Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

Now I bet Brian is going to tell me that this was updated 9  months ago and I missed it.

I normally never go on their site, but we are trying to sort out some issues that come up when local listings pop up in Google sometimes, and then are not seen later, so I was called in to figure it out.

Authority labs is doing great on this, it is just Google that keeps changing whether they show the local listings or not for this client.

If you have not seen the new interface go check it out.

You guys did a really good job on it.

Super clear. Sharp self explanatory logos. Easy to find your way around. No unnessesary options, just the things you need, and an easy way to get to support for the things not described. I know from the past that they get back to you lightening fast.

Brian and Chase, I am imagine how much work went into the design. Love it!

A whole new level of egregious link spam/removal has begun.

We are in the midst of removing a penalty from an important site, and I took a sample of the bad links to look at myself for a little quality control. I cam across a site listed below called, gimmewealth.com. This of course is a funny name, but with a sting when you figure out what they are doing.

The site I am working on had hired an Indian firm to build links for them. The client at the time thought they were writing articles, and then posting them in different places as a way of getting links. The client had no idea that there was anything wrong with this at all.

So we are helping them to remove these links, so that they may get the penalty removed.

This site shown below may have been a link built by the Indian company, or possibly was something even more evil which I will explain below.

Google has told us that bad links should be removed. When you search for bad links, you come across pages like this.

This bad link page, which is a pile of crap to start with, has actually put an automated payment system in place to have you pay them to remove the link.

They are smart in that they set the cost at a point, where most people will actually pay it.

Now here is the question?

Did the links on this site end up there because of Indian and other shady SEO companies building the links? Or did this company build this site, and put the crappy links on their site along with the paypal button as an entire business concept of it’s own.

Step 1 – Build a Crappy Site

Step 2 – Build Crappy Links to your site from porn,  gambling and pharmaceutical sites.

Step 3 – Link out to millions of legitimate websites.

Step 4 – Put an automated button for people to pay to have your link removed.

Bad Luck? Or Evil Genius?

Sean Rasmussen (The name listed as owner of this domain), if you see this post, please comment so we can hear the whole story?

= THE BELOW IS A  SCREEN SHOT OF THE PAGE =

Open Letter To SEO Community + NDA talk at Wynn Casino This Week.

“Link Building That Won’t Get You Penalized”. The number one thing on the mind of Pubcon Attendees per our newest survey. READ ALL OF BELOW

NDA talk, discussion, and private party at my suite at the Wynn on this subject below, but please read all of this first.

Matt Cutts has said for almost a decade (this is me paraphrasing) that he wants quality, white hat, links from sites with a real gate keeper evaluating the links.

Every bit of research we have done the past year, confirms that the number one factor Google is still using to rank a site, are the number of unique domains of real websites that link in to a page.

Google is demanding white hat links or they are spinning your site into outer space.
Our fortune 500 clients are demanding white hat link building.

We have been working our tails off this past few years, and especially the past 3 months developing enterprise level software and methods for doing this.

Also, some people in this industry are Matt Cutts and Google haters, while they make their living off of this company.

I personally am grateful for the friendship and help that Matt has given me, and for the work that Google does. Google never asked me to spend the past 8 years figuring out how they rank sites. The didn’t ask me to make software to reverse engineer what they are doing. That is my choice.

If Matt Cutts or Google decides to change the algorithm, or stop giving me keyword data, god bless them. That is their choice. Google has made my and my clients sites tens of millions of dollars. I thank them for this. But Google owes me nothing.

In our surveys over the past weeks, in our discussions with our large clients, with talks with the agencies that work for these big sites, and in our own minds for our own sites, the major focus at this second is how to build links that won’t get your site penalized.

I am putting together an NDA talk and private party on this exact subject, link building that won’t get you penalized, so we can stay on top of what is new.

We have our own enterprise level link building techniques that are working great and we want to compare notes with others to see what is working well for them.

I am going to spring for the penthouse at the Wynn, food and drinks.

Please fill out the survey to help us figure out the what and when on this, and apply for an invitation.
Survey and Invitation Request.

Pubcon Parties and the big 2014 Poker tournament, go here.

=========

The below is about previous years 2013 parties.

Letter to my friends 🙂

Want to network?

The big texas holdem tournament registration is now open.
There are limited spots: http://seo-poker-012eminv1.eventbrite.com

I have cleverly planned a little upscale networking for you, and all
other players and guests at the tournament. It is the catalytic networking.

Free drinks and In and Out burgers are provided for Guests and Players
thanks to the Mirage and our sponsors,
Bruce Clay, Internet Marketing Ninjas, Link Research Tools

Also, this past year we have dedicated ourselves to reverse engineering Google’s
algorithm. We made a ton of money for our own and clients sites this past year.
I am going to be sharing at my invite only back room talk during Pubcon.

Also, if you care at all about high quality, white hat link building. I will just say this bluntly.
We rock it. We have new techniques that are just killing it right now. We have been doing this
over the past year for fortune 500 and large website clients.

To be a guest at the big tournament, or play, register here:
http://seo-poker-012eminv1.eventbrite.com

Nevada gaming makes it almost impossible to have a true charity tournament any more,
so instead this year we are promoting Water School along the way. Also the sponsors
and myself are donating to this fantastic charity.
In a nutshell, they teach people in Africa who would die of Dysentery, and other viral and
bacterial diseases, how to use a simple empty soda bottle to kill viruses and bacteria in the water.
Voila! Less death.

We have been putting out facebook ads, emails, blog posts and more to promote
our awesome sponsors who are making this possible:
Bruce Clay, Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Link Research Tools.
All by the way get my own personal seal of approval as rocking companies. 🙂

We need a few more sponsors.

If you have a couple of bucks, and want to make a cooler event cooler, just email me at dk (at) purposeinc.com
We have sponsorships available at all levels.

Be cool!

much love,

dk

P.S. You got to the bottom of this so either:
sign up as a player: http://seo-poker-012eminv1.eventbrite.com
sign up as a guest: http://seo-poker-012eminv1.eventbrite.com
or email me back and offer up some super cool sponsor money for the crew 🙂 dk (at) purposeinc.com

On facebook my SEO friends have been whining about Google hiding the search data from them.

If you don’t get this, when you go to Google Analytics, which is Google’s tool for seeing what is happening on your website, they up to now have shown you a great degree of what keyword people were searching for when they came to your site.

Those of us in the Google ranking, and Google penalty removal business, use this data as indicators as to how Google is ranking our sites for different keywords. In fact it has been extremely useful for me to figure out exactly what is causing the penalty.

Google has decided to hide all of this data from webmasters, and now webmasters are whining about it.

My good buddy and secret weapon Dan and I have a basic philosophy which is the harder and more expensive something is to figure out or get past, the better for us.

It is like having a 20,000 foot cliff below our front porch. Only the strong and the smart are going to make it there. Most people are tremendously lazy. If there is any barrier to entry at all, then they are not even going to try to get in. That leaves plenty of room at the top for those smart enough, and willing to work 16 hour days to get to places where the masses, and even the leaders of the masses will never see.

We just got through doing a sideways reverse engineering of a big piece of google. By this I mean we took a way Google is looking at sites, and then came in from the side, worked our way through the webbing, and found an amazing new way to build links that are Google compliant, Google loved, and will get sites to rank even better than we have for cheaper. To do this took 2 months of research on top of what we have been dong for years. Then once I had the idea, I spent three 16 hour days writing up the specs for the programmer, who then banged out version 1 for me.

How many people are going to go through that much work? Not many.

So every time Google makes it harder for SEO’s to get sites to rank well in Google, I give Google another round of applause.

I know as the challenges get tougher, I will work harder and smarter that I ever have before.

As Google tightens its noose against crappy links, and crappy writing, and sloppy lazy analysis, we just keep pulling further ahead.

I will tell you one more secret.

Not drinking and taking good care of oneself goes an awful long way in being able to work hard, and well, for decades at a time 🙂

Making it a bit tougher for us Google ranking folks Google?

Thanks! 😉

As most of you know, we have been working flat out the past few years helping very large sites and our own large sites rank well in Google.  A big part of this has become getting rid of the penalties.

As a result we have a large research team and some amazing white hat link building teams literally working around the clock these days. The sun never sets on the empire as they say.

Today there is an interesting new twist. Google is actually telling you flat out if you have a manual penalty. For some webmasters they got a notice from Google, it disappeared, and then they never saw it again.

Today in Google Webmaster tools showed up a button under Search Traffic, Manual Actions. It then tells you if you have a manual action and some details about it. Most often if you have one, it is going to be about unnatural link warnings, although I am sure there are others.

If you click on it you get Manual Actions, Site Wide Matches, and Partial Matches.

The Site Wide Matches will probably shake out to be more Panda related penalties, and the Partial Matches more Penguin stuff.

I applaud Google for being a little more transparent at this.

I once asked Matt Cutts a question in front of a few hundred webmasters, a bit tongue in cheek but also seriously, if Google was asking webmasters to be entirely transparent in what they were doing, when could we expect the same from Google? This is a step in the right direction.

If you have one of these penalties on a significant site and want to chat, email me at dk (at) purposeinc.com

We have research in place to determine the exact factors that were hit by the March 2013 Google Penguin or Panda update.

Our laboratory team has already identified the major 136 factors of the Google Panda update and the major 26 factors of the Google Penguin update.

I won’t even tell you their success rate now, because you would not believe me.

Huge props to Google on this because while there are fine points one might try to criticize these updates about, they definitely are continuing to create better user experiences.

As we get information in about the 2013 March Panda or Penguin update that is supposed to roll out, we will release info here about it.

There has been some contradiction about whether it is Panda or Penguin. We will see.

There is an invite only private event that will take place in my penthouse at the Mirage on Tuesday night to discuss what we have learned. Click Here.

This will be one of my far reaching predictions that you will see come true over the next 3 to 5 years 🙂

Here are the steps.

1. Google Values Google Plus’s for SEO purposes.

2. People start setting up fake accounts to Gmail accounts to Google plus pages.

3. Google cracks down by only valuing Google pluses based on email history of gmail account.

4. Users in India set up tens of thousands of Gmail accounts that mail each other automatically to build history.

5. Google starts using algorithms to track user patters of gmail users, the way they analyze links now, to look for isolated neighborhoods that do not interact outside of their neighborhood.

6. Indian users start sending REAL emails to U.S. companies, asking “sort of” real questions, to build history and trust in their gmail accounts.

7. U.S. companies go, WTF?, as they are inundated with apparent customer requests and complaints at never before seen levels, and have trouble sorting out which requests coming in are from real customers, and which are not.

8. U.S. companies start insisting on customers validating they are not only a real person, but a real customer, before they will even respond to a seemingly real email.

It used to be that a highly ranked organic local site, could have its google local listing in the 7 pack and have an organic listing above it.

We noticed that this seems to have changed.

Today, we went and googled 50 different random local terms around the country and all of the searches supported my new theory.

If you can find a violation of this rule (Roseanna calls this the tag-along rule) please leave it in the comments below.

Here is how the rule works:

#1: Google follows its algorithm to determine which of the websites should be in the 7pack for the local term.

#2: Google then ranks the organic page according to its organic algorithm.

#3:If the google local listing is ranked higher than the organic listing on the first page for that term then google will list both of these listings on the 1^st page.   This appears to take place for some domain in approximately 10% of local searches.

#4: If the domain we are looking at is in the 7 pack already and if the organic listing is in the same position or above the last listing of the 7 pack, then google will only list the 7 pack style local listing.  It will not list the organic listing separately.  The local listing seems to tag along with the organic listing as it moves up, like a drunkin’ friend when you are trying to hit on some classy hot girl.

#5: If an organic site is exceptionally strong, the organic backlinks are so strong that google naturally places the organic listing higher than the 7 pack.  While following the previous rule, google also breaks that listing out of the 7 pack and places the local listing at the height the organic listing would have been at number 1 or 2. This is like when the hot classy girl invites you over for thanksgiving dinner and your drunkin’ friend tags along in flip flops, a t-shirt and shorts to your new girlfriend’s house with the three car garage and he awkwardly sits down for thanksgiving dinner with her family when he wasn’t even invited.

We were able to find only 2 exceptions to this rule. In each case, the local listings formed a 3 pack instead of a 7 pack.

Let me know when you start to see exceptions to this rule and leave examples in the comments.

Or if you can figure out why Google violates this rule, only where there is a 3 pack, that would be interesting to know as well.

As a lot of you may know, I have been doing some link building for my sites and some others lately.

I only do it totally white hat.

I figured there must be a lot of great companies that could help.

One that I always recomend for helping with this type of work, who do excellent work and do it white hat is IMN, the company of Jim Boykin we all know as We Build Pages.

I want the links to be as diverse as possible, so at Pubcon this year I was talking to other companies as well.

Overall I was extremely disappointed, and realized what Jim does and what I do is some of the best work around, and is totally white hat.

One company sounded really interesting.

I asked them to send me some url’s of sites they get links from.

They are nice guys, and I still might use their company, so I am not going to out them, but what happened next was totally hilarious.

They said, “well we don’t usually give out the url’s of the sites the links come from, but in this case we will give you an example”. They then gave me a link to this site.

I entered the url, and this is what I found. Not a very good promotion for quality links. ROFL.