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.