Paid Link Spam

I received what seemed to be an unsolicited e-mail this week. It was a reminder that I had submitted my link to their directory recently. They stated that there were 57,000 other people who submitted free links as well. They do not have the resources to get to all these submissions. Tell me something I don’t know already.

Here is where the e-mail got a little sloppy. It stated that their directory had sent “2.000.276” visitors to sites like mine. Yes I understand what they meant to say. They had 2 million people click their links. But this is a sales pitch. At least get your grammar correct.

The more I read, the more I felt like I was receiving a sleazy sale pitch. They stated that they were slashing prices 30% this week. I live in the USA. However the costs were listed in Euros. In addition, I only have 7 days to take advantage of the discount.

Apparently they are discontinuing free links. Here is the kicker. The e-mail stated they “would be sorry to loose [sic] me”. One again, you should really nail your English grammar before sending out the sales pitch. Know the difference between lose and loose. Otherwise I will assume you are lost.

The bottom line is that I have good content on my site. That should be enough for you to want to link to me. It is ok if you don’t have the time or bandwidth to add me to your directory. Just don’t try to sign me up to pay for a link on your site. That is not going to buy me anything. If I really wanted to pay, I would be going to a site with a higher page rank than yours buddy.

Page Rank Scultping

I received my first copy of Website magazine in the mail this weekend. So far it looks to be a most interesting read. My favorite article from this issue was “Google Pagerank Sculpting for SEO Profit” by Dante A. Monteverde. This was an informative article since I had never heard the term Pagerank sculpting before.
Sculpting is the practice of using the rel-nofollow attribute on links. You control which outbound links provide link juice, and which do not. This was invented by Matt Cutts of Google. It was initially in response to spammers posting links in comments. Systems that automatically use nofollow on comment links prevent any value from being passed on through such a link.

It is not only Google that will honor nofollow. Yahoo and MSN do the same. You could be more hard core and employ a robot.txt file to prevent crawlers from reading your links. However on some sites you want to link out and make it count, while on the same site you might want to do a little sculpting. Nofollow gives you this fine control over the passing of link juice.

I normally deal with the loss of link juice by not linking out to other sites other than my own. In rare circumstances I do link to worthy sites. However with nofollow, I can link away and still prevent the link juice from spilling out of my page and onto other sites. It is just one extra attribute to add onto the HTML link reference. I might try this out. The only time I will not use this is if I want to keep my viewers on my page. But that is another story.

Directory Submission

I created a couple new web sites last week. And I wanted to get them indexed by Google quickly. So I started with a tried and true method. I linked to them from an existing web site I control. However I wanted to do a little bit more to get these sites on the Google radar. So I went ahead and submitted them to some web directories.

The priority of which directories I submit to is based on the page rank of the directories. The first stop is always the Open Directory Project (aka DMOZ). This directory is a monster page rank 8. The rest of the directories I target are almost all page rank 5. Some of these are more difficult to submit to than others. For example, some of them try to confuse you to get you to click their Google AdSense ads. However some of them are very easy to submit to. One really simple directory to use if InfoTiger.

Most of the time, the submissions just put my requests in a queue for review. At some time in the future a human or an automated process reviews my requests and acts upon it if I pass their guidelines. I found two directories to be very fast at accepting and posting my requests in their directories. These fast response directories are Search Sight and Jaborwhalky. For fast results I recommend them.

It is a painful and time consuming process to manually submit my new URLs to directories. I wish this process could be automated for me. I have seen some software to do this in the past. However I am not sure how good that software is. I would hate to have an automated program mess up my directory submissions. Perhaps I need to do some more research on the offerings in this area. More likely I will have to roll my own program. I am a developer after all. But that will take some time.

Link Exchange

I received an unsolicited e-mail yesterday. It asked “can we exchanged (sic) links?” Then it provided the URL they wanted promoted. A hotmail return e-mail address was supplied. I checked the web site they wanted promoted. It had 451 inbound links to it. It also had a Google Page Rank 2. So I thought about this proposition and the value it would provide to me.

The first thing that was sketchy was that they were spamming me. They did not address me by name. They also did not give me their name. Also they only had a hotmail account. That does not mean they are evil. However they do not have e-mail, or will not give out their e-mail from their own domain. And the final straw was that their email was not grammatically correct. So perhaps English is not their first language. Still that made the request seem a bit shady.

Google does not like link exchanges in general I think. So I would not want to do anything that would penalize me in terms of page rank. The page they wanted to exchange was only a page rank 2. It also linked out to a lot of other sites. So they would not be able to provide much extra link juice for my site.

I guess I could respond with a test URL of my own. Then I could tell them to link to me first, and I would reciprocate. That way I could ensure this was not a one way deal. I could also analyze the effect on my test web page. Hey. It might be worth a try. However I suspect this would either have negligible or even negative effects in the end. You can’t fault somebody for trying to gain inbound links. To sign me up you need to perfect your pitch.

Link to Self

I read a blog post by Tim O’Reilly. This was on the O’Reilly radar blog. The title of the blog entry was “Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web?” Tim is finding more and more that big sites are not lining out to other sites. If they need to reference other sites, their main articles will link to another page of theirs which lists other sites. This phenomenon is catching on quickly. Tim worries that this may spell doom for the web. The whole point of the Internet is for good web sites to be linked to by others.

Now I can certainly understand why big sites do not want to link out to other sites. I run a bunch of very small sites. And I myself am very stingy is linking outside. When I do link, I frequently link to some of my other sites. Why give link juice to somebody else when I can pass it on to my own sites for benefit?

There are some small scenarios where I link out to another site. This happens when I find something truly excellent that deserves a link from me. And I have found that I get good karma when I do that. It might be that the owner of the site finds out and thanks me. Or even better I might get some links back from a site with better page rank than myself.

But the bottom line is that it costs me some juice when I link to somebody else. Why would I want to do that if my goal is to achieve a high page ranking? The only business reason might be that I provide good links that keep my readers coming back for more. I do not know whether that is enough of a reason. I figure I can write interesting enough stuff to gain peoples’ eyes.

Perhaps we came blame this problem on Google. They are the ones that set up the rules for page rank. If Google wanted me to freely link to other sites of worth, they would make it worth my while somehow. Google are you listening?

Web Page Scores

Previously I had blogged about how my premier web blog got rated poorly for SEO by the HubSpot tool. I thought I would review my scores from this tool for a couple other sites I have. Perhaps you can learn something about what I have done on these sites, and the affect it had on their SEO effectiveness.

A very low SEO score of 4 was awarded to one of my image galleries. There is just one page on the site. And it has only one heading. There are 85 images on the page which the tool considers bad. The tool found only 4 inbound links to the page. It has an Alexa rank somewhere around 26 million which is no good. This web site has been around a little while. However it has no Google page rank.

I have another blog where I discuss some dark topics. It received an SEO score of 27 which is still not that good. This blog has 16 headings. It has 15 images, which the tool also reports as being bad. This blog has 26 inbound links. That may be due to the fact that I submitted the blog to a bunch of directories. I am sad to say that this blog also has no Google page rank.

Another blog of mine was an experiment. I post fictional letters to a celebrity on this site. It received an SEO score of 28. It has 49 pages indexed by Google. It only has 12 inbound links. I did submit it to a few directories. It has an Alexa ranking of 9 million. I am happy to report that this site has a Google page rank of 1.

Finally I want to talk about a third blog of mine. This blog does not have a lot of entries. However each entry is about a technical topic. It has an SEO score of 34. There were 87 inbound links reported by the tool. This blog has 47 pages indexed by Google. It has an Alexa ranking of 20 million. But it also has a Technorati ranking of 1 to 2 million. This site also has a Google page rank of 1.

In summary, the HubSpot web score can provide some insight into your SEO effectiveness. Inbound links are a significant factor. I suspect site lifetime plays a good part as well. Submitting a URL to web directories may be one way to help out. Blogs can get a Google page rank without a huge web score from HubSpot. I wonder how much better they would fare if I follow the guidance from the HubSpot tool

Web Site Score

A while ago I read a post about a guy receiving an unsolicited proposal from an SEO Company. So the dude takes the company’s web site, runs it through a web marketing analysis tool, and finds the web site lacking in terms of SEO. This was quite amusing. It may have been an amateur SEO Company. Or maybe they just did not care how their web site ranked. I assume it was the former case. Regardless I thought that I myself should see how my web sites fared with this tool.

The tool is from the HubSpot site. It is an online tool where you feed it the URL of your site. The tool then analyzes your site in terms of SEO, and gives you a score from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the better your SEO techniques on the site. Now I will confess that I have ran many of my web sites through this tool. Most of my sites do not fare greatly. Then again, I have not diligently followed the best practices for SEO on them. I though I would review the results I got back from analyzing my premier site which is Software Maintenance.

The HubSpot tool was quick to point out a lot of SEO problems with my site. I had no meta description or keywords on my pages. I also was missing alt text for images (and I have a ton of images on the site). There were no keywords on the inner pages of the web site. The site was hosted on a free domain (Blogger). There were no links to my site from delicious or Digg. And there was no way to sign up for updates on the site. Ouch. It sounded like my site got spanked,.

The good news is that the tool did report some positive SEO things about my site. For instance the domain was registered for more than one year. Thanks Google. It also had an entry on DMOZ and Yahoo directory. Those were added manually by me. The tool stated that my site had a blog. Well in fact my site is a blog. The tool also detected that my site has an RSS feed.

The tool graded my site below 50%. Last time I was in school, 50% translated into failure. That might be wake up call to do a little SEO work on the site. However what matters are hard results. Some of the items listed may be subjective or have little to do with my site’s success. Here are the statistics that the tool determined for my site. It has an Alexa ranking of about 8 million, which puts it in the top 29%. Yeah that is not too good. The tools also found that my site had a Technorati ranking of around 900,00, which puts it in the top 1.39%. Nice. The worst news was that my site did not have a Google page rank yet. I am hoping this is due to the fact that the site is new. We shall see.

Proposal

I read a great question on the Joel On Software web site. This was in the Business of Software discussion board on the site. A guy tried to do search engine optimization by himself for a couple years with little or no success. So he shopped around for some professional help. Here are the details of a proposal from an SEO company:

$325 for keyword analysis
$1095 for web site optimization
$345 for link building / submission
Optional $349 monthly SEO campaign

The guy asked for some feedback on the proposal from the readers of the site. He stated that he already spent around $1200 a month on Google AdWords. The responses by the other readers of the site were so interesting that I wanted to mention them here.

A number of people advised against the submission part of the bid. This was not only worthless, but could cause some harm to the business. Other people commented that the work could be outsourced at a cheaper price to somebody else. However the quoted price did not seem that high so it might not be worth it.

There were some who believed the work outlined on the proposal would make no measurable difference on the success of the business. A couple people chimed in that the company should be careful that no black hat tricks would be involved with the work. Otherwise the work could actually cause some damage instead of helping.

The majority of the feedback revolved around the topic of inbound links. The key for success in this arena is that you want quality links pointing to you. So submitting your site to the wrong places again might work against you. However good links can turn a small investment into a large return.

Edit Search Results

A couple blog posts have alerted me to an experiment that Google is conducting called Edit Search Results. A randomly selected set of Google search users are seeing additional icons on their search result pages. One of the items moves a search result to the top of the page via animation. There is also another icon which deletes an item from the search result page. Finally a third icon allows the user to enter comments about the search result item. You can also suggest another link to be included in the search result.

This functionality sounds like the Digg voting system where you vote a link up or down in the top Digg rankings. Google says the experiment is supposed to last for a couple weeks. The real question in my mind is whether user editing will have any impact on other peoples search results. Currently the Edit Search Results experiment is supposed to only affect your future search results when you are signed in with your Google login.

Marissa Mayer, who is Google’s vice president of search, has stated in an interview that the Google algorithms determine the ranking in the search result pages. She clarified that this ranking will not get recomputed due to any input such as the Edit Search Results feature. However this feature is still in experimental mode. Perhaps things may change if Google decides to roll this feature out for everyone.

The big question will be whether these results could then be gamed by unscrupulous individuals running tricky programs. I will wait until I actually see the Edit Search Results icons. Then I think this will be a task for Black of Hat.

Beware of Gadgets

I recently read an inspiring and depressing story about a top SEO programmer. He had written a popular gadget that everybody seemed to download and put into their web pages. His gadget linked back to his dating site. He built up over 500,000 inbound links due to this gadget marketing.

He did this work for his company. When they found out how successful it had been, they had him change his gadget to link some pay day loans web sites. Apparently Google caught on to this, considered it spam, and his web sites took a huge hit as a result. This alone is a sad story.

Here comes the kicker. The dude appealed the Google decision. And as a result, he got a manual review from none other than Matt Cutts himself. Matt did a lot of research before making his decision. And apparently he found out that it appeared that the Gadget programmer had intentionally left a lot of critical and incriminating details out of his appeal. As a result, Matt stayed the Google decision. Now this Gadget programmer is owned. The million inbound links amount to nothing. I just hope the poor guy does not get fired.

Note to self - check out Gadget programming to get inbound links to my site. Note #2 to self - don't be spammy.

Effect of Links and Directories

It has been 4 days since I created my new Black of Hat blog. However my blog has not been indexed by Google yet. I would not have expected this to happen so soon just by adding the URL to Google/MSN/Yahoo. However I did some different things with this new blog.

The first unique step I did with my new blog was to link to it from my most popular web sites. In fact, I put a link to my new blog on every single page of my main web site. The second unique step was that I immediately wrote a new blog post in my many existing blogs introducing (and linking to) my new blog. The funny thing is that most of these new posts in my old blogs got indexed immediately by Google. However my new blog is nowhere to be found in Google's cached web pages.

The final most critical new step I have applied to my new blog is to submit it to a lot of directories on the web. I have submitted my URL to 70 different directories ranging from PR8 to PR4. Now many of these directories need to review my request before actually adding me to their directory. However it appears that I am already listed in DMOZ. I was hoping that would grant me immediate indexing by Google.

Whatever the short term outcome, I know I shall be eventually indexed by all the major search engines. I just thought I would conduct an experiment with my latest blog to see if I could expedite the process. Check out my Black of Hat blog. You might find a program or two that can help you with your Search Engine Optimization needs.

Black of Hat Blog

I have started up a new blog called Black of Hat. It will feature new programs that I freely release to "achieve questionable ends". So far I have already published my first program on the site. The program launches Internet Explorer and navigates to web sites of your choosing.

My desire is to get this new blog indexed by Google as soon as possible. So I added a link to the blog from every page of my company web site. I have also written a post about the new blog in some of my most popular other blogs.

Like I have done in the past for other blogs, I have submitted my new blog URL to the big three search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. However I have also for the first time submitted this new blog to a bunch of web directories. Today I have added the URL to over 20 directories. These directories are mostly PR5. Any links back from them should be beneficial.

Let's see how long it takes to get indexed and in the SERPs. I plan to take care of my blog readers as well. My second free program is in the making right now, and should be done and released in a couple days.

Book Report

I have recently turned to print book to study up on a few topics. Today I got a bunch of books on blogging. They may not be directly focused on Search Engine Optimization, but are not that far off either. The first book I read was "Start Your Own Blogging Business".

The sad thing about this book was that its first discussion on SEO was to watch out for SEO scams. Is our field so filled with sleazy rip-off artists that this is the popular opinion of us? This is definitely not the first time I had heard this warning. In fact, other well respected people I consider SEO experts also reiterate this. There is a lot I could say on this subject, however I believe the old saying buyer beware applies here.

On a more positive note, the book I read advised you to pause before you give up on a blog and try to start another one. It recommends you first attempt to maximize the first blog. I took this advice to heart. Yes I have been trying to study up on SEO to help my blog rise up in the SERPS. But in no way have I exhausted all the on-page and also off-page factors. Luckily I have not given up on my main blog yet, even though it has failed to produce the profit that I was hoping it would.

SEO Slam Dunk

I have been reading ebooks to gain ideas and knowledge about Search Engine Optimization. One recent book I read was truly informative. It was "Search Engine Optimization Made Easy" by Brad Callen of SEO Elite. Since I respect Brad enough to link to his site, you know I hold him and his free ebook in high regard.

This book was a monster 10 chapters of heavy search engine optimization material. Having read the whole thing cover to cover, I want to share some of the new ideas I have learned from it. I plan to put some of these ideas into practice immediately.

• Page Rank is only increased by getting links
• Bold, italics, and underline words count for more
• Analyze top websites which rank for your keywords
• Less words in title is better
• Put H1 tags as far to the left of the page as possible
• Get indexed by having a high PR page link to you
• SEO Elite automates optimization work
• Links from different IP addresses counts more to Google
• Mimic strategies of competitor web sites
• Web pages should have a max of 25 links

These items are advice from the first half of the book. Brad also covers some tactics that will either get you banned or penalized by Google:

• Hidden text
• Alt image spamming
• Meta tag stuffing
• Title tag stuffing

There is not way I can cover all the things that "Search Engine Optimization Made Easy" teaches you in the whole book. I just summarized here to give you a taste of what is in there. I think this book is an example of some information that is both high quality and free. Thanks for the book Brad.

Studying Up

I have been busy reading up on Search Engine Optimization. Found a free ebook that was a total plan for getting to $100 per month. Here were some tips I gathered from reading the first 40 or 50 pages of the book:

• Get new domains for new sites
• Participate in link exchanges
• Wordpress is good because it is free
• Post to high Page Rank directories
• Target keywords with low competition
• One way links beat reciprocal ones
• Perform directory submissions manually
• Link to your web site from your articles
• Target two keywords per web page
• Use descriptive anchor text in home page link

I found these tips very interesting. The only one I would hesitate to use would be the link exchange. Recently there has been a lot of talk in the SEO community about Google penalizing sites that sell links. And it might be the case that you would get penalized with link exchanges as well.

My plan is to create some new sites, and see how link exchange participation affects then. This is good practice for any SEO technique. Ideas are great. But testing them out gives you the hard evidence you need to make crucial decisions. Due to the ever changing rules of the search engines, you may need to continually retest your assumptions as well.

AdSense Handbook Part II

This post is a continuation of my previous one on The Google AdSense Handbook. I received this ebook via e-mail. It comes from a group known as Truth To Wealth Mentors. They seem to be a mysterious bunch. Their name appears nowhere in the ebook. Strange indeed.

The book spends a good deal of time describing how search engine bots work. Specifically, here were some things that the bots like to see on your web pages:

• More text and less HTML code
• Lots of back links to your home page
• Contextually relevant in bound links

And here are things that the search engine bots do not like:

• Nested HTML tables
• Too many home page back links within domain
• Duplicate content

Some of this information was just a review for me. However I had not heard that nested HTML tables were a bad thing before. If your goal is to do well on the search engine result pages, you might as well start by making your web site easy to crawl.

Thanks go out to the Truth To Wealth Mentors who provided me with the free ebook. If you get a chance, let me know why you have been so secretive about yourselves. And please don't tell me you borrowed the content of this book from somebody else. Until next time.

Google AdSense Handbook

I received a link via e-mail to download an ebook entitled "The Google AdSense Handbook". The subtitle of this book is Building Your Own AdSense Empire. Sounds good to me. The strange thing about the book is there seems to be zero self promotion involved. It did not list an author. How unusual. I had to go back to me e-mail to see who sent it to me. They called themselves the Truth To Wealth Mentors. Very strange indeed.

Well I read through the book. And to tell you the truth, the book did not change my life. It wasn't that the book did not have good information. But it was very dry. Maybe the style of the author did not agree with me. I am not sure. However I came away with a number of helpful hints that I will share with you here.

• Develop and stick to a blog writing schedule
• Keep posts simple with 1 to 2 ideas
• Give posts your own personal style
• Good idea for a blog is reviews (like movies)
• Write at least 100 words per page for Page Rank
• Put sky scraper ad in upper left hand corner of page
• Don't center headlines as many people will miss them

The book spent a good portion discussing search engine bots. I will cover those in a future post.

John Chow is the Man

In the past I have avoided clicking on AdSense advertising on other sites. Maybe that was because I have become hypersensitive to advertising since I am a publisher that hosts ads on my sites. But recently I have had a change of heart. If I see an interesting ad, I will click through to check it out. I was glad I clicked on an ad for John Chow Dot Com.

I hesitantly entered my e-mail address at John Chow Dot Com in order to receive his Free Online Make Money EBook. And what do you know? The thing was actually free. Yes this guy wants to make money. But he is not trying to trick me into buying some seminar or book or other crap.

John's book teaches how to make money by blogging. He goes over some material that is familiar to anybody who has researched this topic:

• Get your own domain name
• Update your blog frequently
• Answer comments from readers
• Posts should have at least 200 words
• Use descriptive anchor tags in links
• Comment on popular blogs
• Give out back links

However John also had some advice that was new to me:

• Turn old posts into new ones with a little update
• Link to older posts
• Space ads out so they are not too crowded
• Look for Google AdWords coupons
• Write about other sites
• Create/distribute free articles

I was so wowed by John's ebook that I am linking to John Chow dot com. This is significant for me. I am stingy with outbound links, and almost never link to other sites. Too afraid it will mess up my page rank. But I highly recommend John's free ebook. I guess I should disclaim that I have no business relationship to John Chow. Just am grateful he published a good ebook that was free. I like to reward those that do good without any required payback. John - this post is for you.

Good for Users or SEO

This post follows the theme of the last one on "search engine ranking factors". The funny thing is that certain actions may have no bearing on your ranking in the SERPS, but may impact how your users feel about your site.

For example, misspellings may not penalize your page rank. They might even improve your PR. However your users may think less of your site if they spot misspellings. I know this has affected my impression of some product sites. On the flip side, using bold tags may not impact the SERPs much. But bold text can help focus a quick reader's attention. And that is a good thing.

Now others factors seem to have a significant and direct bearing on your page ranking. We all know that, in general, more inbound link mean higher page rank. But what about the outbound links. Do you get penalized if you link to other sites. Apparently it has to do with who you link to. Linking to a trusted site is OK. But linking to a bad neighborhood is bad.

My question is what happens if you link to nobody? Does this mean you lose no juice? Or are you expected to have some links otherwise you get a penalty? I would like to hear from somebody who has an opinion on this. Because at first I thought that a link meant that you give away some rank to the site you link to. If that was the truth, not linking would mean you do not lose any rank if you do not link out. However my hunch is that it is not this simple.

Advice of Experts

There is a lot out there on the web about Search Engine Optimization. I just recently discovered SEOmoz. CEO Rand Fishkin compiled a list of "search engine ranking factors" as voted by a host of SEO experts. The real value of this list was the comments from the expert voters. Here is an executive summary of some of these comments:

• Put keywords in the title tag, close to the beginning of the tag
• Include singular and plural forms of the keyword
• Don't overdo keywords in the body of your page
• Put keywords in the start and ending paragraphs of your page
• Do not create H1 tags which are duplicates of the title tag
• Choose domain names with 3 or less hyphens in them
• Include alt and title tags for images
• Strive to have around 200 words per page
• Text adjacent to links is important

Links That Hurt

I have a couple programs that I mass submitted to download sites. These are freeware programs which try to get visitors to come to my site to click through. You might consider them ad ware. However the programs mostly work and provide good features - like downloading and displaying pictures of assorted starlets.

Most sites posted my submission entries. However a small percentage informed me that they required me to link to them from my web page before they would list my software. This rubbed me the wrong way. I consider my software valuable, and given that it was free, a benefit to the sites that listed the software. There is no way I was going to link to these sites in exchange for a listing.

Now there is nothing inherently evil about asking for a link. I get it. They are trying to increase their inbound links to improve their page rank. But recently I have given more thought to this setup. Who you link to is just as important as who links to you. If you link out to some spammy sites, your site may get penalized by the search engines. And we do not want that.

The safest thing to do is to link to those sites that are truly deserving. And this is what I do. If a download site has a lot of traffic, and quickly adds my submission, they get a link from me. After all, I want people to go to those sites and download my software. But I am not going to risk my own page rank by linking to a "bad" site.

Web Sites Which Sell

I heard about a "free" eBook from Entrepreneur magazine which teaches how to build web sites that sell. So I went to get mine. Turns out Microsoft Live is the sponsor of this free book. And I had to sign up for Microsoft Live. That itself was a pain since they wanted my e-mail address. Once I got the book and read it, I was surprised how little value the book put on Search Engine Optimization.

Perhaps in the big picture, SEO is only a little fish in the marketing pond. The book had a lot of well known web site design principles like KISS. It highly recommended a lot of headlines to catch the reader's eye. One thing it advised which I really have not thought about was to ensure your sight works well with many browsers. Time to check all my pages with FireFox.

Currently I am generating a number of web sites to boost inbound links to my main sites. When I finish building a web site, I submit it to The Big Three: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. However the book I read also suggested that I submit URLs to AOL and Ask.com as well. I am not sure if these extra steps are really required. I really should know this as I have read a couple books that cover this. What do you think?

Getting Indexed

I have a number of new web sites that I want indexed by Google. So I got through the normal process and add their URLs to Google. I also add them to MSN and Yahoo search. As I develop new web sites, I continue to submit the completed sites to the search engines.

What I have found is that it is hard to predict when my new web sites get crawled and indexed. My first new site seemed to get crawled by Google relatively quickly. I thought this was just due to good luck. However my second and third sites took much longer.

As I pondered this discrepancy, I tried to analyze the site content for each of the sites to detect a reason why Google indexed the first one very quicky. This was difficult as each of my sites were nearly identical in layout. Then I recalled that the one thing different about the first new web site was that I linked to it from my main company web page. I am suspecting that this linking may have moved the site up in the queue for indexing. In fact, I think I have heard or read about this effect somewhere.

It is my firm belief that you need to test out theories like this. Since I have a constant generation of new web sites, and the full control of my company web page, I plan to do some tests. If in fact linking to the new site accelerates its Google indexing, I think I will have a new process for launching new sites. I will keep you posted on my findings.

Page Rank like Chess Rating

I have a goal to increase the Page Rank of my main site. So I know one thing that will help me is a lot of inbound links. I am working on building up some filler web sites that link to my main site. But the question is how should these links be arranged? Do I just need thousands of random pages directly pointing to my main site? I suspect this may help, but optimal gains will require a different configuration.

Now I will confess that I do not know the innards of the Page Rank algorithm used by the Big Boys like Google. But I have some theories. The whole scene reminds me of Yahoo chess. In the Yahoo games environment, you are given a score. It goes up when you win games. And down when you lose them. Some boring cheaters created 2 accounts, and let one of their accounts win all the time. But that only got them so far. Each win counted less and less towards boosting up their top account. After a while the wins against the second account seemed to be of no use.

There was a breakthrough idea that you could chain together a number of bogus accounts. The first account would always lose to the second. The second account would always lose to the third. And so on. If you had a total of 15 accounts, and you let the accounts play each other in a controlled fashion, you could do wonders. The trick was that each account would only play the other accounts directly below and above them. That way each win/loss had the most effect. And the overall effect of the many accounts was multiplied.

How does this apply to Page Rank? My theory is that if each page can pass on a little rank to another, there must be a way to set up the links between many pages to optimize the final page you wish to get the big Page Rank. And the idea will follow the chess rating boosting. Let the lowest level pages link to your second level pages. And the second level pages link up to the third level pages. And so on up to you main page which could be level 15. My hope is that these chained links will have a snowball effect and maximize the passing on of rank. I am willing to give this a try. If you find my Software Maintenance web page at the top of the SERPs, you will know I am doing something right.

Hit the Limit

I want to build up my main blog Page Rank. So I am developing a lot of other blogs, and putting free content online. Got most of the blogs started. Now I am creating the main web pages for the content I want to post. Tried creating some Google accounts so I can use a different one for each web site.

At first I was generating my web sites slowly. But each time I generate a site, I want to link the pages to all my other sites. This should be a good thing. One problem - I need to create the sites first to get their URLs. This is where I ran into a problem. Tried to create a bunch of new Google accounts today. This is what I got.

Account Creation Failed
We were unable to create your new Gmail account. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please click here to access more information from the Gmail Help Center.

So I clicked on the link to get more information. Brings me to a stock Google information page. Apparently they are fighting spammers. So if you try to create a lot of accounts at the same time from the same location, you get blocked. I hope this resets after a day or so. Google did recommend I look into their "Google Apps" for bulk account creation. But unlike most of Google's services, I don't think Google Apps is free.

That's OK. Maybe its time to try out other free web hosting sites.

Generating Links

When it gets down to it, inbound links to your site should give you better page rank. I have read about a number of strategies to generate a lot of these links. One long term strategy I have been loosely following is to build up a number of related blogs. I plan to cross link all of these, and have them all link to a master blog that I want to come out high on the Google SERP.

The problem with my long term strategy is that it requires a lot of work. And there is no guaranteed payoff in the end. It does have a benefit in that, when I write blog entries, it is definitely unique content. I just wanted to accelerate the process a little bit.

So my latest idea is to borrow some free content, and just make a web site that links to my existing start up blogs. This too takes some work. But it can be completed in days instead of many months. I had read about this technique before but just passed it over. Now I am putting it into practice. Cutting and pasting existing text is a lot faster than writing next text. And I am getting a lot of pages and links to my blogs. So far I think I doubled the number of inbound links this weekend.

The only thing I want to be careful about is not to trigger any suspicion with the number of inbound links growing too quickly. On the flip side, it would be nice if I could automate this somehow. I am a programmer. So that might be the next step.

Search Engine Result Pages

My first blog I ever created was one on Software Maintenance. So far I have not performed any explicit SEO on it. And I have found that I am nowhere to be found on Google's result pages when searching for "Software Maintenance". This seems a bit strange. I thought these factors would have helped me out:

• I have a number of heading tags
• My pages are indexed by Google
• There are a number of inbound links to my blog
• I got a full RSS feed available

The plan was to get some good content in the blog over the long haul and hope people would come. But I wanted to also be high up in the Google SERPs (for both more traffic and bragging rights). I do know I have the following deficiencies:

• Lack of keywords/descriptions for posts
• No meta keywords
• I got a lot of images but no alt tags
• The blog is relatively new (2+ months)
• The domain is new as well
• No links from del.icio.us or Digg

Another painful fact is that Technorati ranks my blog at number 4 million or so. Ouch. Perhaps I should amend my plan to do some SEO along the way as I build up content for my blog. To also ensure I do not give up hope, I sometimes do Google search for a combination of my 4 best keywords for my site. Then I see my blog in the 1st SERP from Google. But that is not going to get my any visitors. Time to get to work.,

Studying SEO

You read a lot of search engine optimization. Apparently there are all kinds of tricks to help you get to the top of the search engine queries. I am not sure what to make of all this. On the surface you would hope that you could tweak your site to your advantage. Then again, there seems to be a lot of hype in this area as well.

I am experimenting with a number of different blogs. And I also have a few web sites that I have built. So far I have not done any explicit SEO on these. But I do have an overall game plan to at least improve my search engine ranking. I would also love to get a high Google page ranking. I am willing to take the time to see whether there is a payoff in the end.

So come with my as I study the black art known as Search Engine Optimization. Yours truly. The SEO Proconsul.