Archive for November, 2005

I’ve been reading SEO Speedwagon for a few months now, and today there was a killer post by Erik that had me cracking up. The opening paragraphs states:

From a psychological perspective, it turns out that asking a new or potential client, "Have you ever engaged in any spammy or controversial SEO activity?" is quite a loaded question - somewhere between "Have you stopped beating your spouse?" and "Are you really going to wear that tonight?"

Read his full post here.

Chat with Aaron Wall - New owner of Threadwatch.org

Threadwatch has been a staple daily (hourly) news read for me and thousands of other SEO’s since it started. In case you haven’t heard, Nick Wilson just sold the Threadwatch to Aaron Wall (of SEO Book fame). (SEO Book has been another daily (hourly read) to keep up on news in the world of SEO.

Aaron not only owns www.seobook.com (Alexa rank of 9,052), and www.search-marketing.info (Alexa rank of 36,662), www.linkhounds.com (Alexa rank of 62,704), www.directoryarchives.com (Alexa rank of 62,895), www.blackhatseo.com, www.myriadsearch.com, and a slew of other sites. And now he adds www.threadwatch.org (Alexa rank of 6277) to his list of properties.

I asked Aaron if I could interview him with a few questions to publish and here’s our chat:

webuildpages: I just saw on your blog that you bought threadwatch.org - how did this come about?
Aaron Wall: he wanted to sell it to work on performancing
webuildpages: what are your plans for threadwatch?
Aaron Wall: you know to be honest I am not really sure
Aaron Wall: Nick posted a farewell thread on Threadwatch
Aaron Wall: in that I stated that the site was my homepage for most of the last year
Aaron Wall: I was hoping I could help keep it that way
webuildpages: any changes planned right now?
Aaron Wall: not really
Aaron Wall: i just need to figure out how to deal with the overlap of topics
Aaron Wall: and workload
Aaron Wall: may eventually have to hire on an editor for one site or the other… but some of the current editors at TW do a great job already
webuildpages: any plans to change the advertising on threadwatch?
Aaron Wall: most likely it will be more like SEW
Aaron Wall: not as high of rates due to lower reach
Aaron Wall: obviously
webuildpages: We all know you run SEOBook.com, and you give me a list of other sites that you run?
Aaron Wall: search marketing info (predicesor to seobook)
Aaron Wall: black hat seo <– tounge in cheek site about black hat seo
Aaron Wall: directory archives…. similar to directory pages
Aaron Wall: linkhounds
Aaron Wall: myriad search
Aaron Wall: think thats about it
Aaron Wall: i have a few others but none that I have marketed much
webuildpages: You’re a solo act right? how do you manage to manage all of these?
Aaron Wall: you know i just dont know
Aaron Wall: hehehe
webuildpages: do you still plan on updating seobook.com as much, or do you see moving to threadwatch, or moving more to seobook?
Aaron Wall: thinking more toward TW
Aaron Wall: but uncertain to be honest
webuildpages: now to jump to a different topic, what’s the latest on the lawsuit?
Aaron Wall: Still pending / ongoing without any response from Traffic Power.
webuildpages: what’s pending?
webuildpages: where’s it at? (more details?)
Aaron Wall: like it has not been read by the judge
Aaron Wall: traffic power were supposed to answer about a month ago and never did
webuildpages: do you have any plans of hiring a team to help manage your sites?
Aaron Wall: uncertain of what I want to do
Aaron Wall: eventually I will have to partner on some stuff
Aaron Wall: I already have partners on some sites
Aaron Wall: recently also launching another network, etc
webuildpages: what’s this about a network?
Aaron Wall: oh I think I want to start a blog network
Aaron Wall: still early stages though
Aaron Wall: so uncertain how well it will pan out, etc.
webuildpages: can you tell me a little about your involvement in some of the seo forums out there. As I recall, you’re a mod of a few as well?
Aaron Wall: yeah
Aaron Wall: have sorta dropped off on that though
Aaron Wall: I forgot to mention another site
Aaron Wall: a friend recently sold me a forum tracking site
Aaron Wall: www.seobytes.com
Aaron Wall: I still love SearchGuild when I have time to go
Aaron Wall: and sometimes visit at SEW forums and a few of the others
webuildpages: where do you see yourself and your projects in 2 years?
Aaron Wall: uncertain to be honest
Aaron Wall: I dont think as far ahead as I should to be honest
webuildpages: how’s the actual book (SEO Book) doing? …must be doing pretty decent to be able to buy threadwatch, etc..any comments there?
Aaron Wall: well believe it or not
Aaron Wall: much of the money to buy TW was from Google stock
webuildpages: HA!
Aaron Wall: I bought some the opening day and a bit more
Aaron Wall: sold it all to get TW
webuildpages: Nice!
Aaron Wall: yeah
Aaron Wall: thousands more of profit to claim … but also thousands more of expenses
webuildpages: I know from chatting with you on weekends and late at night that you always seem to be online. Do you ever stop? If so, what do you do when you’re not online?
Aaron Wall: hehehe
Aaron Wall: the answer is prettymuch no
Aaron Wall: but I like reading
Aaron Wall: once every 3 months or so I end up playing a video game for a few days
Aaron Wall: go to conferences
Aaron Wall: exercise but not enough
Aaron Wall:
webuildpages: Can you tell me a little history of where you’ve been, and how you got to where you are today?
Aaron Wall: i went to high school
Aaron Wall: graduated at age of 17
Aaron Wall: and joined the navy at the age of 17
Aaron Wall: I became a nuclear reactor operator and did not like it much
Aaron Wall: after 5.5 years in to a 6 yr contract I got kicked out.
Aaron Wall: made a rant website a little under 3 yrs ago
Aaron Wall: started learning seo and marketing stuff
Aaron Wall: reading a bunch
Aaron Wall: and i guess here i am a few years and few clients later
Aaron Wall: a few years, a few domains, and a few clients later
webuildpages: any advice to people starting in SEO?
Aaron Wall: dont look at the math stuff so much as look at how people interact
webuildpages: Thanks for doing my first "interview", Congrats on Threadwatch!

I’m sure I get over 100 emails a day that pass through my email filters. I don’t know exactly how many come in, since a big part of my day is spent deleting or filing most of those (and my COO helps me there too).

Today I thought I see how many emails I send on an average day.

I’m up to 25 emails sent so far today, which seems close to average for an average day.

How many emails to you send on an average day?

Isn’t is crazy that one of our biggest hubs is our email programs, and we spend a good part of the day just trying to shovel it out of the inbox faster than it comes in?

I spend more time in my yahoo email than I do on any other site. (and I hate yahoo email…but old habbits are sooo hard to break).

Yesterday I hired another "future link expert", and I’ve got another "future link expert" starting in about 2 weeks. Funny thing is, is that I often feel that I could have "work" for another 50 or 100 people, all doing different types of internet marketing tasks.

I remember the first few years starting out, when it was just me, and I was promoting the "We" in "We Build Pages", when I was marketing the phrase "internet marketing firm". Shortly after I started in this game, I realized that 3 SEO’s could do so much more, but the only 3 I had in my "We" was "Me", "Myself" and "I". I recall that often in 2002 I debated on "do I dare hire someone or not?".

That internal debate was laid to rest in Dec 2002 when webuildpages.com went to #4 in Google and Yahoo for "internet marketing". I hired 3 people instantly and within 6 months we had 6. A year we were up to  15. We’ve stayed around 15 since then (not counting about 25 writers of whom we also work with, and a few outsourced programmers). 

There’s always issues with hiring additional people and growning. Some of that is from Todd’s ideas and some from my refusal to work with monkeys, and some of it it just not having the millions to turn tons of "monkeys" into experts, and some of it is just lack of "Time".

I can, however, see that the more you grow and then get comfortable, the more things you see that could be done (for clients or for our own sites). I guess it’s the same on every level of size you are. It’s funny, the game and the dreams can just keep getting bigger. That’s part of my motivation in this game - Dreaming big dreams and trying to make as many of them come true as possible.

Sometimes I dream of being like Barry Diller (Barry Barry Barry Barry). Unfortunately I’m several billion behind now.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in having internet marketing dreams especially in the world of internet marketing where opportunities hit you every day in the face online.

What are your internet marketing dreams?

Nearly 1/3 of all "SEO’s" have been SEOing less than 1 year.
(according to my small poll).

My last poll asked: How many years have you been doing SEO?
and the results were:

less than 1 year - 31%
2-3 years            - 31%
4-5 years            - 18%
5-6 years            - 13%
7 or more years  -   8%

Do you think that newbies to SEO have a chance in this game, and why?

Also, please vote in my new poll (to the left) where I ask, "How many websites do you work on?".

Google Supplemental Results

doh!

They’ve been called "the Kiss of Death", "Google Hell", and "Screwed Pages" (Ok, I just made those up), but in any case, Supplemental Results is not where you want your pages to be if you expect traffic from Google.

Let’s see google’s official defination from their webmaster page:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.

yada yada…."auxilary index"? "fewer restraints"? huh??

Here’s the stuff they aren’t telling you:
Pages from the "regular" index will almost always show up first for any searches. The only time you’ll usually see "supplimental results" is if there’s not many, or any, results in the regular index.  What this means, is that if you’re page about "blue widgets" is in the "Supplemental Results" then you’re screwed as far as having your page rank at all (will not show up at all since there’s pleanty of results for "blue widgets" in a google search. Your only chance of rankings a page that’s in the supplimental results is if someone searched for something super specific like "blue widgets in southbend kansas on market street").

Supplemental Results also tend to have old Google Caches…..in other words, once google has sent them to "Google Hell", they tend not to come back….thus you’ll find pages in the Supplemental Results are dated long ago.

Why does google put pages in the Supplemental Results?
I’ve been able to identify 3 main reasons:
1. Duplicate Content - take someone elses content, get sent to Google Hell (Supplemental Results)
2. No Content - create pages with no content (remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing?) - empty pages get sent to Google Hell.
3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself.

Now, for the dirt - how to get out.
1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

Now, that’s not eneough…remember, once page are sent to the Supplemental Results, they tend not to get revisited. Once you’ve done your changes, submit a google site map and cross your finders.

If that doesn’t work, try publishing them on new URLs.

Additional help: Barry also points to steveb at webmasterworld who has some advice.

OK…any have other ideas on why a page could be put in the Supplemental Results?
Anyone have more ideas on how to get pages out?

I was checking out the traffic stats today for webuildpages.com and I got a warm and fuzzy feeling in that it looks like only about 1/3 of our traffic is via search engines today.

To be specific:
Website referrals -         67.40%
Search Engine Referrals - 32.41%

2 years ago about 90% of my traffic was from "Mother Google". That’s a scary thing. I’m feeling lucky that I was able to move beyond Google, and make some real link referral friends. (our free tools was a big help in this effort.)

My stats on search engines seem to be just about average with thier respective % of search traffic.

Google - 73.01%
Yahoo -  20.51%
MSN    -  4.23%

What % of your traffic is from search engines?
What percentage from each search engine do you get?
How old is your site?
What type of site is it? (blog, informational, ecommerce)