I have never really opened the gates to a good old fashioned rant on Seounique before, so here goes!

Have you ever wondered why your interesting blog posts or link bait you pay hundreds of bucks for never makes it big on social media sites? You start asking yourself questions like; is my avatar too offensive? Is my title not “catchy” enough? Or is my blog just worthless?

Well the flat out answer is no, no and no! It doesn’t matter how ultra juicy your story or post may be, it’s all about whom you know and what kind of reputation you have. Unfortunately this seems to be the case in every social media environment, although if it wasn’t the case then the quality of the stories making “published” status would probably vary.

Now if you’re reading this for the first time, don’t panic, and whatever you do, please don’t think you can cheat the system. If you’ve read a blog post explaining that you need to build a reputation to get submissions noticed – don’t be an ass!

This is just one example of someone clicking the Sphinn button as many times as possible for as long as possible. This is not an isolated incident by any means and I’ve seen plenty of users do it, I imagine this happens across the board so this is by no means a punt at Sphinn.

What these people are doing:

1. Reducing the quality of stories by voting rubbish stories
2. Not achieving anything because your reputation will look false
3. Thinking a number is better than the interaction
4. Giving their brand a bad name (if applicable)

So I urge all you geniuses out there to stop trying to look good, its not big and not clever and it’s a waste of your time!

Rant over lol!

An interesting debate broke out on Digital point last week that seems
to have continued gathering interest as it moves on. Someone provided a “tip” for “seo newbies” to help build up links for free using appropriate anchor text descriptions.

The tip was, to quote:

“When you’re commenting on other people’s blogs it will usually ask you for 4 things, your name, email, URL and a comment. Be sure to use your keyword anchor text as your name. When your comment is posted, the url you enter will be attached to whatever text you entered in the “Name” field. So instead of putting John in the name field, put My Widgets Rule, or whatever your site’s keywords are. Oh, and try to say something that’s somewhat useful in the comment section, so it doesn’t look like 100% blatant spam.”

Now I must own up and say in the past I have used such techniques but this was before starting this SeoUnique blog. Since then my opinion on this subject has changed. Because the blog world relies so heavily on the community “vibe” I don’t think it’s ethical to use such methods. Of course a lot of blogs carry the NoFollow tag which renders such methods useless anyway but my point is that at the end of the day it’s just rude. Unless a comment that I regard to be of epic standards I will not approve messages from people that use anchor text in their posts.

I’m not a spoil sport and I want everyone to do well in life but if you want to make a comment about a good/bad article you should not expect anything in return.

I have setup a poll to get your opinion on the subject to whether or not you consider this kind of technique ethically right? The results will be interesting, remember be honest!

So by this point everyone knows that Google has indeed penalized sites that sell links on their site. If you didn’t know that – “welcome to earth” (as in Independence Day the film – for you film buff’s). So you would assume that if you sell links directly from your site under a “advertise here” and you display your advertising rates online this should have gone against you? Well for most people they don’t have the time or resources to fiddle around with creating all the necessary HTML/PHP whatever to cater for this service so they use Text Link Ads.

I’ve used them on some of my early creations and to be frank, have made a little money from them (they take half your much needed money for their troubles). So after the update you would think that a site that “Sells Links” should in fact be punished like the rest? Well this is where it all gets a bit strange – and un-Google like.

If you do a search on Google for “Buy Text Links” or “Text Link Ads” by Google’s own standards they “should” provide the most relevant content to the user who makes the search. Text Link Ads is their name so by all accounts they should be positioned number one for that term. They are not, in fact they don’t appear in the index at all…strange? Very! What’s even stranger to me is that if you log on to the site it remains, or possibly they have increased their PR to PR7.

Search Results for “Text Link Ads“:

Notice the Page Rank:

Getting confused?

So Google have removed Text Link Ads from their Index but have ranked the website a PR 7. I have to be honest but it seems a bit strange, if Google are going to punish websites that sell links surely a site devoted to selling other website’s link positions should also have its Page Rank reduced? I would have thought so, obviously being removed from the index is worse but this should be explained. This could support some theories that PR is being phased out all together? Perhaps, but this is certainly a strange situation, watch this space I say.

I manage a range of websites in various industries including some personal websites of my own. For clients I follow the basic rules of seo down to a T, as I know from past experience that these methods work best to achieve good SERP positions. Now to my own personal shame I run a website promoting unsigned music for artists and fans.  The website was not designed by me (thank god) and I haven’t even attempted any seo as its a maze of random code and bad practice design. So the Google update happens, and currently I have all the following issues going against the site:

1. The titles and Meta’s are the same throughout the entire site
2. There is a huge flash image at the top of the site (making the initial part of the page unreadable)
3. The site sells advertising space (quite clearly)
4. The url structure is not seo friendly
5. The site architecture is horribly confusing
6. The homepage size is over 75kb in size and takes a while to load
7. Backlinks are not high
8. Anchors for the backlinks are not at all relevant to keywords
9. The site uses Text-Link-Ads
10. Sitemap inaccurate and contains an error in Google webmaster area
11. Very few site updates, although new pages added by users
12. No RSS feed

So with all these seo basic being blatantly ignored I expected a boot in the rear from Google on the update.

WRONG

1. The website has moved from a PR 3 to a PR 4
2. The SERP positions have steadily climbed to a point where I am top 5 of Google for multiple strong keywords in the music industry
3. Traffic has increased to well over 30,000 a month and still climbing
4. No penalty for selling links

So why, after so many reports of good quality seo friendly websites being penalized by Google does this sorry excuse for a site continue to be loved by Google? Who knows, but this isn’t the first time Iv’e looked on Google and see poor “seo” websites maintain high SERP positions. I’m not entirely sure but I will investigate further and see if any pattern emerges. I will continue to use the basics of seo as standard as it helps for site usability as much as anything. If anyone knows of any similar sites, please let me know.

For you that don’t already know and have spent the last few years in a nuclear fallout shelter, Alexa is a company that measures web traffic. They run www.alexa.com which is becoming more and more visible to web users.

I have always been taught and read many blogs that you should never judge a websites traffic performance based on the data collected by Alexa. Why? Well Alexa only registers traffic that has downloaded and used their very own toolbar. So in theory the data collected should only be a portion of your websites real traffic as the majority of “normal” web users have no need or really understand what it’s used for.

So as I performed my daily task of looking at websites information, looking for possible link opportunities I quickly noticed a trend in the data. It goes without saying that most web savvy people do use Alexa, if for anything an indication of possible traffic.

So what’s your point Matt?

Well my point is that if you are in the SE/SEM/SEO industry and you are specifically looking to target webmasters and like minded people then the Alexa data is spot on. You know if an seo website says they are performing well, then in fact they are listed at 2 million there are some white lies being told.

I still believe that Alexa is not a worthy tool of measuring non-internet related websites, simply because more people don’t have the toolbar installed than people that do. I did a small test to show these results. I looked at well known www.seomoz.org our website, www.seounique.com and a very popular gadget website in the UK www.firebox.com. In terms of traffic, reach and page views I would have said that Firebox would have been top, followed by Seomoz and last but by no means least my website.

The results clearly show Seomoz miles above the rest, and at the beginning of September Seounique was very close to beating Firebox. Now I’m not going to lie about my traffic, it’s regular and ranges from 5000 unique visits per month down to 1000 per month, it really depends how I promote the site in that particular month. However I can guarantee you that Firebox will almost certainly have three or four times more traffic than I have in a good month at their lowest point. Seomoz is so far ahead because the traffic that flows to their site will be almost all webmaster based.

What’s your final thought on this Matt?

Well my feelings on this subject have slightly changed. I still advise people not to look at Alexa data on non-seo/sem/se websites because it’s still not accurate by any means. However if you are looking to reach the webmasters out there then Alexa should be used and the data collected analyzed.