SEO Hardcore

Brought to you by SEO Book

There is obviously no shortage of information on SEO.

But thanks for turning up here

The sheer avalanche of SEO information can be overwhelming, for beginners and experts alike. Who do you know who to listen to? What information do you need to know, and what information is filler?

Why should you even listen to SEOBook?

1. Most Information Published On SEO Is Filler

You can learn 80% of what you need to know about SEO pretty quickly. You don’t need the additional 20% in order to achieve, unless you’re a masochist – otherwise known as an SEO professional

Most of the information you’ll come across on the topic of SEO is written by, and for, a professional/enthusiast crowd. There is a massive echo chamber of opinion, constantly replenished, produced using publishing tools based on the notion of communicating something, often.

It can result in a lot of noise, and not much in the way of signal, especially when you’re learning. If you’re starting out, and want to focus on learning SEO, it’s a good idea to tune the industry chatter out. It’s more likely to confuse than help in the early stages.

2. Understand The Business Of Search

Search engines aren’t your friend. At best, they tolerate SEO, but only when it aligns with company goals.

The search engines have a business to run, and their goals aren’t the same as yours. Whilst search engine reps often come across as helpful and friendly, because they typically are helpful and friendly people, keep in mind that what they are saying serves their company first and foremost. Any advice they give you is, quite rightly, designed to further company goals.

That’s their job.

Chances are, your goals and the search engines goals will be aligned in many areas, but take their advice with a grain of salt. They don’t care if your site succeeds or not, as there are plenty of other sites to index.

3. Define Goals

Before you undertake SEO, define your website goals. Do you want to make more money? Get more attention? Get more leads?

The purpose of SEO is to get your site seen in the search engines. Your aim is to attract the visitors that help you achieve your goals. A high ranking for a certain keyword won’t necessarily help you achieve your goals unless your site matches visitor intent.

Think about the web from a visitors point of view. What do they want to find? What content will they engage with? What will they spend their money on?

There’s little point ranking well if the content you provide doesn’t make you money and/or gain audience. It’s getting increasingly difficult to rank pages that aren’t closely aligned with the searchers intent. So, the more you understand your audience, and the more content that matches their intent, the more you’ll get out of SEO.

4. Get A Credible, Well Organized Course

Like SEOBook’s course for example

This isn’t a sales pitch. There are a number of great courses out there. Choose one or two that suit your budget and objectives, and dive in. Chances are, you will need to shell out some money, but the cost of a decent, well structured course is nothing compared to the wasted effort spent heading in the wrong direction.

In a nutshell, SEO is about about publishing content people want to engage with, and linking. You need to create content that matches visitor intent, you need to be crawlable, and you need to have inbound links. Good SEO courses will have this message at their core.

Did I mention links enough?

5. Connect With People

It’s natural to want the secret sauce – those secret dark techniques that result in number one rankings.

Whilst this was characteristic of SEO years ago, it’s less true now. These days, SEO is more a holistic, strategic process aimed at connecting with people, as opposed to a dark, technical art aimed at tricking machines.

Focus on making connections with people. That means understanding what people want. You can do this by undertaking basic market research, using the search engines themselves!

6. Test

Don’t listen to me. Well, maybe just a bit. Don’t listen to the repeaters in forums.

Test and measure for yourself. It’s one of the best SEO courses you can do. It’s ongoing, and it’s free.

Start with a simple, focused well constructed site. What is a well constructed site in terms of SEO?

With every change you make, every new SEO strategy you adopt, test the results. Did the change help you achieve your website goals? Did you get more traffic? Better quality traffic? If your rankings improved, did this result in more/better traffic? It can be difficult to isolate variables at the best of times, but there is no chance of doing so if you try too many techniques all at once.

Make changes one step at a time. Test and measure repeat. Become at expert at measuring SEO against your goals.

Build up your own private knowledge base of SEO in your niche. Your niche may require different strategies to other niches, which is why well-meaning advice in forums and on blogs can hinder you. You’ll also become a better judge of who is offering you good advice, and who is just repeating something they heard.

This presentation is designed to help the understanding of SEO and its definition.

This presentation describes why there are so many point’s of view and confusion when trying to nail down a simple definition for Search Engine Optimization.

SEO Architechture Video

Brought to you by SEO Book

Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system…optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google’s yield at the expense of unsuspecting advertisers, who don’t yet know what match types are or that their ads are syndicated to content sites by default.

To help new advertisers get past many of the gotchas we created the Google AdWords tax calculator – a free utility which highlights many stumbling blocks that catch new AdWords advertisers.

Given that each keyword market is unique it would be impossible to make a tool that was 100% accurate in every situation, but the goal of this tool was to simply highlight common issues, and help new advertisers address them. Individual efficiency gains may be greater or smaller than the rough initial estimates the tool provides.

Please let us know what you think, as we will gladly iterate this calculator to make it better if you have some great ideas you think we should include in it. Like all of Google’s products, our calculator is starting out in beta

Brought to you by SEO Book

Does Google like auto-generated websites wrapped in Google AdSense ads?

The short answer is no.

The long answer is a bit more convoluted. But so long as they are…

• well branded
• well funded
• operating at scale
• good at public relations
• wrapped in AdSense ads

…the answer is yes, autogenerated websites full of scraped content are fine.*

*based on Mahalo.com

Mahalo SEO Spam Case Study

The Sales Pitch & Launch

Originally when launching Mahalo, Jason Calacanas claimed that it would be spam free and that SEOs would have hell to pay.

He had a multi-month sales pitch leading up to the launch of his site where he kept stating that Squidoo is spam and kept calling SEOs scumbags so he could pull in attention and links. This was well received by SEO conference organizers because people would talk about how outrageous Jason’s speech was online, so (seeking marketing for their conferences) the SEO conference organizers acted like lap dogs standing in line waiting for their turn to have Jason call their paying attendees scumbags.

The publicity strategy worked great as it helped land Jason some mainstream press coverage and a lot of ditto head bloggers (who lacked either the experience or the mental faculty needed to see the bigger picture) got behind Jason.

The Wikpedia page about Mahalo reflects the public relations driven misinformed pitch

Search results quality

Mahalo’s goal is to improve search results by eliminating search spam from low-quality websites, such as those that have excessive advertising, distribute malware, or engage in phishing scams. Webmasters have a vested interest in seeing their sites listed. Calacanis has said that algorithmic search engines, like Google and Yahoo, suffer from manipulation by search engine optimization practitioners. Mahalo’s reliance on human editors is intended to avoid this problem, producing search results that are more relevant to the user.

When people steal/borrow/syndicate content without any editorial value add or original content, and then wrap it in ads that is generally considered spam. We will come back to that topic later, I promise!

Early Media Success

Around the above conversation flowed a bunch of links, which helped Mahalo get off to a fast start. At first Jason claimed he wanted to create “the best” content for the most popular search queries. Many members of the media were duped by Jason’s misinformation, as well reflected in the cNet article titled Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo: Screw the long tail:

Instead of a server farm that crawls through the entire known Web so it can automatically match Web pages to the queries you type, Mahalo’s search results are created by humans, in anticipation of the queries its users will type in.

How can this possibly work? Because, Calacanis says, the top 10,000 search terms account for 24 percent of all searches. If you can create great results for the top results, users will learn to appreciate the difference between machine search results–which are often thrown off by spam and poor-quality links–and human-powered search pages, lovingly created by caring search editors. For the obscure “long tail” queries that make up the 76 percent of search terms, Mahalo will serve up Google results.

Their first x articles were typically thin link lists, but hand generated. But since the pages were just link lists they were not remarkable enough to be linkworthy and the service was not sticky enough to keep people coming back. So Mahalo also decided to ramp up link building & awareness using 4 strategies:

• heavy internal cross linking of similar keywords
• create “how to” guides (and other in depth editorial) that were well formatted and fairly in depth
• use nepotism and social media spam to promote those articles
• encourage employees to create spam blogs to promote link lists of articles on Mahalo (example screenshot below, from a person who claims to proudly have never seen a superbowl, but allegedly likes the commercials)

A person who claims to have worked for Mahalo named Matthew Wayne Selznick wrote:

Regarding the Mahalo Blog Network: I don’t know how recent that screenshot is, but it’s amusing to see the blogs of several people who have either left the company or were laid off last October, when half the in-house editorial staff (including myself) was purged.
…
When I was working for Mahalo, staff were strongly encouraged to get blogs if we didn’t have them and blog about Mahalo whenever there was a high-traffic opportunity like an awards show, sports or political event.
…
I unsubscribe from the blogs of my former co-workers when the majority of their posts are Mahalo link parades, just as I unsubscribe from any blog when it becomes a mouthpiece.

Their content was not Pulitzer prize level, but the strategy paid off and they started pulling in search traffic.

Strategy Shift

In spite of claiming that he just wanted to dominate the short head of search volume, that is not how Mahalo started gaining search traffic. Even if they poured hundreds of Dollars into a piece of content the generalist content with little to no topical expertise could not compete for the most competitive and highest traffic search keywords.

You need to have something useful or original to add to the conversation if you want to compete for the most competitive keywords, and penny pinching outsourced content doesn’t get the job done there.

Instead what happened was that they ranked almost instantly for keywords like “best computer speakers” even with low quality scraped content.

Around the time I highlighted the emergence of that strategy, Google’s Matt Cutts was interviewed about it and claimed that it was fine because Jason Calacanas was using MediaWiki to create his site. Jason also did a bit of damage control in a Sphinn comment where he claimed the spam pages were “experimental pages” that “we are no indexing”

In his own words:

That was 671 days ago. What has happened since?

A Prediction

Around the time of the above incident John Andrews (who gets the SEO field as well as anyone does) stated:

Everyone just copy Jason Calcanis and Mahaloo, ok? That sounds like a GREAT idea. Jason dissed SEOs in public, at a keynote, on purpose, and then learned a bit so he wasn’t quite so ignorant of SEO any more, and is now working the SERPs as a black hat SEO. Jason dissed affiliates in public, at a keynore, on purpose, and then learned a bit so he’s not as ignorant of affiliate marketing as he was before, and now Mahaoloo has embedded (inline) affiliate links (take a look.. added since Affiliate Summit). I think every “Learn how to Make Money Fast on the Internets” web site should simply point to Mahaoulo and say “copy them.. they are riding the black edge of gray hat SEO” and be done with it. So simple… just copy them. As they add pages, add splogs on those same topics because those are money terms. Every time they link to some resource, link to it from that blog. Scan technorati for Jason’s comments, and add one of your own right into that thread.. every time. Let Jason pave the way to profits…. each time he justifies his spam, he’s justified YOUR spam as well. Every time he explains how he’s not a spammer, he’s explaining why YOUR not a spammer either. Best of all, he’s being your spokesperson for FREE!

Was John Andrews once again correct? Lets take a look behind the curtains

What Happened?

Well the above computer speakers page that was highlighted still ranks in the top 5 search results in Google.

And the site has been growing quickly, with traffic increasing at least 3-fold over the past couple years.

Jason used the economic downturn as a convenient excuse to fire most of their editorial staff. But a big piece of that traffic growth is that they have got more sophisticated in their content scraping strategy.

To appreciate how reliant their model is on scraping content, I want you to see how a new page starts off.

Once you strip the ads and scraped content from that page there is nothing left but branding & navigation.

Two other noteworthy things about that page are that it was generated by a robot (see below) and that it is already indexed in Google. Once you have enough domain authority you can publish automated scraped garbage and rank well in Google. It is the Mahalo strategy.

That page (which was automatically generated in under a minute by a fake user robot named searchclick) is already ranking well in Google! How do you know searchclick is a fake user? Well look through all the different pages they created in under a minute over the course of the last year…likely 10,000’s of them.

Understanding the Insidious Nature of Mahalo’s Scraping

Search engines like Google scrape content so that they may provide a service of value to end users *and* publishers. When they make your snippets they are used to help promote your website.

What Mahalo does is take snippets, and publish them as content on their site. So they use your page titles and your content snippet to rank their site using your content, without your permission.

If you optimize your page titles on a new blog post you are helping to feed relevant optimized content into the Mahalo machine. They will scrape it, and if you are less authoritative than they are, they will likely outrank you!

To add further insult to injury, they put nofollow on links back to the content source which they are scraping content from, so while they are “borrowing” your content you are not getting any link credit for it.

And It Gets Worse!!!

As abusive and as extreme as the above sounds, it is actually only the first step in the process.

What happens next is that if your content (published on Mahalo without permission) causes the Mahalo page to rank for new valuable keywords then they may feed those keywords into their page generation tool and keep making more auto-generated pages in that area, leveraging their domain authority and YOUR content to compete against you while building an automated spam empire.

Some of the top earning pages might have freelancers thicken them out, but the only reason humans are involved at that stage is to legitimize the mass content scraping farm that is the base of the operation. If a company has 200,000+ automated pages with 0 overhead that make 5 cents/day each that is real cashflow – $10,000+ per day of profit!

Still not convinced of the profit potential? Mahalo.com has ~ 300,000 pages indexed in Google. On auto-generated pages it is far easier to get people to click an AdSense ad than it is to get them to buy something from Amazon.com (and you profit on 100% of the ad clicks vs only 1% of the Amazon.com clicks that convert). While there are 4 AdSense blocks *above* the Amazon.com affiliate links, Jason did $250,000 on Amazon’s affiliate program last year “without trying” (again, his own stats in his own words…see Flickr.com/photos/jasoncalacanis/4234615626/ ).

Putting it All Together

If you build link equity and are good at public relations you can get away with murder in Google. Scale it big enough and the guidelines simply do NOT apply to you.

Most people who try to “pull a Mahalo” and spam up Google will likely fail because they lack

• the public relations & affiliations needed to attempt to legitimize such a strategy
• the willingness to lie just to get a bit of media ink
• the public relations & media savvy to pull such a major bait and switch without getting caught
• the domain authority to make it work algorithmically

Originally when launching Mahalo, Jason Calacanas claimed that it would be spam free and that SEOs would have hell to pay. Now that he is scraping your content (and adding nofollow to the links to your content) I think he is right. You are losing out on your search traffic because an authority site is “borrowing” your content and outranking you with your own content.

Are the search results going to start filling up with Twitter recycling start ups? What happens when the media gets in on this “what the bloggers have to say” scraping game? Does it even matter who created the content so long as someone wraps it in ads & ranks it?

I don’t think we can stop people from being greedy or stealing, but I am surprised Google has turned a blind eye to this process. Is this what they want the web to become?

Brought to you by SEO Book

From a marketing and a public relations standpoint this tool is brilliant. Rand just put up a full in-depth review here.

In the past I have not been a fan of certain outing policies, but of late I have seen that practice has went away…and if it stays that way how could I not recommend the above tool?

Sometimes it is hard to appreciate how spoiled we are as SEOs with cheap to free keyword data, cheap to free great link data, and lots of useful tools to help us organize and make sense of it all. And even lots of charts

One area where some of our tools could be better is on the usability front…we tend to presume some level of knowledge and/or the willingness to work through things to figure them out, but the presentation on OSE is very easy to grasp & understand at first glance. Part of this challenge comes from limited resources…and the most limiting one being time. It is so hard to make money servicing the SEO market (because there are so many great free options). As the market continues to open up more with more tools and options, at the same time the SEO *process* keeps getting more complex, with more competitors jumping into the SEO market.

It certainly feels like it will keep getting easier to make money as a publisher rather than a person servicing the SEO market.

But not all forms of publishing will get easier & more profitable. Companies like Demand Media and Aol sharing their results publicly will saturate some segments, but there are many areas where bullshit content won’t be enough to compete. And some thin operations will see margin contraction as the investment needed to stay competitive increases.

But we are quite literally drowning in opportunity. If a person can’t make money as a publisher with SEO knowledge, it is simply because they are not willing to put in the effort (or they are part of an old bureaucratic publishing company which moves slowly, is debt laden, and has a high cost structure).

I have always avoided scaling as a company, but there is so much opportunity that I might have a resolution for 2010