Glowleaf

I am starting to get fed up with what the seo world is turning into.

And the biggest factor in that change, is Google. They force the entire net, to switch to their concept. No follow tags, pagerank, links links links and even more links. And keywords. Oh my god, KEYWORDS.

They are so addicted to automating everything, that keywords are the biggest factor in ranking. And if you never had a website ranking #1 on a competitive niche, you have no idea how important that fucking top spot is.

Read this article, about the newer clicking habits of Google searchers.

People used to actually look through all 10 spots, and now they are only looking at the top 3. Great. Now even the top 10 is not enough.

With the google chrome browser autosuggesting the top result directly in the address bar, that fucking top spot becomes more important in direct conjunction to Chrome’s popularity. Shit, shit and shit.

EDIT: My Google analytics says that 8.5% of my visitors already use Chrome. That is a hell of a market share. Wait till they patch it better, and plugins are created…

Every damn search you make on Google, has one or two youtube results, a wikipedia page, maybe a google map, and an image result. So even if you break into top 10, your link is absolutely certain to get buried under the fold. Fuck.

And we come to the damn keywords. I am a computer engineer, I understand perfectly well how easy it is for a computer to sort everything based on keywords. You can automate everything, and make it work perfectly well. Of course, you need your own private little nation of Phd’s and genious nerds to make a computer sort the entire web, so we are safe. Oh, wait, Google already has that.

But its a fucked up way to index the internet. No, keywords are not the way. So they make constraints, and heuristics to group keywords together. That is why this blog ranks for “willowleaf”, apparently its the same as “glowleaf” in the Google dictionary.

No, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life datamining through megabytes of keyword data, just to rank my damn site. Let me give you an example, maybe then you will understand my frustration.

Lets say, I want to rank for “automobile“, with my nice Greek site. Automobile in Greek is written αυτοκίνητο (actually, the english word originates from the greek one, but lets not get into that now)

Did you notice the little dot on that word? Yeah, you can write it without that. Its wrong, but hey u even c people blog liek this on the webz. So, we have another word, which is different from the first one, because the damn letter with the dot above it is a different ascii character! Add αυτοκινητο to the list.

Then of course, we have plural. 

Automobiles, αυτοκίνητα. Without the dot: αυτοκινητα.

Then, we have something which I cannot really explain in English, because your grammatically inneficient language does not have it. “The automobile’s color” for example, makes the word become αυτοκινήτου. 

And now? Leave the dot out, exactly. αυτοκινητου.

Lets go plural. αυτοκινήτων. αυτοκινητων.

Great, thats half a keyword list for only one word. But we are not done yet.

There are people who search for things using the english word, but are still looking for greek results, so they type automobile in google.gr and end up on a greek site. So google forces me to rank for that as well. And lets go plural, add automobiles to the ever increasing list.

And, for the final touch, we have something you propably dont know of. We type things in “greeklish”, that is greek words in latin characters, like this autokinito.

But, there are many ways to write in Greeklish, and this is not official writing, it was created from the early days of the internet where non latin characters did not work anywhere. Also, chatting. That damn IRC is to blame here. To make it all better, the older people cannot read this writing, but the young ones are constantly using it. So, its popularity forces us to rank for those keywords as well, because a keyword research shows that they have traffic! And a lot of it.

As I said, there are many ways to write a word in Greeklish, mainly because the Greek alphabet and the Latin one are not compatible on a one by one basis. Plus, we have a bunch of “i”’s, where you have only one. And 2 “e”. And two “o”. Yeah, I know, perfect.

So, summing this up, we have: autokinito, aytokinito, autokinhto, aytokinhto.

Plural. autokinita, aytokinita, autokinhta, aytokinhta.

Misstypes: autokhnito, aytokhnito, autokhnita, aytokhnita.

Then the weird grammatical form we mentioned earlier plus the plural: autokinitwn, autokinitwn, aytokiniton, aytokinitwn, autokinhton, autokinhtwn, aytokinhton, aytokinhtwn, autokinitoy, aytokinitou, autokinitoy, aytokinitou, aytokinhtoy, autokinhtou, aytokinhtou, aytokinhtoy.

I will not even dare to list the misstypes for that last part.

So, here comes my keyword list, that I need to rank for, and this comes just from the word “automobile” alone:

• automobile
• automobiles
• αυτοκίνητο 
• αυτοκινητο 
• αυτοκινητου
• αυτοκίνητα
• αυτοκινητα
• αυτοκινήτου
• αυτοκινητου
• αυτοκινήτων
• αυτοκινητων
• autokinito
• aytokinito
• autokinhto
• aytokinhto
• autokinita
• aytokinita
• autokinhta
• aytokinhta
• autokhnito
• aytokhnito
• autokhnita
• aytokhnita
• autokinitwn
• autokinitwn
• aytokiniton
• aytokinitwn
• autokinhton
• autokinhtwn
• aytokinhton
• aytokinhtwn
• autokinitoy
• aytokinitou
• autokinitoy
• aytokinitou
• aytokinhtoy
• autokinhtou
• aytokinhtou
• aytokinhtoy

Popularity: 11% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: boredom, keyword research, keywords, ranking, rant, seo, serp

Today I made some phone calls, selling banner space to my site, to other businesses in the same niche.

And I made a realization: I am selling them, what was already theirs for a good solid 10 years now. 10 years in the internet life is like a millenia. These businesses owned the top 10 results for years, and I showed up out of nowhere, grabbed the top spot, and now I am selling them an overpriced banner slot. Its so shitty I love it.

Now, I am thinking of doing the same in other business niches. I am gonna forget about affiliate offers, the regular high volume niches etc for a while. These businesses cannot sell from affiliate networks, but they are paying big cash to show up on buyers monitors.

The key here, is experience. Weigh the niche, build it proper, spam the shit out of it. Link build it, make sure it gets to the top spot when google lifts the filters, and simply own the first place before google even indexes you.

A little tip is: Try to market to the businesses who already buy banners and adwords, but who don’t know shit about seo.

Quoting Sun Tzu, The Art of War:

A battle is won before the swords unsheath.  

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Popularity: 18% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: banner, rank, serp

A year ago, after a lot of research, I decided to go for a very competitive niche.

(I will not say what that niche is, but smart people will find out anyway)

The niche is a standard business avenue, unlike the classic affiliate marketing world.

The keyphrases I went for were 2, a main and a secondary one.

The main keyphrase had 80.000 results in Google, hardly a competetive number for other niches like poker or credit.

The secondary keyphrase had 220.000 results in Google, a better match.

Obviously, the secondary had more searches than the primary, so why did I choose it the other way around?

Well, the answer was that while the secondary had more searches (and competition), it was a wider interpretation of the business, whereas the primary is spot on the theme. Also, in the primary, the other sites where actually my competitors, where in the secondary, it was them and lots of relevant businesses, but not actually the competition. I hope that made sense.

Then, I researched many of the competitive sites, and I laughed a lot while doing so. The 90% of them was horrible, and the remaining 10% was too basic, and most of that 10% had seo from 1995.

Examining the top 20, and their backlinks, I saw something ugly. These guys had stuffed keywords in metatags, backlinks from every relevant directory out there, DMOZ links, Yahoo directory links, PR6 links from irrelevant sites that had not been updated since 1996 (yes, I am serious). The top 15 where on-site seo’d to shit, with almost every page indexed, in both yahoo and msn.

And the cherry on top was the domain age. Every domain was from 1997-2001 tops, and every site has been in the index with closely the same content ever since its registration.

Not a good landscape to dive into. Actually, for the past 3 months, the only thing keeping me from outranking them is domain age, and their backlinks age.

Right now, I am close to Google spot 26, and the site keeps on ranking as Google lifts the filters from my links. How did I do that? Simple:

• Pure content. Many of the competitive sites where the classic brochure sites, saying a bit about the company, some pics, prices, and a few more pages. I found that they lacked in content, so I beat the shit out of my content part, and stuffed everything in. They have 200-2.000 pages, I put up 50.000.
• Links. All their links where reciprocal (which worked in the old days, but now it nullifies the “vote” from one page to another). I put on one way links. Also, I put the directory on a different domain, so any reciprocals became 3-way-links.
• Spam links. All their seo was white hat, and borderline gray hat. Don the black hat my friends, and your opposition is in deep trouble.
• Dullness. Their sites, except a few, are dull, dull, DULL. Put some web 2.0 thingies up there, and your are good to go.
• Sex. Or lack thereof. Let me say this softly: YOU CANNOT SELL ANYTHING WITHOUT SEX. I put on pictures of babes. They are going the family route. I win, they lose.
• Static sites VS pinging blogs. You know who wins.
• Adsense. Come on! Adsense on a business site? He has got a nice: “This site a scam? Find out here” ad that steals a third of his traffic. Amateurs…
• Communication. If you dont communicate with your customers, you lose. Put in blogs, skype, email addresses everywhere, phone numbers, contact forms, forum, comment, etc.
• Imagination. They lack imagination. I dont. Create anything you can think of that can give you a competitive advantage. Find what they dont have, and put it up first.

EDIT: I got asked what I mean by keyphrase.

When you say keyphrase instead of keywords, you mean like a long english sentence that has the keyword in it? can you give some examples?

A keyphrase is a phrase that contains a few keywords you want to rank for. Something like the longtail, but not exactly. An example : “Glowleaf affiliate marketing blog, out of the box thinking for making money online”

You spoke in the last post about beating the competition with, among others, pure content.
They put 2000 pages, you put up 50,000. How did you put those up? I mean it must be generated, but then the content quality isn’t there so much? Or did I miss something?

About content, you can autogenerate pages, interlink them, and put up links. Check this out:
http://www.cashquests.com/google-pag…eat-the-system

Also, eli at blue hat seo says that internal linking to the upper pages push up rankings as well. I could not find the article on a quick glance. You should read his whole blog anyway!

So, I just combined the two ideas.

Once you put up those pages, all you have to do is try and index them. Then your ranks will go up. Also, always monetize the autogenerated pages with ppc (not adsense, try adbrite, or better yet, peakclick).

What I have been wondering about is how to facilitate the most time consuming part of the work: content.

Could you tell me more about generating those pages. I mean generated pages that are, i guess, good enough in terms of english to get people to go on them and click on ads.

I heard of some generators using dictionaries, but it’s most for bots, not so much for humans.

I like rssevolution. You have to buy it, but you can use a demo for a few days to see what it does. A free alternative is yacg.

Popularity: 15% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: competition, outrank, serp