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Anti-SEO, as I mentioned in one of my posts, really does seem to exist in the form of Googlebowling, an extremely blackhat (and asshat) way to lower your competitors SERP’s. The premise is this: if bad neighborhoods (spam sites, splogs, porn, gambling, etc.) link to a certain site using the same anchor text, aforementioned site will invariably drop in rankings. For example, say a website “A” ranks #1 for term “X.” If competitor “B” ranks #2 for “X” and no matter what he does, he can’t outrank “A,” what does he do? Submit site “A” to thousands of porn directories, gambling affiliates, and scraper sites that all link to “A” with anchor text “X,” of course! Google would notice this huge increase in backlinks from crap sites and thus theoretically drop the rankings of site “A.”

WAIT, WHAT? SERIOUSLY?
Well, technically not. Google denies this can happen in its official webmaster guidelines:

“Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site’s ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google’s index.

Fact: There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”

Of course, Google also penalizes for the following things:

Purchasing Site Wide Links
Many links having the same exact anchor text
Links from “Bad Neighborhoods”
“Sneaky” Redirects AKA Doorway pages
Using Cookie Cutter sites

I don’t see what prevents a competitor from linking to you with the same exact anchor text from bad neighborhoods or buying site-wide links for your site, so Googlebowling should be possible if you have enough money, resources, and are an evil genius.

Oh, and by the way, this article was written for purely educational purposes, *wink wink* *nudge nudge*

Posted by Max Miroff | 12 Comments »

On one of my latest posts about getting a free backlink with your favicon, an interesting conversation topic was brought up: anti-SEO. We all know that Google can penalize you for having your site show up on link farms and other shady sites, but just how much? Would it be enough to knock your SERP’s down a notch?

If so, then companies dedicated to destroying the ranks of competitor websites are bound to soon appear (if they don’t exist already). These shady tactics probably go further than blackhat (but what should they be called; is there a color blacker than black? Note to self: must investigate) - surely this kind of stuff is illegal. I’m far too lazy I currently don’t have the resources to properly investigate this claim, but I suppose it’d fall under the legal categories of “defamation” and “being a total asshat(there’s the term I was looking for!)”

DESTROY YOUR COMPETITION - LITERALLY!
Think about it: instead of spending all your time building backlinks and carefully creating quality content, you could just submit your competitors websites to link farms, porn sites, and other such distasteful web venues. Google will (theoretically) devalue aforementioned websites and as they move down in rank, you will indirectly move up! Sounds like a solid plan, eh? While your competitors wonder why they are getting hits from Viagra websites, you’ll be raking in the search engine traffic like there’s no tommorow!

BUT THERE WILL BE NO TOMMOROW FOR ANTI-SEO
Destroying your competitors rankings might sound like a solid plan, but unless you’re competing against legally blind monkeys (which some of us are, I’m sure) they’re bound to notice and file some sort of complaint. This stuff would have to happen manually, though, creating a painful process for both site owners and search engine employees, because I doubt even Google algorithms are smart enough to sort links depending on intent. Take that, robots!

OR WILL THERE?
If you dig deep enough into the online underworld, you’re bound to find some people offering this kind of service. It’s probably not very effective and is as safe as getting a heart transplant from a shady back-alley surgeon, but at least it’s something. Will this type of anti-SEO ever have a large effect on search engines? In short, no - gaming search engines isn’t that easy, but it’s pretty interesting to think about.

QUICK UPDATE: The stuff I was referring to in this post is called Googlebowling.

Posted by Max Miroff | 8 Comments »

Commenting on DoFollow blogs is one of the best ways of getting backlinks to your blog, but it’s often hard to find high-PR blog pages to comment on. Luckily, I’ve got a foolproof method to get as many high PR backlinks as you want - for free! That’s right, all the quality dofollow high pagerank blog comments you’d ever want without paying a dime!

THE STEP-BY-STEP METHOD
1. Find a few DoFollow blogs with high homepage PR (I’ve seen a correlation between high homepage PR and high post PR). A good place to look is this list of 100 blogs using the CommentLuv plugin as well as this DoFollow search engine.

2. Download the “Google Pagerank Checker” tool on SEO Junkie. It lets you plug in a website URL and gives you the PR of all of its pages. Note: it seems to be a bit buggy as of now. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Still, it’s the only tool of its kind that I’ve found. OR: Internal Pagerank Checker OR Internal Pagerank Checker - both are still great alternatives for checking internal pagerank.

3. Insert a blog URL inside of the program and wait for it to finish its checking. Then, click the PR button to organize by high PR. Voila - you’ve got a bunch of quality dofollow backlinks to use for your link building purposes.

4. Make quality blog comments. That’s the key word here - quality. No one wants to read stuff like “gr8 post m8″ or “lol” or “click here for free medication.” In short, don’t be a comment whore.

And there you go - the easy way to comment on high PR blogs for backlinks. There’s even a way to make money off of it, but I think I’ll share this with you in a different post. If you’re clever enough, though, you’ll probably figure it out yourself ;).

By the way, props to Breakaway for inspiring me on this great idea.

UPDATE: Here is how to make money online with dofollow blog comments. Hope you enjoy it!

Posted by Max Miroff | 58 Comments »

Quick tip for today: get a free backlink with your favicon on Pimp My Favicon. They probably won’t be worth anything considering the page they’re on looks like a link farm, but why not? Mass links are always fun! Just enter your blogs URL and you get a free bonafide backlink!

Posted by Max Miroff | 12 Comments »

Tilt your head a little to the left and be amazed!

After getting one commenter on my blog to tell me they reached it by searching for a keyword my blog doesn’t even come close to targeting (learn more here), I became intrigued as to how I could abuse utilize these obscure search terms to my advantage.

Take a look at the list of keywords to the left, for example. All of these searches have brought people to my blog, even though some of them don’t really make any sense. I’ve highlighted all of the keywords that I’ve never thought of targeting in a nice yellow brush so you can look at them.

Adrian Bryant? No idea who he is. I know for a fact Blog Badly doesn’t have a chatbox (and probably never will. I shall rue the day I put useless widgets in my sidebar). Combine and magician blog designs and themes? Nope.

I could go on and on explaining the lack of these keywords, but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Not to imply that you guys are horses or anything.

HOW TO USE THE LONG TAIL
Acquiring the long tail is harder than just shooting a wild animal and chopping it off. Trying to target more specific niche terms (instead of “Long Tail,” try “Long Tail Search Terms And You - Create Blog Posts With Obscure And Specific Terms Like Pineapples And Skydiving To Get Google Traffic”) should be your main concern if you want to get more long tail visitors.

WAYS TO OPTIMIZE FOR THE LONG TAIL
Post titles in a blog are important for Google - it’s how it first figures out what a certain blog page is about. Making your titles more specific will rank you highly for your terms.

Using specific terms in blog posts can also attract more long tail traffic. Don’t just refer to it as “credit card refinancing” - call it “credit card refinancing for people who have terrible credit but can hop on one leg while spinning in circles and playing the harmonica.” That way, if some person has terrible credit and can hop on one leg while spinning in circles and playing the harmonica, he’ll be able to find your post.

You could also try to write about regional topics by adding locations to your posts.

THE BENEFITS OF THE LONG TAIL
There are quite a few major benefits of the long tail:

Long tail searchers know exactly what they’re looking for and thus will be more likely to buy.
There’s little competition for long tail search terms. You probably won’t be competing with too many people, although I’ve heard the “refinancing homes for Siberian tigers” niche has some pretty fierce competitors.
You’ll get more visitors. The lack of competition will rank you higher and if for some reason you write a post about “hanggliding off of my house” and it suddenly becomes the new fad, you’ll get mad traffic.

So, what are you waiting for? Grab a hold of Google by the long tail and make it do what you want to do. Well, most of the time.

Posted by Max Miroff | 1 Comment »

There has recently been a Google Pagerank update. What does this mean for you, you ask? Excellent question!

WHAT IS PAGERANK
Pagerank is what Google uses to secure its control over the internet and subsequently the world. It determines the ranking of pages in search results (higher ranking pageranks come up higher in search engine ranking position [SERP]) and since 7/5 of people use Google as their search browser, if you get a high PR you’ll often get more traffic.

LOVE BIG BROTHER AND BIG BROTHER WILL LOVE YOU (AFTER STRIPPING YOU OF YOUR RIGHTS, FREEDOMS, AND POSSIBLY CLOTHES)

I called Google Big Brother. How clever is that?

Anyway, Google punishes those who do not follow their rules by lowering their pagerank. Here’s a simple list of things that you should definitely do to make your SERP’s ungood (more Orwellian references. Orwellian is a fancy word and thus you should nod knowingly and comment about it).

1. Make your site a link farm. Exchange links with whoever, whenever. E-mail people that don’t even have websites and ask for link exchanges.
2. Link to gambling sites. Google loves those because they start with a “g” in their name as well.
3. Sell links on your blog. Does “links” have a “g” in it? No? Well, do it anyway. Just because.
4. Oh, sell posts too. Yeah. For the same reasons as number three.
5. Don’t update your site or put any content on it. This both saves you from any criticism (you can’t comment on nothing… right? Right.) and usefulness.

And there you have it. There are more ways for the Thought Police (Are you starting to see a pattern? Because you shouldn’t. The Thought Police will get suspicious) to come get you, and there will be more postings about them shortly. Unless they catch me first. I’m going to go dim the telescreen.

Posted by Max Miroff | 1 Comment »