uGuX SEO

Now, one way to learn SEO is to study the success of other SEO strategists.  Recently, SEO.com was no where to be seen on the Google search engine results, but now they are:

As you can tell, SEO.com is ranked number 10 for the highly competitive keyword.  Now, how did they do this? That is what this post will attempt to answer.

SEO.com’s BlackHat tactics

Currently, some believe that they have used a few unethical ways to achieve their current success.  The tactic that I linked to sums up their spam on Sphinn.com (an SEO and search related news site).  Now, this is certainly BlackHatSEO.  Although many social news sites use nofollow attributes in their links, Sphinn does not.  So, SEO.com essentially had some of their employees create multiple accounts at Sphinn and inject/force links to their site.

Buying links is BlackHat, but buying a site with links is not

After SEO.com was purchased, a huge buzz was found on many SEO and flat-out geek blogs about the purchase.  It sold for 5 million dollars.  Many of these blogs wrote up a little post — saying, “Wow, SEO.com sold for 5 million,” etc.  And of course, most (or many) of these blogs resulted on providing links directly to SEO.com.  (Technorati estimates 205 blog reactions for the site.)

And yes, of course, there were already links pointing to the domain before it was purchased.  Now, 15,100 links according to Yahoo.

Getting closer to a conclusion

With a site, with the perfect domain, and with near-perfect anchor text (hyperlinks pointing with either “seo.com” or “seo”), it leaves no wonder to my mind why they have received a 1st page ranking.

On-site SEO?

Ahh, glad you asked.  Neglecting all keywords with 2 characters and less (via GoogleRankings - Keyword Density)…

…they are certainly optimized.

Regarding other aspects:

• Their site is regularly updated (main page, as well) by showing snippets of each of their blog posts.
• Each of their pages stays on topic (mentions related terms — “search engine optimization”, etc.).
• Inner links very well.

Conclusion

This post is not meant to be rant but rather a way to look at sites that may be your potential competitor.

They’ve optimized well, and it appears to have been a great buy (according to their site):

After  4 ½ months with SEO.com our average monthly sales more than doubled. The decision to hire SEO.com has been one of the best we’ve made in launching our small business.

So, I received an email back from Marcus Ruark (Vice President, Sales and Marketing) of Gigablast with a press release for March 18th, 2008, and in it were a few SEO tips:

“The most frequent complaint regarding alternative site search services is the freshness of the site search results,” said Marcus Ruark, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Gigablast. “Gigablast Site Search with Gigaboost provides a tremendous search advantage to websites with dynamic, user-generated content, frequent page updates, or regular sales promotions.”

Moreover, since web pages with Gigablast Site Search receive priority in the Gigablast indexing process, web searches on www.gigablast.com, or on any of Gigablast’s affiliate sites, will have fresh and comprehensive access to those Gigablast Site Search web pages.

Their most important SEO tip is very similar to ranking highly on MSN/Live.com search. They pointed out that freshness and updating is of tremendous importance. To boost your rankings, I would suggest your include frequently updated content. If you don’t write a lot of content, encourage user comments or parse an external RSS feed into your site.

I posted a few other tips in Gigablast SEO and Gigaboost part I.

BTW, I just checked, and it appears that this site is ranked first for “Gigablast SEO“.

CNN.com is probably one of the most-perfect examples of pure SEO. A simple search for “news” reveals them as the authority in news:

A lot can be learned just from examination. Personally, I believe the reason is that they are the only ones with a Google PageRank of 9 on the entire page (and it’s certainly not because of anchor text).

Okay, there’s an obsession with *.edu backlinks — and I’m here to fill that void. Essentially, this will be a tutorial on how to find .edu/.gov backlinks (nothing too fancy). Be forewarned, the last few suggestions are slightly less serious.

• Competitive Backlink Checking - Look at a domain name that is in direct competition for your site and then run the following “backlink” query on Yahoo.

1. To rank this site highly, I might check a site that ranks high for the term “SEO”. I see that SEOinc.com ranks highly on Yahoo, let’s run this query: linkdomain:www.seoinc.com +site:.edu -site:.com -site:www.seoinc.com
2. If I was in direct competition with Jim Boykin, I’d run this: linkdomain:www.webuildpages.com +site:.edu -site:.com -site:www.webuildpages.com at Yahoo.
3. So, running this on any site that looks to have artificially produced backlinks would be a good start.

• Add Links to User Contributed Pages - Find a site that uses some type of software to have pages produced. i.e., guestbooks, ffalp, forums, blogs, etc. So, check-out a demo of that script, and scroll to the bottom to see any type of copyright notice or a link back to the original site — now, copy that text and run a query (like one of the below):

1. Using a Free For All Links Page: It had the text on the bottom of the demo: Script Created by Matt Wright and can be found at Matt’s Script Archive. Now search: site:.edu “Script Created by Matt Wright and can be found at Matt’s Script Archive”
2. Remember adding to related sites will have the best results. This is not spamming as long as you add your site to just relevant pages. To do this, search site:.edu “name of script” “desire query for optimization”. Doing this will dramatically decrease your number of pages to submit to, but at least you’ll get much higher quality results.

• Provide a Business Service - I’ve personally added some of my sites (other sites) into online business directories.

1. If you take a look at this post — you can actually offer internships and receive a decent backlink because of it. Now, you’ll certainly need to be innovative while trying this technique, but it can work quite nicely.

• Go to College - I doubt all of you will take this advice.

1. …Harvard might be a good start, though (see the link — then you’ll see why).

• Buy ‘em

1. Buying backlinks is no longer considered “white hat seo,” so maybe I should say, “donate.”

• Other Techniques - Acquiring links without pushing for them.

1. Create something that reference-able (yeah, I know its not a real word).
2. Create a mathematical application or tool related to programming or any related subject at schools. Essentially, all educational tools work well. (I’ve done this one fairly well for one of my sites.)

Is the “.edu” really that necessary?

It’s not any better than any other TLD (or maybe I should say they aren’t supposed to be — Matt Cutts confirmed this before). Other than the reason Matt Cutts gave, age is also a factor.

Most are fairly familiar with the current trend in splogs that are stuffed with three AdSense units above the fold of the page.

These pages use blackhat SEO techniques of scraping RSS feeds from multiple blogs. They are then displayed on Google (if the SEO-er is innovative enough).

If you use partial feeds, you’re safe, right?

Here’s a Python Webstemmer that takes it all to a new level.

“Snews” — scraping the news sites

Here’s their claimed accuracy:

New York Times	488.8/552.2 (88%)
Newsday	373.7/454.7 (82%)
Washington Post	342.6/367.3 (93%)
Boston Globe	332.9/354.9 (93%)
ABC News	299.7/344.4 (87%)
BBC	283.3/337.4 (84%)
Los Angels Times	263.2/345.5 (76%)
Reuters	188.2/206.9 (91%)
CBS News	171.8/190.1 (90%)
Seattle Times	164.4/185.4 (89%)
NY Daily News	144.3/147.4 (98%)
International Herald Tribune	125.5/126.5 (99%)
Channel News Asia	119.5/126.2 (94%)
CNN	65.3/73.9 (89%)
Voice of America	58.3/62.6 (94%)
Independent	58.1/58.5 (99%)
Financial Times	55.7/56.6 (98%)
USA Today	44.5/46.7 (96%)
NY1	35.7/37.1 (95%)
1010 Wins	14.3/16.1 (88%)
Total	3829.1/4349.2 (88%)

It’s fairly accurate with an 88% average while scraping professional news sources. If you read a lot of news online, you’d be fairly familiar with how much separation of text there it — meaning, news items broken up with random ads. Now, how much easier would it be to scrape Wordpress blogs that EACH have the SAME EXACT template structures? Not too much.

Below is how text is broken up:

$ cat cnn.txt

!UNMATCHED: 200511210103/www.cnn.com/                                             (unmatched page)!UNMATCHED: 200511210103/www.cnn.com/privacy.html                                 (unmatched page)

!UNMATCHED: 200511210103/www.cnn.com/interactive_legal.html                       (unmatched page)

…

!MATCHED: 200603010455/www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/02/09/billy.interview/index.html   (matched page)

PATTERN: 200511210103/www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/20/bush.murtha/index.html      (layout pattern name)

SUB-0: CNN.com - Too busy to cook? Not so fast - Feb 9, 2006                      (supplementary section)

TITLE: Too busy to cook? Not so fast                                              (article title)

SUB-10: Leading chef shares his secrets for speedy, healthy cooking               (supplementary section)

SUB-17: Corporate Governance                                                      (supplementary section)

SUB-17: Lifestyle (House and Home)

SUB-17: New You Resolution

SUB-17: Billy Strynkowski

MAIN-20: (CNN) — A busy life can put the squeeze on healthy eating. But that     (main text)

         doesn’t have to be the case, according to Billy Strynkowski, executive

         chef of Cooking Light magazine. He says cooking healthy, tasty meals

         at home can be done in 20 minutes or less.

MAIN-20: CNN’s Jason White interviewed Chef Billy to learn his secrets for

         healthy cooking on the run.

…

SUB-25: Health care difficulties in the Big Easy                                  (supplementary section)

!MATCHED: 200603010455/www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/02/28/teaching.evolution.ap/index.html  (another matched page)

PATTERN: 200511210103/www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/20/bush.murtha/index.html      (layout pattern name)

SUB-0: CNN.com - Evolution debate continues - Feb 28, 2006                        (supplementary section)

TITLE: Evolution debate continues                                                 (article title)

SUB-17: Schools                                                                   (supplementary section)

SUB-17: Education

MAIN-20: SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — House lawmakers scuttled a bill that would have   (main text)

         required public school students to be told that evolution is not

         empirically proven — the latest setback for critics of evolution.

…