I’m participating in this year’s Thirty Day Challenge being presented by Ed Dale and gang. I must say the information that they are providing is top notch, with one exception. That exception would be comments on other blogs to gain links back to your main content.

As any good search engine marketeer knows, backlinks are the #1 way to get the search engines, Yahoo in particular, to take notice of your content. This can be done in many ways. The best and easiest way is to post comments on the blogs. Ed tells the participants of the 30DC to be relevant when posting comments on others blogs and I couldn’t agree more.

But..are these relevant comments?

- It can occasionally become problematic to set apart the good vintage text from the dreadful
- Also the natural next question is: ‘What’s if Worth?’
- So for the collector - what are the key things you need to know?
- There is just not enough information on this topic as far as I am concerned!

Ed has created a blog about Vintage Electric Guitars, which is a great market. I have been watching the progress the backlinks that are being created for the blog and I must say I’m a little disappointed. To my dismay, the backlink strategy that is being employed is verging on the edge of spam.

First the backlink results:

40+ backlinks in less than a week….pretty damn good!

Now the comments I pointed out above, taken in the right context and found on blogs about music and guitars would be perfect, but these comments are not on relevant blogs at all. In fact, many of the sites are far from the topic of Vintage Electric Guitars. These links are coming from blogs about wine, pruning shears and photography. Don’t get me wrong, there are comments on blogs that are targeted to music but they are far and few between.

I have followed Ed for 3 years now, learning about him while I was a member of StomperNet. He is the genuine deal. With that said, I’m a little disappointed to see this type of comment tactics being used to game other blog’s comment sections. Now to be fair, Ed is probably not building these back links himself, rather he has the lab doing it for him. I lean towards the lab doing the linking and if that’s the case, the lab folks need a little better training.

Now I’m sure Ed (or a lab member) will see the incoming link from this post and thats ok. I don’t mind spreading link juice to his guitar blog. Like I said, I think he is a stand up guy and I know he’s into guitars. The point I wanted to make here is when making comments on another person blog, try and be respectful and interested in the owners content. If your going to post a comment at least post a comment because it interests you..not just to gain a link.

Edit: One thing that did not occur to me when writing this post this am was it may be possible the there is a campaign to smear the work and teachings that Ed and team are graciously sharing with the world. After a little investigative reading and contemplating, the incoming links that are showing up for Ed’s blog are more than likely the work of people who have bad intentions. It is a shame that this is happening to his blog, of which is actually a true passion of his and could have worked well for him. It’s a real shame that a few ‘turd balls’ are ruining it. My hats off to the 30DC team. The information they are sharing is far and above what most people deserve to receive for free.

Needless to say I was pleased to see a post describing how Ryan Moulton’s How To Backpack knol was already showing up in Googles search results at the number 3 spot just days after it was published. Wow! Thats pretty damn fast. Now I’m aware that some think the Google will favor it’s own content and rate it higher and it could be just that, but I think it’s too early to tell. I’m kind of partial to the idea that Google may be showing us what they want to see but who knows.

Back to backpacking -The first thing I noticed about this knol is the amount of content that Ryan has put onto it. Currently 8 tables with titles that are focus on several aspects of backpacking and excellent use of related terms associated with backpacking; what to wear, how to hike, where to camp, et. Latent Semantic Indexing anyone?

The second thing I noticed; there are no meta descriptions or keywords, only a title meta and the title is actually appended with the authors name (- a knol by). Not much help in the old school SEO basics here.

Third thing - The front page of Knol. Using meta name="robots" content="index,follow" /

I wonder what it takes to be featured on the front page?

Back to the post describing the serp’s - at the time of writing, Ryan’ knol was listed in the number 3 spot for the phrase ‘how to backpack’. I just did a check and the knol now sits at number 1.

Digging deeper using SEO Elite I discover Yahoo reporting 46 incoming links (Blogsearch shows 53). Most of the anchor text is Knol or Google Knol and only four or five actually have the keyword backpack in the text. From looking at the screen shot below you can see the domain linking to the knol as well as the anchor text. BTW- Most of the incoming links are from blogs, which is expected since the knol is being used as an example all over the Internet.

What keywords are being used?

Like I said, the knol ranks #1 in Google for both broad match (7,810,000 competing) and exact match (30,100 competing) for - How To Backpack; according to Gtrend’s you can only expect 21 visits for being in the #1 spot for this phrase. Not much hope there. For the phrase backpacking,: expected traffic from #1 position - 8,917, the knol ranks 21st.

I also generated a keyword list using the phrase “backpacking” in Gtrends then ran all those keyword phrase through SEO Elite. From a list of 100 phrases, none of them returned results for Ryan’s Knol. You can use Wordtracker Gtrends to generate the list of keywords I used.

My conclusion to all this is , well….undecided. Although Ryan’s knol is ranking ok, the keywords it may be ranking for have little traffic, at least from what I have checked. I have questions though, like - What is influencing the SERP’s? Google?

I will continue to observe the Knol’s that make it to featured status - I might learn something.

If you haven’t you might want to take a look at this.

I was first alerted to Google Knol just a week or so ago from a post at the Immediate Edge, although I think the site is 3 years old. I immediately dug into Knol and started looking around. The first thing a noticed about the site is the ridiculously (to me) amount of non-indexed pages considering their age. This made me want to dig a little deeper and find out what was going on.

So, after a few more quick searches I happened upon a post on Knol’s Nofollowing Of Links about Google Knol not following links or indexing the content.

Sure enough. I looked at a random Knol and there in the meta:

meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" - (Google suggested that this was the only true way to address the nofollow to their algorithm back in 2005)

Personally I have found the using the rel=nofollow in a link appears to do little. The link still counts, both from a traffic view and a weighted link. We use the same meta on the upcoming lenses page on the Squidoo social bookmarking portion of this site to battle against duplicate filter issues. Works like a charm to keep upcoming stories separate from the stories page itself.

Are links from a Knol follow or not?

Doesn’t look like it from this.

There maybe a bright side to this though. Knol does give you 100% of the Adsense revenue from your knol. This is a good thing. There is always a catch though…getting it ranked in the top 10 serp’s , Alas, this is where most people get stuck. Traffic. With Knol not following from a meta point of view and if the content provider can get 80-100 in coming links to his /her Knol then links in versus links out (0) should cure the weighting issue.

Admittedly Adsense revenue is not business model I would suggest anyone follow but you can make a nice chunk of change at times to help in other areas where you will need money injections into you marketing program.

The other day I noticed a comment left on an Immediate Edge post about a cool search engine site, currently in beta, called Searchme. Basically the site is just what the title says, a visual search engine. You can start typing a keyword and as you do the site begins to show you categories that are related to your query. When you choose a category you then see pictures of web pages that the site thinks are related to your search.

This is really cool site! The Searchme visual search engine leverages the power and ubiquity of Adobe Flash™ software and Adobe Flex. The results pages are displayed in a carousel view that you can thumb through. Whats so nice about this is that you can see the page before you go to it. I don’t know about you, but I hate it when I click a search result on Google or Yahoo and I end up at a site made for Adsense. Frustrating.

Just for fun, I plugged in the search term “lensroll” and I was quickly presented with a picture of the blog here as well as pictures of all the sites that the search engine thinks are related to the term. It seems the search is pretty much right on as most of the pages I viewed have posts that link to Lensroll. If you want to view textual information on the site you can do so by clicking the “little” gray arrow in the center of the page just below the scroll bar and you are then presented with text version of the link.

Although the sites been around awhile (2005 I think) it’s worth sharing. Searchme is an innovative rich Internet application that is helping fundamentally change the Internet search experience. I’m a huge fan of sites push the envelope of whats normal and the site does exactly that. Love it!

Have fun.

For those of you who have never heard of Squoogle.com, it’s an article directory site for publishers who place their content on sites such as HubPages, Squidoo, Gather and Associated Content.

Launched in beta in January of 2008 the site has grown quickly in popularity amongst the community and now boast around 400 users and 1500 links. The site is run with a software called INDEXU from Nicecoder and has a very basic concept in that it gives content publishers the ability to continue to build a network (back links) to their web 2.0 content properties while also throwing in a social networking aspect by allowing other users to rate and review your pages.

Here are a few stats I was able to dig up on the site:

Home Page PR - 3
Links: 1924 <– Marketleap.com data
Alexa - 339644
Pages in Google - 500 non omitted

I’m seeing user submitted content from the site and have read posts from others that their content is showing up in search results within the top 30 results. For the short period of time the site has been up things are looking pretty good!

As I’ve mentioned a few times: I think back links from quality sites is the number one way to get your content to stand out from the crowd and direct more visitors to your sites. Squoogle is a perfect vehicle in helping to achieve this. If you publish content, take a few minutes and head over and have a look around. Oh, and if you have your own content that needs a little link juice make sure to add it to the site.

To your success.

Basically Quamut is a how-to guide site with plenty of free content but with the difference being that the individual guides can also be downloaded in a PDF format. Quamuts are written, edited, and fact-checked by experts; illustrated with colorful diagrams and photographs; and produced in an easy-to-read format. Currently the site has more than 1,000 topic-specific professionally produced pieces of content contained within 5 main categories including House & Home, Hobbies & Leisure, Money & Business, Computers & Technology and Mind & Body.

They also have what they call a Q-Wiki which gives individuals from the user community the ability to create and edit how-to content through a wiki platform.

If your looking for inspiration, this site might be a good starting point.

One thing I have noticed over the last month is how fascinating Twitter really is. It connects me to people and things that I would otherwise have no knowledge of. I wouldn’t know when thefluffanutta will release a new tool for lensmasters or that Jeff Walker, master mind of the product launch formula, is a fellow Coloradan. Twitter is keeping me instantly connected with the things that interest me in a way that I could never achieve before, allowing me to follow experts and the advice they share. The ultimate expert social network.

Case in point. I follow Ed Dale’s tweets religiously. I learned of him through Stompernet and then the Thirty Day Challenge. The man puts out the greatest content on earth! This morning I noticed a tweet from Ed regarding a article on social networking: The Nuclear Option. It’s a post on how Twitter is helping create instantaneously connected social networks.

I won’t quote. it. Just read it.

Over the past few weeks many lensmaster have noticed a dramatic drop in traffic coming from Google to their lenses. Pages that used to be indexed are no longer showing up in Google and new lenses are taking weeks to get indexed. Many think that the recent server change that Squidoo under went may be the reason, which it very well may be. It could also be a result of the layout change. It’s truly anyones guess at this point as to why Google has suddenly stop indexing Squidoo pages but there are things that can be done to help end-round this dilemma.

Gone are the days of ‘build it and they will come’. Squidoo had been in Goolge’s favor for some time until the ’slap’, then Squidoo cleaned up their house and regained Google’s favor but again has fallen from that perch over the past several months. One thing that still doesn’t seem to be sinking into content marketeers is importance of building incoming links. Not just any links but links from authority sites. Sites that Google likes such as Propeller, HubPages and Scribd.

We have over 5000 submissions in the Lensroll directory and at times I have spot checked several lenses for incoming links and I can tell you that most of the one’s I check have one or 2 incoming links and thats it. From the stand point of trying to build authority for your content this is not good.

Few people take the time to utilize the many authority web 2.0 properties on the web. The usual excuse is it takes to long (I agree but it still needs to be done), they just don’t have the time or they’ve tried using a few of the services but see little benefit either in the way of traffic or serp’s and just give up. This is the worst position you could take when trying to stay at the top of the serp’s for your niche. Good things are not free, rather hard work produces good things.

The way the Internet works has changed and what use to work doesn’t work at all now. For the most part people are missing the big picture when it comes to using web 2.0 properties. Just like in the old days when your Squidoo content was high in the serp’s, riding the coat tails of a authority, is the exact same reason you should use all the web 2.0 properties you can. They are viewed as an authority in the algorithm of Google.

If you take the time and at least bookmark all of your content, asking friends to bookmark them for you also, you will see a huge difference in the amount of traffic you get. Don’t go hog wild here as moderation is the name of the game. Quick burst of a day or two do little but if the content trickles in from different places over days, weeks and months the impact is huge.

To your success.

ACP will be conducting parenting presentations for advertisers in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in May.

Source

What does that mean for Lensmasters?

I’d say that there will be large spill-over from people reading magazines to searching for more information on the net. Or… magazines are known for researching their information online. If you have lens with original and unique content, you may find yourself being featured in a magazine as a sidebar. Others have experienced it at Squidoo (in other topic areas), and found themselves with a sharp increase in traffic.

Yes, again the quality of the entrants have been outstanding. And I can’t help but think how easy the job of the Guest Judge is compared to what the Hub Staff have in sorting through the deluge of entries every… single… day… for a WHOLE MONTH.

After this weekend don’t expect much support from the HubPages staff as they’ll either be sleeping for a week or lying in a coma on some hospital bed due to information overload. Imagine getting your brain pumped. “We’ve got a male Caucasian with a quality content OD on our hands!”

Now here are the five finalists: Tax Tips for Seniors, Accounting – The Language of Finance, Use your credit card for all purchases, Can you afford a vineyard? Can you finance a wine-making operation? and Websites that Teach Kids About Money.

All of an exceptional level of quality. If you need to come up to speed on taxation information for Seniors or the background and basics of accounting then these are the two webpages on the entire world wide web where I’d want to start. Clearly communicated and well presented. I felt smarter after reading them. Though this was not to be their day.

If I were to give out a third place I’d go with Websites that Teach Kids About Money. A well chosen list of resource links, contextual product placement, even an on-topic video! Do you have kids? Have you thought about teaching them about money? If you replied yes to both those questions then you should read this hub. In fact if you answered yes and no you NEED to read this hub.

Second and first place were tight. Very tight. I’m not a wine connoisseur but I have written a hub on winemaking. I live across the road from a vineyard. This hub was great. In fact I’ll be emailing the link to my neigbour, I think he’d be interested in the “adopt a vine program”. Can you afford a vineyard? Can you finance a wine-making operation? gets second place.

First place goes to Use your credit card for all purchases. The criteria in which we are asked to judge the finalists is originality, usefulness, and how interesting and engaging they are. And this hub scores high on all points.

Each and every one of the five finalists are well written, informative and without a doubt original. For me the winner nailed the engaging part by starting with a provocative title. It captured my attention. The information is useful. In fact I’ll be emailing this one to my wife so she can read it when she gets up this morning. And it ended with a conclusion (take away). All things being equal between the first and second place winners, the credit card hub tied it up nicely. It had closure.

While I won’t be judging on the last day I will be setting my alarm early so I can see Jimmy The Jocks results for the grand finale. Congratulations to todays finalists, todays winner, the overall winner which may or may not already be decided on points, and also to the HubPages staff for not only this fantastic competition but allowing us all to play in their sandpit. I think me wanting to set my alarm to go off on 7am on a Sunday to read the five finalists and find out who the winner is is a testimony to the competition and also how much fun its been.