ConstantClick Blog Posts

GrayWolf’s SEO Blog wrote this interesting article on links.  

I really find scandals interesting because people who are on the ball, plugged in, creative, not afraid to take chances and stir up a little controversy can do really well.

Case and Point Playgirl Magazine offered Ex-Governor Elliot Spitzer 1 Million Dollars to pose nude.

It’s a win-win scenario for Playgirl. Let’s go with the most likely outcome and assume client 9 says no, playgirl generated a decent amount of press, links, and attention, for the cost of a press release and some PR work.

Let’s enter dreamland and imagine he goes for the deal, I have no doubt that it would turn out to be the highest selling issue of Playgirl, attracting a huge amount of sales and advertising, more than enough to cover the $1 million dollar paycheck.

I recently asked Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz the following question and he was kind enough to reply, view his reply in bold below:

Hi Rand and Danny ,

Hope all is well. I have a question and I’m going to post your answers
on my blog if you don’t mind (if you answer at all, I know you guys
are busy

I have identified old domains with inbound links such as www.orlando-car.com
and www.albarentacar.com to purchase for my client site www.prestigeluxuryrentals.com

Their age and inbound links are attractive and the prices for the
domains are reasonable. Under $200 each.

Do I:
A. buy old domains and 301 to www.prestigeluxuryrentals.com
B. buy domains 301 non www to www then 301 to www.prestigeluxuryrentals.com
C. buy domain, build out sites and link to www.prestigeluxuryrentals.com

What do you think is best option? I think C is a waste of time,but I
wanted your opinion.

Jean-Pierre,

Best wishes,

Rand Fishkin 

BeefJerky.com Website Analysis

It’s pretty well known that orange and yellow hues make us think cheap when it comes to website design. When I landed on beefjerky.com (amazing domain, by the way) I was struck by the overall lack of quality design (orange colors) and I didn’t feel the good ol boy, pat you on the back, cozy feeling, that should be expected from a quality online retailer.

Why would you put so much time, energy and money into translating your site into over 14 languages and then hire someone with only novice web design skills to create your store? Would you hire someone who has never built a building to build your brick and mortar store? If the answer is no (and it unequivocally should be) then you’ll realize that’s exactly what you’ve done with beefjerky.com This is one reason you’re not selling as much jerky as you definitely should be! Here’s your schedule for tomorrow. Wake up, find the best designer you can, don’t sleep until the website is re-designed.

Now to increase traffic…ahh…this is my favorite part. Your title tag is currently “Beef Jerky,com. The Best Beef Jerky, Fresh from Beefjerky.com”
Sorry to break it to you, but not many people are typing in “Fresh from beefjerky.com” or “the best beefjerky” according to Google’s keyword tool. And this is prime keyword real-estate your giving up to non-performing keywords that are with out a doubt holding you back from receiving greater traffic.

Consider these keywords instead: Gourmet Beef Jerky, Beef Jerky Online, Buy Beef Jerky.

These keywords are searched by potential relevant customers that are more likely to make a purchase online. And there are tons of other keywords you should be using across your site to drive traffic.

For example: Start a page on how to make beef jerky and then sell your visitors a starter kit which comes with a sample of how the jerky should taste when done (they’ll like your sample better and return for more!) Obviously the keywords for that page should be “how to make beef jerky”. And don’t worry about teaching your consumer how to make your product, most people are way to busy with there every day chores and responsibilities, to become serious jerkers (is jerker the proper terminology?)

There’s a million other things I would fix on this site to probably quintuple sales in less than 60 days, but if you can’t see the mistakes your making, you should just sell beefjerky.com to one of your competitors for a couple million and retire.

Otherwise find a good website navigation design company, web designer and SEO company to arm you with the latest and greatest tools to launch your sales into the orbit and get ready to make more jerky than you ever have before.

I recently messed up bad by suggesting a friend should use Pay Per Post for some link building love. Well, what ended up happening is far from ever reaching a link building “How To” book.

I’ll make it short and sweet.

• Friend is on page six of Google for his desired key phrase.
• Friend buys $700 worth of PR 5 and up links on Pay Per Post.
• No real change happens.
• 30 days later friend buys another $700 worth of PR 5 and up links on Pay Per Post.

Poof, friend vanishes from page six and and top 100 search engine results pages too. They’re still in the index but no where near the top ten pages.

Here’s what I think happened. The same people who took the “post opportunity” the first time around, took it the second time around as well. Google noticed multiple links from not so relevant sites within 30 days apart from one another and punished my friend (thank the heavens it wasn’t a big client…lesson learned!)

So I write to Eric from StoneTemple.com the guy with all those Rambling’s About SEO and this is what he had to say…

“Hi Jean-Pierre,

Sorry for the slow response, but I am at SMX West in Santa Clara right now.
A couple of things to think about:

1. Is it possible that the pay per post links originally benefitted you, and
once they were detected and disabled, they simply stopped providing any
benefit? This is a scenario in which you would not recover, simply because
you were not actually penalized. Another words, in this scenario, all that
happened is that your paid links stopped adding value.

2. If you have in fact been penalized, and you have stopped buying links, I
would file a reconsideration request. Make sure you do this from within
Google Webmaster Tools. The standard advice for this is to keep it short
(no more than 3 paragraphs) and direct, admit your sins, point out that you
have cleaned it up, and ask for them to remove any penalty that may have
been applied.

Do NOT do this if you are concerned about what may happen to your site as a
result of a human review by a Googler. I.e. if they found some other
practice you have been using that they are not happy with, a reconsideration
request could make your situation worse. So make sure you are squeaky clean
before doing this.

3. With or without a reconsideration request, the process can take as little
as a few weeks, to several months. Unfortunately, there is no formula to
how quickly these types of things progress.

The other thing you need to think about, to drive your long term rankings
strategy, is what are you going to do to get natural links? These will be
the keys to long term success.

Hope that helps!

Eric”

Thanks for the great advice Eric, I appreciate it.
I think I will tough it out for a few more weeks though, considering we’re still in the Index and see what happens. If there isn’t an improvement soon, I’ll have to beg Google for forgiveness.

What do you think I should do? Apart from get my brain checked ofcourse…