Search engine optimization Canada

You know you need a domain with lots of old links. You can buy a new domain and build links to it over time, or you can buy an old domain that already has links.

There’s plenty of ways to find old domains and websites to purchase, here’s a couple.

Aside: like most things SEO, we start our search on Google. Spend some time thinking of searches, it’ll pay off.

1) Look for dormant accounts
First, look for dormant accounts. Websites that aren’t being used or on the verge of expiring; you can sometimes make a decent offer and pick up a site that someone’s not using anymore. So how do you find them? Google for terms that you would see on websites that are old, out of date, not being used, or have their accounts suspended.

Keeping to our generic mortgage theme, here’s some examples of searches you can do for sites:
- account suspended mortgage
- under construction mortgage
- (C) 1999 mortgage

and so on. The better you are at finding innovative searches the better you’ll be at finding sites that other’s haven’t picked over.

Keep in mind that this isn’t a high success ratio endeavour. You’ll have to spend some time looking, and a lot of time making offers, only to get declined. It’s work and takes some effort (well, it’s not real work though - this is SEO and it’s not like the rest of the world who actually do have to work for a living while we’re screwing around on the internet). In any regard stick with it, they are out there.

I’ve got a friend who offered to buy an old site. Owner wouldn’t sell. A few months later, the owner’s transmission died and he needed the cash. Site sold!

2) Scrape old directories
Google for directories in your niche. Download a copy of Xenu link sleuth and politely! scrape the old directory. That’ll tell you two things. First, any dead links may be indicative of dropped domains - domains not registered any more but with some good old links. Secondly, it’ll show you sites that have been around for a long time.

3) Connect with the industry
Go looking for hosting companies that specialize in your niche. Chat them up, strike a deal so that they let you know if any of their customers are going to drop their website. Maybe going out of business or whatever. Work out something like a $500 payout for the domain owner, and the hosting company gets $100. Whatever - keep your ear to the ground in the niche.

I do hosting for my niche. And a few years ago (before age was a factor in the algorithm) I bought a domain from a fellow who was retiring, for like $500. That’s about what it was worth at the time since it was listed in the DMOZ directory (DMOZ is a good directory to get a link from if you can). Years later it’s now sitting in reserve, I’m shortly going to turn it into one of my flagship sites. And I wouldn’t sell it for less than $20K.

4) Watch the digitalpoint forums
The sites for sale in digitalpoint are full of crap, low end sites, and fraudulent sellers. But every once in a while - and it’s rare - a great sight comes up that’s underpriced. I’ve seen sites probably worth a grand or two sell for $100. Not often mind you, but when they do they go for the buy it now (BIN) price within minutes. So you have to watch.

In summary, keep your eye out for old domains. They can be an easy way to get a ready to rank site.

We’re trying something out right now. I’ll not go into detail on everything I’m experimenting with but I’ll disclose the generalities.

I’ve just set up a blog for one of my kids. We’ve repurposed an old, pr5 well established (gov’t and .edu backlinks) children related site for this. In the blog he’s going to do product reviews of things like toys and video games.

The intent? To get free stuff. At his age, that’s worth the work and is very exciting.

He’s writing some sample reviews right now to get the blog primed. After that I’ll show him how to approach toy and game manufacturers with a request for product reviews. Hopefully some of them will respond with some free stuff.

I’m curious to see how well this does. I think there’s some potential since we’re starting with a well established site and it’s very grassroots. What’s more grassroots than a kid reviewing the toys? I think there’s some potential that I may have to delve into social media as well to help him promote this. Not sure I have time to enter that arena, but will consider doing so later. It’s worth noting - this is one of the ways I learn things. Try stuff that’s outside of what I do. I don’t care if I win or fail on a lot of these things, I’m in it to learn. This project may lead me into social media, and area I don’t know anything about. And that may (or may not) have some spinoff in my main line of work.

I remember the first time I experimented. Previously I was too staid to do anything other than mainstream. But near the end of the digitalpoint network (I’ll let you google that - it was a grey hat technique from a few years ago that worked for a while) surge I finally got on board. I bought a large website for the ‘weight’ and bought another business related website to receive the return weight from the network. The end result? I made like $20-$30K in three months for an outlay of $1500. That wet my whistle, that’s for sure.
The network eventually died and I’ve let the sites sit after cleaning the network off. A few years later, I now have a really old directory website and a really old, not bad ranking, business website that I’m going to put back into production later this year or early next. Win win win.

So don’t be afraid to do the same thing. Grab an old domain name and try something goofy on it. What’ve you lost if it flunks? Not much.

There’s two things I know. First I despise squeeze pages. They suck, they look horrible and I have no clue why someone would buy something from such a page. Secondly, I know little to nothing about affiliate marketing.

Which is kind of funny that I’m going to send you to this page:
Marketing Bully
This is a squeeze page created by Andre Chaperon. I’ve met Andre, he’s a great guy.

And despite my dislike of squeeze pages, I read his stuff from top to bottom, clinging to every word. If this guy’s good enough to make me actually read a squeeze page, then this guy is on top of his game.

I’ve signed up. He had a deal a few months ago for one day only, I was out on vacation and missed it. But sign up for his stuff and watch it closely. Not sure what he’s selling yet, but I’m anxious to learn. I expect I’ll be buying his book or method or whatever when he finally releases it.

OK, first post on how to actually get links. This stuff is very rudimentary. But don’t let that fool you. What I’m about to show you needs to be both the starting point for developing links to your site, and the basis for your link development - the foundation as it were.

These techniques will seem crude and rudimentary. And they’re work to implement. But the work. The difference between many successful SEO campaigns and those that fail is whether or not you do the grunt work to lay the foundation. So don’t say I didn’t warn you - ignore this stuff and you might as well not even bother.

Here’s the dealo. We are going to go looking for links in the following locations:
- sites that rank
- sites that link to sites that rank
- sites that rank on related terms

Now I’m not going to show screenshots as I don’t want some poor soul to get inundated with link requests. But lets use ‘mortgages’ as our target market.

First, go to Google and search on mortgages. There you go - thousands of sites talking about mortgages.
Next, hover over each listing and click your scroll wheel. In firefox this will open up a new tab in the browser. Click, click click on each of the top 10 listings. Go to the second page, click click click. And so on. Do this for the first 100 results.

No browse through each of those sites. Do any of them look like they might give you a link? If so - send them a personalized email. If they look like they won’t give you a link, close the tab and move on. In any regard you’ve just looked at a 100 relevant sites. Maybe you get two or a half a dozen link requests.

Wasn’t that easy? Sure it was. And the difference between those that rank and those that don’t, is that those that rank actually sat down and did this very boring exercise. Repeatedly. Over and over.

But that’s only 100 sites to look at. Let’s find some more. Let’s search on ‘related’ terms. Do the following searches:
- mortgage brokers
- morgages (a typo)
- mortgage rates
- mortgage application
- online mortgages
- mortgage rates online
- mortgage calculators
and so on.

For each of those terms, repeat as above. Open up and visit each of the first 100 results. You will start seeing duplicates which will speed things up a bit. But keep searching - any term you can think of. Let’s say you do 20 terms. You’ve just evaluated 2000 websites and sent out 40 to 100 link requests. Let’s say you get 10 of those back. Booya! 10 links! That’s 10 more than your competitors have.

Sorry, that’s not sexy. But it just plain works.

Now let’s kick it up a notch. Who better to link to us, than sites that link to those sites that are already ranking? Why, nobody of course - that’s who we want to link to us. First we know that links from those sites do make a site rank, and secondly, if they link to our competitors they might also link to us.

So, lets go back to the Google search on ‘mortgages’. Open the first result in a new tab (again using the scroll wheel to open the URL in a new tab). Now click that tab so we’re looking at the site. Let’s see who links to that site.

Right click on your search status plugin. Select ‘Show Backward Links’ > ‘Domain External Only’ > ‘Yahoo’. That will show the first 1000 backlinks to the top ranking website. So we’ve got 1000 websites that link to a mortgage site. Let’s go have a look!

Open each of those sites in a new browser tab. Have a look at the site, and where they link to your competitor. If it looks like they might give you a link, send them an email asking for one politely. Mention that since they’re already linking to your competitor (or ‘I notice you’re linking to mycompetitor.com, I’ve got a similiar site, would you consider linking to me as well please?’) maybe they’d link to you.

Repeat 1000 times.

Now go to the second site in the Google search for mortgages. Open it up in a new browser. Check the backlinks to that site using the searchstatus plugin.

Repeat for the top 50 results for the search term mortgages - i.e. check the backlinks of all the top ranking sites.

Now repeat again for all those related terms.

You’ve just reviewed 50 sites X 1000 backlinks each X say 20 terms. A million sites. So don’t give me any crap about not being able to find people to link to you. Somewhere in those million sites are quite a few who’d be happy to link to you just because you asked nice. Let’s say you send 5 emails out per 100 sites visited. That’s 50,000 emails. (note; these must be personalized emails. Do not automate.). If you get say one in 10, you’ve just developed 5000 backlinks to your site.

Isn’t that some funny math? 5000 backlinks. And no fancy footwork either. Just gruntwork.

I can’t emphasize enough - this is one of the bigger ’secrets’ in the SEO industry. Just do the work. Find relevant websites and ask them nicely for a link. Over and over and over. Boring yes. Tedious yes. Sexy, not so much. Works? Like crazy it does.

If you did nothing else than this you can get enough backlinks in most industries to rank decently. That’s it! Just do the work - that’s what’ll seperate you from everyone else. And the more search terms you can think of - related, and in related industries - the more of a platform you have to find people to link to you.

It’s long been touted that there’s only six degrees of seperation between yourself and anyone else in the world. You know someone who knows someone, who knows someone….six times and you end up with anyone else you choose, anywhere in the world.
More recently this became the Kevin Bacon theory; we’re all only six degrees of seperation away from Kevin Bacon. Wonderful.
But now there’s proof. MSN did a study of MSN instant messenger chats and showed that in fact we’re all only 6.6 degrees of seperation away. So the old adage/wive’s tail actually was pretty close to the mark.
Here’s the news story on the subject:
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=4046743

WTH does that have to with with search or the internet? Well, is it just me or is MSN rooting through your instant messages? Didn’t think they would, hey? Don’t think a search engine will use your data when it suits their purposes? They can and will. But just as importantly, most people have no clue as to how much data the SE’s are actually collecting about you.

If you use gmail you are providing them every bit of info about all your email. If you have Google toolbar installed every single web page you visit is sent to Google. Every. single. page. If you surf sites that use Google analytics, they can and do track your visits - and can track you across websites. If you visit sites that run adsense, they can track you across sites. And they can compile all that data together to create one big profile over just about every site you visit. Scared yet? You’re not nearly paranoid enough.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are compiling this data for the purposes of making money off of your profile. Don’t kid yourself - otherwise why track and collect it? The new search engine Cuil doesn’t track this stuff. But what should be even more of a concern is what happens if either they get hacked, or the government decides to serve them with a ‘cough up the data’ order. Do you want the government to have access to your surfing habits?

This ‘analysis’ by MSN for the purposes of some stupid study should show you that your data and online habits are not safe with the search engines. They’re collecting the data, using it, and we don’t have a clue.

(I swear, I’m not a crackpot theorist! Honest! My concerns are based on fact…and others have the same concern. You’ll develop this concern too the more you get into the habits of the SE’s. They’re the new telco’s. Huge power, little accountability. They just haven’t tripped up publicly yet.).

When you’re out in the wild rummaging around for links or looking at what others are doing to rank there’s a few tools you can use to get a sense of what’s going on with a site.
First, remember that searchstatus plugin you installed? That plugin gives you a small @ symbol in the bottom right corner of your browser. A right mouse click on that symbol will bring up a menu.

1) Checking who links to your competition:
Visit your competitor’s site in your browser. Next, right click on the searchstatus plugin symbol (the @ symbol at the bottom of your browser). Choose ‘Show Backward Links’ -> ‘Domain external only’ ->’Yahoo’. This will show you the first 1000 pages that link to your competitors. Visit those pages. This seems straightforward, but actually looking at the pages that link to your competitors can tell you quite a bit about why people are linking to them, how they are developing links, and frequently other websites that they own.

2) Checking the history of your competition:
Let’s look at their site over a period of time. Again visit your competitor’s site in your browser. Right click on the search status plugin symbol and select ‘Show in Archive.org’. That will show you snapshots of their website over time. Simply click on a variety of time periods and have a look. Like checking the backlinks there’s no defined thing we’re looking for, we’re just snooping. Seeing what’s up. Maybe nothing, or maybe we see something that’s changed over time.

3) Use Google for references:
Google your competitor’s name and website. See who’s talking about them. I’ve used this to find a ‘testimonials’ section of an SEO company - the SEO company that is doing the work for one of my competitors. Now I know what I’m up against and the techniques they use to get ranked (ranked below me mind you ).

4) Who owns their IP address?
Bring up a DOS prompt. Enter the command ‘ping yourcompetitor.com’. That will give you their IP address, it looks like 123.123.123.123 (four groups of up to 3 numerals seperated by periods). Write this down. Now visit this site: http://ws.arin.net/whois/ and enter in that IP address. Now you know who owns the IP address. In many cases that will tell you where they are being hosted.

5) Check their domain registration information:
Visit whois.opensrs.net and type in their domain. This will show the underlying registration information for their domain. The ownership can in many cases be interesting. You’ll also find the age of the domain. And don’t forget to look at the nameservers. Those nameservers will be on another domain, like ns1.someotherdomain.com. That someotherdomain.com may either be their hosting company, or it may be another related website. In any case the nameservers can sometimes provide additional connections to other websites.

6) Who else is on the same IP (part I):
Type the raw IP address into your browser. On shared servers that will take you to the first website listed in Apache. And that website is typically the ‘owner’ of the IP address. That may be the hosting company. It may just be another site on a shared IP. Or again, it may be a related website.

7) Who else is on the same IP (Part II):
Go to MSN and search on ‘IP:123.123.123.123′, replacing 123.123.123.123 with your competitors IP address. This search will list all the sites that MSN knows that exist on that IP address. If your competitor’s have their own server, you likely just got a list of every site they own.

Who else is on the same IP (Part II):
As in number 7, but run the search up one or two IP address and down one or two (i.e 123.123.123.122 and 123.123.123.121). Servers normally get IP addresses in blocks, so again you can find related websites using this technique.

That’s some easy snooping!

You need two things to rank. You need to be a trusted and a relevant website. More on that shortly.

In the beginning there was on page optimization. People would change their website and get better rankings. Search engines soon learned onpage stuff (stuff on your own websites) was not trusted. Aside: this is why developing links is still more important than changes to your website.

So Google figured out that links or citations from other sources was a good way to rank websites. Links on other people’s websites was more trusted than the content on your own website.

They also created the concept of pagerank. Basically pagerank is a number between 1 and 10 that indicates the weight of the links that point to a page. The more and higher pagerank of the pages that link to your web pages, the higher the page rank will be of your web page. If you then link out to another web page, that recipient webpage will receive some of your page rank. So, page rank flows down through the web via links between pages.

Initially using that pagerank was a good indicator for Google and they used it heavily in ranking. Higher pagerank was better.

Enter the age of reciprocal linking. I link to you, you link to me. More pagerank for both. I run a program that crawls the web and finds other copies of the program and auto-swap links. Result: 10,000 reciprocal links overnight and a really high pagerank fast - and thus a high ranking. Google soon figured out that pagerank alone could not be trusted. Goodbye sites that were doing high volume reciprocal linking.

Enter the digitalpoint network (see the digitalpoint forum link in the sidebar). I enter two sites into the network. Site A has 50,000 pages in it. I run ‘ads’ (links) for 5 other members of the network on each of those 50K pages. so 250K outbound links. In exchange, 250K pages from other sites in the network link back to my site B. Voila - large scale one way linking and great rankings. Yes, those were the good old days.

Google soon found footprints for the network. Goodbye sites that were using the DP network. (Aside: it seems that a site I had in the DP network years ago has actually finally recovered and is now ranking on it’s own again - as of the last couple of weeks).

Enter blogs and paid links. I pay you $30, you write a blog post about my site and include some links. Instant one way links. Google has not really killed this yet, but trust me, Google is DYING to stop this. It’s their #1 crusade right now.

So what is Google trying to do? As noted above, they want to server trusted and relevant sites. The problem is, how do we define trusted and relevant? And how do we stay ahead of the curve of Google finding link schemes? Just remember the mantra: trusted and relevant. Even if you’re not doing exactly what Google’s algorithm is testing for today you’ll be sitting there waiting whe Google’s engineers figure it out. And they’re getting better at it.

Now lets define trusted and relevant. A trusted and relevant website is a website that has trusted and relevant backlinks. How do we know if a site that links to us is trusted and relevant? Simple - they have trusted and relevant backlinks themselves.

But what’s relevant? That’s easy enough. A relevant link is a link from a site that has content related to our website and has links from other relevant sites.

Trusted is a slightly more complex issue. I picture trust this way; trust works like pagerank. It flows through links. We want to build lots of links from trusted sites. That gives us more trust, and a better chance to rank. But how do we know a site is trusted? Simple - a gut check. Look at the backlinks of a site. Are the backlinks full of authority, non-spammy sites? Old sites? Do the sites look trusted? If so - that’s all you can do.

For example, would a link from a low end poker site be trusted? Not likely. What about a link from the government? Absolutely - that’s trusted. And there’s a huge range in between. Just use your head you can tell trust mostly just by looking.

Long boring post I know. But important! Trust and relevance - that’s IT. Everything you do in link development needs to center around these two concepts. It worked 5 years ago, it works today and I expect it will work in another 5 years. Build for stability. If all the trusted and relevant websites say your site is worth referencing, Google will think so too. And even if the factors aren’t being measured explicitly right now, it’s where Google is looking to go - be ready for them. Most importantly, that’s pretty much all you need to know about the why of link building. Now all we need is the how (which will be coming soon).

Remember - build trusted and relevant backlinks. That makes your site trusted and relevant. And you will therefore rank.

The second thing you’ll need if you’re doing is an attitude adjustment. Let me state the following:
- You are in business to make money for yourself.
- Google is not your friend. Google is not ANYONE’s friend, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Kiss their ass at your peril.
- there is no blackhat or white hat. There are only techniques and levels of risk.

Let’s address the first point. You are in business to make money. I’ll assume you also run an ethic and moral company because you’re an ethical and moral person. That doesn’t mean I’m going to listen to you carry on about how you’re making the world a better place with your website or how content is king, or natural links are best. If you’re going to connect Google rankings to ethics, you’re in the wrong place.

Secondly, Google is a publicly traded company. They are required to make money for their shareholders. Not have a hugfest. Or ‘do no evil’. MAKE MONEY FOR THEIR SHAREHOLDERS. Their interests are their interests first, not yours, not ‘organize the world’s data’ or any other crap. Ignore this at your peril. If you think a company that cows to China’s dictators, scrapes and republishes entire websites and will ban entire websites at the drop of a hat is your friend, you’re in the wrong place. Google is using your web site to make them their billions. Turnabout is fair play.

Their is no blackhat and white hat. And if there is, blackhat is NOT illegal when used in an SEO sense. Nor is it immoral, unethical or bad for the web. Blackhatters for the most part do not ‘hack’.

White hat means you abide by Google’s terms of service. If you feel the need to do that, reread my second point above. And if you still feel the need to be a whitehat, go hug a tree somewhere else.

Black hat means two things. First, black hatters do not abide by the search engine’s term of service. (Again, nobody’s forcing you to abide by any publicly traded companies arbitrary terms of service). Secondly, they tend to find holes in the search engine’s algorithm and exploit those holes. Blackhatters also automate tasks. They set up hundreds of websites to churn and burn where a white hatter will run on one only.

Of course, there’s a very large range between the two. What I do, and what I’ll be talking about here is how to mostly look like a white hat, but to also test some grey hat stuff. I don’t do true blackhat (honestly, I’m not smart enough to stay ahead of the search engines. I prefer to build so that they come to me instead).

In that large grey range of course are very large tolerances of risk and reward. Where you fall in that range should be a deliberate choice, as mine was. However you should also dabble seperately outside your range in order to learn and grow. It’s worth noting that Google continues to change the line where white hat is. You can find yourself a grey hat one day having done nothing different - Google just decides what was OK today was not OK tomorrow.

If you’re just getting started out with SEO, stick to white hat as much as you can. The time to learn grey is not on your money sites or on any sites where you have a trail.

The very first thing you’re going to need if you’re doing SEO is the searchstatus plugin for firefox. Don’t ask a lot of questions, just make sure you’re using firefox as your browser, then click on that link and install the plugin. You’re going to use it. A lot.

The search status plugin gives us some details about the links related to whatever page we’re looking at - both inbound and outbound links. If you’re doing SEO at all,you should be making heavy use of this plugin. I use it all day everyday.