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July 14, 2008

An Interview With The Creator Of Too Much StumbleUpon – A Piece Of Viral Marketing Genius

too much stumbleupon

Image credit: too much stumbleupon

Around about a week ago I was happily stumbling away when all of a sudden this warning page came up, telling me that my account had been disabled:

Stumbleupon warning

Stumbleupon has been temporarily disabled, because you have used it too much.

  • Stop stumbling and disable stumbleupon toolbar
  • Do your work
  • Don’t think about stumbling

I feel really stupid now, but I fell for this thing hook, line and sinker. I thought that I had been caught stumbling my own blog too much and that someone at stumbleupon was messing with me.

The page is possibly one of the most popular stumbles ever, it was discovered about 8 days ago and already it has received 351 reviews.

I wanted to find out more about the page and who created it, so I used the form on the website to contact the creator. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions for me, but wishes to remain anonymous:

Question 1: How long have you been a member of StumbleUpon?

Answer: I have used stumbleupon since April 2007, So it is about 1,5 years ago.

Question 2: Did you create the page for fun? profit? Or both?

Answer: It was just for fun, I was bored and playing with new firefox 3 and surfing on the “about:robots” page. I noticed how easily the source of the about:robots page could be copied, I remembered those funny “stop stumbling” images and got the idea. I created the page, uploaded it to my site, added it to stumble and forgot it.

Question 3: How many unique visitors has the page had so far?

Answer: Here are my traffic statistics according to AWStats and Google Analytics:

  • AWStats – 101,789
  • Google – 89,901

Question 4: Has the amount of traffic you have received surprised you?

Answer: It was a big surprise to me, because I almost forgot the whole page… The last popular page I had: a joke about vista’s source code, only received 9,240 visitors.

Question 5: Have you ever thought about a career in viral marketing?

Answer: Nope.

Going off this page’s performance, I would definitely be interested in taking this guy on for his social media skills. He is not a professional and as far as I am concerned he hasn’t even marketed the page – One hundred thousand unique visitors and going strong.

Here is a link to the warning page and the 350+ comments at SU.

June 24, 2008

Is Google Trends For Websites Just A Big Google SEO Ploy?

search result on google for searchengineland.com

Image above: search result on google for searchengineland.com

Have any of you started to notice the new Google trend URL page results showing up in the SERPs? Here are a few examples:

It is only a few days since Google launched the Google trends for websites and already Google is often ranking in the top 10 with the Google trend URL pages that are indexed.

IMO: this is not a bad thing: for most URLs the pages really do offer good information. The information provided on the Google trend pages is far more useful then the information provided by many of the other competing URL sites, you know aboutus.org etc.

Also IMO: I am guessing this is a mistake on Google’s part and that they will robots.txt out the Google trend pages.

Update: Kevin Gibbons from SEOptimise has noticed exactly the same thing, click on the link below to visit his post:

Google Trends indexing website URL’s & ranking for brand queries

Update:As I suspected they would do, Google have robots.txt out the pages now. I guess it is a good job I am here to keep my eye on these things for them.

June 19, 2008

Google’s Only Rank For Your Own Name Penalty

Up until about 2-3 months ago I was only aware of two real Google penalties. The outright ban, where a site will be completely removed from the Google index and the minus 40-60 penalty.

About 2-3 months ago I started talking to a local company about helping them with their SEO. It looked like they wanted to do something and they were just thinking things over. Next the guy called me up and said that all of his Google rankings had disappeared and that the only thing his site was coming up for was the name. The site came up no.1 for his two word company name and no.1 for the domain. However all of the other positions the site had with the homepage, albeit not good ones had disappeared. Even when I tried searching for some unique text off the homepage in quotes it did not come up. So I asked the guy a couple of questions, you know – have you made any changes recently that could have caused this to happen? etc. The guy said that the only thing he could think of was that he had placed a load of area names on the bottom of the homepage in tiny text so that no body could see. I said “bingo, that is why the site is penalised, you put hidden text on”. He got rid of the hidden text, I told him what to say to Google on the reinstatement request and his site was back to where it was previously within a week.

Again about 2-3 months ago I started to work on this new site and I came up with a temporary solution to get some link juice into the category pages. This was totally my fault and looking back it was really bad and stupid. This is the only time I have ever got a client penalised by any search engine. The site had about 130 categories and I placed an SEO friendly drop down menu on the homepage and the rest of the pages to the 130 categories. I saw some progress with the rankings initially, but around a week later the site got hit with the exact same penalty, this time it was not just the homepage that got hit, it was all of the pages where I had placed the drop down menu. It was ranking for the company name with and without Ltd, the domain and that was it. I was scared as hell, I had to tell this guy that I had got his site penalised. I spoke to the owner about it and he was so cool you have no idea, it is a good job I choose my clients carefully. Now technically I had done nothing wrong, but it looked seriously spammy – I showed it to a friend and he said “no wonder you got penalised, you’ve got hidden text, hidden links and keyword stuffing” (not technically right, but that is what it looked like). I am still waiting for the developers to finish the new site on this one. Once the site is finished I will ask the owner to send a reinstatement request, hopefully Google will forgive me for being so aggressive.

Weather this is a new penalty or not I do not know. It is different to the minus penalty because when pages are hit they do not show up anywhere, no matter what. It is different to the outright ban because affected sites stay in the index and rank for their own names. Have any of you ever seen a penalty like this? It can definitely be applied for hidden text and it could possibly be applied for hidden links or keyword stuffing.

June 16, 2008

Blogging Achievements & Goals

You know how you get some people who just take to blogging? I was not one of them people. I started blogging for all of the wrong reasons. It was very much a case of keeping up with the Joneses. Many of my competitors were getting blogs and I thought that I should have one.

If you look at the 1st few posts on this blog you will see that I blatantly did not know what I was doing. I would say that I started to enjoy it and get the hang of it around Christmas time. IMO the Mixx review getting linked to by TechCrunch was a complete fluke.

Over the last couple of weeks a lot of the hard work that I have put in seems to have really started to pay off.

About two weeks ago, Lee Odden from Top Rank Blog added this blog to his big list of search marketing blogs and yesterday Liz Strauss over at Successful-Blog.com made me an official SOB.

Other blogging achievements include:

  • Around 150 RSS subscribers
  • Linked to by most of the major search blogs
  • Technorati top 25K
  • Over 100 unique visitors per day (without the main site)
  • Good SE authority – most of the posts rank well

Over the next 6 months I would like to achieve the following:

  • 400 RSS subscribers
  • Technorati top 10k
  • 200+ unique visitors per day

I would also like to start making some money doing this. If I can get this blog (including the rest of the site) making over £1,000 per month off advertising I can cut down on doing SEO a bit and focus on doing more blogs. I will start looking at monetization strategies this week.

June 10, 2008

Funny Link Request

I have just started to put in place a directory of UK web designers and yesterday I got my 1st request for a listing:

“Hi there,

Please can you put my design company into your Directory for Yorkshire. We are a newly established business but have a successful record so far! Our website is being built at the moment (funny how you can design everyone else’s website and never find time for your own!).

Our address:

Unit 4 Amber Business Centre, Rawmarsh road, Rotherham, S60 1RU.

Kind Regards,

Candice Link

Managing Director

JEWEL Cre@tive Ltd”

Her last name is link, how awesome is that for link requests? I was so impressed with her last name, I told her she could have a listing immediately, even though I have not properly launched the dir yet.

Candice’s website, Jewel Creative will be online soon.

June 7, 2008

Is The Googlebot Neglecting Regular Pages?

Googlebot

Image Credit: google bot

So it’s been nearly two weeks since I re-launched this site and Google has still yet to pick the two new services pages. About a year or so ago the Googlebot would have picked those pages up in a couple of days easily.

The blog is getting crawled fine and I am sure that this post will be indexed within a couple of hours of me posting. It just seems to be regular web-pages that are getting neglected by Google. This could possibly be because the Googlebot is paying too much attention to blogs etc.

It is not just this site’s regular web-pages that do not get crawled as fast any more. I work on many websites and generally Google does not seem to be picking stuff up as fast.

June 5, 2008

Advanced SMO: How to Build a Social Media Storm

Social Media Storm
Image Credit: energy transfer
If you have really good content that you want to get thousands of visitors to, then this guide should come in useful.

With social media optimisation (SMO), it helps an awful lot if you either know the right people or are active in the places where you are looking to target. Once you do or are it is fairly easy. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your good content and your SMO campaign, for once you find your feet:

Forget Digg: I know it has been said many times, but it is even more true then ever now. For nine out of ten sites Digg is a big waste of time and getting any kind of e-commerce site on the homepage is virtually impossible. The only people who look in the upcoming section are the digg staff and fellow marketers. Spend 30 seconds getting your free link and then move on.

Planning is Everything: Make a list of all of the social media websites you are going to submit your content to and then work out roughly how long you think it is going to take for your content to go popular on each site. For example with Reddit you can be fairly sure that if your content is going to go popular, it will do within and hour or two. With Mixx it will normally take a good 6 hours and with Stumbleupon you just can’t tell, so you leave that out of the equation.

Once you have done this you need to choose a time for when you are going to plan to have all of your submissions go popular. You might say to yourself, I want all of my submissions to be going popular 7 hours from now at 11.00pm. Then you add the time you need to submit next to each social media site on your list.

Go to work and do everything as planned. If you have submitted to all of the major social sites and if all of the elements are in the equation, then when the time comes you should be able to make it into the top 10 on popurls and you should be getting a load of traffic from JimmyR.com. I have had over 3,000 uniques from popurls.com and I have had over 2,500 uniques from JimmyR.com. If you make it into the top 10 on popurls you have won and you will generally receive over 50,000 unique visitors in a short space of time and lots of trackbacks.

Comment Management: Once you have started to go popular on some of the social media sites you can make your content go a lot further by dealing with negative comments. There are lots of different ways to do this and trying to talk to the negative commenter(s) isn’t always the best one, here are a few ideas:

  • Have all of your friends down vote the negative comments heavily
  • Take the mick out of the negative commenter(s) or their comments
  • If they have a good point, you might want to think about possibly changing your content

With good planning you can consistently get content to go popular on the social media sites, generate buzz and generate trackbacks.

June 4, 2008

How Much For a Link?

A month or so ago, one of the sites that I am working on got mentioned in this big fashion magazine. The magazine had wrote an entire article about the client.

I am not going to say which magazine it was, but if they had linked to the client, it would have been an awesome link. There was however no link to the client. The really annoying part is: they had actually placed the client URL in the article, but without linking it through.

I conferred with the client and we came up with a plan to get the hyperlink: this involved us doing our best to get the person who wrote the article on the telephone.

After a couple of days, we did and she said that she may be able to help us out.

To our surprise she sent us the following offering:

  • £833 per month

And there was a 3 month minimum contract, that is £2,499 (about $5k) to hyperlink a URL that is already on a page for 3 months.

Needless to say, we did not take them up on their offer – We just thought that asking nicely would be enough.

June 2, 2008

Debunked: Only The 1st Anchor Text Counts With Google

A little while ago I read the following thread over at SEOmoz:

Results of Google Experimentation – Only the First Anchor Text Counts

This made me panic a bit, because it would have meant that the footer link I had on this blog was not helping my homepage rank. I think someone mentioned in the discussion that even if the 1st link was nofollowed, it would still be the only one that counted. This would have meant that I was supposed to be completely shafting myself.

I got rid of the 1st links to the homepage altogether hoping to see a rise in Google for my main phrase, but I did not. I did however rise over 60 places, within less then a week or so on MSN/Live search.

I wanted to know for sure with Google, so when I 1st changed over my design less then a week ago, I made it so that every post in this blog linked to the about us page, with my name as the anchor text. I have just checked today and it is ranking 4th on Google UK, just behind my Yahoo! post.

  • The 1st anchor text always says about
  • There is very little on-page for it, other then the links in these posts
  • There are other pages with far more David Eaves links (external ones)
  • There are no external links to that page using that anchor text

My conclusion: Google does not only look at the 1st link to a page for anchor text, MSN/Live search does and I am not too sure about Yahoo!

Good advice and practice from SEOmoz anyway though, if only for MSN. Why take a chance on it? Make sure that you have your good anchor text in the 1st links to your pages.

Update: Seeing how VanDeMar seems to be the one who started this whole thing off, here is a link to his original post:

You May Be Screwing Yourself With Hyperlinked Headers

June 1, 2008

New Logo and XHTML Template Design

I have been working hard over the last week or so, on the new design for this site. I have still got a long way to go, but I certainly feel like things are starting to fall into place.

I have changed a lot of the URLs on the main site and as you would expect everything is going fine with Google. Yahoo! seems to be very slowly getting there and I have no doubt sent a kiss goodbye to many of my MSN/Live search rankings for quite sometime.

The new logo is what I like best about this new design, if you look carefully at the blue design, that is actually a little SEO, with an arrow pointing upwards at the top. When the designer James was showing it to me, he was like;

“the abstract design contains the letters S,E and O and the arrow pointing upwards represents your clients rankings going to the top.”

I just loved it instantly and I was like:

“you had me at S”

I am not too sure about this font and one or two people have commented that it is a little small, I will probably be changing it in the next couple of weeks. I am going to get this hacked up, broken thing looking like a blog as well.