At LONG last, Google has worked out a drum that I have been banging for a long time now. You can NOT fiddle outbound links!

In his blog Matt Cutts has posted how a change to the algorithm has altered rankings and crawling dramatically, and how your outbound links can affect how your viewed. WELL HELLO GOOGLE! So you have finally woken up to start smelling the coffee

 For a long time now I and a few others have posted across forums how it is nigh on impossible to spam out bound linking. ? How so OWG I hear you ask . Well it is simple—-

 Just say you want to game the search engines by linking out, so off you go and you get some good copy written for your page, in your page you get some research done for the sites that are most relevant. It takes some time, but you figure ‘hey I WILL spam this algorithm, I WILL beat the search engine system’. Eventually your page is complete, you release it to the spiders in all its glory, decked out in quality focused content, with top quality out  bound links on it to what you consider to be the best resources on the page subject. HA! You Beat the search engines

 Or did you?

In your attempt to spam the algorithm, you have in fact created a VERY valuable page in the grand scheme of the internet. Your copy is on topic, your extensive research has created one of the best resources online for that particular subject. As realisation dawns that in fact you have NOT ‘beaten’ the algorithm, in fact it has beaten YOU, you crawl away to sulk having put on your sad face that is normally reserved for sad Sunday!

But wait, HARK, what is that noise? It is the annoying bleep bleep of your mail programme telling you you have mail. YOU have MAIL? but your a spammer ? WHO would send a spammer mail? Curious you take a look. The mail all starts off with the same sort of words, such words are alien to you…….

Hi there, I just wanted to say thanks for the information I found on your site at www. spamtheworld.com.

WHAT are these people talking about? I mean people don’t THANK ME! Are they nuts? This is a spam page designed to game the algorithm!!!

In time you get more mails, as those who sent you the original thank you emails thank you further by linking to your site so others can enjoy the site. This results in an ever increasing spiral of visitors emails, thank you’s and MORE people linking to you. WORSE than the fact they link to you is the fact that THEIR sites are relevant to yours, so they are sending more and more traffic.

But HA— YOU have the last laugh because these people that are coming to your site, buying stuff from the affiliate links you have on the subject, or clicking on the adverts you have on the site are DUMB, because they don’t realise they are being spammed, and they visit, come back and click again, many of them even link to the site they are so dumb. They just don’t realise they are being spammed.

As the cheques arrive, you sit back and laugh, thinking,  ’how good is this on topic resource building spamming is!’ You drift off to sleep deep in the thought of how you can spend many hours creating your next high quality, top notch page to fool the search engines.

——————–

The moral of this story is that it is almost impossible to spam outbound links. comments appreciated!

Lots has been happening in the last week, with some meaty changes and happenings in search. I have also been pulling together some of the questions that visitors have sent me, so if your one of them then expect an answer to it over the next day or two.

I can answer one or two questions immediately though.

1. I would not like to enlarge my manhood

2. I do not need to reduce my mortgage

3. I really don’t think my wife would approve of  my new Russian Bride, so I will pass on meeting you, even though you are in town tonight.

4. My sexual health is just fine, I feel like a real man already, and I do not want to ‘make her happy all night’ We have a child for heavens sake, she has to get out of bed early in the mornings .

5. I do not want a replica Rolex, I had a real one and it didn’t keep time that well, also you need a  winch to view it as lifting your own arm up is out of the question thanks to the sheer weight.

Hopefully that answers the easy questions, that I KNOW you have all been waiting to hear answered

So far we have covered the basics, set out our stall, and began the process of keyword research. Today we roll our sleeves up and lay the foundations for a successful website.

OK, you now have a list of words that are relevant to your industry If you have used word tracker overture etc you will have ‘some’ idea of the potential importance/popularity of these phrases. Nothing is going to give you data however like a live advertising campaign will. The added bonus of running a live campaign is that you are going to be delivering traffic to your site which really should deliver sales. I always try to evaluate the potential ROI for keywords for the client, as you should not really rely on organic listings for your business.

Google is the most popular search engine, and with this in mind you should run your test data on a Google ad words campaign. The amount of money you spend will be directly relevant to the industry in which you work, that said so will be the returns. Remember now that one of the aims of this exercise is to find out how many searches there are for your chosen list of words, this will help you decide what phrases to attack later. Armed with this fact, you are going to have to make sure that your advert is appearing in the top 4 or so, certainly no lower than 6. Google delivers 8 ads per page, and by ensuring your ad is top 4 you can be sure that the number of impressions is going to 100 equate to the number of searches for that word.

 It is important that you do not run the campaign just on a broad match basis, as this is going to skew your results. The way I do it is to run the list broad (without any operators) Phrased (you place the keywords into quotation marks “word” and also exact (you place it in Parenthesis [word] ). By doing this you will see which brings in the most traffic, which converts the best (if you use the tracking code).

Run the test for a realistic period on a normal time, i.e. don’t run it for three days that include only a weekend, as you will miss the traffic from people who connect at work. Try not to run a test over a holiday weekend, for the same reasons. The longer you run your test the more accurate your data is going to be, better to spend a few extra £$ etc now than to get it wrong and go for the wrong words. It is essential that you keep a close eye on your spend however, and, if need be split the words into groups of possibles probables, maybes etc. This will make it easier to control the daily spend.

I have my data, now what?
You now get to the fun part; you have to ‘grade’ your keywords. You know how many searches a phrase gets, but that alone is not enough. Right away you can dump the phrases that no one searched for during your test period. There is no point in attacking words that no one searches for is there!

Should you attack the words with the largest search volume? Of course you should, as that is going to bring in the most traffic right? YES it is right, but it might also be the most competitive word, and be one that is going to take 12 months 2 years or more to get a ranking for, in some cases you might never get it. The key here is to gauge the competition, but how do we do that?

Many people post in forums that they are working in a very competitive arena, as there are over 6 million pages returned for a search. WOW 6,000,000 competing pages? NO there are not that many, there are just 6m pages returned for that phrase.

The most basic piece of SEO is the page title, if a page does not have the phrase in the title; it is unlikely to be trying to compete for the phrase. You can find out how many pages compete by running a simple operator on google like this :-

Intitle:”your phrase here”

The above will tell you how many pages have those words in the page title. Putting it in inverted comas will give you how many pages have it in the phrase. E.G intitle:”your phrase”.  

OK so we now know that x number of pages have that phrase in the title that is a better idea of the volume of competition.

Can we further investigate competition?

Yes we can, and in part 5 we will discuss it further.