ISULONG SEOPH

My friend is doing SEO for an american client. They used to rank in the first page of Google results for a couple of their keywords. Then suddenly they lost that ranking and cannot be found nowhere near the top pages of google search. They soon found out that they’re still ranking well in some specific regional google results.

Their product targets the US but they are getting sweet results in Google Philippines which is pretty much useless since the product is targeted. How did that happen? The common denominators are: search engine optimization is being done in the Philippines by Filipinos, contents are written by Filipinos, and most probably site maintenance is being carried out by a Filipino. I don’t know what else but surely they have some server somewhere utilized for SEO purposes (hmmm… like redirection or mass blog hosting for link building?).

Is this any indication that google bots are smart enough to detect patterns?

It’s been a while since I last wrote here. I took a job overseas and is going through a lot of troubles processing my working papers. I just bought the cheapest laptop that I can use at my flat until everything have settled down.

Now, unto our topic, I’m actually doing manual approval of link submission to my directory. I’d like it to have good quality sites as much as I can so I go through each links and verify whether these passes the basic criteria I imposed.

Of late, the volume of submissions increased and it pisses me off that some of the links loads too slow. I mean I have a lot to do than wait for it all day. I’m on a very fast connection so anything that indicates it’s not loading at all will have the submission declined. Fair enough? I think so.

Another thing. I seeing a directory submission trend lately on going around the restriction of double submissions. I’ve seen sites using subdomains with exactly the same content, layout and everything submitted. On the same day. Roughly the same hour. If it’s not intended spamming, I don’t know what is. For that, all submissions from that domains are removed instantly.

Lastly, I’m doing a bit of an experiment. Due to the increase of in links submitted, in order to filter the crap I’m requiring payment for regular links without a nofollow attribute. Links with a nofollow attribute and links with reciprocal will be free.

I’m generally happy with the quality of the sites being submitted for inclusion to my web directory. I approve listings manually so more or less what gets included are worthy to be in. I’m not saying my directory is the ultimate link directory but some of us do dream of being listed in an elitist group.

I haven’t got any link directory inclusion request this past weeks. Perhaps the submitters got tired of resubmitting again and again their crappy and spammy directory sites.

How do I determine quality sites? I have my criteria. It may not in agreement with everybody but then again everything is a matter of preference. Let’s just say that one of my criteria is that it shouldn’t feel like a machine did it, from design to content.

Anyway, I still don’t have any monetization plan for the site yet other than adsense which proved not effective for a directory site. I just got my paypal account so my best bet would be a paid or featured listing. My time is currently occupied with more important things so monetization will be taking a backseat for months to come.

If there’s one campaign I can do SEO, I would love to do online casino. I mean, online gambling is on the top 3 most competitive online business beside porn and pills. These kind of SEO work are more focused. Look sideways for a second and your lead in the race are suddenly taken by SERPs position hungry SEOs.

Anyway, I’m reviewing this site that ranks popular online casinos. Online Casino Bluebook ranks online casinos by bonus size, payout percentage, customer service, game features, number of games, software graphics and ease of use. The next time you play online blackjack, you know where to go.

Their list are reviewed by experienced online gamblers. As a result, you will most likely find the perfect online casino. I haven’t tried using their list yet but I will as soon as I find time. I was itching to play online poker. I always have this feeling that I can bluff and judging from what I see in World Poker Tournament in TV, I think I can dig the game. My problem is that nobody around me knows how to play poker so my best bet is playing it online. I think I’m going to check the list now.

There has been an increase in numbers of url submission to my general purpose web directory. From the looks of it, more than half are directories and they begin to smell like I’m being spammed. Little did they know that I have been checking each and every link submitted. I used to approved everything including fellow web directories. It was only lately that I noticed a pattern. The directory submitted use similar layouts. There’s nothing wrong with accepting other web directories since I do submit this directory to other web directories but giving the impression that everything is automated and was not being well thought of, puts me off.

From now on, I’ll will only allow functional and usable sites on my directory. Those with real purpose rather than just a bunch of links to other sites. I will not be touching those who had escaped me in the past. Consider it a prize for getting in early.

When is spam begin to be called spam? In short what is spamming? The longer I’ve been in SEO land, the more the line between spam and not spam gets blurred. Same with any discussion about what’s blackhat and what’s not. I’ve been doing a bit of SEO for myself but SEO still feels alien to me. There was no shortage of reading material about the topic. I have a dedicated tab for it on my netvibes page.

I had a small chat with somebody I know who’s bent on becoming a better SEO. My stand is that spam is relative. The other camp says spam is spam however you look at it.

Spam is relative because some of us who would consider something as spam may not be seen by other people as spam. I think something becomes a spam if the person doing the spamming intended it to be. Intent is the key here. Why did I say this? Well, somebody I know has been sending me offers (products and services) a lot. As someone who consider himself “in the know” (really?), that’s spam. But my friend on the other hand does not know that he’s spamming me already. I can vouch for his innocence. Why? Because he doesn’t send it to thousands of people but only to a small number of people in his address book. I can’t even put it as unsolicited because I also have his email on my address book.

If you think that Adsense has become too restrictive for your online marketing campaign, chances are you’re going to love the new text advertising system that’s in the works by Super Affiliate Marketing Blog. Well, for starters, it allows a lot of what Google Adsense has cracked down over the past few months like arbitration. What’s more interesting is that they’ll allow you to format however you want the ads to look like as long as they can send traffic to the advertiser. I’m not sure whether it’s purely PPC but they claim to have the anti-fraud system in place.

Not convinced? Read the long list of features/benefits:

1. Arbitrage traffic (buy low and sell high!) is ALLOWED.
2. Get paid via PayPal, e-gold or ACH/Wire.
3. BH SEO traffic accepted! I know people treat you guys like dirt and give you a bad rep, but I also know there is nothing wrong with your traffic, so screw the other guys and stop having to explain yourself to everyone else (unlike in the US, everything banned there is legal in the UK/EU — more advertisers paying a hell of a lot more per click!).
4. Get paid per click. We only care about clean and real traffic, and you get paid in Euros, GBP or USD.
5. 100% customizable. Break out of the barrier of boxed in or bordered ads. Customizing no longer means just limited to changing the colors. You can change the shape of the text ads, put approved images next to them for higher CTR’s, put them inside videos, etc..
6. Webmasters and site owners from around the world are allowed to participate, but we ONLY want traffic from the UK, and Western European countries right now.
7. Bid price tools that tell you EXACTLY how much you get paid. So if the cpc says “$2.22″ per click, that’s what you get, $2.22, no more trying to factor in your percentages and our cut and blah blah.
8. Stats you can read and learn from. Hate using other add-on services like heatmaps or ROI converters, well now, you’re in luck, because those tools all come standard in our reporting module. Including automated tips on how to change around your content and templates so that you can increase your CTR’s.
9. Use XML feeds to display results, either in 1 or 2 click format, it’s your choice! Display search results for the advertisers inside text ads, instead of making people search first and then click, they can click straight away and you get credited right away.
10. Domainer traffic welcomed. Stop getting only $0.08 a click from all of the parking page services, come over to a place where you’re appreciated and respected.

That’s only 10 but they are good enough reason to try. However, only UK and EU are definite to be serviced when the system goes live.

SEO Philippines founder, Marc Macalua, announced the launching of his latest SEO contest, the Bayanihan SEO contest. Bayanihan in Filipino roughly means “cooperation”. And true to its meaning, the contest is all about cooperation. Contestants will be competing in teams which they themselves form. So watch out for teams of superstars. The prizes are not too shabby at Php 600,000 (roughly $13,300).

Marc and the rest of the contest organizers are still accepting sponsors. Being one of the sponsors mean you get tons of linkbacks from competing sites. And judging from the previous SEO contest by Marc, the number of competing sites linking to yours is not to be underestimated.

It’s no secret that good .com domains are gone and had become prohibitively expensive. But it’s no secret also that most of these most sought-after .com domains are parked. This is where other domain extension takes advantage of the situation.

I was recently taking a foray on registering domains. Since I it’s too hard to find a good .coms I tried .infos per advice from a super affiliate I’m reading recently. I registered a bunch of .infos and put real content on them rather than domain parking. These sites were updated regularly once a week, mostly on weekends.

Lately the tracking script shows that there’s activity on the sites. And one of them is outranking a .com, getting real traffic. BTW, my domains are generic domains which mostly have a .com counterpart. So there. My adventures in domains so far yielded positive results and provided good experience so far.

Did you ever come across as comment that you know is promoting a product but for unexplained reasons you go ahead and approved it? I just did. The comment is well crafted that it made me question my definition of a comment spam.

The idea of effective link building by commenting hit me. I don’t know why others still use bots to leave meaningless and irrelevant comments on blog posts when they could do so by doing it manually. It’s time consuming, yes. But it’s way more effective than bots. Akismet and other bayesian filters has done a good job detecting and stopping automated commenting. On my blogs, akismet has effectively stopped spams except for a very few which I guess was due to newer spam parameters akismet still have no record of.

But looking for relevant posts in technorati and writing a good line or two of comment will probably get it approved.