Adam | 100k Blueprint

Be Careful Buying Bulk Backlinks

January 12, 2011 By Adam 1 Comment

Backlinks are essential. They are largely what determines our ranking. All other things being equal, the site with more ‘Total Backlink Value’ ranks higher.

I spend a good deal of time on getting backlinks in the book, but really it could be an entire book itself – certainly there are some out there. If you’ve read through the book, you know we advocate ‘link diversity’, meaning getting backlinks across a variety of sources and sites.

Within the last year, I’ve seen an entire cottage industry grow up on providing ‘bulk’ backlinks. These are ‘packages’ you can buy, either lists of URL’s where you can drop a link, or services that simply create the links for you.

It can sound very enticing, “2000 Backlinks – Only $39.95!”. But 2000 backlinks are worthless if Google doesn’t find or recognize them. And most are PR-NA or PR-0, meaning they add very little to your ‘Total Backlink Value’.

Many of these providers are using automated tools to find these sites, or to actually create the links. Xrummer is a popular one for example. The problem, once again, is that they are very low value links.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy them. But I definitely am saying, diversify your backlinks, and spend the time/effort/whatever to get some ‘quality’ links. I can’t tell you how many times I see a site with thousands of backlinks beaten by a site with a couple hundred links. The reason? That site has some high-quality, high value links.

Keep in mind, Pagerank is a logarithmic scale, not linear. That means that a PR-2 link isn’t just twice as good as a PR-1 link. It’s 100 times as good. A handful of PR-2 and PR-3 links will provide more ‘Total Backlink Value’ than hundreds of low-value links.

And remember, it’s not the PR of the ‘site’ (homepage) that matters, it’s the PR of the page where the link appears.

Filed Under: Quickies, SEO & Ranking Tagged With: backlinking, backlinks

Micro Niche Finder – SOC Explained

January 11, 2011 By Adam 1 Comment

I actually have quite strong feelings regarding SOC – in MNF and elsewhere for that matter.

Here’s my issues with SOC (strength of competition), both pro- and con. SOC can be a good ‘starting point’ in filtering down keyword groups to more manageable groups of “good candidates”. That said, if used either exclusively, or as the first ‘level’ of filtering, it can cause you to discard potentially excellent candidates. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dug into both ‘Yellow’ and ‘Red’ SOC’s, only to find great keywords.

It’s helpful to understand how MNF determines their rating. They take 3 search criteria – intitle, inanchor, and inurl search operands – and uses them to try and determine how difficult it would be to rank for that keyword.

From Micro Niche Finder:

“The rational is that a website (or webpage) that is seriously optimizing for a keyword phrase will have backlinks with that phrase (inanchor) will have the phrase in the title tag and will have the phrase in the url.”

The idea then is that if there are a lot of those measures come back with big numbers (intitle, inanchor, and inurl ) then there must be a lot of pages optimizing for the keyword, hence competition will be tough. While inurl and inanchor do show a lot of possible backlinks, they can – and often are – spread out and not so concentrated towards one page.

And so SOC may be high, but those all-important Page 1 sites might not be.

In terms of determining viability, MOB or Measure of Backlinks is a more accurate measure for our purposes.

That said, a “high Red” SOC is probably going to be tough and worth filtering out, but not just ‘all Reds’ or ‘all Reds & Yellows’.

I can’t say it enough: Always check the sites on Page 1.

What I do is generally sort by volume, filter out everything either so high it isn’t likely to be feasible, or too low to be worthwhile. Then I’ll look at SOC, and filter off the “high Red” SOC numbers. Then if my remaining list is manageable, I’ll start looking at MOB and the actual Page 1 entries.

Filed Under: Quickies, SEO & Ranking Tagged With: microniche finder, mnf, seo tools

How to Quickly & Easily Duplicate WordPress Blog Installations

January 10, 2011 By Adam Leave a Comment

Are you looking for a way to clone your WordPress blogs to quickly create multiple websites with ease?

I churn out plenty of niche WordPress blogs each and every week, and although programs such as Backupbuddy will help, I have my own process down to where I can get everything installed and in order in about 10 mins. per site:

=> Create account on my server

=> Switch DNS at the registrar

=> Install WordPress from Fantastico

=> FTP to the site and copy over a pre-fab folder containing all my plugins

=> FTP my theme folder

=> FTP the contents of a folder I’ve set up with the files I want going to my root directory – Google WMT verification file (it’s always the same for a given WMT account), plus an empty, writable .htaccess file.

=> Launch wp-admin and go down my list:

‘Appearance’ – select my theme, add my Adsense pub-ID
‘Plugins’ – activate / setup my plugins
‘Settings’ / ‘General’ – if I want to add “www” to my domain name
‘Writing’ / ‘Update Services’ – add in my ‘ping’ list
‘Permalinks’ – select ‘Custom Structure’ and use either “/%postname%/” or “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/” depending on the anticipated size of the site

Done. All this takes only a few mins. Fwiw, it’s an easy thing to create a screen-capture video while doing it and use that as ‘instructions’ for a VA.

Filed Under: Quickies, Wordpress Tagged With: clone blog, websites

Where We Stand On Blackhat SEO etc…

January 8, 2011 By Adam Leave a Comment

I get a LOT of questions about various Black- and Grayhat techniques, tools, etc. After reading an excellent unrelated thread reply by one of our forum members regarding spam blog commenting and the like, I wanted to address this with a ‘statement’ of our philosophy and where we stand on things.

This is not intended to be a judgement of others, but my own personal views. That said, I actually DO hope it influences you.

Where We Stand

I’m a believer in Karma – at least I feel like bad things and negative attitudes tend to beget bad things and negative attitudes. While (very) far from being Mr. Snow White, I do try to do the ‘right thing’ as I’m sure most of us do. That said, there is sometimes a disconnect between a persons general moral stance and their actions when things become more ‘abstract’. For example, someone may not believe in cheating, yet feel that clicking on a friends Adsense ad is just a ‘nice thing’ to do for them. The disconnect is that it is stealing – from the advertiser who is ultimately paying that person, but is expecting only to pay for legit clicks. But the two are far enough removed that it may not seem so.

Extend this to blog commenting. When I search for blogs I can post a comment on for the purposes of getting a link, and write a generic comment intended to sound like I read the post when I didn’t, in a way I’m cheating. I’m misleading anyone who reads the post & comments, as well as the blog owner.

I do a lot of blog commenting. I will always at least skim the post I’m commenting on and say something relevant. Is this still ‘cheating’? In a way, yes. Like I said, I’m no Snow White. That’s my own ‘personal line’ in this case. Do I think everyone should adhere to my personal moral compass? No. That’s for each of us to decide.

Beyond the question of morals, integrity, etc., is my much firmer and more pragmatic belief that, for the most part, “loopholes”, “shortcuts”, etc., tend to be less effective over the long haul than making the effort to do things the ‘right’ way. And I’m in this for the long haul. I’m not interested in short-term gain that isn’t sustainable.

That said, here’s MY stance on:

Blackhat techniques – short-term gain, potentially risky. Not for me.

Grayhat techniques – if they aren’t destructive, overtly dishonest, and have potential for sustainable gain, I’m all for it.

Scrapebox, Xrummer and similar tools – automating the creation of bogus forum ID’s, blog comments, etc., not for me. I believe that Google – a smart animal – will devalue many of these efforts over time, and besides, it’s not something I’m comfortable with.

SENuke and similar tools – I use them extensively. I also try to be careful not to end up doing the same thing as above.

Blog commenting – I will at least skim a post before commenting, and make a relevant comment.

Other stuff – I try to find ways to do ‘good’ work, while continuously looking to improve my efficiency and effectiveness. But the ‘good’ comes before the ‘more’.

Your thoughts on this topic are very much welcomed!

Filed Under: Quickies, SEO & Ranking Tagged With: black hat, blackhat, blackhat seo, blackhat techniques

Two Extremely Cool, Useful Keyword Research Resources!

January 7, 2011 By Adam Leave a Comment

keyword research lies at the root of almost everything I do online. Looking at the metrics, such as search volume, EPC, etc., is just the beginning.

One of the most frequent and important exercises I go through is looking for synonyms, related keyword phrases, longtail keywords, etc.the success of many of my sites can be linked directly to finding high value, low competition keyword phrases that either warrant immediately obvious, or not directly related semantically.

One of the most valuable resources for me is the reference.com site. it houses dictionary.com, thesaurus.com, and encyclopedia.com (“quotes” of the day).thesaurus.com is often a starting point for me when I’m looking to expand a keyword phrase list, come up with a domain name, etc.

Recently I came across a particularly cool site called “Visual Thesaurus”.it provides a sort of visual representation of synonyms and keyword relationships. It also makes it very easy to follow threads of related keywords and phrases. It is a paid site, though you can do some basic functions in demo mode, but there is also a 14 day trial:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/