New search engine marketers typically don’t have it so easy. (Anecdotal Evidence Alert) I had two potential clients come to me this month, who I had to turn down because they were penalized. (I just don’t need the business that bad to hold their hands through the process) Both of these clients rented links from a “guaranteed first page rankings” type SEO firm. Giant blinking warning sign!!! Most SEO’s don’t make these promises for a simple reason: they have past results they can point to that will seal the deal without resorting to guarantees. Additionally, as an SEO consultant you never really know what the guy before you was doing to screw it up. Trust me. So straight to the do’s and don’ts of renting links.

How to Rent Links Effectively (If You Must)

To rent links effectively there are a few factors you must consider.

1. Links MUST Come From Relevant Pages. Common sense rules the day here. If your site is about donuts - rent links from sites about food. This is probably the most important rule. Google uses a form of Latent Semantic Indexing/Analysis which has a pretty good chance of figuring out if page A is relevant to page B.
2. If Possible Avoid Footer (or indeed header) Links The further away from the quality unique content of the page - the less likely they will pass any decent rankings. In addition this is likely a metric many search engines can detect. A list of links has a fairly easily detectable signature. Caveat: If you can get a footer link from a highly relevant, CLEAN page it may be worth pursuing.
3. Acquiring Links In Quality Content Works Best Links wrapped in a paragraph of real text is harder to detect, and therefore more likely to be seen as natural. I think this is a no-brainer so I won’t belabour the point. If you are looking for in content links, off the top of my head TLA has in text links and TLB has HMP’s
4. Link Velocity Matters If you gain too many links too fast, its easy for Google to detect. Slow and steady wins the race otherwise you look like an automated linking scheme.
5. Vary your anchor text Again, leaving too many markers for search engines to pick up = BAD.
6. DEEP LINK! You always want to maintain a natural looking link profile. Quality sites get deep links to subpages because they have legitimate quality content. This is the link profile you are going for.
7. Renting Works Best to Give a Small Boost to Important Rankings A few rented links on difficult keywords is a reasonable compliment to other less dangerous link building/attracting plans of attack. If renting is your only modus operandi, don’t say I didn’t weren’t warned when you are penalized.

The Big Players

There are quite a decent number of players in the link brokerage game. The two largest are text-link-ads.com and textlinkbrokers.com. Some slightly smaller players include Link Adage, TNX and Teliad. It probably wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment here about any of these companies.

This tool allows users to create a custom apache .htaccess file that eliminates a couple of the most common PageRank leaks found on a typical site. Simply enter your domain name and default index page on your site (typically index.html, index.php, or default.htm) and click the submit button. A custom .htaccess file will be generated that you can copy/paste into your site’s root directory.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.indexedcontent.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://indexedcontent.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://indexedcontent.com/ [R=301]

Some specifics for my blackhat readers:

All ip’s used by the spammer were from the same subnet, but were more or less unique ip’s.
The site typically has 50-100 conversions per day.

http://code.reddit.com/ticket/154:

In many applications, such as Socialite, it is valuable to look up information about a link on reddit. Currently, there are two good ways to do this using the JSON API:

Info call
Example: http://www.reddit.com/api/info.json?count=1&url=STORYURL

The API “info” call is an ideal way to look up reddit stories by URL. However, in some cases, looking up stories by URL alone presents problems:

1. URLs are not mapped to stories on a one-to-one basis. Since the same URL can be posted to many subreddits, when looking up stories by URL, it becomes necessary to constrain the search by subreddit, e.g.: http://www.reddit.com/r/subreddit/api/info.json?count=1&url=STORYURL

For a typical reddit story the json looks like:

{"kind": "Listing", "data": {"children": [{"kind": "t3", "data": {"subreddit_id": "t5_6", "clicked": false, "name": "t3_70ehq", "ups": 3709, "created": 1220933746.0, "url": "http:\/\/voices.washingtonpost.com\/the-trail\/2008\/09\/08\/obama_to_palin_dont_mock_the_c.html", "num_comments": 871, "downs": 943, "author": "neoabraxas", "domain": "voices.washingtonpost.com", "subreddit": "reddit.com", "score": 2766, "likes": null, "title": "Obama to Palin:\"Don't mock the Constitution. Don't make fun of it. Don't suggest that it's not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It's worked pretty well for over 200 years.\"", "hidden": false, "saved": false, "id": "70ehq"}}, {"kind": "t3", "data": {"subreddit_id": "t5_2cneq", "clicked": false, "name": "t3_70e4r", "ups": 96, "created": 1220928368.0, "url": "http:\/\/voices.washingtonpost.com\/the-trail\/2008\/09\/08\/obama_to_palin_dont_mock_the_c.html", "num_comments": 9, "downs": 61, "author": "andybigs", "domain": "voices.washingtonpost.com", "subreddit": "politics", "score": 35, "likes": null, "title": "Obama to Palin: 'Don't Mock the Constitution'", "hidden": false, "saved": false, "id": "70e4r"}}]}}

So there you have it. No auth string required, just open access to a portion of reddit’s db. So far the only endpoint visible is URL. With a little trial and error you can probably find some other useful endpoints other then the URL one listed.

Floating Divs for SEO

<html>
   <head>
      <style>
      #container {width:400;}
      #right {width:200;float:right;}
      #left {width:200;float:left;}
      </style>
   </head>
<body>
     <div id="container">
          <div id="right">
               Content we want to highlight
          </div>
          <div id="left">
               Content we want to bury
          </div>
     </div>
</body>
</html>

JavaScript Templating

However I recently came across a few javascripts for including files on the client side instead of the traditional server side with php, asp, python etc. Of course I was familiar with the innerHtml function, but never considered the value of using a JavaScript templating system to prevent undesirable portions of a website from being indexed. This little script (4 lines of code) could, in theory, be an additional site sculpting tool to limit spider-ability much in the same way as the “nofollow” tag is used to sculpt PageRank.

How it Works

jQuery does the bulk of the heavy lifting and we will borrow Levi Senft’s jsinclude script (or write your own). Like most JavaScripts, it must be called onload, grabs the file name and path for the file to be included. The content specified between the elements tags is then appended to the dom element in question. the jsinclude file appends to any div with the class of “jsinclude”, but in practice you could set that to whatever naming convention you want. The content is displayed slightly after the original page is cached by the spider, letting us “cloak” our content without fear of reprisal from Google. We will show the exact same content to a normal visitor and a spider, we will just use the spiders shoddy JavaScript support and inherent need to cache pages quickly against it.

How To Implement

First off the bat we need to download a fresh version of jQuery, and add it to the HEAD section of your page’s html, making sure the path points properly.

<head>
    <script src="jquery-1.2.6.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

</head>

Then we want to call the jsinclude file right after our analytics urchin and before the end closing tag.

<script type="text/javascript">
     var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-583901-5");
     pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
      function jsinclude_init() {
	$('div.jsinclude').each(
		function () {
			$('#'+this.id).load(this.innerHTML);
		}
	);
}
</script>
</body>

Now to apply the proper style to the divs we want to hide, and list the path of the file to include:

    <div id="nocache" class="jsinclude">/path/to/file.html</div>

That’s it. The downside is you have to physically wrap the html-php-etc you want to include in a div, but other than that you now have a JavaScript templating engine that works even on web hosting that doesn’t support php.

Why would anyone need a URL Shortener?

Well there are some situations where a Url really needs to be shortened. Some sites especially social bookmarking or social media sites have set up limitations when it comes to posting links. And if you have a 3 line link then your only solution is to make it shorter or post it on your blog…

And as the web evolves (2.0 or 3.0 ?) url’s like http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:QCVFcgmM_AMJ:answers.yahoo.com/question/index%3Fqid%3D20080812142512AAaF0p6+i+need+some+spelling+help+!&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1 seem normal although pretty hard to process.

How would a beginner treat this link ? It might seem funny but some people think this link could contain a virus. How many even heard of a data center ? most will probably think that an address like 209.85.135.104 is some kind of a hack.

The solution is very simple though. Get a site up mix it with a text coding algorithm and you get a brand new url redirecting to your original input. The new “shortened” url will most likely be in the range of 4-6 characters excepting the homepage of course.

For example take this page and the shortened version:

• http://indexedcontent.com/uncategorized/url-shorteners-whats-in-it-for-a-seo/

• http://tinyurl.com/5y82j2

Can you spot the difference ? We went from 77 to 25 characters but the result is the same. The best part is that you can customize your new link giving extra information to the visitor by adding your own alias like so:

• http://tinyurl.com/urlseo

This will have the same effect but it looks better than the first one that’s for sure and it’s 25 characters too ! Tiny url is just an example although one of the most popular URL shorteners that exists but there are literally hundreds of other alternatives out there. Others are appearing as we speak.

A list of some URL shorteners that i’ve come across (the first 4 are the most popular):

1. http://tinyurl.com
2. http://www.dwarfurl.com
3. http://doiop.com
4. http://memurl.com
5. http://traceurl.com
6. http://ix.lt
7. http://tiny.pl
8. http://is.gd
9. http://smarturl.eu
10. http://www.snipurl.com
11. http://yweb.com
12. http://xaddr.com
13. http://muhlink.org
14. http://u.mavrev.com
15. http://bit.ly/go

Ok the presentations are over and we all agree that URL shorteners are a useful way of clothing our ugly url’s and make the Internet a cleaner happier place. But what’s in it for an SEO  then?

Well linking is one of the cornerstones of a SEO so if you take away his linking power then somebody is not happy right ? Although most links today have the nofollow attribute and most social media sites aren’t sending any linkjuice there will be people using these url shorteners for their own sites. This translates into more links to these Sites that shorten URL’s and not the original destination. Although they are still useful as referrals i think that sites will be losing a lot in the SERPs.

Somebody will be busy getting in the goods though and it will be interesting to see how SEO’s will adapt to this growing phenomenon.

I wish i thought of this a way back hehe.

Although Google or other search engines are trying to keep this phenomenon under control by applying penalties like the duplicate content, the -30 or -950 they can’t really handle this completely. As the web continues to evolve even greater than some people would have anticipated, manual reviewing sites is simply a physical impossibility.

So the only way to fight against the big outlaws of the web is by working on the reviews they get for common abuses we see on the net like:

• duplicate content (counting site copying and redirecting) because even search engines can be tricked if the site has 30% of their content changed here and here.
• major examples of cloaking because the competition is always watching your move.
• paid links that seem to annoy everyone except the link building firm and the site who pays for them.
• owning illegal media.
• etc.

So don’t get surprised if you come across this while browsing the internet:

They started cleaning and this is a good thing overall because people should get credit for what they post on the internet. More changes will come, we just need to keep our eyes open and learn from others and their mistakes.

I’ve now come across more than one local business vertical with 8 & 9 bogus listings all with the same phone number even. Why bother with SEO if Google will provide you with an easy shortcut to the top? Simply list all of your business lines as separate corporate locations and you can easily capture a lion’s share of the keyword’s search engine traffic. In theory it will probably also get you penalized, but how are they going to catch you if you don’t even have a website?