Finding Qualified Links the Easy Way and the Easier Way

Just about everyone you talk to about websites knows that links are as good as gold, and if you've ever tried to build links manually you know that sending countless emails can be as hard as mining for real gold, and often as big of a waste of time.

So let's look at the DNA of a good link.  In my book, a website worth getting a link on should be:

1. On a unique Class C IP
IP Addresses are broken down into AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD so for example MartinBowling.com is on 64.79.167.6.  I would want a single link from this IP C class.  64.79.167.5 would be no good, but 64.79.155.6 would be good because the third octet is unique.  Many times when web hosts buy IP addresses, they buy them in bulk so it's likely that 64.79.167.5 is also owned by Martin's web host, and Martin might even have websites on that IP address as well.

2. Root domain has PR or rankings and backlinks
If the root domain has no visible Page Rank and no rankings, it's a waste of time because there are a variety of factors that could have raised a red flag and that is why Google isn't showing their results.  I use Yahoo! Site Explorer to check backlinks and WMTips.com Site Information Tool to check PR, IP address, domain history, etc.  The Firefox plugin is wonderful.

3. Contextually related
Whenever possible, I always try to get a link in the middle of a paragraph on a page that is related to my keywords.  For this post, a good link would be my SEO Services.  It meets all of the criteria.

Easy Way to Get Qualified Backlinks

You can search using custom operators finding sites within your niche and ask them for a link or even consider buying a link from them.  For traffic and branding of course (sarcasm), not for link juice.  Good search operators for finding links are allintitle: and inurl:  You can also look at your competitors links and go get those links as well.  In addition, you can buy a few good links from sites like Yahoo! Directory or Ezilon Regional Web Directory.

Easier Way to Get Qualified Backlinks

The first way (Easy Way) basically has you searching for links.  The Easier Way has you creating sites that meet the 3 qualifications and then linking to yourself.  My favorite method is by using Wordpress MU.  Wordpress MU sites are all on different IP address, the root domain is usually decent and you can create you own content so it can easily be related.  Search inurl:wp-signup.php.

After you create your blog, get a post or two up with a link to a trusted website on a somewhat related term.  My favorite is Wikipedia.  After a day or two, start posting your content with links.  Now you have a contextually related site with links to you.  Then you need to promote this new blog.  Since you don't care about the quality of links, use an automated method for building links, don't spend a lot of time doing this.

Have fun and build out sites you own!

This is a guest post by Brandon Hopkins.  Brandon does Madera website design.

Throw Marty from The Train: A Journey To SMX East

Just How Did I Get Suckered Into a 13-Hour Train Ride From West Virginia to Manhattan?

Those attending the pre-SMX East networking event will invariably notice one or more of the following characteristics of a certain SEO:

1. He will be wearing black-framed, ultra-hip and stylish designer glasses.

2. He will talk non-stop, waxing poetic on any number of subjects on which he is an expert, such as the existential themes of Ricky Martin's music; why Cher is the quintessential pop cultural icon of the 20th century; and the ramifications of the power bomb replacing the body slam as the most common weapon in a professional "wrestler's" repertoire.

3. He will be sipping a refreshingly clean and crisp Zima, with a watermelon (or, occasionally, blue raspberry) Jolly Rancher dropped into the bottle for added flavor and color.

The SEO in question is one Martin Bowling. He's the Chief Technical Officer and resident evil genius here at Vec3. I tell you to look out for him and not for me because, naturally, I won't be there at the pre-SMX mixer myself. Neither will my colleague Matt Crist, the other Vec3 guy making the New York trip. It's not that we don't want to be there, mind you. It's just that Matt and I will be traveling to New York on the day of the mixer (October 5) via Amtrak's Cardinal 50 rail line. We will not get there in time for the mixer. You see, under ideal conditions, it's a 13-hour ride through the Allegheny Mountains into Virginia before the line turns north, running through Charlottesville before arriving in Washington, D.C. From there, the train passes through Philadelphia, Wilmington, Delaware and on into New Jersey before ending up, many hours later, in New York's Penn Station.

Now, if you've ever traveled Amtrak, you know the conditions are never ideal. That means, of course, that Matt and I will be on the train much, much longer. Marty? He'll be at the mixer, regaling you all with tales of his days as a trapeze artist on the underground circus circuit, or of his time in a Turkish prison. (I won't tell you his crime; it was a bogus charge anyway, the worst case of anti-American xenophobia I ever saw).

Marty will be there because he's traveling by airplane specifically so he can arrive in time for social (read: drinking Zima) hour. Matt and me? Again, we'll be on an uncomfortable train which will invariably arrive in New York City at 2 a.m. on Monday. We'll have to hail a cab in the middle of the night in a strange city that backwoods West Virginians are undoubtedly ill-prepared to navigate. All West Virginians are hillbillies, you understand, incapable of common sense or rational thought. It will be extremely unsanitary, for example, to walk around Penn Station barefoot. Maybe I should just break down and buy a pair of $10 shoes from Wal-Mart or something. We'll see.

But I digress. This is about our wonderful CTO and his social needs, not any discomfort Matt and I may (or may not) endure on our railroad odyssey from Appalachia to the Big Apple. Have a good time, Marty. We'll see you when we get there.

*********

Since sarcasm doesn't easily translate on the Web, a disclaimer is in order. I hate flying. Hate it. Not only did I choose my method of transportation for SMX East, I'm looking forward to the ride. Having traveled around the country many, many times in my previous life as an old-school media guy (read: newspaper reporter), I've hopped the Cardinal 50 line a number of times and have always enjoyed the trip.

Rail travel leaves a much smaller carbon footprint than driving or flying. It's also quite easy and relaxing. Sure, it takes forever and a day to get anywhere, but it's worth it to keep from dealing with airports, travel delays, turbulence at 28,000 feet and the otherwise kind, comfortable and accommodating nature of our nation's air travel system. Matt is coming along on the train because he's never ridden Amtrak before and is curious to see if I am crazy in endlessly extolling its virtues to anyone and everyone who is planning a business trip.

In addition, Matt and I will be live-blogging and Tweeting the trip through the Vec3 blog and our Twitter page--as we'll also be doing for the three days of SMX East--so keep an eye out for our updates.

Marty? Yeah, sure, keep an eye out for him, too. Trust me...you can't miss him.

Scared Clear Part Duex Or Something for the Kids at Home

Scared Clear or Using The Zima Meme to Get Your Ass to Scary SEO

Contest Introduction Brought To You By Brian Carter

If you haven't heard, Martin Bowling loves Zima. He loves it so much (or so people say), that Google Suggest has permanently associated his name with Zima- they're officially related now.

Martin Bowling Loves Zima is a meme (a viral idea) that was started by Andy Beal and his wife, and has been embraced and fueled by search industry personalities such as Rob @SEOcracy, Sheila @govisithawaii, Todd Friesen, Brian Carter, Todd Mintz, Joshua Sciarrino, Dana Lookadoo, Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, and others.
Now Martin is announcing the Martin Bowling Loves Zima Meme Contest... it's the contest that asks "Who can create the best whatever (video, blog post, tweet series, captioned picture, avatar, twitter background, the sky is the limit - want a great example check out ZimaFan on Twitter) about the Martin Bowling Loves Zima meme?"

The prizes are awesome, the judges are cool, and the contest is going to get a LOT of attention.
Here's what you have to do by October 3rd, 2008

1. Create your thing
2. Put it on the internet, and you don't EVEN have to link to the contest blog post, that's right this isn't a ploy to steal your link juice :)
3. Tweet about your entry with a link & Leave a comment here with your entry (just incase as we all know that twitter is sometimes teh suck)
4. Rinse & Repeat, cause you can enter as many times as you'd like!

Then you wait for our judges' decision anxiously while chomping on your nails, knowing the outcome could change your entire life forever!

The second half of this post brought to you by your regularly scheduled host Martin Bowling

And now on to the good stuff, how is this going to get my ass to ScarySEO? Well here is how these are the fabulous prizes:

1^st place

Win a trip to ScarySEO, (includes conference registration and Two Nights Stay at the awesome Hilton Deerfield Beach Hotel - Sorry Folks Airfare not included, unless someone would want to sponsor it :wink: )

$50 bar tab provide by yours truly, and no drinks will not be limited to Zima only :)

And one of these awesome Zima t-shirts

2^nd Place

So you don't get the free ride to the awesome ScarySEO mini-con, but we still want to hook you up with some SEO knowledge so

SEOmoz SEO Training DVD’s over 7 hours of SEO knowledge from Rand & Crew

One of those awesome Zima t-shirts pictured above.

3^rd place

3 month subscription to Online Reputation Management Monitoring Tool - Trackur.com subscription, so you can make sure you don't have your own Zima Meme disaster :)

Zima t-shirt

 

*Honorable mentions to receive random Zima treasures

 

**Contest will be judged by the following panel of Zima experts: Andy Beal, GoVisitHawaii, Jane Copland, Todd Friesen, Dave Snyder, Brian Carter.

If you need more details about the awesomeness of ScarySEO go check out this great post by Eric Lander (who is also speaking at ScarySEO) and if you don't win or don't enter don't forget you still have time to go register for ScarySEO.

SEOCracy's DataPresser Launches And Sells Out In 30 Minutes!

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As expected Rob's latest tool DataPresser (DataPresser is a one-of-a-kind utility that leverages the giant collection of databases available for sale at Seocracy.com to allow you to create massive amounts of wordpress blog content with zero programming experience required.) One note on the description I changed it from wordpress to blog; because I am using DataPresser with blogengine .net which I will be posting about at a later date! I first wanted to congratulate Rob on such an successful launch but I also want to remind anyone that didn't get in on the first round should go get on the DataPresser waiting list now Rob will be opening up a few more spots in the coming weeks and I believe it's a first come first serve kind of deal. So don't wait get your name on the waiting list. Second, I wanted to say oopsie! I meant to write this up on Friday and way to try and help Rob drum up some business for the DataPresser launch but given the huge success of the DataPresser 30 minute sell out - looks like he didn't even need my help. Which of course I didn't expect him to cause he always makes such great tools. Again congrats on the success DataPresser 30 minute sell out

Knowledge Sharing, Transparency And When It's Ok To Out The Other Guy Or What To Do When Your Clients Are Being Taken Advantage Of

Over the past several weeks there has been much discussion about serp hijacking and ninja linkbuilding. Whether or not you should be transparent with your clients and engage in knowledge sharing. We have recently started a project with client to help them properly manage their own online reputation and increase their social media presence. They were already working with another company on redesigning their Web site. This was not only a redesign of the site but a site overhaul to improve the search friendliness of their site. As we were moving forward with our portion of the project we did an internal analysis of the sites SEO so that we would know how the site would play in our plan. Discussing the preliminary results with the client - lead them to tell us not to worry all these issues were being addressed. That we should wait till the second week of January and we would be able to view the new and improved site with all of these fixes and more in place with a brand new look and feel!

We were rather excited about the prospects of the client getting and updated look and feel along with some much need search friendliness. We kept moving forward with our planning knowing that all of our concerns some of the things that raised a flag in our analysis were being addressed - and we would have a more solid jumping off point when the project went forward in January. The email stating they have gone live finally arrives, I anxiously open up the email and click the link. The browser opens to a Flash Splash Page, not just a splash page but one that hasn't even used any <NOSCRIPT> to provide any additional SEO boost and it doesn't have any links pointing the rest of the site! And even though google says they are reading flash files, there are some ongoing seo and flash tests that seem to indicate otherwise. So googlebot is already with a massive hurdle in indexing the "new and improved"   "rehased" website. I click on the button in the flash animation and enter the site. I see only two paragraphs of text and some links. Links that I find are all hidden behind some javascript.  But as I continue to scroll down the page I come across something that I find to be very disturbing.

This is the footer that is included on each page. I have blacked out the company name as to not drag them into this, even though this is about outing them to the client I don't feel that outing them to the world is appropriate or my place. But each of the red circles in the above graphic indicate a followed link, a link that has been styled to not appear as a link. They have given themselves 9 followed links with varying anchor text, appropriate title attributes and on images alt attributes. The attributes are something that they somehow forgot to include on any of the clients pages. So this of course leads me to dive into an all out analysis of the "new and improved"   "rehased" Web site. And I proceed to find problem after problem.

We now have a bit of a quandary they have paid for services that we are now telling them they didn't receive. On top of that we are going to tell them that they really need to do these things so that all of their internet marketing efforts aren't in vein. I don't feel particularly comfortable with going back to them and handing them another bill to go back and fix someone else's work. Especially someone who has an established relationship with the client; we are the new kids on the block (yes, I just linked to 80's boy band new kids on the block). So the team comes together and writes a massive report on the "new and improved"   "rehased" Web site. In this report we include everything we look at problems and their solutions - we spell it all out for them. We have decided by engaging in knowledge sharing; by not forcing them into choosing us that we will gain both trust and help make them successful - which is our ultimate goal. We don't want to create a drove of people who are dependant upon us. We want to create successful strategies, we want people not to need us; but to want to work with us on a continued basis to be a part of the process that creates the next winning strategy for them. Everyone on the team is feeling great about this decision. The client now knows what their problems are and how they can be fixed.

As soon as we deliver this report of course the client goes into panic mode. The president wants to know what is the most pressing issue that needs to be addressed is. We of course mention that some of their pages are ranking better for some the other companies terms and even their brand than they are for their own terms. And that they are leaking lots of link love on every single page to this other company 9 different times. I also wanted to stress that one link is acceptable but 9 was a little excessive and that they should really talk to these people and see if it was done on purpose, cause as I forgot to mention this is a .EDU site. And we all know how we SEO's covet .EDU backlinks. So we establish that this is indeed the standard footer and that they just want to build lots of links :) So there wasn't any attempt to game this client in particular; that they just game all their clients in this way. Anyway back to the story, we continue to work with the client and their internal Web department to identify things that they can easily fix and what they can't. Well as we get into the site more and more we realize that this is truly a mess. It's an ASP.NET CMS, that actually isn't really being used only it's database is being used - then they have ColdFusion pages making calls to the db pulling out content to display. So there is no "Theme" to edit and fix the menus, every one of the 23,000 pages has this stuff hard coded, they don't even use any include files. They let us know after the last group created the "look and feel" they went in and manually edited the pages to incorporate them. Wow! I was amazed. Many people had came through their doors - this was the 4th rework of their site; but no one had taken the time to integrate any of the different parts of the sites. Just band-aided them together and let the client worry about the consequences.

We are currently working with the client to help them decide how to best move forward. And I really believe that it was the transparency and knowledge sharing that really gave us the extra bump in their trust of us. They saw that we just wanted to help make their efforts successful, that we weren't trying to just make another buck. We honestly had their best interest in mind. We empowered them with the knowledge to fix it themselves or hire out someone else. But instead they turned to us; because they now know that they can trust us - we put their success first and it's paying off. I would encourage more Search/Internet/Social Marketers to engage in knowledge sharing and be a little more transparent and see how positively it impacts their bottom line. I will keep everyone updated as the saga continues to unfold :)

Sharing The Link Love - Do Follow On All MartinBowling.com Comments

I am a big fan of the DoFollow movement and therefore have made all comments on this blog DoFollow. So as long as you are making relevant related comments you can get a nice juicy (ok well maybe not that juicy but a link none the less) link.  Hope that everyone continues to enjoy the blog and hopefully someone will find it useful.

Using Google to Determine the Next President? Or How Google Can Always Be Gamed

Andrew Shotland over at Local SEO Guide had a great posted the other day about his analysis of backlinks to presidential candidate’s websites and remarkably the google algorithm correctly predicted the Democratic Winner; but was wrong on the Republican side according it to his analysis Ron Paul should have won hands down with more than 3 times as many links as Mike Huckabee. As we all saw though that wasn't the case. But anyone who has been following Ron Paul or his rise to internet fame knows that Digg users absolutely love Ron Paul they eat up everything that Ron Paul related.  So of course he is going to have more links than anyone else.

So does this mean Google's idea of one link equals one vote is broken? Or is the Ron Paul phenomenon more akin to spam and therefore not as relevant? Because as we saw the number two Republican Mike Huckabee did indeed win. So maybe in Andrew's analysis he should have penalized Dr. Paul just like Matt Cutts would penalize a filthy spammer. Lets face it, Digg users basically spam consistently and blindly promote Ron Paul stories all of which of course point back to Dr. Paul's site. And as we all know it's a very limited number of Digg power users that really control the content of the Digg front page. And once it goes hot on Digg of course more and more people link to the story in hopes to get a little residual traffic from talking about the hot item. Voting up and talking about that item becomes the "in" thing to do. So it then becomes unfair to count each one of those links as a vote, because in essence they are manufactured links - in reality nothing more than a link farm.

So am I trying to same Google's algorithm is broken? No I am actually saying the opposite, that Google's algorithm is fairly on target as it goes with deciding what content is popular and relative. But it also shows a fundamental flaw in the Google algorithm, that people can give links and people can get people to get links and powerful people can reach more and more people garnering more and more links. So good news is that Google gaming will continue on as long as links are part of the equation.  Even without links I am sure some portion of the Google algorithm will have some gameable component.

My News Years ReSEOlution Or How I Plan to Better Manage My Online Reputation.

As 2008 approaches, I decided I better start taking some of my own advice and do some real online reputation management because if you google martin bowling I am no where to be found on the first page :(

So I have decided I am going to actively change that. We have been doing some small scale SEO,SEM,SMM & other Internet Marketing for clients around our area; but we are starting to branch out into some niche's that are providing us clients that are national and international. So if I am going to help those people manage their brand and online reputation, I better do it myself.

So this blog is going to start out as a step by step of how I am planning on have zero results to dominating the Vanity SERPs for Martin Bowling.

This is an exercise that I am sure many have gone through and this is something that is long over due; so that's why I am getting it out of the way first thing in 2008.

Part of my plan for better managing my online reputation and personal brand is to become a more active part of the Internet Marketing Community. I have long been a lurker on many of my favorite sites; but now I intend on becoming an active member that fully participates.

Hopefully my little experiment will provide some with a good intro to brand management and to others hopefully it will offer some comic relief :).

I want to wish everyone a happy new year and let you know that you will see a far more active martin bowling in the new year.