Ranked Hard SEO Comics

Crazy Eddie’s Link Emporium

Ranked Hard — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:17:50 +0000

Dan Akroid as Crazy Salesman for the Super Bassomatic ‘76 - “Yes, it’s just that simple!”

If you would listen to Google, and why wouldn’t you, you would be led to believe that they are against link buying and don’t reward sites who do buy links. In fact, they will penalize sites that do buy links. Don’t believe me? Read Google’s engineer Matt Cutt’s own words on buying and selling links. They even provide a handy dandy form to report paid links. Find a site selling links? Report them. Find a competitor buying links? Report them. Then, your site, which is honestly gathering links, should rise to the top of the rankings. Right?

Wrong. Oh, so very wrong.

Google Sells Links

Google has been caught selling links more than once. So they understand the temptation and financial rewards of selling a link. But the rewards can be much greater when buying a link: higher search rankings, more customers, more sales and more profits. But if link buying is really being stamped out by the big G, then why, oh why, are so many people doing it and dominating the search rankings?

Google Penalizes Link Buying

Google certainly scared WeBuildPages.com whose premise of higher rankings for their clients was buying links. Jim Boykin, who is in charge at WeBuildPages.com, was making easy money with his staff finding links, paying the webmasters and then marking up the costs. It is the American way and everything was dandy until Google started checking his clients. Heck, it scared Jim so badly he wrote an apology for buying links and promised to never do it again, pleading to get back into Google’s good graces. It doesn’t hurt when you name drop Matt Cutts either.

Google Overlooks Link Buying

But the pendulum swings the other way when you look at the considerable number of high ranking sites that are primarily buying their way to the top. I understand Google can only do so much but their product (search results) is so tainted with “purchased” rankings it is getting harder to trust the results.

Shouldn’t every effort be made to correct this problem from Google’s search team? I’m not saying every site that buys a link should be banned or penalized, but what about blatant offenders who are only using bought links? Well, this should be cracked down on, BUT I can list example after example of sites that are clearly buying links without penalty. In fact, here are few sites with high rankings for very competitive keywords that are doing just that. I have placed a link to Yahoo’s Site Explorer to check backlinks for each site. I didn’t check every link from the first 100 results but every link I checked was purchased. I’m safely guessing 80%-90% of the links are of the paid variety for each of these sites.

Site: BlueNile.com
Keyword: Engagement Rings, Ranks #3 & #4
Site Explorer Backlinks

Site: PSPrint.com
Keyword: Online Printing , Ranks #1
Site Explorer Backlinks

Selling links is still profitable and sites like Forbes.com proves this to be so. Visit this link and look at the bottom right of the page in the Resources box and you’ll see a link for “Business Plans” and “Online Printing”. Guess where the “online printing” link points? Yep, PSPrint.com. While not definitive proof it certainly gives doubt that link buying is hurting PSPrint.com’s #1 ranking.

Can Google Fix It?

I don’t begrudge either site for buying links. Hey, it obviously works and the ROI is there so why not. It is just good business. The problems is Google is punishing a few sites, almost at random it would appear, and letting most sites slide by. Google should either police this more fairly and efficiently or quit penalizing sites for buying links. It would be better to devalue the sites selling links. This would be a more sane solution but even that is probably impossible with so many blogs selling links nowadays. I don’t envy Google in this task - nigh impossible, it may be - but they have made the rules and it is now time to enforce them or change them.

The More Things Change

Ranked Hard — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:05:03 +0000

Phil: Do you ever have deja vu Mrs. Lancaster?
Mrs. Lancaster: I don’t think so, but I could check with the kitchen.
- Groundhog Day (1993)

Remember looking in the yellow pages and seeing a company listed as AAA Painters and then wondering why the company would choose such a strange name? We all know reason was to be listed first alphabetically. You can call it crafty marketing or an abuse of the system. Well, now the internet has a system being abused as well - or craftily marketed…

As SEO consultants, we really are marketers at heart. We market our client’s websites and we use the search engines to do so. We are so totally dependent on the search engines (let’s be real, we mean Google) that we will do anything to get the results we want, even when they tell us through guidelines they want completely different.

Confusing? You bet.

Most SEO companies follow what they see working, not what Google tells them they should be doing. This comic pokes fun at one of the most abused SEO techniques. And I use the term technique very loosely. I am referring to domain name keyword matching and/or stuffing. If you are in the SEO field you see it quite prevalently. The comic is using imaginary pizza terms, but we did see something very similar for a competitor of one of our clients. If you do a search for ‘fireplace mantels’ the odd domain name in question is ranking #3 and the domain name is fireplacemantels123.com. That is what spurred this comic.

In the comic we went a bit overboard and made really silly URLs but with a bit of looking I’m sure you can find domain names that are equally ridiculous as our made-up pizza delivery URLs. I’m sure that you can because Google has made it clear that keyword-rich domain names are helpful for higher rankings and exact match domains work even better.

We did a test and found this to be true for a brand new domain name. I won’t give away the exact domain, but we were able to rank within the top seven results with a blog and a generic Hello World post. The domain name matched the search result and that was all that was needed. No links, no marketing, no content.

But what are we as SEO companies supposed to do? Do we resist using strategies that are obviously ploys only to get rankings or do we follow the Google Rules and hope for the best. In today’s economic climate it is an even harder question to answer. Google, of course, could make this issue moot by simply not ranking sites highly only because of an exact domain name match. Sure it can be a very small part of the equation, but I feel your domain name should be your company or your product name or something that helps your company’s brand awareness. Using exact domain name matching seems spammy and unprofessional, but at the same time it works to some degree.

The real point of this is not about domain name matching or SEOs following the Google Rules. It is about Google following their own rules and not reinforcing bad SEO tactics with high rankings. If Google wants the SEO game played with a white hat, make sure those wearing a black hat are not winning.

Shell Harris, Big Oak SEO
P.S. Just for fun we asked our incredible artist, Kelly Ishikawa to capture his creative process on video. Enjoy the time-lapse action. Oh, if you look at the 1:21 mark in the movie you will see the crude stick man drawing (on the left) I sent to Kelly for the comic. I didn’t want anyone to think Kelly drew that.

Link Building 500

Ranked Hard — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:12:00 +0000

“If you ain’t first, you’re last.” - Ricky Bobby, Talladega Nights

As any quality SEO company will tell you, link building is crucial to any successful SEO campaign. Of course your on-site optimization needs to be done right - keyword density, the right titles and so forth, but without links you are left with a site no one will ever find via the search engines.

At Big Oak SEO link building is part of the monthly work we do for our clients, and it is mandatory. Often I will talk with unhappy clients coming to us from other SEO companies, and they will complain, rightly so, about the fact that they spent thousands of dollars with little to show for it. My first question is, what type of link building did they do? A moment of silence usually follows and then they respond, “I’m not sure,” or “None.” Well, besides the fact that every client should know exactly what their SEO company is doing, I am shocked that any true company who claims to be providing SEO services is not heavily involved in link building.

After a few minutes of sleuthing it is easy to see that little to no link building was done and the client was basically paying for a ranking report to be run every month. Too many suspect “SEO companies” rely on an initial optimization and then cross their fingers and hope for the best. Or, more likely, they just don’t care and look for the next desperate site owner to come along. A churn and burn mentality is prevalent amongst the bad apples in the SEO industry.

Why is this? I think it is this way because link building, or more precisely, link finding is hard work and takes a lot of time. A successful SEO campaign needs to include link building which increases time and money. Money the client doesn’t want to pay. So, the SEO company gives a low price to win the work and then does site optimization and runs reports for 3 or 6 months until the site owner fires them. Meanwhile, 6 more unknowing clients sign up and the insidious scam repeats itself.

Before you hire a search engine optimization firm, be sure they are doing the hard work - securing quality links to your site on a consistent basis. The focus of this post does not allow me to get into the types of links, but quality counts, so be sure they are building links that will help your rankings. I wrote a post on the perfect link if you are interested.

We joke in this month’s SEO comic, The Link Building 500, that this process can take on a race-like mentality and be grueling, much like a NASCAR race, but that comparison doesn’t lie far from the truth. Usually the site with the best links and the most links wins the race to the top of the search results. But getting to the winner’s circle can take a lot of laps and that means larger budgets.

If you are an SEO company don’t insult or set up your clients for bad results; be up front and let them know that links will need to be created and it will increase the costs. If you are looking for an SEO company, I would say give us a call at 804.741.6776, but whoever you choose, be sure a link building plan is in place. Your site’s success will depend on it.

Shell Harris

This comic is brought to you by:


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A Little Too Personal - Personalized Search

Ranked Hard — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:03:14 +0000

Dan Marino: Hey, Ace, got anymore of that gum?
Ace Ventura: That’s none of your damn business, and I’ll thank you to stay out of my personal affairs! –Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

When Google rolled out personalized search results, the more paranoid members of the SEO community thought it might turn SEO on its head. During a presentation at Pubcon in November 2008, Bruce Clay cryptically declared, “Ranking is dead.”

Now that we’ve had an opportunity to experience Google “behavior-based search” for a few months, this question needs to be asked: Have Google personalized search results become a little too…personal? Are the search results from Google limiting what we have access to and therefore limiting our awareness?

The premise behind personalized search is that Google will serve up different results to end-users based on their previous search history, geographic location, and other personally identifiable factors. Let’s say you’re a car connoisseur who obsessively looks up information about automobiles from the same IP address. In theory then, if you searched for the keyword “beetle,” Google might be more inclined to make the top result a link to a website about the Volkswagen Beetle and less inclined to show you a result related to the insect. Obviously, this would change the face of the SEO game for you if you have a fixation on your rankings, rather than a fixation on your overall search engine traffic, which is what you should have.

Personalized search has also caused some end-users to express concerns over their privacy. For these ignorantly blissful people, behavior-based search results shattered the illusion that Google wasn’t tracking their every keystroke. For the already paranoid, personalized results reaffirmed their conspiracy-driven premises and gave them another reason to lie awake at night, too scared of Google to sleep.

If you dislike Google personalized search results and wish to opt out of them, then you might like this plugin created by Dutchman Joost de Valk.

But just remember, Google is watching.

This comic is brought to you by:


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Want to advertise on Ranked Hard? Send an email to marketing [at] rankedhard.com.

The SERP snippets in this comic were generated using the Google snippet optimization tool. Thanks, Darren.

Rankings Rollercoaster and Client Expectations

Ranked Hard — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:00:20 +0000

“Oh, it has its ups and downs.” - Reuben the Elevator Operator, Mr Deeds

Do these scenarios seem familiar? A call from a frantic and worried client when they drop a few spots? An angry client who has just moved from the first page to the third page of Google’s results for their keyword? If you are in the SEO business, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. Dealing with a client who is addicted to tracking their rankings can be an exercise in frustration and futility.

In the beginning of any relationship, especially a business relationship, you try to set expectations. When I married my wife I set the expectation that I would probably forget to put the seat down. And after 20 years of marriage I’m still reminded that the toilet seat should be down. Hey, I warned her. And speaking of ups and downs…

The rankings roller coaster is something all site owners will inevitably take a ride on. The dizzying highs of a number 1 ranking in the search engines are something to be cherished, especially after starting from nowhere. And while the climb to the top of Google is a slow one, it is very gratifying once you get there. The problem is you often don’t stay there all the time. You may drop to number 2 or 5 or, God forbid, 23 – this is the nature of the SEO “game”. The best way to play and make sure nobody gets hurt is to set expectations with the client early on and then keep reminding them.

At Big Oak SEO we make setting expectations part of our sales process. We let the client know what our best guess is in terms of when they will arrive on the first page of the Google results. Usually, that is many months away and they accept this…early on. When month 3 or 4 rolls around, it is often forgotten. It can also be forgotten when a prized keyword is ranking highly and then, for some reason out of our control, the keyword’s high rankings drop. There is NO guarantee you’ll get high rankings and there is no guarantee you’ll stay there if you do get there. As SEO consultants we must be sure the client understands this.

And it is also in everyone’s best interest if the client is prepared for ranking fluctuations. Tell them not to check their rankings daily or hourly, as some of our clients have. I’m sure many SEO companies have a client who calls more than once in the same day to report on their rankings, usually when they drop or disappear, if only for a few hours, as can happen. Time spent by the client watching ranking results could be better spent working on sales or marketing efforts.

As a friend of mine once said, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Both the client and the SEO company should keep this in mind while running a calm and steady race.

This comic is brought to you by: SEOHosting.com

If you wish to advertise on Ranked Hard, please send an email to marketing [at] RankedHard [dot] com.

SEO Birthday Card

Ranked Hard — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:19:44 +0000

“Happy Birthday, Mr. President. Happy Birthday to you.” - Marilyn Monroe (video)

I received this birthday card on my 40th birthday, Oct. 15, 2007. The card itself is an actual scan of the original card. I thought it was clever enough to include it as a Ranked Hard comic strip, and now I finally have posted it. Thanks to my good friend Chip for giving me the world’s first search engine friendly birthday card. Sorry it took so long to post it.

Obviously this cartoon depicts Brad getting a birthday card on his birthday. It seems some of the SEO elite decided to drop by as well. You may remember seeing some of this group before in the now legendary SEO Squares comic. From left to right you can see Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Jill Whalen and our favorite ninja, Jim Boykin. I’m glad Jim decided to speak up this time.

- Shell Harris, Big Oak SEO

This comic is brought to you by: Keyword Discovery | Syndicate Kahuna | Romow Web Directory | SEOHosting.com

If you wish to advertise on Ranked Hard, please promptly send an email to marketing [at] RankedHard [dot] com.

Keyword Stuffing, Keyword Stuffing, Keyword Stuffing

Ranked Hard — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:02:32 +0000

Phil: Do you ever have deja vu Mrs. Lancaster?
Mrs. Lancaster: I don’t think so, but I could check with the kitchen.- Groundhog Day

The Internet has taken the art of finely-crafted writing and beaten the living crap out of it.

Not only has content on the Internet become a series of bulleted points, short choppy sentences and suspect grammar, but a final indignity has been thrown on the heap of bad copy that pollutes the Internet. I am speaking of the “art” of keyword stuffing by SEO copywriters and their total disregard for the human beings that might actually be reading the content on any given web page that has been optimized.

Oh sure, we all laugh about the page we read where a keyword phrase has been repeated to the point of ridiculousness (much like our writer Simon has been brainwashed into believing this is a good thing), but aren’t we overlooking the bigger picture here? This is just another piece of evidence to the mounting case against SEO as a legitimate business. Spammy links, unethical practices and now, poor writing. Even worse than poor writing, this is writing that is terrible by choice. There are no SEO copywriters, even though we looked for a writer with that title ourselves. In truth there are just writers. Bad writers and good writers, and bad writers write bad content with a lot of keyword phrases repeated. Good copy writers (which I am not) write copy that flows well, has a well defined message, and is easy to understand, among other things. Keyword-stuffed copy does none of these things and only makes the art and science of SEO and copywriting look like a joke.

The search engines are doing a much better job of filtering out sites rampant with keyword stuffing, and hopefully it will lose favor as people see it doesn’t work. Until writing becomes a true art on the Internet (have patience, Shakespeare), try to remember this when you are crafting your copy: Write for people AND search engines, but don’t let the other one know it. In other words, a blend of well written content with a controlled use of keywords should work for both site visitors, whether they are people or “spiders”.

For a great example of keyword stuffing, check out David Naylor’s blog post on the subject.

This comic is brought to you by: Keyword Discovery | Syndicate Kahuna | Romow Web Directory | SEOHosting.com

If you wish to advertise on Ranked Hard, please send an email to marketing [at] RankedHard [dot] com.

Your Ad Here

Ranked Hard — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:08:26 +0000

“Is that a mirage, or just product placement?”, Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)

This comic is brought to you by: Keyword Discovery | Syndicate Kahuna | Romow Web Directory | SEOHosting.com

I’m sure this month’s Ranked Hard SEO comic will draw some controversy, and to be quite honest, that probably is not a bad thing. Whoever said there is no such thing as bad publicity had a point.

The idea for this comic spawned from our previous comic, “Your Link Here“, which poked some fun at the link buying tactics used by some SEO companies. The next logical step, as Ranked Hard’s writer Simon points out, is product placement. Of course it happens in television and movies all the time, and I’m sure we aren’t the first comic to use it either. We did try to put a humorous spin on it by overdoing it to the point that the comic is lost in the advertisements.

Prior to today (Oct. 3, 2008), we hadn’t had any ads on this site in any form. We have been running the comic for 9 months without revenue or distracting ads, and to kick off our foray into the advertising model we thought a tongue-in-cheek theme about product placement in the comic would be a great way to do it. You will be seeing ads on the site in the future (we have monstrous bills to pay), but this should be the only time you see an advertisement in a comic. Notice I used the word should. I can’t guarantee we won’t sell out if large bags of cash are thrown at us….I’m only kidding. We will never put ads in the actual frames again. So thanks for your readership and for your future support.

And with that said…

If you want to advertise on Ranked Hard, contact marketing {at} RankedHard {dot} com.

The SEO Squares

Ranked Hard — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:17:10 +0000

“Yoohoo, I’ll make you famous!” - William H. Bonney, Young Guns II

Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame. We have Andy Warhol to thank for this supposed entitlement to fame, but is fame always justified? We easily could have expanded this “square” to be a rectangle and included dozens of other well known SEO personalities. Why we selected these 8 (can’t really count Brad Smart since he doesn’t actually exist) is something of a mystery even to us here at Big Oak, our SEO company. We started throwing out names of people we had heard of or read about and we choose these on our gut feeling of who would be well known. Picking these folks doesn’t mean they are never wrong or don’t make mistakes, but they have some sway over what many people do when it pertains to search engine optimization.

My comments below are not directed at the folks above, but at the entire SEO industry.

Of course with notoriety there comes responsibility, and that leads to this question: Are SEO personalities good stewards of the power we give to them? Is solid advice coming forth? Do they have the real expertise to show the way? Are they working in the trenches so they have an accurate idea of what the little guy needs to do to get better rankings in the search engines? Or do some live in ivory towers of consultancy, casting down judgment on SEO companies and do-it-yourselfers who don’t have the luxury to write “quality content” and wait/hope for links to come naturally.

Have gurus used their fame to create, what some believe to be, self-absorbed gated communities? Or is it simply impossible to create a community that pleases everyone?

I have heard many gurus speak and most understand that the SEO game is fairly cutthroat, as many ecommerce businesses rely on rankings for their business’s survival. While that can be a foolhardy stance, some businesses feel their budgets won’t allow for much more and their hopes rest “squarely” on search engine rankings. But a few “SEO gurus” dole out impractical advice and remain consultants to the last, refusing to get their hands dirty and help the client do the work or even give the client real examples to follow.

Finally, let me say that I think all the above SEO Squares are honest and try their best to help their clients. This is not an attack on any of them. I hope they are all good sports with their comic equivalents and know we did not intend to offend. This is more a call to action to all of us in the SEO business to be more empathetic with our clients and try to understand how valuable and trusted our advice is to them. We should all put ourselves in their shoes before deciding what we will say and what we will do. After all, our goal should be to help them grow their businesses, not become detached consultants.

Your Link Here

Shell Harris — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:03:13 +0000

“I’m glad you asked, son. Being popular is the most important thing in the world.” - Homer Simpson

It is important to be popular on the Internet and buying links helps with that. Link buying has certainly gotten a bad rap lately. Especially from Google and a certain Mr. Matt Cutts. I don’t want to split hairs, but isn’t essentially all advertising on the web link buying? I realize the difference when you are buying links in order to achieve higher rankings versus buying links in order to increase your brand and drive traffic. But sometimes the line between the two becomes blurred and that is where I get a bit frustrated. It would seem if you buy a link you better have a nofollow attribute attached. But the problem is most people and site owners have no idea what that is. So if I buy a link, must I become more proactive and explain why the nofollow should be attached. I guess Google thinks I should, but is it my fault if it isn’t done. Do I get penalized for that?

But, you know, sometimes buying links is all the little guy can do to compete with larger more established sites. And while the credo of good content will draw links, it doesn’t work that way in the real world much of the time. Small site owners are forced to buy links to gain better rankings. Finding the time to run a business is hard enough without the pressure of writing brilliant content and then hoping people will find it and link to it, right?

On the other hand, link buying has gotten out of control and Google’s way to handle it was to penalize both the link buyer and the link seller. The problem is, just about everyone is buying links in competitive markets, but only a few are actually getting penalized. The playing field isn’t fair and Google has made it worse by turning everyone against each other by asking site owners to report other sites for link buying. The Internet has only been around for a short while and already it has brought out the worst in us. Okay, I’m going a bit overboard, but you see my point. Google created a system based on link popularity and now it is being abused, but they had to see that coming, so isn’t there a better way?

I don’t have an answer, but maybe Cuil does.

Ranked Hard SEO Comics

Crazy Eddie’s Link Emporium

Google Sells Links

Google Penalizes Link Buying

Google Overlooks Link Buying

Can Google Fix It?

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