SEO News Blog

Posted by randfish

Let’s try a little excercise…

Common features of spam domains include:

Long domain names .info, .cc, .us and other cheap, easy to grab TLDs Short registration period (1 year, maybe 2) High ratio of ad blocks to content Javascript redirects from initial landing pages Use of common, high-commercial value spam keywords like “mortgage,” “poker,” “texas hold ‘em,” “porn,” “student credit cards,” and related terms Many links to other low quality, spam sites Few links to high quality, trusted sites High keyword frequencies and keyword densities Small amounts of unique content Very few direct visits Very few links sent out in (non-spam) email to the site Registered to people/entities not associated with trusted sites Not frequently registered with services like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Central or Live Webmaster Tools Rarely have short, high value domain names Often contain many keyword-stuffed subdomains More likely to have longer domain names More likely to contain multiple hyphens in the domain name Less likely to have links from trusted sources Less likely to have SSL Security certificates Less likely to be in directories like DMOZ, Yahoo!, Librarian’s Internet Index, etc. Unlikely to have any significant quantity of branded searches Unlikely to be bookmarked in services like My Yahoo!, Del.icio.us, Faves.com, etc. Unilkely to get featured in social voting sites like Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, StumbleUpon,  etc. Unlikely to have channels on YouTube, communities on Facebook or links from Wikipedia Unlikely to be mentioned on major news sites (either with or without link attribution) Unlikely to register with Google/Yahoo!/MSN Local Services Unlikely to have a legitimate physical address/phone number on the website  Likely to have the domain associated with emails on blacklists Often contain a large number of snippets of “duplicate” content found elsewhere on the web Unlikely to contain unique content in the form of PDFs, PPTs, XLSs, DOCs, etc. Frequently feature commercially focused content Many levels of links away from highly trusted websites Rarely contain privacy policy and copyright notice pages Rarely listed in Better Business Bureau’s Online Directory Rarely contains high grade level text content (as measured by metrics like Fleisch-Kincaid Reading Level) Rarely have small snippets of text quoted on other websites and pages Cloaking based on user-agent or IP address is common Rarely contain paid analytics tracking software Rarely have online or offline marketing campaigns Rarely have affilliate link programs pointing to them Less likely to have .com or .org extensions Almost never have .mil, .edu or .gov extensions Rarely have links from domains with .edu or .gov extensions Almost never have links from domains with .mil extensions Rarely receive high quantities of monthly visits Rarely have visits lasting longer than 30 seconds Rarely have visitors bookmarking their domains in the browser Unlikely to buy significant quantities of PPC ad traffic Rarely have banner ad media buys Likely to have links to a significant portion of the sites and pages that link to themExtremely unlikely to be mentioned or linked-to in scientific research papers Unlikely to use expensive web technologies (Microsoft Server & Coding Products that Require a Licensing Fee) Likely to be registered by parties who own a very large number of domains Unlikely to attract significant return trafficMore likely to contain malware, viruses or spyware (or any automated downloads)

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Popularity: unranked [?]

I was not going to leak the document publicly until others did and it was cited by other popular sources, but given that SEL blogged about the remote quality rater document, now is a fine time to mention the best weekend reading any SEO could wish for…here are two versions of the 43 page confidential Google document: HTML& PDF.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

It is much easier to get people to impulse purchase a one time $79 product than it is to get people to join a higher value but higher price-point recurring program. When I changed my business model the sales rates changed significantly. Just before changing the model the sales rate for the ebook peaked at an all time high. And just after launch the sales rate for the membership site was even greater than my best sales rate for the ebook, but then sales slowed down a bit. As I refined the some of the marketing strategies, order volume has picked back up again.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

A friend of mine sent me a link to The Kept University, a great article about how corporations are increasingly turning universities into cheap biased research labs.

Companies give researchers stock options for conducting research on product development, censor negative reviews, and see a much higher rate of positive reviews. They then use this research to try to push new products into the market. That is about a million times worse than something like PayPerPost, which recently saw many of their bloggers get their PageRank axed by Google.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

With an ever increasing number of ways for people to share content and an ever increasing number of competing channels the easiest way to estimate the value of a blog post is to look at the people citing it. Citations lead to new readers and subscribers…and more citations. If your posts are well cited it does not take many posts to get thousands of subscribers.

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Popularity: unranked [?]

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20721743.post-52188334966174687122007-08-29T11:24:00.000+01:002007-08-29T11:49:46.904+01:00Is This AdWords CTR Quality Score Trick Unethical?I heard a story last week about how someone has setup an AdWords campaign to advertise a charity website without the charities knowledge. The sole intention of the campaign is to gain a high CTR for non-competitive keywords in order to increase their own account’s overall quality score!
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Popularity: unranked [?]

Finally, Yahoo Publisher Network launched what was most speculated, the smart pricing feature for Yahoo Publisher Network partners and Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers.

Here is the excerpt from launch email

In an ongoing effort to strengthen our Sponsored Search and Content Match marketplaces, Yahoo! will be introducing a new traffic quality feature called “quality-based pricing”. This feature is rolling out beginning today and we plan to continue to expand it over time.

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Popularity: unranked [?]