The LSI myth is all grown up!

Here I go again… and seriously, I just can’t fucking help me’self. Ya know? I’ve spent many years defending the flame against those dumb ass people pretending to be SEOs. In particular, the ever popular ‘Dave Bait‘ that is Latent Semantic Indexing/Analysis. Yup, even recent pounded it here.

So you can imagine my emotions when news started to come outta the land of Moz about a LDA tool. At first some of the geekier instincts thought, this might be neat. That soon drifted back to fucking reality as the age old words of isolated anomalies took hold. Then of course if hit me like a link spammer on an abandoned blog;

Here we go again. Time for more snake oil and mass confusion!

Leaving the land behind

Now, I don’t want this to become a debate over LDA and what it means. Nor turn into Moz-illa just yet. We need the larger picture first. As with LSA before it, this will become an unholy comedy show for those reading the banter in the SEO space…

Loved these…

“I’m not even going to try to explain the intricacies of LDA suffice to say that it involves the long standing SEO theory of topic modelling which isn’t so much a theory but more common sense. Learn more about the flavour of the month over at SEO Moz ” – Hamlin.com

Uh… wow. Nice one dood. It’s a fucking bril’ idea that you didn’t get into the intricacies my good man. Because that ‘SEO theory‘ bit? It’s a computer science thingy actually. Oh but it isn’t a theory tho? So a ‘common sense’ thingy-ma-bob? Perfect. That just makes me all warm in my guts bro.

Oh and maybe this ‘Practical Summary‘ has some goodies? Awwww for fucks sakes!! Can I please get that 3 minutes of my life back? (U will pay Mikey!). I gotta love the advice…

1. Make sure you are using the rel=canonical tag.

…shit…

2. Make your web site about something.

…. fucking Thomas Edison lives

3. Stop feeding the social media machine all your stuff.

…OK, this is just getting weird.

Oh and please do go and read the thinking here. But don’t bother coming to me to get those precious moments of yer life back m’kay? Then there was some wonderous bullshit floated with sentences such as;

“You can’t get away with two sentence pages and minimally valuable content any more – you have to do the hard work of creating good stuff in order to leverage this algorithm effectively. T ”

So the algorithm likes ‘good stuff‘? And two sentence pages???? Did you miss the whole Demand Media / Mahalo fiasco? meh.

Then there was twitter, which I kept finding gems such as;

We can clearly start to see the evolution of ‘Google’ and ‘LSI’ in some unholy darker shade of SEO hell that it will soon become. Shit, shit shit… Tommy? Go fetch Daddy’s boomerang.

Now, I will leave these fine, if not somewhat misguided, folks alone. Because even that is not the point here. It has already started. And if this fire is allowed to burn out of control, we shall all be consumed by it. Staffers and contractors asking. Clients and department heads asking. Snake Oil SEOs out stealing $$$ under the ‘Google LDA’ banner. We simply must implore people to look at these things reasonably.

Back to the Moz

Ok, now, I will have to lay this back at their door ultimately. Why? Because this is the genesis of the new threat. If they like it or not. For the record I have already written about the whole ‘Google and LDA‘ thang, albeit from a somewhat different angle. But all along I tried to impart one simple concept (pun intended); let’s not sell it for what it isn’t. Also Rand, Ben et al, did seem to try and put that out there. But it isn’t helping.

Some comments on the post, such as these, needed to be answered, to stop the madness (which they weren’t) .. so allow me;

Whoah back there… ‘behind the Google curtain’. Please get up from your desk and go sit in the corner ok? That titanic shit? I have no clue what yer saying. Go to the corner.

LDA in detail? That like a 3 day SEO course? And a link to Bill’s work on named entities? Those are actually some relatively different elements there and strangely, one is ‘semantic’ analysis and the other… well… fucking named entities. And we can’t prove anything. Ok?

What the fuck? Is that English ol chap? Please don’t be all gushy like that. How do you know it is a goldmine until you try it? We are interested in having you tell us if it serves a purpose. Thanks.. I hope you successfully have that dictionary removed from yer …

Not a stretch to assume…LDA or some other semantic analysis? Uhm sure. It’s a search engine, that’s a safe bet. But once again, we’re not deconstructing Google no matter HOW many times we may have referenced them in the post. And that other stuff? Strange but it sure sounds a lot like phrase based IR, not LDA. We haven’t looked at that yet.

Thanks for that. And your welcome for that… and well.. What? Once more we have no idea why everyone keeps trying to imply this is about Google. I mean this page only scored like a 56% for those two terms.

You get the idea. I have never heard so much greek-geek speaking bullshit in all my life. I mean I am reading comments by people that sure sound goddamned smart, but when you read it a third time, it becomes apparent they don’t even ‘get’ what LDA does nor barely semantic analysis at all (synonyms being on of the common foibles). Please Rand/Ben, please do try to hit such comments and discourage the perceptions of Google gold and continue the education into CS/IR..

Help stop the madness

And so my friends, I leave it to you now. Tell peeps to read up on where LDA came from. Get them to learn more about the IR world. Won’t you just help stop the bleeding? Before it’s too late? If you see some LDA bullshit out there, please contact your local SEOBS reporter. Thank you.

I really don’t care who makes an LDA tool. Shit, you can go and grab the code for yourself if you wanted to. It is just super fucking important that people understand that we can’t really get a strong indication of what any search engine is doing with limited data sets as far as methodologies and scoring. It’s a fact, get over it. And if you’re a manic Mozer, please watch the person next to you and ensure they don’t drink too much of the kool aid. Be smart about it and hopefully we won’t all be cleaning up LDA Snake Oil and mass confusion in the years to come.

/As you were…

As I sat here reading an article (on WSJ) interviewing, (Google CEO) Eric Schmidt, I was sort of struck stupid by a few of the statements. Are we, the general public, just a bunch of idiots shitheads looking for guidance from Google? Is it true that we really can’t think for ourselves?

To whit, a few quips;

“Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know.”

OK hold the fucking phone here… Google wants to tell me things I DIDN’T want to know? Am I such a dork that when I search for Pizza it’s going to give me porn? If I wanted sausage on that, I woulda’ ordered it ok?

And how about;

"As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that’s basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time."

Uhm… so Google is going to think for us? Fuck what I put it in the little box, allow Google to tell you what you actually meant.

So, let us recap so far;

• Google will tell me what I am thinking
• Google will be giving me things I didn’t know I wanted?

Further to that he stated;

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Dear lord jebus on a stick… these guys are freaky. Is it just me or does this all smack of some Orwellian nightmare?

Time for a name change

And that was just some of the search related madness I came across in it… not to be outdone, he also talked a little social… ready for this one?

According to Scmidt,

“we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” But have no fear because Google also predicts that, “…. every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites. “

WOW… just… WOW… This guy really has been smoking some of the good shit and I’d be ever so grateful if he could send me a pound or two of it.

Anyway… just had to mention it as this had me more than a little freaked out by the visionaries over at the big G.

THE SEO CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL!

It all started out innocently enough. I posted a couple of job openings on the SEOmoz marketplace and indeed.com looking for a mid-level experienced SEO project manager to add to our team. All of the usual suspects responded. You know the ones. Ignored the “full time in-office opportunity only, no outsource operations or net-commuters” and sent me their broken English “Dear Sir/Madame I’m Habeeb and my team can get you to #1!” form (spam) letters. After I deleted those without reading passed the first sentence carefully filed those away for future reference, I stumbled upon a real gem.

Holding a MS from NYU and claiming vast experience in all areas of search, analytics and email marketing – he almost made it to the “to be interviewed” pile. That is of course until I got to the part of his resume that read:

SEO CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL

WTF? Since when did our industry elect a governing body sanctioned to pass out certifications?

I quickly fired off an email to him telling him that there was no industry recognized certification and that representing himself as holding one disqualified him from working for us (common sense is one of our prerequisites).

He replied in short order to tell me I was misinformed and that he did in-fact have such a certification obtained from seocertification.org. Oh goodie! Let’s take a look!

Before I’m even 10 seconds into the site I note that they didn’t even apply one of the most basic SEO fundamentals: Canonicalization

Observe:
http://seocertification.org
http://www.seocertification.org
http://www.seocertification.org/index.php
http://seocertification.org/index.php

Well hmm maybe in googles new search engine little details like this don’t matter anymore. I mean what do I know compared to these l33t SEO experts? I am, however, confused how they proclaim to be  “The pre-eminent source of information, education, and certification assessment for the constantly evolving Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry worldwide” on same page as they list Alta-vista and Lycos logos as if those were still remotely relevant.

Those names ring a bell? Oh yeah, that’s right, they died about the same time as the first Playstation and dial-up Internet. But hey maybe I’m making a snap judgment. Best to look at the testimonials before walking away from an opportunity to “Benefit from Industry recognition, Enhanced job opportunities & increased customer satisfaction”. Let’s see…

“I wanted to keep you posted on the current ranking that my new site has received from MSN’s Search Engine. I’ve copied and pasted the results as of today. I’m delighted to say the least for receiving a position in the top 5 for the keyword ‘seo optimized’.”

OH SNAP! I want to know how to rank for useless keywords in search engines that no longer exist too!!! But how long does it take to learn such amazing skills?

“I actually found myself glued in front of my computer once I had registered and downloaded the Study Guide. I didn’t want to stop reading and practicing the test questions. All in all, I spent 3 days doing this and then felt I was ready to take the exam.”

Crap. I must be doing something wrong. Here I was under the impression it took years to hone your skills in this industry but apparently the geniuses at seocertification.org managed to compress all that information down into a digestible 3 day study guide.

LET’S CUT THE BULLSHIT:

Q: Is there a real SEO certification?

A: To make it short and sweet – No.

SEO is a constantly changing field, moving with the winds of the geeks at Google and other search engine behemoths. With each “feature” change and exploit and counter-exploit in the improvement to the search algo, what is a proven tactic today may be obsolete in a month. In such a dynamic field, any such “certification” at present will be rendered pretty useless in just a year’s time.

In addition, there is a sharp difference between being “industry-certified” and obtaining a “certificate of completion.” To sum up the difference, certification means being truly tested and approved as an expert by the industry’s recognized certifying body, such as the MD certification for physicians. A certificate,meanwhile, is just a fancy piece of paper which, depending on the situation, can interchangeably be used for either wiping your ass or impressing a potential employer who knows nothing about the position he/she is interviewing you for. Take your pick.

In the end, you don’t need a PhD (or certification) to know the difference. It all boils down to common sense. Would you pay for “SEO certification” from a site that’s not optimized, and lists engines you haven’t searched since Netscape Navigator?

I think not. But then again, I’m not certified. What do I know, right?

Jeez… if there’s one thing that bugs me more than anything, is when seemingly sane people from apparently respected outlets, don’t seem to understand the fundamentals. Who cares when some blog in some far flung nether regions of the SEO makes a pedantic proclamation? Not I… Heck, I don’t even get worked up when the latest round of ‘SEO sucks’ (‘is dead’ ‘is easy’ insert ignorant analysis here). Nope, that no longer irks me.

But those that should know better, the places where new search geeks and clients lurk for learning, I hold them to a higher standard. Case and point; there is a big difference between (Google’s) PageRank, (PR) and ToolBar PageRank, (TBPR).

Now, as with past rants, this is not meant with malice, just a love for the game. Dear Titus, care of Site Pro News, stop confusing people with articles such as this one, it’s clearly madness of the highest order

A lesson in the basics….

First off my wandering web warriors let us look at one of the more common misconceptions in SEO today. For me, well… it’s not something that needs saying, but apparently I’m fooling myself. Here’s a simple break-down;

PageRank – is the original flavour of link analysis at Google which deals with a random walk over the web graph. Since its original inception it’s been mutated with elements such as Personalized PageRank and more… but still, let us consider the core concept. We do not know the current state, but we do know it is still an important element of how Google ranks pages.

ToolBar PageRank – that is the little green bar that is a finite (non-floating point) number on a scale of 1-10 which is oft updated and when it is, can be as much as 4 month old (a snapshot not organic). Oh, and the TBPR has also been known to be manually corrected with no ill affects on rankings (aka PR).

They really are two different animals and need to be understood as such. All they really share is a name. Beyond that, there is such disconnect that we really shouldn’t be considering them synonymous and speaking of them in the same breath.

Some school yard examples

Let’s look at some of the specifics from that article (and believe me, this is not unique, the confusion is everywhere). This fine fellow was discussing Google’s move to take the TBPR numbers out of Webmaster Tools which is fine, if the distinction had been made. It had not.

And so we get statements such as;

“Regardless of what Google wants to happen, PageRank is still extremely important to anyone marketing on the web,”

“Obtaining a high PR7 or PR8 simply means more business and revenues… regardless of how Google is or is not using PageRank.”

“Total and full elimination of PageRank would be an honest start but it will still be an uphill, if not an unwinnable battle, for Google to fully eliminate link selling.”

Can you yet see the problem here? Actual PR, that stuff of link analysis lore, the mutated beast that still hums under the hood is alive and well. What Google was talking about was the fascination with TBPR, not PR. This is an important distinction unless we are saying that LINKS aren’t important anymore. Such lack of fundamental clarity makes ‘this thing or ours’ more confusing to others when it’s unnecessary.

And then we have;

“For years Google has been downplaying the important of PageRank and states it’s only one of about 200 ranking factors”

No, they’ve actually downplayed the importance of TBPR, (even if they said PageRank) you see actual PR calculations might contain a dozen or more factors all on their own. It is not ONE of them…it is many.

Followed by;

“I have even had many times when my PR drops but my actual SERPs rankings in Google goes up, mainly due to building related relevant backlinks.”

Erm, making my point here as the back links are creating greater PR and the PPR is likely playing into the anchor text scoring. The TBPR? Well, it’s a relatively minor metric.

“So PageRank counts little towards your keyword rankings but it can’t be totally dismissed.”

No no no… in your own words we’ve just established that PR (and by extension PPR) do actually play a role. It is the ever useless TBPR that can’t be used as a serious indicator.

PageRank is dead!! Long live..??

Now, I won’t harp on that particular article, but it does very clearly show what is a VERY common misconception and confusion in the SEO world. Some people will go as far as to write that PR is dead, Google will stop using PR, PageRank is meaningless and other related oddities. The problem of course is that people are still talking about TBPR and PR in the same breath when in truth their distant cousins that only see each other on the holidays.

The reason all of this worries me is that if you are an SEO and can’t readily discuss Google without differentiating PR and TBPR, then what exactly are you thinking? I should expect that any SEO worth much of anything already understands the concepts related to PR and how important they are (in their evolved form) to modern IR. There should be no confusion in the vast difference that is the TBPR.

You would think so… but no.

Ok Dave, who gives a shit?

Well screw you too ok? (dammit, talking to myself again, verbose even). I care because the more these types of fundamental misconceptions persist, the farther we drift from legitimacy (as an industry). This is often something I’ve noticed even more in the larger publications in the market. Often times the editorial integrity is skewed, or goes unchecked as the editors are just that, editors, not search experts.

Let me put it another way, I’m bloody writing about it ain’t I? This is a fundamental area of SEO and there really shouldn’t be any confusion nor misconception. There simply is no serious correlation with Google doing away with TBPR numbers from WMT and how they’re ranking pages… Furthermore there’s little consistency, nor real relevance of the TBPR and the real PR, the one that we can’t readily ascertain.

For the record, this particular little mind muddle is everywhere. Ol Titus just happened to come across my screen as the proverbial straw to this camel’s back side. People using the vernacular PR to actually reference the TBPR can be seen in some of the highest profile blogs and publications.

We really need some clarity on this one peeps… so puhleaaaaze… let’s start being more specific – m’kay? There really IS a significant difference.

Eh, no. It’s not, I won’t, and it won’t.

I don’t buy in to this social-search-coagulation. It just doesn’t compute with me. Looking at my own behaviour online, when I use a social media site I’m in an entirely different mindset than when I’m using a search engine. My ‘user intent’, if you will, is very different.

I don’t use social media sites as search engines. I don’t intend to find stuff when I’m on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Hyves. I do intend to catch up with friends, follow the buzz in online marketing land, laugh at the poor-ass jobs former colleagues ended up in, and stay in touch with my family and friends back in the Netherlands.

When I want to find stuff, I use Google. Or, sometimes, Bing. Or even Yandex. Occasionally I might even use WolframAlpha. In short, I use search engines.

This whole social/search amalgamation seems artificial to me. It’s not intuitive. It feels like a constructed hype that’s being sold to businesses everywhere. And I’m not buying it.

In the interest of being ‘fair and balanced’ I have to admit that there is a chance that I’m wrong. Maybe there is something to this social/search hype. There’s a good chance I’m not your average netizen, and that my online behaviour is not the norm (though the visitor numbers of 4chan lead me to suspect I’m quite normal in that regard).

Maybe, just maybe, there is a convergence going on of search & social. Maybe I’m just blind to it. But (and such is the nature of conviction) I doubt it. Long after this hype has passed, search will be search and social will be social.

Yes, in all likelihood search engines will have some social aspect to them – probably fuelled by one or more social networks. And social networks will have an extensive search function – powered by proper search engines.

But that only serves to prove my point, doesn’t it?

Until we break out laughing.  Which is what happened last night when I found out that Google has a new search engine.  And while some Internet Marketers are in an uproar, apparently others are making millions!  Or at least that’s the opening salvo at one asshat site, GoogleCaffeine.com.  So I had to speak up.  Because this one is just so over the top that I nearly puked my breakfast out all over my desk…

No Link Juice For Dino

I’m not going to give a link to Dino Vedo, the mastermind behind that crap.  Just mentioning it was more than I’d normally prefer to do.  But Jesus Horatio Christ, you’ve got to see this bullshit for yourselves.  But before you go – be sure to put on your grease-monkey overalls.  That way, when you puke your guts out all over the place, at least your clothes will be protected…

Anyhow, for those of you too afraid that actually seeing the site will cause you to laugh so hard you’d rupture your spleen, just envision the typical endlessly scrolling one pager douchebag marketing pitch that offers naive, dumb, or otherwise mentally deficient people the opportunity to find fame, fortune, and, once they realized they’ve been sucker-punched into a load of craptastic bullshit, endless fits of frustration…

Except Dino boy takes it to a whole new level.

Taking It To A Whole New Level

Dino’s really gotten creative – where he takes real-world terminology and concepts, then twists them into a panty-knot of unreality that still “sounds” right.  At least to the hordes of Shoemoney-esque wanna-be’s in the world… :-)  And he does a stellar job of spinning the daisy-chained panty-knots, to the point where, I suppose, if you really do come from the Brad Fallon fanboy fold, you’ll just be dazzled by the level of bullshit…

Exhibit #1 – The Opening Shocker

Yeah- isn’t that frakkin special?  Ole Dino touts his offering by associating himself with CNN, Twitter, bing and Google.  Like he’s been featured in some bullshit frakkin television show or somethin…  Although I’m sure he’s not lying TOO MUCH given that he’s using Google’s brand in his frakkin domain name – and so far Google hasn’t slapped him for it. Just do a search for Google Caffeine and sure enough, he’s there in the SERPs.

(Hey Matt – ya may wanna slap this boy Dino at some point, ya know?  Because if you don’t, I will – and if I slap him, it’ll be so hard he won’t see stars, he’ll see frakkin water-buffalo’s that look like dancing girls in brown mud-soaked bikinis…)

Google’s New Search Engine?

So I guess the rest of us shlubs in the SEO business didn’t get the frakkin memo from Matt.  But apparently Caffeine wasn’t the change to the process of indexing we’d been led to believe (thus called their new search index), but they went and threw out the entire existing algorithm! OMG no wonder every one of my client’s sites plummeted into the basement!

Oh. Wait.  That didn’t happen.

No, not one single site saw a drop of any significance with Caffeine’s rollout.  I must be one of the lucky few, I guess…

Anyhow – I love how he uses the George W. Bush “you’re with us or against us” tactic there highlighted in yellow – don’t you?  Except instead of cowing people into thinking their either patriots or terrorists, he’s going for those half-a-brain hopefuls that he lures to the site to think – Hell – I’m either gonna be on the side of the whiners, or I’m gonna finally get my chance at makin millions! Yeehaw!

Exhibit #2 – The Classic Tangible Asset

And lookie here – Dino then shows his “mind-of-a-3rd-grader” readers the awesome book they’re gonna be offered later on down below the fold… though it’s just an e-book and it’s not so unheard of for e-book writers to make such a representation.

But just look at this sucker – “Master Google’s New Search Engine…”

“Rank Higher in Caffeine” – don’t you just love how these jackass marketers take real-world terms and play off them?  (Except Caffeine is the name given to a change that  was made to the index,  it’s not the frakkin name of the Google database…)

Of course, if you want to rank higher in Caffeine, it’s helpful to learn how to optimize your site for it, which will help to ensure that you don’t end up doing the Google Dance!

Okay, I apologize – after that last sentence, I had to go over into the corner of my office and sit on the floor so I wouldn’t go into an asthma-induced coma from laughing so hard!  Fortunately I’m back to my senses now…

Of course, such a stellar pillar of the Internet Asshat Offering world,  Dino Vedo himself, shows his face.  It’s nice to see he’s willing to let the world know who he is and what his before-I-am-Arrested-For-Internet-Marketing-Fraud mug shot looks like. :-)

Exhibit #3 – Chock Full Of Typical Bullshit

The rest of this too-good-to-be-true “sell ice to Eskimo” pitch is just chock full of motivators.

Don’t Waste Another Minute!

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Get a FREE Tip To Improve Your Ranking In Caffeine Right Now!

See What Our Customers are Saying…

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My guide purchase is entirely Risk-Free and is backed by 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!

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———————————————————————————————————–

Exhibit #4 – The Testimonials Circle Jerk

One of the more typical bullshit hype games Vedo plays is the crappy Testimonials circle jerk.  This is where Vedo solicits customer testimonials from his circle of jack-off buddies in the internet marketing scam business.  In this case, for example, we’ve got a testimonial from none other than the very Don Leadman himself.

Just do a Google search on Donny boy, and you’ll see where this is going.  The first result in the SERP for Donny comes from MoneyFanClub – “For the Online Money Makers” :-)  In this entry, Donny posts a forum entry that has the subject line of:

$7,500 in 30 Days with $47 investment. Real Business! Money Back Guarantee!

Of course, since Donny is just a n00b to the whole ripoff-your-high-school-jock-followers-who-are-dumber-than-a-bag-of-rocks crowd, he’s only got a “Junior Member” status on this site.

But let’s not go crying for Don Leadman just yet.

It turns out that Dino’s wanking partner Donny likes to call himself a “Lead Offline Marketeer”.  Whatever the frak that means…  He’s got a site called OfflineMarketingPro.com  – where he opens with:

“Near-Bankrupt Father-To-Be Discovers Untapped ’Real World’ Goldmine Of Easy Money With Nothing But A Laptop And A Hunch…”

And that site’s – ya, you guessed it – another scrolling land of fantasy opportunities…

Exhibit #5 – But Wait! There’s More!

Donny doesn’t rest on his laurels.  Nope.  See, back over here on Dino’s site, Donny’s testimonial shows that Donny has another site – YoungAffiliate.com :-) and let’s not forget or ignore his other domain BigBackLinkBomb.com!

Exhibit #6 Bringing The Jerk Full Circle

Just do a search for Dino Vedo and you’ll be SHOCKED to learn he, too has other fish frying…

DinoVedo.com for example.  Where he bills himself as

“A young entrepreneur turned millionaire”

And VedoMedia.com Where his tagline reads “Seo Experts, Marketing Gurus, and Super Affiliates…

Yeah, Seo, not SEO. 

In Conclusion

So let’s just skip right past the asshat “before you go are you sure you want to throw away your life” pop-up that opens when you leave the site.  Or the fact that even though Dino displays an Authorize.net secure checkout button, a BBB Online Reliability program button, an Authorize.net Verified Merchant button, and a “100% Secure Purchasing” button, none of these is clickable.  Because when you click on Dino’s “Order Now” button, you actually go to “TrialPay.com”, which is secured using Verisign, and has a McAfee Secure icon…

And that’s kinda like the Internet Porn payment system of douchebag Internet marketing…

Which means that if you’re one of the dumbest jackasses on earth, none of that matters.  Even though it’s Bullshit.

And The Feather In This cap

The icing on this particular bullshit cake?  When I came upon this particular dung-heap, I tweeted about it.

And to that, Dino Vedo himself responded

:-)

The Technique In Question

I’m going through a bunch of competitor’s sites looking at their portfolios when I decide to take a look at their link profiles as well.  Typically you see however many sites they have rolled out with an anchor text link placed in the footer.  Nothing wrong with this, in fact I just got done explaining that it’s common practice within our niche.  What I found right next to these links was what shocked me.

Next to the “website created by:” I found a “credits” link.  Clicking on this link brought me to a page with a description of the website and the web development firm themselves.  What I found within this content was optimized anchor text for themselves and to other sites created and optimized by this firm.  I was convinced that this had to be a friend’s site or something of that nature so I went back to the back links page and went to another site.  Guess what I found?  Yup another credits page.

Shady Technique or Jealousy?

I know that none of our clients would be ok with us exercising these techniques, nor should they be.  I can’t imagine one person regardless of their SEO knowledge willingly linking to websites they have zero affiliation with.   Dare I suggest that this is a form of link farming or even paid links?  What if one of these sites stops paying for their SEO services? Will these links stay or will they be replaced with another website?

I mentioned earlier that we talk to our clients about placing a company link in their website.  We have had people in the past politely decline our request and we harbor no ill will.  In fact, our first concern will always be a quality product and a happy client even if it means no link for us.  With this in mind could I just be jealous of this technique? Maybe this website has a clause in there contract that states this credit link/page must be included in any of their work.  If that’s true does it make the technique any more or less shady?

SEO Isn’t Always Fair – Get Over It!

My company typically works with high end e-commerce and extremely large websites that take some time to complete.  Given this statement we don’t pump out 500 sites a year.  I know other web companies that specialize in low priced sites and launch hundreds every year… most of the time with a link pointing back to their website.  Am I jealous of this? Absolutely, but just like link acquisition I know that quality is more important than quantity.  Our sites, once launched gain authority pretty quickly and net us some pretty impressive back links themselves.  I’m not complaining as a good SEO will always come up with additional ways to build additional links.  I know that my industry isn’t the only one in which ‘non traditional’ tactics are used to acquire links so I hope my contribution will help you learn one thing.  SEO isn’t fair, we need to get over it!

Greetings, SEO Bullshit readers! So my pet peeve is receiving unsolicited emails, especially when our marketing brethren take it upon themselves to add my email address to a list of marketers. I hate it even more when there is no unsubscribe and the sender claims it’s somehow “personal” or that I’m not on a “list.” Eeesh, it makes me want to vomit on my shoes or kiss someone with terrible teeth.

I should know better than to engage those I perceive as spammers. Like trolls and rouge affiliate marketers, those I consider email spammers seem to display a peculiar sense of entitlement. Really. Who the hell are you to add my name to your little sales list?  Because I use GoogleApps, I don’t see much actual is-it-spam touch my inbox. SO, when I DO feel as if I’ve been spammed, I take a moment to make sure it does not happen again.  Here’s a thread from last month, which I was going to leave alone until the writer emailed me again a couple of days ago.

Maybe my skin is a tad thin. Maybe I should just press delete and forget about those who strike me as dweebs. Either way I hope you enjoy this little exchange, culminating in my protracted rant to the sender. BTW, the English language hacks and misspellings are straight from the writer’s pen. I’ve messed up the URLs so no outbound links are given from this publication.   :) -aimClear, Duluth, Minnesota-

From: Tanu Sinha
To: Marty Weintraub
Subject: Hi Marty
Sent:  May 22, 2010

Hi Marty,
This is a one of a kind opportunity to instantly corner a big piece of the  SEO traffic online.

As you may already know SEO Agency is one of the key words that searchers  use when they want to spend more on Seo than someone searching for a Seo  consultant for example. SEO company and SEO agency are two of the three best converting keywords for the SEO industry.

www. Search Engine Optimization. net was recently sold for a reported $60,000 to  Patrick Gavin the founder of Text Link Ads.

I am offering you the opportunity to own:

www. SeoAgency. net and www .SeoCompany. net

Both equally valuable domains.

According to the Google keyword tool; set to exact match:

SEO agency  gets 4400 US searches per month and 12,100 searches per month  globally. The average cost per click on Google is $4.39 if you were to buy  Google AdWords.

SEO company gets 27,100 US searches per month and 60,500 global searches per  month. The average cost per click on Google is $6.55 if you were to buy  Google AdWords.

As you know the first step for someone that needs SEO is for them to make a  website so why not own one of the top three best domains for web design  www.WebDesignCompany.com

The keyword web design company gets 18,100 US searches per month and 49,500  global searches per month.  The average cost per click on Google is $4.61 if  you were to buy Google AdWords.

We are considering offers.

Financing Available!

Price:

w w w SEO agency. net $30,000
w w w.SEO company. net $35,000
www Web Design Company. com $45,000

Our other SEO company may also be for sale at the right price:

In business for over 5 years with an A rating from the BBB and zero negative  remarks anywhere on the web.

Here is the current revenue:

14 Clients:

$1500/mth
$500/mth
$5500/mth
$1600/mth
$350/mth
$1000/mth
$1000/mth
$1000/mth
$800/mth
$500/mth
$500/mth
$449/mth
$449/mth
$2000/mth

Total Monthly Revenue: $17,148
Please email JP to jeanpierrek@mac.com

Best Regards,
Tanu Sinha
Constant Click // An SEO Agency
{email} tanu@constantclick.com
{dir}   305.663.7305
{fax}  800.683.7341

View our BBB rating here http:/ /www . seflorida . bbb. org /Business-Report/Constant-Click-LLC-92015936

Constant Click only uses ethical Search engine positioning and Internet marketing services to increase your website visibility and improve your conversion rate. We do not perform any activities that will get your site blacklisted, banned or penalized on Google or any of the other major search engines. In addition we do not use cloaking, doorway pages, micro sites, keyword stuffing, hidden text, external landing pages, link farms, temporary bought links, or black hat techniques of any kind.

———————

Marty to Jean-Pierre

Do I know you, to receive unsolicited email? Or is it spam?

Sincerely,

Marty Weintraub: President, aimClear
Office: 218-727-4325
Twitter: @aimClear

———————
From: Jean-Pierre Khoueiri
To: Marty Weintraub
Subject: Unsubscribe
Sent: May 23, 2010 1:11 AM

It wasn’t a mass email, it was sent to specific individuals, and since you are not on our list there is nothing to unsubscribe from.

Best,
Jean-Pierre Khoueiri
Constant Click
305.331.4893 cell

———————

Marty to Jean-Pierre

Please remove us from your not-a-list list :).

Sincerely,

Marty Weintraub: President, aimClear
Twitter: @aimClear

———————

Marty to Jean-Pierre

Jean-Pierre,
Just for the record, the reason your email tweaked me was because I found it ironic that a company would brand about being “ethical” marketers in a lightly-customized spam mail to the personal email of someone they don’t know personally.

It’s hilarious to say that the email was sent to “specific individuals” and not to a “list.” That’s a riot, dude. Does that mean that those on a “list” are not “individuals?” I think you meant to say that it is not a mass list. Still, the fact that you’re talking about individuals means that someone, somewhere has a “list.”  WTF?

You did not do your homework about us enough to personalize the spam to the point where I might accept the inquiry. The kind of customer you will reach who DOES accept this type of junk may not be the caliber potential buyer you seek.

This is my pet peeve: email solicitations that don’t have unsubscribe links. Just because it came from your Outlook or Gmail email does not mean that the responsibility for unsubscribes is abrogated.

Regardless of how you paint the non-list list, the email solicitation violates spam rules. Any company that takes that approach must have pretty cheesy clients.  Why would we want to buy THAT? I am on holiday with my family. Why would I want to wake up to your spam?

A better start to the spam might have been:

Dear Marty,

We’ve never met but we are aware of you by way of your SearchEngineLand, SearchEngineWatch and aimClear Blog articles over the years. I saw you speak on agency business models at SMX Advanced last year.

We don’t want to break any spam rules, so if you are not amenable to an approach by an industry peer regarding the sale of our agency and its assets, please type “remove” in the subject of a response email and we won’t contact you again. Just so you know, this email is not to a list, per say, rather personal to 5-6 agency owners. Thanks in advance if you continue reading… Thank you for your time, sir.

I think I need to blog about this. I may reproduce the entire thread for the benefit of readers and let them decide :).

Sincerely,

Marty Weintraub: President, aimClear
Twitter: @aimClear

———————

From: Jean-Pierre Khoueiri
To: Marty Weintraub
Subject: Unsubscribe

Marty,

Didn’t mean to disturb your holiday mate. Surely, mine wasn’t the only one you didn’t ask for. And as opposed to an offer for cheap seo services or viagra like most spam you might get, this email actually had something that might be interesting for an seo/internet advertising agency.

I wasn’t under the impression you had to know someone personally to send them a message. It would be the equivalent of never saying hi or making an offer to someone if you don’t already know them.

What I meant by individuals and not a list, was that these where sent one a time and not a list. No there is not a list. Sites where targeted for their vertical, and sent an email, there was no record kept of who was emailed.

Didn’t want to do homework on dozens of companies/  We have 3 interested parties all in our price range.

Let me know how the blog goes.

Also, I own Internet Advertising Agency. com if you’re interested.

Best Regards,
Jean-Pierre Khoueiri, Dir
Constant Click // An SEO Agency
{email} Jp@constantclick.com
{dir}   305.663.7305
{cell}  305.331.4893
{fax}  800.683.7341

———————

3 Weeks Later…

———————

From: Jean-Pierre Khoueiri
To: Marty Weintraub
Subject: Unsubscribe

Marty, I was just reading something that reminded me of you http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

Your was not part of a bulk send :) hence not spam.

Best Regards,
Jean-Pierre Khoueiri, Dir
Constant Click // An SEO Agency

———————

Marty to Jean-Pierre

Spam is as spam does :).

Sincerely,

Marty Weintraub: President, aimClear
Twitter: @aimClear

And I’ll cut straight to the chase.

YOU pay Omniture for Omniture, then YOU give them an optimised site wide link as well?!?

Yep that’s right, you PAY them £20,000 + and then you give them a sitewide link that’s optimised for “Web Analytics”!!!!

Image Credit: mistilittle @Flickr

Not only do they pull down your pants over the price, but they go straight in for the kill and not even say hello! Yep that’s right folks, the Utah Saints didn’t even ask for permission, they just dropped it with their tracking pixel!

I asked our Omniture specialist about the JS and he replied that this method allows for us to track basic information for visitors who have JS disabled, which is fair do’s but however I cannot stress the sly-cunning-dick-dastardly move they made to sneak in the optimised link through their tracking pixel.

Here it is, in all its glory:

/********* FOR ALL PAGES *********/

/************* DO NOT ALTER ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE ! **************/

var s_code=s.t();if(s_code)document.write(s_code)//--></script>

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"><!--

if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf('MSIE')>=0)document.write(unescape('%3C')+'\!-'+'-')

//--></script><noscript><a href="http://www.omniture.com" title="Web Analytics">

<img src="http://metrics.******.com/b/ss/******prod/1/H.19.4--NS/0" id="ctl00_ctl00_noScriptImgTag" height="1" width="1" border="0" /></a></noscript>

<!--/DO NOT REMOVE/-->

<!-- End SiteCatalyst code version: H.19.4. -->

Oh yes, you like those warnings dontcha! Do not alter, do not remove, and when it comes to tracking pixel’s and Omniture tags, you tend to listen to the stern ****** warnings. It’s an easy fix, we’d simply add a rel=”nofollow” but I’m awaiting confirmation from our Omniture guys if it could break our tracking, I very much doubt it, but when you’ve spent that much money – you have to double double check everything!

But fuck it, they’re absolutely riding us red raw here and these guys don’t even rank #1 for web analytics! Obviously the type of link and how its being dropped within a <noscript> won’t exactly pass on the best equity but boy oh boy, how I would love to have a sitewide from lets say, Wired Magazine (PR9), how about from a charity, no problems – cancer.org (pr 8) humm how about another PR9 sitewide? Well take CBSNews.com!

Okay, not bad so far, but you know you need some .edu link love? No problems, why not pull them through MIT! Oh yes, they’ve even got the big geeks out in Massachusetts licked every which way within their Press area (web.mit.edu/press pr8).

The list is rather endless but here is a nice sample of what I manage to find:

Puma.com PR 6// Subaru.com PR 7 // Kellyservices.com PR 6 // Macworld.com PR 5 // Homestead.com PR 7 // webstore.amazon.com PR 7 // bsa.org PR 7 // Avatarmovie.com PR 7 // asp.net PR 8 // redhat.com PR 8 // Converse.com PR6 // Nikkei.com PR 7 // HP PR 8 // doi.gov PR8 // americanbible.org PR 6 // newyorker.com PR 8 // Nintendo.com PR7 // Economist PR8 // Army.mil PR8 // radissonblu.com PR7 // ramada.com PR8

So, Omniture, you’ve been busted for your SEO Bullshit and I’m pretty sure the guys behind the online marketing to the sites listed above will be gracing your presence with the words “What the fuck guy!” – I know I will be!

It began quite innocently really, just sitting around going about my day, when one of my fellow warriors came to me complaining they’d lost some rankings due to the infamous Google MayDay update. He wanted to know if I could poke around and give some insights on the situation. Innocent enough.

I grabbed the analytics and webmaster tool info and we immediately noticed there were some very strange data coming in. The site was getting traffic for some terms that had absolutely nothing to do with the site, not even the same language actually.

Huh. Methinks something is rotten in Denmark. Ok, so next we went to Google and searched for some of the terms via the site: command and sure enough, they were showing up. When you click through to the page there was nothing. Then we looked into the source… still nothing. Not to be deterred, that next stop was the Google Cache. Ah HA! Fuckers.

Will Hack for Links!

It turns out they had been using a method that only shows the hidden links to Google-bot and so when you viewed the page and source, there was no trace of it immediately. I decided then to cross the border and talk to one of my dark side aficionados. He looked at the code and said this was most certainly the case and took a shot at the fella for using ’2 year old methods’. Apparently there are ways to avoid being detected even from the Google cache (great..sigh).

While I generally can tolerate a lot of black hat techniques and have some cohorts that use them (one must learn ALL approaches to SEO) – I am not one that tolerates hacking to meet those ends. Dear hack hatter; do you want me to break into your house and shit all over the place? Because that’s what it is to me.

Serisouly. Some of these people have families to support and the few bobbles they make from their website might be the difference between stake and kraft dinner. Between a child’s birthday party and not getting anything at all. Do you really have the right to break in for your own selfish ends? How do you know you haven’t truly hurt someone in the process. THAT is total bullshit.

Words to the wise

Now, I talked to black hatters and Goolers alike to get a better picture on this. The dark side folks said that WP (which was the CMS in this case) is generally fairly secure, it is more often the plugins that they use to gain access.

From the other side of the fence, the Googler said it wasn’t all that surprising and highlighted another approach that can make finding them via Google cache even harder. And no, I am not going to say what that was as I ain’t giving no one ideas… nor warning the hackers what G looks for. But they do suggest using the webmaster tools ‘Fetch as Google-bot’ if you are concerned about hanky panky going on with your site.

Considering that I doubt these assholes do care or will ever stop, here’s a few proactive tips.

1. Set up alerts for various common spam grounds (think the 4 Ps – pills, porn, poker, and payday loans)
2. Watch your webmaster tools KW data
3. Check suspect pages in WMT ‘fetch as Google-bot
4. Keep your CMS up to date – limit the plugins

And if you’ve found some problems;

1. If it is a template hack, re-upload a clean version
2. Keep CMS up to date
3. Assess what plugins you are using
4. Add ‘Monitor Hacked Files‘ and set up cron
5. Once clean, file reconsideration request (esp. If lost traffic)

When you do file a reconsideration request, be sure to have the documentation of how you found the offending (hidden) links and what you have done to clean it up and (hopefully) avoid it in the future.

Stay on top of things

This does highlight the need to be watching the vital signs for your website. Always be checking both analytic data and webmaster tools for any anomalies. Even better, grab and install the Monitor Hacked Files program (thanks Donna) and set the cron to run a few times per day. We have successfully deployed it and actually been able to catch hacks before ol Google did. Very handy.

These crap hatters are a shitty bunch by the way. I was very concerned about posting this episode because the last time I outted a tactic, I was beset upon with hacks and a slew of non-stop comment spam that was just ridiculous. I won’t go into detail on what they did once in, but it was ugly and cost me a TON of time.

Ultimately, I felt that this time the desire to help others outweighed the potential risk. Wish me luck and be careful out there!