So, the time has come.  Sleepless nights.  The wondering.  The fear.  Your grey campaign is milking years off of your life. (I just HAD to reuse that image on the left. It’s more appropriate than ever for this piece.)

You’ve weighed the negatives, the positives.  You wanted to stand tough.  But there was one factor that tipped the scales.   The domain.

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE
You see, Google basically gives you one ‘get out of jail free’ card in regards to paid links.  Yes, you can ride the grey, get caught, and beg for forgiveness promising never to do it again and thou shall be saved.  But, you only really get one bail out.  Even if you tried it again on another domain, and got nailed, I doubt that the Google gods would be as forgiving on your 2nd and subsequent requests.  So, throughout your whole life, you get one and only one pardon.

When will you use it?  How long do you plan on being an SEO?  5 years?  20 years?  40 years?  Perhaps time refills the guff.

But getting a pardon for paid links requires one important fact:  You’ll need to own the domain, or have full access to it in order to authenticate through Google Webmaster Tools in order to file the reinclusion request.   Meta tag, DNS, file upload, or Google Analytics authentication.  You’ll need access.

THE COMPANY-OWNED DOMAIN TIPPED MY SCALES
“So,” you say.  ”What’s the significance of that domain ownership fact, King Douche?”

Well, what if your money-maker was on an affiliate corporate-owned domain where you had no access to the site?  What if you couldn’t file a reinclusion request if you ever got nailed?  Would you then have to scrap the subdomain and start over?  Is there a better way?  Are you really better off riding the grey and just facing the penalty if it ever comes?  What if would have never came?

Well, therein lies the question.  What if you would have never got caught?  What if you raked in the dough throughout the product’s lifecycle and by the time the algorithm caught up with you the product’s life cycle was on its way out?  Which path would you choose?  Turning the grey into white?  Or riding the grey?

I’D RATHER CLAW MY WAY BACK THAN TRY AND BREAKOUT OF THE DOG-HOUSE
Even if I did have access to the domain, this solid realization remains:  I’d rather experience a drop in rankings switching to white hat, then work my ass off to get it back, rather than ride the grey until (if) it breaks then work my way out of the dog house.

You see, a good SEO isn’t afraid to work hard.  Yeah, yeah we work smart, too, but a solid campaign is almost never ending.  The fact that a good SEO has a strong work ethic plays is his/her favor.  Many simply won’t work that hard.  99% want to take a shortcut somehow.  If you vow to keep cranking away on your campaign, you’ll end up right back at the top.  That’s my logic anyway.

THE PRICE IS RIGHT
Go as far as possible without going over.  This is the strategy for running a grey campaign.  But when Google penalizes one of their own products, and even their own search engine in Japan for violating their quality guidelines, it’s time to chainsaw the main beams in your link strategy and try and go white hat.  (Go ahead, Google “Google Chrome”...GONE is the download page, completely.)

WE SAW IT COMING
From SearchEngineLand:

“Paid links drew much attention last year, after Google penalized JC Penney, as well as Forbes and Overstock for using them. Google even banned BeatThatQuote, one of its own companies last year, BeatTheQuote, over the issue.”

THE DECIDING FACTOR:  GOOGLE CHROME RESULT GOT NUKED, GOOGLE’S NOT MESSING AROUND ANY MORE
It used to be somewhat easy to jack-up rankings.  A few paid reviews, a few paid links, a handful of this and that, good relevant content, good page architecture and you were pretty much at the top of the SERPS and assuming your site was well designed, it converted.  Now, with even more intense algorithmic changes, at best you’ll just not realize any gain from paid links.  At worst, demotion or at ultra-worst, total nuke.  Hell, Google demoted GOOGLE JAPAN for 11 fucking months from a PR9 to a pR5 and then they came back a PR8.   If they’ll do that to one of their own companies, imagine what they’ll do to me.   They’ll feed me to the lions without blinking an eye.

With Google Chrome getting nuked, I’m not doing grey hat anymore. No way.  Not any more.  It’s a new year.  It’s time to take the hit, recover, and sleep easy as a white hat.  Before it’s too late.  Me?  I’m out.

In a few months, I’ll let you know the repercussions of going white hat from grey.  Hopefully, it’ll just be a few hiccups and not a total loss of lifestyle.  I’ll keep you posted.

Well, my friends, I am happy to report that we’ve caught a break.  It’s now hard as hell to reverse-engy a HTTPS backlink campaign with the death of Yahoo! Site Explorer.  Open Site Explorer only allows HTTP links and you have to PAY to get to see Majestic’s data so that leaves shitty and totally non-useful “link:” data as the only method to get any data on a link campaign.

Of course, you could just quote out a domain name in a search query and have fun analyzing every reference to that domain then visit the link, draw a conclusion, then move on to the next result but with a domain with > 500 links/references, you can bet that your competition will give up quickly.

However, if reverse-engy’ing a campaign is something that you do to get traction, then here are some cool backlink tools you might want to know about.  And, no, there are no fucking affiliate links in here any where.  SEOBULLSHIT doesn’t pull that shit.  Our bullshit is for the sake of bullshit, not affiliate bullshit.  It’s just for your reference.

MAJESTIC SEO:  http://www.majesticseo.com/plans-pricing

SEO SPYGLASS:  http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/

OPEN SITE EXPLORER (I love Rand, but there is no  HTTPS option):  http://opensiteexplorer.org 

Got more backlink checkers that you want us to know about?  Put your non-affiliate linked URL  in the comments below.

Did your site go up or down?  Post your link to your site in the comments below.

You’ve done the research.  You’ve found the niche.  You’re pretty much first on the scene.

You’ve built the site, the content.  You’ve got the inbound links.  You’ve crushed everyone and are the dominant website result domain for nearly all related keywords in that niche.  You’re at the top for your niche and it’s making fat bank.  You’ve started saving, paying off bills, student loans.  You’re going on vacations.  You work from home.  You’ve got your girlfriend/boyfriend, wife/husband helping you and they’ve quit their regular day jobs and now assist you in your efforts.

You’re on top of the world.  You’re on top of the SERPS.  Your site rocks.  Your content rocks.  It converts awesome.  It’s a great user experience.  You SHOULD be at the top.  We’re not talking fucked-up pharma-spamming, we’re talking quality content, UI, and a great user experience that any FOUR PERSON QUALITY TEAM FROM MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA would be proud to serve to their users if they ever had to look at it.

Now comes the late-players.   They see you.  They see your site.  They want in, too.  They don’t know what they’re doing but they mimic your strategy.  They’ve got the freshness boost, no scars on their record.   There are so many.  The SERPS are in major flux all around you.

Then the worry sets in.

You’ve scratched and clawed to get where you’re at.  You rode the grey.  I’ll leave the term GREY to your imagination and interpretation since that term varies with whomever you ask.

Now, the worry of losing it all is not only a possible reality, but the penalties are now huge.  Then it hits you:  YOU’RE AT THE MERCY OF A FUCKING BOT AND FOUR DUDES AT THE GOOGLEPLEX continually working on automated methods to destroy you.   They control your life.  Your marriage bliss.  Your happiness.  Your retirement.  The worry is killing you now.  You can’t even enjoy your time anymore because you don’t want to get too used to your new lifestyle.

You see people going to their day jobs in the morning, going to their car with their coffee in their hand.    You’re just going to bed because you’ve played Battlefield 3 all fucking night.

So, you come up with a solution.  Go white hat?  Yeah, right.  Enjoy Page 3, dude.  Well, maybe you can pull it off by weaning your site from grey?  You come up with a weaning plan that will take 3 months.  You’re going to slowly remove the grey from your SEO campaign.

MISTAKE #1:  YOU TRY AND SWITCH YOUR GREY HAT SITE TO WHITE HAT
So, going grey has turned you grey.  Yeah, it’s a pun.  Fuck off.

Like a house built on a foundation, your inbound links, however they were acquired, are part of an interwoven chaos of query result relevance.   If you try and wean yourself off of grey hat strategies, you’ll likely find yourself in a precarious situation.  Not only will your core site drop, but all pages that the root domain was feeding will suffer as well.  Google, it seems, is somewhat unforgiving when it comes to SERP drops.  Once you’ve experienced a SERP drop due to lost links, getting those SERPS back isn’t as easy as just waiting it out.    The inbound links that you had removed were aged, long standing links.  You’ve just kicked out one of the support beams for your house.  Don’t think there won’t be penalties.

Sure, your content is strong, your page architecture excellent.  But the playing field is set so only the risk takers win.  If you try and go white hat out of the gate, you’ll never get anywhere.  You try and switch to white hat after-the-fact, you risk losing it all.  SO YOU’RE FUCKING FORCED TO LIVE WITH THE ANXIETY.

NUT-UP SOLDIER
Very few of us have mentors in the SEO-as-a-business world.  I’m talking about someone who has lived your life, experienced what you experience.  You’ve most likely only got one person to turn to in times of crucial decision-making.  THAT’S YOU.  However, if you did have a mentor, someone whom you respected, they’d likely tell you this:  “NUT UP.  QUIT WHINING.  This is how the game is played.  That’s why it’s not easy.  That’s why not everyone can do it.”  

I will tell you that it’s very easy to start getting down on yourself.

Criticizing yourself for playing hard and riding the grey?  Don’t.    This is how the game is played.  This is the life you chose.  This is SEO.  It has benefits.  Money.  It has risks.  Loss of money and lifestyle.  The only thing worse than losing it is having it in the first place then losing it.  If you never had it, you didn’t even know what you were missing.  Yeah, I’m getting all philosophical and shit.

STRATEGIES

Fucking save your cash.  Live like a pauper as comfortably as you can.  If you start to spend your cash with the rationale that “you’ll make more next month,” you’re playing on dangerous ground.    When you check SERPS 2-4 times PER DAY, you’re just WAITING for the blood-warming drop day.   You’re sure it’s going to come.   Right?  You’re already prepping yourself mentally for it.  But when it comes, you can’t fully prepare for it, mentally.  It will always hit you hard.   Your only solace is the fact that you banked as much as you could and didn’t squander it when you had it.

If you started out grey, you’ve got to ride it out.  Which would be worse to you?  Having top serps, making money, then losing it because you couldn’t take the heat of running a grey campaign?  Or getting nailed by an algorithm adjustment and getting your ass handed to you?   I’ll take the latter.

Know that any great idea you come up with in terms of wordage, UI, design, or on-page strategies will be copied by every one of your competitors:   You can rest assured that any ideas you deploy will be copied.   Think that the search engines will rank your content first because you fucking wrote it?  Not always.  Fucking BingHoo is dumb as shit.   BingHoo allows competitors to outrank my site often, with my content, that they copied and pasted.  DMCA them?  Perhaps.   Don’t take it personal.  Well, try not to anyway.

Don’t make any major changes near the holidays:   If your niche is dependent on sales of products, the time for experimentation is SPRING, not FUCKING NOVEMBER or DECEMBER.   Got a great idea that you’re sure will convert well?  Great, save it for SPRING and try it out then.

Try to realize that your life is short on this planet.  You make money, you live, then you die.  It’s that simple:   If you do have a bad-SEO-day, and shit hits the fan, and it looks like it’s game over, your only hope to get yourself out of your funk is to get back to basics.  Could you have done it differently?  Sure.  Could you have played it safer?   Sure.    Would you have had the same awesome results?  No.    This is how this shit works:   Grey hats at the top.  White hats in the middle.  Black hats near top briefly, then nuked forever.

This is the gift and the curse of top rankings.

What’s the best way to boost sales of your bullshit WordPress theme?

Well…Step 1 might be to create an affiliate program that essentially bribes a bunch of talentless bloggers and SEO wannabes to over-hype your theme’s poorly-implemented features.

For Step 2…perhaps you could start blogging about SEO and WordPress–despite the fact that you know virtually nothing about those topics?

Apparently, this is the business and marketing strategy of DIYThemes, LLC–aka, the company that sells the Thesis WordPress theme.

I Can’t Not Call Out DIYThemes’ Bullshit

For me personally, I was suckered into buying Thesis by Step 1, and I have no desire to read the bullshit SEO tips being published on the Thesis blog. No problem…I can just ignore that blog entirely.

Except that I can’t ignore it. For 2 reasons:

1. Thesis doesn’t meet the criteria for inclusion in the WordPress.org theme repository, and it doesn’t implement any PHP code that allows independent themes to be notified of updates, so the only way I can find out about new version releases is to check their blog for announcements.
2. Thesis 1.8.2 is/was supposed to be a bug fix that makes one of its admin panel menus compatible with WordPress 3.2, but curiously…it also added a widget (i.e., a WP meta box) to the top of my WordPress Dashboard that displays the 5 most recent posts from the Thesis blog!?

From the announcement on the Thesis blog:

If you’ve already upgraded to WordPress 3.2, you may have noticed that Thesis’ awesome category page SEO controls were not showing up.

To fix this, we’ve released Thesis 1.8.2, and we also added one new feature: a dashboard news widget with links to the latest posts from the Thesis blog.

With a title like Thesis 1.8.2 Brings You Full Compatibility with WordPress 3.2, you might expect to find…gee, I don’t know…custom post types or customizable background images or something. But no, “full compatibility” in this case means one of the Thesis admin menus was unfucked…and DIYThemes.com is now feeding bullshit SEO information directly into your admin interface.

But whatever…surely this unsolicited junk will hardly be noticeable–it’ll probably be buried under a million more-important Dashboard widgets…right?

Let’s try enabling Thesis 1.8.2 on a test site and see what happens…

WTF?

Oh wait…I left WP_DEBUG set to true in my wp-config.php file. I forgot that Thesis generates massive amounts of PHP warnings and WordPress errors. Heh…my bad. Let me just set this to false and let’s try this again…

There we go. In case you can’t tell, this image is a full-length screenshot of the WordPress Dashboard–i.e., the administration panel you see when you first log into WordPress. I’ve highlighted the Thesis “news widget” in red, to give you an idea of just how inconspicuous it is.

I mean honestly…I spent one hundred and sixty-fucking-four dollars on the Thesis “Developer’s Option” and in return, every time I log into WordPress, the ass clowns at DIYThemes hit me in the face with a bullshit pie.

Just How Shitty is the Thesis News Widget in Version 1.8.2?

Here’s some additional fun facts about this widget o’ bullshit:

• This widget is hard-coded to display 5 posts. (That’s a lot of bullshit.)
• No configuration options
• No convenient action hook to remove
• Hard-coded as a high-priority meta box–meaning it’s no accident that this unsightly bullshit factory is at the top of the Dashboard; DIYThemes made a conscious decision to promote its blog above everything else. If for some reason you actually want an RSS half-stack of bullshit displayed in your WP admin area, but not at the top of the screen, then edit line 122 of /lib/admin/admin.php and change the last argument from ‘high’ to ‘low’ (i.e., change the priority).
• The widget uses a new PHP class, named thesis_dashboard_rss, which is instantiated (called) by the function thesis_admin_setup() in the file /lib/admin/admin.php. The class itself is defined at the bottom of admin.php. To disable this server-resource-wasting piece of shit, delete the class definition code (lines 110-142) and the line that instantiates it (line 12: new thesis_dashboard_rss). Worried about hacking core files? Don’t worry, Thesis is on its deathbed anyway.

Not All Dashboard Widgets Are Jerks

For an example of a Dashboard RSS feed that doesn’t suck, see the WordPress SEO plugin from Joost de Valk. After this plugin is enabled, a Dashboard widget appears, containing links to the 3 most recent posts from Yoast.com’s RSS feed. What sets it apart from the Thesis implementation (other than the $164 price difference) is the big X button that permanently disables it with a single click. Plus, I like the fact that it doesn’t shove its way to the front of the line, claiming to be some kind of A-list widget celebrity or something.

If anyone is interested, here’s the official documentation on WordPress Dashboard Widgets.

Examples of SEO Bullshit in the Thesis WordPress Theme

In terms of search engine optimization–or even web design in general–Thesis is undeniably flawed in several ways. Here are a few examples of why Thesis’s “airtight SEO” claims are actually bullshit.

• Internal links point to non-canonical URLs.
  • Go to any post on Matt Cutts’s blog and view the Home link in the top menu. It points to http://www.mattcutts.com/blog which then redirects to http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/. Even the Thesis blog itself has this problem.
  • Go to http://www.krispykreme.co.uk/ and view the top-level links in the top menu. The parent links point to the canonical URLs, but the first child link in the drop-down menus point to the non-canonical URLs. In other words, the nav menu contains links to both /doughnuts/our-varieties/ and /doughnuts/our-varieties.
• Comment Permalinks (e.g., /category/post.html#comment-1234) are nofollowed.
  • For example, this post by Danny Sullivan contains at least 100 self-referencing links that have the nofollow attribute added for no apparent reason. If the rel=”nofollow” attribute means “I don’t vouch for this URL,” then what does it mean when you point to your own blog post with 100 individual nofollowed links? Also, note how the Next Comments link is a normal (i.e., followed) link, despite the fact that it links to a duplicate of the entire post (only the comments are different).
• Post Authors’ links in comments are nofollowed.
• Next/Previous links point to unrelated content (i.e., posts that are related chronologically but do not share the same category).
• Sidebars arbitrarily use h3 tags to mark up headings.
• Comments arbitrarily use definition list markup (e.g., dl, dt, dd tags).
• Cross-linked posts generate nofollowed internal links as trackbacks.

Examples of SEO Bullshit Published On the Thesis Blog

• Literally every SEO-related post I’ve read from the Thesis blog contains significant quantities of bullshit. The following examples are intentionally not linked. I’m not trying to inconvenience you, dear reader, I’m simply abiding by my own policy: don’t link to shit. If you want to see the bullshit for yourself, try a Google search for something like [DIYThemes "WordPress SEO for Everybody"].
• From the “Advanced SEO” post, titled How to Interlink Your Articles the Right Way:
  • Links higher in the HTML pass more search juice
    • First of all…WTF is search juice?
    • Second of all…the supporting content under that heading ended with this brain-fart conclusion: So, when interlinking pages that are important, make sure you keep it as close to the fold as possible.
• Speaking of brain farts, read this article. (I’ve saved the entire thing as an image, to show the comment I left at the bottom. My comment was deleted from the moderation queue, so the live version of this article doesn’t show it.) Does anything in that post come even remotely close to completing a valid thought?

Conclusion

DIYThemes doesn’t know jack shit about SEO…but that won’t stop them from force-feeding its customers a bunch of bullshit. Save yourself the trouble, save yourself the money, don’t buy Thesis.

First, let’s start of with the norm.  Bashing PageRank.  Yep, it’s cool for an SEO to bash PageRank.  If you really want to look like a cool SEO, you gotta continually dismiss and downplay PageRank even though it’s the single quantifiable metric available for public observation.  Only to COOLEST SEO’s can disregard PageRank and claim that ONLY traffic and sales matter.  The rest of us are forced to look at it and get excited that we’ve built a site that seems to have a strong and trusted foundation and that are efforts are being positively validated by the world’s largest search engine company.

MONETIZATION
Another great feature of a Toolbar PageRank update is the ability to monetize your site.  You can monetize a site based on 1 of exactly 2 factors:  TRAFFIC or PAGERANK.   So, why would an SEO dismiss the 2nd factor?  If your site doesn’t rack in 1,000,000 PV”s per day/week/month, then all you have to go off of is the PageRank.    And it you’re going to sit there and tell me ‘But, hey, King Douche, you’re supposed to ‘nofollow’ paid links!’  Yeah, and I’m supposed to brush after every meal and eat lots of fiber but I don’t do that either.

When you launch a new site into a marketplace, your site’s PageRank will govern how much money you make off of that site.  No, don’t tell me that PageRank is unimportant.

PUBLIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
If you’re an SEO for hire working on a new client’s site, your traffic generation and sales goal will be a long one.  It doesn’t happen quickly unless you want to pay big for it.  So, as an organic SEO, you’ll want to prove to your new client that you’ve taken their brand new site and built it up to a point where the reputation has been QUANTIFIED.

ABILITY TO LAUNCH NEW SITES
So, last post, I wrote about how my PR6 site was awesome for launching new sites.  That brand new site would come out of the gate a PR5 and the Link Juice Tree was bearing fruit waterfalling into each of my linked subpages.  Sweet, sweet TBPR fruit.   

THE PAGERANK FRUIT TREE
With the assignment of a metric, i.e. TB PageRank, you’ll get to see how your site’s equity is trickling into the subpages.  You’ll get to see how and reverse-engineer why certain sub-categories get more PR juice than others.  You’ll see how your footer links seemed to all get PR while links 3-deep away from home ended up getting 1/5th of the root pages PR (as it probably should.).  These are just examples and not ‘rules of PageRank‘.  You’ll get to see and deduce why pages with original content got more PageRank assigned to them when they had outbound links  to relevant sites and inbound links from relevant pages all in a beautifully inter-weaved cacophony of ordered chaos.

It’s exciting to see your tree bare fruit.  PageRank is the report card that shows how much fruit you’ve got to give out.

Now, let’s get into this true story that happened in 2008.

THE SHITTY PLAGIARISM CHECKER
One of the first successful sites I developed was a shitty little plagiarism checker that I paid a Russian $150 through GAF to build for me based on  a simple premise:  break an article up into small fragments and search Google using the SOAP API for the appearance of these fragments then report the results.  The tool came out of necessity (as most good inventions do) and since all other plagiarism detection tools charged monthly fees, or offered limited functionality for free, my fully functional, free tool gained popularity quickly and word spread at Universities for teachers to use the tool to pre-check students papers for blatant plagiarism.  The site gained PageRank quickly and I got it jacked up to a PR6 in about 2 years with LOTS of inbound .EDU links.

THE POWER OF THE PR6
Now, for an SEO, a PR6 site is pretty powerful shit.  You can pretty much put a link on that page and it’ll pop up to first page for most any medium-competition keyword so I used the site to introduce new niche markets and it was the catalyst for all of my successful sites.  I pwned the competition quickly for my niches simply by introducing new sites with a link from my PR6 site and the new niche site would come out a PR5 right out of the gate.   A PR6 site is a powerful tool if you can get one.

So, I was new to monetizing sites and I had the bright idea to sell Text Link Ads and i was fetching $280/month per link and I had 4 links paying me monthly.  For a SEO noob, to have 1 site that generated over $800/month was pretty good.  That, combined with the new-site-introducing power of the PR6, I had a nice thing going.  So, of course, I found a way to fuck it up as efficiently as possible.

That was until I had the idea to sell the site and ‘cash out’ my PR6.  I figured I could fetch 15 months ROI and get about $15K for the site.   I put an ad up on EBAY, did screenshots of the traffic, and some of the link-revenue I was generating to backup the ‘the site makes so-and-so per month’ claim for the eBAY ad.

Wait, it gets worse.

HEY! I’VE GOT AN IDEA!
Then I had the bright idea that I wanted to advertise the EBAY listing so I saw an SEO article and plopped the auction link as comment spam justifying it by saying ‘Hey, maybe an SEO wants to buy this site?”  Again, this is fucking hard as hell for me to write this—I was such a dumbass. It was the first project that I had undertaken and this was what got me started in SEO as a full time job.   I was starting to make money from creating websites and getting those sites to rank and making money off of the ranking.   But every successful SEO has the project where they learned *NOT* to do a certain action.  This was my fuckup story.

So, like watching a slow-motion trainwreck, let’s continue.

Let’s paint this picture now.  I have a PR6 site selling links, and then created an EBAY listing announcing that I was selling links for the purpose of passing PageRank and you could own this wonderful site for only $15,000 which was about 20 months ROI.  I then advertised this by comment spamming the presence of the EBAY listing on an SEO forum site (searchenginejournal.com).  Holy dickwad, Batman!

THE BUST
About 48-hours later I get an GMAIL CHAT instant message from some guy.   It wasn’t broken English he was chatting but perfect, eloquent English.  American name….we’ll call him David Andrews (fake name but you get the idea on how normal the guy sounded).  So David asked me a few questions over chat.  ”I see you’re selling your website?’ and “I see that you’re making about $800 per month selling assets on those website?”

I then went into a record-setting chat marathon typing-session bragging on how good the PR6 site was at getting other sites to rank and that $280 per month was CHEAP for such a powerful ranking service.  It was then that the dagger-question came from DAVID ANDREWS (CAPS and punctuation are for editorial emphasis).

“So, you ARE selling links on your site then for the purpose of passing PageRank?”

My response, “Hell yeah, and it works awesome, too!  Any link that gets put up on that site ranks at or near the top for medium competition keyword.”

I then pasted examples of the people’s websites that were currently advertising with me to prove it.

DAVID ANDREWS then simply responded “I have all the information I need now.  Thanks for your time.”

And just like that he was gone.  I thought to myself “Damn I was pretty sure he was gonna buy it to!  He seemed really interested and asked some good questions.  Oh well!”

THE PENALTY
So the next day I awoke to my site completely de-indexed from Google.  Not a listing to be found anywhere.  Yes, the EBAY ad was in it’s 5th day of the 10 day auction.  Wouldn’t even come up for the DOMAINNAME.COM search.

Yep, it got nuked.

“What happened?” I thought.

The next day, still no show, The 3rd day, it was back.  I checked the Toolbar Pagerank and it got reduced from a 6 to a 3.  Just like that.  3 full PR coefficients.    It was then I realized that I had been nabbed by the Google manual penalty police.  The user DAVID ANDREWS never answered any emails nor responded to additional chat requests.  He was gone, 100%.

THINGS HAPPEN FOR A REASON?
So, about six months later, the good news is that another buyer eventually came along and bought the site, unsolicited.  I didn’t even offer it for sale after that and his offer was, *coincidentally*, $15,000.

I took the $15,000 and steamrolled it into a nice portfolio of Internet businesses across different markets.  It’s what I do to this day.

“Create an EBAY listing about selling my PR6 site and monetizing said site with Paid Links then comment spam the listing in an SEO forum. ”  Sheer genius, dude.  Sheer fucking genius.

God, what a dumbass.  Cheers.

Now, I understand that the full PR Algo paper written by Page and Brin is a lengthy one, but surely people understand the basics of it, right?  Surely NO ONE would think that PageRank 1 means ‘The First Page of Google Results’ and PageRank 10 means ‘The 10th Page Of Google Results.’  Right?  RIGHT?!

Thanks SmashingHub.com. No seriously, THANK YOU.

You can see the full “article” (Google cache) by clicking on the image.

So, you ‘d think that no one would see this right? Well, it was on Digg, which further reinforces my assertion that ‘Digg is Dying.’

Digg is Dying

Seven pages in to this 66-page report I realised that these guys weren’t really competition. The report was so chock full of disinformation, ignorance, and random stupidity that any SEO work they end up doing is likely to be of pretty abysmal quality.

But I’m still bloody annoyed. Annoyed that witless chimps like that get to write site audits for big UK brands. It’s testimony to the FUD surrounding SEO – as well as the general ignorance about SEO pervasive in the corporate world – that clueless halfwits manage to talk big corporate management types in to buying their services.

A Look Inside a Useless SEO Audit

So what exactly did this report contain? Let’s take a look:

Fairly early in the document, in the context of competitive analysis, it says that the amount of results that Google says it’s found for a given query is an indicator of how competitive that query is.

Really? It’s a pretty piss-poor indicator, if you ask me. Sure, you can use it as one aspect of broader competitive analysis, but the report does no such thing – it mentions this metric right at the start of its competitive analysis section, and doesn’t do much to put it in its proper context. Which is pretty fucking stupid.

Secondly the report claims, straight-faced, that the links shown in Google Webmaster Tools show "the full range of backward links that Google has indexed". At which point I loudly proclaimed ‘GTFO’, to the amusement of my colleagues.

It gets better. Shortly after that proclamation, the report has the audacity to refer to "Google Page Rank" aka; toolbar pagearank, (yes that’s how they typed it) as a valid indicator of a site’s quality. Oh dear.

They go on with blowing shotgun-sized holes in their feet by referring to ‘inanchor:’ and ‘intitle:‘ search queries, implicitly assuming that the bullshit Google serves you on such queries is actually accurate:

"The fewer results that are returned for an ‘inanchor:’ search, the easier it should be to achieve high rankings for the keyword being analysed".

And it goes on and on… using the ‘site:’ command to measure indexation, recommending using the ‘title’ attribute on all links to improve SEO, using the ‘link:’ command as the primary method of finding sites that link to competitors, and recommending the site’s HTML code should be W3C valid. (They see the 20 validation errors on the site’s homepage as a strong indicator the code needs to be improved. Fuck off. 20 errors is about half of what I consider acceptable for large ecommerce sites like that one.)

Where’s the beef?

It’s not all bullshit of course, the report contains some actual useful tips. But not only is it immersed in such horrendous beginner errors, it also features some glaring omissions: nothing at all about site structure and semantic tagging – which for the site in question has huge potential – and nothing about the site’s dismal URLs either.

This sort of shit pisses me off to no end. It infuriates me that such uneducated ‘tards successfully manage to peddle their quackery to big companies. It’s not just the fact that they get paid to write uninformed shite like that – it’s the fact that they probably get away with it, time and again, because their clients simply don’t know any better.

The people who wrote that report probably consider themselves to be pretty clever, cutting-edge SEOs. And that, most of all, ticks me off, seeing the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

Well shit, what can I say? Sometimes we even have to call ‘bullshit‘ on our friends for the greater good. When we see misconceptions and odd statements that causes more confusion, something must be said. Case and point;

New PageRank Formula May Change Your SEO Priorities

I have a lot of friends over at Search Engine Journal from the owners to the editors and even many of the authors. Shit, I even write there myself. But this post just has to be beaten to death lest we further dilute our often struggling industry. I take no joy in it, thought it over a few times… it has to be done.

Getting Geeky Wid It

First things first; if you’re going to talk about SEO, learn about search engines.

Secondly, if you’re talking about PageRank (aka PR)… you’re talking link graph. If you’re talking about the stupid fucking tool bar, please refer to it as TBPR…. ok? If you believe PageRank has little value, then stop building links. If you’re talking about that little green shit-for-brains, dumbassed, totally misunderstood little bar, then say ToolBar Page Rank. Confused? Read this.

Here’s a goddamned info-graphic

If you do that, you won’t ever make confusing goddamned statements like THIS:

“The vast majority of website owners seem to be obsessed with PageRank. It was one of the heaviest ranking factors in the original Google algorithm, and the fame persists. I must admit that I also find it hard to ignore the single most visible feedback figure presented by Google.”

After that? Stop reading patent posts as the fucking gospel.. they’re not SEO Magic Bullets. For starters, you might want to actually look at the filing date on the patent you reference (2004 for those playing along at home). That really does put a gaping fucking hole in the ‘New‘ that is referenced in the title of the post. Not ALL link related patents from Google are about PageRank. This one sure isn’t.

Next up… gee, I dunno maybe do a little research on that particular patent and it’s coverage to date? Maybe a little ol post called; The reasonable surfer; makes for unreasonable thinkers – I won’t get into the specifics again, but let’s just say it doesn’t end well (spoiler alert!).

Just the Meat Hold the Potatoes

Now Mr. Danylchuk, sorry, but much of your post just chaffes my ass to no end. Let us play shall we?

“Previously, each link on a page passed the same amount of authority to the target page. Now, every link is weighted according to how likely a “reasonable surfer” would be to click on that link.”

NOW? Really? Maybe the terms ‘may be’ ‘could be’ would be better served here no? Please though, do go on…

“To pass PageRank, the link now has to achieve the same thing as to get the click: stand out prominently from the rest of the page, and be relevant. ”

Great, please do send over the data to proves this. Not only are there dozens of link scoring methods (patents) that may also be in play, there is a lack of understanding to implicit feedback signals (that’s what behavioural stuff generally falls under).

You then go mumbling on about why your blog didn’t get any TBPR and how you’d unlocked the secret as to why. We won’t get back into the whole TBPR crap, but sweet fucking Oracle of all that’s holy, it’s complete bullshit. Next thing I know we’ll be blaming the mythical sandbox… WTF does any of this have to do with a patent from 2004?

It doesn’t… so we must stop trying to sound like an expert in areas we’re actually not. But enough of that, I promised myself not too go too hard on ya…

Editorial Integrity in SEO Media

And so my warriors, we must ask; WTF is Dave on about? We (knowledgeable) SEOs don’t pay attention to such tripe?

Agreed, that is true. There are a million brain dead fuck nuts useless posts on SEO published around the web each and every day. That never gets me too upset. It is when some of the more highly regarded publications in our industry are involved that I start twitching like a rabbit’s nose.

I happen to be the Asshole in Chief over at my own offering. Is everything there fact? Probably not. Is everything there useful to everyone? Probably not. But, would I publish pure misleading posts that are further muddying the perceptions of the facts of what a search engine is? Not. A. Fucking.Chance.

Now, at least Ann did step in a make a case for them running the piece;

“Arguing about new / not new in SEO is as old as SEO itself. We’ve seen it enough at Sphinn… Now, we are editorial blog but we let readers decide what they like. And readers obviously like this article. ”

Which might seem sensible at first glance… but it’s not that simple. Just because a lot of the wandering pandering noobs and sheeple voted for something doesn’t make it right. I truly care about the SEO industry and have spent YEARs fighting for us to become more educated and stop misinformation.

We’ve been here before right Ann? Remember the LSI post last year?

I personally believe that we do have a responsibility to encourage a greater sense of understanding of search engines and dispel the crap when we see it. (thus I decided to pen this). I take no joy in writing this post and it’s obviously not in my best interest (given my relations with the Blue Glass/SEJ crew). But it sometimes just has to be done. (I’ve also railed against Search Engine Land and SE Watch in the past. I am an equal oportunity asshole ok?).

Quotable Quips

And now, before we go, let’s look at some of the early comments…

This was about Google changing the PageRank calculations? Fuck me. This is exactly the problem my friends. THIS is the message the reader got from it. This post proves nothing of the sort.

Writing for eyeballs or writing to educate? Your motives and measures are out of whack. Huzzah to Barry!

WTF dude, you must still be hanging on fool’s forums. Once more, those ‘changes’ are 7 fucking years old. How exactly does some friends anecdotal evidence prove ANYTHING of what is being claimed here? It doesn’t.

Thanks for the reference? Thanks for the fucking Reference? So SEJ is publishing people that don’t know something as mandatory as to how the TBPR is calculated and updated? Seriously? Muthrfuckr.

You get the idea… there are more since then that firther show the damage this post has done. There are a bunch of numb-nuts talking about the ‘new algo change’, confusing PR with TBPR and more.. It’s a fucking shame.

We MUST Become More Guarded if We’re to Grow

Anyway, I have it off my chest and am feeling better now. Thus we call this blog ‘SEO Group Therapy‘. It’s a place we can let loose and get things into the open that need to be said. As frustrated as I get, there is no real malice to Val nor my pals at SEJ. This is more about ALL OF US being more active in crafting the future of this industry.

Ignorance breeds ignorance and if we ever want to grow beyond being considered link whores and hype merchants we all need to step up. Even to the more experienced among us, these types of articles might just get a ‘meh‘… a shrug, and we move along. That is a disservice to the generation of SEOs to follow.

Keep on fighting the good fight.. I’m outties…Peace!