Sebastian’s Pamphlets

I’m truly excited. Two of my pamphlets made it in The Rubber Chicken Award’s Top 10! That’s 50% success (2/4 nominated pamphlets), so please help me to make that 100%: vote for #3 and #4!

Just in case you, dear reader, are not a hardcore SEM addict who reads search blogs even during the holiday season, let me explain why a Rubber Chicken Award Top 10 nomination is a honor.

The Rubber Chicken Award honors the year’s most serious SEO research. Extra brownie points are given to the dullest draft and the most tedious wording.

Rumors are swirling that Google’s search quality spam task force has developed the complex RCAFHITSI^©™ algo^{patent pending®} which compiles and ranks search blog posts presented to Mike Blumenthals’s Rubber Chicken Award Jury:

• Bill Slawski
• Greg Sterling
• Rand Fishkin
• Danny Sullivan
• Matt Cutts (suspected final arbiter and extremely busy, so we don’t know whether he’ll show up or not)

Here is the cream of the crop of the search world, the 2007 Top 10 search blog posts nominated in the Rubber Chicken Award for the dullest and most boring/serious SEO/SEM article:

1. Want traffic? Rank for High Traffic Keywords…
2. We Add Words to AdWords… Google Subtracts them
3. Why eBay and Wikipedia rule Google’s SERPs
4. SEOs home alone - Google’s nightmare
5. 13 Things to Do When Your Loved One is Away at Conferences
6. SEO High School Confidential - Premiere Edition!
7. The Sphinn Awards - Part I & -Part II.
8. Top 21 Signs You Need a Break From SEO (2007 version)
9. 10 Signs That You May Be a Blog Addict
10. The SEO’s Guide to Beginners
11. The Internet Marketer’s Nightmare
12. Mission Accomplished—Top Ranking in Google
13. Google Interiors - the day my house became searchable

I’ve selfishly marked the two posts you want to vote for. Because all nominations are truly awesome, just vote for everything but make sure to check “5” for #3 and #4:

Thank You, Dear Reader!

Update: I can’t post another voting whore call to action today, but of course I’d very much appreciate your vote in the Best SEO Blog of 2007 category at SEJ’s 2007 Search Blog Awards.

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If only this headline would be linkbait … of course it’s not sarcastic.

Rumors are out that Microsoft will launch a porn affiliate programm soon. The top secret code name for this project is “pornbucks”, but analysts say that it will be launched as “M$ SMUT CASH” next year or so.

Since Microsoft just can’t ship anything in time, and the usual delays aren’t communicated internally, their search dept. began to promote it to Webmasters this summer.

Surprisingly, Webmasters across the globe weren’t that excited to find promotinal messages from Live Search in their log files, so a somewhat confused MSN dude posted a lame excuse to a large Webmaster forum.

Meanwhile we found out that Microsoft Live Search does not only target the adult entertainment industry, they’re testing the waters with other money terms like travel or pharmaceutic products too.

Anytime soon the Live Search menu bar will be updated to something like this:

Here is the sad –but true– story of a search engine’s downfall.

A few months ago Microsoft Live Search discovered that x-rated referrer spam is a must-have technique in a sneaky smut peddlar’s marketing toolbox.

Since August 2007 a bogus Web robot follows Microsoft’s search engine crawler “MSNbot” to spam the referrer logs of all Web sites out there with URLs pointing to MSN search result pages featuring porn.

Read your referrer logs and you’ll find spam from Microsoft too, but perhaps they peeve you with viagra spam, offer you unwanted but cheap payday loans, or try to enlarge your penis. Of course they know every trick in the book on spam, so check for harmless catchwords too. Here is an example URL:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q= spammy-keyword &mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP

Microsoft’s spam bot not only leaves bogus URLs in log files, hoping that Webmasters will click them on their referrer stats pages and maybe sign up for something like “M$ Porn Bucks” or so. It downloads and renders even adverts powered by their rival Google, lowering their CTR; obviously to make programs like AdSense less attractive im comparison with Microsoft’s own ads (sorry, no link love from here).

Let’s look at Microsoft’s misleading statement:

The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on addressing your conerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addreses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

• That’s not traffic, that’s bot activity: These hits come within seconds of being indexed by MSNBot. The pattern is like this: the page is requested by MSNBot (which is authenticated, so it’s genuine) and within a few seconds, the very same page is requested with a live.com search result URL as referer by the MSN spam bot faking a human visitor.
• If that’s really a quality check to detect cloaking, that’s more than just lame. The IP addresses don’t change, the bogus bot uses a static user agent name, and there are other footprints which allow every cloaking script out there to serve this sneaky bot the exact same spider fodder that MSNbot got seconds before. This flawed technique might catch poor man’s cloaking every once in a while, but it can’t fool savvy search marketers.
• The FUD “could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index” is laughable, because in most niches MSN search traffic is not existent.

All major search engines, including MSN, promise that they obey the robots exclusion standard. Obeying robots.txt is the holy grail of search engine crawling. A search engine that ignores robots.txt and other normed crawler directives cannot be trusted. The crappy MSN bot not even bothers to read robots.txt, so there’s no chance to block it with standardized methods. Only IP blocking can keep it out, but then it still seems to download ads from Google’s AdSense servers by executing the JavaScript code that the MSN crawler gathered before (not obeying Google’s AdSense robots.txt as well).

This unethical spam bot downloading all images, external CSS and JS files, and whatnot also burns bandwidth. That’s plain theft.

Since this method cannot detect (most) cloaking, and the so called “search quality control bot” doesn’t stop visiting sites which obviously do not cloak, it is a sneaky marketing tool. Whether or not Microsoft Live Search tries to promote cyberspace porn and on-line viagra shops plays no role. Even spamming with safe-at-work keywords is evil. Do these assclowns really believe that such unethical activities will increase the usage of their tiny and pretty unpopular search engine? Of course they do, otherwise they would have shutted down the spam bot months ago.

Dear reader, please tell me: what do you think of a search engine that steals (bandwidth and AdSense revenue), lies, spams away, and is not clever enough to stop their criminal activities when they’re caught?

Recently a Live Search rep whined in an interview because so many robots.txt files out there block their crawler:

One thing that we noticed for example while mining our logs is that there are still a fair number of sites that specifically only allow Googlebot and do not allow MSNBot.

There’s a suitable answer, though. Update your robots.txt:

User-agent: MSNbot
Disallow: /

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This is a guest post by Tanner Christensen.

What are you doing to make Internet marketing a better industry to be a part of? As it sits now: Internet marketing is one big popularity contest, and that’s not a good thing. Internet marketers are making it nearly impossible for the average person to find valuable content.

The real online content providers - the websites who deserve all of your attention - are becoming harder and harder to discover because of Internet marketers like us. Though Internet marketers - both you and I - can’t really be blamed, our job is all about getting attention. The more attention we get for our website(s), the more popular our website(s) become, the more money we can make.

But because of the recent surge of interest in Internet marketing and search engine optimization, websites that focus on providing content - rather than getting attention - are being ignored. And because these content-focused websites are being cast into the shadows of attention-focused websites, they too are jumping on the Internet marketing popularity contest bandwagon.

Even though every webmaster and his or her mother is jumping on the bandwagon, it’s not accurate to say that Internet marketers are making all less-important, less-helpful, and less-useful websites more popular than really helpful website, but there is definitely the possibility of real news and information being masked by attention-seeking content.

So what do we do? What do Internet marketers and search engine optimizers do to make sure that the Internet popularity contest doesn’t become a contest of lies and attention-seeking tactics; but rather a contest of quality, helpful, interesting, important, groundbreaking content?

The first step is to become a part of the online community. I’m not talking about the Internet marketing community - it’s biased in a lot of ways. I’m talking about the real online communities. Doing so will help create a universal feeling of online morals; or what’s good information and what is bad information.

And discovering where the real helpful and important websites are online will help Internet marketers such as ourselves learn where the websites we work with really should be ranked.

Sure, there are still those people who don’t care about quality of content and only care about the all-mighty dollar sign. But poor-content will eventually catch up with them, when websites that really deserve attention in the online popularity contest are lost in the fold and the dollar sign loses it’s value.

Tanner is a Web specialist and designer who writes helpful, inspiring, and creative internet-related articles. A while ago I’ve contributed an article to his blog Internet Hunger: The anatomy of a debunking post. I think “can agessive SMO tactics push crap on the long haul” would be an interesting, and related discussion. I mean, search engines evolve too, not only in Web search, so kinda fair rankings of well linked crap as well as good stuff not on the SM radar might be possible to some extent.

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OMFG, yet another post on Sphinn? Yup. I tell you why gaming Sphinn is counter productive, because I just don’t want to read another whiny rant in the lines of “why do you ignore my stuff whilst A listers [whatever this undefined term means] get their crap sphunn hot in no time”. Also, discussions assuming that success equals bad behavior like this or this one aren’t exactly funny nor useful. As for the whiners: Grow the fuck up and produce outstanding content, then network politely but not obtrusive to promote it. As for the gamers: Think before you ruin your reputation!

What motivates a wannabe Internet marketer to game Sphinn?

Traffic of course, but that’s a myth. Sphinn sends very targeted traffic but also very few visitors (see my stats below).

Free uncondomized links. Ok, that works, one can gain enough link love to get a page indexed by the search engines, but for this purpose it’s not necessary to push the submission to the home page.

Attention is up next. Yep, Sphinn is an eldorado for attention whores, but not everybody is an experienced high-class call girl. Most are amateurs giving it a (first) try, or wrecked hookers pushing too hard to attract positive attention.

The keyword is positive attention. Sphinners are smart, they know every trick in the book. Many of them make a living with gaming creative use of social media. Cheating professional gamblers is a waste of time, and will not produce positive attention. Even worse, the shit sticks at the handle of the unsuccessful cheater (and in many cases the real name). So if you want to burn your reputation, go found a voting club to feed your crap.

Fortunately, getting caught for artificial voting at Sphinn comes with devalued links too. The submitted stories are taken off the list, that means no single link at Sphinn (besides profile pages) feeds them any more, hence search engines forget them. Instead of a good link from an unpopular submission you get zilch when you try to cheat your way to the popular links pages.

Although Sphinn doesn’t send shitloads of traffic, this traffic is extremely valuable. Many spinners operate or control blogs and tend to link to outstanding articles they found at Sphinn. Many sphinners have accounts on other SM sites too, and bookmark/cross-submit good content. It’s not unusual that 10 visits from Sphinn result in hundreds or even thousands of hits from StumbleUpon & Co. — but spinners don’t bookmark/blog/cross-submit/stumble crap.

So either write great content and play by the rules, or get nowhere with your crappy submission. The first “10 reasons why 10 tricks posts about 10 great tips to write 10 numbered lists” submission was fun. The 10,000 plagiarisms following were just boring noise. Nobody except your buddies or vote bots sphinn crap like that, so don’t bother to provide the community with footprints of your lousy gaming.

If you’re playing number games, here is why ruining a reputation by gaming Sphinn is not worth it. Look at my visitor stats from July to today. I got 3.6k referrers in 4 months from Sphinn because a few of my posts went hot. When a post sticks with 1-5 votes, you won’t attract much more click throughs than from those 1-5 folks who sphunn it (that would give 100-200 hits or so with the same amount of submissions). When you cheat, the story gets buried and you get nothing but flames. Think about that. Thanks.

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Whilst blogs like The Tampon Blog are considered “high quality” by clueless amoebas hired by BlogRush, many great blogs like Tamar’s were banned by the Reeve gang.

In my book that qualifies BlogRush as a full blown scam. If it’s not a scam, it’s an amateurish operation intended to hoodwink bloggers at least. Hiring low-life surfers for 12 bucks per hour to judge the quality of blogs talking about topics the average assclown on BlogRush’s payroll cannot understand is ridiculous, if not a sign of criminal intent. Here is how they hire their amoebas:

We’re looking to hire a bunch of people that would like to earn some extra cash. If you or someone you know might be interested, please forward this message to them. This would be perfect for a stay-at-home mom, college student, or anyone else looking to make some extra money.

All that’s required is sitting in front of their computer and doing the following…

Login to our Review System with an account we will setup for them. There will be a top “frame” control strip that has a few buttons:

“Approve” “Reject” and “Not Sure.”

The bottom frame will automatically load a blog that needs to be reviewed. After reviewing the blog, just press the appropriate button. That’s it.

* We have created a little training video to teach reviewers what to look for and how to decide what gets approved or rejected. It’s very simple.

After pushing one of the buttons the next blog to be reviewed automatically loads in that bottom frame. It’s as simple as that.

Here’s The Deal…

We’re paying USD $12.00/hour for this review work. It’s not a fortune, but it’s a pretty simple task. Heck, just put on some music and sit back and review some blogs. Pretty easy work.

I’m not pissed because they rejected me and lots of other great blogs. I’m not even pissed because they sent emails like

Congratulations! You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict Quality Guidelines and criteria — we believe you have a high-quality blog and we are happy you’re a member of our network!

to blogs which didn’t even bother to put up their crappy widget. I’m pissed because they constantly lie and cheat:

We’ve just completed a massive SWEEP of our entire network. We’ve removed over *10,000* blogs (Yes, ten thousand) that did not meet our new Quality Guidelines.

We have done a huge “quality control audit” of our network and have
reviewed all the blogs one-at-a-time. We will continue to review each
NEW blog that is ever submitted to our network.

You will notice the HUGE DIFFERENCE in the quality of blogs that now
appear in your widget. This major *sweep* of our network will also
increase the click-rates across the entire network and you will start
to receive more traffic.

They still do not send any|much traffic to niche blogs, they still get cheated, and they still have tons of crap in their network. They still overpromise and underdeliver. There’s no such thing as a “massive amount of targeted traffic” sent by BlogRush.

The whole BlogRush operation is a scam. Avoid BlogRush like the plague.

Update: Here is one of John Reeve’s lame excuses, posted in reply to a “reviewed and dumped by BlogRush idiots” post on John Cow’s blog. A laughable pile of bullcrap, politely put.

John Reese from BlogRush here.

I am not sure why your blog wasn’t approved by the reviewer that reviewed your blog. (We have a team of reviewers.) From what I can tell, your blog passes our guidelines. I’m not sure if the reviewer loaded your blog on a day where your primary post(s) were heavy on the promotional side or not — that’s just a guess of what might have influenced them.

You have my email address from this comment. Please contact me directly (if you wish) and I will investigate the issue for you and see about reactivating your account.

AND FOR THE RECORD…

No one is being BANNED from BlogRush. If any account doesn’t have any approved blogs, the account is moved to an “inactive” status until changes are made or until another blog that meets our guidelines gets approved. Nothing happens to referrals or an account’s referral network; they are left completely intact and as soon as the account is “active” again everything returns to the way it was.

* I just found out that your pingback message was deleted by one of our blog moderators because we don’t want any comments (or pingbacks) showing up for that main post. A few childish users started posting profanity and other garbage that was getting past our filters and we needed to shut it off for now.

There’s no “conspiracy theory” happening. In fact, we’ve been incredibly transparent and honest ever since we launched — openly admitting to mistakes that we’ve made and what we planned to do about them.

~John

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Do not click BlogRush affiliate links before you’re fully awake. Oh no, you did it … now praise me because I’ve sneakily disabled the link and read on.

My BlogRush Summary:
1. You won’t get free targeted traffic to your niche blog.
2. You’ll make other people rich.
3. You’ll piss off your readers.
4. You’ll promote BlogRush and get nothing in return.
5. You shouldn’t trust a site fucking up the very first HTTP request.
6. Pyramid schemes just don’t work for you.

You won’t get free targeted traffic to your niche blog

The niches you can choose from are way too broad. When you operate a niche blog like mine, you can choose “Marketing” or “Computers & Internet”. Guess what great traffic you gain with headlines about elegant click tracking or debunking meta refresh myths from blogs selling MySpace templates to teens or RFID chips to wholesalers? In reality you get hits via blogs selling diet pills to desperate housewives (from my referrer stats!) or viagra to old age pensioners, if you see a single BlogRush referrer in your stats at all. (I’ve read a fair amount of the hype about actually targeted headline delivery in BlogRush widgets. I just don’t buy it from what I see on blogs I visit.)

You’ll make other people rich

Look at the BlogRush widget in your or my sidebar, then visit lots of other niche blogs which are focused more or less on marketing related topics. All these widgets carry ads for generic marketing blogs pitching just another make me rich on the Internet while I sleep scheme or their very own affiliate programs. These blogs, all early adopters, will hoard BlogRush’s traffic potentials. Even if you can sign up at the root to place you at the top of the pyramid referral structure, you can’t avoid that the big boys with gazillions of owed impressions in BlogRush’s “marketing” queue dominate all widgets out there, your’s included. (I heard that John Reese will try to throw a few impressions on tiny blogs before niche bloggers get upset. I doubt that will be enough to keep his widgets up.)

You’ll piss off your readers

Even if some of your readers recognize your BlogRush widget, they’ll wonder why you recommend totally unrelated generic marketing gibberish on your nicely focused blog. Yes, every link you put on your site is a recommendation. You vouch for this stuff when you link out, even when you don’t control the widget’s content. Read Tamar’s Why the Fuss about BlogRush? to learn why this clutter is useless for your visitors. Finally, the widget slows your site down and your visitors hate long loading times.

You’ll promote BlogRush and get nothing in return

When you follow the advice handed out by BlogRush and pitch their service with posts and promotional links on your blog, then you help BlogRush to skyrocket at the search engines. That will bring them a lot of buzz, but you get absolute nothing for your promotional efforts because your referrer link doesn’t land on the SERPs.

You shouldn’t trust a site fucking up the very first HTTP request

Ok, that’s a geeky issue and you don’t need to take it very seriously. Request your BlogRush affiliate link with a plain user agent not accepting cookies or executing client sided scripting, then read the headers. BlogRush does a 302 redirect to their home page rescuing your affiliate ID in an unclosed base href directive. Chances are you’ll never get the promised credits from upsold visitors using uncommon user agents respectively browser settings, because they don’t manage their affiliate traffic properly.

Pyramid schemes just don’t work for you

Unfortunately, common sense is not as common as you might think. I’m guilty of that too, but I’ll leave my widget up for a while to monitor what it brings in. The promise of free traffic is just too alluring, and in fact you can’t lose much. If you want, experiment with it and waste some ad space, but pull it once you’ve realized that it’s not worth it.

Disclaimer

This post was inspired by common sense, experience of life, and a shitload of hyped crap posts on Sphinn’s upcoming list where folks even created multiple accounts to vote their BlogRush sales pitches to the home page. If anything I’ve said here is not accurate or at least plausible, please submit a comment to set the records straight.

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I’ve worked hard to overtake the SERP positions of a couple merchants allowing me to link to them with an affiliate ID, and now the allmighty Google tells the sponsors they must screw me with internal 301 redirects to rescue their rankings. Bugger. Since I read the shocking news on Google’s official Webmaster blog this morning I worked on a counter strategy, with success. Affiliate programs will not screw me, not even with Google’s help. They’ll be hoist by their own petard. I’ll strike back with nofollow and I’ll take no prisoners.

Seriously, the story reads a little different and is not breaking news at all. Maile Ohye from Google just endorsed best practices I’ve recommended for ages. Here is my recap.

The problem

Actually, there are problems on both sides of an affiliate link. The affiliate needs to hide these links from Google to avoid a so called “thin affiliate site penalty”, and the affiliate program suffers from duplicate content issues, link juice dilution, and often even URL hijacking by affiliate links.

Diligent affiliates gathering tons of PageRank on their pages can “unintentionally” overtake URLs on the SERPs by fooling the canonicalization algos. When Google discovers lots of links from strong pages on different hosts pointing to http://sponsor.com/?affid=me and this page adds ?affid=me to its internal links, my URL on the sponsor’s site can “outrank” the official home page, or landing page, http://sponsor.com/. When I choose the right anchor text, Google will feed my affiliate page with free traffic, whilst the affiliate program’s very own pages don’t exist on the SERPs.

Managing incoming affiliate links (merchants)

The best procedure is capturing all incoming traffic before a single byte of content is sent to the user agent, extracting the affiliate ID from the URL, storing it in a cookie, then 301-redirecting the user agent to the canonical version of the landing page, that is a page without affiliate or user specific parameters in the URL. That goes for all user agents (humans accepting the cookie and Web robots which don’t accept cookies and start a new session with every request).

Users not accepting cookies are redirected to a version of the landing page blocked by robots.txt, the affiliate ID sticks with the URLs in this case. Search engine crawlers, identified by their user agent name or whatever, are treated as users and shall never see (internal) links to URLs with tracking parameters in the query string.

This 301 redirect passes all the link juice, that is PageRank & Co. as well as anchor text, to the canonical URL. Search engines can no longer index page versions owned by affiliates. (This procedure doesn’t prevent you from 302 hijacking where your content gets indexed under the affiliate’s URL.)

Putting safe affiliate links (online marketers)

Honestly, there’s no such thing as a safe affiliate link, at least not safe with regard to picky search engines. Masking complex URLs with redirect services like tinyurl.com or so doesn’t help, because the crawlers get the real URL from the redirect header and will leave a note in the record of the original link on the page carrying the affiliate link. Anyways, the tiny URL will fool most visitors, and if you own the redirect service it makes managing affiliate links easier.

Of course you can cloak the hell out of your thin affiliate pages by showing the engines links to authority pages whilst humans get the ads, but then better forget the Google traffic (I know, I know … cloaking still works if you can handle it properly, but not everybody can handle the risks so better leave that to the experts).

There’s only one official approach to make a page plastered with affiliate links safe with search engines: replace it with a content rich page, of course Google wants unique and compelling content and checks its uniqueness, then sensibly work in the commercial links. Best link within the content to the merchants, apply rel-nofollow to all affiliate links, and avoid banner farms in the sidebars and above the fold.

Update: I’ve sanitized the title, “Google says you must screw your affiliates in order to get indexed” was not one of my best title baits.

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What a brilliant marketing stunt. Click here! Err… click: Brilliant. Marketing. Stunt.

Best of luck John

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Thanks to Danny’s crew we’ve got a promising search geek community site. Since I’ve recently started to deal with invites, here is the top secret link where you get your free Sphinn invite. Click it now and join today, as Gorbachev said ‘those who are late will be punished by life itself’

Previous experiments revealed that my pamphlets aren’t diggworthy, despite the presence of OL/UL lists. Because I mention search and stuff like that every once in a while, I decided to submit a horror story to Sphinn to test the waters over there.

Adding Sphinn-it! widgets to my posts hopefully helps promoting Sphinn, but with Blogger that turned into kinda nightmare. To prevent you from jumping through infinite try-and-error hoops, here is how it works:

Classic templates:

Search for $BlogItemBody$ and below the </div> put

<script type='text/javascript'>submit_url='<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>';</script>
<script src=’http://sphinn.com/evb/button.php’ type=’text/javascript’/></script>

(Blogger freaks out when you omit the non-standard ;</script> after the self-closing second tag, hence stick with the intentional syntax error.)

Newish templates:

Check “Expand Widget Templates”

Search for data:post.body/ and below the </p> put

<b:if cond='data:post.url'>
<p><script type=’text/javascript’>submit_url=’<data:post.url/>’;</script>
<script src=’http://sphinn.com/evb/button.php’ type=’text/javascript’/></p>
</b:if>

(After saving the changes Blogger replaces some single quotes with HTML entities, but it works though. Most probably one could do that in a more elegant way, but once I saw the badges pointing to the correct URL –both in the posts and on the main page– I gave up.)

Have fun sphinning my posts!