SEO Toronto

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.

I’ll be speaking about SEO and PPC at the September Toronto LUG (or newTLUG).

Date: September 23, 2008
Time: 7:00 - 10:00 pm.
Place: Seneca College on the YorkU campus, Room S1209, Lower Kaleidoscope Room
Stephen E. Quinlan building
Cost: Free. Parking however is $8.

I spoke at the KW Lug and everyone seemed please with the value for the price; I’ve got three hours this time instead of two so I’ll go into a bit more detail on the ‘how to’.

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!

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.

I recently spoke at KW Lug (Linux User’s Group) about SEO and was very pleasantly received. That’s despite:
- using a windows computer for my demo (my computer is actually dual boot and I run Linux normally, but I don’t have wireless networking working under linux).
- explaining that Google is in fact a for-profit company with for-profit motivations.
- Talking about SEO, which is very maligned in the tech community.

Still, they were very pleasant and seemed to enjoy the presentation. I’ve been asked to speak at Toronto LUG as a result and plan to do that some time in the fall.

In addition to my occassional speaking gigs, I regularly post on various forums on the subject of SEO. I think I’m going to tone that down a bit and start posting here instead.

So - assuming I start to use this site as a regular blogging platform on the subject of SEO, what subjects would you like to talk about?