“Domination to the point of demoralization,” is my answer.

That’s when the bug-eyed, blank stare hits me.

The concept of my strategy is so under-estimated, so feared, so rare, that no one hardly ever gets it that THAT is what I’m doing.    Go fucking psycho on them.  But that’s my strategy.

WHAT IS PSYCHO?
Well, it starts with sleepless nights.  Or day-night sleep reversal, whatever you call it.  Personally, I can’t work while those wretched birds chirp so that means when the birds start chirping, it’s time for bed.  Although, I live in Vegas, and perhaps that’s par for the course.  However, the indisputable fact remains:  ”I worked well beyond what you’re capable of working. I win.”  And, that’s my strategy, people.  Work harder than anyone else to the point where other competitors look at your campaign and say to themselves, “that site dominates everything, why bother?”

Perfect.  The exact response I was looking for.

DOMINATION TO THE POINT OF DEMORALIZATION
That’s my motto.  I want to make you cry.  I want to make you feel hopeless.  I want it so you don’t even try to compete with me.  Why?  Because you CAN’T COMPETE WITH PSYCHO.   Nothing instills a win faster than someone contemplating to compete with you then giving up because you never became complacent with your campaign and this fact is evident when competitors try to belly-up and play ball with a pro.

“Don’t even try.”  That’s the message I’m trying to convey.

FINISH YOUR SHIT.  DOESN’T MATTER IF IT FAILS.
Don’t be a douchebag.  The MOST COMMON defense mechanism your big-fat oversized brain will try to impose on you is “If you don’t finish the site, and it fails, then it’s okay but you never gave it 100%.”

That’s TOTAL SEO BULLSHIT.

Recognize that your brain is trying to save you from pain.  If you were to deploy, what you considered to be a 100% awesome site, and it failed, you would then conclude that YOU are a failure and your brain will do everything in its power to prevent pain.     DEPLOY THAT SHIT.  FACE THE PAIN.

If your idea/site is a failure, then so be it.  But don’t NOT do something because you want it to be perfect and, therefore, if it’s not perfect it’s not deployable.  That’s a bullshit defense mechanism.  Recognize it.   Thwart it.

GOD HELP YOU IF YOU REACH THE TOP 10
If I could behead you, video it, and put you on THEYNC, I would.  All you do when you start making progress is piss me off.  Nothing aspires progress like hate.  It’s this writer’s opinion, and that of others, that HATE is the STRONGEST of all motivational emotions.  It allows you to accomplish anything.  It’s like an adrenaline-inspired emotion.  When you try to compete with me, you invoke an adrenaline-overdosed demon.  You create hate.   Just when you thought that I was done with my campaign, I will GLADLY double/triple/quadruple my budget for new content generation and campaign advancement to make sure that you don’t succeed.  At this point, my goal is to make sure you fail.

DOUBLE JEOPARDY, ALEX
Not only do you have to conjure up the motivation to succeed, and do it with such tenacity as to compete with me, but now you have me trying to make you fail with the SAME tenacity.  Matter of fact, my approach to make you fail is more mature than your attempt at getting psycho.  I’m a pro.  You’re just learning.

You won’t have a boss looking over you and that’s your disadvantage.  You see, it would be one thing if you were at a place of business, say APPLE, and that boss, say STEVE JOBS, went psycho on you and forced you to over-achieve.  This is the standard.  But what if you worked at home?  What if I knew you didn’t have a Steve Jobs to motivate you?  What if *I* was my own Steve Jobs.  What if I watched videos of Steve and modeled my own motivation after his?  Have fun competing with that.  You will fail.  It’s your only option.

CHECK OUT THE BIG BRAIN ON BRAD
So, Mr. Smarty Pants, you’re trying to pounce my shit?  You’ve just conjured up “the psycho in me.”  A normally kind, generous, helpful gent that will help grandmas succeed just turned into the most scary, relentless terminator that you can imagine.  Allow me to quote from scripture, paraphrased slightly (The Terminator)

“He doesn’t eat.  He doesn’t sleep.  And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are gone.”

I liken myself to how birds fight with each other and how ants dismember their prey when I judge how to punish you.  Peck your eyes out.  Dismember you.  Whatever.  As long as you suffer, I win.  I want it so you associate pain with your campaign.  This works.  Everytime.

Not only do I meet the minimum, not only do I go over the minimum, not only do I go to MAXIMUM, I go to Level 11, where you cry to your mommy, “Please God make him stop.”

I will never stop.  I will never quit.  No matter what.  Not ever.

You can’t compete with psycho.

Search for “Video SEO” in Google and one of the first things you get is an article published two years ago on TechCrunch. Now, TechCrunch is surely not an SEO site so can pretty much be regarded as any other mainstream publication trying to write about SEO (we all know what comes out of it – either something we all laugh about or some site getting banned/penalized). But FFS, if you claim to be an expert on the topic and submit your article to a large publication like this, could you at least get your facts right and word it properly???

Quote:

“You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages” (via TechCrunch)

LOLWHUT??? A robots.txt FILE on every page? Do you even have a clue how it can be implemented practically, other than maybe <?php include “robots.txt”;?> Should I just email the guy and ask him if he managed to figure out what robots.txt is since that publication? Should I launch an online course called “ROBOTS.TXT FOR CLUELESS MARKETERS“?

How much do you think I should charge for it?

Moving on to other results, that’s not the only one interesting in this manner. AimClear has published a whitepaper a year ago. OK methinks, aimClear is a reputable agency, must be good information, in their blog post announcing the whitepaper we are promised to see “a blockbuster featuring a correlation study of query intent, tagging, and how the combination effects a video’s chances in Google and Bing SERPs” so should be some impressive in-depth study…

No such fucking luck! Pure whitepaper spam! Out of 12 pages of the PDF, 6 are screenshots of Google SERPs and how video results can be included in them, plus there is a list of a bunch of video sites they have discovered – only this list is an image so not much can be done with it, and it has duplicate entries in it too (makes one doubt how accurate the rest of the data in the paper is). The closing points of the whitepaper mention that “aimClear has a rank checking extraction agent. Contact us for further information.” – wait, what? That was just a bait-and-switch to try and pitch your scraper to me?

I can build my own scrapers alright, been doing so since 2005. Another possible revenue stream for me: sell my scraper optimization services to aimClear so that their scraper does not output duplicate results, dohh…

Of course video SEO is a relatively new topic so good information accumulates over time. But as long as people accept bullshit as “expert opinions” under the veil of authority mainstream publications and whitepapers, separating good information from worthless banter will not be an easy task. So many people believe if it ranks on Google it must be good information! The two examples above show how it is not necessarily so. Google is all about rel=author and AuthorRank – how about BullshitRank?

There’s adjustments, and there’s EVICTIONS.  Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Google’s latest algo adjustment dubbed ‘Titanic.”  Why “Titanic?”  Because you’ll be searching for survivors, that’s why.  Well, the official name has now been officially entitled “Penguin.”   Our original “Titanic” moniker was at least  related to something being cold and frigid.

THE FALSE ALARM
Last week, we saw some interesting, albeit odd, adjustments in the SERPS as Google wrangled with a buggy ‘parked-domain’ signal.  Many, like myself, thought it was some A/B/C split testing going on with Google SERPS and was likely a premonition to come.  This was not the case.    That false adjustment alarm was prelude to the real adjustment which was designed to further signal unnatural linking and ‘webspam.’  Both grey and white-hats were affected by this adjustment.

So, you say, “big deal,” King.  Well, here’s why I posted.

GOOGLEBOT IS AN ANGRY STEP-FATHER WHO DRINKS
As you might have read a few weeks ago, I went white-hat with my money site in January due to weak nerves and was sodomized by a robot named GoogleBot.  Sure, GoogleBot is cute and bleeps a lot but there’s a side to that machine that anally rapes you, uses sand as lubricant, and punches you in the face on the way out the door.   Yes, GoogleBot is passive-aggressive and has a temper.  Deal with it.

JUST MADE THE CUT-OFF
So, it seems, by 60 – 90 days, I went white hat just in time.  Because my money site, which was in the shitter a few weeks ago, just got promoted to #1 across the board for pretty much any keyword phrase even REMOTELY related to my niche.  All the other competitors that were running grey got their ass handed to them….many of them totally fucking nuked.

A FIERCE ADJUSTMENT
What shocks me the most about this algo adjustment is the fierceness of  it.  This isn’t some “move this site down 2 positions, or to page 2″ adjustment.  This is a total adjustment of a 3.1% of all search queries (the name “PI” for this adjustment was a close second.)  This is huge.  I would venture to say that this makes Panda looks like a cute, furry adjustment.  No, my friends, this adjustment is nothing less than MAJOR.

NOT A NEGATIVE SEO OPPORTUNITY
Some are saying that this is prelude to a new type of SEO campaign.  The “Negative SEO” campaign where you can actually hurt your competitors by placing shit-stained links in bad neighborhoods.  Me?  I am always on the prowl for my backlinks showing up in a bad place and am ripe-and-ready to file a notice to GoogleGods stating “that link is NOT mine, please don’t kill me, my income, and my life.” #kthxbye.

However, and this is what gives me pause, if Titanic was just a devaluation of poor links and/or content, then why are the affected sites NUKED rather than just demoted?  It sure looks like there is more than just de-valuation going on here.    This is a penalty, it seems and this paves the way for Negative SEO which is scary as hell.   Perhaps this was a one-time sweep although I highly doubt that.

TRENDS/PATTERNS
How did you do after this adjustment?  Did you find any pattern to the sites that were nuked?  I did.  The ones with paid links in shitty web spots all had the SERPS that were affected NUKED.  It seems that Amit found a way to really find many paid links and nuke the fucking shit out of the benefit of those links.  I personally don’t think that NEGATIVE SEO is possible.  I do think that there was benefit from even slightly shitty links and that benefit has now been mitigated.

FEEL CHEATED?  READY TO INFLICT MORE DEATH?
Google’s got a form for that.  If you feel that your site was wrongfully affected by the algo adjustment, you can submit your request for review using this form.  If you feel that the change wasn’t deep enough and there are still sites that missed The Death Penalty, use this Google Spam Report and mention the keyword “Penguin” in your report.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got legal, paid juice passing. This means that there is a white-hat way to flow juice while paying for it. So, yeah, it’s not a ‘paid link’ but it is ‘paid juice’ and since juice means domain authority, I think we’ve caught a break.

So, let’s take this to the extreme then. What if I had a huge-ass budget and I decided I wanted banner ads placed on hundreds, even thousands of sites. In theory you could jack up your site to a PR 7 or even a PR8. PR6 should come relatively easy with even a modest budget and now, it seems, you can get a PR6+ site by coughing up recurring monthly dough. But, holy fuck, talk about recurring monthly marketing budget nightmare. You’ll be in bed *forever* with hundreds of sites, paying them monthly, yearly, etc. You’ll need to ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”

So what ARE the advantages of having a PR6+ site? Well, first you’ll pass authority to each sub-page. Okay, so what does that do? What effect does domain authority have on SERPS?  According to Rand @ SEOMoz:  None whatsoever.   However, if you’re looking to monetize your site, you’ll only have 2 metrics in order to classify how much you can charge:  PageViews, or PageRank.  That’s it.  You either have 1, or the other, or both, but never neither.

FUCK IT, CREATE A BANNER AD MARKETPLACE
So, if it’s legal, let’s take it to the fucking extreme. Form a marketplace like TLA and sell only Banner Ad placements with followed images. TLA’s infographic marketplace won’t work since they only require an infographic be placed for 30 days. You need a way to place that shit long-term in the same spot. Any one out there know of a marketplace that sells banner ad placements? I say take that shit to the max. If it got the blessing from Cutts then I say that could be one of the last, paid ways to get more PR juice to your site. I don’t care what anyone says, I want my site to have the highest PageRank possible. And if there is now a paid way to accomplish that then I say go to Level 11 on that shit.

I’d like to pose this question to the visitors: “What are the advantages of having a high PageRanked domain?”   Since we can apparently pay to get one now, how would we leverage it?   Now is a great time to watch Fishkin’s video on PageRank.  I’m going to get crackin on finding some way to pass seemingly worthless link juice to my sites, legally.

So, last quarter, I wrote about how I declared Google the winner of the “you better go white hat or else” stalemate.  I did paid links, paid reviews, and never, ever did any shit like “cloaking”, “spam”, or “stuffing.”  Hence, the “grey” hat campaign type.  I had awesome content.  I had a crawlable site.  It was perfect in every way.  I used paid links and reviews to scream at GoogleBot, “Hey, notice me!  I’m right here! I have killer content and reputable sites link to it.”  The results were great.   The money.   Terrific.  I left the competition scratching their heads since my site was HTTPS, it was hard to reverse engineer as most link-finding tools couldn’t really find my backlinks.

However, the stress of running a grey-hat campaign eventually wears on you and you long for the peace of a white hat campaign.  So, I hatched a plan to wean my site from grey and pray that the results weren’t too bad.  I expected a 15-25% drop in SERPS and traffic which I could then recover by getting a big relevant, content piece linked up to the pages where I removed the TLA’s.

Fucking failure.   Total and monstrous failure.

Because I didn’t have the BALLS to gut out the imaginary stress of my campaign,  I think I have nearly ruined it all.   My total traffic drop?  -72.5%.   About 10 days after the first phase of removing TLA’s, I saw the first hit to my SERPS.    It was bad.  Way worse than I had imagined.  Then when phase II came around 30 days later, it was nothing less than a total disaster.

It’s hard for me to write right now.  Because writing this means that the realization is true.

SAME PAGES, SAME CONTENT, DIFFERENT SUBDOMAIN
The way that my money site is setup is “mysite.corporate.com” and other competitors in my space have “theirsite.corporate.com” and “grandma.corporate.com”.   It’s a sub-domain structure.   So, what’s happened now is that mysite.x.x has been replaced, with a roaming/constantly-changing yoursite.x.x, someothersite.x.x. Google is so confused now that it doesn’t know what competitor site to rank where my SERP was.  I’ll tell you one thing, it ain’t my site anymore.   Did an experiment where I tried to get one of them back and I can’t even get the page to index.  I am seeing the total number of indexed pages drop EACH day from 530 -> 460 -> 420 -> 411…pages just keep dropping out of the index.    Organic SERP traffic DOWN from 290 keywords a day to a paltry 60.

THE SWEET TLA CAMPAIGN FLIES UNDER THE RADAR
I was piping in sweet link juice from about 4 PR6 sites and a couple of PR7 sites (all with less than 20 outbound links per site so that juice was sweet.)  My TLA bill was $380 per month which I didn’t give a fuck about because I was making $11-$27K per month NET NET revenue.   Who fucking cares about $380?    My new numbers are more like $7 – $10K now.   Yeah, yeah I can hear all you haters out there, “You should be happy with that!”  My answer is a whole-hearted FUCK YOU.   No douchebag entrepreneur settles for a 50% loss on their revenue and takes it in the ass and says “THANKS!”

Fuck that.  This loss is the SAME EXACT thing (analogously) as getting robbed at gun-point and having to give up my wallet and jewelry.    Then punching me in the face as they leave.

CONTENT STRATEGY IN EFFECT
So, my only strategy here is to work the problem.  I’ve dumped almost $3800 in content these weeks…big, nice pieces, beautifully interlinked with the rest of the site however the traffic upswing is slower than expected.   Plus, certain SERPS that I was certain I could pounce with some nice content aren’t going anywhere and some grandma seems to be out-SERPING me with NO TEXT and some fucked up “BUY NOW” button that has been upscaled from 75X75 pixels to a 20/200 vision 250 X 35 pixels and looks like it was done by a 7 year old.  Yes, Google, that outranks my shit.  So much for user experience.

I could write for days on this and correct the fucked-up sentences in this post that don’t make much sense or are awkwardly worded.  However, I’m just going to hit Publish before I change my mind on posting this.  Cheers.

Sidenote: Please, colleagues. This is really rough on me. Go easy on the flaming. This one’s hard. (That’s what she said.)  I write these pieces so you all can learn from other’s mis-steps and hopefully prevent disaster on your end.

UPDATE:  SEE WHAT HAPPENED!  http://seobullshit.com/google-presents-titanic-coming-serps/

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.