Earn Money Online with Brandon Hopkins » Link Building

Stop the Junk Links

Brandon — Tue, 17 May 2011 19:52:48 +0000

Stop the Junk Links, Love Google

Today Google released an update to it’s algorithm that targeted junk links such as forum profiles and comment spam. Many people that sell services aimed at forum profiles and high pr comments are really fighting this, but the proof is there. Check any major webmaster forum and you’ll see plenty of threads discussing the latest “Google Dance”.

A Google Dance usually refers to Google’s algorithmic changes which happen on a semi-regular frequency. Basically, a lot of people see changes. This one is a little different. There are more posts about lost rankings on the forums that delve into the darker arts such as xrumer, custom posters, scrapebox, and about 10 other “black hat” tools.

What can be done if I’ve lost rankings? If you’re serious, hire a link building service that can prove they still have rankings. In fact, ask if your current link builder has seen an increase today. No? Maybe what they’re doing isn’t working well.

Here’s proof that I know what I’m doing. Screenshots are taken today.

Link Building Vs. Link Buying

Brandon — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:20:51 +0000

Google has repeatedly said that buying links is in, “violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

So if buying links is against the rules, what is a website owner with a legit service or business to do? This is where many of my clients first come to me. They have a business or website and want to rank higher in the search engines, but no matter how much content they add to their sites, no matter how much time they spend working on their site, it still doesn’t rank higher.

How can I rank higher without buying links?

Start building links!

There are many different ways to build links, here are my two favorites that are working right now, in 2011.

1. Guest Posting

Guest posting is not easy. It takes a lot of time. Here are the quick steps. Contact 10 website owners related to your niche. Email back and forth with 7 of them. Find 1 or 2 that will allow you to submit a guest post. Write a great post that they will be happy to publish (poorly written posts will be rejected). Add your links in your bio (you did negotiate to allow a link right?). Submit your post. Two weeks later follow up with website owner to see why they haven’t published the post. Wait another couple of weeks to see if they still want to publish the post. Hopefully after a month it will be published.

Like I said, guest posting is not easy, it takes a lot of time and often ends up with a lot of wasted time and energy. Taking that into consideration, it can still be effective, especially if you can outsource most/all of it. I’ve done guest posting for a few clients and they’ve all be very happy. It helps to have connections to people, and a reputation for high quality content.

2. Hire a link builder

When I first started hiring link builders, I looked at hundreds of resume’s and tried to filter out anyone who didn’t have experience. Then I hired a few link builders. After a few months of paying my new employees, my websites hadn’t moved in the search engines. What was I paying for if the links they were building weren’t actually helping?

That’s when I started doing my own link building, I knew what worked, but I couldn’t seem to convey it. That was 2006. What worked in 2006 no longer works, forum profiles and high PR blog commenting are a waste of time and resources so I had to revise everything I was doing. Now in 2011, what works is different, and I’ve learned that doing link building myself is ridiculous especially since I need link building with a much larger volume that a single person can do on their own. Right now I have a team of 13 link builders (and always hiring more). The reason I have so many is that what I’m doing right now works, and my websites (and my client sites) are benefiting. Many of my clients who start with one link builder, have grown to 3 or more link builders.

So if you want to hire your own link builders, you first have to evaluate how much added income they’ll bring in. You need to know what a #1 ranking will bring in terms of income to make sure they cost of a link builder is worth it. Secondly, you’ll need to hire and train a link builder. Most will want to do manual blog commenting, Angela and Paul style forum profiles, article submission and other link building that will not do anything to your rankings. Check out my SEO test for a little proof using an exact match .com domain.

So what will you have your link builder work on? That’s up to you. I’m constantly working on training videos for my link builders. Every month I evaluate what is working, and what is not working. I train and re-train them to do new things. This is a big project, do you have time to handle it all?

Hiring a link builder is too much work!

You’re right, hiring, training and managing a link builder is a LOT of work, trust me I know first hand.

If you couldn’t tell, I was setting you up for my link building service. But in reality, link building isn’t as simple as hiring a link builder and letting him go crazy. The links that he’ll likely build will not help. Just check your search engine rankings after a month of link building. If you haven’t moved in a month, you’re not getting real results.

What do you want out of your link building efforts? Do you want real results (moving up in the search engines), or do you want to feel like you’re saving money while still “link building”.

When you’re ready for real results and ready to stop spinning your wheels paying for something that isn’t working, let me know.

How Do I Keep My Competitors From Stealing My Links?

Brandon — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:28:36 +0000

Stealing links is a very popular link building method for many people, including my team. If I can get all of the links someone else has, then build more, I will theoretically outrank them. That doesn’t always work out because there are many other ranking factors including domain age, age of links (yes, that’s right, the age of your links), quality of the site, on-page SEO, etc.

I posted earlier about how to steal your competitors links, so check that out to learn the easy and difficult methods to stealing links.

So now that you and the rest of the world know how to steal your links, what do you do to protect your sites ranking? The best way is a technique I learned from a lawyer. He was explaining to me that he had a case against one of the largest companies in the world and has been in the Fortune 500 for many years. As he was deep into this case, he had asked the company for records of his client. When the company sent records, the sent 27 boxes of records for the client, who had worked for the company for 15 years. They basically drowned him in paperwork!

How Do I Keep People From Stealing My Links?

To keep people from stealing your links, you utilize similar methods to the lawyer. If you can give them so much data that they can’t sort through it to find your links, you’re successfully protecting your links. For me the easiest way to do this is to buy links in bulk. In the link above about how to steal your competitors links, I showed you two ways to steal them. Buying links in bulk will protect you from both methods. Places like Fiverr can give you thousands of links, some on high PR pages at very affordable prices. This contributes to a great link diversity. As I mentioned in my Fiverr SEO Test, these links aren’t going to help much, but they can definitely bury your competition in a mountain of data to sort though.

With 800 incoming links, it’s easy to see which links provide the most value, but when you show 8,000 links, how will your competition know which links are providing value, and which are a waste of time. They won’t, and that’s how you protect your link profile.

How to Steal Your Competitors Links

Brandon — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:56:42 +0000

Stealing your competitors links is the quickest and easiest way to make progress when trying to rank for a competitive keyword. Here’s how you can do it too.This is a strategy that my link builders are employing every day. There is an easy way to do it, and a difficult way. The easy way includes owning Market Samurai (free trial). The difficult way is free, but a lot more difficult.

Easy Way to Steal Your Competitors Links

Open Market Samurai and click the SEO Competition module on the left side. Change “Backlink Source to Yahoo Site Explorer then click “Generate Results”. I set my max backlinks to 1000, but you can do less if you’d like, it will be faster. Here is the part of Market Samurai that many people don’t know about. Next to each domain is a little triangle, click that triangle then click “PR Analysis”.

For these screenshots I used the keyword Dallas Wedding Photographer. As you can see, there are 2 PR4 blog comments, a few PR3′s you can grab, as well as a bunch of PR2 links waiting for you! And this is just one of the sites in the top 10 for a single keyword. Imagine how many links there would be if you did this for all of the top 10, and chose 10 related keywords. That would be enough links to keep you busy for at least a few weeks.

Difficult Way to Steal Your Competitors Links

The second and much more difficult way to steal your competition’s links is to go through the Yahoo! Site Explorer, put in your url and then click “Inlinks” then “Except from this domain”. That will show you all of the links that Yahoo! knows about, but they’re not sorted at all, and if the website has a sitewide link, you might see 500 links from the same domain which is a pain to sort through.

Using the Yahoo! Site Explorer is definitely not ideal, but if you want to save a few bucks, it will definitely work.

Now go put that into action! Steal some links and start ranking. Or, hire my team and we’ll do it for you.

SEO Test With Fiverr.com

Brandon — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:08:49 +0000

If you’ve never been to Fiverr.com, there are millions of links to be had. The only problem is that they’re mainly junk links which are only good for increasing link diversity, and not actually helping pages rank. Increasing link diversity can help keep your competitors from stealing your links. On second thought, these links are also good for helping a new site get indexed. They can quicken the process and help Google find your site sooner. For most sites, this happens pretty quickly, within a week at the most.

So, to prove this theory that junk/spam links don’t help much, I’m going to take one of my sites and buy a bunch of packages at Fiverr and see what happens over the next couple of weeks. The domain is an exact match .com which makes it very easy to rank. If I had my link builders work on this site, I would expect a number 1 ranking in 2-4 weeks.

The only work I did was to spin a generic article using TheBestSpinner which took me about 2 minutes to get to 75% unique.

I won’t link to the site from here since I don’t want to skew the results. The site is Job In Hawaii….com. As you can see, it’s a one page site that is currently ranked #93 (as of 4/19/11). I did a comment blast on it a few weeks ago, that’s why it’s ranking #93. It’s been ranked at #93 since I’ve been tracking it (4/10/11). I’ll come back and update this post in a few weeks and we’ll see what has happened. Subscribe to my blog if you want to see the results but think you might forget to come back.

Fiverr Gigs ordered:

1 x Scrapebox links, 10k comments

1 x SEnuke X, only Social Network/RSS

1 x Article Marketing Robot submission

3 x Xrumer profile links, pyramid and direct

Total Cost: $30

This is what the test site looks like, just so you can make sure you’re at the right place.

UPDATE: 6 Days later…All links have been finished, and are now live. Ranking went to 63 for one day, now it’s at 109.

UPDATE: 22 days later…No significant change in ranking. Site is now at #66. Screenshot below from Market Samurai showing no significant change.

What do you think, is Fiverr worth even $5?

No related posts.

What is Link Diversity?

Brandon — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:55:51 +0000

Link Diversity definition: having different types of links pointing to your site.

This means that you will post some blog comments, build forum profiles, guest blog posts, etc. Basically having as much variety in your link building strategy as possible. This helps hide your links from competitors. When you’re trying to get a number 1 ranking, the easiest thing to do is steal your competitors links. That means you go to each site where they have a link, and try to get a link. This is one strategy that is very common among professional link builders. The exact strategies are different, but the principal is heavily used.

The only way to stop link builders from stealing your links, is to bury them in junk links. This is the first reason why you want link diversity. The second reason you want link diversity is to protect your site from future updates. Every update Google implements adjusts settings that you see in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages). If you have a single type of link and that type of link gets devalued, you’re site is going to drop in the rankings. If you have a variety of links, you have a better chance of keeping your ranking.

Need proof?

During the last Panda update, a lot of sites lost rankings. Not a single one of my sites dropped in rankings. Just because I love Market Samurai, here is a picture taken today showing my rankings.

iMacros Select Random Datasource Line

Brandon — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:21:32 +0000

If you’re like me, you want things to be as random as possible, this means selecting just about everything from a CSV or database. If you want to select a random line from your datasource, just create as many columns you need and use this code.

URL GOTO=http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/randomN1.cfm TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:low CONTENT=1 TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:hi CONTENT=10 TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=NAME:Random TAG POS=18 TYPE=TD ATTR=TXT:* EXTRACT=TXT ' SET !VAR1 {{!EXTRACT}} ' CMDLINE !DATASOURCE datasource.csv SET !DATASOURCE_COLUMNS 1 SET !DATASOURCE_LINE {{!VAR1}}

The last three lines are what choose the random line in your CSV. Line 2 sets the low range and line 3 sets the high range of your random choice, so if you have a datasource with 55 lines, set the following.

TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:hi CONTENT=10

Hope that helps you use iMacros in a better and more random way!

iMacros Random Number Variable

Brandon — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:09:28 +0000

I’ve been using iMacros a lot lately and absolutely love it! Here is a quick and easy snippet of code to set your variable to be a random number between X and Y.
URL GOTO=http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/randomN1.cfm TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:low CONTENT=1 TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=ID:hi CONTENT=10 TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:SUBMIT FORM=NAME:CFForm_1 ATTR=NAME:Random TAG POS=18 TYPE=TD ATTR=TXT:* EXTRACT=TXT ' SET !VAR1 {{!EXTRACT}} SET !EXTRACT NULL

This bit of code will choose a random number between 1 and 10 (you can change the high and low number on lines 2 and 3), extract that random number then set your random number into an iMacros variable !VAR1. It then erases the !EXTRACT so you’re ready to move onto something else.

You can then use !VAR1 anywhere else you need to use that random number. You can even use it multiple times!

And The Winner Is…

How To Find Long Tail Keywords

Brandon — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 21:38:54 +0000

Finding Long Tail Keywords

The “Long Tail” keywords are phrases that contain up to 5 key words and are highly specific. Since they are so specific, the search volume is very low.

Long tail example:
“Large Sony Plasma 1080p Detroit” – This key phrase is a very specific search phrase. Someone that searches for that knows exactly what they want. They want to buy a large Sony plasma TV in Detroit that has 1080p resolution. If you Google that key phrase you’ll see there are less than 10,000 results, and none of the results are any good.

A regular key phrase would be “Sony Plasma 1080p”. Not only do you have a lot more competition with that key phrase, but you don’t know very much about this visitor. You don’t know if they want a 32″ or a 50″, do they want to spend $500 or $3,000? Do they plan to buy online, or are they doing research and plan to buy locally? Do they really want a Sony, or are they looking for specs. Do they already have a Sony and need a new remote?

When you target the long tail, you will get a much higher conversion ratio because you already know what your visitors are looking for because they’ve been specific with their search. Since you know what they want, you can give it to them above the fold, quickly and easily.

The best way to find long tail keywords and key phrases is through your own data. This is your search engine referrer logs. If you’re site is new, you probably don’t have logs showing what people searched for just yet, but you will. Once this data starts rolling in, start making pages based on what people want.

Until you have that data another good way to find long tail keywords is through a keyword suggestion tool. Google has one, but Keyword Discovery is my favorite. The numbers in the search totals are not very accurate, but it gives you a good idea of what is being searched for.

Using “Sony plasma” as an example we get the following long tail key phrases:

sony multisystem plasma tv
sony plasma dvd connections
comparison chart for sony, toshiba, and panasonic plasma tvs
repair of sony plasma tvs
biggest sony plasma tv
sony plasma dvd digital receiver connection diagram
prices on sony plasma hd tv
sony 37 wega plasma tv specs
sony 950 plasma wall mount
sony bravia hdtv 46 plasma
how to get my sony plasma off standby

As you can see, after a 30 second search, you now can create 11 pages of content that is highly targeted. Some of those searches aren’t going to convert to sales (diagram, specs, off standby), but others could convert very well (wall mount, dvd connections, repair). Even if your page isn’t designed to convert, it could still make you money.

Imagine someone in a forum asks “how to get my sony plasma off standby”. Someone answers by linking to your site. When someone else comes along looking for issues with Sony TV’s, they’ll find your site. Then they might find your comparison chart, or your 1080p vs 720p guide. Since they’re looking for more information, you keep giving them information and your site makes a sale, and gets a link. Win-win for you and the person you helped.

Do you know of other ways to find long tail keywords?

Great Outsourcing Post

Brandon — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:53:55 +0000

I outsource a variety of my daily tasks, simple and complex stuff. I tend to outsource the tedious (writing) and the stuff I’m not great at (PSD to PHP/HTML conversion). If you’ve never outsourced, take a look at this guest post at Shoemoney.com. It can change the way you do business.

Typically I find my workers/employees through forums like DigitalPoint, but the Craigslist Philippines is a great idea, one that I had never thought of. Give it a go and let me know how outsourcing works for you.

By the way, I’m always looking for talented people, send me a message if you’re one of them!