So, the time has come.  Sleepless nights.  The wondering.  The fear.  Your grey campaign is milking years off of your life. (I just HAD to reuse that image on the left. It’s more appropriate than ever for this piece.)

You’ve weighed the negatives, the positives.  You wanted to stand tough.  But there was one factor that tipped the scales.   The domain.

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE
You see, Google basically gives you one ‘get out of jail free’ card in regards to paid links.  Yes, you can ride the grey, get caught, and beg for forgiveness promising never to do it again and thou shall be saved.  But, you only really get one bail out.  Even if you tried it again on another domain, and got nailed, I doubt that the Google gods would be as forgiving on your 2nd and subsequent requests.  So, throughout your whole life, you get one and only one pardon.

When will you use it?  How long do you plan on being an SEO?  5 years?  20 years?  40 years?  Perhaps time refills the guff.

But getting a pardon for paid links requires one important fact:  You’ll need to own the domain, or have full access to it in order to authenticate through Google Webmaster Tools in order to file the reinclusion request.   Meta tag, DNS, file upload, or Google Analytics authentication.  You’ll need access.

THE COMPANY-OWNED DOMAIN TIPPED MY SCALES
“So,” you say.  ”What’s the significance of that domain ownership fact, King Douche?”

Well, what if your money-maker was on an affiliate corporate-owned domain where you had no access to the site?  What if you couldn’t file a reinclusion request if you ever got nailed?  Would you then have to scrap the subdomain and start over?  Is there a better way?  Are you really better off riding the grey and just facing the penalty if it ever comes?  What if would have never came?

Well, therein lies the question.  What if you would have never got caught?  What if you raked in the dough throughout the product’s lifecycle and by the time the algorithm caught up with you the product’s life cycle was on its way out?  Which path would you choose?  Turning the grey into white?  Or riding the grey?

I’D RATHER CLAW MY WAY BACK THAN TRY AND BREAKOUT OF THE DOG-HOUSE
Even if I did have access to the domain, this solid realization remains:  I’d rather experience a drop in rankings switching to white hat, then work my ass off to get it back, rather than ride the grey until (if) it breaks then work my way out of the dog house.

You see, a good SEO isn’t afraid to work hard.  Yeah, yeah we work smart, too, but a solid campaign is almost never ending.  The fact that a good SEO has a strong work ethic plays is his/her favor.  Many simply won’t work that hard.  99% want to take a shortcut somehow.  If you vow to keep cranking away on your campaign, you’ll end up right back at the top.  That’s my logic anyway.

THE PRICE IS RIGHT
Go as far as possible without going over.  This is the strategy for running a grey campaign.  But when Google penalizes one of their own products, and even their own search engine in Japan for violating their quality guidelines, it’s time to chainsaw the main beams in your link strategy and try and go white hat.  (Go ahead, Google “Google Chrome”...GONE is the download page, completely.)

WE SAW IT COMING
From SearchEngineLand:

“Paid links drew much attention last year, after Google penalized JC Penney, as well as Forbes and Overstock for using them. Google even banned BeatThatQuote, one of its own companies last year, BeatTheQuote, over the issue.”

THE DECIDING FACTOR:  GOOGLE CHROME RESULT GOT NUKED, GOOGLE’S NOT MESSING AROUND ANY MORE
It used to be somewhat easy to jack-up rankings.  A few paid reviews, a few paid links, a handful of this and that, good relevant content, good page architecture and you were pretty much at the top of the SERPS and assuming your site was well designed, it converted.  Now, with even more intense algorithmic changes, at best you’ll just not realize any gain from paid links.  At worst, demotion or at ultra-worst, total nuke.  Hell, Google demoted GOOGLE JAPAN for 11 fucking months from a PR9 to a pR5 and then they came back a PR8.   If they’ll do that to one of their own companies, imagine what they’ll do to me.   They’ll feed me to the lions without blinking an eye.

With Google Chrome getting nuked, I’m not doing grey hat anymore. No way.  Not any more.  It’s a new year.  It’s time to take the hit, recover, and sleep easy as a white hat.  Before it’s too late.  Me?  I’m out.

In a few months, I’ll let you know the repercussions of going white hat from grey.  Hopefully, it’ll just be a few hiccups and not a total loss of lifestyle.  I’ll keep you posted.

Well, my friends, I am happy to report that we’ve caught a break.  It’s now hard as hell to reverse-engy a HTTPS backlink campaign with the death of Yahoo! Site Explorer.  Open Site Explorer only allows HTTP links and you have to PAY to get to see Majestic’s data so that leaves shitty and totally non-useful “link:” data as the only method to get any data on a link campaign.

Of course, you could just quote out a domain name in a search query and have fun analyzing every reference to that domain then visit the link, draw a conclusion, then move on to the next result but with a domain with > 500 links/references, you can bet that your competition will give up quickly.

However, if reverse-engy’ing a campaign is something that you do to get traction, then here are some cool backlink tools you might want to know about.  And, no, there are no fucking affiliate links in here any where.  SEOBULLSHIT doesn’t pull that shit.  Our bullshit is for the sake of bullshit, not affiliate bullshit.  It’s just for your reference.

MAJESTIC SEO:  http://www.majesticseo.com/plans-pricing

SEO SPYGLASS:  http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/

OPEN SITE EXPLORER (I love Rand, but there is no  HTTPS option):  http://opensiteexplorer.org 

Got more backlink checkers that you want us to know about?  Put your non-affiliate linked URL  in the comments below.

Did your site go up or down?  Post your link to your site in the comments below.

First, let’s start of with the norm.  Bashing PageRank.  Yep, it’s cool for an SEO to bash PageRank.  If you really want to look like a cool SEO, you gotta continually dismiss and downplay PageRank even though it’s the single quantifiable metric available for public observation.  Only to COOLEST SEO’s can disregard PageRank and claim that ONLY traffic and sales matter.  The rest of us are forced to look at it and get excited that we’ve built a site that seems to have a strong and trusted foundation and that are efforts are being positively validated by the world’s largest search engine company.

MONETIZATION
Another great feature of a Toolbar PageRank update is the ability to monetize your site.  You can monetize a site based on 1 of exactly 2 factors:  TRAFFIC or PAGERANK.   So, why would an SEO dismiss the 2nd factor?  If your site doesn’t rack in 1,000,000 PV”s per day/week/month, then all you have to go off of is the PageRank.    And it you’re going to sit there and tell me ‘But, hey, King Douche, you’re supposed to ‘nofollow’ paid links!’  Yeah, and I’m supposed to brush after every meal and eat lots of fiber but I don’t do that either.

When you launch a new site into a marketplace, your site’s PageRank will govern how much money you make off of that site.  No, don’t tell me that PageRank is unimportant.

PUBLIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
If you’re an SEO for hire working on a new client’s site, your traffic generation and sales goal will be a long one.  It doesn’t happen quickly unless you want to pay big for it.  So, as an organic SEO, you’ll want to prove to your new client that you’ve taken their brand new site and built it up to a point where the reputation has been QUANTIFIED.

ABILITY TO LAUNCH NEW SITES
So, last post, I wrote about how my PR6 site was awesome for launching new sites.  That brand new site would come out of the gate a PR5 and the Link Juice Tree was bearing fruit waterfalling into each of my linked subpages.  Sweet, sweet TBPR fruit.   

THE PAGERANK FRUIT TREE
With the assignment of a metric, i.e. TB PageRank, you’ll get to see how your site’s equity is trickling into the subpages.  You’ll get to see how and reverse-engineer why certain sub-categories get more PR juice than others.  You’ll see how your footer links seemed to all get PR while links 3-deep away from home ended up getting 1/5th of the root pages PR (as it probably should.).  These are just examples and not ‘rules of PageRank‘.  You’ll get to see and deduce why pages with original content got more PageRank assigned to them when they had outbound links  to relevant sites and inbound links from relevant pages all in a beautifully inter-weaved cacophony of ordered chaos.

It’s exciting to see your tree bare fruit.  PageRank is the report card that shows how much fruit you’ve got to give out.

Now, let’s get into this true story that happened in 2008.

THE SHITTY PLAGIARISM CHECKER
One of the first successful sites I developed was a shitty little plagiarism checker that I paid a Russian $150 through GAF to build for me based on  a simple premise:  break an article up into small fragments and search Google using the SOAP API for the appearance of these fragments then report the results.  The tool came out of necessity (as most good inventions do) and since all other plagiarism detection tools charged monthly fees, or offered limited functionality for free, my fully functional, free tool gained popularity quickly and word spread at Universities for teachers to use the tool to pre-check students papers for blatant plagiarism.  The site gained PageRank quickly and I got it jacked up to a PR6 in about 2 years with LOTS of inbound .EDU links.

THE POWER OF THE PR6
Now, for an SEO, a PR6 site is pretty powerful shit.  You can pretty much put a link on that page and it’ll pop up to first page for most any medium-competition keyword so I used the site to introduce new niche markets and it was the catalyst for all of my successful sites.  I pwned the competition quickly for my niches simply by introducing new sites with a link from my PR6 site and the new niche site would come out a PR5 right out of the gate.   A PR6 site is a powerful tool if you can get one.

So, I was new to monetizing sites and I had the bright idea to sell Text Link Ads and i was fetching $280/month per link and I had 4 links paying me monthly.  For a SEO noob, to have 1 site that generated over $800/month was pretty good.  That, combined with the new-site-introducing power of the PR6, I had a nice thing going.  So, of course, I found a way to fuck it up as efficiently as possible.

That was until I had the idea to sell the site and ‘cash out’ my PR6.  I figured I could fetch 15 months ROI and get about $15K for the site.   I put an ad up on EBAY, did screenshots of the traffic, and some of the link-revenue I was generating to backup the ‘the site makes so-and-so per month’ claim for the eBAY ad.

Wait, it gets worse.

HEY! I’VE GOT AN IDEA!
Then I had the bright idea that I wanted to advertise the EBAY listing so I saw an SEO article and plopped the auction link as comment spam justifying it by saying ‘Hey, maybe an SEO wants to buy this site?”  Again, this is fucking hard as hell for me to write this—I was such a dumbass. It was the first project that I had undertaken and this was what got me started in SEO as a full time job.   I was starting to make money from creating websites and getting those sites to rank and making money off of the ranking.   But every successful SEO has the project where they learned *NOT* to do a certain action.  This was my fuckup story.

So, like watching a slow-motion trainwreck, let’s continue.

Let’s paint this picture now.  I have a PR6 site selling links, and then created an EBAY listing announcing that I was selling links for the purpose of passing PageRank and you could own this wonderful site for only $15,000 which was about 20 months ROI.  I then advertised this by comment spamming the presence of the EBAY listing on an SEO forum site (searchenginejournal.com).  Holy dickwad, Batman!

THE BUST
About 48-hours later I get an GMAIL CHAT instant message from some guy.   It wasn’t broken English he was chatting but perfect, eloquent English.  American name….we’ll call him David Andrews (fake name but you get the idea on how normal the guy sounded).  So David asked me a few questions over chat.  ”I see you’re selling your website?’ and “I see that you’re making about $800 per month selling assets on those website?”

I then went into a record-setting chat marathon typing-session bragging on how good the PR6 site was at getting other sites to rank and that $280 per month was CHEAP for such a powerful ranking service.  It was then that the dagger-question came from DAVID ANDREWS (CAPS and punctuation are for editorial emphasis).

“So, you ARE selling links on your site then for the purpose of passing PageRank?”

My response, “Hell yeah, and it works awesome, too!  Any link that gets put up on that site ranks at or near the top for medium competition keyword.”

I then pasted examples of the people’s websites that were currently advertising with me to prove it.

DAVID ANDREWS then simply responded “I have all the information I need now.  Thanks for your time.”

And just like that he was gone.  I thought to myself “Damn I was pretty sure he was gonna buy it to!  He seemed really interested and asked some good questions.  Oh well!”

THE PENALTY
So the next day I awoke to my site completely de-indexed from Google.  Not a listing to be found anywhere.  Yes, the EBAY ad was in it’s 5th day of the 10 day auction.  Wouldn’t even come up for the DOMAINNAME.COM search.

Yep, it got nuked.

“What happened?” I thought.

The next day, still no show, The 3rd day, it was back.  I checked the Toolbar Pagerank and it got reduced from a 6 to a 3.  Just like that.  3 full PR coefficients.    It was then I realized that I had been nabbed by the Google manual penalty police.  The user DAVID ANDREWS never answered any emails nor responded to additional chat requests.  He was gone, 100%.

THINGS HAPPEN FOR A REASON?
So, about six months later, the good news is that another buyer eventually came along and bought the site, unsolicited.  I didn’t even offer it for sale after that and his offer was, *coincidentally*, $15,000.

I took the $15,000 and steamrolled it into a nice portfolio of Internet businesses across different markets.  It’s what I do to this day.

“Create an EBAY listing about selling my PR6 site and monetizing said site with Paid Links then comment spam the listing in an SEO forum. ”  Sheer genius, dude.  Sheer fucking genius.

God, what a dumbass.  Cheers.

Now, I understand that the full PR Algo paper written by Page and Brin is a lengthy one, but surely people understand the basics of it, right?  Surely NO ONE would think that PageRank 1 means ‘The First Page of Google Results’ and PageRank 10 means ‘The 10th Page Of Google Results.’  Right?  RIGHT?!

Thanks SmashingHub.com. No seriously, THANK YOU.

You can see the full “article” (Google cache) by clicking on the image.

So, you ‘d think that no one would see this right? Well, it was on Digg, which further reinforces my assertion that ‘Digg is Dying.’

Digg is Dying

Let’s face it; if the SEO industry gets a wild hair up their butt you’re sure to see a dozen “next big things in search”.  The last big craze was LDA, before that it was site speed, and let’s not forget the most important ranking factor of all; bounce rate! Needless to say at any given moment when researching SEO you are bound to find thousands of different theories, ideas, and techniques.  These ideas can lead you to believe that a legitimate SEO firm has no idea what they are talking about, simply because they see through the nonsense.

But I Know A Guy

When it comes to talking to an SEO savvy person you’re bound to get the same results.  Nine times out of ten it’s a guy you know who knows enough about SEO to get himself into trouble and he usually claims to know a guy that works at Google.  I had a recent battle with this when someone was fed that Google only crawls 500 words of content.  Even after proving this was wrong the “Google Guru” still knew best.

So what’s a website owner to do?  Stop researching how to SEO and instead look to the search engines for information on how you shouldn’t SEO.  Instead of being riddled in theories, buzzwords, and craphat techniques, the search engines offer guidelines on what the best practices are to help you find an SEO and help your site rank.  Gain a basic understanding of this and then follow your gut feeling when you go to hire and SEO or SEO team and you should be fine.  Fill your head with misinformation about a topic you’re completely out of touch with and you are sure to set yourself up for disaster, or at least a lot of headaches along the way.

The Technique In Question

I’m going through a bunch of competitor’s sites looking at their portfolios when I decide to take a look at their link profiles as well.  Typically you see however many sites they have rolled out with an anchor text link placed in the footer.  Nothing wrong with this, in fact I just got done explaining that it’s common practice within our niche.  What I found right next to these links was what shocked me.

Next to the “website created by:” I found a “credits” link.  Clicking on this link brought me to a page with a description of the website and the web development firm themselves.  What I found within this content was optimized anchor text for themselves and to other sites created and optimized by this firm.  I was convinced that this had to be a friend’s site or something of that nature so I went back to the back links page and went to another site.  Guess what I found?  Yup another credits page.

Shady Technique or Jealousy?

I know that none of our clients would be ok with us exercising these techniques, nor should they be.  I can’t imagine one person regardless of their SEO knowledge willingly linking to websites they have zero affiliation with.   Dare I suggest that this is a form of link farming or even paid links?  What if one of these sites stops paying for their SEO services? Will these links stay or will they be replaced with another website?

I mentioned earlier that we talk to our clients about placing a company link in their website.  We have had people in the past politely decline our request and we harbor no ill will.  In fact, our first concern will always be a quality product and a happy client even if it means no link for us.  With this in mind could I just be jealous of this technique? Maybe this website has a clause in there contract that states this credit link/page must be included in any of their work.  If that’s true does it make the technique any more or less shady?

SEO Isn’t Always Fair – Get Over It!

My company typically works with high end e-commerce and extremely large websites that take some time to complete.  Given this statement we don’t pump out 500 sites a year.  I know other web companies that specialize in low priced sites and launch hundreds every year… most of the time with a link pointing back to their website.  Am I jealous of this? Absolutely, but just like link acquisition I know that quality is more important than quantity.  Our sites, once launched gain authority pretty quickly and net us some pretty impressive back links themselves.  I’m not complaining as a good SEO will always come up with additional ways to build additional links.  I know that my industry isn’t the only one in which ‘non traditional’ tactics are used to acquire links so I hope my contribution will help you learn one thing.  SEO isn’t fair, we need to get over it!

Frank Kern is leading the pack.

Frank is teaching a class, as are many others, to people who are unable to make money online. They will be moving them into the offline world to teach them how to make money offline. The idea is to find business owners and trick talk them into believing that you are able to make money for them online.

Now…these are the same people that couldn’t make money online and it’s the reason they are heading offline. Hmm….seems a little strange but Frank says the money is no longer in selling products, it’s in selling services.

So…he’s selling a product about how the money is in the services. Now isn’t that just dandy.

But then Frank is one cool dude, when Frank decided to leave the online marketing industry to start marketing offline, he didn’t do like most people would have, which would have been to just leave with their great idea and never say anything, Frank wants to sell his idea to the whole internet marketing crowd.

I know…some people might wonder why Frank wants all the competition, but he just really enjoys helping people.

So be on the lookout for the phones to start ringing (more than they already do) and if you’re a shop owner you’ll soon be visited by a guy offering you a service that he was unable to perform on his own business.

But don’t let that bother you because this guy was smart enough to buy a product about how to do it, from a guy that was selling a product about how the money was in the services and not the product. Even though he was selling a product instead of a service, no wonder this guy is now going door to door in order to sell is internet marketing services.

If you use affiliate data feeds to populate your site, get ready to be the red-headed-crazy-bitch of Google because your spammy affiliate text won’t rank worth shit.   You would need a fucking link from Google.com homepage to get that shit to show up.

So, what do you do when you’ve got 2000 products to write for?  Well you hire a fucking writing team, that’s what.   It’ll take time and patience to get the right team together because what you’ll find is that all of the good writers would rather not work than get paid $10 per 350 words.

I even acted on a red-hot tip from someone on THIS site about hiring a writer for an ongoing gig.  Want to know what price she quoted me?  $125 per 500 words.  So I explained that if I paid that rate, I would need $375,000 to pay for original content for all my products.  Response:  crickets chirping…tumbleweed blowing.

Yep, you read it right.  Twenty-five cents per word.    Then I got the lecture about ‘using top writers’ and how much better it would be.

What I found out is that most ‘professional’ writers have a chip on their shoulder and really don’t want to write.  They aren’t writers per se.  They are opportunistic businesspeople who are trying to get someone to pay them $250 per hour and are wondering if you’re the sucker to do it.

Now, while I would absolutely LOVE to out this person, I will not.  It will just create a flame war and that’s not what The King wants.

Try and tell the writer that they can write 2-3 pieces per hour and that means $30/hour from their home computer?  Nope, that won’t work either because remember, they really don’t want to write.  They want quick, easy money and if you’re proposing that they have to work for it, well you just made the short-list.

So, I went to fucking ODESK and posted up an ad and got the best writing team I could have ever hoped for.   Writers from the Denver Post, Running Magazine, more.   Masters and Ph.D. candidates from TOP universities.

In conclusion, if a writer quotes you some fucked up rate, tell them to blow then go post on ODESK.

King Douche: Making Friends