Archive for: February 2008

I’ve been meaning to do this for quite a while, but I’m just lazy I guess.

I really liked that nifty bookmarking widget that my friend removed to protect the innocent created. I just didn’t like the way it looked in the sidebar.

So this evening, while a new spammer script was doing it’s thing, I decided to get it placed on the pages better. I like it much better now. What about you?

~dink

**edit. Removed the widget by request

We live and work in an ever-changing world. No news there, huh?

We build webpages. We use our words to market <something>. We use a lot of different methods of bringing traffic to our pages. Some of these methods could be considered ‘questionable’ in certain circles. Mostly we try to beat the search engine placement algos.

The thing is, we tend to keep on keeping on. We find an exploit that works. We tweak it. Then we run it full speed. We do it over and over again. Minor changes maybe, but still mostly the same methods.

Then one day we wake up to find that our exploit doesn’t work any longer. What happened? Well, the various search engine algos changed. Or, we got tapped by a competitor. Or……

Or, we got complacent. Satisfied that our exploit was doing it’s job, we went about pushing the envelope. We tend to forget that change is always with us. Mostly not good change either.

Michael Martinez over at SEO-Theory made a great point (well, he makes a lot of great points, but this one is relative to the post) on his blog the other day. Burn this into your brain:

Blackhat spammers burn out the usefulness of about 10% of all SEO tips, tricks, and techniques that are openly or semi-openly shared on blogs and forums in about 12 months. White hat SEOs, newbies, and SEO gurus burn out the other 90% in 6 months or less.

Michael’s comment is right in line with the real world. What works for us today has very little bearing on what might work tomorrow.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. When (if) you discover an exploit, work it to death. Keep it close to your chest and your lips sealed. Chances are that if you tell someone else and they tell a friend of theirs, then that friend tells……….

The search engine spam techs are looking to cut us off at the knees. All the time. We don’t need to speed up the process, so keep it quiet.

Keep asking yourself how it could be done differently. Ask yourself ‘what if…’. Then do something else that Mr. Martinez preaches: experiment, measure the results, adjust. If you do that each time you have a new project, you’ll be far ahead of the pack. That means you have adapted. Doesn’t mean you won’t die, tho. lol

That’s it for this time. See you around.

~dink

P.S. If it sounded like I’m high on Michael Martinez, well I am. If you want to figure out the real deal on SEO, go read his blog. No, you don’t need to tell him that I sent you either. He can speak blackhat, but he ain’t one.

So you have some content. You wrote it, or you paid to have it written. Or, you got it somewhere. PLR? Article services? Elsewhere?

Do you only use it once? You don’t buy a new pair of shoes, wear them once, then toss them out do you? Ofcourse not. Why should your hard earned content get thrown out after only one use? It shouldn’t.

All of the content you have ever gotten, or will ever get, should be saved and used like the gold that it is. Your collection of articles is your content corpus. You can use, and reuse, it time and again.

One way that I reuse content is to add some of my handwritten content to an article I gathered up from *somewhere*. There are two advantages and one disadvantage to this technique. At least that’s from where I’m sitting right this minute.

• If you have a 350 word article that you add 100 words to, you have a 450 word article that is 29% different from the original.
• You can easily include ‘in context’ links and insert your desired keywords where you want them.

The biggest disadvantage to this is that it doesn’t scale very easily. It can be done (I’ve done it), but the results aren’t very good sometimes. Other times it’s perfect. Go figure.

Another way to reuse your content is to ’spin’ it. Now, I’m not endorsing any product here. Neither am I slamming any particular product. So, when I used the term ’spin’, it doesn’t relate to any product that may, or may not, have that term in it’s title or web promotion pages. I merely use it to indicate changing the wording or the meaning of an article.

There are a lot of content spinners around. Some are decent, most are a piece of dog shit. <<–Pardon my french fries. I’ve used several of them. Tried out several more. Paid good money for some of the worst ones.

A great many of the spinners rely on variations of the Markov Chains. I use several different versions of Mr. Markov’s excellent tool myself. You can find several of them around the net. If you haven’t ever tried to mash up some content with a markov() script, you should.

Some spinners use synonym replacement. That’s ok if the designer/programmer built a large enough dictionary of words to use. I’ve seen a couple of them floating around the web so, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one.

Some spinners use a translate/retranslate system. What this amounts to is pasting your article into a translator application, then putting the result back into the application and have it translated back to the original language. Depending on the translation ap and the language you are translating to/from, the results could vary from OK to ‘wtf is this shit’.

You’ll have to judge what method (or combination of methods) provides the best bang for the buck. We each have different ideas about what standards to apply to our content.

That’s it for this trip. See ya.

~dink