If you have never heard of a blog carnival or a blog round-up, this is not to be missed. As a blogger, you should seriously consider hosting a blog carnival – and you should absolutely be participating in blog carnivals every week.
First, the terminology.
Blog round-up. A summary of interesting blog posts from the previous week (or however long the blogger decides).
Blog carnival. A summary of interesting blog posts from the previous week (or however long the blogger decides).
Ah…yeah. So what is the difference? Originally a “carnival” traveled, hosted by a different blog each week. A few still do, but most are simply round-ups with a festive name.
Why your blog should host a carnival:
Traffic. When you post a dozen links to other people’s posts, guess what happens… they tweet about the post and sometimes link to it and generally send people your way.
Links. As I said above…
Networking. List a dozen blog posts and you get brownie points from a dozen happy bloggers.
Why you should submit your blog to a carnival:
Traffic. When someone posts a link to your post on their carnival, chances are people will follow the link and discover your blog.
Links. As I said above…
Networking. The blogger will appreciate that you contributed to his blog.
Blog Carnival tools:
There are a few ways that you can find posts to include in your carnival. There are two broker websites, which I will review below, and there are a few simple tactics to find posts on your own.
1. Tweet a request for contributions.
2. Ask your mastermind group on FaceBook or Skype or wherever (I have seen this done effectively several times).
3. Post a notice on niche forums.
4. Track the blogs you like via RSS and choose the posts you like most (several people do this).
5. Do a blog comments carnival. I take the more substantial comments that I leave on other people’s blogs, and I blog them into a carnival.
6. Post a notice on your own blog – that might be enough to get a flood of submissions.
BlogCarnival.com: This website has been around for a while, and lists hundreds or blog carnivals.
What I like about the site…
It is nicely automated. When you put in the URL of a blog post, much of the submission form is auto-filled.
Plenty of blogs in all sorts of niches, and since your posts will mostly be relevant to one niche all the time, and to most niches on occasion, this works well.
What I don’t like about the site….
Most of the carnivals listed no longer exist. At least there is a notice that the carnival does not exist, but still it does clog things up. I always sort the available blogs by “most recent” carnival, and don’t bother with ones that have not been kept up to date.
Several blogger I know who have used the site have complained that they don’t get the submissions people send. I know some go through, because I have had success, but I have no idea what submission success rate is.
Each carnival opens in the same window, so to submit to several, I need to manually open up several windows at a time.
BlogCarnivalHQ.com. In response to the submission problems at log Carnival, this site was set up by Tom Drake, a leading financial blogger (he also runs Fwisp, a growing social bookmarking site for finance bloggers).
What I like about the site…
Quick clicks to each blog, uncluttered by hundreds of no-longer active carnivals.
Great for finance articles.
Solid programming and a personal commitment by Tom Drake to keep it functioning properly.
What I don’t like about the site…
The site is still new, so other categories are pretty sparsely populated. (This is your chance to get your blog in on the ground floor.)
Each carnival opens in the same window, so to submit to several, I need to manually open up several windows at a time.
If you don’t want to run your own carnival, but you do want a post included in a carnival, there are three ways to find carnivals to submit to. One way is to search Google or Bing for carnivals or round-ups related to your niche. The other two ways are to search the two blog carnival websites I reviewed above.
Welcome to our second “Business Blog Commenting Carnival”, an irregular feature where I share with you some of the comments I left on great posts from other blogs.
I say it is the customers. “The Customer is Always Right.” If the customer needs something quickly, I work overtime. If customers change their taste or preferences, my business better change to meet their demands.
When you are an employee, you have only one customer. You call him “the boss” or “the employer”, but the fact is that you are selling him some combination of your time, your effort and your expertise.
When you own the business, you have many bosses or employers. You call them “the customers” or “the clients”.
Indeed, most online folks really don’t think about taking things offline. But imagine the power of leaving sticky notes all over in public places: “Free download – make money online”. Or imagine handing strangers in the mall a business card that says: “A penny for your thoughts” with a penny taped to it, and a subheading: “Comment on my blog at http…”
Civility is just another word for respect, or at least for demonstrating respect. If you don’t demonstrate respect, why would anybody do business with you?
At The Mystery of SEO, I found myself speaking in quite a counter intuitive fashion…
Anthony, on the whole I agree with your approach. However, I will take issue with the web designer who rejects any client not interested in an SEO analysis. The vast majority of websites will never rank well for any search phrase worth speaking of. There are simply too many more websites than their are available search phrases, and too many websites that are already very strong in most of those search markets. And as much as it might seem contrarian for an SEO specialist to be saying this, there are so many moire awesome ways to find a website than through search engine rankings. Radio ads. Print ads. Sponsoring YouTube or offline video, pay-per-click ads , guest blogging…and so many more. Many B2B websites have a very small niche clientele that can be best reached through trade shows and trade publications. Thinking the world revolves around SEO is the myopic miscalculation fostered usually by SEO specialists; how unfortunate that a web designer has also been infected.
Yes, the typical link wheel has fallen out of favour with Google. But the newer version is a lot of work. Creating several unique articles just to get a single link (Yes, you can pay $5 or $10 to have some regurgitated baby food pounded into something that looks like words, but do you really think Google is stupider than the folks who write that crap?) So here is an alternative:
Create a good article on a Web 2.0 site. Submit it to a couple appropriate social bookmarking sites for the niche. Comment on a couple good blog posts in the niche, using the article URL as your “website”.
There you go. You have created great content, engaged with bloggers and given real link juice to your hub.
This is not a blog, but rather a forum thread that asked: “I just started working for a local law firm and Im new to SEO. Im helping out with the link building campaign. I wanted to get some advice on a good strategy for building white hat back links for a local law firm?”
I disagree that anything you do to build links violates Google’s TOS. Links represent to Google “votes” for your content. In other words, if you have content worth linking to, you should get links, because links are the natural extension of everything you do, online and offline.
1. Ask clients if they can place a little acknowledgement on their website, linking back to your website. “Thanks to LAW FIRM NAME for helping us get our paperwork in order and setting up our business. (Links are not just about Google – they are first and foremost about referral business).
2. You want you site to have great, informative content, not just sales pages (I know I don’t buy from people tryin g to push a sale down my throat). It could be tips on how to avoid whiplash or how to determine what is false advertising or anything else that relates to the areas of law you practice. Then tell the world. Should it out on Twitter and FaceBook, on StumbleUpon and Chime.in, on Tumblr and Squidoo. The more people who discover your great content, the more people will share it and in some cases those shares will bring you links and in others “social signals” that the search engines value. But best of all, again, they will bring you referral traffic.
A couple couple weeks ago, I wrote about links from statistics and valuation websites, and posed the question whether it is worthwhile paying five dollars to have one’s domain submitted to 5000 of them. You might want to read the post before continuing.
“Did you check how my of these sites already had a link to yours? If I search for any of my domain names I get lots of these that I have never asked to list me.”
This is a good question, but it is hardly the full question. Some of these sites have static pages, and might already be linking back to you. But many of these sites create the pages on request. You punch in a domain name, and they grab the information from authority stats sites like Alexa or Compete, or from search engines like Google or Baidu.
So in most cases, the answer is “no” – most of these sites were not already linking to the site I submitted.
But as I said, that is not really the full question.
Think about it for a moment.
Keep thinking…
Aha! That’s it. If the linking page exists only because I requested it, what happens when I leave? Does the page still exist? Or more to the point, is the page stored somewhere for the search engines to find it? Yeah, 280 links or so, but on pages that really exist? A few, perhaps, but not most.
So you probably think I am about to change my mind and poo-poo the $5.00 I spent on this? Not quite. You see, $5 for 100 or 300 or more links (we are not sure exactly how many, remember?) is actually a pretty good deal. Any professional SEO consultant knows how much time it can take and how many fails one has to go through building just a couple links. What if we could take the pages we created on the fly and freeze them in time? Or in space? Or in cyber space?
Here’s what you do:
Check which of the pages actually have a live link to your domain.
Save the list of those pages.
Build links directly to those pages
How? Here are four ways, depending on your comfort level.
Create a page on your website just for “Hey, look who thinks they know what our website is worth”.
Use these URLs when making blog comments.
Include these URLs in article marketing and blog posting (The Free Traffic System is ideally set up for this.)
Try some social bookmarking; there are many minor social bookmarking sites that are not as particular as Digg and Reddit are.
When the links you create are spidered, the pages evaluating your domain “exist” for the search engines. Plus, they actually have some small amount of link juice, which probably places them in the top 1% of pages on the each site for link popularity. Remember that most of these pages link only to your website, not to 30 or 40 or 50 other websites on some link exchange page. The more link juice these pages get, the better for your website.
So, the big question I am sure you all want to know is whether there were actually any improvement in rankings as a result of this little experiment. Well, here are the results at Google, keeping in mind that no links have been built in to these pages.
Keyword One before: around #70 (I did not take an exact reading)
Keyword One after: #60 (a couple days ago, I saw this at #55)
Keyword Two before: around #70 (I did not take an exact reading)
Keyword Two after: #65 and #66
Keyword Three before: around #70 (I did not take an exact reading)
Keyword Three after: #59 and #60
So these readings are positive in that it appears the site climbed a bit for all three search terms, even adding an interior page to two of the searches. The movement, however, is not phenomenal and it is possible that it is explained by other factors. It will be interesting to see if there is further movement once some links are built into a few of these pages. I might just have to report back to you again…
I saw a gig over on Fiverr that caught my eye. For those of you who don’t know about Fiverr, it is where anyone can offer to do anything (almost) for five dollars. It’s a bit like The Dollar Store of online services. You can get some amazing deals on Fiverr – stuff you would expect to pay $25 for. Or $50. Or even $100. You also get some blatant scams.
Some great deals. Some rip-offs. But either way, five dollars isn’t much. Like I said, it’s like The Dollar Store.
The gig that caught my eye was:
I will submit your main domain URL to well over 5000 statistic sites. How This Works. I will submit your URL to various statistic sites. These give a value of your site/blog, and also provide a free link back to your site. My software sends your URL to over 5000 sites which gives you that many one way backlinks and Rapidly gets your site indexed by Google! I will send you a text doc to prove works done too. Order now and get indexed.
Anything that generates hundreds or thousands of links automatically can’t be particularly useful for a professional SEO campaign. But it did occur to me that a few of these sites might be useful, and the links would most likely be either the domain (some with www, some with http, some with both, some with neither?) or the title tag, so not the usual keyword style links you see in blog comment spam and forum profile spam. And not from the type of sites my clients would usually get links from, so perhaps it would add a nice little variety to a site’s link profile.
With low expectations and high curiosity, I laid down my five bucks.
OK, first off I must say that I did not check through the full list of 7861 entries (representing 36782 sites? I think there was a typo), but with domain duplications taken into consideration, it is still likely that the promised 5000+ were delivered).
The first thing I noticed were how many of the statistic sites were obviously scraping results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and most of all Baidu (If you think China wants to buy up all Western real estate, what does this say about China’s hunger for Internet property?). To be expected, I suppose, but irrelevant to this review.
I checked through 3 dozen entries, being careful not to duplicate any sites. I guess my first disappointment were how many came up dead (sites were for sale, 404 error pages, server would not connect, etc.) – nearly half. But I suspect that for five bucks a gig, nobody will bother to check 5000 sites for deadwood (although, maybe the software should be set up to remove dead sites).
My second disappointment were how many of them did not link to the domain they were reviewing. They tended mostly to link internally to other pages about the domain in an internal web of sorts.
Did the gig live up to the promise of “over 5000 sites which gives you that many one way backlinks”. Not a chance. One of the pages gave a NoFollow link. Another gave a link from a secondary page (which might have been one of the 7861 entries that I did not check). Although the sample size is too small for an accurate extrapolation 36 site, or less than one percent of the total – it implies that the site did get over 280 new backlinks, from new pages on established sites. Even if I am off by 50%, that is still 140 links for $5, with at least a couple of the links probably reasonably good.
Five bucks for 140+ links that took me just a few minutes to order (and a couple hours to blog about, but that’s another story). I would say that it is worth it.
But there was another residual benefit, too. A few of the statistic sites (2, 3, 4? – I didn’t keep track) linked to various authority profiles that link back to your domain. For instance, a profile on Surcentro.net will not link to your website, but it will link to your profile at:
Alexa
WayBackMachine
Robtex
And each of these links back to your site. So we can assume that at least another 140 links have been built to your domain’s profiles on authority statistics sites that already link to your site, and that is also a worthwhile.
Would I use this gig again? Yes. I wish more Fiverr gig sellers would cut the hyperbole and be more accurate about what they are offering. But inaccuracy aside, I would call this gig a worthwhile addition to a comprehensive link-building campaign.
Over at WebProWorld this question caught my attention:
One of my ways of getting links for my sites is posting articles on blogs. I submit these articles to a site and they publish them on blogs relevant to these articles. So if I write an article about guitar playing, this article is published on blogs dealing with guitars/guitar lessons/ etc.
I have written a good amount of articles for my guitar site, and they are published on guitar blogs, I get a good few links that way, but they are coming from the same blogs. I was wondering, if I keep on doing this, would it be better, seo wise, to write less relevant articles, say about jazz music or something like that. That way I would be getting links from different blogs.
So my question is: What is better, getting 50 links from 10 different blogs that are very relevant to my site, or getting 50 links from 50 different blogs that are less relevant to my site?
Here is my response, in a little more detail than I answered in the forum post itself:
I would take a 3-step approach. First, get good coverage in those blogs (and other websites) that are highly keyword relevant. Relevance is perhaps the most important factor for SEO. In this case, his main keyword was “guitars”. He had submitted articles to all those blogs that were specifically about guitars. In so doing, he had built up a strong message for the search engines that his guitar site is one that is respected by other sites in the niche. That is a strong ranking signal. He now has links at a number of “guitar” websites:
G G G G G G
Endorsed by guitarists.
But he has not sent a signal that his site is respected by others beyond his niche, but related enough that they really ought to know.
So step two is to submit his articles to websites that cover related topics, such as music in general, musical instruments in general, various forms of music, etc. He could easily write articles about rock or country or some other types of music that involve guitars, for instance. The search engines value keyword relevance, but they also value topical relevance (and don’t forget that many of these music sites will have the word “guitar” mentioned here and there.).
Plus, they value a wide variety of linking domains. Getting a link on many music websites broadens the variety in his link profile, while solidifying the authority in his niche (because music, rock and country are still in his niche). His link profile now looks more like:
G G G G G G
M M R M R M C M R M C C M M M C C M R C M C M M R M M M C
Now you’re endorsed by the whole band.
Now, on to step three. Since one of the ranking signals the search engines look for is how widely popular a website is, find ways of writing about other topics that a more diverse blogging community will be interested in. First define our target. If you use the Free Traffic System, as I do (see my Free Traffic System review), you can search for blogs by keyword, and easily see which words bring up the most number of blogs, and even what types of topics they cover (some “music” blogs might only cover very specific niches, whereas others might cover anything music-related.) You can also use a Google or Bing search or search one of the larger blog directories. Let’s take a common example – there are a lot of MMO (make money online) blogs out there. OK. How can you write an article about guitars that an MMO blog would want to publish?
Easy. Prepare a video about guitars to post on YouTube in order to draw traffic to your site. Next write an article about how you posted a video on YouTube to draw traffic to your guitar site. Make sure to explain how you portrayed the guitars or how video is a great medium for showing off guitars – just to make sure your article about making money online is also an article about guitars.
So he should identify each target set of blogs and figure out what he can write about that will be about guitars (or whatever your main keyword is) but also about their niche. All of a sudden, the link profile starts to look more like this:
G G G G G G
M M R M R M C M R M C C M M M C C M R C M C M M R M M M C
n y e d c g y o p s j q c x j d b i m l j e d s a r t h y u v q l o j y z h u y l p a s r c b v e q j h y t f v x s a k f d h u j m n r s w a g c e w b g k l u q i o v r s
Now the whole crowd is cheering for you!
Wow! Let’s review what the search engines see when you follow this approach to link-building:
Websites just like yours link to you. That is an expert endorsement.
Websites related to yours link to you. Lot’s of them. That is quite an impressive endorsement, too.
Lots and lots of websites of all kinds link to you. Your website is profoundly popular. It must be good.
Now go out and show everybody what an amazing website you run.
For a huge website (ecommerce, directory, etc.) with many variations of the same product or service, whether by location or by brand, the effort to work individually on each one would be monumental. For that reason, we often focus on:
a) The home page, which is naturally where a fair number of links will have to go.
b) A selection of the most important interior pages (such as those cities which might yield the best ROI) with a purposeful effort to help them rank better for relevant searches.
Some of the activities we do will help just those pages; some will help the entire site. To understand this better, it helps to understand what types of ranking signals the search engines look for. They include hundreds of specific signals, but most of them can be grouped as follows:
On-page relevance to a specific search query.
The changes we will make to the template(s) will bring benefits across the site to every page they apply. In other words, even if we identify 10 city-specific pages on which to focus, every city-specific page will benefit. If we add text or other elements on a page-by page basis, only the pages we work on will benefit.
Off-page relevance to a specific query.
Links that we obtain to 10 city-specific pages will often (but not always) confer relevancy. The extent to which this occurs will depend on the content of the page that is linking, the anchor text of the link itself, and a number of other factors. This relevancy is specific only to the page being linked to. For instance, a link to the Chicago page of the website confers no relevancy to the London page.
Off-page importance/popularity.
Inbound links to a page also convey “importance” or “popularity”. They represent a “vote” for the page in the eyes of the search engines. That importance or that vote is specific to the page that is being linked to. But, Google’s PageRank algorithm also spread the link-love to other pages that are directly linked.
For instance, let us assume the Chicago page links directly to other Illinois city-specific pages, such as Rock Island, but not to any Florida city-specific pages. If we obtain 20 links to the Chicago page, that will greatly boost the popularity of the Chicago page. It will also boost the popularity of the Rock Island page, but not the Miami page (at least, not noticeably).
This is why internal linking patterns for a big site like this are so important.
Domain credibility/authority/popularity
This is the exciting part. Every quality link we build into the domain, strengthens the credibility/authority/popularity of the entire domain. Every day the domain ages, strengthens the entire domain. Every time a high-authority site links into the domain, every time there is a social media mention, every time the domain is renewed for a longer period of time…the entire domain – every page – benefits.
So the efforts we make for a few specific pages can benefit them all to some degree. For a highly competitive sub-niche, that might not be enough. For a smaller, less-competitive niche, the page might rank well without any direct attention to it.
Each social bookmarking website distinguishes itself in some way. OK, so that’s not totally true, but most of the good ones do. Brian over at BlogEngage has built on something original to that platform, an optional program called the Blog Engage RSS Subscription Service. The banner ads, like the one below, bill it as an “Adsense Sharing Program”.
However, I am not going to review the Adsense aspect of it, but some of the other benefits, for several reasons.
I think there are several much more exciting aspects to the program.
As you know, I am not really one of the monetization folks – best leave that aspect to someone who is, like Justin Germino
I haven’t tested the program long enough to have much to comment on the Adsense aspect.
The Blog Engage RSS Subscription Service is optional
Let it be noted that the service is optional. Of the 2000-plus active users of BlogEngage, I would guess that a few dozen have signed up for the service. BlogEngage is one of the best social bookmarking websites, in my opinion, and was just recently promoted to top line at The Bookmarketer .
The service does cost money. It is not expensive, but some bloggers are counting their revenues in the cents-per-week range, and obviously they will be more hesitant to sign up.
And it is only for bloggers. Indeed, BlogEngage is only for blog posts, as the name implies. Got the world’s funniest video? Put it in a blog post if you want to see it at BlogEngage. Created a life-saving app? Blog about it first, then submit it at BlogEngage.
Cool benefits of the Blog Engage RSS Subscription Service
Automatic submission. Once you write your blog post, that’s when the hard part comes. You have to pull up all your social sharing websites and submit your post. Well, not all – through the RSS service, BlogEngage automatically grabs your post and submits it (under your account, so you are still the submitter).
Extra vote. Do you spend what seems like a ridiculous amount of time cajoling friends to vote for your social submissions and retweet or like or thumbs up your posts so that they get more exposure? Well, at BlogEngage it takes eight votes to “pop” (at which time your posy gets home-page exposure and becomes a DoFollow link) – and the RSS service votes once. When you have voted, that makes two votes already, saving you from wearing down your cajoling muscles.
More links from more domains. All RSS submissions are automatically syndicated to Blog Serp, Top Blogged, RSS Leak,Blogger Ink and Blogger Tag. This means more DoFollow links, as these are automatically published, even if they don’t get enough votes on BlogEngage.
Better promotion. BlogEngage also auto-tweets and autoshares on FaceBook all RSS Service submissions, making it easier to garner the votes required to “pop” and also spreading the word about your blog posts.
Contest Sponsorship. This is brand spanking new… ” All our Gold membership customers and above will automatically be added into our guest blogging contests as sponsors.” That means fame, fortune and links. OK, maybe not fortune, but if fame and links can earn you a little extra money, I though I would slip the fortune in there for you.
And of course, there is the Adsense sharing, which I promised not to address. I won’t even mention it. Just forget that you read this line.
Five levels of membership
There are five levels of membership to choose from, the lowest costing just $1.99/month. The highest – a premium enterprise service if you run multiple blogs – costs $19.99/month. The gold membership I mentioned earlier costs $4.88/month. If you blog daily or almost daily, it is a worthwhile expense. You can learn about the differences between the plans directly at the Blog Engage RSS Subscription Service page.
Two Canadian webmasters were reviewing their website stats, and discovered 25,000 new backlinks from one domain. This is how they did it – and how you can, too.
It should be noted that the link-building technique that will be described here is applicable to everyone. However, the precise mechanics of it are available to you only if your website:
1) Is Canadian.
2) Features informational content, such as a blog, a photo gallery or an articles directory (This is 2010 – if you are even considering SEO as a means of attracting traffic, I am sure that informational content is part of your plan, right?).
A Tale of Two (Canadian) Webmasters
Vancouverite Daniel Snyder, of Info Carnivor, was first to notice. He discovered 15,000 new backlinks from one domain, and that left him puzzled. He had only submitted two of his blog posts to the site, so how come he suddenly had 15,000 backlinks.
Next it was Hamilton-based Jim Rudnick, of Canuck SEO, who’s website saw a “sudden increase of inbound backlinks – 25,000 brand new ones” – and all from the same domain. He asked the support team at his stats tracking supplier to double-check this obvious error, but they confirmed it was right.
What Was the Site and How Could This Happen?
The site – or should I say “the domain” (I’ll explain the distinction shortly) – is Zoomit Canada, a social bookmarking website just for Canadian news, blogs, articles, etc. If you are familiar with Digg and Mixx, you will understand how Zoomit works.
So how did they do it? That is simple enough. They submitted their blog posts to Zoomit, and they did a little bit of networking (voting for/commenting on other people’s submissions). Because both Daniel and Jim submitted good quality content and supported the good quality content of others, other folks also voted for their submissions – enough to be voted to the front page.
And that’s when the magic happened.
As with most social bookmarking websites, it’s when a story gets voted to the front page that the inbound links really begin to count. This is the case with big social bookmarking websites, like Digg and Mixx, as well as with smaller ones like Old Dogg and MMO Social Network.
As I said above, what we are discussing here is applicable to everyone. However, the precise mechanics are available only to Canadian content. You see, Zoomit added an extra twist that you won’t find on those other social bookmarking websites – a top domains widget.
Look down the right side of the page and see that there is a “Top Domains” widget that lists the 20 top domains in alphabetical order. In other words, submit your post, network a bit and you’ve got yourself thousands of backlinks.
What Are All These Links Worth?
Now you might ask, what are these links worth, SEO-wise. You might have heard that a sitewide link isn’t worth all that much. This makes a great case study to separate fact from fiction. Here are four points to consider:
First, 25,000 links from one domain are nowhere near as useful as 25,000 links from 25,000 domains. Link diversity does count for both Google and Bing.
Second, 25,000 links from one domain are better than 24,000 links from one domain. And both are better than a single link from that domain. Yes, every link counts.
Third, a sitewide link in most cases (certainly in this case) includes a link on the home page, something that is generally considered quite valuable in SEO. In this case, the home page is PR4.
Fourth, look at the Zoomit Canada site structure. Each province and each news channel is hosted on a separate subdomain. Subdomains are generally treated by the search engines as separate websites. In all, this website – oops, sorry… I mean this “domain” – includes 13 province subdomains, 21 channel subdomains, plus the main domain. That adds up to 35 home page links by being a “top domain” on Zoomit Canada.
Given the effort in building quality links, and the unlikelihood that you’ll ever have links from 25,000 different domains – and possibly not even from 2,500 domains, the effort to get those 25,000 links from one strong domain is worthwhile. Lucky Canadian webmasters who benefit.
Don’t despair if you post non-Canadian content. Social bookmarking and other social sharing is a great strategy, and every great piece of content (quality stuff, not $25 articles written offshore by someone who knows about as much of your topic as my neighbour’s cat and writes in something that almost exactly fails to resemble English) you create and promote creates links back to your website.
Every sales person, every lobbyist, every entrepreneur, every preacher, every person who wants to deliver a message knows that the most important words are “Please” and “Thank You”.
So a big “Thank you” to Daniel and Jim for inspiring this post.
And (shameless plug alert) please let us know if you need writers for your content – to write good quality, meaningful posts – the type that my neighbour’s cat just can’t produce for you – and promote them in the world of social media.
In my review of the “Free Traffic System” (FTS), I recommended spinning manually your articles before submitting them through FTS or through any other article submission program. And I promised to share with you some advance spinning tips. This blog post is divided into two parts:
1. Why manual spinning is superior to an automated spinning program.
2. Exactly what to do to manually spin an article – my advanced spinning tips.
For those who are new to this topic, let me quickly review what spinning is. Those already in the know can skip to the first sub-heading below.
The [spin]beautiful|wonderful[/spin] thing about [spin]nature|outdoors[/spin] is the fresh feeling you get.
The sentence above is, technically, four different sentences. When this sentence is fed through an article submitter that recognizes spin code (This is the particular syntax used in FTS, but the principle is universal), it comes out as four different “unique” sentences at four different article directories or blogs: The wonderful thing about outdoors is the fresh feeling you get. The wonderful thing about nature is the fresh feeling you get. The beautiful thing about outdoors is the fresh feeling you get. The beautiful thing about nature is the fresh feeling you get.
The math is simple: two words, each with two options, creates 4 “unique” sentences. The value in this is to ensure that the hundreds of articles pointing back to your site are not duplicate content, which is supposed to be frowned upon by the search engines’ algorithms. Try this one:
The [spin]beautiful|wonderful|amazing[/spin] thing about [spin]nature|outdoors[/spin] is the fresh feeling you get.
Two words multiplied by three options gives 6 “unique” sentences. Why do I put “unique” in quotation marks?That’s in the next section, but the theory of spinning leads to the conclusion that you are getting past whatever duplicate content filter the search engines might place on the pages linking back to your website. One more…
The [spin]beautiful|wonderful|amazing[/spin] thing about [spin]nature|outdoors[/spin] is the fresh [spin]feeling|sensation[/spin] you get. A [spin]holiday|vacation|trip[/spin] out of doors will [spin]refresh|relax|reinvigorate|benefit[/spin] you more than you can [spin]imagine|dream[/spin].
The concept of article spinning, just to belabour the point one more time, holds that just with this one paragraph spun as above, there will be 192 “unique” articles (3x2x2x2x4x2) on 192 websites, each one pointing links back to your website.
That is spinning in a nutshell.
Why bother spinning articles manually?
Before I dive into the benefits of manually spinning, as opposed to using one of the automated or semi-automated article spinners on the market, a big CAVEAT: This is a strategic issue. This is not a rule. Follow my logic, then make your decision, because there are trade-offs involved. Trade-offs of quantity versus quality. Trade-offs of long term results versus crash-and-burn-results. With a bonus of risk assessment thrown in for good measure.
Article spinning: the story so far…
A) Once upon a time, people would submit articles to the article directories. To both of them, in fact. Search engines loved these content-based links, and all was good.
B) Then, people got smart. Because these were good links that helped sites rank better, more people started writing more articles and more article directories sprang up. Search engines loved these content-based links, and all was good.
C) But people loved these more and more and more and more and the number of articles was multiplying and multiplying and people got even more clever and created submission software so that even more articles could be distributed in a fraction of the time. Ah, the miracle of automation.
And spammers just love miracles and they love automation. Ah, the curse of automation!
This would be a good time to refresh your memory of what search engines are all about. Which is, of course, making money. To make money, they need eyeballs. To keep eyeballs, they need lots of people really liking the search results they deliver, which is why they have meticulously crafted and carefully guarded algorithms. Do they care if people try to maipulate their results? Not really. Do they care if people succeed at manipulating their results? You bet! Let’s look at the three steps above from a search engine company’s perspective:
A) So what?
B) So what?
C) Wait a second, massive link-building can skew our results. Automation makes link-building scalable, especially to spammers, and needs to be balanced out of our algorithms.
And so, the effectiveness of duplicate content in article submissions was (as best we can determine through the observation of thousands) reduced to very little.
A) So people started manually spinning their articles to avoid duplicate content.
B) And some smart person came up with a lazy way to spin, using automation.
C) Spammers, being inherently lazy, caught wind of this as did everyone else, and now everybody is spinning their articles using automation.
And the search engines’ reactions?
A) So what?
B) So what?
C) Wait a second, massivearticle-spinning can skew our results. Automation makes article-spinning scalable, especially to spammers, and needs to be balanced out of our algorithms.
We don’t know if C) has happened yet or whether it’s on its way, but I can tell you with 99.9% certainty that it is not far away.
At this point, I know that some readers who are using automated spinning programs will dispute this, typically saying, “Well, it’s worked for me so far.” I can’t even begin to count the number of times I have heard this line about one link-building technique or another shortly before the search engines have taken step C. Before webmaster forums are filled with the gnashing of teeth from all the people whose websites lost rankings. If you want to build your rankings based on the past (as most people who call themselves “SEO expert” seem to), you can stop reading here.
What I can tell you about the past is that one pattern has proven enduring, and that is the same pattern as you will see in the stock market: when everyone is rushing to buy, that is the time to sell (before the crash). When a particular linking method becomes so scalable through automation that even the spammers are doing it, stop sinking more resources into it.
Let us look, then, more specifically at automated article spinning. It does offer a very seductive advantage over manual spinning. It can be done quickly. In fact, a typical testimonial for article spinning software would be, “It took me minutes to do what it used to take me all day.” So you can do 5-10 articles in the time it takes to do one. The advantage is quantity.
But does it give quality? The very simple spinning examples I gave above in my intro all replace single words with synonyms. Here is a screenshot pitching one popular automated article spinner program:
They create “unique” articles, but do they create unique articles. Well, I guess if you can’t find a thesaurus, they create hundreds of unique articles. But what if Google and Bing have thesauruses? What if megalithic Google’s and Bing’s computing power, funded by millions of dollars of capital, is somehow bigger than the computing power of your little $70 article spinning software? Sure, unlikely…but what if? Let’s face it, those four sentences I used as an example in my introduction are not unique – they use synonyms, but they remain the same sentence…and any algorithm drawing data from a thesaurus can see that faster than you or I can.
So quality versus quantity. And when the search engines do devalue duplicate content links with the help of a simple thesaurus, it becomes long-term results versus crash-and-burn results, as all those “unique” links you’ve built are suddenly worth less (not necessarily worhtless, but worth less).
But I also mentioned risk assessment earlier. So let’s imagine for a moment that a search engine sees that you have 573 identical articles pointing to your site. Let’s further imagine that the search engine has identified that these are not organically identical, but identical by virtue of synonym manipulation. In other words, duplicate content, disguised as non-duplicate content to try to trick the search engines. If there is one thing we know about Google (and I can only surmise it is likewise with Bing), is that is punishes blatant attempts to trick it – hidden text, doorway pages, concealed links. Perhaps also fake unique articles?
I leave it to you to determine whether Google would consider this deceptive and whether they would do something about it – whether automated article spinning is just poor quality work or whether it actually places your website at risk.
How to manually spin your article
To do what I would consider a quality spin, you need to create articles that are significantly different. By significant, I mean more than just replacing words with their synonyms. In the extreme, this means writing from scratch a brand new article for each place it appears. Yup, one for each of those 573 article directories. Look up the word “unique” in the dictionary.
For those of us who don’t have 1500 hours in a day, the extreme option is not an option. Below is my guide to what I believe is effective in creating articles that are unique, rather than just “unique” with what I view as a reasonable amount of grunt work. Who knows if I am being paranoid or just over-cautious — or perhaps I am not creating articles that are unique enough and these might still be seen as duplicate by a search algorithm. Take what you want and leave the rest.
The title is the most important part of the article to make unique, as it often appears in <title> tags, in a page’s URL, in <H> tags and in links to the page. This is the one place where I’ll sit down and write 100 options from scratch, trying for many variations of style.
Because I am partially lazy, I usually start out with a few styles, such as:
6 ways to enjoy your villa rental Why a villa rental is tops in accommodation Villa or hotel? Choose a vacation villa over a hotel or motel Six reasons villas are tops The villa choice for luxury
Then I will rewrite each one, mixing up several elements. For instance, here are some rewrites of the first style:
Six reasons to enjoy your rental villa Six ways to enjoy your vacation rental villa 6 reasons to enjoy your private villa rental Six ways to enjoy your private vacation villa 6 ways to enjoy your private rental villa
The first sentence is pretty important, so I tend to write 3 or 4 versions of it in completely different styles…
When you use your credit card, it would be worth stopping to remember that credit card issuers are businesses with shareholders.
Who issues your credit card? A business, of course.
Some folks view credit card issuers almost like quasi-government institutions. Not a chance. They are businesses like any others.
Notice that I totally reworded the first sentence. Each example sets up the second sentence equally well, but notice that the three options are different length, even different number of sentences and, of course, totally different wording. These are completely unique. Mix up not just individual words, but the sentence structure itself.
Do the same for entire paragraphs. Take a paragraph, then rewrite it so that it is shorter. Then rewrite it so that it is two paragraphs. Use some of the same wording if you are feeling rushed or lazy, but remember that the more you change the better.
At least once in your article, rewrite a long paragraph as a short paragraph followed by a bullet list. It helps to create a few versions of the list, changing the order of the bullets and even removing some of them in some versions. Bullet lists are often the easiest to play around with.
When rewriting a word, don’t always choose a single word as a replacement option. For example…
When rewriting a word, don’t always choose a single word as a [spin]replacement option|replacement|replacement option in your article|replacement option, but try to add in more text so that some versions of the article are truly different and unique[/spin].
When creating options, more is better. In 5. above, the example has four options, much better than two. There is a time versus uniqueness trade-off here, but if you can create more than just two or three options, especially in the first few paragraphs, it helps make your articles more unique.
Let’s end with one of the most important places to have variation – your linked text. As much variation around your keywords as possible…but you probably already know that from other link-building efforts. Vary the actually links (link to different pages of your website in different versions, if appropriate), vary the link text, very the surrounding text and vary the order of your links (in some, the home page might be the first link, so make it the second link in others).
Nothing I have had to say here should be taken as “The Truth”. It is my best assessment of the most effective compromise between various trade-offs, based on my experience in SEO since 2003. I just hope it is helpful for people who might seek a similar balance between quantity and quality…and don’t want their “Yippee!”s turn into wailing at the next major algorithm shake-up.
SUMMARY: The Free Traffic System is NOT what the name sounds like. It is an effective platform to build editorial links on keyword-relevant pages across multiple domains of mixed quality. And it’s free.
Readers who know me well might be forgiven for raising their eyebrows at something called “Free Traffic System“. After all, I am probably the person you know who most vociferously opposes any SEO approach that involves automation. So I should lay to rest that I am not reviewing a “system” in the sense of what it might sound like. In fact, I think the word “platform” would be more appropriate.
Some of you surely still have your eyebrows raised because you know I put little stock in all those traffic machines that send huge swathes of untargeted traffic, which for most niches is pretty useless . The fact is that this “system” does not send any “traffic” directly. Traffic does result from the promotion it helps you do, but this really is a system – er, I mean … a “platform” for promotion of your website, your company, your credibility, your blog posts, etc.
If you’ve let down your eyebrows, get ready to raise them again, because this world-renowned cheapskate who avoids paying for any SEO or promotional tools he can possibly get away with, has just upgraded to the “Pro” version of the Free Traffic System, which is not cheap by anyone’s measure. However, after using the free version these past two months, I have been impressed enough that I am convinced it is worth paying (against my cheapskate instincts) for the even more effective Pro version. So, yes, technically it’s free (but no longer for me). But more importantly, it’s effective. And it’s even more effective (I’ll explain how later) when you upgrade to Pro.
(Complete disclosure at the end of this post.)
Free Traffic System could use a name change
So this really should not be called the Free Traffic System (I know a name like that sells in the Internet Marketing community, but it cheapens what is in fact a much more sophisicated approach); it should be called the Effective Promotion Platform. Right. I shall petition the owner for a name change. In the meantime, let me tell you…
• what FTS does
• how it works
• who can benefit most
• any downsides?
• the differences between the free and pro versions
Please keep in mind as you read this that the process is NOT automated. I might call it semi-automated, but really the only automated part is distribution. The really big time-saving is in searching for link-building opportunities. What FTS gives you is instant access, saving hundreds of hours of searching for linking opportunities.
In simplest terms, the Free Traffic System is a platform for spreading your content across multiple blogs run by multiple owners. It is a cross between article distribution and guest blogging. The basic steps are as follows.
1. You create content, much as you would for article distribution.
2. You fill in the forms, much as you would for article distribution.
3. You select the blogs you want your content to appear on.
4. The bloggers decide whether to accept your content.
Step #4 is a crucial step to keep in mind. You do get instant access to the blogs, saving hours of searching; you do not get guaranteed or automatic access. It means two things.
First, the bloggers are folks like you and me – a myriad of blog owners around the world, with a myriad of domains across a myriad of IP addresses. Take note, that is important for SEO.
Second, if you submit crap, they won’t accept your “guest post”, so it really is worth investing the time and/or money in creating good quality articles.
Detailed review of the Free Traffic System process
Let’s look at the process in more detail, because there are some elements built in that might seem small, but are nevertheless very important.
The first information that goes into the submission for are the URLs and the anchor text.
As you can see by the screenshot, you are allowed two links per submission in the free version of the Free Traffic System. That might be your home page and a link to a specific blog post or product in your eCommerce site.
Notice how both the fields have height? You can add as many keyword variations for each link as you want, and each one will become the anchor text for the link. What this means is that if you add 5 different “keywords”, one fifth of the blogs you submit to will feature each keyword as an anchor text. From an SEO perspective, this is great because we all know that anchor text variation at least to some degree is important. The one caveat is that all the variations have to fit into the same spot in the text of your article.
Even more interesting is that you can have multiple URLs for your two links. What this means is that if you add 2 different URLs for one of the links, half the blogs you submit to will feature each URL. This works only when the anchor text can be used interchangeably between the two URLs. For instance, we have a page about book writers and another page about ghost writers. We could put both of the URLs into the %LINK2% field, and include keywords that easily apply to both URLs. From an SEO perspective, this is great because we add variety and spread the deep-link love better across the domain.
The title is crucial
Next we enter the title of the post. From an SEO perspective, the title is important because it is often used for …
• The post title
• The page title <title>
• File name
• Internal linking anchor text
• Anchor text from external links
From a duplicate content perspective, then, it is crucial that each instance of the article have a different title. There is special code (easy as pie, don’t worry) to “spin” the title so that you have a different title on each blog you submit to. The image below shows a part of the code and some of the variations that are spun out of it.
Please note that you still have to use your brain to input the information, which is then automatically spun into multiple variations the information you input, not your brain).
The example above is what I would consider the lazy way to do it. The title is worth more effort than that, and in a future blog post I will share some advanced spinning tips. In the meantime, this works.
Content is truly king
The next step is to submit the content, the body of your article. What should you write about? If you are a blogger, take any of your recent blog posts and rewrite them. You need at least 450 words to qualify for both your links.
If you suck at writing, we can write a very high-quality post for you; please let me know. If you are even more of a cheapskate than I am, you can go to Freelancer.com for articles but be warned – quality counts if you want your article to be accepted, and when it comes to writing, you get what you pay for.
Now you are ready to submit…No, wait! Not yet. There are two things you need to do to your content before pasting it into the form.
First, you need to inset your two links. One of the really exciting things about the Free Traffic System is that your links are not consigned to a “resource box” after the end of your article. You can place your links wherever they fit. I strongly advise placing them at different parts of the text, at least one of them in the first half of your post. This sort of placement tends to be more valuable from an SEO perspective (these are often called “editorial links” – look it up).
Second, you would do well to spin your article or at least parts of it, so that you are not submitting identical content to 30 different blogs. There are automated spinners (Yuck!) that spew out, well, what you would expect a machine to spew out. FTS offers a convenient link to one of them. It does take time to manually spin an article (at least an hour the way I do it), but I believe this is highly valuable for long-term SEO value.
However, automatic spinning is better than no spinning at all – just double-check the quality. In a future blog post, as I mentioned above, I will share some advanced spinning tips.
Now you are ready to submit it and preview various versions of it. Each time you hit preview…
You will see different anchor text for your two links, and you will see different versions of your article if it has been spun.
Choose your tag(s)
Next, you get to enter one tag in the free version, so make it the most relevant keyword. If you know anything about blogs and tags, you will immediately understand the value of this from an SEO perspective. I won’t go into the explanation here.
Now comes the fun part (What, haven’t you been having fun yet?) OK, OK, you got me there. I love to write, so for me the fun part was actually up front. But we are now at the action part. You’ve written your content. You’ve filled in the form. Now it’s time for you to…
Select your blogs
This is done by entering keywords into the field…
The Free Traffic System will then spit out a list of blogs and categories within blogs that contain the words you listed. For instance, in the example they offer, you will get a list that includes every blog with “finance”, “money” or “loan” in its title OR with a category name that includes “finance”, “money” or “loan”. The image below gives an example for you.
A few things you can see right away. You get to see the titles of the blog and the titles of the categories, but that’s all. No eyeball test for quality (there is an obvious reason for that). No PageRank data (that would be a nice easy feature to integrate, but I suppose it would lead to too much clustering and it might actually be better this way).
Based on the titles, you can pretty much tell if a blog/category is appropriate for your article. You get to select one category in each blog, up to a maximum of 30 blogs in the free version. If you choose wide, sweeping terms (like “money” and “finance”, for example), you might end up with too many to choose from. If you choose terms that are too narrow (like “payday loans” and “cashflow”) you likely won’t have enough choice. Once you’ve played around with the system a bit, you’ll find the right balance.
Since you can’t tell what quality a blog is before you choose it, is it really worthwhile? Yes. If you have written good quality content and targeted the right blogs and the right categories effectively, your article will be accepted. I just took a look at my stats for an article I submitted12 days ago (while I was still using the free version). So far, 26 blogs accepted, there was one error in communication and three blogs are yet to be accounted for. Not bad. Plus, these are keyword relevant links on keyword relevant pages on keyword relevant (or at least topical) websites.
Once the article is live, you can search Google, Yahoo and Bing for it, and you can see the value of the various blogs. My experience is that there is a wide range of quality and PageRank, some cluttered with Google ads and some crisp and clean. Some that nobody reads, some that have an active community. Some that just sit there, and some that are promoted on Twitter and FaceBook.
And they are all worthwhile, because you want links from a variety of quality websites, not just from top-ranking ones. Read my counterintuitive post on why you want sucky links, too.
The obvious answer is anyone who is building links. This is a nice addition into the mix, to keep getting a variety of different links from different websites on keyword-relevant pages. However, if you are a blogger or someone currently submiting to article directories, you can benefit even more, because you’ve already done the work of researching and writing, all you have to do is tweak the article and submit.
The other type of website that really benefits from this type of platform are hard-core commercial websites, such as eCommerce or brick-and-mortar companies with boring websites (you know, industrial services like machine tooling or sanitation or backhoes). These types of sites are hard to attract natural links (unless you are extemely clever about link-bait), so this makes a welcome addition to the link-building opportunities.
Are there any downsides to the Free Traffic System?
There are always downsides, and even a wonderful tool used improperly can be ineffective, possibly even dangerous. If you rely only on one link-building method, it is much less effective than a multi-facetted approach.
FTS should be part of your link-building strategy, not the whole thing or even the major part of it. You still need to create great content on your own site. You still need to attract links to that content. You should still submit to directories and comment on blogs. You should still exchange links with related, non-competing websites. You should still do social bookmarking and spread your content on Twitter and FaceBook. You should still post to forums and answer questions online.
If you don’t spin your content or spin it poorly, you might end up with a lot of duplicate content – probably not enough to get your website banned, but enough that it will probably drag down your rankings.
Why did I pay to upgrade to the Pro version?
There are many reasons to upgrade to the Pro version of Free Traffic System from the Free version, and as you might guess they are all on the website in a slick sales pitch. Don’t be fooled; there is only one reason, and that is mucho more links. Sure, they promise a bunch of future benefits. Nobody upgrades for that. They promise faster review and support, but my experience is that they give fantastic turn-around time even to free members.
No, there is one reason why someone would upgrade, and that’s for the extra links. Let’s do a little math. Here is a quick comparison of the three elements where Pro members get a better deal than Free members:
FREE: two links in each article PRO: three links in each article
FREE: one tag for each article PRO: five tags for each article
FREE: each article submitted to 30 blogs PRO: each article submitted to 50 blogs
How does this all add up?
FREE:
Each article has two links. The article appears typically on its own page, a page in the main blogstream, a page for the tag you define, a page for the category you choose, and a monthly archive page. So that’s two links on five pages, for a total of 10 links. Let’s suppose your article gets picked up by all 30 blogs, each with 10 links …that equals 300 links across 30 domains. In real life, there will be errors. For instance, in my example above, I got 260 links across 26 domains. Not bad considering I paid nothing, it took me only a couple hours, and these are valuable one-way editorial links (including laser targeted deep links).
But check this out…
PRO:
Each article has three links. The article appears typically on its own page, a page in the main blogstream, one page for each of the five tags you define, a page for the category you choose, and a monthly archive page. So that’s three links on nine pages, for a total of 27 links. Let’s suppose your article gets picked up by all 50 blogs, each with 27 links …that equals 1350 links across 50 domains. From a single article. Wow! Of course, in real life, there will be errors. But for my money (and I did pay!), this is worth upgrading for. The funny thing is that on the Free Traffic System website, they claim that a Pro member can gain up to 900 links per article. Huh? Why are they underselling themselves?
I asked, and was granted, permission to embed their upgrade promo video on my blog, so here it is:
So in summation, I highly recommend this to webmasters, bloggers and link-builders. It is a quick and easy way to add a ton of one-way editorial backlinks with a very small amount of work.
My one BIG caveat is to not get seduced by how easy it is. Do it right, so that it really works for you. And keep doing other forms of link-building, even if this seems easier and more effective, because you want a great variety of different types of links.
Disclosure statement: The links to Free Traffic System in this post are affiliate links. That means that if you click through and sign up, I benefit. This in no way influenced my recommendation; I first decided to pay for the upgrade, then decided to add the affiliate links (I would be crazy not to!) You don’t have to use those links to sign up, but obviously I would be extremely grateful if you do. Thank you.
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Why You Should Be Blog Carnival-Crazy
First, the terminology.
The title is the most important part of the article to make unique, as it often appears in <title> tags, in a page’s URL, in <H> tags and in links to the page. This is the one place where I’ll sit down and write 100 options from scratch, trying for many variations of style.
The first sentence is pretty important, so I tend to write 3 or 4 versions of it in completely different styles…
Do the same for entire paragraphs. Take a paragraph, then rewrite it so that it is shorter. Then rewrite it so that it is two paragraphs. Use some of the same wording if you are feeling rushed or lazy, but remember that the more you change the better.
At least once in your article, rewrite a long paragraph as a short paragraph followed by a bullet list. It helps to create a few versions of the list, changing the order of the bullets and even removing some of them in some versions. Bullet lists are often the easiest to play around with.
When rewriting a word, don’t always choose a single word as a replacement option. For example…
When creating options, more is better. In 5. above, the example has four options, much better than two. There is a time versus uniqueness trade-off here, but if you can create more than just two or three options, especially in the first few paragraphs, it helps make your articles more unique.
Let’s end with one of the most important places to have variation – your linked text. As much variation around your keywords as possible…but you probably already know that from other link-building efforts. Vary the actually links (link to different pages of your website in different versions, if appropriate), vary the link text, very the surrounding text and vary the order of your links (in some, the home page might be the first link, so make it the second link in others).
