Although this blog is not about search engine optimization, the company I run – Zealus Web Design Studio – is providing search engine optimization services. Which means we do conduct some in-house experiments. One of the experiments we did was on anti-optimization. In other words – we were trying to figure what actions may lead to web site’s loosing certain position in Google’s output.

Aside from obvious things, like decreasing the number of external links and their quality, removing links from social services and so on, we found that some things don’t quite work as expected. For example – removing pretty and fat links from other web sites don’t send the web site back to the position it held before. So for example, let’s say your web site was number 16 (or 6th on a second page). You’ve added a bunch of links from good web sites with some PR juice and your site jumped to be number 12. Now, if you kill every single link that you have added the web site will sink to (approximately) 14 – 15th position, staying one or two steps higher then before.

Not sure why is this happening, but it does. I’ll give it some time to see if it will sink deeper, but it looks like if you purchase links a little before Google’s PR update and remove them a little after – it may do the same trick as if you were paying for them all the time. All you need is just a sharp date of the next Google dance.

As a bad taste SEO techniques adopter a company called Sitelynx on behalf of the The Times (UK) was spamming media sites with links. Why would a reputable publication like The Times fall for black-hat SEO techniques is another story. What is interesting is that a report on Waxy.org looks like a breakdown to bootstrapping your web site. Well, at least a part of it. Comments give an idea what was done wrong, what worked and what didn’t. Very interesting indeed.

Last week I was participating in another experiment with Freshmeat.net. A lot of pages there have PR 3 and above, so it was naturally a good idea to comment away. However, moderators appear to be quite on guard, so most of the experimental posts and accounts went down the drain couple of days after the end.

Short and comprehensive guide – how to create a link bait on your site. Thanks to members of SitePoint and DigitalPoint forums this all have been gathered.

1. Put together a list of web resources (forums, blogs) that are relevant to your topic
2. Put together a good post or article or eBook or anything of the real value. Give it out for free from your resource
3. Write a brief about your value post. Call it a press-release and submit it to proper catalogs (they called press release web sites)
4. Contact blogs you have gathered in step one. Give them the link to your content and press release.
5. Register or open new thread on forums you gathered in step one. Provide link to the content you have created. Answer questions. Be a good forum member. Don’t forget to put a link to your content in your signature.
6. Write couple of articles about whatever you have created. Use title of your free content as anchor text. Submit these articles to article directories.
7. Stumble, Digg, Reddit, put it on del.icio.us. If it’s a video, can be shown on video or can be featured in video – put it on YouTube. Don’t waste your time on Netscape, by the time you read this it’s probably long gone dead.
8. Guest-post on other blogs. Explain what and why you have created your content. Create buzz.
9. If you have ties via social web sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, etc.) promote your content there.

Most of these bullet points are very obvious to anyone who ever tried to get a decent amount of traffic to the web site. Still, not everyone manages to follow through these simple steps. In any case – this would be a good reference point.

As I was almost going to bed tonight I (again) checked the PR in my trusty Firefox SearchStatus bar and to my dismay – it went down to 0. Of course I got puzzled and annoyed. First thing I did was going to Google Webmasters Tools to see if there is anything wrong with the blog.

Right I was! Turns out – when I changed the design of the blog I forgot to submit the site for verification again, since the old verification method was creating a specific meta tag. Obviously, with new template the meta tag was gone, which sort of angried the Google monster

Word to the wise. If you one of those people who enjoy tweaking your blog’s design instead of watching TV – don’t use meta tag verification method.

Now, if I only did it AFTER Google dance, not a week before…

No dip in website traffic though. Maybe not yet.

There is a huge number of posts on this blog that have a very high chance of never being read again. There is also a very high need to increase a PR, Alexa rank, Compete Rank and so on. There must be a way to reuse the content, at least that part of it that could be reused. So far I came up with the following tricks:

• Posts that make sense apart from the blog – submit them to article databases
• Posts that make sense without sponsored links – repost them once sponsorship expires
• Posts that make sense apart from the blog – repost them to other web sites with backlinks to main blog. This could be guest posts or just reprints.
• Posts by certain tag – mix them with posts from other blogs of similar nature to create new content-rich site.

Well, I have couple of more ideas as well. I will try them with Zealus Community Forums and will report on the progress. Most of this will be automated, so I won’t have to spend huge amount of time on that.

As any blogger I can’t help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don’t see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it’s wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa redirect and how that helps your Alexa score.

What I did was I gave out just one redirect link (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.dontdateguy.com) to our friends’ blog DontDateGuy.com on a not very crowded forum and watched stats afterwards. In just several hours I saw a tremendous boost in Alexa’s “curiosity”. Alexa was going over the site like there is no tomorrow, superseded by Google only (but who can beat that guy, eh?). For last 8 days (since the blog became active) Google hit it 143 times, Alexa 93, Yahoo 65 and Ask.com – 27. Comparing to this blog where Alexa also wasn’t showing up – pretty impressive to me.

So I have set up some more redirect links to two aforementioned blogs and will keep watching what will happen by the end of the month.

UPDATE: Alexa’s redirect doesn’t work now. Guess it got abused too much.

Last week I have discovered a new and innovative way people will produce doorways for their black hat SEO techniques. It’s called Twitter and it’s some sort of a guestbook, where posting is available via number of widgets, including direct post from IM. Create a bunch of twitter pages (the only manual part of the process), link them properly (via short posts), post automatically via IM to all hundreds and thousands of them, collect fat checks at the post office/client site.

Easy money

Today I got a call from one of my clients asking me to check stats with him as he is seeing certain discrepancies in Overture reports. We went in and figured that the number of clicks reported by Overture roughly 3 times larger then what is being reported by AWstats. Upon contact, Yahoo/Overture issued a statement that basically says “your software is badwe know better”. Alright, we thought, and ventured to check on Google. The result was astonishing – the difference was 0.6%. Either Google is very good at serving ads that are traceable, or Yahoo/Overture isn’t being honest. Or both.

Let’s play some PR games here, he-he

http://zealus.com – PR=4
http://flashcom.tv – PR=4
http://catbegemot.net – PR=4
http://sitcomtv.com – PR=4
http://wadv.biz – PR=4
http://wadv.net – PR=4

http://cynicweb.com – PR=3
http://pesikot.com – PR=3
http://photofyi.com – PR=3
http://vgrubman.com – PR=3
http://vgru.com – PR=3

On the subject of SEO (search engine optimization) – found very interesting conversation on one of the russian forums that discussed doorway making as opposed to “white” optimization methods for web site promotion. Basically, doorway making is considered “black” kind of a deal because it’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s effective and it messes up search engine output. “White” methods are just as effective, but slow, expensive and don’t mess up search engines’ output. In other words – the truth is somewhere in between, I suspect. Those, who need immediate results use cheaper and faster methods while more stable companies will use more expensive but more “stable” results.

Speaking of “more stable” results I recalled that some time ago the US Robotics web site was swarming with invisible text, invisible keywords, invisible links and other “dark side” stuff. Checked it today and the stuff has magically disappeared. Probably recent events with BMW.de played huge role in that…