Links & Go Compare
There has been a lot of talk lately about companies offering content for links and there are people on all sides of the fence, including myself. I just read an excellent article by Linktank(must read blog btw) entitled The Content For Links Debate, and I completely agree with what he has to say in regards to going about this tactic. A lot of the chatter has been revolving around the Go Compare fiasco which has seen them up and down in Google.
If you haven’t heard about it, then let me fill you in quickly. They were basically sending out mass emails saying they’ll write content for your site and include one simple link back to their website. This method can work out great but I can see how a lot of people didn’t like the way they went about things. Mass emailing a template to webmaster’s is not a great way of doing things. I however think that this is a great method of link building if done properly, and by properly I mean getting personal in each and every email. I also read that they were offering around 400 word articles as content, and to me this doesn’t come close to cutting it. If you’re wanting that link from the other site you’d best be writing at least 2000 words on something new and fresh, not rehashed. Spend the time doing the social media marketing to attract links to that content, which will in return pass on quality link juice.
Now it isn’t clear that they(Go Compare) received a penalty mainly because they bounced back quickly. If you’ve done link building in a tough niche you’ll know that your rankings will fluctuate all over the place. You also don’t want to be too aggressive going after one keyword because that’s going to get you notice and slapped.
I could go on and on about this subject but i’ll let you folks write me some comments with your thoughts. I’m also going to link to a bunch of great posts already talking about what I’ve covered here and then some. It’s a touchy subject, and link building is a mine field of an industry so it’s fun(hard?) to keep up on things.
How to Determine a Search Engine Penalty – Jonathan Stewart
Go Compare Penalized Again – Patrick Altoft
The Content For Links Debate – Linktank
Content For Links – Kieron Donoghue
Link Building In Ultra Competitive Niches – Red Cardinal
Love.com At A Glance
April 30 | News | Ryan Clark
I wasn’t aware of Love.com until I read Aaron Wall’s post “Does Google Love.com Spam?” which lead me to peering into their backlink profile and more. Aaron is the man when it comes to pointing out the crazy things companies will do and AOL is redefining content scraping. Now most sites wouldn’t have lasted this long but when you’re AOL you have a little bit more sway that others. I don’t want to get into the ethics of it all, but instead take a peek at their backlink profile and how they’re abusing social media.
Love.com Backlinks:
So far they’re blistering along in the search engines with nearly 150,000 pages indexed in just Google. Aaron tweet’d that he’d give away some SEOBook prizes if anyone could guess the date this would start dropping, and honestly I’m not sure if this will happen quickly. Love.com is going to at least have a grace period mainly due to the age of their domain name, and when you see their backlink profile you’ll shit a brick. Before I even ran them through LinkVoodoo’s Backlink Analyzer I expected to see a lot of AOL owned sites providing most of the juice. Well as of today I’m seeing just over 1000 backlinks with 93% of them being dofollow which is quite rare in a backlink profile, but I was right in guessing most of them would be from an AOL owned site. Also as expected, since most of the sections are on their own subdomain a lot of the links are coming from those.This also means that 93% of the links are pointing to their root index.
So far this has been working out in their favor and I can see the pagerank is flowing around to a lot of the Love.com subdomains. So all in all despite the crazyness this site is going to bring out in the SEO world it is worth the behind the scenes look at how you can manipulate the search engines. I’ve attached the .csv file from out private beta version of the LinkVoodoo backlink analyzer in case you’re wondering how I’m getting reports. It will be out soon so don’t worry, we’re still testing and fixing some bugs so this report may not include all the backlinks but it will be damn close.
Download: Love.com Link Analysis
Love.com’s Twitter Usage:
Everyone is using Twitter these days and it didn’t take me long to see how Love.com was making use of it either. It’s a great way to get traffic, but they’re seemingly taking it to the next level. If you do a quick search for Love.com on Twitter you’ll see what’s going on here. Tons and tons of seperate Twitter accounts based on niche feeding in news from the site. It is too early to tell if this is working out great for them but it’s interesting none the less.
What do you folks think about this?
Love.com’s Alexa:
I know Alexa isn’t the best for measuring traffic volumes but it will do fine just to see how things are progressing so far. As you can see the Scraping + Domain Age + Link Profile is bringing in the traffic so far, but I can’t wait to see the results a few months from now. I think Aaron’s guessing game is a great idea and I think I’ll make my bid.
Tagged Link Building, love.com, scraping, twitter
Backlink Checking With Link Voodoo
Well we’ve finally launched the public beta version of our backlink analyzer which is still in early development. We’ve tested it on Linux(Ubuntu), MacOSX, Vista and XP so it should run fine on most computers if they have Java installed. We are encouring anyone to leave feedback and comments so we can tweak and improve the software as we go along.
The software runs in two different modes, quick run and full run. The quick run checks a sites entire backlink profile but only reports back one unique anchor text link per domain, instead of the full run which will report site wide links. Yahoo Site Explorer reports everything and we found that this is usually annoying to sift through. We will be soon adding a sorting function that will allow you to list the results by PageRank or Alexa Rank.
If you input your domain and there are already results that means someone has already run your domain through the backlink analyzer. You can choose to view the data or click the “update data” button to scan for new links that may not be listed. This will relaunch the Java app and gather all the new links, and once it’s finished you can refresh the page or click the update option on screen to usher in the new or updated results.
The Pro Tools portion of Link Voodoo will be rolling out the first part after this section has been thoroughly abused by you and me. I still can’t go into details on what those features will be, but trust me they’re going to be schweeeeet.
Tagged backlink analyzer, backlinks, check backlinks, link voodoo
