SEO UPDATES

It’s not good enough these days to simply get back links.  Back links to your site need to be from thematically related websites and more then that, thematically related PAGES and paragraphs and even sentences within pages.The modern search engine examines content surrounding outgoing links on a page to determine its value.  The content should be in a similar topical vector.  This means if your site is selling golf products you want links from other sports and recreation sites and pages that use sports related terms.  Google specifically uses something known as LSI or latent semantic indexing to determine if the content on a page is topically related to your site and if your anchor text makes sense.

The big question is how best to get these topical backlinks.

Well, article marketing is one of the most time tested methods for building quality thematically related backlinks… and fast.

BUT you do not want to simply write an article and submit it to every directory you can find.

Why?  The major search engines will not count all these versions of your article.  They’ll look at the first few and drop the rest because they’re duplicate content.

Well how do I get them to count?  You simply use multiple versions of sentences, words, paragraphs, and phrases within your article and use a content spinner like Jetspinner from Jetpacked to spin them into hundreds of versions of your article all ~30%-60% unique.

Then you can take automated submission software like Jetsubmitter and submit a unique version of the spun article to each of 400 directories.  Now instead of getting 1-2 backlinks from your article you’ll get much closer to the full 400.
These method alone is responsible for putting tens of thousands of dollars in my pocket and millions of visitors on my web sites.
Use it wisely!

Aaron Wall from SEO Book has released his free link analysis software. Going with the name of Back Link Analyzer, you can download it directly here.

What is this tool, may you ask? Aaron explains it all in the page linked hereabove. In a nutshell, however, Back Link Analyzer is a link analysis tool that shows what anchor text is linking into a page or website. It can grab backlink data from Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and analyze anchor text, Alexa data, IP addresses, number of outbound links on a page, and other information.

This tool is available for Windows only at the moment.

Duncan Riley outs a comment spammer (Amy Cross of realtrafficsite.com) over on blog herald:

Duncan Riley> Whilst digging for my last post I also discovered an SEO who is not only using comment spam on blogs as a tool, but is actually soliciting for new comment spamming scripts using Freelancing sites.

(Drum roll please) And the SEO is: Amy Cross of realtrafficsite.com.

Now its one thing to be unscrupulous enough to spam blogs in the pursuit of search engine traffic, but it takes a particular level of stupidity to advertise for someone to write you a new script as Amy has done at Get A Freelancer.com.

If you follow the link you’ll also disturbingly find that there are quite a few offers from programmers willing to help her in her comment spamming ways.

So who is Amy Cross, if that is indeed her or his real name? Well the whois information provides little use, with the contact details being held from public view. On her site she describes her self as follows: “Amy has been recognized as an effective leader who is in tune with her client needs and has one of the single highest customer satisfaction and consumer confidence ratings ever recorded”. For somebody so well known I cant even find her on Google.

We do know however that the site is hosted on marketrends.net, a Sacramento based hosting company. So if we don’t know who Amy is, we do know a little about one of her customers, who provides a customer reference to Amy right on the front page, and guess what products they are flogging…..if you guessed cialis you’d be right! So Joe Hopkins of genbucks.com, come on down! But you know, for some strange reason these comment spammers don’t want to be found because Joe also uses a cloaking company for his domain registration, and even the dns for his host is cloaked.

So a dead end for now, but none the less the world is hopefully a slightly better place for the exposure of this comment spamming scum. Have a nice weekend!

Amy Cross - you’re busted!

How would you like to plead to the court of public opinion?

Here are a few guidelines suggested by MSN to help you out. First and foremost, MSN readily admits that MSNbot will actively be using Meta tags for part of its web site analysis. Yes, meta tags are still relevant pieces of code (despite all the nay sayers out there), and with this new Bot they seem to play a very important role within the indexing algorithm. Similar to other search engines, the ‘title tag’ again appears to be the most heavily weighted within the algorithm, followed closely by the Meta Description Tag and if you read between the lines, it is suggested that your best ‘keywords’ should be included in both places. MSN does not come straight out and say that the “keywords meta tag” will be utilized, but by reading between the guidelines it strongly suggests the keywords in all areas (title, description and keyword tag and content) should adhere to each other.

Content of course is still king when it comes to MSNbot’s ability to put the entire puzzle together. Apparently, at this stage, the Bot does not read text within a graphic, so if you have important keywords contained within a graphic (especially on your main page), they strongly suggest you move those keywords into plain old text format. And here’s a tip; the closer to the top of the page, the better.

MSN Search calls for pages to be under 150K in size, suggesting the Bot will either simply stop reading after this point or in a worse case scenario, may measure/weigh the page size before reading and simply skip the page all together. This point is not made entirely clear, but it should be of enough concern to have every SEO firm scampering to measure their clients web site’s index pages, just in case. In actuality, a page size of 150k could contain a lot of relevant text content, but add a few fancy graphics in there and the total can add up quickly.

An interesting point within the guidelines suggests that words (even keywords) within headers, footers and tables will not be read. Again, simple text is the rule of thumb. This may cause some web sites to need a complete redesign. Graphics with long or non-content supported ALT tags will also be dismissed. This is very similar to the rules from other major search engines, as it provides somewhat of a safeguard against sites that stuff keywords in an attempt to fool or “spam” the engines into thinking they are something they are not. Redirects will not be read either.

Linking, as per usual, will be an important part of MSNBot’s equation. They offer two suggestions as to which links will be deemed the most important: links from the main page and links no more than three levels deep. This means all hyperlinks on your site should be accessible within three clicks or less from each other for maximum effectiveness. Very interesting. Larger web sites may have a problem adhering to this rule, but it should be kept in mind that the MSNBot is still feeling its way through the web. A three deep scenario is probably the beginning of the parameter. It will surely offer a deeper crawl as it becomes more sophisticated.

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