Archive for December, 2005

I was reading Andy’s Blog today and he makes reference to a yet to be released article in Inc Magazine about challenges CEO’s will face in 2006, Andy also quotes from this Inc article

"… they’re likely to find that they have two concerns: one, whether they need to launch a corporate blog to get their message out, and, two, what the blogosphere is saying about them."

This just got me to thinking over on to something else…what should the rules of employee blogs be? I’ve got 3 employees whom have industry related blogs (I’m not going to go into what my "rules" have been (if any) with these), but I do want to know what you think about employee blogs in general.

For any company:
What do you think the rules should be on employee blogs?
Should there be employee blogs?
Should there be any rules at all?

Link Ninjas is going to end after our January training dates.

Link Ninjas didn’t stick with us, but keep reading to find out about the first annual SEO mini PowWow.

For those 10 people who were chosen for our free class on Jan 18th, I still guarantee that they will think this is 5 times better than any SEO conference they’ve attended to date. (or your money back…hehe).

Why do I think this? 
At a conference you get to listen to lots of people speak on lots of topics for ~15 minutes each.  I know what most of you are thinking when you attend those conferences, because I’ve been there myself, your attitude at these conferences tend to at some point turn to:

"Give me the dirt! Tell me something I didn’t know that will directly help my business because I paid thousands of dollars and want to take home some knowledge that will justify my cost of attending this conference." 

So for those lucky people who get our one day of classroom training from 4 bright people at We Build Pages, with special guest Aaron Wall - (all for free for 10 people (class limited to 10 companies), we’re still going to give those people the SEO show of their life. We’re going give these lucky 10 people a free pass to go deep into "What we think you should do to achieve high rankings on any site with a focus on "How to Get Links (and be under the radar)" They will get 1 or 2 hours of classroom training with each special guest Aaron (1 hour) as well as Justilien, Sean, Todd, and Me. We’re going right for the dirt information, no fluf, no sales…just great info for free so they can do the work themselves.

Then the doors are shuting down on the Link Ninjas training.

—————

What’s next you ask? Well why not have a small SEO gathering?
The first annual SEO PowWow at night on Jan 18th or 19th (not sure which day yet). I’d love to chat and share a beer with you.

If you’re an SEO and want to come, let me know. Let’s see if an annual really small SEO gathering in upstate new york sticks.

Details on the First Annual SEO PowWow

Cost - Free - You pay for getting here, your own meals, the hotel, whatever, and there is no charge for this and we’re not going to plan much - we’re winging it. I don’t expect this to cost us anything except our own beers.
When - Night of Jan 17th or Night of Jan 18th….unless you really want a 2 nighter. (we work during the days).
Where, Troy NY - just north of Albany - 20 minutes from airport, hotel next door, bars within 3 minute walk.
Why? Drink at a bar and chat SEO might even make a few good connections. 
How many will be there? I don’t know. I’ll be there, I’ll be pushing the rest of my team to come. I’ll be bending Aarons arm to have a drink as well, since he’s in town as our special guest for our first and last link ninja training class.. I think I’d be lucky to get a few other SEO’s to come too, who knows.

Goal is to be small and free and fun. Come over for a beer. Can you make it?

 Blog Spam part 1,
Who is doing it and how to stop it.

So there’s 2 sets of blog spammers that I’m aware of, the Industrial turn and burn blog spam and Backlinks for link value  blog spam.

Industrial turn and burn blog spam
Those who do it on a massive planned scale for the sole purpose of generating a crap load of links at once via pressing a button and getting links from blogs that have a record of having a "hole" whereby a link will be published and counted, thus scoring rankings in some of the search engines for the targeted site. I tend to think these are gambling, porn, drugs, but might be anything that’s "turn and burn".

Last year a very well known SEO gave me the keys to a blogging spam software that was just amazing. You’d type in a keyword phrase, and it’d return hundreds or thousands of related blogs for that phrases, and would put all the comment forms all on one page, you’d fill out and submit and wa-la, you got a bunch of instant links.

I never did use that software I was show - honestly….it was just a little to scary for me, and at that time, I didn’t have a site to burn.  I’m sure there’s several more blog spamming tools, and from what I recall one night Mr. Ploppy got to drinking and just might have recorded some of these. 

Backlinks for link value spam
The guy doing it for the sole purpose of building links to a website for the "link" value…hey, there’s been guestbooks, forums, link trading, and yea, blog spamming. At the last SES conference I ran into a guy who was telling me about having his link team work on 90% blog posts for the purposes of "link building".  I asked him if he checked for the "nofollow" and he said "what’s that?"…. So I’m hoping that after my educating him, he’ll at least now have his team check for weather there’s not a nofollow tag on a link.

How to stop blog spammers.
No one likes having their blog spammed with blog comment spam. I’m pretty new to blogging, but here’s what I’ve been using to combat blog spam.

When my blog was set up for me, it came with the nofollow on all links on all usernames and in all comments. Meaning, that for those who make a post, where their name is a link, that link in the eyes of Google it’s invisible because it has the nofollow tag on it. I’m not sure if I like this answer (to see why, read my part 2 on Blog Spam).

I also make users sign up as a user before they can post. I then let logged in users post which immediaely gets published…. but if they post even 1 link in their comments it’s not posted until I approve it. This seems to work OK for me.

I’ve seen some blogs use that security code where you’ve got to type in the letter before you can publish your post, but I hate those (I have problems getting those damn letters right).

I know some blogs that approve all posts before publishing, and I’ve seen some blogs that will publish everything instantly, and I’ve seen some blogs just remove the ability to make comments all together.

What are the methods that you use in combating Blog Spam and how successful do you think it is?

Blog Spam Part 2
Combating Blog spam with the nofollow tag.

When my blog was set up for me, it came with the nofollow on all links on all usernames and in all comments. Meaning, that for those who make a post, where their name is a link, that link in the eyes of Google it’s invisible because it has the nofollow tag on it.

Not only that, but if you put a link in your post it doesn’t get posted; rather I get an email asking me if I want to approve the post. Most of the time it’s reasonable, sometimes it’s good comments with a few too many links and I edit as I feel at the time, and sometimes it’s a shit post with links in it. But at least I can look at what it is and approve it before I let it get published.

But isn’t the nofollow is unfair.