Author Archives: Michael Busch

How to Build High Quality Links to Beat the Penguin

Gone are the days where you can automatically blast thousands of poor quality spun links via automated software to wordpress blogs, article directories, web directories and social bookmarking sites and get on the first page of Google within a few weeks. In 2012, after the Panda and Penguin updates, such spammy practices will lead to penalization and a swift drop in rankings.
If you want to succeed in SEO nowadays, it is an absolute necessity to learn how to create high quality backlinks; but in order to do that, you must be aware of the key components of a high quality link. In general, a high quality backlink contains the following properties:
1. DoFollow – if your link has the rel=”nofollow” tag on it, Google does not count it, therefore it is vital that your link is dofollow first and foremost
2. Contextual – your link must be surrounded by a substantial amount of content
3. Grammatically Correct – the content which surrounds your link must be well written, quite the opposite of the spun garbage which many SEOs (even professional companies) still use
4. Unique – the content which surrounds your link must be unique, spun content again is insufficient
5. Relevant – ideally, the page which contains your link and the content surrounding it should be relevant to the site being linked to (your site), although admittedly this is not always possible
6. Low OBL – low outbound link count on the page
So where do you find places to create backlinks to your site with the above properties? You can do a variety of things like pay webmasters for a link placement, make a guest post, or use your own private network of blogs. However these methods are often prohibitively expensive. By far the cheapest, most effective way to obtain DoFollow, Contextual links surrounded by grammatically correct, unique content (i.e. all the components of a high quality backlink) is to manually submit relevant, constructive blog comments. However, it is very difficult to find blogs which allow DoFollow, Contextual comments. For example, wordpress blogs are nofollow by default (i.e. useless links) do not allow contextual links (they only allow a backlink the name and not within the comment). You could spend weeks just to find 100 or so URLs which give you DoFollow, Contextual links, however in late 2012 a very special list of URLs has been released to the public after almost 1 year of preparation, containing the kind of precious links that are hidden securely in the vaults of some of the world’s most respected SEO experts. But even those SEO experts do not have URLs in such gargantuan numbers. The list contains approximately 2 million live URLs spread across over 30,000 unique domains. Make no mistake, it is difficult to submit hundreds or even thousands of unique, well written and constructive comments, but it is by far the most cost effective way for webmasters to build high quality backlinks that can catapult you up the search rankings.
For far too long, newbies to SEO have been duped into thinking that you can just press a button, rank on the first page of Google for all keywords and rake in tons of cash. If this were true, we would all be rich! The reality is, anything in life worth having requires hard work. The real SEO experts know this and their secret weapon has not been revealed – until now.

If you want to learn more about the Extreme dofollow list, click here.

Learn how to make money by selling content

One of the most reliable ways to earn money on the internet is to offer content to other webmasters. That will be articles in most cases, but could also extend to photographs or infografics or things like that if you have an artistic streak.
Indeed, quite a few really successful Internet Marketers started their Internet career by writing and selling articles to others. One of those is Josh Spaulding, a Marketer I really like and respect.
He has written a short eBook that teaches you everything you need to do to succeed – and believe me, it is not just theory, it is how he started himself. It is a way for Josh to give back to the marketing community, so he decided to give it a way for free. Have a look for yourself, you can download the eBook below:

Get more value out of SENuke

I want to be honest with you – actually SENuke (X, XCr) probably wouldn’t even be on my radar if it was not so much integrated with two products from Jonathan Leger. Anyone who read my blog here for a time certainly knows that I am a big fan of his products. I have lots of experience with both The Best Spinner as well as Article Builder, and guess what – both products have been heavily integrated with SENuke XCr. SEnuke uses both products for the tasks they are best in, creating lots and lots of unique content. With the help of the two JL tools SENuke X CR becomes a much more powerful weapon in the SEO fight. You just enter your program account API credential in the SENuke settings and you are ready to go.
Now the problem is, Jon’s tools are high quality tools and as such they also come with a cost that related to that (Hmm, well on second thought, they are quite affordable for that type of performance they deliver 😉 ).
Anyhow. Jon decided that as it makes so much sense to not only use SEnuke but use it in conjunction with his two power tools, that he is going to give away the two tools as a bonus, more information on his terms and how to get them can be found on his website SENukeBonus.net Probably this is the best way to get maximum value out of SENUke.
In case you are not familiar with what SENUke actually does, here is is the gist:
I view it as a robot that you can tell in an easy way how your link building strategy should look like. It then goes out and does all the tedious jobs for you in an automated way. The good thing is, it knows quite a lot of different ways and places where you can find backlinks, and even if there is a website or a method that it does not know yet, you can give instructions how to handle those or use scripts from other users and SEnuke will integrate that new method into it’s arsenal for you. You are completely in control as you can use the drag and drop interface to design your link building campaign and then determine a period for how long your campaign should run on autopilot.
Now I want to stress one very important aspect of using SENuke:
While it is very easy to use, there are also dangers: Certainly you have heard of the Panda and Penguin google updates and that google generally aims at counting only high quality content when it comes to evaluating links that should be taken into account for actual rankings. Without Article Builder the quality of the content that SENuke produces might not match the quality criteria google uses.
In fact, if you take a look at the screenshot of the SENuke Turbo wizard on their website (www.senuke.com, also watch the video while you are there), you will notice that the content quality settings read “Use low quality” and “Use high quality” – and the latter setting requires Article Builder as a prerequesite…
If you don’t want to run the risk of getting a penalty you should obviously opt for high quality.
Another thing for new users is how to decide what the best strategy could look like.
My advice: Have a close look on how your competitions link profile looks like. Emulate what those who are extremely successful in you niche do. If you need help with link profile analysis, I can probably help.

Logo for my new company needed

Hey folks

You could do me a favor and vote for one of the designs shown here:

Clean up your link profile or just disavow links?

In a recent video Matt Cutts introduced the link disavow tool. In very short words, this tool gives web masters the opportunity to basically tell google: “here is a list of links that are spammy and that I could not get rid of”.
So why do the tedious clean up work at all? You could just go to your webmaster tools and disavow the links instead of trying to remove them. Is that a wise idea? Is it possible at all? Caution! There is a little sentence in that video that many might have ignored. Google is going to do a before/after analysis of your link profile regardless of any disavowed links. Only if there is a difference google will see your efforts in really trying to clean up. I would consider the disavow feature as only a last resort if there are links that you can’t get removed even after trying to contact the other webmaster several times.
Last but not least, for whom is that tool? I would only consider using it if I got an unnatural links warning in my webmaster tools. I would certainly not use it as a preventive measure as that might even trigger a manual review when up to now there only was an algorithm ranking loss.

Here is the complete video, so you can make up your own picture:

Add some facebook viral marketing to your mix

I admit it – I ignored Facebook as long as I could because I did not like the idea of chatter and everyone sees everything.

But from a business point of view this was a mistake – Facebook done correctly can be a great means of finding new prospects and of spreading the word about what you have to offer.

Especially when you manage to leverage the main powers that drive people in Facebook:

The interest in what your friends do and sheer curiosity!
Maybe you have already seen that sometimes you can access certain content only when you click the like button.
Have you ever wondered how this is done?
How you can make your readers want to reveal that treasure trove behind the like curtain?

Only one click away lies a hidden treasure...

I will explain in the following:

(oh, you just have to press the like button in the blue fields below 😉 )
Like this to reveal the hidden content.

Penguin Winners vs.Penguin Loosers

Link Building Case Study on Penguin Update
Penguin Update – Link Building Case Study via LinkResearchTools.com

The Penguin Update is not exactly new any more – there was time enough to dive into the data and have a look what distinguished the Google Penguin Update Losers from the Winners. One of the best experts to do an analysis like that is Christoph Cemper. Why is that – because he has one of the best toolsets in the industry at his disposal and he is a renowned specialist when it come to link building and link analytics.
Click on the infographics above and read the complete case study.

Test Nuclear Affiliate

To be honest: This is one of the few times when I got curious from a promotion email I got.

Usually I get one or two of those per day as I want to see what all the IM “Gurus” (what a silly word…) are promoting. I rarely buy one of those products as I don’t like the hype that comes along. And usually I don’t think they come at a price that can be justified…

But today I am going to test Andrew Fox’s “Nuclear Affiliate” – Maybe the good price point convinced me (I first did not want to buy, but when I closed the page I was graciously offered a $10 discount as “one of only 5 customers” – wow, maybe you are as lucky as I was, I reckon 5 can be stretched a little bit 🙂 )

If the system convinces me, I will write a report here…

P.S.: Sorry Andrew if I revealed the price loophole here…

CTR vs rankings (about ads above the fold)

Did you read that notice from google, too? “We are adapting our ranking algorithm a bit – it concerns only 1% of all searches, and if you listened to our previous adsense advise you are now screwed” … well, that is not verbatim, but it was something along these lines.
What has happened? Actually not necessarily a bad thing. Google is taking into account what readers will see above the fold (i.e. what you see without scrolling) – if you plaster that space with ads only and make it hard for your readers to find the actual content that they have come for, that creates a bad user experience and bad user experience is the red flag for google. You will eventually loose rankings.
But what about the former advise to put large ads at the beginning of your text – well that has somewhat been revised, you are still encouraged to find spots with good CTR and that still applies very much to that space above the fold, but you should take care that there is actually some content and not only ads. This is especially important if your site has a two sidebars design with ads on both sidebars. When you then put another ad at the beginning of your content you might very well already be over the top. I have not yet read much about whether this applies to all kinds of ads or only to adsense, but my personal bet is that google has become smart enough to recognize most ads and thus this will apply to any over full ads page…

Get traffic with Internet videos

“1000 Visitors in 24 Hours” – that is the title of a 30 page report written by Jonathan Leger. Yes, that is the same guy who made 3waylinks.net, InstantArticleWizard.com and a whole lot of other great SEO/Internet Marketing stuff.

With broadband internet access widely available, video has gained an enormous popularity – especially with the younger audience. Obviously there has to be a lot of money in that market, otherwise Google would not have paid $1.65 billion for YouTube!

Jon has found an easy to follow way to benefit enormously from the video hype – and to actually convert viewers into visitors. He describes a method, how he managed to convert 25% of his viewers to visitors… and not only that: the conversion rate from those visitors again was more than 10%!

His “1000 Visitors in 24 hours” Article is a detailed, easy to read, no-questions-left report, that I can only warmly recommend. “1000Visitors in 24 Hours” is in two ways different from a lot of the other stuff you can buy all over the net:

1. It is not overcharged – at a modest $7 you get a report that is worth far more than every cent of it.

2. Jon has this certain attitude – he won’t sell anything that he didn’t thoroughly test himself – and he publishes all his statistic data so you can have a look at the numbers yourself. I cannot imagine a better proof.

P.S.: If you wonder how many videos Jon had to create to achieve his 1000 visitors in a day goal… It was ONE. Just one video. Now think what you could achieve if you just created a couple videos… Check out “1000Visitors in 24 Hours” and find out for yourself!