Hello,

I visited your website today and noticed that you can benefit from more original content.

I can easily make your web site more successful by adding hundreds of web pages to your site with fresh, original content. It’s an easy formula for success: More web pages with great content attracts lots of visitors that generate profit for your website.

Forget about spending hours upon hours writing content for your website or paying hundreds of dollars for a professional writer.

My service can help.

Well thanks, Article Chief, for that enlightening information. I had no idea that my website was lacking in original content. I mean, here I thought that I’d been writing new and unique content for the last 10 months!

If this was actuall submitted by hand, I would say this is badly mistargeted marketing.

However, it’s equally likely that it was actually submitted automatically: so in reality, it’s untargeted marketing. Spam. As spam goes, it’s pretty legitimate: it’s well written, it’s got a name attached to it, and it’s provided contact information (email.) But, like most spam, it’s also entirely irrelevant to my needs. And, because it’s been so badly mistargeted, the end result is that I’m reading this blog post – providing negative information about Article Chief and their marketing practices which will now be available indefinitely online.

Providing a spam service requires spam marketing, I guess. If you are selling a service which nobody really wants, you just need to market widely in order to have a chance to sell anything. Frankly, you’d be better off coming up with a legitimate business model.

Article Chief offers webmasters 300 pages of content each month for $29 per month. I immediately note that the first and second paragraph specify “original content” – but when it comes to statements explicitly about what the service offers, the word “original” is no longer present. Suspicious, isn’t it? Rather than reselling hundreds articles every month, why not spend your time writing a few pages of truly original writing and sell your services as a professional copywriter? Instead of spending your effort on untargeted marketing efforts, work on building a professional reputation: truly market yourself and your services rather than preying on unsuspecting webmasters.

Thanks, Article Chief: but I’m afraid I won’t be requiring your services.

So, rather than attempting to catch up, I’m just going to jump directly into the present. I’m reading posts which I really want to read; but making no attempt to actually cover the entire month of news. It’s a lost cause!

So what’s interesting to me today? Well, in a bit of a change from my usual fare, I’m currently reading a very interesting post on I Hate Google.org. I Hate Google.org is a SEO news blog run by one of the more well-respected and well-known "black hat" SEO experts around – Dan Kramer. He’s an expert on the black-hat method of cloaking a website – and his Definitive Guide to Cloaking is well worth reading.

The article is thorough, and discusses in detail the many valuable uses for cloaking. Cloaking is not, by itself, an "evil" technique. It has applications which are ethically questionable when it comes to search engine marketing; but it also has applications which are useful and helpful. Google itself makes use of cloaking methods when it automatically re-directs a European user to the most appropriate edition of their index.

Dan provides a great quote about the ethics of cloaking:

Cloaking ethics are a hot topic on many webmaster discussion forums. On one hand you have arguments by so-called "white-hat" webmasters who say we have a responsibility to tell the truth about our websites to search engine spiders. On the other hand you have "black-hat" webmasters who say they are only trying to keep their competitors from seeing their optimized HTML. Search engines have made their stance clear as mud by forbidding cloaking and then allowing it in some cases.

The ethics question has become thoroughly muddled, I think, because of the black/white dichotomy it’s usually presented in. Cloaking is not wrong – what is wrong is delivering different content to a human visitor than to a search engine. Delivering different content to a German search engine than to an English human, on the other hand, should be just fine – as long as your German visitors are seeing the same thing the German search engine is. I think that the most important question is what you, as a site owner, are using cloaking to do – and I highly recommend reading through Dan’s article to understand more about what it is you’re doing, and where you could be putting your business at risk.

I’ve posted before on malicious SEO techniques – or, I suppose, "anti-optimization", referring to a story related by Nick Lewis.
Recently, the subject has arisen once more after Rand Fishkin returned from SES London with a tale of horror. Well, more an interesting proposition of how such a thing could be accomplished, but you get the picture.

The basic story is this: if you link to a set of perfectly reasonable sites, who are then pointed at by spammy sites, you may receive a penalty by association – once the formerly respectable sites are damned, your own site may be sent in the handbasket alongsides. This can hypothetically happen in any number of ways – but the end result can be very unfortunate. It’s unclear whether this is actually true – I haven’t seen any confirmation.

Google’s Sitemaps team claims it’s not possible for inbound links to damage a site’s rankings, so perhaps this technique is not actually possible.

The point of the whole exercise however is to emphasize that ranking is never entirely the product of the quality of your own site. The better the actual quality of your site, the more secure you are – but there are many external factors which could have a dangerous effect. If you’ve suddenly lost your presence in Google, but can’t identify anything wrong with your site, perhaps you’ve been targeted by some kind of internet espionage.

After reading Internet Advancement Fuels My Rage, I was bound to try and learn something about the company, independently. Rand had talked to the company’s sales staff and gotten their spiel – which was already enough to make me quite suspicious of the company – but I decided to give a quick examination to one of the sites which Internet Advancement themselves used for their testimonials page. (It would be more scientific to do more, but I don’t have the time for that!)

I’m starting with a couple of assumptions, here – first, that the sites used as testimonials were actually worked on by Internet Advancement. Let’s be frank – I’m already suspicious of the company, and there’s no reason to be absolutely certain that these testimonials have any actual grounds to be on the site. Second, I am assuming that Internet Advancement is the only company which has worked on the relevant sites. Tougher to tell – other companies may also leave telltale signs, but we’ll just have to see.

Regardless, many of the testimonials did not actually include URL’s. The site I’m choosing to look at is Arizonahomes4less.com. Now, obviously, having written this article, this site now has one additional link – which could certainly change the results I’m about to report on. Oh well!

Arizona Homes 4 Less: SEO by Internet Advancement

First things first, I note that the site is absolutely hideous in Firefox. I’m not looking at design issues here, so I’m not going to check it out in Internet Explorer, however I feel that any respectable internet marketing company should take the look of a site into consideration! Bad mark against Internet Advancement already.

Second is a perusal of the page code. Title tag: heavily populated with keywords, but with a distinctly spam-like feel. This doesn’t describe the page or provide me with useful information. It is merely a home for keywords. Next: headings. The site does contain one heading, an H1 heading. It contains useful terms at a much more specific level than the title information. The body text contains randomly bolded text, primarily for the words buyers and sellers.

The site really falls down on canonical URL issues, however – the site can also be accessed at DenverJohnson.com, and at JoycePaule.com. So far nothing really horrible has turned up, but certainly nothing worth paying for, either!

Now, one of the points to search engine optimization, of course, is to influence search engine results. So it’s off to Google to see how Arizona Homes does. And, to be frank, it’s not too spectacular. They do not appear in the top 30 results for any of the keywords in their title tag nor for the keywords in their top level header. Ouch! Finally, on a search for their URL., arizonahomes4less, they only managed to rank 4th. Now that’s rather odd, wouldn’t you say? This is a reasonable unique url – I’d expect it to do a little better. The third result was the Google Directory. The second result? Internet Advancements client testimonials page (which, by the way, does NOT provide links to the clients page.)

And the first page? An odd site containing a large number of real-estate related links in no particular order with a search engine which seaches a different site and footer links which all head strangely back to the index page. The site which the engine searches is called 4GreatBuys.com. A teensy little bit of internet sleuthing unearthed this forum thread from I help you. Apparently, this individual had received an invitation to join 4GreatBuys.com from somebody with an Internet Advancement reference address.

Now, I’m not the most suspicious/paranoid person in the world. However, my first inclination here is to suspect that Internet Advancement is operating in concert with 4GreatBuys.com to a) dupe people into paying them money for so-called directory listings and b) using that listing to dupe other people into paying them money for SEO. Link spam city!

So I see little reason to search any further – I’m satisfied that Rand’s rage is fueled with complete justification. This hereby serves as my condemnation of Internet Advancement and the principles for which they stand – cheating and deception.

On a side note, the top of Internet Advancement’s testimonial page includes a set of client graphics which provide access to some very interesting information. I would have expected these links to provide access to the client sites themselves, but apparently Internet Advancement has little interest in providing links to their clients. Instead, they link to reports on the SEO progress that Internet Advancement has achieved. Very revealing of the work process of the company, perhaps?

Update, 2007-07: very interesting and revealing post from a work at home mother who was, unfortunately, taken in by this scam.

Many elements of optimization are obvious from a glance, for the web professional – speed issues resulting from excessive scripting, large Flash files or too many graphics are frequently visible to the naked eye. You can often see problems with appropriate headings, alt tags, and code density by a quick glance at the source. However, seeing these elements and demonstrating their importance to a client are two very different tasks.

When the time comes to deliver your initial "state-of-the-website" report, including statistics, ranks, etc., can help provide something for the client to seize on which they understand. Technical terms aren’t really that help – as often as not, an explanation of a site’s information architecture problems results in severe cases of "glazed-eye-syndrome." Finding good tools to help you assemble these numbers is an important needs for the business.

There are literally hundreds of SEO tools (maybe thousands) sitting out somewhere on the web. There are expensive packages such as SEO Elite, clocking in at $167 versus the free edition of Web CEO. And a simple recommendation for any SEO software package? Don’t buy them. (I’m not saying that all SEO software is a scam – I just don’t recommend it.)

Why do I say this? Two reasons – first, analysis tools are only useful if you can take the data a step further and analyze it yourself. I have yet to see a tool which showed any comprehensive understanding of the data. Second, there is so much data available for free that I can’t recommend spending this kind of money.

Oh – and there’s a third reason. And it’s a kicker – one tool commonly offered by SEO software is the "auto-submission" option. A system to send your submissions out far and wide to thousands of search engines. I simply don’t trust this technique – I would rather carefully select appropriate and reliable directories and search engines and submit by hand, where this
activity is even relevant.

Are there any advantages to buying SEO software? There can be. I’m not going to go into them extensively, but many of these software tools WILL provide a good analysis of your site, without your needing to run from page to page, learning new data formats and trying to assemble your analyses yourself. Some tools will help manage link building efforts by helping you find link partners and keeping track of your process. However, all SEO software needs to be taken with a sizable grain of salt.
Read this post at The Web Marketing Blog by Mark Daoust for a well-thought out and fair appraisal of the values of search engine optimization software.

This whole idea came to my attention because I read
this blog post on a new Firefox
extension for SEO. Although I got WAY off track in the actual post, this was the original intent behind this writing! The main tools I use for an initial site analysis are largely embedded in this tool bar – backlink checking from Google, Yahoo, and MSN are here. Alexa rankings, DMOZ checker, etc. For a basic appraisal of a site, this is a great place to start – it puts a whole range of analysis tools at your fingertips. (If you have a touch screen, that is . . .).

Links to a few sites with free SEO tools:

• SEO Tools from SEOmoz

  Free, but require registration.

• SEO Tools from Webconfs.com

  Not all of these tools are really useful, but some are fairly unique. I enjoyed the "Keyword Cloud" tool.

• SEO Chat Tools

  Wide variety, with some other interesting options such as "Future Page Rank" prediction.

We talk a lot about SEO ethics on this site – and one question that comes up over and over is how to identify an ethical SEO company. Well, this isn’t an easy question, nor is it a simple question.

I’ve written a new article to this purpose – Are they ethical? Finding the facts about SEO spam. This article is intended to aid you in finding your way around the ethics of search engine optimization.