The Click Depot Blog

Archive for July, 2008

1. Simple. Search for the word http on Google. The top 100 pages (or even 1000) pages by page rank appear.
2. Want to know what Google thinks are the 1000 most popular websites in the world? Enter www in your search result and see for yourself!
3. Want to know what google applications are the most popular and which ones aren’t, just enter google
4. Want to search within a site but the damn site does not have a search bar. No problem just search for <keyword> site:yoursite.com. For example, search advertising site:theclickdepot.com and you’ll never again spend valulable time navigating through a site.
5. Want to exclude certain sites from your search results? Go ahead and exclude them with -site. For example, use seo books -site:amazon.com. This will show books from all but amazon.com
6. Want to know who’s linking to you? Just type link:url for example link:theclickdepot.com will show you who links to us. But remember, Google reveals only a fraction of the actual link information with this command. Noone knows why. Yahoo Site Explorer shows much more.

We got more coming…sign up to our RSS feed to stay informed!

Recently, we were questioned about an SEO technique that is commonplace - Blog commenting and forum posting. So before we dive into the issue, let’s look at what this technique is. Blog commenting is the process of making comments on other people’s blog with the primary intention of generating backlinks pointing back at your own blog or website. Secondarily, it also generates “buzz” for your website and people get to know about you.

Now, everyone comments on blogs and that’s definitely not a bad thing. However, when you spam somone’s blog just for the backlinks that is certainly spamming. These days, there are several plugins and tools that are available to bloggers to block comment spam. One of the best available is Akismet
- http://akismet.com/. These do a pretty good job of blocking out comments that are either stuffed with keywords, not relevant to the blog post or use a weird-looking name or URL. Another technique for discouraging comment spam is the use of no-follow tags (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow) on blog comment links. These have proved quite effective as well.

However, there are other kinds of comments that are less obvious and in fact, many consider them perfectly acceptable marketing techniques. If a marketer visits blogs that relate to their website and post relevant comments on these blogs with backlinks pointing back to their sites that cannot be considered spam. Some still do. Perhaps it’s because when used as a backlink generating technique, they usually don’t just go about commenting on any relevant blog. They specifically target the ones that are popular and the posts that are related to their niche. They also try to find blogs that do not use the no-follow tag. Further, the point that really makes it debatable is that they don’t really desire to share thoughts on the blog posts and are doing it just for the sake of the backlink. So, is that spam?

According to us, it is not. As long as it is done the right way. Here’s the reason why. Television, radio and any other media advertiser tries to target their ads to the right market. Not all marketing is on TV or radio. Nike pays movie makers a lot of money to get actors to wear their apparel. Iron Man only drove Audi’s. So, is that spam? Not really. So when commenters try to target blogs and comment on them for popularity, why is that spam? The thing about do-follow. OK, that’s a no-brainer. The idea is good, but it really doesn’t help anyone that wants to improve their blog’s search engine popularity. Any who doesn’t?

Bottomline. Don’t get carried away. Remember that your blog could be spammed as well. Your competitor could use blog commenting too aggressively and beat you at the rankings race. In order for this to be a viable technique, this needs to be the same for everyone. Comment, but be relevant. Add to the content of the blog. Add thoughts, opinions or information that will be valuable to the reader of the blog post. Resits the temptation not to do so. If that makes you post fewer comments so be it. You can at least know that you are doing the right thing. That way, everone gets what they want.

So, where do you stand - the clean and clear side of things or do you dwell into the darker, questionable kind of things. There is always a gray area. In most professions, and even in personal life, we often run into decisions that we have to make where there really is no wrong on right, at least the law doesn’t mention it. That’s when we have to take one side, the side that we believe in and touches us stronger than the other. That’s when we need to decide whether we let ourselves get greedy and carried away or stand by and do the right thing.

One such situation the choice between Black Hat SEO versus White Hat SEO. In the world of SEO, there are several techniques and methods that one can use to get higher rankings on search engines, that are not conventional. They attempt to get the better of search engine algorithms and artificially achieve rankings that the page may not otherwise rank for. These are called Black Hat SEO techniques. Some of the common ones are mentioned here for your reference:

1. Keyword stuffing 1: Invisible text: Use keyword text that is the same color as a page’s background
2. Keyword stuffing 2: Hide the text: Add keywords behind other visual elements such as images so you don’t see them on the page but they are there.
3. Keyword stuffing 3:  Small font text: Keywords in really small font placed along the top, bottom or sides of a web page.
4. Doorway Pages: Pages that never display to the visitor but are there only so search engine spiders can see and list them. These pages redirect to the actual page that sells the product.

There are plenty more of these to go by. There are entire forums dedicated to these techniques - http://www.blackhatworld.com/. But here’s our stand on this: DO NOT DO IT. The reason should come from your business ethics, but if that’s not enough, just know that search engines are not stupid. They will get you and when they do, you will lose all your work because of a little bit of greed. About.com puts it well

Black Hat SEO is tempting; after all, these tricks actually do work, temporarily. They do end up getting sites higher search rankings; that is, until these same sites get banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO. Here’s a few articles that can get you on the road to knowing search engine optimization:

In reality, every professional SEO knows to stay away from these for the long-term. There are sites that sometimes need to be successful only temporarily, for instance, before the day of the elections, Etc. However, even for those, there is no point in using Black Hat. Search Engines could block out an entire IP. If you are on shared hosting, that could affect other sites using the same IP. You could be doing harm for you and others.

There are other harder decisions. Ones that are no all black or white. These are the hardest. Our next topic is regarding practises that are commonplace but debatable.