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Just when you think you’ve seen them all well… guess again. Some guys who are responsible for a good share of your inbox (spam) have thought of a new way to trick the the algorithms. Since image spam or pdf spam is thought to be not so effective well why not ASCII spam the victim’s inbox.

ASCII spam ?! well yes if you remember the good old days when ascii art was cool and all… those days are back and their going to haunt our inbox for as long as the algo’s will let them.

I got one today and it looks quite good here’s a snap:

ascii spam

As you can see the mail is pretty readable so to speak except the commmm something at the end. If you take a better look at those letters you’ll be able to see that their made out of numbers:

spam letters

This shows us that people who do spam are getting more and more ingenious day by day and will stop at nothing to get you buying their crap (drugs, fake accessories, porn etc). We’ll just have to wait and see what tomorrow brings :)

It has come to my attention lately that most people who are doing SEO or seo wannabees are in fact not using their heads when trying to rank (like they should btw) but follow some general advice that’s so like 4 years old now.

For example some people still list their sites in more than obfuscated directories, submit them to search engines and still brag around with it like they are semigods or something…

Just because you read a book that’s been published in late 2003 doesn’t mean the rules still apply today so loosen up a bit while you ?? Stop it with the 5%-7% keyword density (i mean really exact calculations) stop it with meta descriptors (they’re so dead) and try to use your head for a while.

There are a couple of things that have always worked and i mean always

Good content - not hard to understand the concept… still it’s a tough thing to embroid. If everyone was a writer over night heh… imagine how many newspapers would be out there (sigh!). Ok content is very important but there is still a lot to do to make it public. I especially hate the “content is king” bulls%%t and other expressions because they only make people to think linear and stick to some “rules”. I am not talking about that, i’m just stating that content is important because it makes you original (more or less depending on the niche), gets you traffic (because people who loved your articles will spread them like crazy) and furthermore good content will attract links !

So content is the greatest and biggest step to make but there should be a initial amount of effort in order to promote those few articles out there (the ones that will start gathering visitors).

The best way to explain this (not sure, but first thing that came inside my head) is to compare your site + visitors with a fractal generated image.

At first you have a couple of articles that generate not so much traffic. Once you start writing more those people interested in your site will promote your content and write articles generating more refferals on a daily basis. This is the image:

So taking this into consideration most people will say now that i don’t like rules or certain seo tips aren’t gonna work for them etc… Not True !

Success if a formula (not known) that just sits there for us to grab it by the tail… I’m not saying you shouldn’t take tips into consideration (Of course titles and headers will work for the next 1000 years because they are too relevant ! as long as part of the content itself) but i’m highlighting that we can be more successful if we were to use our heads write for people and optimize for search engines !

Stop trying to impress Google, Yahoo and MSN… be smart take advantage of their benefits but think that there isn’t a robot on the other end it’s a human being !

As an SEO I use intitle/inanchor counts from Google to help gauge keyword competitiveness on a regular basis. I type well over 80 words per minute but even I get tired of typing: intitle:keyword inanchor:keyword dozens of times per day. To remedy this we created a simple firefox search addon to automatically search Google for intitle/inanchor counts on any query.

To activate this search plugin

just click on the glowing down arrow next to your firefox search bar search engine icon at the very top right of your browser. There is a glowing down arrow next to the G, Y!, L or (A?) icon for your default search provider. Click on that arrow and scroll down to “Add Intitle/Inanchor” and left click. This will add our extension to your list of selectable search engines. That’s it. It’s ridiculously easy to make the XML file required to pass search parameters to:

<OpenSearchDescription>
<ShortName>Intitle-Inanchor</ShortName>
<Description>Intitle-Inanchor SEO tool</Description>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://indexedcontent.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://google.com/search?q=intitle%3A{searchTerms}+inanchor%3A{searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Today I am going to talk a lot about Content.

We all know that everyone is trying to get as much quality content as possible. We all heard that content is king and this is the smart way to do it or the one that pays off in the end. So why is content that important ?

From my point of view, content is responsible for two major things regarding your site:

1. Human Interaction

2. Search Engine Interaction

Although both important one can’t really exist without the other or success is a combination of both so to speak. You might chase rankings and keywords, get them high and still be unsuccessful or have a positive feedback from a very small group but can’t target the whole lot.

Content

So what is content really or what is the term content associated with in general ? Not taking quality into consideration we could say that content is the same thing (more or less) with lots of web pages. So having lots of web pages means you got content but what good is that ?

I advise the people i work with and tell them it’s best if they have a blog for example attached to their website. The thing is that by having a blog or any kind of CMS that you update frequently you solve at least three of your major problems:

1. Showing Google or other Search Engines that your site is updated constantly (Google loves fresh content)

2. Having the possibility to cover any number of keywords without stuffing them into one single page.

3. Showing your audience that you care by offering them Updated Information (related to your field) and thus offering them something closer to a complete service.

That being said let’s analyze things a bit. So we all agree that a higher number of pages means that you are more likely to target a higher number of keywords. Every page you create has it’s own title tag/headers that can help your page even more in the actual optimization. It’s easier to Deeplink and you can vary up your anchor texts as much as you like without worrying about flags or penalizations.

We all know that the tail of a keyword is bigger that the keywords itself in terms of traffic. So for example if we were to take car as our example and let’s say that

TRAFFIC( X ) = traffic that word X generates on the # 1 position in Google then:

TRAFFIC (car) < TRAFFIC (car + all descriptors) where a descriptor is a word like cheap, red, big, small, etc.

Imagine how many search strings we can cover using 3 or 4 words… basically the possibilities are unlimited and the competition for those words is direct proportional with the “complexity” of the search string.

cheap cars in canada will be less competitive than cheap cars for example.

Ok so by attaching a blog to your site you make Google happy and if you know what to write you make your audience happy. But that’s not all ! As long as you’re an active writer and you tend to write only from a specific niche this is what will happen:

1. Site will benefit because search engines now use Latent Semantic Indexing

More on Latent Semantic Indexing !

2. You will get many keyword combinations ranking well as long as you optimize your site “the good way” so this means a lof of traffic + links. (As a reminder: Trying to focus on a specific niche while writing your blog posts will get you more links plus a lower bounce rate)

3. Could convert well for services/sales/affiliates related to your niche. Lower ROI if planning on chasing after PPC fortunes but i wouldn’t recommend using this type of revenue system because this type of site development works better with a more select audience that in general criticizes Google Ads for instance. (We are still trying to get a lot of traffic though but filtering it roughly).

This being said i can’t find a more time saving solution, other than a blog, to increase your traffic/keyword variety in terms of rankings thus transforming your site from a handful of web pages into something more professional where the time on site and bounce rate are crucial factors which can be used to rate your work.

What Constitutes a Natural Link Profile?

When building links SEOs often take into consideration metrics that Google and other search engines might use to determine if a site is actively trying to manipulate their results. Avoiding detection, or creating a natural link profile is commonly overlooked in the SEO business. In truth the metrics SEO’s use are often arbitrary and rely on ‘best guess’ approaches. It’s difficult to know for sure whether Google tries to detect manipulation algorithmically or what metrics it might employ, however one can put on their Google hat and make an educated guess as to what might be reasonable yardsticks to measure by.

Link Building Basics

Vary Your Anchor Text

While pursuing links from all of the above site’s is a worthwhile endeavor, no amount of artificially trying to appear natural makes much sense if you put a giant bullseye on your back by building links that all have the same anchor text. Varying up your anchor text on links you build, buy or rent is the safest way to go.

Vary Blog/Forum Platforms

Sure you may have found the latest and greatest way to slip nofollow free links past wordpress or drupal, but exclusively building links on one or two platforms looks a little suspicious wouldn’t you say? Just because a link isn’t passing linkjuice or keyword rankings, don’t automatically assume it’s worthless. Every link has some value, even if its just to diversify your portfolio.

Deep Link Your Site

If your site has 5,000 pages it might raise a red flag if all of your good anchor text rich links point to the homepage. Get around this by creating multiple keyword landing pages and deep link to them with a mix of anchor text.

Solicit Links from 0 PR Pages

Not every link that a site acquires over time comes from a PR 6 page. Typically the vast majority of pages that link to you organically will have 0 PR. Once again if all the pages that link to yours are from high PR pages, a spotlight could shine on your site.

Build Links Over Time

Most of this article has dealt with who to acquire links from and where those links point. A third equally important metric is the time it takes to acquire your links. Most sites don’t go from 0-60 overnight. A good linkbait article CAN do this for your site, however building links over time is the safest way to approach things.

Link Profile Metrics

Existing Tools

Several popular seo tools already list possible metrics. Aaron Wall’s SEO tool for example lists a site’s Whois, Technorati index, Bloglines subscribers and del.icio.us bookmarks as potential metrics. SEO Quake lists only a site’s whois and del.icio.us bookmarks. As del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking tool it makes sense that if Google uses any sites as metrics, del.icio.us bookmarks would be first on the list. However with so many social media networks, if you are investing time and money in building links; spreading your eggs across several baskets is the wise move to avoid detection and possible penalty.

These are some sites that we at Indexed Content feel are good candidates to pursue links from to build a natural link profile for your site:

• Digg.com - a site that has made the front page of digg is likely to receive good backlinks on its own, however sites that don’t have multiple pages submitted are not likely to be worthy of keyword rankings for difficult to rank terms
• Stumbleupon - sites with several reviews by diverse users seem like a good fit to have naturally acquired good backlinks
• Del.icio.us - the first and most popular social bookmarking tool, all del.icio.us links are nofollowed making them of dubious SEO quality which makes them a natural fit as an organic metric
• Google Bookmarks - A bookmarking tool from Google, and since Google has access to all the data, using it as a metric would be exceedingly easy
• Technorati - the prominent blog search, ranking, and notifier of new blog posts, not a natural fit for certain sites that don’t run blogs
• Wikipedia - the worlds largest human edited encyclopedia, Wikipedia is free for anyone to edit but getting links to stick isn’t easy unless your site has expert quality content that qualifies.
• Faves.com (formerly bluedot) - Another popular social bookmarking site that adds nofollows to links.
• Furl - A social bookmarking site
• Blogmarks - A social bookmarking site
• Blinklist - A social bookmarking site
• Yahoo’s MyWeb - A social bookmarking/social media tool from Yahoo! When Yahoo controls the data why wouldn’t they use it as a metric and reward sites that score well on their products?

Although a lot of progress has been made concerning this problem there are people out there, gifted ones of course that use all their skills in developing the latest in “spam industry”. Captcha protection simply doesn’t catch it anymore, neither registrations nor any other basic spam avoiding trick.

Xrumer has reached platinum and for only 450 $ this is an affordable spam machine ! If you haven’t checked it out then check the potential here. I’m not promoting spam software but instead I’m just trying to underline the fact that malicious software exists and is reachable to anyone waving the green papers. Most people tend to study software like this because they can come up with better protection but I guess there will always be “the next big thing” and as long as you catch the wave (as a spammer) and monetize the flaw/exploit/tool (basically being always one step ahead) you’re going home with all the goodies.

Of course those who make a living out of spam know what they’re doing and people will do anything to continue their incomes and why not extravagant lifestyle. So what should a web entrepreneur/ seo person do to get some $?

• Mind your own business and work like a slave (Probably the most common decision people tend to take but very lousy payments ).
• Turn to the dark side and risk it for those extra $$$ (n/a if you don’t have the brains/info/connections/software/equipment but very high payments).
• Speculate opportunities while working your ass off or doing blackhat seems to be the best combo but you need to be informed all the time, have the money to invest and be one hell of a salesperson. But things are not impossible, one recent example being the acquisition of Pizza.com and like QuadsZilla was saying…. well it was sold for too little or practically stolen.

It’s really up to you to choose the color of your hat but there are a few variables that people tend to forget about in any industry. Besides knowledge a person should be able to to think outside the box and adapt as the business evolves… makes sense right?

We’re beta testing a new keyword rankings tool that pulls data from the Seodigger.com api. It’s basically one api call to seodigger specifying the domain to search for and a variable that limits results. We then wrap it up in some pretty css via jquery. Please check it out and report any bugs to ryanunderdown >at< gmail >dot< com

While searching the Internet I stumbled upon a very interesting article on Seomoz about how to hide your content from Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc).

When we’re talking about Search Engine Optimization we want to highlight content and promote pages/sites, try to bring them to the surface as much as possible and get the best rankings for certain keywords. But a lot of people want exactly the opposite, to hide and obfuscate that content, try to make it invisible to search engines.

There are mainly two reasons from my point of view and these are:

1. Confidentiality.

Many persons just want to keep their work hidden from vicious predators that SQL inject passwords, scrape content and generally steal others work.

2. Duplicate Content.

One of the very basic SEO rules when building a site is to stay away from duplicate content as much as possible. When a page is too similar with another (content, keyword descriptors, etc) search engines may think these pages were created only for the soul purpose of having as much content as possible so they penalize these pages. In the last years Google and other top search engines struggled to bring the best most relevant content to the top results so it would be wise to write long, quality articles to avoid duplicate content. The pages who are thought to be duplicates are moved to the supplementals section which is at the end of the results which means no traffic at all

Anyway the best methods and the most accessible ones too for avoiding these 2 problems are:

1. Using the robots.txt which can be found in the root of your site: www.myexample.com/robots.txt.

2. Using META descriptors : By adding < META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX,FOLLOW” > in the source code of your page (works per page only) will allow spiders to crawl your page, even your links but the only thing which will not get indexed will be your Content.