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Link Blasting Your Money Sites

Posted by admin | Incredible Advice | Friday 30 July 2010 12:10 am

I like to browse forums, read blogs, etc, after I’ve had a few beers and am relaxing (which I guess is like 70% of the time). This issue has been bothering me and I want to address here on my blog. I will keep this one short, I swear on my bad ass chair.

Every time something like Scrapebox is discussed or any link blasting utility (I use the word blast specifically because I will be reviewing the mother of all link blasting services very soon), this topic comes up. No matter how many times it is spelled out, the hesitant, pussy-footing SEO’s out there will just keep asking the same questions instead of doing some testing of their own. It’s almost like they thrive on getting contrasting feedback and marveling and the mysteries that they’ve created in their minds. It’s not that complicated. So, in response to the most common question I’ve been seeing…

Is it safe to build a shit ton of links to my money sites?

If you are hung up on the idea of blasting links directly to your money site instead of laundering that precious link juice through web 2.0 sites and the like, I’m cool with that. If you’re paranoid about it, just answer the following questions: Is your domain at least 12 months old (or so)? Do you have diverse backlinks already (that means different kinds of links, silly)? If so, the risk of receiving a “Google slap” (as you are so fond of saying) is minimized. And guess what? Worse case scenario, if your site is slapped into oblivion, it will come back in a couple months. And it is likely it will come back stronger than before. Sure, there are really sneaky ways to sabotage a competitor’s site, but building a ton of links to them isn’t really one of them.

As countless people have highlighted before me, if it were that easy to de-index and basically destroy a site by spamming inbound links, then everyone would be doing it to each other (at least in competitive niches). It simply doesn’t work like that. Aged sites (I use the term loosely) with a good amount of links pointing at them are not that easy to dethrone. And don’t you dare ask me exactly how many links a “good amount of links” is!

And you know why those new sites are de-indexed so quickly? Cause the vast majority of new sites suck balls and don’t last longer than a year before the webmaster fails to pay the hosting bill or ultimately doesn’t renew the shitty hyphenated .info domain.

Have Balls

Or ovaries, whatever you please. You’re never going to get anywhere in this business if you’re not willing to take risks here and there.

Stop Asking Questions

Seriously. I know I’m basically talking to myself here because the people that know what they’re doing and are destined for success are in total agreement with this post and don’t even need to read it while the rest of you are wondering why I’m such a raging, ranting alcoholic.

True, no one can give you a definitive answer to all your inquiries about the mysterious Google algorithm. But if you keep blatantly ignoring the advice from seasoned SEOs who deal with this stuff on a daily basis…double-u tee eff?

I’m sorry to get my rant on like this. But, shit, you know, I needed a new blogpost so they could move me up higher on Affbuzz!

Meetup202 – Los Angeles

Posted by admin | Affiliate Marketing,Events,Incredible Advice | Monday 19 July 2010 1:08 am

After Eleah from AKMG threatened me with bodily harm, I decided to check out Meetup202 in Marina Del Rey on Saturday.

Highlights:

If I hadn’t been so distracted by the beer and Chilli Bean, I would have thought to take some notes and then plagiarize the helpful info from the speakers here on my blog.

Riley gave a detailed report on how to go about contacting high traffic websites for media buys and what pitfalls to avoid. One point he made that I thought was worth repeating is that you should NEVER take a webmasters word for their traffic stats. Use compete.com and similar sites to get your own info and request analytics reports (if available). Webmasters that run Google Analytics can go as far as adding another Google account with limited permissions so that you can go in and check it out for yourself. Reports can also be exported and emailed as PDFs. If you’re going to drop a bunch of cash on a media buy on some random site (or non-random site, for that matter), I don’t think its unreasonable to make such a request. I digress…

Jason (aka Smaxor) and Nana took questions from the crowd. As I was 3 beers deeper at this point, it gets sort of fuzzy. One good point that Smaxor made, was that his company was built on a foundation of blackhat SEO. Even though they have moved on to much bigger and better (i.e. less shady and more profitable) things, he pointed out that a lot of big online companies that started out with little capital used blackhat SEO to get the ball rolling. I get a lot of IMs and emails from people asking me how to make a buck with limited resources…and I think this is something that might be motivating for those people. Blackhat SEO is a “cat and mouse game”, according to Smaxor, and one that of course isn’t a very sustainable long-term business model. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do a little automated search engine manipulating to scrape a few bucks together at first.

Anyhoo, here are a few pictures:

Dog Drinking Beer
Eleah’s beautiful dog, Chilli Bean and myself enjoying the refreshments.

Riley Pool, Eleah Portillo, Mr OffWhiteHat
Riley Pool (apparently immune to my sexual advances), Eleah Portillo, crazy-eyed Chilli Bean, and yours truly.

assorted empty beer bottles
Some of the beers I put away.

All in all, I’d say it was a success.

List of Ad Networks (Courtesy of Google)

Posted by admin | Affiliate Marketing,ppc | Thursday 8 July 2010 11:09 pm

If you’ve logged into Adsense recently, you may have noticed the following alert:

google adsense alert

If you go into your “Adsense Setup” section and choose “Allowed Sites”, you will see an option that lets you block all of these external ad networks, block individual networks, or allow all of them (default). For those of you who are constantly on the lookout for new places to buy traffic (and fear the backlash of such an inquiry on Wickedfire), this could be a pretty handy little list.

Here I have copy + pasted the list (sort of), and even gone above and beyond the call of duty and hyper-linked each one to its respective site. Well, most of them. Keep in mind that many of these companies only deal with big clients, sizable media buys, etc. However, some do offer CPC advertising, such as Chitika, AdPepper, Pulse 360, etc. Also, I should point out that I’m not endorsing these networks in any way, as I have only used a handful of them personally. Now, without further adieu…

Google Certified Ad Networks (as of July 8th, 2010):

Please not that the list was pruned of some duplicates (i.e. Adcompany UK, Adcompany EU, etc) and also some Google properties.

I hope you get buttloads of use out of it.

Quick Unique Image Content

Posted by admin | Tips | Thursday 1 July 2010 1:26 pm

I came across a thread on Wickedfire recently where someone was asking about how to go about getting lots of images for a site without much of a budget. Of course you could just steal them, but then you risk the content owner finding out about it and hassling you. Another problem is that Google will see them as duplicate image content and won’t rank your images in their image search. Here is a simple workaround I’ve used plenty of times in the past.

TinEye – Reverse Image Search is a site you may be familiar with. It’s basically a site with a huge index of images that you can use to cross reference any particular image and find out if it exists anywhere else on the internet. Many stock photo owners and webmasters use it to see if and where their images are being used. However, most of us just use it to find additional pictures of those special hot chicks that captivate us on forums, 4chan, etc. Of course, it hasn’t come close to indexing the whole web, but as far as I know it has the largest index of image-searchable images around and it’s super easy to use. I don’t know how exactly their image detection algorithm works, but I know how it doesn’t work, and I’m pretty confident that Google uses something similar to identify duplicate images.

Let’s use this silly cat picture as an example:

If you look this image up on TinEye (url: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-original.jpg), there are a whole bunch of results, as it has been published all over the internet. In my initial testing, I tried converting images to black & white to see if that would make them appear unique, but as you can tell by running a search on this image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth_bw.jpg, it is too smart for that.

My next experiment was mirroring the image, and voila, it works. Check out this horizontally flipped version of the image: http://offwhitehat.com/images/catteeth-reverse.jpg. Do a search and this here website should be the only one in the index for that particular image. All I did was flip it in Photoshop. If you are a Photoshop noob, you just go to Image > Image Rotation > Flip Canvas Horizontally. I’m sure most photo programs have the same capability. Some are probably even easier than others. However, Photoshop has a sweet batch function that you can use to automate the flipping of your images.

Of course, for images with text and special circumstances like that, this technique may not be the greatest. But yawning cat pictures? The best!

Anyway, now you have a way to steal lots of images, make them look like unique image content, and make it super hard for the people you are robbing to find out. Neat!

PS This is probably illegal and I totally don’t think you should do it. This is all hypothetical.

Edit: I forgot to add that this method won’t work on images that are nearly symmetrical. There needs to be a significant degree of variation to the flipped version, like with the cat example above.