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!

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!

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:

Page Rank	“Points” required to achieve Page Rank.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10	0 – 88 – 64 64 – 512 512 – 4096 4906 – 32728 32728 – 262144 262144 – 2097152 2097152 – 16777216 16777216 – 134217728 134217728 – 1073741824 > 85899349289

 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 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!

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

The ULTIMATE SEO Tool is Finally Released to the Public!

For many years I have had the #1 Google rankings for ALL  major keywords and search phrases and people kept asking me how I managed to do it and begging me to teach them. Well the secret is finally out. Here’s what I did… I tapped into the Google API and added some custom hacks of my own and then hard coded  the algorithm into a specially built keyboard designed by an ex CIA operative and manufactured by a friend of mine who works at hanger18, area 52, Nevada.

All I have to do is open the page that I want to rank in my browser and press the Google key. Each time I press, I jump up to 100 places in the SERPs… Easy peasy!

OK – for some of the more competitive terms I have to do a lot more work – I have to press the Google key many times  in order to achieve the coveted #1 position.  It’s tiring and sometimes leads to a finger cramps which can be quite uncomfortable, but I persevere because of the HUGE amounts of money I can make by getting my crappy PR zero Made For Adsense sites to the top of the search results.

I never used to worry about the naf smaller search engines, but since Yahoo is going to start serving Bing results soon, Bing will effectively have about 30% of the search market and so I decided to incorporate them and use the same technologyto send my sites to the top of Bing as well (up yours too Bill Gates I then decided I might as well add a small Yahoo button so that I can dominate them as well for as long as they are still around. It might be worth a few clicks.

Anyway – I made the mistake of letting the cat out of the bag on a few forums and I was flooded with requests. People all over the world were begging me to sell them one of my special SEO keyboards. They were offering me huge amounts of money, stock options, naked pictures of their wives and sisters and God only knows what else, so I have decided to make a limited number of SEO keyboards available for sale. Here’s what they look like:

• Be the first in your niche to own one of these invaluable tools!
• Dominate all the search engines! 
• Make millions of dollars in the comfort of your own home!
• Work just 5 minutes per week!

You never need to worry about cutting edge SEO techniques like social bookmarking, directory submissions, blog commenting and meta tags ever again! The SEO keyboard will do it all for you!

Order one right now and you will be a millionaire in just a week or two. Send a check for $2997.00 to:

C. Ash
12 NainaPriyanka
Hassanzubair
ND 1867
Bangladesh

I will send you your brand new SEO keyboard right way