You have to ask yourself the question, given the resources it has at its disposal, the seemingly limitless funds and general marketing & personnel clout that it can throw at a situation, how come Google so often seem to open their mouths to change their feet?

How can such an organization that prides itself on the quality of its staff and resources engaged employ such a bunch of idiots to actually go out and do what they do at times?

First there was last year’s little escapade over the serious emergence of their new Social Media Promotional angles when they said that certain types of Link and Referral data was being withheld for…wait for it……Data protection issues. Then they were found to be selling, yes you’ve guessed it, that same Data to Adwords Buyers if they paid the right fees. The whole exercise was then blown wide apart when most observers rightly (in my opinion) highlighted the whole incident as the opening shots in driving the free version of Webmaster Tools under and the emergence of a Premium version of Webmaster Tools.

Now they’ve gone and done it again in another “hello Mr Foot please meet Mr Mouth” incident over paid Linking Campaigns.

Now for those who have only just entered this fun packed little Industry of ours, Google have developed, over the years, quite a negative stance (understatement here) on the whole concept of paid links. They don’t like them, they don’t like the practice of it and if they catch sites doing it then they basically consign them to the “nether regions of on-line hell” (or certainly below No 500 in the index or ban entirely) or so the theory goes.

Imagine the hilarity then when the Big G themselves get caught out a few days ago, supposedly engaged in a paid Link Building Campaign for their Chrome Browser but when challenged about it, suddenly develop a sense of moral outrage that “yes the Campaign was ours but it was not what we signed up for!”.

Really?

As they say over here in Ireland, “Do they think we’re not wise?”

Anyway back to the point, this whole episode highlights a great many things.

Firstly Google are going to do what Google want, for the interests of Google and not anyone else and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise?

Secondly they are not above making waves and delivering changes that come completely out of the blue as with yesterdays “Search, plus your World” announcement.

Now this has to be as clear an indication that they have finally decided to come out of the closet and take on FaceBook head on in the Social Arena with a beefed up “Google Plus” program.

Now my opinions of Google Plus in the early stages were very undecided and were very much powered by my distrust of all things Google and I still have some of the reservations but I do think that Google Plus could be “where it’s at in 2012″ and that 2012 could be the first year that FaceBook “catches a cold” (albeit not a major one).

We need to study at greater length the Google “Search, plus your World” concept further and we’ll write about in the days and weeks ahead as this could be something that it is essential to keep on the right side of with regards to Google but let me finish this with one last  warning.

If in your or your client’s Campaigns you are indulging in anything even remotely, how can I put this, slightly greyish/leading to Black Hat then steer clear of Google Plus by a country mile.

The downside of Google Plus is that because they call the shots as you can only take part if you have a Google controlled account, this means that if a Grey Squirrel as much as breaks wind in Southern Spain then the boffins at the Googleplex in California will know about it. I know this might sound as if I am an apologist for the likes of George Orwell et all but Google plus could possibly turn out to be the most potentially Orwellian of online marketing tools in that it really is a case of Google playing the role of Big Brother.

They do know what you are up to so keep it smart and stay safe.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t indulge in the odd piece of “cute” marketing as that would be boring but just don’t do it with any user logins or profiles that you use for Google Plus.

Now a newsletter / email like this wouldn’t be the same without a “shameless wee plug” for one of our ongoing promotions and Volume 3 of Back Links Heaven has just been released and in this edition we cover the Forum software punBB and how we can use sites using punBB for our needs when it comes to placing links.

As with other editions of Back Links Heaven this version is available from us here at Backlinks Heaven (http://backlinksheaven.com ) and so far we have covered the following formats in Vols 1-3:

1.       Vol  1 –  UseBB +10k Assorted Forums

2.       Vol  2 – AEForums + 10K Assorted Forums

3.       Vol  3 – punBB + 10K Assorted Forums

Basically this whole Series will encompass over 500,000 assorted Forum Domain Urls spread over nearly 50 different Platforms that will, when finally published amount to arguably the largest and most comprehensive resource on Forum Marketing there is.

Each volume is available for $ 16 but there are a few limited slots still available for the Series Subscription which is $160 and represents a saving of over $640 over the entire Series.

If anyone is interested in this then get in touch and I can get you set up on the system.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

IP Diversity and Link Diversity are two often misunderstood terms in conventional Link Building methodology.

First up, when you ask most folks as to what exactly an IP is they look at you with an expression that roughly translates to “ask me one about last night’s football?”

What exactly is an IP address?

Well to quote Wikipedia it is as follows:

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.^[1] An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Its role has been characterized as follows: “A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there.“^[2]

For more information about IP Addresses see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address

For our purposes the “name of the game” here is to get your back links for any of your target Urls from as wide an IP spread as possible. Google want to see (and if Google want to see something then show them, don’t be stupid, don’t fight them) your Back Links come from as many Internet Users and Sources as possible, spread over as many parts of the globe as is humanly possible.

‘Nuff said really.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Hi Gang,

I’ve been writing recently about the success we’ve been getting over the past few Months with combining the twin power of good Press Releases and then hitting them hard with associated support practices chief amongst whom are SLS.

The process goes in this order:

1.    Keyword Research. In our case this is fairly tightly focused and widespread as to be honest we don’t want to spend too much time fighting a variety of battles so we want Niches that we can get into fairly fast. By fast I mean hours rather than days if possible

2.    Drafting the Press Release. Now as far as our main aim is to get into Niches quickly we also want to make sure that wherever possible our Chosen key phrase is right at the beginning of the body text. This is because at the moment Google is sourcing its Meta Data (i.e. the data it uses as part of its ranking algorithm) from the first 300 Characters of the Body Text. Now when you take into account that this also includes the beginning information:

(EMAILWIRE.COM October 17^, 2011) – sample date

then basically you are down to the first 145-155 Characters so our technique is put your Key phrase in first and then we usually close it with a question mark to make it isolated.

3.    Press Release Submission. Now the Service we use and one that we’ve run Webinars over is this one: http://www.warriorplus.com/linkwso/5lmj33/368 and yes this is an affiliate link but then I have to keep the present Mrs Morgan as happy as I can . The real reason we use and recommend this Service is that quite simply, we’ve found Dennis and Eric to be the best suppliers and have the best after sales and support going. For unlimited Press Releases the current rate (whatever that is) is vastly under priced but as I say, it’s the fact that they deliver every time with the Press Releases and deliver promptly. At the moment we have anywhere between 1-2 per day going through per day and by and large without any issues at all. If there are any issues and there very rarely are (I think I’ve had one problem release) the after sales support is so good they by and large tell you there is a problem before you have any chance of finding out.

4.    Promoting the Clippings Report. Usually a few days after the Press Release has emerged and been submitted they issue a clippings report. Now I have prepared a few videos covering this but will edit them all into one master video but the basics of the process is this. The Clippings report contains about 50-60 Urls of where you can find your Press Release. Take these Urls and using any one of a number of services, mash these Urls into one RSS Feed and then submit this RSS Feed into Yahoo Pipes and then run the pipe. Take the Pipes RSS Feed and submit via your favourite RSS Submitter and hey presto, you have Yahoo all over your links like a rash and also via redirects; you have links to all of your individual clippings from Yahoo. Not bad eh?

Next up you can repeat this exercise with Google Reader and suddenly you have links to your clippings from Google. Finally we take the RSS feed that we’ve created and then submit it through SLS as well as a number of the key Clippings Urls (the ones where the master site has a domain rank of over 5) and then promote as per normal. We usually only hit about 6-7 of the Urls as this is enough to make sure that these PR Urls have enough grunt behind them to dip in and out of Page 1 in Google usually very quickly.

I’ve just recorded a Client Case Study video that shows us submitting a Press Release on November 7^th and by November 10^th (less than 3 days later) we had notched up 2 No 1 slots for the clients inner page, one No 2 and the rest were 5, 6 and 7 slots. All six terms were on Page 1 and the Press Releases in this case hit Page 1 on five out of the six occasions and on the sixth the PR was at No 12.

I can’t reveal the niche or Key phrase at present but once I’ve got the client permission to do so (and I expect this in a few weeks time) then I will release the videos free of charge to members as a case study exercise. You can appreciate that we have to respect the Client wishes first and foremost and once they feel that their Campaigns will no longer be compromised then we will be able to proceed.

To back up and support these claims, I’ve shown a limited number of the videos to certain select SLS Members and their confirmations supporting our assertions can be found here: http://simpleleveraging.com/slschat/index.php/topic,190.0.html

There are additional aspects to this type of promotion that make it so successful and I’ll cover these in later newsletters but the key thing to it all is that taking these Press Releases and using SLS and a combination of other factors really means that you can get into niches very quickly.

Usual deal, if anyone has any questions then by all means post in the Forum or just email me by return and I’ll try and work my way through as many as I can as quickly as I can.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Yes you read it right correctly, this is how we took a particular term that was OK a very tightly focused niche term, but one that had adverts running as far as Page 2 in Google and therefore was making money (or so Google thought so) and we ended up “owning” 95% of Google in under 24 hours.

Actually astute viewers of the video when it comes out will spot that we actually did this in just less than 13 hours!

So what did we do?

First in broad match our Press Release for the Client hit the No 2 slot out of 309 million pages in 13 hours and in narrow match we ended up with our Press Release taking 19 out of the top 20 slots in Google in the same period

Now the video, though having been recorded, is not going to appear for another 14 days or so as we are live in the midst of the Campaign for the Client and to be blunt, I don’t want any enterprising folks out there “nicking our niche” but the video proof is there and when I deem it safe the video will come out to our members only download area.

So how was this done?

1. Careful Keyword Research.
2. Timing
3. Proper and planned use of META Data

Firstly as Myra and I discussed in our recent Web Discussion, it was all down to careful Keyword Research for the right term for the client. Secondly as this particular Season Campaign has just got underway I guess our timing was pretty hot in that we hit the tracks running just before the previous Seasonal campaign had actually ended. Thirdly and last of all we made sure that our MEAT Data for the Keyword Research was included right up at the front of the Press Release.

Now astute Google watchers will know that Google have fine-tuned their algorithm recently and for the time being seem to be using for the Meta Inserts in the SERPS, the first 300 Characters of the main body copy of the piece you are trying to optimise for.

Now the Golden Rule here is to try and make sure you get your main Key phrase inserted right there at the start of your piece. Now this is not new and has been standard SEO practice for years but it did seem to have gone slightly out of fashion recently but now appears to have come back to the fore in Campaigns or so our research has shown.

So given the fact that in Press Releases our distributor automatically assigns the first 300 characters to the Meta description and this includes the beginning information, for example:

(EMAILWIRE.COM, October 17, 2011)

This means it shortens your ability to use the keywords in the first 145-155 characters in the meta description that Google displays before it truncates. So make use of your keywords in the Meta description early on, ideally right in the first part of the first sentence.

Anyway enough of this. I’ll get the video put into the Members only support area of the Forum within the next 14 days or so but to further add proof to the fact that we’re not sensationalising this, I’ve released the video to a couple of SLS members to get them to verify that we’re not making this up. I’ll get them to add their comments to back up our claims.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

One of the things I love about Simple Leveraging is that the “knowledge share” truly goes in more than one direction. This has been evidenced particularly in two incidences that spring to mind for me.

Firstly the experience working with Myra Love on our forthcoming project provisionally entitled “Multi Disciplinary Marketing” where we took the $240K in four days Campaign and analysed it’s various component parts and broke it down into stages and examined in detail.

Secondly, it was after talking to another SL member, Dave “Quinn” Thomas over cool ways to promote Wikis etc and this opened my eyes to a technique that I was aware of but hadn’t really thought about too much in detail.

I have now though, but perhaps it might be an idea to get back to basics first.

Why do we pursue this whole concept of Tiered / Layered Multi-level Linking? Firstly it’s something that we have been advocating and doing at Simple Leveraging by and large well before most others but more importantly why?

It’s a question I get asked all the time, why do you advise the constant building of links to support links to support…….etc  etc?

The answer is very simple. It is because of the transient nature of certain forms of Link Support that we use in our Campaigns. Now that is not to say that short term support is a bad thing, it’s more a case of understanding fully what is going on.

For example, one of the first things we want to do with a site is build in Authority links as soon as is possible. Now in most cases this means getting links on High Page Rank Social Media sites and / or Press Releases.

Now in a lot of cases the Home Page PR of a lot of these sites is fairly high ((5+) and the knock on effect is a fairly vigorous (if we’ve planned and executed it properly) short term “hit” on our sites that results in a rise up the “SERPS”.

Now as they all say, “What goes up always has to come down” and that is the case with the effect received from those short term links but there are steps that we should do almost immediately to mitigate any potential downfall.

I explain it with diagrams and a PowerPoint in this short video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxboJJneJg0  but the upshot is that sooner or later pages gaining the benefit of links from these High Page Rank Home Pages drop the moment that the links themselves disappear and the inbound links form these sites tend to come from less powerful inner pages.

Hopefully by then, all good promoters / Link Builders will have already had in place additional Link placements to add support to these pages. In the case of declining Press Releases, usually a fairly vigorous Link Building Campaign (from SLS etc) is good enough to not only arrest the decline but in most cases reverse it.

I’ve also uploaded to the Members Only Downloads area of the Forum another more in depth video that goes into detail a very useful little technique that drives excellent authority links from a PR8 Site to all of our Press Releases no matter how many we have, within seconds. You can also use this to replicate this technique with at least one other Authority site also. The video can be found here:

http://simpleleveraging.com/slschat/index.php/topic,187.0.html

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Just wanted to update members on a new training video we’ve just posted live in the Simple Leveraging YouTube Channel.

The video covers the subject of Tagging and how correct tagging can double or even triple your effectiveness for bookmarking. We show a live case study of a Blog / domain that was bought less than a week ago on 6^th October and how through just usage of SLS has been taken to cover the top 3 slots in Google for its chosen niche with narrow match search out of 2,800 competition and for Broad match it is No 38 out 6.2 million competing pages.

All in under a week but the real story lies here. This Blog was bought, created, crawled, indexed and ranked in under 12 hours from start to finish and all through just promotion via SLS. In fact the video recorded shows that for the narrow match search that the various SLS Bookmarking Directories are also indexed and ranked as well.

The reason for the power of the network is explained in the video and the video can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-e9sbwyUEM

Secondly, there are still some of the High Page Rank Blog Link Packets still available from below for those who might have missed it yesterday. The details are as follows:

A supplier of ours has come to us with a fairly neat list of 2,500 High PR Blog Urls that we can offer to our members for $30. Amongst these Urls is at least one PR6 (there are about 5-6 PR6 Urls) EDU and all the Urls are PR2 or above. The majority are manual approve but then if you want a link on a Blog that is not going to end up rat infested then manual approve Blogs are the way forward.

The link for these Blog Urls is here:

http://simpleleveraging.com/bonuses/2500highprblogurls.html

Delivery is immediate via e-junkie.com.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Just a quickie as we update and prepare our next Free Members only Monthly Link Packet to be sent out.

One of my colleagues sent through to me a fairly neat little list that I thought might be of use to some of you out there who use Article Marketing as part of your Link Building Programme (and who shouldn’t be?)

Basically it’s a list of 276 Article Directories that are either Auto Approve or publish material extremely quickly. Now the methodology behind the compilation of this list is that a submission project was set up with a larger list via Article Marketing Robot (AMR) and two days later the 276 Directories in this list had been checked as showing that they had published the test article.

Now this list contains a couple of Directories with reasonable Homepage PR and they are as follows:

PR 4 – 4 Directories

PR 3 – 13 Directories

PR2 – 25 Directories

PR1 – 54 Directories

The rest are either PR0 or we couldn’t trace the PR but there might be the odd surprise in there.

Now as to the usability in practice of these, I would use these as follows.

Basically the fact that they publish quickly is an absolute godsend so you can submit and get published very quickly articles with your links in the Author Resource Box. Then via your favourite Back Linking tool, drive links very quickly to these Urls and so start the process towards building up a very powerful link Mountain (as we call it).

The bonus would be that this mountain would consist of in excess of 200 separate IP’s so perfect for “Panda Proofing” your Link Building Campaigns.

Easy really. The hard part is finding the Article Directories that publish very quickly for you to use?

As this is a small list and was supplied to me one of our suppliers, I can’t give the list away free of charge but the list can be bought and downloaded from here for $9:

http://simpleleveraging.com/bonuses/276AAlist.html

Give it a rattle (as we say over here).

Back to you soon with the new Free Members only Monthly Link Packet.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This question was asked recently at one of the Forums that I participate in and I thought that the reply I gave might be of use here as well.

The answer to this is very straight forward. One of the most important factors that appears to have emerged in the latest Google “Algo” update was that they were now looking at the breadth, strength and variety of the inbound links that appear in your back links “landscape”. The old days of just getting loads of so called “dofollow” anchor links from one site / IP no longer cut it.

Now whilst folks have caught on about the IP diversity (still not to the extent they should have) people still haven’t fully appreciated the fact about “Link Diversity”. By this I mean that Google are looking now for a bank links landscape that as fully replicates that created by a human as possible. To this end they are now looking to see a variety in styles of links such as a mix of dofollow / nofollow, directs, indirects, typos etc in fact anything that looks like it could have been created by hand rather than an automatic submission bot.

At the same time time there appears to have been a re emergence of a concept they first looked at a few years ago called “Trust Rank”. This looks at the site that the inbound links originate from and assesses the “trustworthiness” or “authority status” of the site as it lies within your back links landscape. This is where EDU sites really come into their own and even if they only provide “nofollow” links. As most of these EDU Domains are virtually coming down with authority back links within their own profile, a lot of this is passed on in a way that is quite different to the old and now defunct (in reality) concept of Page Rank.

So to sum up (before I go too much about this) nofollow links from EDU domains are really valuable in a number of hitherto misunderstood ways. There are also a number of other factors that give benefit as well.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

So, unless you’ve been hiding under a stone recently or have just arrived here from the Planet Zarg then it’s a safe bet that you’ve been hearing loads about Google+

So then why is it that yours truly is urging caution and reticence regarding this one in the latest series of offerings from our almighty Search Engine, the Big G.

Well first up, Google + is operated and run by Google.

Secondly, it’s run by Google…

And so on.

What more do you need here folks?

Lets be honest, Google’s track record in releasing offers like this is not exactly exemplary. Hands up all those who remember Google Buzz, Wave and Voice plus not to mention all those glorious Updates?

No my reasoning is more to do with the fact that I trust Google about as far as I can throw them at the moment but let me explain further.

It’s like this. You have a great website and you want to get some more action in Google over it but as we all know Google frown about all sorts of activities that might in some way give your site a slightly more competitive edge over the competition. So what do you do?  You get all your friends organised into one of these Google+ circles and get them all to “vote” for your site and then sit back and watch as your site climbs the charts?

Hmnnn, let’s think about it folks. You’ve been using a service run by Google to actually help in your intended aim of “gaming” Google.

The best bit of it all is that sooner or later some clown will come out with a WSO or E-book claiming that this is all one big Google Loophole and that this is going to be the next killer application and this is how you make it much better.

Just how dumb can we all get?

It’s like taking a big stick and standing there somewhere in the heart of the Congo Rain Forest and poking a big Gorilla with it. Folks, this, like the Google scenario, is not going to end well. Someone is likely to end up needing fairly intensive surgery and let me take this opportunity to say “it ain’t going to be Google…or the Gorilla.”

I mean, how clever is it to scheme up some really smart plan of actually creating a structure that is designed purely and solely for the purposes of getting round Google’s filters and structures….and then telling Google how we are going to do it…and when?

Let me finish this short newsletter with a quote taken from “The Filter Bubble” by Eli Pariser. In this short extract he describes the end of a conversation with a “Google insider” in which the subject of the Company Mantra “Do Not Be Evil” comes up:

“I once explained to a Google Search engineer that while I didn’t think the company was currently evil, it seemed to have at its fingertips everything it needed to do evil if it wished. He smiled broadly. “Right,” he said. “We’re not evil. We try really hard not to be evil. But if we wanted to, man, could we ever!””

Please treat Google+ with a huge amount of caution, especially if you are trying to use it as a form of SEO Weapon?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites