Three Steps to Stay top Google Ranking

In this article I will show you the most effective way to steal ANY top Google ranking for ANY keyword.  As I frequent SeoChat I notice many people asking why they are not achieving top rankings for specific keywords they have been targeting. Many times the answer is quite simple, the webmaster is doing complete on-page optimization while neglecting to do any or at most very little backlink building.  Or perhaps the webmaster is trying to take out competitive rankings while building links from web directories or forums.  Many times the cases are very similar, while many webmasters really do try to build links very few do it in the right way or stick with it. Even if you get a few good links, that is not the time to stop and hope they will push you over the edge, nay, instead it is time for you to move into over-drive.


The answer to achieving that coveted ranking is actually very very simple, the only question I have is, are you dedicated to REALLY taking on that competitive keyword? – if so then lets get started, lets learn the TRUE secret to stealing ANY top Google ranking… are you ready?


When I share this secret with you, you will ultimately do one of two things… you will either say “ohhh that makes sense” and you will begin to implement it into your SEO campaign or else you will assume its either too easy or too hard (likely the latter) and move on. The truth is that in some cases it is very very easy and other times it is quite hard, but if you stick with it and follow this method completely through it will work.
A few years ago I was working on a site for a retailer, I was using my typical link building techniques and was making progress however I learned something through that campaign that reshaped how I do SEO.  I discovered that the owners of the websites where friends with numerous people who owned the top positions for the keywords they were targeting. So I thought to myself, if I can get links from all these sites I can take out the top position and hold it easily. So I set out to do this and, belive it or not, it was actually very easy to do, I was able to take out the positions they desired and firmly place them in control of many rankings which they have ever since effortlessly held.


Perhaps your puzzled and wondering what I actually did. Well it is very simple, I decided which rankings we were targeting primarily, I then went to each webmaster on the first (sometime the second) page of Google for that term and found a way to get a link from them. Some of these sites were provided products by my client so I was able to use this to get a link, I used other methods to get the remaining links. It really doesn’t matter how you get them, you can request them politely (does still work),  you could offer to pay for the links or you could use my first method… we will discuss each of these methods in detail.
I want to move through each of these methods step-by-step and give you an idea how to handle each request you will make, if you focus EVERY ounce of your link building energy to using this method you will achieve that coveted ranking, I have not found one case where it didn’t work. But it takes dedication… like ANY real SEO achievments will.
So here are the methods:


#1. One hand washes the other
The goal using this method is either to use something you are doing for the webmaster to get a link or to create a situation where they are obligated to give you a link or at least feel like they are. This can be as simple as you providing the webmaster with leads, this is a excellent way of getting a link and is how I got some of the links for the aforementioned client’s site. It may be providing the webmaster with a bit of exposure in a way your business would have an advantage. This has to be adapted to the specific niche your in, you will need to think this out for each site… believe me though, it is well worth it to spend the time for each of the first page sites. These links are worth their weight in gold.
If the webmaster y0ur attempting to get a link from does not really owe you anything or even worse doesn’t even know you then you may have to “buy” your way to getting that link… and I don’t necessarily mean monetarily.

#2. Linkbait – they’ll swallow it hook line and sinker
I firmly believe that there is a way to get a link from nearly every authority site, however that is easier said then done… however I recommend you atleast look into finding ways of link baiting for specific sites or groups of sites which you desire a link from. You will have to research what will effectively bait a site.  It may be a tool, generally a tool, if correctly developed will generate hundreds if not thousands of links however one or two links from first page ranked sites may be worth numbers of regular links to that tool. So make sure you specifically use link bait to get links from high ranked sites, don’t just hope that they will see it and link on their own.

An article is also very good link bait, I have done numerous research articles and these can turn into powerful link baits. If you do your research thoroughly this can prove to be a super valuable link bait development method.  But again, remember to target your article to the specific sites you want a link from. If you can get those links, all other links your article might attract is just the icing on the cake.

#3. Simply request a link
Sometimes the obvious answer is the right answer… just asking for a link can sometimes get you that link.  But sometimes you have to pay for the link. Whether its a set fee for a “permanent” link or a monthly agreement it does entail risks.  I do NOT recommend link exchange at all, instead if you have linked to a site and desire a link back from them, I recommend you email them in a way that in NO WAY even hints at the fact that you have linked to them or at all smells like a typical link exchange request. Find a way of buttering the recipient up, comment on an article they have written, provide a honest and detailed testimonial of a software they sell etc.  These are much more successful attempts at gaining a link back and are much more “natural” to Google. No need to tell them you linked to them, if the link is worth anything they will notice… if not what makes you think they will be impressed because you inform them of it? I’d be insulted…

Whatever you do to get these links, you should never ever spam webmasters in any way, if they have do-follow open comments or a forum, do not use this to spam for a link. The link you do get, should the webmaster not remove it, will be worth far less than a naturally placed link on a quality relevant page by the webmaster. I can’t overstress the utter worthlessness and waste of time it is to try and spam for links.
Perhaps you had hoped for some pill or miracle drug which would give you super SEO powers but if this article has seemed a let down in anyway you need to re-read it and seriously consider using these methods. I use these methods all the time and it has turned out to be the best way to start my SEO campaigns.  I have kept it simple because the method is simple, whoever said SEO was rocket science anyways?

Obviously there are certain niches where this method would be hard and in such cases you will need to continue beyond just trying to get links from the first page for your primary keywords, because in some niches many of the first page-ranked sites will not even link to you… you should ultimately go after every site ranked in Google for the keywords you are trying to rank for. If you actively proceed with this method you will ultimately rank for the terms you desire… but again this is no miracle work. Like all the methods I use and recommend, they take time and patience however the results are well worth it.


The purpose of this article is to help you realize that you should be getting links from people who are holding positions in territory you want to hold, then keep moving back through the rankings trying to get links. Don’t worry if they are ranked on the 10th page, if the term is competitive they will still be a valuable linkback.
As always comments and emails are welcome, and of course we love to have you link directly to our articles. If you enjoyed this article please add my blog to your feed reader… if you do not have a feed reader, please join the 21st century. Goto Google.com/reader and start by adding www.1stsearchenginerankings.com to the list. That way you have instant access to new articles as soon as they are published. Thanks again for reading!


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Google's PageRank Explained and how to make the most of it

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

From here on in, we'll occasionally refer to PageRank as "PR".

Notes:
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.


How is PageRank calculated?

To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

a page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

"share" = the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

Top 10 Black Hat SEO Techniques

Black Hat SEO techniques are methods webmasters/marketers use to get a leg up on the competition in the search engines. Whether they are fair or unfair, legitimate or illegitimate is not up for discussion here. This is a list and explanation of ten of the top black hat SEO techniques.

10. Buying Links

Is buying links a black hat technique? Of course it is. When a marketer pays for a link, they are essentially “buying a vote” for the page they are promoting. That link would not exist except that it was paid for. This gives extra weight to the promoted page in the search engine algorithms. The paid-for link does not itself add extra value to visitors, so the technique must be black hat.

9. Cyber Hoaxing

Hoaxing is a way of “creatively” making news. First, create a fake news website that looks real. Second, write a sensational but false news story. It helps if it is difficult to prove the veracity. Third, create multiple accounts on various social networking sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, etc., and submit your story there. Fourth, be ready for emails and phone calls from actual big-time media outlets with questions about your story. You will generate buzz and get links to your fake news story. Eventually, when it is discovered your story is false, try to capitalize on the outrage. How to monetize the whole situation is up to the webmaster, but it is commonly done with affiliate programs.

8. Keyword Stuffing/Hidden Text

This technique involves picking a bunch of keywords for which a marketer wants a page to be optimized, and then placing them on the page in such a way that they will be read by search engine spiders, but not by human visitors. They can be located in a hidden div tag, colored so that they blend into the background, or even placed within HTML comment tags. This is truly an oldschool technique, and is not nearly as effective now as it was back in the day.

7. Doorway pages

Doorway pages are web pages created solely for the purpose of being spidered by search engines and included in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They are usually optimized for placement in the SERPs by being stuffed with keywords and created in bulk. Often, you will see that the pages are named after the primary keyword being targeted. Also, doorway pages will likely have a form of redirection involved sending visitors to the “money site”. The redirection can be a meta refresh tag or javascript. Most webmasters using this technique will have software which cranks out doorway pages by the thousands.

6. Web Page Cloaking

This technique goes hand-in-hand with the doorway pages technique. The idea behind cloaking is to show a doorway page to search engine spiders but the “money page” to human visitors. Both pages are accessed using the same URL. Software is used to identify the search engine spiders and serve the doorway page to them. There is a dual purpose to web page cloaking: competitors are kept from scraping the content of the optimized doorways, and human visitors are kept from seeing the ugly doorway pages (the redirect is unnecessary in a properly executed cloaking solution). I may be a little biased about web page cloaking because I am the author of KloakIt, a cloaking software application.

5. XSS Injection

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a technique used to take advantage of certain pages with a special security flaw. They accept input from the HTTP GET QUERY_STRING environment variable (the text after the “?” in a URL) and display it on the page. Therefor, it is possible to construct a URL to one of these pages which will be displayed as a link to the site you specify, with the text you specify as the link text. The constructed URL can be set up as a link somewhere that a search engine spider will follow, getting the XSS-generated page indexed. Very sneaky.

4. 302 Redirect Hijacking

This technique is a really nasty black hat trick where the evil webmaster creates a web page on a high-page-rank domain with a 302 redirect to the page he is trying to hijack. Googlebot (or another search engine spider) follows the redirect to the second page and indexes it, but on the SERP, the URL of the indexed page will be that of the page with the redirect. In other words, the evil black hat webmaster will own the SERP, and the page with the content will be de-indexed. A truly evil hijacker builds cloaking into the redirect so human visitors to the page will go to his “money page”, while search engine spiders will still see the 302 redirect.

3. Scraping and Spinning

Scraping and its cousin spinning are a black hat technique that uses software to spider websites, grab the content, mix it up a bit, paraphrase, randomize, and generate “new” content from it. Often it will contain links to sites the marketer is trying to promote. Or, it will contain Adsense or other ads which are used to monetize the content. Spinning content into duplicate-content-penalty-avoiding text is the holy grail of black hat techniques. Programmers who come up with methods for doing this on-the-fly have created true money machines for themselves. Here’s an excellent scraping and spinning story.

2. Splogs

Close cousins to scraping and spinning, splogs are simply blogs with worthless, automatically generated content. Many splogs read RSS feeds and create blog posts for themselves from them. Splogs are the framework into which scraped and spun content is laid out to create made-for-Adsense (MFA) sites. Also, splogs can be used to get other sites indexed or their Pagerank increased, by including links to them. A large percentage (some say 20% or higher) of the blogs on the web are actually splogs. More Info…and the number one black hat SEO technique is…

1. Link Spamming

King of black hat techniques, link spamming is just a way getting links to the websites of your choice through the use of automated software which accesses unprotected blogs through anonymous web proxies and leaves links in their comments. Long, frequently updated lists of proxy IP addresses are necessary, as well as decent comment generation software. Blog software developers have fought back, however, such as the the development of the Askimet comment filter for WordPress.

A Last Word

Now that you are an expert on black hat SEO techniques, go out and make your millions. But wait! I’ll through in one more technique as a freebie… “churn and burn“. This is actually not a technique, but a strategy. Churn and burn means you have to be prepared to lose domains to penalties in search engine rankings as Google or other search engines discover they are spammy. The real secret to black hat success is to always be developing new domains and campaigns. If one is slammed, you should have two on the back burner.

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Let's have fun with the Google search box.

The Google search box has become the new oracle at Delphi, the thing we consult before all major undertakings. How do I know this?

Through Google Suggest, of course. For the complete take on Suggest, read my colleague Josh Levin in Slate. For those who don't know how Suggest works, he sums it up nicely:

Google doesn't reveal its search algorithms, but the company's engineers confirm that what we're looking at in [Google Suggest] is, essentially, a list of the most popular queries that start with a given prefix. (It's unclear what time period the suggestions are culled during, but a spokesman says they're generated from "recent [search] activity.") A suggestion-enabled search is like an instant popularity contest. Just type in a couple of letters, and you've got access to oodles of data on what your fellow Web surfers are hunting for.

To wit: Google Suggest is a helpful feature. It's a little sliver of the collective mind. It's also a lot of fun to mess with.

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The Internet has lots of great examples of misfires served by Google. Here's a favorite: "i am extremely terrified of chinese people." But I was most impressed with this anonymous bit of genius dug up by Digg, which uses Google for some armchair sociolinguistic analysis. The graphic compares "less intelligent" queries with "more intelligent" queries, such as "how 2" with "how might one:"

vs.

You can spend entire afternoons duplicating this experiment:

Hey Google, I'm Over Here! (a 301 Experiment)

Recently, I made the difficult decision to change the domain name of my blog and consulting website. It had to be done; the old name just didn't make sense anymore. No one could spell it, and it was terrible for SEO. Of course, I knew all of the rules of successful 301 redirection in theory, but when it came to putting theory into practice, I found myself dreading pulling the switch.

There have been plenty of good articles on SEOmoz and elsewhere about the technical aspects of 301 redirection, but I felt a lot of uncertainty about the timeline of re-establishing my presence on Google (inbound links, PR, etc.). So, I decided to track my progress daily, mostly to calm my own paranoia, but also as a bit of a case study in what a 301 redirection process looks like. I finally finished collecting data when my PageRank was established over the weekend, and this article is a recap of my experience.