Are You an SEO Expert?
I came across this cool SEO Expert quiz at SEOmoz and decided to give it a spin. Just a warning this isn’t a lightweight fluff quiz to boost your ego, it’s pretty hard core. 75 questions that will take you about half an hour to complete.
It is a realistic assessment of your SEO knowledge. If everything you’ve learned is from forum rumors, you may find it a little bit tough on the ego. 
Even if you don’t score highly on the quiz, by reviewing the answers to the questions, you will learn a lot of good SEO fundamentals.
Personally I have learned more about SEO, SEM and understanding Internet business in general in my last few months studying at University 20/20 and Theme Zoom. Even if you just join the Theme Zoom mailing list, you’ll have access to a lot of advanced SEO knowledge.
Another reason to visit the quiz is to take a look at a very slick and high quality piece of linkbait. Rand, who runs SEOmoz is practically a celebrity in the art of linkbaiting and getting his own and his client’s pages on to the front page of Digg and other top social networks. Take a look just to see what ultra high quality content looks like.
Can you beat my score of 76% ?
Thanks to Adnan from Blogtrepreneur for letting me know about the quiz.
Warning: Are You Blogging Like it’s 1999?
In the late nineteen nineties, many many people began to invest in the stock market primarily because online brokerage houses made investing so easy that anyone could do it. There was no longer any need to contact a stock broker, so everyone could believe that they had the knowledge needed to beat the market. For the next few years this “easy money” dream combined with the technology bubble drove the stock market to new heights.
Finding Harmony In Conflict
This article is about a simple discovery that I made. By asking myself a straightforward question I was able to easy archive my goal and learn an important lesson about how what you ask for actually will determine the reality you experience.
My New Condo = Party Central?
A few days ago my wife and I moved into a condo. Our first purchase, we love it despite the added pressure of having a rather large mortgage. Last night was the first night that things seemed ‘normal’ and I went to bed around 11pm. At about 1:30am the upstairs neighbors arrived home. And they had guests. Their voices were loud, they turned on music (although it wasn’t “call the police” loud, it was easily audible through the floor). Constant footfalls were heard on the floor.
Thinking that I just purchased this place, having disrespectful mid-week party animals as upstairs neighbor was about the worst possible scenario. It wasn’t like I could just give my notice and move out.
I was fully awake at this point and judging by the noise level that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep any time soon.
Alexa Search Offers Online Crooks a Helping Hand
I’m considering re-naming my site to CSI: Interweb as this is the second recent article on the topic of thievery. Both have been based on evidence that I’ve uncovered via my server logs.
The first episode was mild compared to this one. This thief is at least semi-professional, but still left behind too much evidence to be called a pro.
This type of theft will only affect you if you are selling a digital product. I discovered it when I found the following entry in my server logs:
United Kingdom
user-5445ed87.lns4-c13.telh.dsl.pol.co.uk (84.69.237.135)
www.ninjablogsetup.com/HIDDEN.php
www.alexa.com/search?q=%22Thank you for your order%22 link&page=7&count=10
I hide the actual URL of my page that they landed on. Not because it exposes me, in my case it was only a page telling people who had signed up for my service to check their email, but because I have conversion tracking on that page and everyone that visits it is tracked as a conversion, so I don’t want y’all to visit and send my conversion rate through the roof.
Here’s the deal. If you follow the link to Alexa search results on the bottom of the log entry, you’ll see that the searcher was searching for pages that contain the phrase: “Thank you for your order”
If you click through to some of the results of this query, you’ll find the secret download links for many digital products!
Please don’t download them, that’s stealing and terrible karma. You’ll be telling yourself that you cannot afford to acquire what you want in a legitimate manner, which will re-enforce poverty in your life. Really bad idea. My intent is to educate and show Alexa and digital product creators a loophole in their systems, not to provide an key to theft.
How Is This Possible?
After seeing the intrusion, I checked and my page was not indexed in Google. Which makes sense as it has a “no index, no follow” meta tag on it, but obviously the thieves have discovered that Alexa apparently is still indexing pages with a “no index” meta tag on them.
That’s a serious security loophole thanks to the folks at Alexa (owned by Yahoo! Amazon). I guess we know what the exclamation mark in Yahoo! stands for.
Updated: Thanks to Mindanao Bob for catching my mistake … sorry Yahoo! luv ya.
Why A Semi-Pro?
Of course if dude from the UK was smarter he would have copy & pasted the link to my site into his browser rather than clicking on the Alexa search results page, that would have eliminated the referrer link in my logs from Alexa and I never would have discovered the intrusion.
I’m not sure if a specific request in a robots.txt file would prevent Alexa from indexing these pages. I will send a copy of this story to Alexa and see if they respond. If you ever have a page in Google that you don’t want in their index you can use their webmaster’s tools to remove it, I’ll have to check to see if I can find a similar service provided by Alexa.
The other solution for product sites is to not use an obvious thank you phrase; remove the “Thank you for your order” footprint.
Interesting how the same fantastic tool, a simple search engine, can be used equally well for creative and destructive purposes.
TLA Goes Underground – Are Paid Links Evil?
I received an email from Text Link Ads a couple days ago telling me that I had to update my affiliate links to their new ones. Fair enough, but then I noticed that the new ones were being run through the “tinyurl.com” service.
Here’s my new beautiful affiliate link: http://tinyurl.com/2twhrb
Very weird, I thought….why would they completely give away their brand and have their entire system rely on a third party website (that’s a major business dependency and a huge risk point).
Then the answer became obvious…Text Link Ads is going underground in response to Matt Cutts and Google’s basically declaring war against paid links. Here’s more background than you’re ever going to read:
- SES Paid Link Presentation
- SEOmoz | The Paid Links Debate Rages On – SES San Jose 2007
- Are Paid Links Evil: SES, San Jose 2007 » Unofficial SEO Blog
- Bruceclay.com – Are Paid Links Evil?
At first I was ready to wave an angry flag about how Google was abusing their power and spreading fear and paranoia in an effort to make webmasters “be good” so their job as a search engine would be easier.
Then I read this excellent post from John Andrews called Understanding the Google and I actually began to see things a little bit differently.
Matt Cutts communicated very clearly that Google wants to see more of the kind of content that drives adoption of the web. Google is a carrot and stick company, as we all know too well. The stick goes to paid links. The carrot goes to good content. For those who weren’t there, I’ll recap.
The session was about purchased back links, and why Google says they are bad. One of the complaining panelists asked why Google values links earned by a funny video but devalues links that are bought. Specifically, if a real estate guy posts a funny video on the politics of the search marketing industry, and earns a collection of backlinks, why do those back links count when they are off-topic and have nothing to do with real estate? That was a good question. And there was a good answer. Matt answered that the funny video was creative, was unique, and added something to the web, but the paid links did not. Did you hear that?
Google is talking. Are you listening?
I think that when you live in a dictatorial society, and that’s what life as a webmaster these days certainly is…with Google being the dictator, it is easy to assume the dictator is evil and has only his best interest in mind. After all that’s how we would all behave if we had almost absolute power but what if the dictator really is wise and benevolent…what then?
Just something to think about, I really liked John’s refreshing take on the story and I find that I enjoy believing in the goodness of playing in alignment with the dictator as opposed to fearing where the next shoe will drop.
- Jon Symons
PS. Want a blog SEO tip? …notice how John’s individual post pages do not have sidebars or even menus or categories. Each post has a link to the next and previous, a link to the home page, and his “about page” and a link to the feed at the bottom of the page. That’s it. From what I’m learning at Theme Zoom this is the correct why to setup a page for maximum SEO benefit. I’ve been craving to “go lean” with my theme and I think I’ll borrow a few ideas from John’s site.
Negative to Positive…
After my last story about some dude trying to copy my Ninja Blog Setup site in Spanish I received the following email via my contact form:
hi jon i’m being honest, and i tell you, you had an amazing Idea… I’m also a
hug fan… But the funniest thing is “I didn’t know it was yours” also I want
you to leave your post as is because i want other peeps to know that is bad(I
will delete my stolen blog as well) :-S and how i felt after seeing it… bro
I’m a grown Venezuelan man, and i almost cried … cause i had dreams but i took
the wrong way … plz consider writing another post with this letter also and
my photo. I want to be recognized as the man who regrets, and ask for your pardon
an Admirer
David Orozco
I believe that David is sincerely sorry and that he has learned a lesson.
I guess I must be a real businessman at heart because I immediately began to think about “how can we turn this into a positive situation?”
Well he did translate most of my site into Spanish and I’m sure, if my idea is good there is a large Spanish speaking market who would need blog installations too…and in terms of search engine rankings it is probably much easier to acquire access to them in Google.
So I created a Spanish version of Ninja Blog Setup (WordPress Instalado) and invited David to continue his translation work on that site. He can translate, promote and install the blogs in Spanish, and we’ll split the revenue. My guess is that it is a win-win, since my site is already ranking highly for WordPress Installation Service even with a split of the revenue I think he will make more than going on his own.
For me I get to turn competition into an ally and open my service to an entirely new market.
Jon
PS. My apologies for the slow posting rate, my wife and I are in the middle of a move and we’re determined not to move anything that, as she would say, “doesn’t support our journey to wealth.” So we’re going through everything as letting go of a lot of stuff. A big, but worthwhile, process. I should be back to a more normal schedule by the middle of next week.
How To Know When an Idea is Good?
You’ve put your latest affiliate love child online and it’s too soon to tell if your idea is going to take off or not, but how can you know that the idea is a killer?
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery…
I guess if some wanker takes the time to copy it verbatim, that would be a pretty good endorsement. I guess it is some small consolation that at least he is translating it into another language.
Don’t be a Stupid Thief
Parents – Domain Name First then Birth Certificate
By whatever magic of nature, science or criminal activity, you’ve achieved a baby, but for god’s sake before you name the thing, make sure the domain name is available.
“…One of the criteria was, if we liked the name, the domain had to be available,” Pankow said. It was, and Pankow quickly grabbed Bennett’s online identity.
A small but growing number of parents are getting domain names for their young kids, long before they can do more than peck aimlessly at a keyboard.
It’s not known exactly how many, but the practice is no longer limited to parents in Web design or information technology.
They worry that the name of choice might not be available by the time their babies become teens or adults, just as someone claimed the “.com” for Britney Spears’ 11-month-old son before she could.
The trend hints at the potential importance of domain names in establishing one’s future digital identity.
Full story about domaining your brats on Wired.
Adds a whole new revenue stream to all those affiliate and MFA (made for AdSense) sites for “baby names.”
Offline Ads Are Heavy Drivers of Search
Here’s an interesting report with a message that makes sense when you think about it, but is often taken for granted or overlooked.
Anyone involved in online business knows and spends a lot of time trying to grab searchers from search engines: analyzing keywords, traffic conversions, search volumes etc. But what makes people search for certain terms in the first place?
If you listen to certain sources they’ll tell you that offline ads are in steep decline and that all the money is moving online, but the following story may illustrate that online searches are much more dependant upon offline influences than expected:
Four Hour Work Week for Free When You Elance
I heard through the grapevine that Elance is running a promotion where they will give a free copy of Tim Ferriss’ popular book Four Hour Work Week to anyone posting a new project on their site.
I searched their site up and down to find evidence of the promotion and couldn’t see it, so I shot an email to my account manager and here’s the reply I got:
Hello Jon
The 4-Hour Workweek is currently the #1 business book on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. Author, Tim Ferriss, shares his secret to success—focusing on what he loves and outsourcing the rest!
Receive a free copy of The 4-Hour Workweek when you complete your next project on Elance. Just post and pay for your next project on Elance by October 31, 2007 and we’ll take care of the rest—mailing a copy of the book to you within 4-6 weeks.
Never been a better time to try the new rich lifestyle and hire out some work. As I mentioned in this story I finally overcame my fears of outsourcing and am very happy with the results.
Just in case you are thinking that you have to be hiring a computer programmer or freelance writer to use Elance, think again.
Here are some offbeat projects ideas (these are actual current Elance projects):
1. Need Assistants To Find Dates!
I’d like to hire several people to find girls to go on dates with me, using MySpace, Facebook, and any other methods or websites you determine.
I will provide an online calendar where you can schedule dates, and let you know my availability. There will be a $100 bonus for the person who gets the best date (the woman I like the most).
I will provide you with details on the type of women I want to meet, and more about myself including photos and background (I am a 24 year old successful business owner and part time model, only interested in very attractive women).
2. Board Members Needed
We are looking to fill our void of Board Members for two small high tech startups. Need assistance in finding 3 candidates.
Candidates must;
a. Be willing to take stock for participation
b. Help in the forming and strategic planning
c. Help in raising seed money
d. Work from home or office, virtually
We shall provide information about companies after award. Winning bidder must show experience and success in this area.
3. Feasibility Study/ Analysis for a new Project Idea
Feasibility Study /Analysis for a new Travel Industry web based project idea.
The Feasibility Analysis should address the following:
A) Need Analysis
B) Process Work
C) Engineering & Design
D) Cost Estimate
E) Financial Analysis
F) Project Impact
There doesn’t seem to be any restrictions on the size of the project, so conceivably if you posted a job to have a few articles written you could get a taste for outsourcing with Elance and get a great book for free.