Note from Nick: This is this sites first ever guest blog post.  It’s from a very tall friend of mine who chose to remain anonymous.  For simplicity reasons we will just refer to him as “Hattori Hanzo”.  As mentioned below in the disclaimer this post is all in fun SEO satire and not intended to be taken seriously.  If you’re offended feel free to remove yourself from the RSS feed.

Disclaimer (Parental Discretion): Before you read any further, please know that this post contains plenty of vulgar language and quite a bit of sexual innuendo. It is all written in good fun. If you feel that you cannot develop a sense of humor or tolerance for the certain words (fuck, being one of them) by the end of this fucking paragraph you shouldn’t keep reading. You need something a little bit more vanilla.

The Cold Hard Truth (PPC vs. SEO)

Regardless of what people like to think, all Internet Marketing disciplines are not created equal and do not work the same. To better understand that concept we need to examine a Webmaster’s relationship with Google as a real-life relationship.

• The “Art” of PPC (aka Paid Love)

  In this analogy Google is the high-class hooker that you meet at the casino bar. She will probably buy you a drink (the $100 AdWords voucher), she will talk sweet nothings into your ear and convince you to spend your harder earned money on a wild night with her. At this point, you are thinking that this girl is special and that she probably really likes you. She’s fun. She’s hot and most likely swallows (assuming that you pay enough). If you are a high-roller, she will keep coming back to you, but if you are not, chances are that you will wake up in the morning, she will be gone with all your money and you will be left behind holding your meat.

• The Real Art of SEO

  We all know that lasting relationships do not get built that way. Dating a money-lovin’ hoe (even if she’s not an actual hooker – no, I don’t want to pay your bills) will only get you into trouble and leave you heartbroken. And this is where SEO comes in. SEO represents how a successful and long-standing relationships should be built. You need to put in the time and effort to make things happen.

Below is a balls deep … linking blueprint on how to successfully seduce, date and satisfy Google.

Dating Ain’t Easy: You Need to Put the Time In

You have asked Google to go out with you and she said yes. Maybe she heard you have an awesome keyword-rich URL, a .org TLD, and an awesome SEO-friendly CMS to go with it. So you are waiting all week for Saturday night and getting your shit together (yes, this is fucking high school). You have written some kick-ass content, optimized the shit out of it and have even talked to some friends of yours to put in a good word for you (quality links) during the week. Google has probably also done her homework by doing a background check on you and looking at your Webmaster Tools. You have taken care of that shit and you know you are golden.

Saturday night is here. You are looking fresh in that brand new WordPress design and all your plug-ins have you feeling good and confident. You take her out for dinner and a movie (possibly a roco) and you are giving her a chance to get to know you (you are a swell guy and have nothing to hide afterall). You are treating her like the lady that she is, but at the same time you do want to show her that you are the alpha-wolf and that you are the next big thing in the insurance vertical.

At this point you also know that she will put not out on the first date. This is insurance Google that you have taken out, not Duluth MN SEO Google (she puts out much easier). The date goes well, you drop her off at home and you ask her out again. Assuming that you have not done anything to fuck it all up, she will say yes. Fast forward a few weeks or couple of months and you are now on your 10^th date. You are still putting in the time to get to know her, show her what you are all about (more content) and have some more people around the school tell her how awesome you are (even more contextual links baby). At this point you can also introduce her to your brother who is in college – unless he is an asshole, he will of course give you a glowing review (and there goes the .edu link – boom goes the dynamite).

And just like that you are out of the sandbox and very close to her box. You 10^th date went as well as you expected and you my friend have earned yourself a trip to the show. You are now making out on her couch for a while and when light touching turns to heavy petting it is the time to play a game we like to call …

Just The Tip … Linking

At this point, you are probably thinking to yourself: “Holy shit, this is actually happening!!!!” and this is the point where most Webmasters blow it. Don’t be that guy. Don’t get overaggressive. Keep putting the work and time in and keep showing Google that organic growth that she is looking for. Remember, so far she has only seen and heard good things about your awesome home page and even though she knows of your deep pages, now is the time to show her the quality. Deep inside you knew this day was coming so you prepared. You probably man-scaped (is that a word? I think it is) by already building some pretty good links to your “content package” and it pays off. She is thoroughly impressed and she is ready to make some bad decisions. This is where you suggest playing that little game called “just the tip … linking”. Just for a second, just to see how it feels. As expected, IT FEELS AWESOME, and up the ranks you climb. 3^rd page, still climbing and you’ve only started. Time for some advanced SEO moves. Go after that long-tail like a boss.

Balls Deep … Linking (Advanced SEO)

Take your linking, balls deep to levels she never even knew existed.

The diagram below shows how you how to do it! This technique – “The Triangle of Love”, is based on the premise that you have an additional site with some PR that you can use to your advantage and that a 301 redirect transfers 1.5 times the link value of a regular links (Matt Cutts confirmed). It also makes temporary use of the power of the 302 (you don’t want to let that juice out too early) as a temporary buffer to algorithmic ecstasy. This is what you should be working on while in the sandbox.

The graphic above might resemble a link wheel, but it’s not a fucking link wheel. It’s a link triangle. Big difference! Here are the steps:

1. From the awesome content of your secondary site at the bottom of your triangle you link to two other sites with similar anchor text to the one you are using on the deep page (Awesome Blossom Deep Content Page) of your money site.
2. You 302 redirect those sites to another 2 sites (no content needed)
3. You then again 302 redirect those sites to one final site at the tip of the pyramid. (no content needed)
4. From the tip of the pyramid you place one final 302 redirect to a page on the site with similar content as your money page – Near Duplicate Awesome Blossom Balls Deep Content Page.

Needless to say, you have just set the stage for something magical to happen. No juice yet, but all the piping is there and ready to go. The two final steps to this technique is what we call …

The Money-Shot

And now, it’s time to blow … Google’s mind and put the finishing touches to an outstanding SEO performance that will have Google keep coming back for more. Take a look at the updated diagram.

1. Turn the 302 redirects to 301 redirects and transfer all the juice you have been working on to the tip of the triangle and then on to the near duplicate content page! At this point you might be wondering why the fuck I would transfer all that juice to a duplicate content page (Google doesn’t like that after all, or does she?) instead of an original content page. If so, keep fucking reading and stop interrupting. There is a very good reason.
2. CANONICAL and release all that juice to your Awesome Blossom Deep Content Page (Money Page) at once.
3. Listen to Google scream the 3 little words that every Webmaster wants to hear: “NUMBER 1 RANKING!!!!!!!” and “Double listing for the canonical”. Happy now? You better be.

Warnings

1. Remember that this was a few weeks/months worth of juice (depending on how long you were in the sandbox) that you just released on your money page! That is almost 11.4 points of PR awesomeness – 5 301 redirects and a canonical = 1.5 worth of PR juice to the sixth power (remember the premise of this technique). That is a lot of juice for a page 1 to handle and you might want to grab a towel. You need to be mindful of the sites that now rank below you. Actually you don’t and your link juices are the least of their problems, because you also just shit on them on your way up. Good times! Welcome to the Google layer cake folks.
2. Throughout this beautiful experience, you might have noticed that there is a big-ass Panda bear sitting in the corner of the room watching the whole thing, fondling itself (pervert) and waiting to pounce on you if you get out line – the closest you might have gotten was the duplicate content page, but you planned and you came through. Needless to say that pulling off an advanced SEO technique like this, gives you the right and the responsibility to tell the Panda (on behalf of the entire SEO world) to “shut the fuck up” and go eat some bamboo or you will straight up murder its almost extinct ass.

That is all. Rinse and repeat for the next page and next page and the next page. Google is smitten and you my friend can do no wrong. Monetize like your life depended on it. If you didn’t murder that Panda though watch your ass. You never know what the crazy, furry bastard might do.

Find Content Through Expiring Domain Auctions.

My favorite way to find potential content to re-use is to checkout expiring domain auctions at GoDaddy Auctions.  You want to first go to their “advanced” search on the right side of the screen and click on the “keywords” tab.  At this point change the first drop down to “contains” and add your sites topic below.  What this will do is narrow down the list of expired domains to ones that include your keyword in the URL.  Finally you will want to scroll down to the “Type” tab in the advanced form and click on “Expiring Domains”.  Then go ahead and click “Search”.

To illustrate this technique I will use the finance niche for my example.  Starting with the screen shot to the right you will see that I added “finance” to the keywords tab and clicked on the expired domains.  After hitting the “search” button you will see the following results.

Pro-Tip: Sort the list by 100 results and even by traffic/price to help find quality sites.

 Search For Quality Sites & Utilize Archive.org.

Here is where you will likely spend most of your time executing this technique.  You will want to visually look for domains that are of quality.  You may even want to sort the domains by bids, traffic or valuation.  At this point you will want to copy the domain URL and open it up in another tab.  99% of the time you will land on a parked / this domain will expire Go Daddy page.  What you want to do here is click on the Archive.org button on the SEOBook toolbar or manually add the domain to the search field on the way back machine at archive.org.

Continuing with my finance example I sifted through the list of sites that were displayed and found toptenfinance.com.  After plugging this URL into the way back machine at archive.org I saw that this site was first registered in 2001 and that this site has been crawled many times.

Clicking on the December 1st date I was taken back to the record of the website.  From here I was able to navigate to the “articles” section of this website and gain access to all the unique articles that this website had published way back in 2008.  This is exactly what your looking for.

From the main articles pages I was able to dig through and find some really good content pieces that are no longer live on the web and is fresh for the picking.  For instance this post on mortgage loan finance ideas:

Avoiding Duplicate Content & Maximizing Value.

So by now half you reading this post are shaking your head ready to rip me to shreds in the comments.  For the rest of you salivating at this opportunity keep on reading.  The first concern with re-purposing this content is to make sure that Google doesn’t already have it in their index.  Depending on how long the site has been down will increase your chances of it currently being indexed.   The best way to check whether or not its been indexed is to copy the first 3 or 4 lines of the article and search for it in Google with quotes.  With the example shown above Google currently has the page indexed but it will likely fall out of the index quickly as its already cached with the GoDaddy expiring domain page.

Since Google has already cached the GoDaddy landing page its only a matter of time before they remove the old page from the index.  At this point the content is free for you to use.  Once the old content is removed from Google and you publish it on your site it will be completely unique to your domain.   It’s important that you wait until the old page falls out of the index as you want to make sure your domain is the only one that is publishing and getting credit for the content.  If you did a Google search for the first couple sentences and nothing came back in the search results you are free to publish it right now!

Is This Technique “Wrong” / Advanced Link Building

This is a technique that you have to decide whether or not your comfortable with.  People can argue copyright and such so you might want to be careful where you lift the content.  If you are questioning this technique because you simply don’t want to take the risk of re-hosting this content on your own website I have the perfect solution for you.  GUEST BLOG IT OUT! It’s not difficult to find guest blog opportunities.  In fact a simple search for Finance+”Write For Us” returned over 1,700,00 results.

Do you think one of these websites would be willing to accept this content as a guest post which would include a link pointing back to your website?  Be creative people – don’t let others convince you that you have to work hard to build links.  You just have to work smart!

Now here is the part where the people screaming ethics and morals get to respond in the comments below.

This weeks discussion is an extension of my post from last week about buying links successfully.  I want to know what your “red flags” are when you build links.  I’m not concerned whether your purchasing them, trading them or even receiving them “naturally”.  What kind of factors would concern you enough to warrant attempting to remove an existing link to your website or just avoiding the link opportunity all together?

Below are a couple “red flags” in my book that what would scare me when looking to build one off links.

• Websites that aren’t indexed in Google and aren’t new sites.
• Websites that have issues with their entire site being indexed in Google.
• Does the website link out to questionable or “bad” niche sites?
• What type of links does this website have coming in? Are they quality, full of spam or from questionable neighborhoods?
• How many outbound links does the particular page i’m targeting already have?
• Dropped domains – especially ones that have been picked up and the theme radically changed.

These are just a few qualities I look for when building links to my clients and personal websites.  I have been told several times that I am far too picky about my link building prospects but I argue its a good technique to last the “test of time”.

So what are your “red flags” when building links?

picture courtesy of FLICKR

Let’s first get the facts straight.  I’m not a “white hat” nor “black hat” SEO I’m a “do what it takes to rank” SEO.  With that said a couple weeks back I was cruising through my Twitter timeline where I read a tweet from someone asking why everyone posts the same crap about “X SEO tactics to avoid“.   This tweet was followed up with a comment along the lines of “it would be much more interesting if someone posted about getting away with X black hat tactics”.   In addition a lot of hoopla was published last week about Google purchasing links that has caused the SEO industry to freak out. At that point I set out to do the obvious, to share how you can buy links but get away with it!  I talked to several individuals I know that are highly involved in the link purchasing world and received an absolute ton of information about the game.  One individual shared with me that he has a 2000 site network created strictly to sell links via blog posts.  In the last handful of years even with all the algorithm changes and Panda updates he has had a total of ZERO sites penalized.  These techniques he shared have helped net over $50,000 a month!  Naturally questions ensued and I was able to further find out exactly how you can buy links and get away with it!  Best yet the individuals were perfectly OK with me sharing them with you.  So on to the goods!

Passing The Sniff Test.

Even when you buy links the first goal is to make them not look like paid links.  This is where the “sniff test” comes in. The sniff test consists of any “obvious” signs of a paid or manipulated links such as unrelated anchor text links, several links pointing to the same domain in a single piece of content and even the authority or health of the linking domain.  Think about this, outside of the blatant anchor text links from non niche related sites or text that says “paid” or “sponsored” how can YOU tell if a link is naturally given or paid for?  It’s pretty common for authors to link out within blog content and Google even encourages this.  The key to passing the sniff test is not being able to blatantly tell if the link is paid.

What You Need To Look For When Purchasing links.

When you purchase links the smart way it’s going to include work – nothing in life is easy.  Just like organic “White Hat” SEO there are different types of value you want out of each link acquired such as:

• IP Diversity
• Niche Relevance
• Anchor Text
• Authority / Trust
• Page Rank (to a lesser extent)

Now remember that you don’t need every link to fit every one of the requirements.  Focus on achieving 3 out of the 5 of these for every link.  Get your authority / trust / PR from one site, get your anchor text from another, and your relevancy from another.  The goal is to achieve natural looking links.  Naturally acquired links very rarely touch all 5 of these characteristics so your paid links shouldn’t either!

What To Watch Out For When Purchasing Links.

As mentioned earlier buying links isn’t as easy as it sounds.  Everyone tries to cheat the system and link brokers / sellers will do the same thing.  Below are several techniques or things to look out for in general when purchasing your links.

• Hosting a ton of sites on same IP/C-class
• Interlinking their own domains
• Not hiding their SOA records
• Overusing the domains (such as posting 3-4 posts each day with highly optimized outgoing anchor text links)
• Using dropped domains (check archive.org to verify this)
• Linking out 3 times to outbound sites — This seems to be extremely popular with the crap paid blog posts!

In addition to the points above you also want to look at any sites overall health before purchasing a link.  How long as the site been around, does it get regularly indexed, are all the pages indexed in Google etc.  If they don’t meet these basic requirements you should run away as its a good sign that Google may have dinged them.  The last thing you want it a crap site linking to your site.

If The Deal Is Too Good Then Avoid It!

All SEOs have seen the 10,000 blog comments or directory submissions for $29.99 gimmick.  Most of us wouldn’t fall for this these days so why would you consider taking up an offer for 100 paid links for $200?  Most of the time the sellers have to cut corners to be able to offer such a service.  It’s not uncommon for the following red flags to be tripped with these types of offers which could completely ruin your site.

• Purchasing bulk blog post links typically includes the seller writing 1 or 2 unique posts and then using the best spinners to spin the article 50 or 100 times.  Red Flag #1
• These sellers sell their entire link network each time someone buys a “package” which can be a clear sign of manipulation to Google regardless of different IPs or niche website.  Red Flag #2
• Since each one of these blog posts are nearly the same they have the same outbound link pattern. Red Flag #3
• Blog posts are all published around the same time which builds new links at a unnatural rate.  Red Flag #4
  

Remember that the key to purchasing links is to make them look NATURAL!  The get a million links in 5 days for $10.00 gimicks aren’t going to work.  Don’t waste your time, money, or your website authority.

Impatient and Don’t Want To Build Links “Over Time”?

Building links over time is very important and a rush of “naturally” acquired links can cause red flags.  Once again building links (paid or organically) is all about making it look natural.  There are quality signals you can “game” to break this rule and build tons of links right away.   Think about it, how often is content going viral, companies exposed on the news, or even mentions in a newspaper that causes a flood of editorial links to be given?  These are the types of signals you will want to replicate.

• Push out a press release – make it good with an exciting “announcement”.
• Purchase blog posts in which the entire post is in response to the press release.  If you really want it to look natural consider buying one or two posts that tear apart your company as nobody buys links in negative press right?
• Fire up social media accounts – Tweet about the “announcement” and start conversations online.

These are the same type of signals that naturally occur when a rush of links are acquired.  These can all be replicated but you have to put some thought into it!

Anchor Text – To Vary Or To Not?

I found this technique especially interesting.  Use your favorite back link research tool and plugin the top 5 or 10 websites that are currently ranking well.  Replicate their types of back links!  If they are using heavy anchor text then do the same as Google is obviously not being too picky.  If they are going strictly after authority/domain type links do the same.  Of course since your purchasing links you will want to probably buy more links but keep the same ratio of optimized anchor text, URL, “click here” type links.  If these ratios are working for your competitors then you can bet it will work well for you too!

Avoid Patterns, Avoid Patterns, Avoid Patterns!

Search engines typically bust paid links because they fall within a pattern.  A lot of paid blog posts for instance have three outbound links to the same domain within a post.  This doesn’t look natural!  Why not link out to an authoritative website that doesn’t compete with you directly and then include a link of your own later in the post?

In Google’s situation a simply search in any search engine for the phrase “This post was sponsored by Google” shows every single post they purchased that links to their chrome browser.   These are the types of patterns you absolutely do not want to happen!  Every blog post should be unique, use different by lines and link to different pages within your domain.  As I have said about 50 times now in this article it’s all about recreating NATURAL and AUTHORITATIVE links.  Google wasn’t smart enough to replicate this but are you?

• Your website is brand new so no age, authority, or existing links exist (unless you’re using your budget to purchase a domain).
• The end goal is to make a recurring monthly income – this can be via Adsense, affiliate marketing, E-books or any other way you want to monetize a website.
• No rules for tactics used but a strict budget of $500.00 is enforced.
• You can assume you already have web hosting paid for.

Some things you may want to consider covering when “spending” your money includes domain registration, content generation, design, logos, e-mail lists, link building etc.

How I Would Spend $500.00

It’s only fair that I go first in this weeks discussion.  Here’s my breakdown.

• I would look to create a small niche website based on an affiliate product.   COST: $0.00
• Research affiliate programs and do keyword research for what I believe would be the best “selling” keywords in the niche.  COST: $0.00
• Purchase an exact match domain or domain with the keyword in the domain that is also brandable COST: $10.00
• Install WordPress on the domain and purchase a relevant theme COST: $40.00
• Lay out the exact way I want my content written in a word document that I can send to a copywriter. COST: $0.00
• Pay someone to write 5-10 pages of content for the website. COST: $100.00 – $150.000
• Pay someone to write 5 blog posts that will be used as guest blog posts later on COST: $50.00
• Purchase 1-2 of the affiliate items and run a contest on the new site COST: (Depends on value of affiliate item: lets say $50.00 each) $100.00
• Manually scour websites that accept guest blog posts and offer them one of the blog posts already written COST: $0.00 (already paid for)
• Manually search niche related directories COST: $10.00 – $20.00 each depending on value of directory $50.00 total
• Press Release advertising launch of website and product give away – COST: $75.00
• With the remaining $25.00 I would probably use it to entice a blog owner that typically doesn’t accept blog posts to make an exception.  COST: $25.00

My goal with the outline above would be to rank on the first page of the search engines for some of the “selling” keywords and also rely on long tail keywords generated by the additional content found on the site.  The press release and contest will hopefully generate buzz, social sharing and build ‘natural’ authority links to the site.   Assuming all works out (cause it always does right!? ) I could use the monthly income to further invest in the site or start up another fun project.

Your turn – What would you do with $500.00?

2012 Goals

• Post less on NickLeRoy.com and make sure that when I do post that the content is of the most quality.  No more feeling guilty when the site goes untouched for a couple weeks.  If I can’t offer you advice or tips to effectively change your SEO mindset then I won’t post.  I do plan on posting more weekly discussions but I don’t consider these traditional “posts” but more of an opportunity to share opinions and encourage discussions between other SEOs.

• Slowly remove myself from client work and make money off my other web properties. The “easy” money is in making money for my clients.  I want to go another direction and start building some more sites that are more to my interest.  Not only will I have more interest in the projects but I will have 100% control of the website and SEO.  No more excuses for why a site doesn’t rank or why something hasn’t been done.   I’m excited to get more serious in the Affiliate and Adsense scenes to generate some extra cash that I ordinarily would make from client work.

• No more bullshit SEO – Do what works and don’t worry about what anyone else says/thinks.  It’s taken me over 3 years to realize that I shouldn’t care what anyone thinks about SEO and trying to be “e-cool” doesn’t pay the bills.  You will see far more posts that MAKE YOU THINK and may even anger you (Like these types of posts for instance).  Expect a post around the new years that may cause some controversy.  No more “White Hat” or  “Black Hat” posts – simply posts, tips, and reports about what works in the SEO industry.

• No more Sphinn – As many of you know Sphinn is no longer around (which is unfortunate) so my responsibilities as an editor have gone away too.  While I enjoyed my time as an editor it was time I probably could have used for my own projects.  Working on other  sites so they can make money and hopefully build up little more online reputation is no longer a priority of mine.

• Streamline SEO Audits – As I mentioned above I have an idea to build some sort of e-book or process for people to create their own audits using the knowledge and techniques that I use for my custom audit services.   I realize that not everyone has a budget for a $500 audit and i’m a huge proponent of  do-it-yourself SEO.  Hopefully i’ll have the time to put this together and it will help do it your selfers at a fraction of the cost of what it takes to hire me to write up a report on their site.

• More Family Time – Getting out of client work will allow me to work on my projects on my time.  This means more time for my new baby boy and family as whole.  I refuse to be that guy tied to a computer and ignore my family.  If that means making a little less money then so be it.

• Lose Weight – Isn’t this everyone’s goal each year?  Sitting on the computer all day doesn’t exactly make the pounds fall off.  Time to utilize the gym membership and get back in shape.  I’ve even contemplated starting a weight loss blog simply to keep me motivated and on track… talk about integrating  a passion of SEO into becoming more healthy!

• Learn More About Motorcycles – A hobby I got into last summer was motorcycles.  I recently purchased a Harley Davidson Dyna Wide Glide and I want to know more about it, how to work on it and generally enjoy riding more.  Going for a nice long ride on a warm sunny day is a great way to “get away” from everything and just relax.

So just a couple goals for the next year off the top of my head.  Can’t wait to turn this blog into a more actionable and useful blog and try a whole new type of SEO role.  It will be exciting.  What goals do you have for 2012?