Glad to see that I do have some loyal readers. I was in the live support chat on Wachahost the other day, and talked to a number of people who read my blog. It’s much nicer to talk to readers with instant messaging, rather than by the comment section on here, or via email.

But something that 90% of the people said however, is that they didn’t even realize that the site was open. That you can actually buy hosting . They thought I was still in the planning stages. Gah, How good am I at marketing .

So I’m back with a small post to let you guys know that yes, Wachahost is open for business and you are more than welcome to get your hosting needs there . I already have a few Pyrogenic Media readers signed up, and I gave them all 50% discounts aswell. So if you want to join them, use the coupon “worldcupspecial“, and you can get 50% off your first month. Which will mean you are paying around $3.50 for the smaller plan. A nice amount to test the waters

O and if you are wondering why the coupon is “worldcupspecial“. New Zealand drew the game with Slovakia last week in the Fifa World Cup. Doesn’t seem like much, but this is only the second time in history that we have made it to the world cup. And the first time we have ever gained a point!

I haven’t been posting much recently. That is down to two reasons.

Most of it was because I was sick most of last week. Just the flu, so nothing major. But it just drains you and all you can do all day is sit and watch tv (Which is what I did). Took 3 days off work aswell, which was actually alot longer when you think about it. Monday was a public holiday in New Zealand (Queens Birthday), I went to work Tuesday feeling a bit off, but OK. Then took Wed, Thurs, Fri off. I actually went to work on Friday, but got sent home within the hour. Funnily enough when I went to work today, The guy who usually sits on the desk next to me was off work sick. Woops!

And also I have been working behind the scenes at building a “Tangible” business for myself. I guess the word tangible doesn’t quite fit here. Usually it is something that you can physically hold, that you can point to and say “Hey, I did that!”.  I don’t know why I call what I’m doing now, more tangible than anything else I’ve ever done. But this time it feels like I can point to something and say that I actually have a “real product” with real customer lines.

In the past I have centered most of my efforts around affiliate marketing. And for a long time now I have thought that while I do well at it, and it is a solid “money maker”. It doesn’t quite feel real to be doing hit and miss SEO work or PPC work. And it never made it any more of a tangible business by offering your services to others. I always felt it was always going to be something invisible, something that I could never have anything to show for my efforts at the end of the day, other than money.

Most will point to the fact that I have built a number of successful tools and products to do around the IM niche. And while this is getting closer to having something that I consider to be “real”. It still never really hit me in that way. It could be the way that I ran things back then. I was more of a happy go lucky businessman. And just rolled with the punches. That isn’t to say I didn’t plan ahead. But I never ever pictured myself actually building it up into something more broad. Affiliate marketing in my mind, is still a fairly small niche (With alot of developers in it), and so developing affiliate marketing tools was not always the path to riches and a fully fledged business.

And so that lands me here right now. Today I finished work on Wachahost.

Wachahost is put simply, a Web Host. For some of you, you may be going “What The FU–” in your mind. I mean, a lock stock webhost? That is as plain as they come. There is millions of them out there, what makes you think you can make millions with just a standard webhost? And the truth is, I don’t. Do I expect to break even? Ofcourse! Do I think I will eventually be able to make a good chunk of change with it? Most Def! But I am under no illusion that Wachahost is going to be the next big thing. I mean… Just look at it… She’s as plain as they come

All of the above doesn’t worry me. If anything, I am looking for something to keep me occupied that is more routine. It is getting back to using a part of my brain that I thought I had almost forgotten. Nothing really in setting this up has been about massive problem solving. It hasn’t really stressed me out yet (Touch Wood). It has just been business dealing, working out the data center that we are going to use, doing all the paper work behind the scenes. And it has given me a good idea of what goes into a bricks and mortar business.

At this point, there isn’t much to report about the business going on’s. We haven’t officially launched yet. I don’t even know if we are going to do a huge bonanza anyway. But I will likely be reporting back periodically in between my regular posts, about how the business is doing (Minus financial’s in all honesty). In actual fact, it has given me a bunch of post ideas already. You seriously never realize just how much load WordPress takes until you see a shared hosting server going full tilt.

Following on from my post the other day about Page Navigation to garner you some deeplinks. I also had a brainwave about how to get Google crawling even deeper into your posts.

First off, Whenever I build an automated site. That is either scraping content from elsewhere, using datafeeds, or sometimes even my very own content. I like to have the webpage be generated dynamically everytime. By that I mean, if you came to my homepage, and then refreshed, you would see two different web pages. Maybe not completely different, but maybe different stories, different links, different images etc. When I think about some of the most crawled pages in the world, they are the ones that are forever changing. Whether that be legitimate change or not. For example Twitter’s homepage is constantly changing (With all the tweets). Even with most news outlets. They have constantly changing homepages because the latest News is forever changing.

Google loves all of this.

It wants to keep up with the play of the world. And if you are constantly changing your homepage, then trust me, it will crawl you like mad.

So how to get the Deeplinks flowing, and Google crawling? The first step is to give it some random links on the sidebar. For me, it meant installing this plugin : http://www.romantika.name/v2/wordpress-plugin-random-posts-widget/.

It basically shows random posts on your sidebar in WordPress. In my case, I actually made the header “Popular Posts”. If you were using a site with tangible products, you could label it “Hot Products” or similar. All in all, It doesn’t matter in Google’s eyes what you name the widget. But when visitors come, if they see the words “Random” there is not really any reasoning for them to view it. Maybe if they were bored, but otherwise why do they care about some random post on your blog. However if it is named “Popular” or “Hot” then they think it is the very best of your posts, and will immediately check it out. I personally do this with most of the blogs I come across in the Affiliate Marketing Niche. I always head straight to their most popular posts.

Anyway, Back to work.

Pro Tip : It is also important to note that if you want to really make this change every refresh, you have to turn off all your caching plugins. Things like WP-Super-Cache, will cache your page, meaning that each load it will not change. It will simply be loaded from your WP cache.

Something I also ended up doing on one of my autoblogs was to implement the “Advanced Random Posts” plugin. I actually installed this one by accident, thinking it was going to add random posts to the sidebar like above. But it has turned out to be a diamond in the rough. This particular plugin will add X amount of random posts onto your actual homepage. You can place them after X amount of posts aswell. So essentially, Each time your homepage loads, there is a complete new set of posts on the homepage. This make’s Google think that you have all these new products/posts flowing in, and it will crawl like mad.

I do want to say though, that this really isn’t ideal if your blog is personal, or if you are looking to build up readership. These are more for autoblogs or automated data feed sites that are relying on one time visitors, not building an audience.

Just to give you a bit of inspiration, and proof that using these simple deep linking techniques (Hell you only have to install plugins!) really works. Here is a quick picture of Google’s crawl rate on one of my sites.

It is a fairly new site. Not even a couple of weeks old I think. Although I will admit, I have owned the domain for quite some time, but never really had much on there. As you can see, in a matter of days since I implemented all these changes, I went from pretty much 0 crawl rate, to almost 700 crawls a day (And still rising). It may not seem that magnificent to some, but this is really quite an amazing feat considering most people consider getting Google to just index your homepage in the first few days of a new site is good work. And once again, I will point out. There was no secret linking techniques used here. There was a few blog comments done (20 odd?), and I used Digg.com on one post and that is it

I have recently been messing around with what some would call “AutoBlogs”. I don’t exactly like the term autoblog, simply because it carries some negative connotations that you are stealing others content. But there is plenty of ways out there to automate content nowadays, that is not ripping off the original creator. One of the biggest methods floating around at the moment is using Datafeeds from places like Commission Junction, That automate pushing content to your blog. I don’t want to get too involved in what that entails, you can read a pretty good overview here : http://www.ppc.bz/get-money-get-paid/datafeeds-autoblogs-and-forums-oh-my (And yes, I know, PPC.bz isn’t exactly marketing central, but it is an OK read).

Now something that alot of people seem to overlook, is how Google is going to index all these pages and pages of content. It isn’t like this blog, where I push out a post once every few days, and so Google can easily keep up. When you first push an autoblog, it could get hundreds, sometimes thousands of posts at once. And there is no way of google getting to those pages at the very back of your blog.

You have two options, Either you build links to those back pages, to try and get them indexed. Aka waste lots of time.

You install a wordpress paging system, that allows Google to follow links directly to deep pages. Aka save hours of time.

What is a paging system? If you look at the bottom of this page, there is a link called “Previous” that takes you to the next page of posts. If Google had just found my blog, to get to the back pages. It would need to follow this one link, over and over again. Going one page at a time. Infact, I know Google does this. After I wrote my last post about Tracking Google Spiders, I watched Google go from the homepage, crawl all those posts, go to second page, crawl all those posts, and etc. It went one page at a time!

But luckily, you can get plugins (Or in my case, custom coding). That will create page navigation that gives a spider the ability to jump right to the end posts, and anywhere inbetween.

One of the more popular plugins is WordPress Page Navi : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/screenshots/

I linked to the Screenshot page so you can see exactly what I mean.  The plugin allows Google to instantly go deep into your posts, instead of going back one page at a time. And does it work? You betcha. I instantly saw a change in how Google (And Yahoo actually) crawled my pages. Often going several pages deep right from the get go. Infact, Google has not left my site since I implemented this function. It seems now that Google is now super keen to see what else I have to offer.

I would give out my Custom coded one. But in all reality, It is a bit messy, and requires editing a bit of PHP to get things working. It is much easier to install a plugin.

O and before anyone asks. I would still recommend installing this on any blog, even if Google has crawled every page from Day 1. There is not really any downsides to giving Google easy access to your content, right?

In my post about “Pinging“, I talked about a rather simple method to track when spiders came to your website. At that time, my method was just viewing the “Latest Visitors” page within CPanel. And basically refreshing it waiting for a spider to come. At this point, I was merely checking whether doing a “ping” actually did anything. I wasn’t trying to track how often it came, or what pages it came to over a certain time period, just that it came when I called.

Well the other day someone pointed me in the direction of the “Spider Tracker” wordpress plugin. This plugin does exactly what it says on the box. It tracks spiders crawl rates across your blog. I recommend if you are going to install it on your own WordPress blog, use the plugin installer built into the admin section.

By default, it just tracks Yahoo, Google and Bing bots. But you can add any user agent’s you wish to track, and it will track these aswell. So in reality, you could use it to track anything with a unique user agent. If you were super adventurous, you could track things like Blackberry or IPhone visits. I don’t know why you would, but you could!

Like always. When I install something new I want to see it working instantly! Unfortunately I did have to wait a bit for Google to come, and when it did I noticed odd patterns in it’s crawling. It never really seemed to crawl pages that are linked from external URL’s. Im sure eventually it will, but most, if not all the crawls I saw happening were just random checks by Google to (What looks like) check if the URL is still up, and if any changes have happened.

You can see that it is going to page 18 of the blog. I can assure you, there is no external URL’s pointing to that page. And logically, it should only be internally linked from page 17, and page 19. So I am rather surprised Google knows about it at all. There were other crawls much like this one, to old old posts of mine, that have no outside links pointing to them at all.

I don’t really know the answer to it, but it does seem to be Google just coming back and checking on a page at random. I know alot of people have theories about how PageRank factors into this. Like the higher your pagerank, the more often Google will come back and check on that page out of the blue. I’m not quite ready to wade (get it!) into that debate yet, but it is interesting.

Aswell as Google, Yahoo has done pretty much the same thing. Come back and crawled random pages that don’t have any external links pointing to them. Unfortunately the plugin doesn’t track where the spider came from (Can it even?), so I can’t tell if it came from an external link, or just randomly. But certainly from the pages, it is random.

I’m going to leave it running for a week, and see what sort of patterns Google comes a knocking for.

In an interesting move yesterday, Twitter came out with a blogpost/statement, that outlined the future for Twitter. Contained inside this post was some pretty rash rules on how their Twitter API will be used, aka sites like Sponsored Tweets and Ad.ly, Were no longer allowed to use their API for tweeting out ads.My first thought in all of this, is that Twitter has gone absolutely bonkers. And a small part of me thinks that a slight hint of jealousy is involved here. With Twitter rolling out it’s own Promoted Tweets feature (Basically ads), I think they don’t want advertise going elsewhere, they want to keep ‘em for themselves.

The full blog post can be found here : http://blog.twitter.com/2010/05/twitter-platform.html

Makes for an interesting read. But I’ll add my two cents in here.

As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.

I think the most important part of this paragraph. Is that they are disallowing it in the API. Does that mean using Twitter’s own interface is OK?  I know they try and say it is about user satisfaction, and in a small way I agree with them. I think the reason they use the API wording, is because the API is the prime source of most of Twitter’s spam. Cutting out advertisers, and only allowing OAuth is a prime way to cut down on all the crap that floats around on Twitter.

Why are we prohibiting these kinds of ads? First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.

Same as above really. They keep pointing out the user satisfaction, but I can’t see that being 100% of the reason.

Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation.

Uh-Oh. Let me draw your attention to these words,  “near-term monetization”. What Twitter is saying, is that everyone is making money off their platform, except for themselves. And ontop of that, they are the ones having to support the network, having to deal with all the spam complaints, whereas the third party ad networks avoid all those problems. I think it may also speak volumes for how Twitter has to price their own ads. They will have to, in a way, charge more per Tweet then other Third Party networks do, simply because of their overheads. By overheads I mean the entire Twitter network.

There has been a small reaction from Sponsored Tweets. They wrote a small blog post up here : http://sponsoredtweets.com/changes-coming-to-sponsored-tweets/

Something interesting, is that they have this line in there post. “You can still use your account to tweet out deals.” And yes, the link to the Dell Outlet Twitter is supposed to be there. And they make a good point, just with that single link. What constitutes an ad?  Dell tweets out deals all the time, which are essentially ads for their service. Sure they aren’t buying other people’s streams, but they are ads none the less. And what if Dell uses TweetDeck or another Twitter app to manage their accounts. That runs through the API, what if they tweet the deal through there?

Very muddy waters indeed. Over the coming weeks I’m sure we will start to see some reactions from other players in the Twitter Ad’s world.

I promised this post a while back, after I did my post on Twitter botting coming to an end. And I guess now is as good a time as any to write about the start of my very first application (And this blog) and how I got here. It sort of co-incides with the fact that I registered this domain in early June last year (How time flies), so I guess it can be my 1 year post aswell.

So I guess it all started early I think March of last year. I started a programming course in C#. I already knew the bulk of programming skills, but wanted a little bit of certification behind me. So anyway I needed to develop something to test my chops on, something to release out to the public and give me a taste of being a real programmer. At the time the only other Twitter tool out there was HummingBird, and it came with a price tag of $197. This was honestly ludicrous at the time, the features were certainly lacking. Anyway I brute forced my way through programming the first Twitter friend adder, and managed to come up with a semi legit product. I always intended to give it away for free, but take donations on the side.

As a small side note, Donations never worked. People just don’t donate. And it is really ironic that the whole of the “pirate” community thinks that the world can work with no copyright, and for things being shared for free. But at the end of the day, I’m not developing now because there is no incentive to. Other than me doing it out of the goodness of my heart.

Anyway, the first version looked like this :

It looks so stupidly simple. As you can see back then I was always with the train of thought, that less is more. At that time I was going under the name “Pyrogenics” or that was my make believe company at the time . I simply had a donate button, and there was really no support back then either. There was no blog etc. Aswell as this, this version was pretty darn buggy. Back in those days, Twitter fail whale would always come up and would crash the app.

Anyway, Not long after, I decided to start developing version 2.1. I didn’t really add anything more, maybe a few more labels to tell you what was going on. It was at this time that I wanted to just add things for the sake of adding things. As my girlfriend will tell you, I spent many a long night trying to program the darn thing. She uses this word “Gamer Anger”, which she uses to describe when I get epically pissed while playing any sort of game on PlayStation/Computer etc. At this time, I also had “Programmer Anger”, of which was me getting all riled up when god damn C# just “wouldn’t work right”.

Anyway version 2 (actually 2.1, I have no friggin idea what was version 2 ) looked like this :

As you can see I went for a very long approach. This was simply because I tried making it wider, But it didn’t really line up symmetrically. Just one of my quirks, I like things to be symmetrical. Now that I’m looking at it, I can’t see any functions that I added. Unfortunately back then I used no source control for my work. So I just built ontop of the existing source that I had. So I no longer have version 1 to compare to. I know there was a few things behind the scenes that I fixed, And sped a number of things up. Also you can see the mass of labels down the bottom.

Also note the unfollow button. Contrary to popular believe, this actually just lead to Twitter Karma, and not my own app.

This version is also a fairly big milestone for me personally. Because it was at this version, that I decided to open this blog. For nothing else than having a centralised place that I could call my own. I remember thinking at the time, that If I had a blog, it would also mean that I can make some money off the backend. If people are constantly coming to my blog for updates on the Twitter Friend Adder, then maybe I could sell them something along the way. It never really ended up like that, I don’t even bother having ads on my blog. But it was what I was going for in the beginning. So as the logic stands, this must have been released around June, considering that’s when the blog was done.

Soon after this, People wanted a function to store there thousands (Literally) twitter accounts, So they didn’t have to type them in manually. This gave birth to Version 3 :

As you can see, this version had an account manager. This simply opened another window which allowed you to store your usernames + passwords. This also gave birth to the infamous “Accounts.txt is missing” message. Basically when you downloaded this version, there was clear instructions to create as accounts.txt text file in the same folder. This was the file it would use to read and write the usernames. Do not even ask me why I didn’t just make the application create one itself. I thought of it more as an idiot deterrent. Meaning that if you were too stupid to follow the instructions, I didn’t really want you using my app anyway. Well anyway, it became one of the biggest headaches ever. And I got inundated with emails regarding how to fix it. As a bonus, it meant in the forums that I posted this app, the threads where constantly getting bumped by idiots not getting it to work.

I think this was also the first version where I really got sick of “customers”. Although they weren’t paying me anything, it really got me realising just how stupid people could be.

You will also see, this is the first real version, that included the function of following friends of a user. So for example I could stick in the user “Shoemoney”, and it would follow the latest X followers of his. Was quite nifty for finding people within your niche.

The next update to come would be when I changed the entire name to “Phoenix Twitter Desktop“. Surprisingly, this would actually be my last ever version. Anyway it looked something like this :

Tonne of updates. Most of all the Tweet Scheduler. This just schedule tweets to go out every X minute. I never found it overly helpful, but others seemed to think so, since it was a heavily requested feature. The Account manager also got a bit of an upgrade.

You can also see that things got stuck into a MDI window. So that you could open up multiple instances inside the one app. Kinda confusing, but it was a cool thing at the time.

The issue with this version. Is that I had just learnt about the ClickOnce installer by Microsoft. It was this new fan-dangle thing, that made auto updating a cinche. But in the end, it made things just way over the top of my head. In the image above (Or your version of Phoenix), you can see that there is a notice about saving the accounts.txt file to your desktop. This was caused by the installer overwriting the file every update. God, What a nightmare honestly.

After this version, there hasn’t really ever been any more updates. I think it was because I got too caught up with new features of the .net language. Things like the Clickonce installer, and the MDI form. They were not ever needed, I just put them in there because I learnt them and needed something to test them with. O well…

I could go on and on about how little features came out of the woodwork, and little changes between versions. If you really want to know, there is still a tonne of downloads floating around the web with old versions. And dare I say still alot of eBooks being sold with nothing but my application.

I think that is still one of the things that bothered me the most. I won’t say I revolutionised Twitter Botting, but I did quite alot to further it. And from all of that, I think in over a year I got $50 worth of donations. It didn’t really bother me at first. But I saw more and more ebooks popping up, all referencing my program. And ofcourse all these ebooks claimed they were making $500 a day etc. Can’t they spare a dollar for me? Considering they would have nothing otherwise? I even had times when people were wanting to make me an exclusive version for them to give away on their forums etc. But they weren’t willing to donate/pay or anything. I even had one ebook say “If I was the owner of this app, I would definitely have made it pay, it is so amazing”. And you can bet your arse I didn’t get a donation from him . Once again, I don’t care about the majority of users, but the ones who claim to have made thousands, or want something from me, should really give something back.

One more thing I would like to point out, is that ALOT of features were never implemented. Simply because I thought they were too over the top. I always felt like I was somewhat of a barrier to stopping overall Twitter spam. There was so much I could have added, but I just had to leave out for fair of destroying Twitter (Literally).

Any questions feel free to fire away. I actually enjoyed writing this post, nostalgia ftw.

Direct Messages on Twitter are more like “I’ll befriend you, send me some marketing message”. I reckon it would be around the 50% mark, of Twitter users who have auto DM’s setup for when they get a new follower. And heck, it works. I actually wrote a post on this quite some time ago : http://www.pyrogenicmedia.com/using-direct-messages-effectively/. It basically involved having a snowball effect, by having people send an @ message to you. Anyway, read it if you are interested, it still does work, but to a lesser effect.

Anyway I was looking at my Twitter account today, And I had some ludicrous amount of direct messages. Several hundred infact. For some reason, Twitter doesn’t give you an option to delete them all at once, And I wasn’t about to sit here and go through one by one, removing them all. (As a side note, I was also too lazy to program a tool to do it ).

So I found this : http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm-deleter/

It is a small bookmarklet that can delete all your sent and received DM’s. Aswell as that it can save any messages from certain users (If you want to keep one’s from your real friends etc). So quite nifty. If you are in the need for some direct message whacking, give it a go

It has been around a month now since I started serving custom ads on my girlfriends site. I won’t give away the URL, but just know that it gets around 2 – 10k traffic per day. Unfortunately it got booted from adsense, and once you end up in that position, you can only really go on your own. The rest of the ad networks are really poor at serving relevant ads (Bidvertiser, Im looking at you!). Infact at times they were sending flash ads that had color changes at 50 times a second, and would give 99% of the population a seizure (Once again bidvertiser). So I started trying to serve up relevant CPA offers, and regular ads to viewers of the site.

In all, You don’t really need to know how I did it. In the simplest of terms, I used this tutorial here : http://www.pyrogenicmedia.com/geo-targeting-ads/. I basically created a small PHP function that would echo different banners based on the country of the visitors. Pretty easy, nothing special. And you can do it piss easy using the tutorial.

Anyway, One day I was working on the site and I noticed ads weren’t showing. At this time, there was just plain banners to other parts of the site (So non-ads really). And yet these weren’t showing up. It took me a good while to work out what the heck was going on. And eventually I realised that it was the “Adblock” addon for Firefox. For a while, I was in a state of panic as to why these were getting blocked. I mean ffs, it is just a plain image, served from my own website. So why would it block it?

Well I dug a little deeper into how adblock works. Unsurprisingly, for the most part it just blocks certain domains being allowed to send through data. So just as an example, if Google’s ad server was located at ads.googleadwords.com. Then it would simply block that domain from being able to display on Firefox. I’m not entirely sure, But I think the data still gets sent through, but it’s just not displayed. Anyway this didn’t really help me. The ads were being served from my own domain and obviously my domain wasn’t on this ad domain list.

So I dug deeper.

Well actually not that deep. Was fairly obvious from just looking at the blocked url list.

/adtop.js
/adtrack/*
/adtraff.
/adtype.
/adunit.
/adunits/*
/advert-
/advert.
/advert/*
/advert?
/advert_
/advertise-
/advertise.
/advertise/*
/advertisement-
/advertisement.
/advertisement/*
/advertisement_

Now wtf is this you may ask?  This is just a small fraction of the huge list of banned Folder and File names. Yes not domains, But actual folder names. For me personally, I had my ads coming from www.mydomain.com/geoads/adserver.php. “adserver.” is a blocked filename, and hence my ads were not being shown.If any file is named adserver, then it will be blocked from loading.

I ended up renaming all my folders + files so that they would now serve ads. But still, it amazes me the lengths people will do to, just to block a few ads. And in this case, they weren’t ads, but just simply banners to other parts of the site.

If you are serving your own ads, You had best name your folders/files wacky names to get around them. Otherwise chances are they are getting blocked.

One of my greatest tools in my SEO tool belt, is watching played out niches. Most people try and avoid these as they are far too competitive to even bother with. And for the most part they are right, most of the time I fall flat on my face and never get past page 2, sometimes onto the bottom of page 1 with my websites. But generally I’m not even bothering to monetize these sites. So why am I spending hours of time SEOing a site for zero profit?

Well, Fun mostly. But ontop of that, To learn SEO tactics that I have never seen before. To see how the “pro’s” are gaming Google, and to learn from my failures. Kinda funny however, That tackling a tough niche is basically setting yourself up for failure. But it almost pits one SEO tactic against another. For example if I go into a niche that the top results are heavily reliant on Linkwheels, Then I go in guns blazing with Profile links. And then I can really see how Google treats different tactics when it comes to ranking. See how many profile links it takes to take out a website that has three 6 spoke linkwheels etc. Of course there is more going on then just Linkwheels, But it is interesting none the less.

There is a limit however. There isn’t much point going after phrases like “Buy Viagra”. That just isn’t going to go well for you. But it doesn’t mean you can’t sit back and take a look at how they are ranking. For example the number one result for buy viagra online for me is this site here : http://www.buyviagraonlinenow.com/. Now if you analyse the backlinks, you will see that this person has setup a huge mini-net of websites (All with good domains). And they are pumping content onto every one of those sites. Obviously for someone beginning out (Or really even seasoned veterans), buying 2k domains to give this a go isn’t really viable for most niches. But it gives you a hint that Google is definitely looking favourably among mini-nets now. Especially ones with alot of content.

If we move back a bit, and take a look at some of the more emerging niches. Something that is exploding right now is “Watch **** Movie Online”. Replacing **** with any movie you can think of. As it gets closer to the release date for that movie, the SEO stakes get higher and higher, and people are using crazy tactics. The good thing is that most of the people ranking for these terms, are usually blackhat in nature. Or are at least CPALead’ers who are using Linkwheels, Profile Links, etc. So let’s take a look at a keyword that is starting to grow bigger, that being “Watch Toy Story 3 Online”.

First result on my end is http://watchtoystory3.net/. So let’s go with that.

As I look through the backlinks, I see that alot of the links are “Profile” links. But not only that, they are of fairly well known sites. More then likely the links this person is using is from a Linkpack that Angela or Paul from Warrior Forum sell. It isn’t just forum links, these are real legit sites.

Interestingly enough, There is a few sites listed that are like “Scribd” or “DocStoc” for example : http://www.slideshare.net/watchtoystory3/watch-toy-story-3-online. These are basically documents, but they have click-able links. I am not actually entirely sure whether google can read those links inside the document… I checked the Cache of Google, (Type into Google = cache:http://www.slideshare.net/watchtoystory3/watch-toy-story-3-online), and it does seem like it can see them. If it can, then good tactic, Going to have to start using document/PDF sites more often.

There is also some Social Bookmarks mixed in there (Diigo, Spotback etc), which is slightly interesting. Because I remember using sites like these a while back. And I thought they really did nothing. I’m not talking about big ones like Digg, Mixx, Reddit etc. But these smaller ones never got indexed, never showed up in backlink checks, never really did anything. So maybe things are changing?

Moving back to the Google results page. I can also see there is a number of Web 2.0 pages in there. Both blogs and article sites seem to be listed. To name a few :

• http://watchtoystory3online6.blogspot.com/2010/03/watch-toy-story-3-online-for-free.html
• http://www.articlesbase.com/movies-articles/watch-toy-story-3-online-download-now-free-2339578.html
• http://watchtoystory34.ning.com/profile/JohnieRiddle
• http://johnie4riddle.typepad.com/blog/2010/03/where-can-i-watch-toy-story-3-online-for-free.html
• http://sites.google.com/site/watchtoystory3online6/watch-toy-story-3-online-for-free

And the list goes on.

If you check some of them out. 80% of them seem to point to http://watch-toy-story-3-online.net/. Which is ranked 6th on my screen for the keyword “Watch Toy Story 3 Online“. Checking his backlinks, They all look to be Web 2.0 links. But not in a linkwheel formation, they are just simply linking to his site. Seeing how he is 6th, maybe he needs to mix up his strategy a bit? Could possibly introduce links from places outside of Web 2.0 and article sites.

And really the list goes on. You don’t want to sit here for hours reading too much into it, because really, Google can be a fickle bitch. Google can boot you from the SERPS, and at the same time rank someone else number 1 using the same tactics. But it goes a long way into showing you what works and what doesn’t, and what Google is really loving at the moment in the way of Backlinks.