Archive for: September 2007

Internet years. Whew. They go by so fast.

I was working on a new set of sites over the weekend. I haven’t done anything in this niche before, so I looked up a few neat keywords. Decided on which ones looked to pay off best and made some pages.

Then it was time to get some links pointing in the right direction. I was very close to pulling the trigger on the automagic spaming machine, but I didn’t. (more…)

For those of you who have been living under a rock, cloaking is defined as presenting one set of data to a search engine and a different set of data to a human.

There are all sorts of cloaking mechanisms, scripts, and programs. Any server-side language has the capability of doing cloaking work. What you choose would depend on the level of programming skills you have, your budget, the relative strength of the cloak you require, and the risk you are willing to take.

I only have one site that is cloaked. It uses a small php snippet to separate the wheat from the chaff. The user is not redirected. The snippet is quick acting and subject to being found at any time. The only reason the site is still active is because the target niche (and the long-tail) is relatively obscure. ie no competition to rat me out.

As I told you in another post, I believe that cloaking will be one of the ways that blackhat marketers will evolve. Or, more accurately, a combo of cloaking and great content will help assure the future.

After looking around for a few days, I have come to the realization that if I am to cloak with any degree of success, I need to learn a lot more about the business.

I consider myself fortunate to have made friends with one of the masters in the cloaking game. In fact, he may be the master. I have asked him if he would write us a primer on cloaking.

Look for an article on cloaking from Fantomaster in the very near future.

~dink

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve prolly noticed that I generally don’t use the term(s) Black Hat SEO, or Blackhat SEO.

The reason for that is simple. Well, simple for me. I believe that bh seo is dead. It’s no longer a descriptive term with an accurately identifiable entity.

Say what? (more…)

SEM, as you no doubt know, stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEM is very closely related to, but different from, SEO.

The optimization of your page will make a tremendous difference in the actual marketing phase. If you remember what we discussed in the first part of this series, you will also remember that I stressed the need to have all of your ducks in a row. SEO ducks that is.

There are several areas of SEM. A definition of SEM could cover quite a few individual topics. For this discussion (and, for my purposes) we will disregard everything except the actions needed to get the site listed high in the serps. (more…)