Why You Should Use Hollywood and Google Blog Search Bookmarklets

These bookmarklets will allow you to immediately find out who is linking to the specific webpage you are on. Here are the instructions how to install and use them:

Visit this page to grab the bookmarklets.
For Firefox and Safari browsers, drag the bookmarklets onto your toolbars.
For IE 7 users, right click on the bookmarklets and select ‘Add to Favorites‘.
When you want to find out who is linking to a specific webpage, simply click on the bookmarklet when you are on the page itself and you’ll be taken to a search results page with all the sites linking to it.


Technorati or Google Blog Search

Technorati highlights the anchor text for the link and allows you to sort by authority as well so you can find out which are the bigger blogs (by link count) which link to a specific site.

Google blog search allows you to search via a specific timeframe, such as blogs linking in within the last hour, 12 hours, one week or months. You can also add the search results feed to your Google homepage or create an email alert.

Both of the search engines show different amount of results for the same webpage. According to Technorati, 3,486 unique incoming links point to Hollywood  homepage whereas Google Blog Search says that 2,081 blogs are linking in.

Pick the one that suits your usability needs or personal preferences and use both if you prefer to have a comprehensive overview.

Don’t forget that both search engines allow you to subscribe to the results via RSS feed so you’ll be updated whenever a new site links to the website you are observing.


Why Should I Use these Bookmarklets?

Finding out who is linking to a specific site is useful for many reasons. You can use this data to improve your knowledge on a topic, examine your competitors, do research for articles or even build links for your websites.

Here are some of the benefits of discovering what blogs link to the page you’re on:

Link Building. Someone willing to link to a relevant competitor might be willing to link to you as well. Visit the blogger’s web page to send them an email about your website or company.


Network with your audience. Find out who is linking to your site and visit these blogs to leave comments or say hi. Both bookmarklets allow you quickly target specific pages of your site.


Research for an article. Writing a product review or a linkbait and need more information? Visit the blogs linking to the specific website and learn more about the topic. Remember to credit your sources if you use their ideas.
 
Generate exposure for your website. New Hollywood  need market their content in order to build an audience. One easy way to do so is to trackback relevant articles when you are writing a blog post. Find who is linking to your topic and include the best articles as references.


Credibility check. Want to sign up for a new website or buy a new eBook but need to know if they are legit? Examine what bloggers say when they link to the specific website and make your decisions from there.


Learn from other websites. One way of understanding how to be successful is to examine the success of others. Take a look at the site linking to a successful or authority site in your niche. Find out what makes people link to them and implement the same or an even better strategy.
I’m sure there are many other ways to find out who links to a specific website but these bookmarklets seem to be the quickest and most efficient way to do so. I love the one-click functionality and I’ve been using them quite often for research purposes.

These tools might be new to you and hopefully they’ll be helpful in some way.

Want to See How Work is Making You Old?

Here’s something for a quick laugh. Ever wonder how your job is making you age disgracefully? You might want to check out this cool Flash-based “aging” progam. It’s Age-o-matic from Careerbuilder.com.

It lets you load a picture. You set some details about work environment with quips like “If my job was an animal, it would be: road kill, a lab rat, a chicken pig.” (I’ll be a manbearpig!) Then it’d render how you’d look after working too much in your workplace. Warning: there’s no such thing as aging gracefully with this thing.

Laugh. It’s good for you.

Are You Using the Right Content Development Strategy for Your Website?

 The type of content you produce influences the popularity and profitability of your website. People will often subscribe to and read blogs that are well-written and informative or entertaining.

Potential customers are much more likely to make purchases when your sales copy succeeds in promising benefits and reducing risk.

If you operate a paid membership website, your content needs to be interactive and educational. Directly fulfilling user informational needs and providing channels for user feedback are important.

Content goes a long way in establishing the value of your website for each visitor.

It determines the amount of repeat visitors you’ll get and transforms your personal and business brand. It is easy for high quality content producers to receive natural citations and recommendations. I’m sure you all know how incredibly valuable word of mouth is for increasing sales and your audience reach.

Having the right content development strategy can make a big difference in how fast your site grows. This article can be summed up in one sentence: Learn how to create and use the right content development strategy as a powerful means to achieve your website or business goals.

Guidelines for a Content Development Strategy

content development strategy

I’ve previously talked how content needs to capture attention, a scarce asset in the today’s accelerated information economy. Your product or service must be relevant to customer needs or desires. Content is similar. If the information you offer is not what they’re looking for, search engine visitors will click away to another website.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen published an article yesterday comparing the benefits of creating long and short articles. By benching costs (time needed to read an article) against benefits (value obtained from the article), he concluded the following:

People prefer to read short articles. This is also what we’ve found in empirical studies of users’ behavior while reading websites. People tend to be ruthless in abandoning long-winded sites; they mainly want to skim highlights.

If you want many readers, focus on short and scannable content. This is a good strategy for advertising-driven sites or sites that sell impulse buys.If you want people who really need a solution, focus on comprehensive coverage. This is a good strategy if you sell highly targeted solutions to complicated problems.

Nielsen goes to suggest that a content strategy which mixes both long and short articles is the best way to go, because it fulfills the needs of all visitor types. He recommends producing short articles for the majority of users, while supplementing them with in-depth articles for the few who want to know more.

One way of doing this is to create content that is short and within it, include links to more detailed articles and in depth information on other pages.

The more value you offer users each minute they’re on your site, the more likely they are to use your site and the longer they’re likely to stay. This is why it’s so important to optimize your content strategy for your users’ needs.

It might make sense to follow these suggestions for static websites with fixed pages and content that rarely changes. These sites do not evolve beyond their mission statement, tagline or initial purpose. If they are selling vintage posters, they will always be selling vintage posters or variations of them.

But Nielsen’s recommendations do not mesh well with blogs which continuously provide fresh content on an almost daily basis. I brought up Nielsen’s article to show how markers like content length are not really important, as well as to illustrate the actual value of content as a strategic tool to achieve your overall site goals.


Content Development Should Not be Separated from Strategic Planning

content development strategy

Remember what I wrote about strategic blogging? Creating, maintaining and growing your blog with ends in mind ensures that you stay on track to accomplish your goals. These ends involve the tactical development of content.

Content should be considered a part of your overall master-plan and not just an isolated necessity or discipline. You don’t structure your articles simply to please a group of transitory visitors. There are many other larger factors involved.

If you’re trying to generate as much revenue as possible from advertising, it makes sense to write frequent and shorter blog posts. Going for volume will get you more search engine traffic and that sometimes means sacrificing quality for quantity.

But that’s fine because the size of your traffic is more important then the quality or type. You want the masses in and you want to send them out via an ad link. But this strategy doesn’t work if you’re trying to produce content that makes you an expert.

The best channels, the ones worth paying attention to, filter. They are valuable as much for what they DON’T publish as they are for what they do publish. If you have an ad supported business model then information pollution is an effective means to increase profit margins, but if you sell consulting and/or content a different approach is required

When you’re trying to sell personal consultation services, you shouldn’t create short blog posts for the purpose of generating traffic or piquing interest. Your articles should have one ultimate and all important purpose: to demonstrate your knowledge and skills. People want to hire a thought leader, not an follower.

One infallible way of doing that is to write and share articles of in depth information and unique value. Instead of writing a short reference post which links to a detailed article, write that detailed article instead for incoming links and attention. Every citation you get is a positive vote for your abilities and expertise.

If you’re a web designer looking for work, produce that lengthy manifesto on best design practices. Write a long how-to guide (example) telling everyone what they need to create a brilliant and usable website. Spread it through social media, let it generate some buzz. Give it a chance to develop your brand and reputation.

It also makes sense with network with other established industry players by citing and linking to them in order to generate goodwill. You want those recommendations and testimonials. Your site should reflect your active participation in the industry.

Clients will start coming in naturally. You’ll get emails inquiring about your rates. All this stems from networking and disseminating strong articles that position you as an expert on topics that are relevant to the services you provide. This is something that pumping out 10 short news articles a day will not achieve.


Understanding the Influence of Content on Visitor Preferences and Actions

content development strategy

In actual reality, there is no singular or definitive reader profile you can use to fit a benefits/cost ratio. When a website consistently receives tens of thousands of new visitors in a single day, you can see how Nielsen’s guidelines are broad generalizations developed from limited empirical evidence.

The profiling of visitors is also futile because their informational needs are constantly shaped and transformed by your content. Every word you write and concept you put out influences minds and creates desires or perceived needs.

It is not as simple as simply producing information that is relevant to your site theme or creating resource pages to fulfill the keywords used by search engine visitors to find your site. Content is more more powerful and it can be used to develop entire breeds of new audiences/customers from the existing crowd.

Take my article on the importance of social media marketing. It is an educational piece I specifically created to demonstrate the efficacy and value of social media channels for your own website or business. This article is written to inform and was also created as a lead-in towards an future series of articles on social media.

Nielsen’s guideline reports are the same. He publishes his findings in the form of guidelines in order to recommend public compliance. His guidelines are designed to re-conceptualize or reformulate industry standards and this positions his brand as a leader, hence making his consultancy service attractive to high profile clients.

My article was written as a means towards an end; To generate interest and demonstrate expertise. By teaching my audience about social media, I am producing future interest for advanced social media marketing tactics. These future articles might be very detailed or they could be short, bite-sized tips.

The length of the articles don’t really matter when you have an audience that is sold on what you’re selling. An audience that has a foundational understanding and an avid interest. And this is the real trick to increasing the benefits of every article you produce for your visitors. Content pre-sells and makes related content valuable.

Word count is a superficial yardstick that is not important for blogs.


Moving Your Visitors Along the Attention Funnel

content development strategy

Content can be strategically developed in many ways. For instance you can write about broad and general topics to accumulate mass interest and get visitors to come into your site. This also includes writing content specifically for social media.

Use the right content hook to get people in the door. After that create similar content to maintain their interest while gradually producing material that builds on what you’ve already written. Distribute their attention by directing them to correlated products or services through your affiliate recommendations.

Once they are subscribed to your email newsletter or RSS feed, the attention of readers can be funneled in so many ways to build your reputation (send them to a mention of you in the press) or generate income (promote J.Vs or relevant products).

Content development is not a perpetual cycle of fulfilling reader needs via archetype profiling. It should really be a strategic process that generates desires and builds on them by offering related material which capitalizes on established visitor interest.

Forget the impossible task of satisfying readers by creating articles of a certain length or type (short or long, brief or detailed). It doesn’t really matter because visitor objectives and preferences are circumstantial factors you cannot predict.

Know that any percentile you’ve calculated from a poll or test will rapidly be adjusted and made inaccurate when more people flow into your website. Focus not on framing visitors in a fixed mold/profile but rather create interconnected layers of information and use content to funnel the audience into the core of your business model.


Content Differentiation Helps You Survive & Succeed in a Crowded Space

content development strategy

Content is a subjective factor because it is irrevocably tied to the creator’s knowledge and experience levels. You might think that your article on viral marketing is superb but someone more experienced and knowledgeable will find it simplistic.

On the other hand, complete beginners with little to no background knowledge will not understand your article and hence, will fail to appreciate its value. Your content is only as good as the degree to which the reader finds it useful/entertaining.

This subjectivity of content consumption is one of the main reasons why I think that content dissemination and distribution channels are sometimes more important than the actual content quality. The more visitors you can get to view your articles, the more they will begin to resonate with the right people and spread on their own.

But one thing remains constant: whatever content you produce will be benchmarked against other content in the same niche. If you are writing about making money online, your content will compared with other blogs which produce the same content. This naturally arises because of attention scarcity on the part of readers.

Differentiating your content from others ensures your website remains necessary, well branded and distinct from the rest of the crowd. When you are the only hot dog vendor stationed at a busy road junction, you automatically capture a market.


The Reason Why I Write Really Long Articles on Dosh Dosh

content development strategy

Content differentiation is usually a natural process for blogs. Your personality, background, opinions and the way you write distinguishes your blog from many others. The manner in which you interact with visitors and network with your peers also affects their overall loyalty and support for your site.

But sometimes that isn’t enough to develop reader interest and repeat visits. That’s when you need to focus a little more on differentiating your content type. This is one reason why I’ve been experimenting with longer articles for the past few weeks.

One thing is for sure: you won’t be seeing articles like the ones here on any other blog within this niche. I’ve noticed that the majority of bloggers covering the same topics like to write shorter blog posts that are easily digestible. Nothing wrong with that at all; I like reading and writing short blog posts myself.

Long articles alongside infrequent posting is an example of a content development strategy I consciously adopted to differentiate Dosh Dosh from other blogs. After blogging like everyone else for 9 months, I thought it was time for something different and so I cut out all the news posts and fluff to focus on unique content.

So far, the results have been great. While I enjoy this content strategy, I do plan to include some short action articles as well because some ideas and initiatives will achieve greater traction when they are published and spread in a simple format.

Note that changes to your content focus/format should be undertaken as part of an overall content development strategy, which can involve the production of content in multiple channels like audio or visual formats (podcasts/videos/user forums) to thicken up your site’s profile and communication reach.

Creating a Content Development Strategy for Blogs

Decide the most important goal for your blog. For example, you might use blogging as a branding tool or a means to generate direct or indirect revenue.


Make a list of content types that will achieve your goals. Create a weekly schedule which includes these content types (e.g. expert interviews, industry roundup, mullet baits or resource lists etc.)


Observe the type of content that other blogs in your niche produce. Find an informational need that is poorly fulfilled by others and create content to plug the gap. Experiment with different content types to attract attention. 


Differentiate your blog by altering the content focus, type and format. Effective differentiation tactics involve creating a authorial persona, writing from experience, sharing your opinions and revealing your personality.
And that’s all there is to it. Pay attention to the content you are currently creating and think of ways they could be interconnected. Examine your content to see if they are fulfilling your overall goals. Create a content development strategy that works.

Consciously and strategically thinking about the content creation process is a good way to position your website against other content providers in the same field. Your site will gradually develop a distinctive value-driven identity, which will eventually lead to greater profitability and popularity.

Socialist When Poor, Capitalist When Rich

 

When you are poor you would like someone to share your financial burdens; you want to someone to give you some tax relief; you want someone to give your kids financial assistance to get through college; you want someone to bail you out of the financial crisis; it seems logical for you that the “rich” are taxed more - you call that graduated tax; you consider it fair that there are incentives/affirmative-action for the economically and socially challenged; the growing disparity between the quality of life in the rich and the poor bothers you; the concept of “free market” doesn’t always work in your interest; you find it surprising that CEOs are paid several million dollars a year while you can barely make your ends meet; you generally don’t like that the fact that health insurance is controlled by for-profit companies; and you want the government to have some control over banks/firms who handle your retirement money; you generally envy the “capitalists”.

When you are rich you want to enjoy all your wealth by yourselves; you think “poor” people are “poor” because they aren’t working hard enough to get “rich”; you think it’s unfair that you are taxed at a higher rate than the “poor” - you call that “spreading the wealth”; for you “charity” is only a means of reducing your taxable income - you generally don’t believe that “wealth should be spread around” so the concept of “charity” doesn’t really appeal to you; you are a staunch supporter of “free market” (but you still want the government to bail you out of financial mess - I don’t know what’s up with that); you recoil in horror because some plumber who earns more than $250,000 a year will pay about $3500 more per year in taxes; you think it’s draconian to limit profits or pay of any company or individual; you don’t care about the fact that health insurance is offered by for-profit companies - because you can basically afford anything they charge; you want minimum government involvement in anything that you are associated with financially; you believe that lack of government control leads to a “self-correcting” market; you generally hate the “socialist”.

The world isn’t black and white.

How To Build Your Own SQUIRT

LOL, be truthful. Did you honestly see this post coming? People wanted to know how the tool works, but I think I can do you all one better. I’ll explain in detail how exactly it works and how to build one for yourself so you can have your very own, hell one to sell if you wanted. Would you guess there’s a demand for one? Haha Sure why not? I can’t think of a single good reason why I shouldn’t (I never considered money a good enough reason to not help people). However I would like to ask a small favor of you first. Please go to RobsTool.com and subscribe. Throughout this month we are adding a new section called “The Lab” inside the tool where we are going to be hosting a multitude of crazy and wacky SEO tools that you’ve probably never thought could exist. Even if you don’t have a membership please subscribe anyways so you can get some cool ideas for tools to build yourself. That out of the way, lets begin. 

The Premise
SQUIRT works off of a very, very simple premise. Over the span of the months you promote your websites from their infancy to well aged mongers, you make dozens of small decisions daily. All the tool does is mimic as many of those decisions as possible and boil them down to a small yes or no; true or false; boolean expression. This is just very basic AI (Artificial Intelligence) and decision making based on some data. There really is nothing complex about it. Think about the first time you promoted a website in the search engines. You looked at what you considered some factors in ranking. You saw what your competitors had that you didn’t. What was your first initial reaction? You likely thought, “how can I get what they have?” A script can’t do this of course. This is a human reaction that can’t be duplicated by a machine. However, now think about the second, fifth, tenth website you’ve promoted. Once again you looked at what your competitors had that you didn’t. From there you may have noticed your mindset changed from “how can I get it” to something like, “how did I get it before?” This a machine can do! Experience just made the difference between a decision that needs to be made and a predefined decision that sets an orchestrated path. I know this all seems overwhelming, but I assure you its all really, really simple. The trick is, just build a tool that would do whatever you would do, based on the current situation. The situation of course can be defined by what we all know and study everyday of our professional SEM lives, Search Engine Factors. So the best place to begin is there.

A List Of Factors
Since the tool will make its decisions based on stuff you consider to be factors search engines use to rank your sites, making a list of all the known factors is a big help. Sit and write down every search engine factor you can think of. Break them down to specifics. Don’t just write “links.” Write Link Volume, Link quality, links on unique domains, percentage of links with my anchor text..etc. The SQUIRT utility I released looks at 60 separate factors. So at least you have a general goal to shoot for. Come up with as many factors as possible. Once you got a good clean list of factors start figuring out a proper way to measure each of them.

Factor Measurement
How many times today did you go to a search engine and type in link:www.domain.com? That is a measure of a factor. How about site:www.domain.com? Thats another. Each of those are a factor that when explored by either going to your own site, or going to the search engines can result in some sort of figure or number you can use to calculate how your site fairs in comparison to the sites currently ranking. Let’s use an example. You go to google and you search for your keywords that you are wanting to rank for. You make a list of all the sites in the top 10 and separately do a link: command for each of their domains. You then take all those figures and average them out. That gives you a rough idea of how much “link volume” you will need to get into the top 10. You then do a link: command on your own site to see how close your site is to that figure. From there you can make a decision. Do I need to work on increasing my link volume factor or not? You just made a boolean decision based on a single factor using data available to you. It probably took you a good 5 minutes or more to make that decision. Where as a script could of made that decision for you in less than a second. Now I know you’re all just as much of a computer nerd as I am, so I don’t have to preach to you about the differences in efficiency between yourself and a machine, but at least think about the time you would compound making these very simple decisions for each and every factor on your list for each site you own. There goes a good five hours of your work day just making the predictable yes or no decisions on what needs to be done. This sounds ridiculous of course, but I’d be willing to bet that at least 90% of the people reading this post right now spend most of their time doing just that. Ever wonder why most search marketers just trudge along and can’t seem to get anywhere? Now you know.

Making The Decisions
Okay so let’s take an example of a factor and have our script make a decision based on it. We’ll look at the anchor text saturation factor. We look at our inbound links and find all the ones that contain our anchor text versus the ones that don’t and only contain some similar words somewhere else on the page(most other documents). We then make a percentage. So we’ll say after looking at it 30% of our inbound links contain our exact anchor text. We then look at our competition. They seem to average 40%. Therefore our script needs to follow a promotional plan that increases our percentage of links that contain our exact anchor text. Very good, we’ll move along. Next we’ll look at inbound links that don’t contain our anchor text but contain our keywords somewhere in the document. Looking at our site we seem to average about 70%. Our competition seems to average about 60%. So we are doing much better than our competition. Therefore our script doesn’t need to increase our links that doesn’t contain our exact anchor text but do have relevant text. Wait, did I just contradict myself? These two factors are complimentary. So the more our tool increases one factor the further the other one drops. Wouldn’t this throw our promotion through some sort of infinite loop? Yes I did contradict myself and Yes it would put our promotion through an infinite loop. This is called on going promotion. The fact is THEY rank YOU don’t. Therefore you have to keep improving the factors you lack until you do rank; even if they seem to almost contradict each other. By the end of the analysis your script ends up with a long list of DO’s and a long list of DON’T NEED AT THIS TIME. So now all you have to do is use your own experience and your own site network to make all the DOs happen to the best of it’s abilities.

Establishing A Promotional Plan
So now that we have a list of all the stuff we need to improve with our site we can program our SQUIRT script to just simply do whatever it is we would do to compensate for our site’s shortfalls. To give you a better idea of how to do this and how SQUIRT handles these exact situations, I’ll take 3 example factors and let you know exactly what it does when you hit that submit button. However keep in mind, no matter how much information you gather on each site, every promotional situation is unique and requires a certain amount of human touch. The only thing you can do is define what you would do in the situation if you had no prior knowledge of the site or any extenuating circumstances. Also keep in mind that you have to remain completely hands off. You don’t have ftp access to their site, you can’t mess with their design. So anything you do has to be completely offsite SEO. Also, anything you do can’t hurt the site in anyway. Every plan needs to be 100% focused on building, and any method of promotion that may possibly cause problems for them, even if you plan on only running throw away black hat sites through the tool, needs to be 100% positive. So if you want to go get links. You need to do it within your own network of sites. You can’t go out sending spam comments or anything.

Page Rank
Your Site: PR 2
AVG Competitor: PR 3
Decision: Increase Page Rank
The Plan: Create a network of very large sites. Since pagerank can be gathered internally just as easily as from external sources. Than you need to build a network of sites with lots and lots of indexed pages. Take a look at the current volume of sites you plan on running through your SQUIRT tool and decide how big you need to build your network before hand. When we decided to make SQUIRT public, even though not all the sites would require a Page Rank increase we knew a TON would. We launched the tool with the capability of handling 500 members. So we knew that 500 members, submitting 10 sites/day with each link needing to hold on a single page for at least a week, could result in needing 150,000 links available to us each week. If each link was on a page with a PR 1 than each page would send a tiny page rank increase to the target link. Likewise if each indexed page had a PR1 and we put five links up on each page, than each page would give out even more page rank through the links. There is a point of saturation of course. We decided 10 was good for each page. So we could get the maximum amount of pagerank sucked out of each indexed page while maintaining the highest possible volume of links we could spare. So if we built a network of sites that contained a total of about 1,000,000 pages indexed(you heard me), each averaging a PR1. Than we could transfer enough page rank to 150,000 links/week to constitute a possible bump in page rank to each link. For your own personal SQUIRT of course you don’t need nearly that volume. However make sure to preplan ahead because even if you make a 1 million page site, it doesn’t mean you will get 1 million pages in the index. So may have to build quite a few very large sites to reach your goals. This of course takes time and lots of resources.

Anchor Text
Your Site: 30%
AVG Competitor: 40%
Decision: We need to increase the number of links that contain our exact anchor text.
The Plan: Now since the tool can’t directly affect the site than we can’t exactly go to every inbound link the site has gotten and figure out a way to get them to change the anchor text. There are just too many ways to gain links and its completely unreasonable to attempt. So the only way to increase the anchor text match percentage is to increase the total number of links to the site and then have them all match the anchor text. This is where you need to queue up the blogs. All you have to do is create a bunch of blogs all over, and take steps to increase the chances of each individual post getting indexed. Than you can fill the blogs with the anchor text of the site. This however is no easy task when dealing with a large volume. Since you need plenty of authority you will need to get accounts on all the major blog networks. Remember, the average blog usually has less than 5 posts/day so you will need to compensate in sheer volume of actual accounts. These will also need to be maintained and anytime one gets banned another needs to be automatically created to take it’s place. Those of you using the tool have probably already noticed links from these places showing up in your logs and Technorati links. Since we knew so many links/day would be required we had to create an absolutely HUGE network of blogs on various places as well as the automated system to create new ones if another gets buried. Once these links have been dispersed over time, the anchor text percentage will start to rise.

Deep Indexing
Your site: 3 pages in the index.
Crawl Stats: 10+ subpages identified
Decision: Need to get more bots to the subpages of the submitted site.
The Plan: So the script grabs the main page of the site and immediately sees more subpages available than are currently indexed in the search engines. This lets us know that the submitted site is having a hard time being properly deep indexed. So this is when we queue the Roll Over Sites to help get some SE bots to these subpages. There is one problem however. When dealing with my own sites it’s fine to scrape the content then redirect as detailed in the strategy that I talked about in the Power Indexing post. However since this tool will be a public one I can’t scrape peoples content because there is the odd chance that my rollover site may temporarily outrank their actual site and it could draw some anger from people who don’t know what it is. Remember the rule. The tool can’t harm the site in any way. So we had to go another route. Instead we pulled from a huge list of articles and just used that as the content then pushed the spiders to those pages then when they got indexed, redirected them to the site. These of course don’t show up as links so it’s all backend, however it does a fantastic job of getting subpages indexed. Since Rollover Sites use actual content than there is no problem making them absolutely huge. Therefore you don’t need a very large network of them to push a very large amount of bots. Yet at the same time you still have to follow the rule of no interference with their site. So if their site is having a hard time getting deep indexed and you can’t exactly ftp a sitemap over than you have to bring in a large network of Third Party Rolling Sitemaps. So what you do is, you create a network of sites that are essentially nothing more than generic sitemaps. You drive a lot of bot traffic to them on a regular basis and have them roll through pages that go through the tool. Once the tool has identified up to 10 subpages of the target site than it can add them to the network of third party sitemaps. The new pages go in, old pages go out(The technical term for this is a FIFO algorithm). If you have a solid enough network of third party sitemaps you can hopefully push enough search engine crawlers through them to get every page crawled before it gets pushed out. This of course is a huge problem when dealing with a large volume of sites. If we originally wanted enough power for 500 members than we knew that 500 members submitting 10 sites/day which each contained up to 10 subpages would mean we would need enough third party sitemaps to accommodate 50,000 pages/day. While the efficiency of a single third party sitemap site may be big, a massive network would be needed to push that kind of volume. It’s just beyond unreasonable. So instead, we incorporated a gapping system. So anytime there wasn’t a new page coming in and it had a chance to display a set of links to a SE bot for the second time than it would grab some older entries that were already rolled through and display them as well. So if you push enough crawl traffic through than eventually every page will theoretically get crawled.

Rinse and Repeat
So thats all there is to it. It’s really quite simple. As you build your SQUIRT work your way through every factor you wrote down and think about what you would do as a hands off Internet Marketer to compensate if a site didn’t meet the requirements for that particular factor. This also applies to flaws in onsite SEO. Let’s say for instance the page doesn’t have the keywords in the title tag. You can’t touch that title tag, so whats the offsite SEO equivalent to not having the keywords in the title tag? Putting them in the anchor text of course. Just keep relentlessly plugging away and build an established plan for each factor on your list. With each failure to meet a factor there is potentially a problem. With each problem there is a potential solution your script and personal site network can take care of for you. It just may require a bit of thinking and a whole lot of building. It’s tough, trust me I know but it’s worth it because in the end you end up with a tool that comes close to automatically solving most of the daily problems that plague you. Here’s the exciting part. Once you start building and going through all the factors you’ll find some you probably can’t solve. Just remember, every problem has a solution. So you may just learn a few tricks and secrets of your own along the way. Shhh don’t share them. 

Is SQUIRT Biased?
ABSOLUTELY! Think about what it uses to determine the site’s standing on it’s strengths and weaknesses. If you do a link: command there is a delay in time between what the search engine shows and what actually exists that may range up to days and weeks. This causes major problems. The tool may think you need a bunch of links when it in fact you already got plenty and they just haven’t shown up yet. It may think you have a ton of links when those links were actually only temporary or you lost them before they had a chance to disappear. Essentially the tool operates off of your site’s potential SEO worth. So lets say you have an old site that you haven’t really done anything with, then you run it through your SQUIRT. The tool will stand a much better chance of making an accurate analysis, and likewise any boosts you receive in the factors will more than likely be the right ones. Therefore it will appear as if your site just skyrocketed up simply because of one little submit through the tool. When in fact the site had that sort of potential energy the whole time and it just needed a little shove to get moving. The same could be said about an established site experiencing extremely slow growth. It fairs well, maybe even in the 60%+ range, so it appears to not need very much. Then at the same time, everything the tool does do, matters very little in the large scheme of your escalated promotional campaign. Also, the tool can only focus on one site during one phase in it’s promotion at a time. So if you got a brand new site that you submit, than the tool will naturally focus more heavily on getting the site properly indexed and less on helping it gain rank through the SERPS. So if indexing methodologies don’t completely work in that particular case than it appears as if your tool didn’t do anything at all. Remember, this is only a tool, its all artificial decision making. There is no substitution for the human touch. No matter how complex or how efficient a tool you build is, there is no way it can compete without an actual human element helping to push it. All your competitors are humans. So there’s no logical reason why you can expect to ever build a tool that is the end all solution to beating them everytime. So even though you now have a really cool tool, still remember to be hardworking, smart, and efficient…never lazy. 

Sorry about the long as hell post, but you guys wanted to know what the tool was doing when you clicked the button. Now you do, and hey…least I didn’t go through ALL 60 factors. 

Get Building

Back To The SEO

Thanks guys/gals sooooo much. This launch went crazy good. In fact it was downright record setting. 

We almost double sold out in 2mins 21 seconds. We managed to stop the registrations at about 250 members(The tool can easily handle more than that). The server looks great, even though it underwent what can easily be considered a digg effect X5. Thanks to everyone who sent in reports of anything not working. We fixed them all and a few minor changes will be made to make sure everything is in perfect working order.

Couple things:
The domain errors was a result of not being able to find the whois information for a domain. This was fixed but some bugs may possibly remain with .co.uk and .c* domains until further notice.

Most of the accounts have been activated and been made to full member status. If your account isn’t activated by tomorrow please send an email to rob [at] robstool.com with your account email and paypal email information.

If you accidentally double paid through paypal, just email rob [at] robstool.com and let us know your account email and paypal email and we’ll make sure your account gets activated and properly credited.

The analysis tool is 100% free and uses no credits. So go ahead and use it at will, if you don’t have a subscription just create a guest account and you will still be able to use it.

The bunny in the logo is my real life bunny named Roady. He’s a 4lb fully grown 5 month old dwarf rabbit. He is potty trained, loves people, and makes the best mascot ever. 

If You Missed The Registration
Send a blank email to waiting [at] robstool.com. This will automatically add you to the waiting list. Then as slots open up we will systematically move through the list on a first come first serve basis and give out invites to those next in line.

I’m always open to constructive criticisms. If you have any suggestions or feature requests definitely let me know. Any ideas to make this subscription gain value month to month is more than welcome.

Also, many people want a private forum here. This is being moled over however most of you already know that I am adamantly against people paying for SEO information. However, this place has a huge amount of very very smart readers, and I think a place where the readers here
can network with each other and share ideas privately would be great. So in the next couple days I will be opening a chatroom up. It’d also be really nice to meet some of you and get to talk to you outside of email.

Thanks so much and enjoy,
Eli

PS. Sorry for the long string of announcements. Lets get back to some SEO shall we?

Black Hole SEO: Desert Scraping

In my introduction post to Black Hole SEO I hinted that I was going to talk about how to get “unique authoritative content.” I realize that sounds like an oxymoron. If content is authoritative than that means it must be proven to work well in the search engines. Yet if the content is unique than it can’t exist in the search engines. Kind of a nasty catch-22. So how is unique authoritative content even possible? Well to put it simply, content can be dropped from the search engines’ index.

That struck a cord didn’t it? So if content can be in the search engines one day and be performing very well and months to years down the road no longer be listed, than all we have to do is find it and snag it up. That makes it both authoritative and as of the current moment, unique as well. This is called Desert Scraping because you find deserted and abandoned content and claim it as your own. Well, there’s quite a few ways of doing it of course. Most of which is not only easy to do but can be done manually by hand so they don’t even require any special scripting. Let’s run through a few of my favorites.

Archive.org
Alexa’s Archive.org is one of the absolute best spots to find abandoned content. You can look up any old authoritative articles site and literally find thousands of articles that once performed in the top class yet no longer exist in the engines now. Let’s take into example one of the great classic authority sites, Looksmart.

1. Go to Archive.org and search for the authority site you’re wanting to scrape.

2. Select an old date, so the articles will have plenty of time to disappear from the engines.

3. Browse through a few subpages till you find an article on your subject that you would like to have on your site.

4. Find an article that fits your subject perfectly.

5. Do a SITE: command in the search engines to see if the article still exists there.

6. If it no longer exists just copy the article and stake your claim.

See how easy it is? This can be done for just about any old authority site. As you can imagine there’s quite a bit of content out there that is open for hunting. Just remember to focus on articles on sites that performed very well in the past, that ensures a much higher possibility of it performing well now. However, let’s say we wanted to do this on a mass scale without Archive.org. We already know that the search engines don’t index each and every page no matter how big the site is. So all we have to do is find a sitemap. 

Sitemaps
If you can locate a sitemap than you can easily make a list of all the pages on a domain. If you can get all the pages on the domain and compare them to the SITE: command in the search engines than you can return a list of all the pages/articles that aren’t indexed.

1. Locate the sitemap on the domain and parse it into a flat file with just the urls.

2. Make a quick script to go through the list and do a SITE: command for each URL in the search engines.

3. Anytime the search engine returns a result total of greater than 0, just delete the url off the list.

4. Verify the list by making sure that each url actually does exist and consists of articles you would like to use.

There is one inherent problem with the automatic way. Since it’s grabbing the entire site through its sitemap than you are going to get a ton of negative results, like search queries and other stuff they want indexed but you want no part of. So it’s best to target a particular subdirectory or subdomain within the main domain that fits your targeted subject matter. For instance if you were wanting articles on Automotive, than only use the portion of the sitemap that contains domain.com/autos or autos.domain.com.

There are quite a few other methods of finding deserted content. For instance many big sites use custom 404 error pages. A nice exploit is to dosite:domain.com “Sorry this page cannot be found” then lookup the cached copy in another search engine that may not of updated the page yet. There is certainly no shortage of them. Can you think of any others?

Cheers