LinkMoney.org

You all know that in SEO that there is a right way (white hat,) a wrong way (black hat,) and a sort of in-between way (grey hat,) method of obtaining a good Google rank for your keyword of choice. I am not going to tell you any specific methods of white or grey ways because they are discussed ad nauseum throughout the whole Inter-webs and beyond.

I do want to tell you about a case in point of a wrong way that I can speak from experience on, and you are welcome to make comments or ask questions regarding same.

Here is the scenario. About six months ago I purchased a dropped domain name that is an absolute killer, very common three word phrase, that is a marketers dream for a domain name. These words fall into the class of Top 10 best, Best Deals Online, etc. They are three words that always would be used with a specific target product of any type, and not likely that anyone would ever use just those three words alone, and by the way it is a dot com and no hyphens. Oh and it came with a GPR of 3/10.

I had great hopes for this domain and commenced writing articles humping various affiliate products. All was going real well, traffic was starting to build and then one late night offer was too good to resist. You know the type, “100 links from high quality websites, spaced out over a month, guaranteed quality links, only $14.00,” blah, blah, blah…

What the heck, it’s worth a shot right? Wrong.

The company in India did exactly what they said they would do and starting in about two weeks I started to get notices of various websites that would send me an email saying that my link had been accepted for their website and when ever I checked them they were indeed applied. By the end of the month the 100 guaranteed quality links were posted and I started to get tons of offers to increase my fabulous deal. No thanks. Oh yeah, some of the quality sites were X rated.

This excellent domain name still ranks number one for the three word domain name, but that is all that it does. There is absolutely no data shown in the serps for this site, just the domain name, nothing cached, no article titles, no article excerpts, nothing, zip, nada. It’s great to be in first place, but remember no one would ever use just those three words without a product or item included as well. So I reign supreme over everyone with this site, but you will never know it. The site now has a GPR 0/10.

You no doubt have heard that Google uses a sandbox to stick brand new websites in so that they don’t just pop up over night ranking for a keyword over all of their good paying customers. There is a lot of discussion from many people that are all very experienced and most all of them have differing opinions as to whether or not there is such a thing.

I did a little searching on the subject and found some older posts from a few years back where this was talked about, and a couple of them are as follows:

webmasterworld.com

The existence of a new-site “sandbox” (which delays the site being ranked well for months) has been a topic of debate among SEOs.

From a forum that I did not record the url for:

In reply to a question, Matt Cutts of Google said that there wasn’t a sandbox, but the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.

Mark Mason told me in a recent message that there was no such thing as a sandbox, but call it what you will, this little treasure chest of a domain name is in limbo somewhere. Not one article comes up in G search anywhere.

What am I going to do about it? Not much. I will still write articles for it and not lean on any affiliate deals, just put up articles discussing marketing in general. I will still do some article submissions and link to it, but I will not ask anyone to link to this site, not ever. I will strive to put up quality content and hope that at some time in the future it will have the dark cloud lifted.

I suppose I could go back and try to have some of those 100 links removed but that is a huge pain in the ass. This one site out of over a hundred niche sites and a few primary Blogs is not going to kill me. I learned a huge lesson that I will never forget. The site cost fifteen bucks and some man hours. I’ll move on.

Was I trying to game the system, you bet. Did I know better, you bet. Did I think I would ever get caught, no way. Please take my word for it, don’t try anything like this.

In case you think, well there is no way I would get caught, just think of some of the things that we all do without even thinking. Most of the people I know in Internet Marketing are using WordPress Blogs. If you do, you no doubt use Akismet as a spam blocker right? Well every time you activate Akismet you must include your unique WordPress API key right? Do you think that Mother G does not know each and every site that you own or operate?

If you use Adsense, and most marketers do, then your Google ID is known. If you use Google Analytics, then your G-ID is known. So it doesn’t matter if you spread your websites out over several different hosting companies, there is no place to hide.

Remember, it is not nice to fool Mother Google.

Wow, Twitter never ceases to amaze me. One of my latest Twitter followers is DNfame.

So naturally I checked out the associated link and was blown away! DNfame dot com is a F.R.E.E. Tool that almost instantly reports on tons of metrics for any domain name that you type in the search box.

It couldn’t be any easier. Go to the website, type in the url you want to check and as fast as your ISP connection will allow, it returns all of the data listed below:

Rank Data:
Google GPR
Alexa Rank
Famous Rank
Compete
Quantcast
Technorati Rank
Technorati Authority

Listings Data:
DMOZ
Yahoo Directory
Archive dot org

Search Engine Backlinks:
Google
Yahoo
Alltheweb
AltaVista
Alexa Search
Lycos
Cuil

Social Resources:
Delicious
Furl
Reddit
Su.bscri.be
Faves
Clipmark
Blogmarks
Propeller
Jumptags

This is a very humbling experience when you search on your own children. Websites that you have worked extremely hard on for a year or more returning paltry numbers might have a tendency to discourage you after all of the effort that you have put in to it.

I would prefer to take that data and make a plan to sally forth and do battle! Knowing what you know now by using this tool you should be able to go out and kick some ass. Find your weak points and compare them against your competition and you will instantly discover what you have to do to excel.

I must admit I have never heard of some of the sites that are used in this tool, but they probably all bear looking in to. DMOZ is so hard to get in to and Google says they use the information on that site quite a bit so I would like to know what one has to do to get listed in DMOZ.

I have always been of the opinion that I don’t care where my sites rank in the above stats, and that it is more important to work on getting your keywords to rank on the first page of Google. I actually still believe that, but it wouldn’t hurt to work on improving the above stats and in turn that would likely help your keyword ranking. The proof will be in the pudding.

Thanks to DNfame.com for twittering and a VERY BIG THANKS for letting me know about this FABULOUS TOOL !!!

ps: If you want to rank up there with someone that I have written about many times on this blog, whose name shall remain annonymous, but whose initials are GCDC, you need to go out and get 33,300 Google Backlinks.

Let us know how you rank by commenting on this Blog.

SUBSCRIBE NOW ! - (Oh and if you backlink to www.linkmoney.org please let me know personally.)

Thanks for reading and participating.

Rich

Subscribe via RSS:

We have had an RSS Subscribe method for some time, but readers were not able to find it easily. We now have a nice big RSS button that works very well. We want you all to subscribe and keep up to date with our postings as they come out.

Three New Plugins:

LinkMoney now uses three new plugins; KeywordLUV, Show Top Commentator (widget version,) and we also added Lucia’s Linky Love. These plugins will put some minimal restrictions on when and how do-follow juice is awarded to commentators.

These new features, such as CommentLUV, KeywordLUV, Show Top Commentator and Lucia’s Linky Love offer benefits to both the Blog being commented on, and to the commentator. The Blog gains more traffic because readers are encouraged to make comments, and the commentator gains a backlink that is keyword rich when the comment is relevant, not spammy, and offers value to the Blog post.

The minimal restrictions installed require a commentator to leave more than a certain number of comments (right now the number is very low, subject to change if necessary,) before gaining LinkLUV. That keeps the hoards from just skimming through the web and finding places to drop their drivel.

Networking:

These new features added to the LinkMoney (dot org) Blog are installed to encourage readers to network with like minded readers and to share information as well as building some traffic generators.

I wrote a previous post about CommentLUV plugin.

Sources:

These plugins are discussed with great clarity on the following Blogs:

More Than Scratch the Surface

Andy Beard’s Ultimate List of Dofollow Plugins

Lucia Liljegren’s Big Bucks Blogger

Karol Krizka’s Show Top Commentator widget

Andy Bailey’s CommentLUV plugin

Backlink Policy:

If you find this Blog of interest or help to you in some way, we would REALLY appreciate receiving your backlink. Send an email to richhill at linkmoney dot org to let us know about your link, you will receive two links back from some of my other Blogs. That way they will be one way links and according to many people they might have more weight than a two-way link.

We reserve the right to reject inappropriate link sites.

The wordPress plugin CommentLUV is now installed for an undisclosed testing period.

You will get a link to your website using a keyword that you select by leaving comments on this Blog.

Normally when you leave a comment on a site they ask you for your name, email address and website url. This Blog will keep doing the same thing, however you can choose the keywork or phrase that you want to use by putting it in the name box.

Let’s say your name is Gertrude Blatz and you have a website named LadiesHouseholdFurnishingsAndClothing dot com. Normally you would put “Gertrude” or “Gertrude Blatz” in the name box.

Now let’s say you want to become known as a specialist in and to get high rankings for the keyword phrase “leather pocketbooks.”

Now instead of putting your name in the name box use the keyword phrase “leather pocketbooks.” That way when a reader finds your comment of interest and wants to see what type of a website you have they will click on the keyword phrase to go to your website and you just received a free vote in ranking.

Here’s the deal. This is an experiment and I might pull it at any time for any reason, but you can be sure that if you intend to spam or scam this generous offer I will wish a POX upon you and all of your goats.

Keep the comments relative to the subject, make them interesting and helpful and you will gain great benefits. No one likes negativity so keep it upbeat.

Thank you Gertrude for letting me use you as an example.

Rich Hill

ps: Chris Guthrie has posted an excellent article on back scratching.

See also: CommentLUV, KeywordLUV and lucy’s Linky Love here.