Now if you do everything we tell you in The System you will have no need of the following, but Even Harry Potter had to go through training in the black arts! It pays to know your enemy, especially if they are ‘doing it to you’! Call it self defence.
So this morning I got an email from Harry sorry Howie Schwartz who definitely bats for Slytherin. C’mon even his name means black. He says he’s reformed but he’s selling the complete works on how to be a black hat wizard for just under $40.
It’s a must read for anyone who wants to practice the dark side and he also gives you a link to a very good SEO forum where they are discussing the benefits of negative SEO.
Unfortunately as The System predicted nearly a year ago this practice of messing with your competitions backlink structure to damage their search results has become commonplace amongst all the large billion dollar making so called SEO companies, that also buy links for the big multi nationals. Well you can beat them and don’t have to join them. I’m currently testing out negative SEO against a company that WAS ranking at the top of Google for car insurance. I know they cheated and I have been shown how, their SEO company even boasted about it in a blogpost saying how reducing the number of spammy links got them to the top of Google. Well who put those spammy links there in the first place? And just how can you remove them unless you have control? (usually paid!). Anyway here’s an extra ten thousand spammy links for you! for FREE! . Lets see if Howies tools Work 
Link surges can do havoc with your competitors rankings if you do it right. They can also do BIG damage to yours so get Howies stuff and ‘Be Prepared’!
Here’s the link
While I’m on the subject of internet marketing stuff worth having – Here is some incredibly good FREE stuff from Stompernets Don Crowther. He explains how to do social media marketing the right way, and looks deep at the social linking structures that google now includes in its ranking algorithm.
Local Search is all the rave right now and this is not surprising as over 70% of queries on Google are local, and account for billions in sales every week.
So it pays to game it right? After all if you get into local – you appear at the top of the SERPs every time a geo locator such as a place, placename, zip or postcode is added to the search query string.
Some search query strings are not worth a lot of money, for example:
ski shops Tripoli
others are worth millions, for example:
Car Insurance London
So I was really very surprised and perturbed to see made up companies at made up addresses gaming both Google places and Google Maps when I did type ‘Car Insurance London’ into Google.
The top three results came back as car insurance companies supposedly based in Parliament Square in London (the Geographic Centre?) .
Well Google ‘there aren’t any!” Youve been Gamed!
There are no offices or companies listed at this place which consists soley of The Houses of Parliament, the backs of Government buildings and Westminster Abbey – You’ve been duped!
Somebody who signs into Google REPORT THEM PLEASE!
Well this revelation that certain companies and websites were systematically gaming Google results led me to look further and I discovered many other loopholes in the system, some which are much too powerful to reveal here! I will pass them on to the relevant black hatters and Google employees…. tee hee!
One thing I discovered really annoyed me.
Years ago I lost a court case and a six figure sum in costs, on a technicality to a Cowboy builder who wrecked our home. I keep a constant vigil on the Internet to see if he is advertising and post about him to forums. He knows better than to advertise on the Internet, my domain, and I will destroy his business if he dares……..
So I was very angry to see him appear on Google maps!
The Thing is though, he doesn’t even know he does.
In order to populate its maps and places with businesses, Google has done regional deals with business listing suppliers. In the UK it is Thomson Local.
You’ve only got to pay your annual Thomson listing fee to get a Google place page and local advertising old school style! Shame about the Cowboy Builder!
As I sideline to blogging I sell generic domain names that I invested in over 12 years ago.
This year both prior to and post the Panda update, I have received numerous enquiries for domains I own in the financial and Insurance sectors, a sold quite a few……..
But do generic domain names really influence Google Rankings?
I read a report last week on the state of SEO from authority site SEOMOZ.org http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics which looked at the correlation between various factors considered by ‘experts’ to be ranking factors.
If you read the report their conclusion is that the ‘perfect’ generic domain name has lost importance as a ranking factor.
I have to disagree – totally.
If you take a single keyword or two highly popular keywords like ‘car insurance’, you will see the SERPs dominated at the top by Brands.
However this is purely because they employ SEO companies to buy and acquire links for them with their multi million pound per year SEO budgets. These websites have gamed Google and must be discounted for this analysis.
Once youve removed these sites from the listings you are left with what Google tries to apply to all search pages, a diverse search listing, including universal search elements (youtube, news etc), educational listings and a high proportion of generic domains from various registries around the World.
If you look at a regional server like google.co.uk or google.co.au you will see the same pattern however with the majority of results local, including a high proportion of generic .co.uks and .org.uks in the case of the UK.
Google tries to be diverse and it is this that allows at local level a .org.uk generic to rank as high or higher than a .co.uk in the SERPs.
Does Google prefer domains without hyphens?
The majority of people out there in SEO would currently appear to believe this is so , given the amount of money they are prepared to pay for so called ‘clean’ i.e. non-hyphenated generic domain names.
However once again I disagree. There has certainly been a fad for these type of domains recently and once again it the SEO effort behind these websites which makes them rank. A fews years back hyphens were the preferred SEO resource.
I do have to agree that there currently does appear to be an anomaly or possibly a ‘hole’ in the algorithm regarding long tail .org.uks. It does seem at the moment that if you stick up a three keyword non-hyphenated .org.uk and keep it on theme with original content and stick a couple of links into it, the site will shoot above the opposition in very little time on G.co.uk!
Try it 
Eats, Roots, Shoots and Leaves
The System has been offline for a while as I had a death in the family.
So you see Google – I am real, not one of those autoblogs you rightfully punished during the so called ‘Panda’ or ‘Farmers’ or blah blah update to the algorithm that was apparantely rolled out first in the US in February and then to the rest of the English speaking world in April, according to The System’s new found buddy and pal the great Matt Cutts on the official Google blog and his Twitter.
Did The Panda Wave Bye Bye To Your Rankings?
At this point The System would wholeheartedly like to apologise to Mr Matt Cutts for all those nasty things we’ve said about him here at the System in the past. (Nah!)
Yes Matt and Google have finally seen the light and rewarded not punished those who produce quality original content with higher rankings.
There’s stacks out there on the Panda / Farmers update and the effect upon websites. There’s a lot written about how ezinearticles and other ‘content sites’ have been hit in the rankings.
But doesnt Ezinearticles produce quality content?
Sure and I reserve all my best articles for initial distribution there!
And despite Panda…I’ll continue to do so!
So what were the Panda effects?
Well the main feature of Panda is that it is a continuous process and is still going on right now and will continue to affect sites that rely upon links from sites that have been affected or will be affected.
As the authority of these ‘blackmarked’ sites is reduced so is the link juice emanating from them. Some sites will therefore see their rankings reduced as their cumulative link power is reduced, however for the majority of sites that rank with thousands of inbound links, the effect is negligible.
One of the startling things that has come out of the google Panda update has been the ‘openness’ of Google to discuss the algo change on it’s official blog. Here’s the list of quality guidelines that Google intimates were addressed by the Panda algorithm change:
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
- Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
- How much quality control is done on content?
- Does the article describe both sides of a story?
- Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
- Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
- Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
- Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
- Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
- Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
What is clear is that Panda has been a quality update, and if you want to rank high for your content you will need to produce content of high quality that is unique, and that earns you authority and expert status.
We lost just one website from the many we operate during the update, which had similar content on a number of pages. A rewrite of these pages brought it back to it’s pre-update status.
Don’t ignore or confuse Panda with other algo changes that have been made this year including the further adoption of latent semantic indexing (LSI), Google’s obsession with page load speeds, and the further integration of social proof into the ranking algorithm.
There’s always at least two sides to every argument and just how much you need to tell your clients about your SEO practices can cause bitter division.
With all this talk of sites getting banned from Google for so called black hat SEO practices, you can empathise with the hard pressed marketing or IT manager who has been called upon to spend money to improve his company’s search visibility, wanting to know every detail of your methodologies. However…….
I have major problems with this and this is why I rarely agree to perform SEO for other people unless they are only interested in the start by the results, and not the means employed to achieve these results. Each situation is individual and different tactics are required for different ranking problems. SEO is your business, not your clients.
I have a similar problem with the US administration at the current moment regarding the release of information regarding the operation to take out Bin Laden and the reluctance to show us the body or release the photos or snuff movies! They are only too willing to concentrate on the methods used and not show us any actual results.
Habeus Corpus Barrack! It’s called Social Proof! Stick it up on your Flickr or youtube account! Its bound to go viral!
SEO Companies Outfox Google
So called SEO companies have come under a lot of fire recently, partly because of their manipulation of the SERPS for the most sought after ‘buying keywords’ such as loans and car insurance and football betting and cheap flights and the list goes on and on………
……… but mostly for the exhorbitant amounts of money that the industry has spawned for what is effectively a link buying service to get you to the top of Google.
Its a dangerous game, because if Google detects unusual link patterns, such as a sudden flood of high PR on theme sites linking to you, creating a surge in ‘passed PR’ or link juice as I like to call it, the type that these ‘snake oil ‘ companies sell you, you are more than likely to get deindexed sooner than later with the next expected changes to the Google Algo.
Give these multi-billion dollar companies their due though. The enlightened ones dont just buy links anymore – they buy these high ranking and high PR websites and the inherent link juice! For $20000 or so instant big blocks of link juice to channel where-ever they want!
Now sort that one out Google!
Big Google Algorithm Changes are exciting things for those of us engaged in SEO and social media marketing for ranking, whether you do it the correct way using social media and on-site optimisation or you do it the bad way of relying on your brand, and purchasing power and buying your way to the top.
Those of us at The System who sit and watch our major keywords SERPS movements intently, get to know everything about the rankings of competitors and study the movements like a football statto would follow the league tables.
Seismic
I liken Algorithm changes to earthquakes, you get daily rumbles and occasionally you get something big on the Ricther scale. You also get aftershocks and devastation caused by ‘big ones’, leaving rankings and loss of income in it’s wake for many a site!
These days I welcome algorithm changes because I like to play by the Google rules!
If a website that has bought it’s way to the top, through paid links or spam or whatever and they’ve spent millions of bucks doing this then……..well I love to watch them DROP!
When the large insurance aggregators that have bought their way to the top of Google, get punished by Google, as they have been in the past for whatever transgressions and get shifted to page two or worse…….. it makes me laugh and smile ))
And it’s costing them billions everyday they are in purgatory for Google Gaming!
January 2011 Google Dance
Two weeks ago my wife spotted that something wierd was happening with the rankings…….we were watching the Google Dance in realtime!
So this last algo change is supposed to be about all sorts of things including content spam and webspam!
I believe it was and what Matt Cutts says on the offical Google Webmaster blog to be true.
But what Matt Doesn’t tell you there, is What the actual algorithm change that was implemented to the existing algoritm actually was?
What did it functionally do?
After all theres only so much you can do with datasets!
By chance we think we’ve stumbled across the logic of the change in a very unusual effect we saw immediately after the earthquake.
Firstly none of my webites in any niche or the ones we work on for clients suffered downwards movement during the seismic shakeup.
Within days I received a bunch of emails from friends saying they’d lost top ranking and had been relegated to page three or wherever and did I think that so and so was to blame.
I asked them all to spell out exactly what their strategies had been for linkbuilding.
They all were only too willing to entrust me with exactly what they have been doing, so thanks people.
I can tell you now that there was absolutely no correlation between any of the possible methodologies and the sites that had suffered.
I was none the wiser what the update had been until something strange happened a couple of days ago.
I received an email asking me whether I wanted to sell a website, that I forgotten I even owned, that I stuck up on the web about seven years ago and on which the content had not changed during that time.
I checked on google and the site had miracuously appeared on the front page for a very competitive insurance keyword!
Bizarre!
Admittedly the site was fully onsite seo’d and was a very good 10 year old generic domain name without hyphens, but we had not carried out any linking to the site for seven years or changed the content which was full of broken links!
So from this we can only deduce that the change made to the Google algo affected the variable - AGE!
Canonical Weightings?
Each of the variables in the database would have their own age structures of historical data. So each of the ‘mythical’ 200 variables that form the relational set that Google uses to combine with the inbound link rank score to determine SERPS has an age component which can be asigned various weightings.
Moreover some of the object variables are Age itself, if all the talk is to be beleived.
For example Age of domain , Age of Website, Age of Link, Age of Post, Age of Comment………..etc etc etc.
Nowadays if you’re the young man, you ain’t got nothing in the world these days……..
This makes sense because many posts throughout December and January in the Internet Marketing and Google world have in a roundabout way touched upon the importance of trust, age, aged domains and aged links!
They have also been discussing spam, authority and trust and the obvious things to trust more are the ones that have been there the longest! If its an old domain name bought over 10 years ago then it is much more likely to rank higher and quicker than a new domain that may have been bought for webspam.
Oh yeah and the company we sold the domain to for not a lot of money, specializes in buying old websites that rank, to be turned into ……..private content farms where subscribers can auto post links and articles for juice!
Roll on the next earthquake!
I’ve got 800 more of those!
PS Age also has senility as a major risk and time equals trust and that’s the only reason we have neo-conservatives! Let’s not stop time Google – Time for another Change!
There’s been a lot a of talk in the Internet Marketing world recently about ‘spam’.
Most of it has drummed up by spambuster Matthew ‘Witchfinder General’ Cutts, not Hopkins, Google’s self styled rankings mouthpiece.
Read his deliberations over at the Google blog.
There is a post over at webpronews that is worth a look
Where is all this spam?
If you search Google and find what you are looking for, then logically the search results are of good quality!
You will not find any spam sites on the first few pages of Google for any major short tail keywords, in the majority of cases you will find long established websites that have been linkbuilding for years.
At the top of the SERPS the big companies fight it out buying links – quite often from the spammy blog sites – because they need as many links from different ip addresses as possible – the older the better.
Quality is a side issue in ranking, uniqueness is more important but, its all about buying or creating links.
It is easier to create links naturally if you create quality content and you will avoid all of Googles spam penalties.
If you are spending a fortune buying links for a product then you must have the product to supply.
So where’s the spam?
It’s called MARKETING!
If you are not ranking it’s your own fault! Maybe you should seek another career!
One mans spam ( a piece of content everywhere like a billboard) is another mans income!
Yahoo Scraps Yahoo Video – SFW!
If you are a seasoned video marketer like myself you might have been slightly surprised by the email in your box this morning……………
Following on from an announcement yesterday that it is shedding a quarter of its jobs, troubled giant portal Yahoo has this morning announced that it is going to close permanently it’s video broadcasting services.
Dear Yahoo! Video User,
After careful consideration, we will be removing all general user-generated content upload capability and user-uploaded video from Yahoo! Video. As a result, your videos, user profiles, ratings, favorites, and playlists will no longer be available after March 14, 2011. User video content from Yahoo! Video that remains embedded on third party sites will no longer be playable after March 14, 2011.
Available on your profile page is a software utility that will allow you to download the videos you have uploaded to Yahoo! Video to your computer through March 14, 2011. You can find your profile by clicking on the ‘My Video’ tab or going to http://uk.video.yahoo.com/mypage.
Once you download your videos, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video.
Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Yahoo! Video.
If you have any questions about this change, please visit our FAQ section, or contact Customer Care.
The Yahoo! Video Team
It makes you wonder just where Yahoo is going and whether the business model of this pioneering giant will survive. It no longer provides search facilities of its own since it merged its results with MSN Bing a few months back.
What will this mean to video marketing?
Probably not a lot. Searches on Google video rarely show video.yahoo results these days whereas a couple of years ago the results were dominated by youtube, google video and yahoo video.
There are literally thousands of video serving platforms out there to market on. You can see the tip of this iceberg if you set up accounts at trafficgeyser, tubemogul or howcast for example.
If youtube takes over 80% of the traffic, this doesn’t leave a lot for the rest. So video distribution to serving platforms which nobody much visits really does nothing for Brand and serves one purpose only.
1. To create links on as many different IP addresses as possible, globally.
Obviously not doing much for a site like Yahoo video’s bank balance…..
So that’s the end of Yahoo.
While on the subject of video distribution, to get the most link juice out of your videos and to create traffic funnels, concentrate on Google owned youtube.
Now about Video Authority – There is Youtube and there is …….well not a lot else really.
Maybe Metacafe, Kewego etc carry some authority in the form of transient buzz, but you really need to focus your long term video strategies on dominating Youtube for your niche keywords.
Upload directly to Youtube preferably in HD which will rank higher on the internal search.
Link back to your videos from Twitter, blog posts and articles.
EMBED your youtube videos in the same!
Bookmark everything – including all the video serving platforms that carry copies of your videos!
Concentrate your efforts on getting youtube channel subscribers, comments and likes. This is the social proof that will turbocharge your video marketing efforts!
While you are at it, please Facebook like this post and subscribe to my Search Engine Marketing Youtube Channel where I am going to post some Social Media Marketing Videos giving away some amazing stuff that will rocket your site to the front page of Google and beyond…..
The first of these videos is called ‘Perpetual Free Buzz and Endless Links’ which shows you how to get just that from every piece of content you distribute…..will be going out on Christmas Day! Be sure to have a look – this technique will blow your mind!
These ‘secret’ videos will only be available to youtube subscribers who will be notified by email when the video is posted.
Next …. more on Small World Theory and how you can use it to crush the giant star networks!
It might surprise you that around 70% of the queries put to Google are ‘local search’ with local ‘buying intent’.
It therefore follows that 70% of the total transactions derived from search on the Internet are spent or consumed ‘locally’.
This amount of ‘clustered’ traffic is the reason why Google and other large multi-nationals have regional servers.
This situation creates a certain ‘cognitive dissonance’ for Internet Marketers.
On one hand they are fighting for the top spots on Google for global generic keywords, however 70% of the money is in the longtails, keyword searches with local semantic qualifiers.
To overcome this problem, indeed to take advantage of it, it is necessary to understand how Google uses small world theory in its ranking algorithm.
The art of top SERPs these days is acheived by positioning yourself, your blog, your website between major hubs of social networks for link juice and niche groups for trust/authority juice. You do this by semantically connecting the two major hubs thus creating a channel!
By doing so you become the connector within a small world authority network of sematically connected authorities.
Bingo, Google loves you because you are helping to create a ‘joined up web’, semantically ordered! Your ‘network’ becomes the authority!
Create the system!
Big Brands have dominated the Google SERPS for the last couple of years. Social Media Marketing will allow the small company to fight back!
A couple of years ago when Google first started to integrate measures from social media into its ranking algorithm, one particular update left all the big brands dominating the first few pages of Google, for all the major competitive product keywords.
All the so called thin affiliate sites disappeared overnight from Googles top spots and a fair few thicker affiliates too!
I even came up with some solutions to attacking the brand ranking dominance that still hold true.
The algortihm change rightly caused a lot of consternation at the time amongst the SEO community as they all postulated half baked theories based upon individual observation in their particular niches.
It now appears that the Brand dominance was not caused by Google reacting to the old skool SEO effort but more the natural result of the new skool content focused SEO effort in action.
Around this time all the big brands started to employ SEO agencies right left and centre. These agencies tried every old style link building method that existed and many adopted the new methods as well, which effectively declared an SEO war amongst the big brands. Whether they intentionally knew it worked or just stumbled upon the fact that something ‘worked for them’, many new media marketing agencies started to explore further the alternative links and traffic sources that are available from Social Media.
Also, at the same time the bigger brands started to employ people to create lots of content.
Not because they knew how to use content in social media marketing, but more often because they needed something to put on the Facebook and YouTube etc. accounts, that some highly paid executive had told them they needed to have. They didn’t see the ROI but they knew they had to be in Social Media.
They also needed content for their static websites, in the more than likely mistaken belief that size would matter the most in the long term, and created a whole new industry for copywriters!
So Big Brands bought their way to the top, blindly, often employing ‘blind’ SEO experts and ‘trendy’ new media content creators to create links and content on a scale that the family run business website could not compete with.
What this shows us is that Google has become a big Billboard, which the savvy content creator can shape to show what he wants to be seen and enjoy natural high SERPS as a result!
Get your content seen in all the right places . The Right places are the places where all the humans go, i.e. all the high traffic sites (Alexa top 100000).
The brands don’t have it all their own way anymore though now following recent Google algorithm changes that incorporate social networking and other human buzz!
If you can get your product talked about in all the ‘right’ places – you can compete with the big brand boys!
Unfortunately Big Brands will always have the resources to naturally create buzz and if they have constant product launches or marketing campaigns they will have constant buzz opportunities available.
BEAT THE BRANDS!
So how can you beat the big brands?
There is only one way to beat them and that is at source!
Many an Internet Marketing Expert will tell you to analyse the competition, copy and plagarise!
If you take this literally it’s not likely to win any awards at Google.
MIND THE GAP!
You need to do something different to outrank them, in other words do what they are NOT doing!
You need to look deeper at what the big brands are doing.
You need to backtrack further to find out Who is doing their SEO?
Then you can easily see, who you are up against and what that companies particular strengths and weaknesses are. Most of the time these companies are just buying links. Their weaknesses are the things they are not doing!
The vanity of SEO Account Handlers
Many SEO companies boast about who their clients are, sometimes in a bid to convince other big brands to come on board.
But the smarter SEO companies keep quiet.
To find out who is doing SEO for who and therefore what they are ‘bringing to the party’, do a quick search on Linkedin of the company you are interested in with the term SEO – you’ll be surprised what comes back!
When you’ve established the company that has a contract for SEO check out the range of skills of their employees on their Company Linkedin profile.
Quite often the big brand may have multiple SEO & marketing agencies working for them.
Now you know what they don’t know!
Exploiting the gaps in a competing SEO company’s employees knowledge base allows you to out-manouevre the competition.
This can be achieved through Social Media Marketing (Where you will always find gaps!) which if done properly, allows you through syndication to rapidly spread content and links to knock any Brand off its perch for any keyword!
Going Mobile
Mobile phones now account for around 38% of Internet usage. If you are a designer, marketer, web-master or large corporate website you had better sit up and take notice of the fact that convergence is already upon us and if your website is not mobile friendly you will be losing sales exponentially.
There is a subtle revolution going on at the moment. It is a completely new Twenty First Century way of life, and it’s being driven by the mobile phone. More specifically it is being driven by the widespread roll-out of cheap 3G devices, must have 3G fashion accessories and an extended 3G network. The revolution is mobile computing or mobile communication or whatever you want to call it. Fact of the matter is that everything you could want from TV to films, music, radio, talk and Internet…. is there besides you 24 hours a day.
The majority of the people who live their lives this way would rather lose their dog than their phone.
This quiet revolution in already beyond its infancy and will soon explode as did the ADSL broadband revolution for wired and static devices a couple of years ago.
Already large global networks like Vodafone are giving away in a bid to encourage users, 3G smart-phones like the Nokia 6700 that over a year ago would have cost $300 / £200. With the introduction of the new Nokia N8, European Nokia Symbian users, which currently account for 80 of the market will enjoy access that the majority of the 290 million Apple and blackberry users in the US have been enjoying for the past year.
Soon everyone will be carrying a tablet 3 or 4G smart-phone!
If you are an Internet Marketer and you are not ready for the big bang of Mobile Internet and the effects it’s going to have on advertising, SEO, Web Design, Google Rank and every other component of reaching your customers, quite frankly….
……. You have been Disconnected!
Further Reading – Strategic Guide for Content on Mobile Devices
[tweetthis]
