Text Link Brokering Advice from the Best in the Business

Well Done CarRentals.co.uk

3 months, 3 weeks ago

I just got a text message from Doug, saying that Car Rentals has only gone a won the
Best Car Hire Website
Winner: CarRentals.co.uk
“CarRentals wins through its convenience and breadth of choice, combining user-friendliness and a low-fuss interface.”
It’s even more impressive when you look at the shortlist of companies that car rentals was up against.
short list for […]

Dave Naylor

Shoemoney’s fighters.com

3 months, 3 weeks ago

HAHAHA this is so funny…
We started off talking about my newest venture fighters and how its a great new challenge for me personally being its a totally new market for us to penetrate
I broke shoemoney’s rib while I was sat down in a bar :), so how can a big softie like Shoe promote fighters.. […]

Dave Naylor

Did Matt Cutts just say link buying is ok ?

3 months, 3 weeks ago

Ok Matt was asked about Nofollow recently at the Domain RoundTable 2008, and If I’m reading this write, what Jaan posted
Matt says nofollow is a “very simple thing”. Nofollow link doesn’t flow page rank, doesn’t flow anchor text. Link level to say “I trust this link but I don’t trust this link”. You don’t […]

Dave Naylor

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Barack Obama Website Hacked !!

3 months, 4 weeks ago

well it was an XSS exploit in the community section of Barack Obama’s site the exploit redirected users to Hillary Clinton’s, I guess it could have been worse it could have just downloaded Malware.
How can such high profile sites keep getting hacked, come on web masters firewall up !!
DaveN

Dave Naylor

Natural Link Building generic keyword domain

3 months, 4 weeks ago

Ok I missed this question but also feel it worthy of a post :

Do generic domain keywords have an advantage in search engines ranking when the content is relevant / unique.
I ask this question as it was my rational in 1999 to register groups of generic domains in clusters rather than one off registrations, These […]

Dave Naylor

Dave

3 months, 4 weeks ago

Dave TV asks the question “Are you Dave?” Personally, I think the mighty DaveN should step forward and announce himself as the one and only Dave.  Dave could already be considered the ultimate in home entertainment and is a match for any broadcast station. Perhaps he may start a TV station of his own?

Dave Naylor

economist.com PR8 backlinks for sale

4 months ago

yep looks like they are selling Juicy PR8 backlinks.. www.economist.com grab before they lose the juice
DaveN

Dave Naylor

Free WordPress Themes

4 months ago

So I create a few Free Wordpress Themes, let say 10 add a bit of copy say ..
Welcome to Free Wordpress Themes I decided to create a set of 10 Free Wordpress themes and the terms are. they are 100% free wordpress themes for personal or commercial use, You don’t have to pay me a […]

Dave Naylor

George Maxwell buyers beware

4 months ago

George Maxwell is a company that sells chesterfield sofas, and I guess his SEO is http://www.munki-boy.co.uk/index.html, so why did they register this domain
Domain name: DISTINCTIVE-CHESTERFIELDS.COM
Registrant:
George Maxwell UK Ltd
6 Ashley Court
Hale, Cheshire WA15 9PD
GB
Now if I found out that they had bought some links to a site we designed, that also sells chesterfield sofas, then […]

Dave Naylor

ufindus more like uspamus

4 months ago

Ok maybe I’m been a little harsh here, over the weekend I did a quick search on Google for”Armani Suits Harrogate” clicked on #1 ufindus and been an SEO instantly thought hmmmm what going on here then.
so is this bad or good practice.
http://www.ufindus.com/fashion_clothing_shops/harrogate when I went to this page, I notice that the word Armani […]

Dave Naylor

Subdomains root of all evil or wealth

4 months ago

after a meeting last week I decided that a client had enough reasons to start using sub-domains on a city level,
I still feel you have to be careful thou, take when google killed all the “uk.com” sub-domain websites, sites that used to rank for #3 fireworks (fireworks.uk.com) just died overnight, they went on and decided […]

Dave Naylor

Link Building Fears

4 months ago

Further to Dave’s post on checking backlinks maybe it’s time to make a stand on effective link building. In my eyes there certainly seems to be too much fear about who is linking to who and why. You are looking at launching an effective link building strategy yet your initial thoughts are I’m not going […]

Dave Naylor

SEO Rank No1 in Google

4 months ago

It’s the age old problem. Explaining to clients that SEO takes time. Many watch their rankings on a daily basis, they may have dropped 3 places in Google. Our answer is always the same… How are your sales? How many people contacted you about using your services? What’s new about your site ? Have you […]

Dave Naylor

SEO is a Social Activity :)

4 months ago

Here is a 10 minute and 46 second flash video about how SEO is becoming less mechanical and more social. So far we have about a half dozen members only videos like this one…I am trying to make about one new one each week.

Aaron Wall

Can you really check backlinks anymore

4 months ago

I think the big 3 search engines have done a great job at stopping normal SEO’s and web masters checking out back links.
First off Live.com well they just pulled the link: and linkdomain: a while ago, hopefully they will add it into the webmaster.live.com
Google hasn’t for years shown real link data and yahoo […]

Dave Naylor

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The Value of Small Daily Incrimental Improvements

4 months ago

Building a well known brand and a sustainable business model in a competitive marketplace is challenging, but if you break things down into pieces and do something every day eventually you win marketshare. People who become successful have large goals like “become the leading source in our market” or “increase profits 150% year over year” but most people who actually achieve those types of goals set smaller goals and work toward achieving them every day.

One of my better habits is writing a to do list. When I scratch things off the list there is a sense of accomplishment which drives further activity. Sometimes the accomplishments are moral victories, learning how to create a little bit of code, or improving the graphical interface of something, while other projects are much more complex, like writing a book or hundreds of training modules. As long as growth is sustainable then all is well. If you stop growing in a growing marketplace then you need to evaluate what you are doing wrong.

• Are you doing too many repetitive tasks that software or a cron job should be able to do?
• Does your site lack viral marketing components?
• Does your site do a poor job of prequalifying leads?
• Are you selling to the wrong market?
• Are you pricing too cheaply and attracting the wrong clients?
• Are you dong a poor job building perceived value?
• Is your conversion process broken?
• Are you doing a poor job of transferring value?

In nearly every growing business at some point in time the answer to every single one of those questions is yes. Each is an area for improvement.

With employees I can come off as being under-appreciating and/or too demanding, largely because I expect people to work as hard as I do, and maybe 2% of people do. When you have the attitude of making incremental daily improvements it is hard for some people to grasp it until you beat it into their heads. I have found it hard to teach most people - especially if they work remotely.

You really need to find that 10% of people who want to add value…and then you need to find the 30% of those who’s loyalty exceeds their greed. It is hard to find good workers. As software gets cheaper I suspect it will only get harder to find and retain quality employees as more of the quality people decide to work for themselves, which means that you need to create ways to get customers to do your marketing for you.

I think the key to smoothing out some of the friction with workers is to teach people to set their own score card. Daily contact off the start is needed to set expectations and keep things progressing. But over time have them ask themselves each day what they did to add value, make a difference, and remove market friction. If you are active in your marketplace, are receptive to feedback, are aggressive with push marketing, give away value, and keep trying to build value each day, eventually the profits roll in. It might take a couple years to work out well, but eventually it does.

Aaron Wall

Google Thinks YOU Are a Black Hat SEO. Should You Trust Them?

4 months ago

Preemptive Spam Penalties

There is a great thread over on SEOmoz by Matthew Inman about how some Googlers consider any of his future attempted linkbaits and widgetbaits to be off topic spam, based on his aggressive misuse of widgets in the past.

With hundreds of comments many of them are noise, but some of them are spot on with Google’s current trends, especially those from Jeremy Luebke and Jim Boykin. Jeremy wrote:

Google is determined to make any scalable link building process blackhat. It won’t be long before all off topic linkbait, including articles, is considered linkspam.

And Jim wrote

And the blackhat club gets bigger…. and the waters get murkier and murkier…. if you’re an SEO, you’re a black hat. Only those who don’t know what SEO is are the white hats…. Don’t try to rank high on purpose….if you do then you’ve broken a google guideline

Corporate Marketing vs Individual SEOs

This event clearly demonstrates how differently Google treats major corporations vs individual SEOs (especially if they are publicly known as SEOs). An individual SEO who is great at his job can expect to be preemptively penalized to be made an example of, even while the competition are doing exactly what he wants to do (ie: the same activity is brand building when the corporation does it and is spam when Mr. Inman does it).

A corporation typically is out of the index for a few days to a week at most, even if they are operating at an industrial spam scale for years! When the corporations are relisted they may need to do a bit of rebuilding, but millions in profits from years of spamming allow them to invest adequate capital into growth.

This is why some of Google’s editorial judgement seems so arbitrary and lame. The small player innovates, gets crushed by Google for being creative and innovative, then the monolithic corporations uses the same techniques to an industrial scale and are somehow better for borrowing/stealing the techniques. How does that process foster web innovation?

I lost a lot of links when a Google engineer decided to penalize one of my sites, and in the process all the links from my aggressive promotion costing 10s of thousands of dollars disappeared, while the fortune 500 companies in my field got a head start and competitive advantage against me by recycling my idea. I can’t express how thrilled I was. That was the past and I am over it, but I think Google needs to take a close look at their own behavior when judging others.

Does Google Use Off Topic Linkbait & Widgets?

• An off topic transcription is a legitimate source of links, according to Matt Cutts - at least when you are syndicating Google’s opinions.
• When you install AdSense for search on your site with the Google logo (aka paid link) it direct links back to Google (ie: not to their AdSense program).
• Google barters PageRank to push their business objectives.
• How is what they are doing any better than what the average SEO does? Should they hold themselves to the standards they judge everyone else by? How can they be seen as objective if they do not?

Be Careful Who You Trust

What is worse about this game of passing arbitrary judgement is that many of the best known SEOs praise each other in public only to snitch on one another in private (talk about being ethically challenged). One member who recently joined my training program read the training module about how affiliate programs can pass PageRank and asked Matt Cutts if they could use 301 redirects on their affiliate program “like Aaron does” so that he too could “rank for everything”. Within a week my affiliate program no longer passed link juice.

Pick a Smart Professional Label

Google can not keep growing their revenues at an acceptable rate without beating the value out of others. If you are new to the SEO field and want to excel online, call yourself something other than an SEO. Using the label SEO invites arbitrary monitoring and punishment, and there are too many plastic personalities in this field willing to dime out a friend in exchange for a wooden nickel.

Aaron Wall

Get Paid Links from the US Olympic Team

4 months ago

So hey Google care to explain why this isn’t a paid link page? Any reason you haven’t dinged the page rank of this known link seller or cut off their ability to pass page rank or anchor text? Now I’m not daft enough to believe that any of those companies gave money with the primary […]

Michael Gray