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Beware the Giant Panda

Hi Gang,

Well I’ve heard it all now. First of all we had “Big Daddy”
then later on we had “Florida” and god knows what in between
and now low and behold we have the Giant Panda!!

OK in this case just known as “Panda” but for all it’s worth
the Internet’s best illustrators are all using images of the
cute and cuddly Giant Panda for illustration as opposed to its
smaller cousin the Red Panda.

I would imagine there are groups of Red Panda’s the world over
all busy consulting their Lawyers as I write, trying to fathom
out how as a group they lost out on such a PR stunt but then
there you go, life isn’t fair. If it was, updates like this
wouldn’t happen in such a manner.

Ho hum

However back to business, the latest in Google Updates hereinafter
known (according to Google itself) as the Panda Update and what
an update it was?

Rather than try and second guess exactly what has happened (who
in their right mind would want the gig of trying to second guess
Google) I thought that in this case that I’d just provide some
links to other articles arguably better written than my humble
attempts at prose where you can find slightly more reverent
opinions as to what exactly is going on:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/2/

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm/

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/google-clamp-down-content-factories/

I know I know, this update was all about “nuking” those sites
that only survive by regurgitating what others have written and
here I am doing exactly just that but heck, life is too short
and too much has been written about this update by those better
qualified than “yours truly” and my concern is more or less
“where do we go from here?”. How can we survive? How do I keep
the present Mrs Morgan in the manner to which she has become
accustomed and how do I stop my son and heir to the Morgan
family overdraft from spending all the family savings.

Well the answers to the latter are questionable but I reckon
the answer to the first i.e. “How can we survive?” is not a
million miles from the approach I counselled in my last newsletter
about surviving a “Google Dance”.

If you’re in the US and you’ve been hit (and there have been
loads) then there is nothing at present you can do immediately,
the damage is done, all you can do is sit down dispassionately
and try and think logically about how you can structure your
sites from here on in.

If you are based outside of the US and your core market is not
based round Google.com in the US then there is still time to
make some emergency adjustments if necessary as Google in their
infinite wisdom have decided to hit the US first and depending
upon the outcome and how bad the collateral damage is, hit the
rest of us at a yet to be determined later date.

It would appear that Google are after the whole sector of the
Internet that exists by republishing in all shapes or forms other
peoples content. The sort of sites that appear to suffering the
most through this update funnily enough are the major Article
Directories such as Ezine Articles ( apparently they have lost
over 25% of their traffic due to this update), Hub pages, Suite101,
wisegeek, buzzle, associated content and also one of my favourites,
Articlesbase.

Looking at what exactly these sites all appear to have lost,
the overall opinion would appear to be that the real losers
here are the smaller lower quality types of articles that are
either badly spun or badly rehashed versions of other material
found elsewhere.

Now with every downside, there is a corresponding upside and it
would appear here that if you are taking lots of care as to
exactly what you allow to be published on your site both in
terms of size and originality then you appear to be OK.

This of course is a good thing and the other important factor
here is that off page aspects of SEO (such as Link Building)
appear to be of even greater importance and how you structure
things matter greatly here.

It’s not all bad news and before this newsletter gets too unwieldy
I’ll sign off by stating that certain basics of SEO still remain
the same i.e. the most important piece of “on page SEO” is getting
the tags for pages correct (the Title tag here being absolutely
essential) and then also the amount and variety of your back
link landscape.

Now in our collective rush for automation this is quite often
overlooked.

What Google wants to see now more than ever is a Back Links
Landscape that as closely as possible resembles that which would
exist if it was purely compiled through natural organic processes
such as just through human intervention. So this means as large
as possible a huge variety of Domains and IP no’s. Lots of
different types of links, Directs, In directs, do follow, no
follow (yes these too) and even mistakes such as typos and badly
coded links. All links that look as if they have been compiled
by humans and reflecting what is arguably the most common human
frailty, the ability to screw up and make mistakes.

In my next newsletter (coming out shortly) I’ll go through in
more detail additional aspects of how you can further attempt
to “bomb proof” sites from Google and a couple of services starting
almost immediately from us here at SLS that will really help to
ensure that you comply with all future Google interventions.

Usual deal.  Any questions then ask away in the Forum or if the
subject is that sensitive then feel free to email me directly.

Speak soon gang.

Steve

Surviving a Dance with Google

Hi Gang,

There has been a lot of talk on various Discussion Boards recently
about getting “Google Slapped” or “Google Danced” and what do
you do when it happens?

The first thing we always find is actually to recognize this for
what it is and don’t panic.

OK, easier said than done but it’s the best advice I can give.

The reason I say this is as follows.

If you are in a full blown state of panic then there is no chance
that you will think coldly and dispassionately (as you should)
about what to do about your sites present situation.

OK So what are my best tips on dealing with this situation when
you first encounter it?

1.    Go away and make a coffee or a Cup of your favourite
beverage and stay away from your PR or Laptop for about 5 minutes
at least.

There is nothing to gain and everything to lose by blindly pressing
all sorts of buttons, editing and re-editing pages and generally
behaving as if you spent the previous evening sleeping on a Termites
Nest.

If you’ve been “Taken for a Tango” then you certainly won’t be
able to redress the situation within minutes by any of your
actions as things like this don’t get resolved that quickly
despite what the various Gurus’ promise. But by giving yourself
a bit of breathing space and the ability to think calmly then
your next actions could turn out to be really productive.

2.    Return to your work station and now having had a degree
of separation between yourself and your perceived problem now
you should examine in logical order what it is you have done
to your site over the previous 2-3 weeks to make sure that the
current adverse situation is not arising through any fault of
yours.

This is easier done that you think and I can think of numerous
occasions where there have been fairly massive and drastic “plunges”
in SERPS due to innocent errors on the part of webmasters. You’d
be surprised how effective and damaging an errant “noindex”
tag left in the wrong place on a page can be.?

3.    So having completed a fairly rigorous and thorough
investigation of your current situation you now establish that
indeed this has not arisen through any actual proactive act of
your own what could the cause be and what can you do about it?

The first and most usual blame centre for most problems like
this is usually aimed at the current back links activity. After
all isn’t this usually the cause of most problems such as these.

The answer to this question is usually and most emphatically
not. The reason for this being in a nutshell (as I have explained
to clients and members of SLS on numerous occasions) if this
were the case then it would be the most used and abused form
of SEO known to mankind.

After all if you can get Google to trash your competition as
a result of an influx of back links then why waste money on
your own SEO, just load up your Competitors site with loads
of dubious links and then sit back and watch your own site
serenely rising through the ashes of Google trashing all your
competition.

Not going to happen is it?

Google may be many things but it is simply more complex and
“aware” of this type of false activity than to be that simplistic
in its analysis of your site.

The answer to your question may lie purely within the subject
area known more informally to you and I as a good old plain
“Google Dance”.

The real reasons for Google Dances are hidden deep within the
mists of SEO Folklore and not even Google will admit to them
actually officially happening or for even such a phenomena to exist at all. Ask most Webmasters whether they exist and most will reply most definitely in the affirmative but again most know very little about it.

Most webmaster “guestimates” about “Google Dances” revolve
around Data Centre Upgrades that occasionally throw out results
across the board that are all inconsistent with each other.

The first thing to accept is that there is no such thing as
“one” Google Index and in fact Googles Search Index is made
up from Hundreds of Data Centres spread worldwide and therein
lies the problem. It would be a complete non starter for them
to update all at once and as such Google is in effect constantly
updating itself somewhere as they roll out one algorithm change
after another and they don’t always get it right (few of us do :-) ).
Rather than spend this entire newsletter on the details of such
phenomena rather lets concentrate on what to do to get out of
it if it occurs.

I can only stress here that our experience here has to be put
down as anecdotal but we have found through quite considerable
“non scientific testing” (i.e. we don’t sit around here in white
coats and run around the office waving clip boards etc) and most
of our techniques emerge through quite considerable trial and
error. So our view is that the quickest way to get out of the
effect of a Google Dance is to concentrate on freshening up as
much as possible the IP spread of the Back Links Landscape you
have created for your site.

Bookmark like heck basically and bookmark anything that links
to your site so that not only are you creating fresh IP’s for
the Bots to discover but also add to the power of the links you
already have. Sooner or later the added power of your existing
links plus the appearance of more and varied links will tip the
scales back in your favour.

This is where the large links lists that we feature within the
Members download area of the SLS Support Forum come in handy.
Don’t worry about Page Rank or whether the links are dofollow
or nofollow, just widen that IP spread like mad.

Lastly, just as an adjunct to the above, I’ve spoken to quite
a few SLS members recently about a resource we’re opening up
shortly that will assist the above “big time” as they say.

We’ve been working on two separate Projects recently that we
decided to bring together and they are as a follows:

1.    A Resource of EDU Blog Urls that are useful and available
for Blog Commenting.

2.     A Similar resource to the EDU List but concerning
mainstream Urls ( i.e. .coms, .net and .org’s etc) and as such
a much bigger resource.

To give you an idea of how big a resource and database we are
processing at the moment, we have over 24 million Blog Domains
and over 36 million Bog Urls we are processing our way through.
Now we are refining the searches here down to only consider pages
where the Actual Page Rank of the Page is quite reasonable and
not just the domain Page Rank.

At present we have over 40,000 Urls where the PR is 2 and above
(actual Page Rank and not Domain Rank) and we have over 8,000
Urls on EDU Domains with a Page Rank of 1 or over.

We are going to be making these available to members on a regular
basis at quite frankly what is effectively “at cost” i.e. at
$27 per thousand Urls or $37 per thousand Urls to non members.
Now in each pack there will be 1,000 Urls and the page rank will
be spread between 1 and 4 (again actual PR of the Page) and will
be spread in proportion. This means that approximately in every
1,000 Urls there will be a spread of rank as follows:

400 PR 1 Urls

300 PR 2 Urls

200 PR3 Urls

100 PR 4 Urls (SLS members will get a few PR4+ plus some EDU
Urls thrown in as a well.

Now this will also be available as a forthcoming service via
the Warrior Forum plus a few others and places will be limited
but as before first choice option goes to members of Simple
Leveraging. We aim to only have about 400 members of this project
as obviously we want to try and limit the exposure of the information.

Now a similar service has just been launched by one of the “Gurus”
and they are charging $197 for 1,000 Urls which we think is a
complete over the top rip off adn that is why our service is
effectively at cost.

Why?

Well as I said, we have nearly 36 million potential Urls to
work with and probably over 400,000 with Page Rank so that is
more than we can handle as an in house resource and our aim
here at Simple Leveraging is always to try and look out for
our Members interest first and foremost.

This project is called “The Lost Art of Conversation” and is
ultimately an attempt to increase the quality of comments found
on Blogs and we will also be running a series of Videos whereby
we analyse a series of Blog Urls with a number of suggestions on
how to engage the Blog owner to publish your comment plus leave
you with a nice in-bound link.

I will send some more information about the “The Lost Art of
Conversation” in the next 24 hours to keep everyone informed
and up to speed so to speak.

In the meantime get back linking!!

Speak soon

Steve

Kick Start Your New Year Linkwise, Feel Good and Donate to Charity

“Kick Start your New Year’s Link Building with a Vengeance”

Hi Gang

Let us help you “Kick Start your New Year’s Link Building with a Vengeance”.

If you sign up to Simple Leveraging at the moment you get access to the ‘Net’s largest Private Social Bookmark Directory Network for starters which is over 362 strong and about to launch its next development of a couple dozen more Directories so this kicks butt big time for starters.

However that’s not all, in the members Free Download area there are lists for each member to download and use where we give you over 40,000 places where you can place additional links for your promotion. There are also more lists on the way as we show you how to make you build the most substantial Link Structures anywhere that will withstand the biggest and “baddest slaps” going but there’s more…….

Not only do we want to make your decision to join Simple Leveraging even more of a no-brainer but we want you to feel good about as well. Get in touch with us and I promise we will do the following.

Normally our Monthly membership rates here at Simple Leveraging are $65 a month with an initial setup fee of $65 in the first month making the cost $845 but we have a special yearly option available at $329 and I want to be able to offer you the following deal which will be of cracking value but also make you feel great about yourself as well.

Save money and make yourself feel good about it

We have a local Charity here in Northern Ireland that we want to help in 2011. It is the Children’s Hospice and it is one of the most worthwhile causes you will ever contribute to and I want you to do the following. When we have spoken and you have decided to join our “elite band” then I want you to go to their Just Giving donation page at http://www.justgiving.com/nihc/donate/ and donate $20. Send me the confirmation link to info @ simpleleveraging.com and I will match your donation in terms of additional discount and therefore you will qualify for the yearly deal at the discounted rate of $289 instead of $329 – a discount of $40 off, twice your donation of $20.

So not only do you qualify for an extra discount you get to feel good as well?

Who can beat that and believe me this is for a great cause.

For those who are unfamiliar with the work of the Hospice movement then visit this link: http://www.nihospicecare.com/index.php/NIHospice/childrens-hospice.html

I am sure you will all agree with me that this type of care is essential and for anyone who has visited somewhere like a Children’s Hospice that is basically providing help for “End of life Care” it is extremely harrowing yet strangely rewarding work but is essential.

Go on, you know you want to, do it and make a difference to a group of folks who will really appreciate it.

Rescuing De indexed Pages and / or Sites plus Freebie Members Bonus

Hi Gang,

Just a quickie to tell you all about a freebie we have coming out later this week for members. I have had various discussions over the past week or so and one of the common themes is “how do I go about rescuing a domain / web site when it has appeared to disappear from sight index wise and / or been slapped by one or other of the Search Engines?”

Now if we are all honest then most of us have been in this unfortunate situation from time to time and the best piece of advice that I can always offer in a situation like this is to look at ways that you can “freshen up” the back links landscape of the site or domain in question.

This is quite often one of the less well known aspects of the SEO but it really is one of the most basic and the reason behind it is actually quite obvious when you think about it.

What Search Engines are looking for when they “come calling” is to see a web site that as far as its Link Profile is concerned is a profile that as closely as possible approximates that that would have been created if the entire process had been created by human intervention and not via a network of software applications.

What is that we humans do best?

Screw up, that’s we do more often than most and in a lot of cases that is what we do best and as such that is quite often what the SE’s want to see. As such as far as inbound links then the SE’s want to see a good healthy mix of the following:

  1. Direct Anchor Links
  2. Indirect links
  3. Redirects
  4. Dofollow links
  5. Nofollow Links
  6. Typos
  7. Good IP spread of inbound links

A back links landscape comprised of a healthy mix and spread of the above type of links will stand you in good stead and make whatever landscape you are constructing look credible and believable.

So how do we go about the above and make this whole landscape look varied and believable. Firstly don’t shy away from sites that only provide “nofollow” links as these can still be extremely useful for two reasons. Bear in mind that our back links serve two purposes. Firstly we want to try and pass on and / or aquire as much “juice” or credibility as we can from the originating site as possible and secondly we want to try and make sure that the links and / or pages we are promoting are discovered as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Now bear in mind what the “nofollow” attribute does to a link. Basically it tells GoogleBot not to pass on any acquired power / PR / ”juice” or whatever to the target site for the link but that is all. Contrary to a lot of folks it does not tell the Crawler or Bot not to follow that link just to disregard any link power that the originating site may or may not be passing on. As such “nofollow” links quite often are to be found on sites or locations that might be good for traffic and to that end they are perfect.

Bear in mind that our second major attribute of an inbound link is to make our target pages discovered as soon as possible and therefore “nofollow” links serve this purpose excellently. So the ideal scenario is to use “nofollow” links to link to or support pages where “dofollow” links exist to make them discovered as soon as is possible.

So we drive traffic and Bots via our “nofollow” links to our other back links and therefore get them discovered and crawled and therefore the Linking Process begins and the “dofollow” links start to accumulate and direct power to our target and / or other web 2.0 pages that are part of our structure.

Now whilst we were fine tuning our approach to “re invigorating” supposed dead sites we happened to stumble upon ( no pun intended as Stumbleupon was not a site that we used in this scenario) another of the so called New Generation of sites that helped us kick start one of our so called dead sites.

Now quite often sites or pages can slip down the indexes if Google or Yahoo etc think the page or site in question is dead and no longer current or valid. At this point you have to do two things. First off you need to rejuvenate the inbound links – freshen the profiles of these links up as much as is possible and then secondly you have to tell the Bots that the site in question is not actually dead or moribund but still “alive and kicking”.

There are several ways that you can accomplish the latter but one of the most effective ways of doing this we have found is to make sure that as much traffic finds its way to the site in question and by the very nature of this traffic, it tells Google / Yahoo/Bing (almost forces them) to reconsider its assessment of the viability of the site.

We have found Twitter to be rather useful in this and it was whilst we were experimenting with Twitter earlier today that we found out how useful it could be.

Now that Google has started to crawl and index Tweets then Twitter really starts to figure quite proactively as far as site promotion is concerned. Not only is it an ace way to drive highly targeted and focussed traffic to your site but if you have the support of a at least one (preferably more) good Twitter accounts with “clout” then there can be considerable benefits all round.

By “clout”, I mean a Twitter user profile with a reasonable number of followers that suggest to the outsider that it is an account of some standing” (the more followers the better) and as such merits consideration.

Now the commonly held view is that with Twitter you have to get your user accounts over the 2,000 follower marker as soon as is possible. Once you have more than 2,000 followers your credibility rises accordingly.

Developing a Robust Tier 1 Blogging Structure

If you are going to develop any form of Link Structure to assist in the promotion of any of your online activities then it is best to build that structure in a manner that will withstand all the knocks and “brickbats” that will come its way.

Launched today is the Simple Leveraging Back to Basics Course where we examine a wide variety of Link Building Strategies that you can pursue.

Video 1 is where we examine the whole Simple Leveraging Methodology and how you can integrate what we call your Tier 1 Blog Structure so that it can achieve the maximum level of support possible and still flexible to withstand all forms of expansion, contraction and general shenanigans.

The video can be found here.

The SL Submitter v1.1 is finally live and kicking serious butt!!!

Our first new Autosubmitter went live yesterday and the initial results are looking fantastic. Will get the videos live as soon as we have finished the voiceovers.

It’s called the SL Submitter v1.1 and it speeds up indexing of web sites in Google and Yahoo etc and in one case one of our testers was getting 12 pages of a brand new dot com site indexed within Google in just over 24 hours. In another he got 9 pages indexed in the same period. In another case one tester saw their Ad Revenue and traffic rocket by 150%. To most onlookers this would be very much a case of “you really do need to get more” but for those of us involved in the commercial side of the Internet, speed of indexing can be the difference between a project being successful or dying on its backside.

So finally, to Andy (my lead programmer) a big big thank you for all your hard work and putting up with me (thoses of you who know me really well will know that I’m a great big softie at heart really) and look I forward to developing further updates and about another 5-6 sister applications.

Click Here to view the guided Tour of Simple Leveraging: click here

It’s all a matter of Psychology?

Whaaat? First he tries to sell me a Mega Bookmarking system, now he’s an expert in Psychology? Either he’s just come straight back from the Pub (us folks over here in Ireland do like to have the odd wee trip down to our favourite “imbibing establishment” on a Friday lunchtime) or his wife has put some more out of date luncheon meat in his Sandwiches today and he’s tripping badly!

None of these, dear brothers in the “Fellowship of the Simple Leveragers” none of the above.

I’m here merely again to advise you of two things and to point you in the direction of some cracking Free information.

I have just finished reading some Free Newsletters on Internet Business and Copyrighting put together by John Carlton. They are brilliant and what is particularly brilliant is that the psychology of the marketing tactics he espouses can be put into perfect practice with selling your newly acquired experience, services and tools that you have with Simple Leveraging.

Now what I want you to do is to go to this link (http://SimpleWritingSystem.com/blog/sws-express-intro-lesson2/) , sign up and download the four free SWS Bonus reports. This is not an affiliate link, that’s not the way we operate.

I know I know, “’Er Indoors”, “She who must be obeyed” will be livid again at passing up yet more financial gain in the pursuit of making our membership happy but the family will have to settle again for simple fare this weekend instead of “Filet Mignon” whilst we give you a straight link, no affiliate sign up, no cookies, just a straight simple piece of free advice.

Go to this link ( http://SimpleWritingSystem.com/blog/sws-express-intro-lesson2/ )and sign up, confirm and then download the reports. You’re not then obliged to do anything else. Sure you’ll get emails from him now and then but then he is one of the coolest copyrighting geniuses around so actually that’s no bad thing. Then think about what he says and how this free knowledge is going to help you put into application the next two batches of information I am going to tell you about in our course of “How to make serious cash using Simple Leveraging”.

Now go and do it now whilst I think up a reason how to explain this to “The Boss”.

The Link is again:

http://SimpleWritingSystem.com/blog/sws-express-intro-lesson2/

Cheers

Steve

The Perils and Pitfalls of Third Party (Parasitical) Links and Link Building

This actually sounds more unpleasant than it actually is and let me state right from the outset that I use the term “Parasitical” advisedly and purely to refer to the practice of placing Links on third party web sites either with or without them complying with their Terms of Service.

Now unless you have been living under a rock for the past few months you would have been hard pushed to miss one “irresistible offer” after another claiming to offer to provide you with the “ultimate game changer” as far as Google and the other Search Engines are concerned by way of the ultimate tool that will provide you with a “bazillion links” all within nanoseconds of starting and especially on accounts on web sites that until you started that particular tool you were unaware of!!

Wow what a package and where do I sign up?

Now I know there are going to be quite a few out there who will now attempt to haul me over the coals and generally attempt to pillory me over this but don’t believe the hype and please don’t fall for it either.

Let me explain why this is all B.S and perhaps you’ll understand where I am coming from.

Now there are very few software applications out there on the Internet that allow you to post material and especially links on sites without some sort of account application process and this believe me takes time.

We are testing a few of the so called game changers at the moment and to be honest none of them (repeat none of them) are performing exactly as the sales blurb states they do.

Now out of professional respect to the suppliers, we don’t comment publicly on what applications work and those that don’t as to be honest  I need “a flame war” with either an application owner or some stooge on their behalf  like a hole in the head but I will say this.

One application we are testing at the moment claims to be able to submit to over 1,500 web sites automatically and create the necessary accounts to do so and all with just a couple of clicks and the job is done.

Firstly when we checked the documentation this particular process actually took the running of an application three times and then we managed to create accounts at only 694 web sites out of the promised 1,500 and then the process took 14 hours to complete.

If that’s an immediate high speed application then I’d hate to be around when they produce something that works slowly.

The other problem lies with the type of site that you are trying to place your links on. By and large they really don’t want your links and if they allow it then it is by and large in so called Member profiles that one by one are having the heck abused out of by the Black Hat Brigade. As such one by one they are either being forced to change how they operate by Google who view this as a blatant method to “game the system” (bright boys) such as Squidoo or by the sheer outrage of the community that link builders are trying to take advantage of such as with the Pligg Community.

I’ll be covering this in more detail on the membership forum over the next few weeks and months as we launch a whole series of new additions to the Simple Leveraging Community but let me leave you with one last thought.

If a suggestion or technique in an email sounds and looks almost too good to be true then by and large it is…..untrue :-(

Climb Every (Link) Mountain

Just a quick follow up on the email I sent out recently about the terrific Link Wheel we had had constructed for a client recently and a few of you had raised a couple of issues that I thought might be of interest to more of you.

First of all let me bring you up to date with the particular clientexercise that brought this about (within reason) the results of an SEO exercise we are carrying out for a client at the moment (without getting into too much detail for reasons of client confidentiality – though will check as I am sure they won’t mind but…).

We started off with 22 terms in the Health and Fitness Niche of which we were on Page 1 or 2 for all 22 so the summary of the position at the outset on May 28th was as follows:

Nos in those positions

Positions May 28th June 4th

Top 20          6             0
Top 10          4             5
Top 5          4             5
Top 3          2             3
Top 2          4             7
No 1          2             2

So the initial story is that the current round of promotion had taken the various key phrases and concentrated them now quite firmly into Page 1 for every keyword / phrase we were targeting and in most cases now quite firmly towards the upper half of Page 1

Now an analysis of the results threw up the following bits of information as well.

1. We had increased our profile of places where we had consecutive places i.e. 2&3 etc by more than double and in fact out of the 22 terms we now had 12 double positions.

2. The rise in SERPS appeared to be across the board with a rise in places for terms that we had scheduled to really get behind book marking wise later this week so the Link Wheels additional effect appears to be increasing the weight behind the entire site and not just specific terms.

All of this before we really could add any additional SEO behind the Link Wheel i.e. it is too early to count in the effects of additional RSS work or increased book marking of the pages, which of course we will do.

Once I get clearance from the client then I will post more details and information about this exercise into the members’ area so you can get a clearer idea of what we are talking about. As I mentioned it’s in the Health and Fitness Equipment Niche and though fairly small there are about 10 to 20 companies “taking chunks out of each other” at the top of this niche and it is fiercely competitive.

Now some of the other issues raised by members were as follows:

1. Is this type of Link Wheel a traditional one or is it random and how much use are they? Well an analysis of the structure makes it look fairly random to us and as to the continued efficiency of these as promotional tools I can only point to the results above achieved so far and they will get better once we swing the full force of the entire SLS Network behind each Link Spoke i.e. each Blog.

2. How effective are they for sites at various stages in their development and what about too many links? My take on this is as follows. As the great economist, John Maynard Keynes said “In the long term we are all dead”. The old concept of too many links is an old wives tail. If it wasn’t then you would crucify your site every time you released a successful Press Release that got picked up all over the place. Life is too short. If folks want to wait for “forever and a day” attracting 2-3 links per day whilst the rest of the world flies by then fine but I think life is about a little more than this. You need results if not now, certainly by the end of the week. It is that important.

3. Is it possible to have more than one Link Wheel active at any one time and how can we maximise the return? Can you have too many links coming from any one URL towards the same URL? Not really it’s called deep linking and anything that helps Googlebot find your internal pages is fine in my book.

The thing is that once you have this set up you have total access via username and password to each site so my advice would be to start adding spun content at random to the various sites and then bookmark these pages as and when you add them so you have a fairly organic growing “Link Mountain”.  Wow, forget about Wheels, Pyramids, Clouds etc we are building a Link Mountain!! These entire buzz phrases get a bit silly after a while, still I’m sure someone will use it one day. The other is that the cost of getting this whole thing up and running quickly (takes 6 days) is so cost effective that the best thing to do is get the basic structure in place and then enhance it gradually.

4. After you receive your report, how many links is ideal behind each spoke? I would hit it with the lot – read point 2…seriously why not? Hit it with your full allocation, your library pass, any pots and pans that come to hand and if necessary the neighbours cat!

5. After the report arrives what RSS promotion should be done and how to develop links further?  I would hit it with all the resources you have at your disposal. The thing about Google is that yes it finally gets round to recognising things with indexing etc but folks get too paranoid about Google. There are millions of web users and site owners out there with new sites coming on stream every day. It would be totally paranoid of me to assume that Google have a department set aside with my picture on the wall and every time I do something a buzzer goes off deep in the heart of the Googleplex with teams of “apparatchiks” all streaming out with “get Steve Morgan” emblazoned on their foreheads!

I hope this goes some way to clarifying any potential queries some of you might have had over this but as usual, any further questions then fire away and keep them coming in.

Lastly, Simple Leveraging has finally succumbed to Twitter. I know, I know, I preach on and on about Best Practice in this and that and here we are, Simple Leveraging has not has a fully developed Twitter Account. Well actually it has, it’s just that with all the other comings and goings and advising people “here and there” we never actually got round to developing it to its full potential.

Now the real reason that we are finally pushing our Twitter account is that it is the ideal platform for advising people quickly and effectively regarding any potential networking issues that might exist at any one time and that might be affecting submissions. So from now on we will be using Twitter to notify folks of any networking issues so if you want to keep “in the loop” then add our account at http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=DXfSd&m=1dpXxD4cF9P1kG&b=3GMYcjF5nAhnghX7XBf9FA  Also any issues that it is quicker to notify folks about via Twitter than conventional media then we’ll use it that way too.

In the meantime, have a colossal weekend, don’t catch too much sun and enjoy…

Cheers

Steve

Forget about Link Wheels, Build yourself a Link Mountain!

Hi Gang

We have just taken delivery from one our associates an incredible deal for Link Wheels.

The size of the Link Wheel we ordered was for 100 spokes (pretty massive) and it also came with a free shot for the links to the supplier’s autopligg network. Now to be honest, this was very much an addition that was useful for spidering purposes if nothing else.

Pligg, for those who aren’t aware is a nice little application that is effectively an OS equivalent of Digg, i.e. it works very much by way of peer recommendation and votes etc but to be honest has very much been abused over the past 12 months or so and as such the majority of the thousands of Pligg sites there are out there are all virtually now “nofollow” so for SEO purposes it is not that much use but they do add to your IP spread so there is a limited value. In this case we were more interested in the coverage for the client and the spidering so we went ahead.

The Link Wheel, when it arrived, actually comprised 117 spokes instead of the 100 guaranteed and what really made us feel good about this was that when we entered the urls into our Bulk C Class IP checker we found the following results:

Domains Entered 117
Total distinct domains: 117
Unique IPs: 113
Unique Subnets: 108
Domains with Duplicate subnets: 15
Domains with Duplicate IPs: 4

Which I think most folks will agree is pretty damn good for SEO purposes.

Now there are a number of ways of looking at this and I think the best way is as follows and this is the real reason I am writing out to all members about this. Firstly all these sites are based on WPMU which as you all know is the multi user platform for WordPress so is good for Googlebot recognition for starters. When we checked there were some nice PR4 and PR3 domains in there so its going to do some good as well but the real bonus for all of you out there who reckon they can do this sort of thing cheaper is this. Firstly, what you get is a good working list of WPMU sites for future reference which in itself is a result. We managed to compile a list of about 240 WPMU sites recently through a supposedly well known piece of software that is good for checking footprints etc and the results were complete junk.

By junk I mean we managed to find about 25 working sites out of 240 and it took us over 3 hours to check so we wasted all that time.

Here the grunt work is done for you.

The other aspect of this and is the reason that we will continue to use this service for our SEO clients (that’s how much we rate this service) is that on an hourly charge-out basis it’s a complete no-brainer.

The service retails at $90 for a 100 spoke Link Wheel (better that on Warriors? I think not), takes 6 days to deliver and will probably over deliver again. We have managed to negotiate a discount rate for our members of $20 so the cost drops again from $90 to $70 which is even more of a steal and I am sure as our usage of this service grows that we will be able to get an even keener price which of course we will pass on to members as and when this happens.

The other way of looking at this is how can you get this done yourself for the price?

Outsource it?

OK yes but as I said, you have to find the working WPMU (which are also still dofollow) sites first and that as we have shown takes time and effort and that costs.

My recommendation, get in touch and we’ll set up the process for you?

Cheers

Steve

PS more deals on the way, just looking after our members best interests.

PPS No here’s a thought? Take the above and plug it into 382 + Social Bookmark Directories and you have a serious amount of promotion going on, know what I mean? Watch this space for the results and see how it goes ;-)

pps Forget about Link Wheels, build yourselves Link Mountains

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