Search engine optimization

Quick post for friday afternoon, an update to a post I did on sphinn that never got sphunn because I have no friends :). Over the next little while I may repurpose some of my ideas I’ve posted elsewhere and rebuild and update them here.

1) Sugarrae - Sugarrae’s blog. She doesn’t post as often anymore, but you’ll want to cling to every word. Go back and read all of her previous posts. She did a small paid consulting job for me when I first started doing SEO. To date it’s the best money I’ve ever spent. As an SEO, she skyrocketed me right to the top with ‘what works’. In any regard, read her blog.

2) Jim Boykin - Again he doesn’t post as much as he used to, but go back and read all of the old posts on his blog -go back a few years. Jim is free with his advice to everyone, and he’s another very, very sharp person. I ran into Jim at a pubcon years ago, long before I knew he was far more than a scruffy bearded hoodied geek. In an hour, over a beer, he imparted more guidance than I’ve read in years online. Probably 5-6 years later I still use what he told me in that conversation as foundation guidance on how to build links. He was talking trustrank concepts years before anyone was discussing the idea publicly. I don’t just want to be LIKE Jim, I want to BE Jim :). Maybe I should get a ‘I want to be like Jim’ hoodie….?

3) Andrew Goodman - Best Google adwords book available. Support your independent bookstore and go buy a copy if you’re doing PPC at all. You should probably also buy Perry Marshall’s book.

4) WebMasterWorld - The internet’s premier SEO forum. It has ebbs and flows of good posts, but there’s lots of good advice there still. If you’re serious about SEO, it pays the $100 or so to become a site supporter, or it gets the hose again.

5) Digitalpoint forums - In all seriousness, I don’t read the SEO forums there. Too much low end garbage to wade through, full of folks who’s life is automated directory submissions. But still, if you’re getting started, it’s an alternate view on the industry. I like it for the buy-sell forums. It’s a great place to get a banner graphic or template done cheap. And there’s a whack of sites being sold - every once in a while you’ll find a gem. For design stuff, you can hold a ‘contest’ which means you post your payment, everyone does their design, you pick the one you like and pay them. Weird, but true.

6) Sphinn - Really, this shouldn’t be in a top 10 list. It’s full of low end garbage posts and self promotion. But the self promoters in the industry seem to like it, so let’s say I bowed to peer pressure. It’s not in my top 10 list, but it’s a widely read site so it gets a mention. FWIW, Sphinn is Danny Sullivan’s new gig. Danny is the original force behind the SES conferences, he was and is a powerhouse in the industry - but not the sphinn site :).

7) SlightlyShadySEO - As it’s name suggests, it’s not really as blackhat as you might think. More of a grey hat. But well worth the read, it’ll give you good insight into some of the edgier stuff in the business. Not all of it - but enough for you to kind of get a feel for the type of thing going on. And you do need to have a bit of a feel for that side of the business, even if you’re whitehat. My goal for the coming year is to meet this guy and have a beer with him. That’s assuming he’s old enough to consume alcohol :).

Pubcon - The conference run by the folks at webmasterworld. Everyone who’s anyone goes. White hat, black hat, search engines, everyone. If you’re newish, the sessions are fabulous. If you’re more experienced, it’s where you go to network. Some of my very best ideas came out of having dinner with someone at pubcon. Meet the folks you’re going to message SEO ideas back and forth with for the coming year. Seriously - this is a must attend. I was a bit reluctant to go the first time, after that it’s a big deal to me if I don’t go.

9) Search Engine Strategies - This is the grandaddy of SEO conferences. Huge. The conference in Toronto is a dud though - I only ever get an exhibit hall pass, do a 20 minute drive by of the 8 booths they have, then go home. The conference in New York, I think the sessions are still a bit weak (meant for the lowest common denominator) but the exhibit hall is freakishly large. Can you say 3 stories of booths? The exhibit hall alone is a day or two to get through. For sure worth going. The other one is the SES in San Jose. I have not been but I’m told it’s outstanding - I’m dying to go. It’s where they have the famous ‘Google Dance’. Apparently all the search engines put on parties.

Funny story at SES NY. Last time I went, they were drawing for a new Jeep. I laughingly folded a corner on my ticket and told the guy to pick that one. Ha. Ha. So they drew a ticket. Not me, but the winner had to be present to win….so they waited. And waited. And no show. So they drew another ticket. And again waited. And waited. Another no show. So they drew a third ticket AND THE CORNER WAS FOLDED! Yes, I remained cool, but I was pretty excited :). No, it wasn’t me. But it was fun for 3 seconds while I thought ‘maybe’!

But back to building links. Tony Spencer had a great idea if he won a jeep for free. Drive it off a cliff and video tape it. Post the video, and you’re going to get links and hits. A waste of a jeep, but hey, it’s a jeep right?

10) You’re already here! Remember, I’m speaking in Toronto this month, see you there!

And have a great weekend!

(The following post makes more sense if you’ve bought the ebook and read it). If you bought Andre Chaperon’s Marketing Bully ebook today and have had the time to review it you’ll notice in one section on advertising (I’m being vague deliberately) he talks about using about.com to get lists of websites in a specific niche.

Well, let me extend this a bit - there’s another place you can get lists of websites in a related niche - Google adwords. And here’s how:

Go to Google. Click on ‘preferences’ and set the number of search results shown to be 100. Now go do your search for your niche. Of course you’ll get all the adwords listings. Now click on ‘more sponsored listings’. Now I think Google just changed the layout of this page, but you should now have a three column listing of at least 100 advertisers on that search term. That gives you a ton of information to use in conjunction with the ebook’s suggeste strategy. And combine each of those websites with the about.com technique in the ebook, now you’re cooking with gas.

My apologies if this specific strategy is mentioned in the ebook. So far I’ve only glanced at it and picked up a few points. I saw the new Google layout on the sponsored listings page and just kind of put two and two together.

Now, for those of you not following along in the ebook there’s still something to be learned here. Watching the PPC ads are a good indicator of what’s going on in the industry. How can you use that in what you’re doing? Worth giving some thought to.

I watch the PPC ads relatively closely in my niche to see any new players. Normally what I see are incompetents spending money which is kind of nice. But sometimes there’s more going on. Players who are getting slaughered in the organic listings moving to PPC. PPC players trying to move into organic. And just two weeks ago I was investigating a new player in the PPC market (see my previous post on researching your competitors online) and found a very high quality backlink. I’ve not completed my research yet, but I may be able to duplicate the link. If so - watching the PPC ads paid off, didn’t it?

A bit of a review post here, but we’re going to use this when developing backlinks. We need to be able to judge if a site is a place we want to get a link from.

Bear in mind when reading this, much of this isn’t ‘factual’. I really don’t know how Google ranks sites. Some of this stuff I’ve developed from reading. Some stuff I’ve developed from my own sites. But this stuff does work and I believe it will continue to work. So even if some of this stuff isn’t perfectly correct right now, following it does work somehow - and I expect will continue to get you ranked in the future. FWIW, the very first site I ranked was about 5 years ago. I built links for 3 months and have not touched it since. It has remained ranking reasonably well for the last 5 years - untouched.

Anyay, at this point I’ll repeat my mantra. You are known by your backlinks.

Pagerank:
Pagerank is a Google algorithm that assigns a number between 0 and 10. A pagerank (PR) of 10 is high.

Pagerank is also an iterative algorithm in that it cycles around in a loop. The more you calculate it, the more accurate it becomes. The actual calculation isn’t overly important though.

The way it works is this. Lets say I somehow have a pagerank 5 web page. If I link to you, I lose a fraction of my pagerank and you gain can some. So maybe my pagerank on that page becomes 4.8 (though keep in mind, pagerank that we see is only ever an integer) and your pagerank becomes a 3.

Your pagerank isn’t linear either. It takes a lot more to go from a pagerank 2 to a 3 than it does to go from 1 to 2. It’s generally assumed that it’s logarithmic, it takes roughly 8 times the links to go from 2 to 3 than it does to go from 1 to 2.

Now lets say you get another backlink from a pagerank 5 web page. Now your page may become a pagerank 4. And so on - the more backlinks you have from higher PR web pages, the higher your PR becomes. And if you link out to someone, you will pass a wee bit of PR to them. (It’s understood that this pagerank bleed does lower your pagerank. However you should assume the bleed is so mild that you really shouldn’t worry about it. Linking out has far bigger concerns and reasons than worring about going from a PR 5.85555 ot a PR 5.85554.

So, pagerank flows through links. The more, higher PR backlinks we have, the higher our PR is. And it’s harder to move up from a PR 5 to a 6 than it is from a 4 to a 5.

Google used to use PR heavily in their ranking. A high PR meant good rankings. I do not believe this is the case anymore - I believe the PR described above is hardly used at all in rankings. In other words, a PR 3 can easily beat a PR 5 site.

What you do use PR for is an indicator of ‘volume’ of backlinks. Higher PR pages and sites generally have more backlinks. Are they good backlinks? Is this a good place for you to get a link? PR does NOT answer those questions anymore.

Relevance:
Relevance of a page is based on two things. Text on the page, and relevance of sites or pages that link to that page.

Now, lets consider something. I believe Google right now is primarily ‘page’ based and not ’site’ based. So getting links from relevant ontopic pages, on an offtopic website works great right now. Will this continue to work? Ideally I think Google would like to use site specific relevance instead of page specific relevance but they run into problems with ‘general’ sites like news sites and the like that have pages on many topics. The reason this is important is if you develop links from ‘pages’ that are important but are basically fudged on a site that really shouldn’t be linking to you - well, that’ll work great right now. It may or may not work great later.

So for relevance, look at the page and make sure it uses words similiar to what’s on your site. Then check the backlinks of the site and make sure they have backlinks from places that are relevant as well.

Trustrank:
This is another conceptual guideline. It may not be exactly what Google does, but approaching this from the right perspective does work now, worked previously, and I expect it to continue to work.

Trustrank is like pagerank. And it works very similiar to pagerank. Trustrank flows from page to page and site to site via links. Get a log of high trustrank links to your pages, your webpages will get a high trustrank.

There are three differences though between TR and PR. First, we can’t see trustrank (pagerank has plenty of little toolbars we can install in our browser to see the PR of any page).

Secondly, rather than being iterative, TR only flows downhill. It’s been speculated (and speculated correctly IMO) that Google dictated some sites as ‘trusted’ and gave them TR. All trustrank flows down from those sites. We do not know what those initial sites are.

Thirdly, unlike PR, I believe Google uses TR heavily in it’s algorithm. Get a high trustrank, and you’ll rank. How do you get a high trustrank? Get lots of links from sites with high trustrank.

Since we can’t see trustrank, how do we measure it? Well, we can’t. All we can do is assume. But that’s OK - it’s very easy to do a gutcheck of a trusted site. Let’s look at some examples. Goverment of Canada site. Trusted? Of course. Highly trusted? Sure is. A university. Trusted? Of course. Not quite as high a TR as the Government of Canada, but probaby not a slouch either. What about a directory site that links out to anyone and everyone for a $15 fee. Trusted? No, not much at all.

In short, just have a look at the site. If it seems highly trusted, assume it is. If it seems shaky, assume it’s low trustrank.

Age:
It’s been assumed that Google has some sort of aging algorithm in it’s backlink checking. Older links are better. This was done as a spam prevention measure. Most web spammers are not willing to wait 6 months or a year to see if backlinks work. So aging cuts back on that. It also places distance between developing links and their affect on your ranking making it more difficult to tell if a specific link helps your site. Six months from now and your site moves up or down - what caused it? Can’t tell if it’s a link or not - and Google wants that obscurity.

Now that you’ve read all that, here’s how you judge backlinks. You want old, trusted, relevant backlinks. When you’re looking at sites to get backlinks from, check their backlinks. If they have old, trusted, relevant backlinks, then that makes them a good link for you to get. Such a link means you know have trusted relevant backlinks that will eventually become old - and you’ll rank.

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.

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.

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.