Testing, 1.. 2.. 3.., is this thing on? It’s been awhile since I used one of these blog things; let’s see if it’s like riding a bike.

I flew back from SMX Advanced 2008 on Thursday and I wanted to give some closing thoughts now that I’ve had time to rest and catch up. I met some great people in Seattle; some I’ve talked with online or read their work and others not. I’m not going to do the roll call because they know who they are. OK, I have to acknowledge Chris Winfield. He knows why.

I have to take my hat off for Matt Cutts after meeting him. I have more respect than ever for him and the job he does. Every time I saw him he was friendly and outgoing to everyone. He is very helpful where he can be but has a tightrope to walk balancing the needs of Google with webmasters and marketers. Personally, I don’t see how Matt can stand the pressure of everyone wanting a piece of him at every turn. Since when did software engineers become such skilled communicators?

The SMX sessions where great overall, but started a little slow with link building. Bot herding just had too much info to cover in a short presentation. The 2nd day rocked across-the-board on the organic track. Some have complained about too much talk of black hat techniques while others such as myself disagree. If you don’t want to know how all forms of Internet marketing work then your probably not passionate about the industry and can’t consider yourself an expert in the field. My only real recommendation to Danny Sullivan is to limit the number of speakers on each panel to 3 so they have time to go into their presentation in-depth. It’s needed for advanced sessions to live up to the name.

I think the biggest benefits gained while at SMX had nothing to do with the sessions. While there I had time to take a breather from the day-to-day grind and all the sudden brilliant ideas started to pop into my head. Some sparked from conversations while others just came to me through some form of osmosis from smart people in the room.

To wrap up, yes the show had high and low points, but so does every event in every industry. To me it was worth every penny and I plan being there next year. The way that SMX as a whole is splitting up conferences into niches is the only way to go. If I only attend 2 events a year it would probably be SMX Advanced and SMX Social Media. Maybe there should be an SMX analytics also?

I’m probably not going to make any friends with this post but I don’t care. Whitehat linkbait turned spam pisses me off because this type of junk is what ruins perfectly good link building techniques.

When Matthew Inman left SEOmoz and talked about his dating site and it’s accomplishments using linkbait, I was happy for him and truly impressed with his results. He took a simple idea like funny quizes and turned them into a backlink building machine using badges that linked back to both the quiz, and the dating site hosting the quiz. I don’t think anyone could consider it spam.

So yesterday I was talking with someone about how all this worked and went to show them an example and to my surprise, I see JustSayHi has turned Matt’s quizzes into a link spam machine. No longer do the links below the badges point to the dating site, they point to what looks like rotating, off topic affiliate sites. This reminds me of the hit counter spam that Google has been known to love.

Examples (nofollows added by me):

69%

Looking for payday loan?

54%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Find Ultrasound technician schools near you

Normally I’m not one to point out specific examples of shady SEO, but I am taking a hard stance against this particular technique. At this time, Google and the other search engines consider badges and widget a white hat technique but if normally white hat companies pull this junk too many times, this form of linkbait will sleep with the fishes (paid links).

Update: Looks like they changed back to only linking to themselves. Lets hope it stays that way.

There is no link more relevant than a one from a website on the exact same topic as yours. For informational sites and blogs, obtaining those links are pretty simple. Create great content and network then the links come. With commercial sites it’s not so simple. Wirefly.com isn’t going to link to LetsTalk.com. So if you are a commercial site, you need to think a little outside the box to obtain backlinks from sites selling the same product or services.

One of the more successful strategies I’ve used deals with targeting links from different geographic locations. There are many industries that are country specific. Lets take loans for example. Most national US lenders are not offering loans to UK consumers so there is an opportunity. Contact the UK lending sites and see if they are open to a partnership of some form.

Real estate agents have been doing this for years with link exchanges from other agents in different cities and states. Unfortunately they go overboard and end up looking spammy. Just make sure it looks like a legit recommendation of the other company, maybe through a blog post or article discussing how things differ overseas and you will be good to go.

Andy Hagans has posted the most in depth Linkbait Guide I’ve come across yet. Most of the info has been said before but I haven’t seen all this info in one article before and laid out so well.

The only network I think he dropped the ball on is Fark. If you go with a humor hook, Fark is a must. I know a guy that gets tons of traffic from it. We are talking the same traffic numbers as he gets from Digg.

I’d also add a few more headlines and a blog opening section from CopyBlogger.

Hat Tip to Stuntdubl for the heads up.

If you are like me you have many domains just sitting around not doing much. I keep a notebook of ideas and when a new idea pops into my head I do two things. I write it down in the notebook and I buy a relevant domain. I may or may not actually develop the idea anytime soon but buying the domain early ensures I get what I want.

You have a number of choices when it comes to dormant domains. Some people are lazy and just leave them parked at their registrar. Other people use PPC parking services to earn a few bucks. I personally like to put my domains in the virtual wine cellar (domain cellar?) to age.

With Google’s current algo, older domains have a much better chance to rank. Over at WebmasterWorld there is a discussion going on whether just having a domain registered counts toward the aging. In my opinion it does not.

I believe you need both content and links on a domain for it to start aging in Google’s eyes. So this is how I prepare my domains to store in the domain cellar.

• Add domain to one of my reseller hosting accounts (unlimited domains).
• Create a front page with a minimalistic design.
• Add brief paragraph on the subject matter the domain is about.
• Add 10-20 internal links to subcategory pages containing 2 frames.
• Each subcategory page used the page name convention key-word-phrase.html.
• The top on-site header frame contains a logo and internal links.
• The lower off-site frame points to another website that is already ranking for the target sub-content.

I don’t bother putting up adsense or any monetization. The investment in the domains future is worth way more than a few adsense clicks or domain parking pages can earn me.

Now that it’s up, make it a habit to get 2-3 links a week for each domain (link condom free). With the number of user generated content sites on the web this should not be hard or take much time.

In a year or so when I finally get around to developing a site I don’t have to worry about a sandbox and the domain has enough history to rank for what I want. So stop wasting precious your domains on domain parking pages and get them ready for the future. You might even get lucky and even start ranking for some keywords before you start to build an actual sites. I actually know of several sites that have such frame pages ranking for certain keywords.

I read someone’s comment on a blog today stating they didn’t think ALT text meant much to Google. There is so much misinformation dealing with SEO it’s sometimes hard to tell the truth from the bull. The confusion usually stems from either old information still live on websites or just the fact that much of what we do is based on past experience. A lot of what I see on forums these days is the blind leading the blind.

While doing a site search on Google for Xuru.com you will find evidence that Google treats ALT text as nothing less than on page content. I used a template for Xuru.com and didn’t do much in the way of SEO to tell the truth. On my category pages where I did not add a description tag, Google is showing the top most content from the page since there are no keywords provided in the search box to center the search listing around. See where I highlighted in the first listing “balloon left slice right slice.” That is the ALT text for the balloons in the pager header. To me that is proof positive that the ALT text is content to Google.

Somehow this post slipped through the cracks but better late than never. I’m sure most of you know Andy Beal and the MarketingPilgrim.com website. Andy was nice enough to invite me to be a contributing blogger.

If your not already reading his site, you should be. You can see my contributions so far here. This doesn’t change anything here. You will still see regular updates on Xuru.

Last night, while listening to Net Income [mp3 link], Cshel brought up the site review panel at PubCon. Using his super secret agent laptop Matt Cutts called out a webmaster for having around 50 domains. From the sounds of it he was not interlinking them so no big deal right? Well maybe not. Why would Matt bring up the 50 different domains that where unconnected unless Google was using this information.

I’m sure the Google spam filters are much like email spam filters in that they use a point system to flag sites for penalty or manual review. The more points a site or page accumulates, the more likely it’s spam. I could see why Google would be wary of webmasters who have thousands of domains registered. Let’s just hope this is something that would only flag a manual review and not something that would cause an automated penalty.

So what are all my fellow tin-foil hat group members supposed to do?

• Private Registration - The public cannot access private registration data but can Google? On the same Net Income show, I think it was Cshel who mentioned a company she worked for that was a registrar had access to all private domain registration data from the main registrar database. If that’s true, there is no such thing as private registration when it comes to Google.
• Fake Registration Data - By using fake info when registering a domain you can avoid Google being able to connect your whois data. This does not mean that Google can’t still connect domains by use of Adsense, Google Analytics, or the servers you host on. Do you really have the time it takes to create a separate account for each and every domain for all of these services? While unlikely to happen, there is also the small chance of losing the domain for using fake info.

It’s up to you to decide how thick you want your tin-foil hat. I think this is definitely a sign to at least setup a new profile for any sites that are less than white. For example, I would have one profile for your white hat content sites and another for your MFA / black hat sites.

Update: Matt Cutts just posted the session details. A must read.

Update 2: It has been confirmed that Google cannot see past private domain registrations. That doesn’t mean they don’t have contracts with larger registrars to get the information for a fee.

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced they are joining Google in their support for the XML sitemaps protocol. All three engines will be upgrading to version 0.90.

I don’t personally use Google sitemaps often. I prefer to create a website that search engines love and let Google find the pages on their own. My method is a great way to determine whether a sites has been properly structured by watching how it is indexed by Google and others.

Yahoo is on the same level as Google and has no problem indexing all of my pages when a site is designed properly.

MSN Live Search on the other hand is horrible. This may be a godsend for people wanting to be completely indexed by MSN. It will be interesting to see if MSN actually indexes every page included in a sitemap or if they ignore half of them like they currently do when indexing a website.

Google has teamed up with StopBadware.org to combat spyware, viruses, and so on. If StopBadware flags your website as either hosting badware or linking to another site hosting badware, Google will flag your domain and warn surfers of a possible threat. It is unclear whether actual rankings can be affected by this flag. Maybe Matt Cutts or Vanessa can give some clarification.

The good news is Google Webmaster Central now informs webmasters if their website has been flagged for badware. While I don’t use the sitemaps tool often, Webmaster Central really is becoming invaluable to any serious webmaster. First they start reporting website penalties and now this.