I spend a lot of time in various forums and it just pisses me off seeing the bad advice being dished out in 99.9% of posts. Every “expert” keeps repeating the same things… build links, do directory submissions, do social bookmarking… it’s all the same old bullshit being repeated over and over, and nobody is testing the effectiveness of anything!

There is no one click, magic bullet, free and easy technique for link building. It will take time, effort and/or money.

Right, so here is my quick guide to effective link building. I deliberated for a long while before deciding to write this post. But then I decided why not.. most people are too stupid or lazy to implement 99% of what I advise and will go back to asking loser questions on public forums, so I’m not giving too much away.

Side note: When building links,  forget about Page Rank – imagine that PR doesn’t even exist. Just get all the links that you can. Don’t forget that a page that is PR 0 today might become PR 6 in the near future (and vice versa) 

Directory submissions.
Directory submissions are mostly worthless. Anybody can do it for any site and there are people out there who will submit your site to 2000 directories for under $20. If it’s so simple that all you need to do is PayPal a few bucks to somebody in Bangladesh, why should Google or any of the other search engines give any weight to directory links what so ever. Shear numbers here can help a little bit, but it’s really only worth while doing for your piss willy little  supporting beer sites.

Reciprocal linking.
I keep reading that link trades don’t work anymore, but I’ve got sites ranking at #1 on Google for some mildly competitive terms using nothing but reciprocal links! Sure, they may not be as effective as they used to be, but they sure help!

Social Bookmarking
A total waste of time. Any asshole can do it and, like directory submissions, you can get somebody in India to add your site to thousands of social book marking sites for just a few bucks. Any SEO benefits are so small that your time will be better spent on just about anything else.

Link Wheels.
See above.

Parasite Hosted Sites.
Still mildly effective, but not as good as it once was. Blogger, Wordpress, Wetpaint, Squidoo and a buch of others will allow you to set up free sites that are effectively subdomains of the hosting site. As such they will leach a little PR and authority from the main site and so building free sites and linking to your other sites will help you, but a site with only links from free, parasite sites will raise a red flag to Google.

To be effective you will need to build hundreds (or thousands) of these sites (and maintain them) and then launder the links through your beer sites.

Trade favors for links
This is super simple and highly effective. You obviously have some sort of online skill set that other people don’t have. Contact other site owners and trade some free work or resources for a link. Use whatever skillz you have got. Design graphics, create content, create videos or flash animations, do some programming, donate some hosting space, do market research, do keyword research, write articles…whatever…

Very few site owners are 100% proficient in every aspect of site creation, maintenance and marketing so if you can offer them something of value, a good backlink in return for your services is a very cheap way for them to get some much needed work done.

Blog Spam
This is also not as effective as it once was and is just downright annoying to most people! There are too many Indian “SEO companies” who will employ a bunch of barely literate retards to post comments on every blog they can find. You can spot them a mile away – they always post shit like “I find your informations very good and I subscribe your blog for more learnings to same” – these are inevitably never authorised or deleted ASAP.

You can get some results from blog commenting, but it will take a lot of time and effort because you will need to comment on thousands of blogs. Read the posts before you comment, and then write short but useful and intelligent comments.

Forum Spam
I HATE these assholes with a passion. I’m looking at you bastards that are polluting places like Digital Point with pointless and inane questions as well as stupid comments and answers. (If you don’t have anything worthwhile or intelligent to say, just STFU!!!)

Some forums pass link juice, some don’t (I haven’t seen anything in my Google account coming from DP so please just stop it – it doesn’t work!)

Participate in forums that are in your niche, and offer real useful advice and comments. Check your Google webmaster  console to see which forums are being counted as inbound link and concentrate on those. The direct click traffic that you can get from intelligent forum posts far out weighs any SEO benefits!

Buying links
A lot has been made of the fact that Google hates bought links and will slap you if they catch you. Yes, it’s true if they catch you – so don’t get caught! Don’t use any of the link buying and selling services out there, just approach site owners directly and offer them a few bucks for a link. Be prepared to bargain, barter and beg. You’ll be surprised at what you can get!

Link bait
Still probably the best way to get links organically, but it takes time, effort and imagination. The official line from Google is that you should simply create great content and people will naturally link to you. Yeah right.. when did you last link to a site just because it had good information…people link to stuff that is unique, funny, controversial, unusual, gross etc so develope content in your niche that will attract natural links.

Useful downloads are great link bait. I don’t mean crappy PDFs or white-papers, but things like useful software applications get loads of natural links.

Give Away Free Sites
There are millions of small businesses that don’t have websites, have no real need for a website, but having one would be nice.

I’m talking about local pubs, restaurants, estate agents and other one man or mom and pop businesses. They aren’t going to spend a pile of cash with some development company to create a fancy site for them, so approach a bunch of local businesses around where you live and offer them free websites. Nothing fancy – just a WordPress or Joomla install will be more than adequate for most. You can decide for yourself whether you want them to pay for thier own domain registrations and hosting or if you will provide it for free, but develop nice little sites for them and ask only for link permission in return.

Software and Widgets
If you have the ability, create (or pay somebody to do it for you) things like FaceBook applications, WordPress themes, plugins and widgets. Make them freely available with a small link to your site.

Build your own beer site network
If you own the sites, you control the links. If you have 100 sites each with 10 000 pages indexed, that means you have the power of a million pages worth of links that you can direct anywhere you want!

Most of the above mentioned techniques are only worthwhile for building a little bit of reputation and PR to your beer sites. With enough beer site power you can rule the world!

I’ve recieved a few questions and comments lately, so instead of answering them one by one by email, I’ll just address them all here in a single post (thereby ceating a bit more content at the same time )

Problems setting up .co.cc domains. When you get a new free .co.cc domain, you only have 2 days to set it up or it will get deleted. What I generally do, is to use the redirect feature right away and direct it to an existing website. That way it’s safe until I get around to setting it up properly.

This is really simple to do. Just click the setup button, select URL forwarding and enter the existing URl that you would like your .co.cc domain to redirect to while you are setting up properly (or even leave it pointing to an existing domain if you are just planning on using it for ad tracking) .

In order to point it to a proper hosting account, you will first need to set up an account with a hosting company or set up an add-on domain for it on an existing hosting account. In other words if you want to get the domain buycheapviagra.co.cc, first check that it is available and then set up a hosting account for buycheapviagra.co.cc, then complete the registration process.

Your hosting company will tell you what your primary and secondary name servers are (it will be something like NS1.host.com and NS2.host.com) . Click the setup button and select the Name sever (DNS) option. Simply type the names of your name server in the appropriate fields and save. That’s all .

It can take up to 48 hours for DNS propagation before your new domain is accessible. I have seen it happen in minutes before, but don’t count on it and be prepared to wait a while.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression has been that it doesn’t matter how many sites you have with the same IP, as long as they’re separate niches and don’t link to each other. Where you need separate IPsare for sites that link to each other, hence the advantage of using Squidoo, Zimbio, etc.

Spot on! Google doesn’t care how many sites you own and nor should they. I mean how many domains does Google themselves own? It’s tens of thousands I bet! (think of Gmail, YouTube, Adsense etc, etc not to mention all the derivatives like GooglePorn that bought in order to keep them safe and protect their brand).

The only problem with owning thousands of sites on the same IP arises when you cross link them all – too many links from the same IP is a huge red flag to google and they will automatically assume that you are simply linking all your sites together in order to artificially boost your search engine rankings, and they will slap you accordingly.

But 99% of sites on the internet are on shared IPs, so it would be unusual if a couple of sites within the same IP range didn’t link to each other, especially if they in the same niche, so a little bit of sensible cross linking between related sites is fine.

Using .co.cc domains with Wordpress, Adsense and Traffic Equalizer. 

Firstly I LOVE WordPress. I’ve used it for ages but only became a “power user” about a year ago and I now have loads of sites built on the WordPress platform… they don’t have to look like blogs! Also, following my beer sites principal, I don’t do any real keyword research – I just create sites around any PLR articles or e books that I have laying around on my hard drive.

Co.cc domains aren’t sub domains. They are true top level cc TLDs. Just for clarification, sub domains are something that you set up on your hosting account – http://www.child-custody.co.cc is a TLD whereas  http://stuff.child-custody.co.cc is a subdomain. Co.cc domains shouldn’t raise anymore of a red flag to Google than registering a lot of co.uk, .co.za or any other country specific URLs. I’ve never had an issue with AdSense not displaying on .co.cc sites on add-on accounts (although I’ve recently had a weird situation with AdSense displaying on Forfox but not IE!  But that must be to do with my java settings rather than URLs or domain types though..)

I personally like the Easy Adsense plugin (it’s what I use on this site) and I’ve never had any problems. Remember, it takes a While for Google media bot to come around and read your site, so it may take a little while for the ads to appear.

I haven’t created Traffic Equaliser pages on any of my WordPress sites yet, but the principal remains the same. I’m an .asp guy and I don’t know much about php (yet!)  but the principal remains sound. Dig around in the WordPress code and find the include files for the page header, navigation, theme etc and use them in your Traffic Equaliser templates. You may have to change the paths to to files slightly, and reference some other core files but it will work if done properly.  Sigh ….. this is just one other item on my to do list. I’ll do a post about it when I eventually get around to it…

Hosting on addon accounts or reseller accounts or whatever shouldn’t make any difference to Google. No matter what the server setup is, you have a unique URL resolving to a unique set of content and so the same rules must apply.

 If you do something dodgy and incur any penalties, and ifpenalties can be past between sites on addon domain accounts (who knows) I think they will be handled in the same way  as sub domains. I.e. Your main domain will be able to pass penalties to your addon domains, but addon domains won’t pass penalties to the main domain or each other. I haven’t tested this yet (yet another item on my to do list), but at least I can do it for free with co.cc domains!

Traffic Equalizer – does it work?

I first heard about Jeff Alderson’s Traffic Equalizer software 5 or 6 years ago, when John Reese first released his traffic secrets program (yes – I was one of the people that helped make his million dollar day a reality by buying the program and it has been a favorite piece of software ever since.

Lately I have been reading a lot of questions in various forums from people wondering if Traffic Equalizer still works, or has Google gotten wise to it and nullified the potential gains. A lot of people say it doesn’t work anymore. Some even say it never worked, but let me tell you this… It still works like a charm in 2010 – IF you use it correctly!!

That’s a big IF! Anybody who doesn’t make money using Traffic Equalizer is clearly using it incorrectly, so here’s my step by step guide to using Traffic Equalizer the right way.

1) First build a proper website with decent original content. It doesn’t have to be huge, maybe 10 or 20 pages – but make it good! A site built completely with Traffic Equalizer will probably fail, so these good pages will be your solid foundation.

Build your pages in .txt modules using include files  (<?php include(”header.txt”); ?> if you’re using .php, or <!–#include file =”header.txt”–> if you’re using .asp) It will be beyond the scope of this post to explain the basics of php or asp, so if you are a noob,  just do a Google for “include files” – there are plenty of tutorials out there.

Basically, using include files just makes you life a helluva lot easier. If you create your page header, navigation bars and footers as include files you can just create them once, and use them on all your pages by just adding one line of text, without having to repeat the same code on every page.  As the pages are compiled on the server, the include files are pulled in as an integral part of the page – not like frames or those crappy shared borders that Microsoft was trying to foist on us a few years ago. If you make a change to the include file and upload it, the changes will appear on ALL pages that include that files content, making site wide changes a breeze!

The reason you want to use include files, is because we are going to be using them in our Traffic Equalizer templates.

I can’t design worth a shit, so I use Xara Webstyle to generate my graphics and layout for me and then I chop it up into top, left, bottom and content include files (Oh… btw – if you use Xara webstyle, be sure to strip out all that CSS and call it as an external style sheet)

2) Do your keyword research properly. Don’t build a huge list of a million keywords and expect to make money – that will just raise a huge red flag to Google. I generally use about 100o of the best keywords per site. Once they are all crawled and indexed, I may go back and add some more later.

There are are a few good keyword tools out there that you can choose from, but if you are going to be playing the AdSense game I highly recommend Keyword Country – Not only will it give you the search figures, but it also reports your probable earnings per click for each keyword so you can really compile a profitable list easily.

Important note. Your Traffic equalizer pages are only going to work for long tail keywords. For the more competitive keywords, create legit pages on your legit site. Your Traffic Equalizer pages will only rank for the terms that hardly anybody else cares about or optimizes for.

3) Create your Traffic Equalizer templates – DO NOT use the default templates – you MUST create your own! By using the same include pages that you used to create the rest of your site in your template, your Traffic Equalizer pages will look identical to the rest of your legitimate pages and carry the same legit footprint.

The most powerful feature of Traffic Equalizer isn’t the fact that it pulls content from the search engines. The %KEYWORD% token is what will get you your rankings! In fact, generally I will only pull 1 or 2 SERPs per page.

You will want to pull the majority of your content from sources other than the search engines. Pull from your own database, RSS feeds, news feeds, scrapes etc with the %KEYWORD% token in your SQL queries, scripts and RSS URLs. this will generate great, targeted content from a huge variety of sources rather than just the search engines.

Don’t worry about “keyword density” – Google doesn’t! I won’t go into too much detail here,  but “Latent Semantics” are far more important. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means… just use the %KEYWORD% token to ensure that your keyword appears a sensible number of times on your page and that it is used in H1’s, alt tags, bolds etc. Selecting decent content sources will take care of the LSI for you.

Create another include file (or files) to display your AdSense code – this way you will be able to switch the ads out in seconds if AdSense stops working for you or if something better comes along. The same goes for any other advertising that you put on your pages.

Use the same navigation on your Traffic Equalizer that you use on you legit content pages, so that any PR that gets assigned to your TE pages will flow back to your solid pages.

DON”T use the Traffic Equalizer sitemap page (it’s a huge footprint) – rather link to your Traffic Equalizer index pages from your legitimate pages. You can do this without being obvious by hiding the links in plain site (hint… use CSS).

Here’s another important tip – use a script to convert your RSS feed to html, just do a Google for “RSS to HTML” or something like that. the are a few good free ones available.

Here are some examples from a site that I started about a year ago and might just get around to finishing someday. It’s not in a profitable niche, but it still make me a couple of bucks every day.

Music Quiz Questions is a legit page (see if you can find the links to the Traffic Equalizer index pages

Bible trivia is a Traffic Equalizer page. If I hadn’t told you, you probably wouldn’t realize that it was an auto generated page – it looks almost identical to the legit pages on the site

4) Once you pages are up, you will want to promote your site as usual, generate links etc. I generally only promote the legit pages on the search engines and let PR flow down to the TE pages naturally. The reason these pages will get any rankings and traffic is simply because you are targeting keywords that nobody else is and your pages aren’t banned from Google for being stupid or lazy and using Traffic Equalizer right out of the box without doing any custom work!

Beer sites… that’s a term I coined for sites that will only cost the equivalent of a beer or two to develop and, if monetized, are unlikely to earn more than a beer or two per month.

Basically these are sites that are either free to develop and own, or will cost you a few cents at most. So why should you bother to create sites that don’t make any money? It’s simple… if you own the sites you control the link juice!

Think about it – if you have 100 sites and each of those sites have 1000 pages indexed, that means you have control of the link power of 100 000 pages! Sure you could get the same amount of links by comment spamming, directory submissions and other “cutting edge” techniques but that will take years and never be as effective!

You beer sites don’t have to be that good – they could be as simple as basic WordPress sites with auto-generated or scraped content because you don’t have to worry about things like duplicate content penalties on you beer sites. You don’t necessarily want them to rank high on the search engines – you just want them to be spidered and indexed!

You can get the domains for free, and either host on free accounts or a cheap hosting account that allows unlimited add on domains. If you have Fantasico on you hosting account you can create Wordpress sites, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB and God knows what else at the click of a button!

The only problem with add on hosting (or even reseller accounts) is that you will be leaving a huge footprint by having all your sites on the same server with the same IP, so you’ll want to spread your hosting around a bit.

One of the many projects I am developing at the moment is http://www.beersites.co.cc (God only knows when I will get around to completing it!) but when it is done, it will be a forum where people who own beer sites can get in touch with each other in order to trade links between beer sites. This way we will all be able to boost our PR and link equity without leaving massive footprints for Google to find and negate.

This happened to me a few years ago (back in 2000) but I’d still like to know what to do if it ever happens again.

I had a very successful but low tech website. Just plain html and graphics.  I was displaying products, descriptions, prices etc,  and if somebody wanted to order they just sent me an email and we took it from there… like I said, very low tech but  I was doing a LOT of business.

Anyway – I checked my server logs one day and I noticed a load of hits coming from a Madagascan website. No worries, a lot of my products (gems and minerals) were coming from Madagascar and I had a lot of friends and contacts over there, so I didn’t think too much of it.

Before I got around to doing any real investigation I had a really nasty bike accident and was out of commission for a couple of months (fractured skull, brain hemorrhage… you don’t want to know!) and so I forgot about it for a long while.

Much later, when I was regaining some sort of comprehension, I looked at the server logs again and saw thousands of hits coming from the same site and so I went to take a look only to discover that some bastard had stolen my site and was hot-linking to my pictures.

I don’t mean he copied my layout and copy – I mean he copied the whole site. Company name and all!  The only things that were different were the URL and (of course) the order email address. God only knows how many customers and  how much money he had managed to steal from me in the time it took me to discover him!

Anyway – I managed to trace his hosting company and had him shut down ASAP, but how could I go about prosecuting him? I didn’t know about things like whois lookups at the time and couldn’t identify who it was. Clearly a crime had been committed, but where did it happen?

I live in South Africa and created the site here, and then I uploaded it to a server in Canada. The thief copied the site in Madagascar and then uploaded to a server in America. He defrauded people all over the world by pretending to be me… so which government, police force or whatever should I have complained to?  Where, geographically did the crime occur?

I realise that the chances of this happening again are pretty scarce, but if it does I’d like to know how to REALLY nail the bastard dammit!

I started writing this ages ago and just re-discovered it in my drafts folder and since Google appears to be in the process of getting rid of page rank, I figured I might as well complete it and post it. OK – so I doubt that Google is acually getting rid of page rank, they have already removed it from webmaster tools and many think that it may be removed from the toolbar as well soon, so they may well stop reporting at all in the future.

To tell the truth, I am sick to ‘kin’ death of answering questions about Page Rank! It is the most over used, abused and misunderstood concept in the science of search engine optimisation and in order to make my life a little easier, I’m going to do a series of posts about that magic green stripe in the Google tool bar and just direct people to my blog every time I get a question instead of repeating myself over and over again.

Right, so what is this page rank thing anyway?

I think everybody knows this, so I’m just going to do a very brief summary for any real noobs – skip ahead if you know this… In the old days, the early search engines only looked at on page factors when deciding which pages to display at the top of the rankings when people did a search for any particular keyword or phrase. Of course, as soon as people realised this, it became very easy to abuse the system and I can remember putting, er… shall we say keywords of a mature nature in my meta tags and using very primitive tricks like putting loads of keywords in white on a white background so that people couldn’t see them but the search engines would.

As a result my pages would show up when people did searches for things like “boobs” or “Britny Spears naked”  (and some others that are not as family friendly , even though the visible content of my page had nothing to do with those terms what so ever! I just knew what people were searching for, and it was easy enough to hijack them and present them with a page that was selling something or other. It was a dumb idea – this was before I learned about things like conversion rates so I got tons of traffic but hardly any sales!

But I wasn’t the only one doing this, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to find anything of value using the search engines of the day. Most people were doing it the other way around and so if you were searching for something as innocent, such as say “plumbing supplies”,  you would invariably get at least a couple of porn results in the mix.

 When Sergy Brin and Larry Page were at university, they came up with an idea that would make it much harder to cheat  and the search engines would be able to return much more relevant results. They created an algorithm that calculated the value of the number of  links to a site as well as the importance of the individual links and they used this as as an important factor in a “master” algorithm that determined which pages would rank higher for particular searches.

(Interesting side note – they didn’t set out to create a search engine company – they tried to sell the algorithm. Only after nobody wanted to buy it did they manage to raise a little venture capital and formed Google

Anyway – the sub algorithm, the one that calculates power of the incoming links to a page, was called Page Rank and it is displayed as a number between 0 and 10 in the Google tool bar if you have it installed. What is important here is that is just A factor (one of over 200) in the overall Google algorithm – not THE factor. It’s actual importance is mostly unknown but it is NOT as important as many people seem to believe!

It was a fairly complex mathematical alogorithm to start with (you can see the original here), but it has evolved over time to become far more complex and is kept top secret.

Now, most people think that page Rank is a number between 0 and 10 and nothing can be further from the truth. It is only displayedas a number between 0 and 10, but people forget that between any 2 whole numbers there are millions of smaller numbers! So even though 2 sites may appear have a Page Rank of 5, one may have a 5.00000001 and the other may have a 5.999 – mathematically speaking this is a HUGE difference!

To confuse matters – we believe that Page Rank is based on a base 8 logarithm – try to visualise it like this:

 OK – my numbers are totally hypothetical, but the premise holds true. If an inbound link from a page with PR 0 counts as one “point”, you will need at least 65 links from PR0 pages for your page to advance to a PR2 hich is fairly easy using basic beginner techniques such as link wheels, blog commenting, forum commenting etc, but to achieve a PR6 you would need to generate well over two million links!

Since links from pages with higher PR pass more PR to your pages, it may only take a couple of links from high PR pages for your page to achieve the same PR6 as more than two million low PR links would achieve. A PR6 can hypothetically be achieved by getting 2097152 links from PROs and PR1s (very difficult and time consuming) or from just 1o links from PR5s (also difficult, much much easier than the other way with some creative thinking).

But now I’ll say this again, Page Rank is just 1 of over 200 factors that Google use in their algorithm and most people are way to focused on it.

You shouln’t obsess over Page Rank, or even rankings!! The only metrics that count in the game are “how much traffic are you getting” and “how much of that traffic is converting into sales”.

Why knock yourself out and spend thousands of hours and dollars to get a high page rank? It means nothing and your time and money is much better spent getting customers than increadsing a metaphgysical number that may not mean anything at all.

I know it sounds too good to be true, but I discovered a way to get FREE top level domains and free hosting. In other words 100% free websites!

I hesitated for a while before making this post because I wanted to keep this to myself, but even though it isn’t well known it’s hardly a secret – so in the interests of “paying it forward”  – here it is. If you find this useful I only ask for a link or 2 back to this site. Thanks in advance

Domains generally cost in the region of $10 per year and hosting is from around $10 per month (Yes – I know there are cheaper and more expensive options…these are just broad, ball park figures) so even the most basic site will need you to invest at least some money because even though you can get “free sites” through places like geocities (are they still around?) and blogger.com, these sites are on parasite subdomains and are practically worthless. Now I have discovered how to get real URLs with real value for free and have them hosted for free! Gotta love it!

Whether you are a professional webmaster, SEO, internet marketer, AdSense player or what ever it’s always a good idea to have a decent sized domain portfolio. It’s always nice to have a couple of domains ready to roll if you have a bright idea in the middle of the night and anyway… very few people are content with  making a  living with just one site.

Before I let the cat out of the bag, I’m going to ask you not to abuse this. Don’t go and register thousands of domains that you have no intention of ever using or (even worse) roll out thousands of worthless scraper sites.

Here are a couple of valid uses of these free sites:

1) Get a couple of keyword rich domain names that are related to your niche and then 301 them to your existing site. This makes great URLs for you to use in marketing campaigns and you can easily track your advertising without using those horrible shortening services.
2) If you are an affiliate marketer, you can 301 your free domains to the various offers that you promote and never have to worry about link cloaking or lost commissions ever again.
3) If  you are a SEO, you can develop a couple of small sites, build some link juice and page rank for them for a while and then 301 them to your main site.
4) I have always maintained that if you are an SEO and you have never had a domain banned by Google, you’re not trying hard enough. Use these free sites to experiment with some of the more risky SEO practices so that your money sites and clients sites are never in danger.
5) Never ming the risky SEO practices – just use the free sites and free domains to experiment. Period! The best way to get good at SEO is to experiment to find out exactly what works and what doesn’t, rather than asking questions on public forums.
6) Put up a few one page websites – just a “coming soon” notice and a few paragraphs of useful keyword rich content. Get these pages spidered and indexed so that when you develop your real content the domains are well seasoned and you are a lot less likely to get sandboxed.
7) If you are an AdSense  (or other PPC sevice) player…. duh…. free sites don’t even have to make a dollar a day…they can make a dollar a year and still be profitable!
If you market your own products or services, and the .com and .net version of your company name was taken – here’s another chance to get your company name as a domain.
9) Same thing for keyword rich domains – get ‘em while you can!
10) Get you’re own name as a domain – just use it for you@yourname emails
11) I could go on – there are hundreds of valid uses for your own TLD domains…. even more when you get them for free!

Okay, okay – so how do I get these free domains???

Step1 is to sign up for a free hosting account that allows domain hosting and doesn’t force deliver third party ads.  A couple I am experimenting with are http://www.1free.ws , http://www.agilityhoster.com and http://www.50webs.com but there are a lot more if you just search.

Step2 is to go to http://www.co.cc and register your free domain. You need to complete the process right away which is why you need to have your hosting in place first.

That’s it!

Yes – a paid for hosting account would be better. Back up and support from the free companies is hardly stellar but ya know… free is free .

For your more important sites I suggest getting a reseller account from www.hostgator.com or www.micfo.com which will allow you to host virtually unlimited domains, for a very reasonable cost, and give you maximum control over each individual site.

Like I said earlier, if you found this useful I only ask for a link or 2 back to this site.

I recently posted a “top secret black hat seo technique” and avertised in a couple of forums – basically I said that I would teach anybody how to get unlimited free links from .gov and .edu sites in return for a link back from their own sites.

Unlimited free links in return for one link?  Of course it was a lie. A scam! I’m a bad person

Did it work? Well, yes and no.

First let’s take a look at the “technique”. It’s exploits a vulnerability in phpinfo() in some verions of PHP that allows you to dynamically inject a link onto a page through the URL. If you know the first thing about SEO, you will be able to get  Google to spider that page and count the link that you injected as an inbound link to your site and therefore count towards raising you site in the search engine rankings.

Now I got to admit – I only did the smallest of experiments to see if it works or not (I didn’t see any of the links I created counting as backlinks to my site) but I couldn’t have been bothered to waste time on something I was very sure wouldn’t work. Let’s face it, even the most junior of Google engineers would be able to filter against something something as basic as phpinfo() in a minute or two, so even if it  did work it would only be a matter of time until all those links I created were discovered and stopped counting.

But what if it DID work? What if it was something I was pretty sure wouldn’t easily be discovered and algorthmically filtered in a hurry? Would I do it then? HELL YES!! If I could get the top rankings for search terms like “viagra” and “online poker” overnight with a simple trick like this, I’d do it like a shot! If you could rank at the top of the search engines for terms like those, you would be raking tens of thousands of dollars every day!

…and it’s legal!  Some of the more common questions I was asked when I revealed the “technique” were about the legality of the trick and the truth is, like most black hat tricks, it is not against the law anywhere in the world! Against Google’s terms and conditions, sure… but not against the law! Nobody would come and arrest me, there would be no fines or jail time or anything like that. The worst thing that could happen to most blackhat SEOs is that they will be banned from Google. Actually not even that…. only the site that they have have used blackhat techniques on will be dropped from the Google index and, even then, there is a possiblity that it may get back in if they clean up thier act! I would be more than happy to risk a site getting kicked out of Google in 6 months time if it was eaning me $20 000 per day until then!

So, if it were real, would using my “technique” get me dropped from the Google index? I seriously doubt it. Links from other peoples sites are supposed to be out of my control (which is why Google hates link buying and selling so much). If links to a site could cause a site to be dropped from Google, I’d buy millions of links to my competitors sites and get them dropped from the index so that I could claim the #1 postion by default. (Ok  – there are ways of doing this, but I won’t cover that here. )

Another common comment about the technique is that the pages that the links were injected in were PR O  pages – and many beginners believe that links from pages with zero page are worless. Wrong! I’ve got a half finished post about PR and links in my drafts folder that I may finish and post sometime soon.

OK – so the whole thing was just an experiment in link baiting. In total it earned me 50 or 60 inbound links which may sound like a good thing considering how little work it took for me to  generate these links but the overall quality was abysmal. Mostly crappy made-for-adsense sites on blogger.com that get NO traffic what so ever.

What amused me most were the types of people that responded. There were a couple of genuine people who were willing to experiment, but the vast majority of respondents were shitty Indian “SEO” rip offs. The kind of morons who frequest othewrwise decent forums and dumb bomb shit like “u need to build more back links for same” on almost every thread thinking that this is a clever way to sig spam thier shitty SEO sites into some sort of search engine rankings!

I’m not a huge petrol head, car fan or status symbol type of guy and I always swore I’d never drive a brand new car. It totally pisses me off that a the value of a car can depreciate so fast  that you can lose up to 30% of your investment just by driving it out of the showroom!  To me, a car is simply a means of getting from point A to point C, preferably without breaking down at B along the way, so I always took advantage of the depreciation and would only buy cheap, reliable, second hand cars – reasoning that if they got stolen, smashed or broke down I’d simply pull out my credit card and buy another one – and I’d never have to face monthlypayments of any kind.

I’ve had my current car for (which I totally love) for about 8 years (a ‘78 “S series” Beetle – the one with the curved windscreen ) but even though it goes like a dream, I knew I’d have to take it off the road for many months to give it the make over job I want, and I’d need to buy something else to keep me mobile while the VeeDub was being worked on.

So anyway – I started shopping around and spoke to a friend of mine who works at a VW dealership that sells both new and secondhand cars if he had anything decent in stock. Well, when you buy from an official dealership, even though you know you are getting a very good second hand car, the difference in price between new and secondhand isn’t a million miles and so I started considering a brand new car (shock and horror!)

I liked the VW Golf  TenaCiti 1.4i and we worked out that the monthly payments would be about R2000 per month (that’s 2000 Rand – South African currency) Now, I HATE the idea of paying for something monthly and almost chucked the idea and went to look for something cheap and cheerful that I could pay for in one lump sum without totally draining my bank account. But then I thought “Hey – Google sends me an AdSense check for about R2000 every month so it wouldn’t actually be like I was paying for it”

I must add here that I am not an AdSense power player. AdSense is not my main source of income and I always considered any money from them to simply be a bit of extra beer money and so I never really worked on maximising it.  Anyway – I did a bit of tweaking which pushed my Google income up to around R3000 per month which means that I am now driving a brand new car and never have to put my hand in my own pocket! Google covers my monthly repayments, insurance AND satellite tracking and recovery without me doing any extra work at all!

I mentioned this one one of the forums which lead to a flood of people asking me how I did it, so I decided to do a post explaining everything, and here it is

Like I said – I’m not an AdSense power player, it is not my main source of income and I do not put up any Made-For-Adsense type sites. Most of my sites are e-commerce sites selling physical products – the kind that the experts say you should never put AdSense on because it will lower your conversions! But here is the key… I know that every single visitor that comes to my site (or any other site for that matter) will leave my ite. And I want to control how they leave!

Preferably, I want them to leave from my receipt page after making a purchase but if they don’t want to buy my products then I’d rather that they left via an affiliate link, Adsense ad or any other monetized link rather than simply hitting the back button, starting a new search, closing the browser or anything else that doesn’t at least earn me a few cents.

I craft my pages in such a way that I almost force visitors through a series of  “obstacles” in order of which will earn me the most money. 1) Newsletter opt in. 2) Buying my products right away. 3) Leaving my pages through a monetized link such as AdSense. I mostly put the AdSense code at the bottom of my pages – if a visitor doesn’t opt into my list, if they don’t buy my product – then I’ll damn well put AdSense ads at the point where they are going to leave my pages anyway!

I also put a fair number of auto-generated Traffic Equalizer type pages on all my sites. It’s a much maligned piece of software and the forums are full of assholes who don’t know how to use it properly crying that it doesn’t work. But here’s how I use it and make money from it.

Firstly and most importantly,  I don’t use it to create millions of pages with nothing but shitty scraped content and AdSense ads! I use it to create a lot (but usually less than 1000) of valid pages that target long tailed keywords related to my site. Call them doorway pages, call them bait pages, whatever… the fact is that they are real valid pages and I craft my templates in such a way that visitors have to pass through the same series of steps that they would have to on my “real” pages. Ie. 1) Newsletter opt in. 2) Buying my products right away. 3) Leaving my pages through a monetized link such as AdSense.

The reason this works so well, is that for many long-tailed keywords it doesn’t take much more than some basic on page optimisation to show up on the first page (sometimes even first position on Google). I don’t stuff my pages with nothing but SERPs harvested by Traffic Equalizer, but I do use it to generate 100s of pages that have proper title tags, H1’s, H2’s, <strong> tags, anchor text etc. All pages have the same navigation bar as the rest of my site so all my pages are easily navigable and I pull valid content from my own products database as well as RSS feeds from related sources.

I don’t do all that keyword research that the experts advise – I simply make sure that AdSense displays related ads and manually remove any ads that are not relevant to my sites. The point is – that if people arrive on my site looking for “blue widgets” and don’t buy my blue widgets for what ever reason, they are more likely to leave my site via a “blue widget” AdSense ad than an ad for “Travel in Hawaii”

So that’s it in a nutshell really, put AdSense ads where people are probably going to leave your site anyway and manually remove any ads that aren’t directly related to the content of your site!

 I’ve made this a DoFollow blog so feel fee to comment or ask questions, but DON’T abuse it with fuckwit comments like “Nice post” or “Thank you I learn much”. If you’re going to comment, make it something sensible or ask a valid question. Dumb bombing for links will not be tolerated!

Here is the technique for generating free links…

1) Search for http://www.google.com/search?q=%22PHP+Version+4.4%22+%22phpinfo%28%29%22  (it’s showing me 930 200 results)

2 ) Click on each result and add ?f[]=%3Ca%20href%3Dhttp%3A//www.yoursite.com/%3EYour%20Anchor%20Text%3C/a%3E to the URL

3) Scroll down to the PHP info table – if you see your anchor text and the link is clickable, the page is vulnerable. Cut and paste the full URL into a text file and save.

4) Repeat and find as many vulnerable sites as you can. Keep saving the results until you have as many as you want.

5) Place you list of links on a page on your website.

6) Wait until the page spidered

7 ) That’s all!

To find .edu sites, use http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22PHP+Version+4.4%22+%22phpinfo()%22+inurl%3A.edu&btnG=Search

To find .gov sites use http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22PHP+Version+4.4%22+%22phpinfo()%22+inurl%3A.edu&btnG=Search

For the REAL BIG secret – stay tuned