SeoBlackhat.co.uk

Over the last week or so there has been a TON of press about the new Google algorithm change with brands – even some going as far as to saying it is bigger than Update Florida. I wouldnt go that far, because that update literally killed many markets. This one, not so much. But lets break this down as I have had a week to really hammer on it in my testing lab.

So what changed?!?!

Report: Google has flushed their index and rebuilt it again based on brand strength. Last fall Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was quoted as saying Brands are the solution, not the problem and now brands are shooting to the top of the SERPs.

Reaction: Everyone who is not a brand is freaking out that SEO is now dead again.

What You Should Do Right Now: Sit back, take a deep breath, and know this: the sky isnt falling. And Im going to show you why you dont need to panic. SEO is far from dead.

Lets start out by defining a brand.

Definition of Brand: A company that is well known in certain markets. Examples:

Running Shoes: Nike
Photocopies: Xerox
Tissue: Kleenex
Jeans: Levis
Bandage: Band-Aid
Coffee: Starbucks

The sheer power of brand awareness is when the actual competitors product is called by the name of the branded company. For example, you dont ask for a tissue if you are going to sneeze, you ask for a Kleenex. If you get cut, you dont say, Do you have an adhesive bandage? No. You ask for a Band-Aid. And if youre old enough, making a photocopy was referred to as Making a Xerox copy.

With that out of the way, we can agree that branding is important and nothing will change that. Lets now look at the actual algorithm change. Well use RankPulse to track these changes as it has been the choice tool in all the Blog posts online.

First things first – lets define the Supplemental Index. The best way is to take it straight from Google

A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that its pulled from our supplemental index. Were able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If youre a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; theres no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesnt affect its PageRank. For tips on maintaining a crawler-friendly site, please visit our webmaster guidelines.

Reference: Googles Webmaster Help Center

ok this is working flawlessly

its quite simple, the code I have produced in older posts look for it, and then you add the code in a html file..

another example, 1st line on www.sexaddicts.us

As you can see people will click on the 1st line of video’s.. so I am getting hits all the time on my adsense.

Currently averaging approx 200 per blog I have this on per month

Another example:

Just remember to keep your CTR DOWN, post your adsense on legit sites on posts, my CTR IS ALWAYS LESS THAN 1%

Search Engine Cheat Sheet Posted

The Search Engine Cheat Sheet which was originally posted in the On-Page Factors eBook is now posted in the Tutorial section and it has been updated.

There were a few updated changes, here they are:

The displayed characters each engine accepts changed:

Google increased one character from 65 to 66. Here is an example of the new longer Title tag:

Yahoo! is currently 71 characters as evidenced by this example:

Microsofts Live.com shows 70 characters:

What does this mean? Basically that you have one extra character to play with when creating your Title tags. I just posted the information from Live and Yahoo! to show how the other two engines are currently behaving, but Google is still your main focal point. Since they are the lowest, you target that number.

Why?

The testing numbers are stil accurate. Titles which have ellipses (the three dots at the end) have a lower click through rate than Titles which do not.

Many members ask me on a regular basis how you can ensure that you have an IP address that is clean, so let me tell you.

You will want to do a deep check on the IP address, meaning you want to check the main sources of the black lists. The following list is what I use to check IPs that have been assigned to me by my host. Before I give you this list please NEVER do the following:

You: Are all of these IP addresses you just assigned to me clean?

Host: Absolutely. We check and cross check all the IP addresses before assigning them.

You: Great, thanks!

This is a huge mistake, never take their word for it. Verify that the IP address is clean by using the following tools:

Open RBL – This program will check against many of the popular blacklists and will give you a quick overview of the blacklist giving you a status of that IP address on the lists.

The following are good separate blacklist checkers, as they tend to be quite trigger happy when blacklisting IPs.

http://www.ordb.org/lookup/
http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/index.lasso

This is another great way of making you feel like you are in full control of your business and allows you to ensure that you are given exactly what you have asked for. Webhosts give away dirty IP addresses on a regular basis so take the time to protect your business and verify that every IP address is germ free.

Finally I have got my finger out of my arse, and installed the cookie stuffing script

I have had alot of people asking about Forums and VIP service So once again here we go. I have alot to add and to update.

The VIP service will get access to tools not seen in the SEO Community, and alot of quality Info ect..

People wanting to Buy VIP status can go here: BUY VIP or Just click the bottom banner on the blog. Payments can be made through paypal, wire, cheque and Credit Cards via Plimus.

Previous Followers & Members Contact me for Discounts

Also the Cookie Stuffing Script is Complete, which can enable forum stuffing , Image stuffing, SWF Stuffing & Fake the referrer , plus live statistics all with front end and backend login. Possible the best Cookie Stuffing script made to date.

I know that if I was to post the exact profitable targets I’m seeing on the exact most profitable relevant offers, dozens of members here would rush to insert the campaign into their CPV accounts and end up fighting each other out of the market, including me, so that doesn’t help anyone.

What I will do is help you understand more about profitable CPV campaigns by exposing certain kinds of targets matched with certain types of offers based on my own personal campaigns which if you apply, you’d be hard pressed not to earn a nice ROI.

For the first example in this series, I’m going to introduce you to a very successful category of targets I’m currently seeing great results from.

One type of offer that’s always done pretty well for me over the last few years is the offer that’s aimed at the college student. Loans, loan consolidation, earn your degree online, student friendly credit cards, etc. Even cash advance loans continue to do very well for me to that audience.

Naturally I had to ask myself where would be a great place to snipe the traffic of both prospective and current college students? Official college websites make sense, doesn’t take a rocket scientist.

That of course led me to do a search hoping to find an online listing of every US college in operation today. Two seconds later I found http://www.utexas.edu/world/univ/alpha/

Well that was easy.

From there I scraped every URL into a text file and loaded them right up into my CPV accounts to begin rotating in relevant and even loosely relevant offers.

Let’s just say that a number of the targets on this list perform extremely well and a number of others while not generating a fortune, are still profitable and continue to spit more back at me than my spend every month.

As with anything, you must track your performing targets, so place your CPV networks pixel(s) with the offer or use the Pixel Cloak tool, you must also rotate offers, not just different offers, but the same type of offer, not just the same type of offer but if available the EXACT same offer on different networks.

That is CPA 101 stuff that I’ve said 1000 times and will say thousands more times because there’s always a handful of people that do it all fucked up and start whining they didn’t make any money.

If 3 networks have the exact same offer I can guaran-fucking-tee you that one will always convert higher than the other two, I won’t repeat myself and explain all the reasons why that is, what’s important is that if the offer is performing for you and is available on multiple networks, test as many of those as you can to see if there are conversion differences.

Half the time, the network that’s paying a little bit less on the offer will convert far better resulting in more commissions overall, and the network paying higher will convert shitty.

Rotate Rotate Rotate, then ROTATE some more. This is where most people fail with CPV advertising and just advertising in general, most traffic does not just suck like many like to say when they haven’t turned a profit.

A lot of times it’s the offer that sucks, or the way the offer is presented that sucks, or you that sucks. CPV’s greatness lies in it’s low costs and self serve atmosphere to fit any budget.

Just about everyone can afford to run thousands and thousands of impressions with it, do not waste them driving them to just one or two offers and refreshing the screen like a moron hoping for a conversion to come as your budget continues to spend down to zero.

I’m keeping this stuff short and sweet, it does not take a novel to explain effective strategies to make a lot of profit each day.

Let’s recap. I have told you in a nutshell that I’m seeing great profit running CPV traffic from multiple networks targeting thousands of US college websites. I have told you the types of offers that I am rotating to this traffic to find the best converters. If you look below, I have also provided you every URL so that you can just copy and paste it into your campaigns and start doing some tests.

What else can I do to help short of handing you my exact campaigns which aint gonna happen? Well if you are going to run this, I’ll pull whatever offers you need and host them on Elite ROI with a weekly payment option to help you scale up when you find some good targets, aka I’ll front the cash out of my own pocket so you can keep buying traffic.

I will start of by saying my method of adsense behind image works pretty well, altho it is very blackhat if you need good money fast thats the way to do it…. However..

I know I am not an AdSense Monster but I feel I do well for myself even though I use things differently than most do. I use AdSense to help with my PPC bill. Let me show you quickly and then well go through some points that can help you with your AdSense.

Create a plan for why you are going to use AdSense. You will want to do this because the amount you are earning per click is a fraction of the amount an advertiser is earning. That is the reason why they are paying you to do it, you will make more money then they will.

Caution: Do not settle for many 50 cents when you could be making $12.00 instead.

Robots.txt Tip:

To ensure that you get your site indexed properly by Google Media Bot ensure you place the following code into your robots.txt file. After you put it in you will see a difference so make sure you put it in there. One of the main benefits of having this code is that it will place relevant ads and fewer PSAs. You dont need to be nervous about the Disallow statement that is in the code, it is the syntax of the robots.txt file. It doesnt have anything after it so this means its not disallowing anything from the bot meaning you are giving full access to all your pages to the spider.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

When AdSense first came about I decided to sign up and placed the ads onto one of my affiliate sites. It turned out that my conversion ratio for that affiliate program didnt have much movement keeping a consistent rate. When I looked a bit further I noticed that I had a 6% CTR. Before AdSense my conversion rate was approximately 2% so it turned out I was earning money from 8% of the visitors I received. Not too shabby.

I decided to test this out on more sites and the same figure came back to me but the conversion still stayed quite consistent. So why exactly was this happening? I did an exit survey but that didnt give any details since the people leaving didnt seem to fill out my survey. I came to the conclusion that the people that purchased my stuff were already going to buy anyways with or without ads showing. For those that were leaving higher percentages were hitting the back button and the other handful looked for a way out and they usually were the ones that hit the AdSense ads.

In all honesty its not my fault they didnt find what they were looking for. There is no possible way you can please everyone and nor would I like too, but I would like to maximize the revenue my site gets so I came up with a plan. Take a look at the plan I came up with:

1) Having a targeted monthly budget is key so when I launch my affiliate program I will already have the list of keywords that will convert. As an example we will use a budget of $1,000.00 per month.

2) Target the average CPC. This is actually pretty easy to do. You never want to have a bid that is more than 50% of the revenue youd earn per visitor. So for example your PPC campaign has a commission of $50.00 with a conversion ratio of 1% youll have revenue of 50 cents per visitor ($50.00/100=$0.50). To ensure you have profit this means you can not go over $0.25 per click. By bidding more then that you will actually see yourself loosing money and this is the main thing you want to avoid. Now for another example lets say your conversion ratio increased to 4% meaning youd have revenue of $2.00 per visitor, meaning you can now have a bid of $1.00 per click. Quite amazing isnt it?

3) With AdSense try to project a 6% CTR with a revenue of $0.50 per click. For every 100 views you get to your page youd get revenue of $3.00 or $300.00 EPM (Earnings per Thousand Views).

4) For our example we spent $1,000.00 a month for our PPC with an average of $0.25 a click. You brought 4,000 visitors into your site holding an average number of page views being 3 per, or 12,000 page views.

5) 1% conversion: 40 sales x $50.00 = $2,000.00 (Affiliate Revenue)
6% AdSense CTR: 720 clicks x $0.50 = $360.00 (AdSense Revenue)
Subtract the PPC Spend – $1,000 (PPC Spend)

In the past I’ve talked a little about some of the offline advertising opportunities we use frequently and today I want to go into a little more detail about placemat advertising.

Placemat advertising is dirt cheap, often times you can get your ad in multiple restaurants in a targeted region for under $300.

Depending on the service you use and package you buy, your ad can be seen by 5000-30000 people on average with every campaign.

Some of the benefits besides it’s affordable cost are

• In many cases, the advertising service will design your ad for you at no extra cost.
• Your ad is seen by a prospective customer for an average time of 30 minutes per session.
• Diners in certain cities have a high demographic of target customers for certain offers.
• People read these ads, it’s estimated that over 90% of patrons look at each one.
• Low barrier to entry, anyone can have an ad up in running with no experience.

Like every form of advertising, nothing is easy money, but I can tell you that if you target your region intelligently for the offer you choose to run, you have very strong odds of making a profit here.

A theme you’ll notice when looking at samples is that most advertisers are local small business, it’s rare that you will find many direct marketing companies or affiliates buying space here. Direct marketers typically have their sights set on higher volume campaigns, and affiliates quite frankly either don’t think about avenues like this, don’t know about them, or are too lazy to try them.

As a product owner I generally don’t use placemat advertising to gain new customers directly, like most other direct marketers I’m interested in larger buys for my offers, however on the affiliate side, I have a staff member who is totally dedicated to local advertising opportunities because they are phenomenal for lead generation campaigns, super cost effective to test, and virtually competition free.

The math is certainly in your favor when you do the numbers, if you’re cost is $300, and you are getting $18 a lead on a cash advance offer, you’re talking about 17 leads to cover your costs.

On a biz-op paying you $38 per 1.99 trial using the same ad spend, now you’re talking about 8 orders to cover your cost.

You’re looking at potentially thousands to tens of thousands of people actually reading your ad in many cases.

Directory PageRank Update

Going through the directories manually and will have the spreadsheet updated next week. In the meantime, here are the directories which had their PageRank changed. As you will see, no major directories were affected.

Performance Corporate – 3/10 (+3)
A1 Directory Search – 2/10 (-1)
ABiz Directory – 2/10 (-1)
Established Websites Directory – 0/10 (-4)
Ajdee – 4/10 (+1)
All in Order – 0/10 (-1)
All the Biz – 2/10 (-1)
All Web Directory – 3/10 (+2)
A News 4 U – 1/10 (-1)
Anthony Parsons – 2/10 (-1)
Bhanvad – 4/10 (+1)
Business Seek – 3/10 (+1)
Canny Link – 3/10 (-2)
Can’t U Find – 4/10 (-1)
Check Houston – 4/10 (-1)
Cluboo – 2/10 (-2)
Dhundo – 0/10 (-2)
Direct-o-ry – 1/10 (-1)
Velnet Search – 2/10 (-1)
Directory Gold – 3/10 (-1)
Direcory Here – 1/10 (-1)
Directory Storm – 4/10 (+1)
Directory World – 4/10 (-1)
Fast Paths – 1/10 (-1)
Favouite Link – 0/10 (-2)
Find Rex – 3/10 (-1)
Find What Where – 2/10 (-1)
Galaxy – 7/10 (+1)
Home Page Seek – 4/10 (+1)
Houndit – 0/10 (-2)
iBrain – 1/10 (-1)
Index Plex – 4/10 (+1)
Info-Listings – 5/10 (-1)
Information Outpost – 3/10 (+1)
Italist – 0/10 (-3)
King Bloom – 3/10 (-1)
Klik Klik – 0/10 (-4)
Linkism – 2/10 (-1)
Link Lasso – 2/10 (-1)
Look Forth – 3/10 (+1)
Most Popular Sites – 5/10 (-1)
My Site Guide – 0/10 (-3)
Ozami – 4/10 (-1)
Phyder – 2/10 (+2)
Please Retrieve – 0/10 (-3)
Primo Directory – 3/10
Resource Help – 5/10 (+1)
Rubber Stamped – 5/10 (-1)
Skatoo – 2/10 (-1)
SOC Engine – 6/10 (+3)
Sporge – 4/10 (+1)
Sun Stream – 5/10 (+1)
Text Links R Us – 2/10 (+1)
Top Sites – 0/10 (-3)
Tygo – 4/10 (-1)
URL Can – 0/10 (-3)
Wholesale Pimp – 1/10 (-1)

Increasing SEO Leads

This is the first in many parts of how to increase your consulting business. If you don’t have a consulting business, the advice can be applied to most business structures. If you currently take SEO clients, after reading this article please do the following:

Send me a snippet of your experience and what sets you apart from the competition along with how expensive you are. I am updating my recommended list on my site and I want to ensure I group everyone together correctly so a prospect with a limited budget doesn’t call SEO Inc. or Mike Grehan and waste their time.

Okay, so you need more leads, or you need more qualified leads, or you need to convert more of the people who call you. Let’s first go through your current status:

1) How many hours per week are you currently working?
2) What is your current monthly revenue before expenses?
3) What is your net revenue (this would be your “paycheck”)?
4) On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being fitted with a straight jacket) what is your stress level towards your clients?
5) Right now, what is your biggest stress (either personally or professionally)?

Let’s now break these down to ensure you can actually handle more work.

1) If you are currently working 45 hours or more per week your problem is not a lack of business, your prices are too low. Increase your prices and you will lose a few clients, but the increase in pay will keep revenues the same while decreasing your work hours. The secret to being an effective SEO is having plenty of “down time” to allow the creative side of you, which is typically a weakness, to come through to allow you to do a better job and retain the clients you have.

2) This is either for you personally or for your company. You need to know this number. If you don’t, find out today, not tomorrow, but today. Wake someone up if you need to. Not knowing how much you make is a bad thing if you’re running the show.

3) If your paycheck is less than $10,000 a month you are doing something horribly wrong. There is no reason for it and I am being as kind as possible with that statement. If you are making above that figure and you aren’t happy with it, write down what you want it to be. Be realistic, while at the same time focused on achieving what you know you deserve based on your skill level.