Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Are people who don't use their keywords as their name in comments the true spammers?

The Power of Content shows us that the anchor text used to link out can help increase your ranking.  The anchor text you use to link out acts like a super bold.  People have reported a ranking increase by linking out to authority sites but I don't think it's the authority site linking that gives the ranking boots it's the link anchor text.  For example if I link out using the anchor text keyword to a post about keywords then that will help this post rank better.

By using their name, people are denying you that opportunity to increase your ranking.  For relevancy, there's no way that google can be that smart.  I don't trust relevancy anymore beyond the word level.  I'm not sure that Google can know the relevancy between all the synonyms and definitely not between unconventional connections.  Let's say your blog is about making money online and someone posts a comment with the anchor text online banking.  You get relevancy for the word online!

Unless your name is something like Tom Cruise then your name doesn't provide any value to the blogger as anything that would be searched for.  There could be a rare circumstance like:  You post a comment under the name Jerry and someone googles "How did my friend Jerry make so much money online?"

Your name is also largely irrelevant except as a means of identification.  A rose by any other name doth smell as sweat...  If your website is a site like Fear dot com where you could die by visiting the website then it would be much better for you to describe the site with your anchor text then use your name.  Your anchor niche can also be used as a form of identification "Hey that guy always chooses banking keywords!"  If that doesn't work then you can always just sign your name on the bottom.

Don't comment spam with your worthless name!  Use your keywords!

Thursday, July 22, 2010

The Power of Forum Linkbuilding

Among the possible link building methods which include article directories, blog commenting, social bookmarking/directory submission, and creating new blogs or websites; forum link building is a powerful over looked method.  Forum link building is not just a set and forget put as many links to your website in your profile as you can.  You've got to build links to your linksArticle directories are good but you really want an article directory that offers profit sharing, requires unique content(so you can compete with people who submit to a bunch of different article directories) or has syndicated content which helps build links to your profile page, and has editorial control(in the hopes that google will manually boost the trust rank of the site and avoid possible nerfage).  In addition, you'd like an easy to use interface and have their be high traffic to the directory so you get referral traffic and a higher probability of organic links.

There's not a lot of article directories that meet that criteria.  Some you have to pay for like The Keyword Academy and you have to buy your own Wordpress Blog to take full advantage(so you can capitalize on all the people who want to submit articles to your directory).  Like with The Keyword Academy you have to make it profit sharing by profiting off the articles on your own article site.  And you have to be experienced to make back the monthly payments(although you do get a one dollar trial).

So when you've exhausted all the good article directories, forum link building is a good way to augment it.  Forum referrals from related niche forums is my #2 source of traffic behind Google.  You can have links from both your sig and profile page.  You can also include deep links within posts.  You can also link to other threads on the forum which contain your link boosting the link power of those links.  In addition, many forums have social bookmarking buttons on the bottom of the page making boosting the link juice of those threads easy.

A lot of forums are also authority sites.  So you can build threads targeting various keywords and rely on referral traffic.  Forums also are a good source of new content featuring info from a lot of mavens in a niche.  The only issue with forums is it being hard to get good anchor text but that's why we have article links.

Friday, July 16, 2010

In the future will no one post on their own blog?

Wordpress article directories are all the rage.  Due to the C-class IP restriction and self-hosted blogs built in trust ranking, sites like The Keyword Academy and Free Traffic System encourage you to submit your own Wordpress blog in exchange for you being able to post content on other peoples Wordpress blogs in their Article Directories.  You then put Adsense on your Article Directory site and rake in the money.

The experts recommend 90% backlink work and 10% work on your own site.  What if you did 100% backlink work?  If you write articles from your own directories you can get more internal linkage and not have to link to other sites.  There are Wordpress plugins that automate internal linkage and linking to other sites can help improve your ranking based on the anchor text used to link to other sites.

So basically, if you own such an article directory why would you ever post on that directory when you could be posting on other people's article directories generating precious backlinks so you can make money with adsense.  Yes, people will not contribute keyword rich content to article directories but you can overcome anything with enough backlinks.  Also, some directories like The Keyword Academy enable you to edit the content as long as you keep the links in so you can improve the ranking that way(without relying on backlinks).  And as the directories grow, you're more likely to get more gem content thereby allowing you to focus more on linkbuilding to those articles.  The coal articles still give you internal linking opportunities and hey maybe they article poster will send some link juice to those articles.

You just can't compete with an article directory that wants to make money.  Any article directory designed to make money is going to work harder to ensure readable, unique content(The Keyword Academy has a checker to make sure the content is unique).  This is of course where TKA beats Free Traffic System as submitting your word press blog only gets you 7% bonus back links regardless of the actual quality of the blog.  Whereas if you want to make money with a site, you're going to want to make sure your site has a good trust ranking and authority ranking.  You're going to need those two things to beat out the site that the submitted article beats the site it's linking to.

So, I foresee a future where eventually no Internet Marketer writes a word on his own site.  The most they'll do on their own site is install plugins, register a domain name, pick tags and categories, and edit posts so they rank better.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Article Marketing Experiment

In the past, I've been using article directories mostly for backlinks.  Now I'm going to try to actually feed people to more article which still links back to my site.  Here's my "Super" Article on Table Clamps for height increase.  Now my hypothesis on trust rank was that sites with more trust rank can have more backlinks counting than un-trasted sites.  So the question is:  Can I rank this page on infobarrel more easily than on my own site?  This page is directly related to height increase so I want a high click-thru rate.

For infobarrel, you're not supposed to have a call to action but height increase is so complex that there was no way to cover everything in the article.  The reader could never feel complete with one article and would be compelled to click-thru. 

Now when I've done interlinking on my own site, I do notice some of the interlinking anchor text used to help find my site.  But I wonder if interlinking counts more on trusted sites, I might try linking a few other infobarrel articles to it just to see if it helps.  But theoretically, links from external sites should help more.

Also, my article may get irrelevant searchers looking for table clamps and people looking to increase the height of their table.  This will be my first foray into a "normal" buying niche.

I'm going to start out by sending 10 ezine articles to the page.  My trust rank hypothesis is that infobarrel being a trusted site should have all of those ezine articles counting even though there are probably already a million ezine articles linking to infobarrel.  I'm going to use my other ezine link to link to this site so this site doesn't look like a can.

Most Internet Marketers have their farm sites on Tier four or five of the pyramid.  If this site doesn't have a lot of backlinks it looks like a tier four or five farm site.  Google doesn't like farm sites so I want this site to get backlinks especially since it's a blogspot blog.

I'm not worried about anyone stealing my niche because there's no way some internet marketer could perform the height increase experiments that I have on his or herself.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Trust Rank

Trust Rank is one of the things most sought after by internet marketers.  How does one acquire trust rank and what does trust rank give?  Here are some theories.

First, we have to look at all the other factors that are not accounted for by the other variables like Page Rank, Site Authority, and so on.

The main factor is the C-class IP restriction.  Many have noted from their own sites get less link juice from the same domain over time whereas domains like ezine and hubpages don't have that restriction.  Trust Rank is one possible explanation.  The higher your trust rank the more links that are counted from a single domain.

Self-hosted domains rank higher than Web 2.0 sites but Web 2.0 sites can eventually catch up but why?  One possible explanation is trust rank.  Trust rank is a modifier on how strong links are.  So the self-hosted domains start with a higher trust rating so they start off with more links counting and stronger but as the Web 2.0 sites acquire more trust rating their links begin to be valued equally to the Self-hosted domains links.

How does one acquire trust rank?  It can't work like PR which can be generated from any form of content.  It also has to be a fairly automated system.  Each domain has it's own trust value. Every link from a new domain gets you a greater point of trust value.  You can't get trust with internal linking like you can PR.  Each unique domain link is one point of trust.  Trust rank has to operate differently from the Page Rank system to have a purpose.  Hence each domain one point of trust.  Higher trust equals more links per C-class ip counting.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Is it possible to Make Money Online without targeting Noobs?

I was recently looking over at Ben's SEO blog and he mentions that normally he caters to noobs whereas with his SEO blogs he targets smart internet users.  Maybe, I should take a page from pro-wrestling and call them smark fans?  Now, he doesn't run any ads on the blog but he does hype infobarrel a lot and constantly drops his affiliate link(with infobarrel's affiliate program you get 2% of your refferals google adsense adviews).  Now, after the google destruction where a lot of sites were de-indexed, he hasn't posted since.  I take it he wasn't making very much money with infobarrel refferals?  He even had a hook too(100 infobarrels in 100 days, and sign up using my affiliate link so I get 2% of that).

So Ben failed to make money with his high quality SEO blog and made the majority of his money writing about random products which targeted internet noobs.  Most of the internet marketing guru's recommend targeting low hanging fruit with buying keywords.  There are tons of long tails for each product:  Cereals, board games, make-up...  I just typed in "Where can I buy Count Chocula?" and the number one ranked site was Amazon so apparently it's not a very profitable niche.  Now I type in "Where can I find Dilbert Calendars?" and now I get a clear internet marketing site called freeality which is nothing but a bunch of ads.

Anyways you type in any conceivable long tail product keyword and there are sites there looking to profit on it.  But if you type in more intelligent questions you don't get very much or you don't get what you're looking for(usually a wikipedia entry).

Now my website has some of the best information on growing taller myths and it doesn't rank very well for non-scientific terms relating to height increase.  I'm the authority of the science of height increase but if I rank so well for all science + height increase long tails shouldn't I rank somewhere in the trenches of the height increase keyword as well?  If my height increase method is not a success then I can't make any money to support height increase endeavors.

The search engines only care about shopping.  They only care about internet marketers who compete with their advertisers who take 60% of the ad clicks for thin buying keyword sites.  The search engines don't care that irrelevant wikipedia pages take up the first few entries when you're trying to find hard scientific information.  The search engines set their priority for buying keywords versus informational keywords.

Can anybody make money from informational keywords?  The search engines don't bother doing it.  Scientists charge a lot though for their four page "e-books" off of pubmed.  You don't see scientists using adwords to advertise their articles though...

If people can't make money by targeting intelligent people then all we'll see is 100s and 100s of crap articles targeting the same interweb nobs.  You have to provide a lot of value to make smart people take notice whereas for noobs you don't have to provide nearly as much.

I don't think there's a way to make money on the internet unless you find a cure for cancer or a way to increase height(the too are related by cellular proliferation by the way).

Saturday, July 3, 2010

The C-class IP restriction

The Power of Content theory states that each page must have some link juice value.  It's rather like a can in fighting where every page no matter how many links go out(how bad a record) gives some benefit to the page it's linking too.  I get a lot of random links but google still shows them in webmaster tools.  I get a lot of random links from the same sites like righthealth and kosmix for my quest for height blog.  Usually, when I search for my blog whichever site is the double listing for when I search for "quest for height" is the site with the most random links.

If Google stopped counting links from the same C-class ip per domain then why are people building links to their ezine articles or hubpages?  The logical conclusion is that the C-class ip thing is by a ratio and that the search engines expect you to have a lot of different links from a lot of different C-class ip's.  And what about internal links?

What I've done is to adapt to what I see in google webmaster tools.  Google says I have 520 links to my domain in my main blog but only shows my 160.  However, for the rest of the pages on the site it shows me all of the links.  This says hey I need to build links to the other pages of my site.  Whenever I hit a plateau on domain wide links showing up, building links to the internal pages of my site seemed to help.  It could however be a sandbox thing(where domain age affects how many links are counted) but the counterargument to the sand box is news stories which get a lot of links very quickly.  Usually they are not whole new sites though but are part of an already trusted domain.

Basically, my view on the C-class ip thing is that Google tells you when it counts links or not.  When links stop showing up then you get links from a new source.  Google Webmaster tools says that anchor text is valuable so if the anchor text is showing up that means it's a good link(comment links show up).  The amount of time that it takes for the anchor text of a link to show up correlates with how valuable that link is.

I think the whole C-class ip thing is over-exaggerated and mainly designed to sell products.  I mean if you're making mini-sites that are one page with exact matching domains then maybe the C-class ip thing matters more but I don't think so for larger sites(I think you can have a very large percentage from one domain no problems as long as you vary anchor text and page linked to).

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Amazon Affiliates versus Google Affiliates

This is a topic that comes up in a lot of blogs.  I am absolutely horrid at monetizing the blog.  I just keep on building links and hope that search engine juice flows praying that eventually I'll get enough money to appropriately fund my height increase efforts.

What I like about Adsense is that it's a measure of how good my blog is.  Every time somebody clicks on an ad it's like I failed to protect them from scams.  What's good about Adsense is that I can make money even if nobody clicks and nobody converts for the advertiser.  Yeah I'll get smart priced but Adsense won't get pulled away like a private ad network would if nobody buys anything.  And there are no regulations against discouraging people from clicking adsense ads :)

What I like about Amazon is that you can go hey check this out, what do you think about such and such product.  Get people to click on the link, the cookie stays for 24 hours and you get irrelevant buys plus you know that Amazon really favors the consumer.  I knew a guy who sold on Amazon and they gave a refund on his products for every little thing.  Click bank has a refund policy too but most of the information on Click Bank is available for free.  You know that Amazon actually gives value to your readers.

The irrelevant product I sold on Amazon so far...you internet marketers are going to love this:  A Hair Loss product.