Diary of a Market Hacker

SEO spam - personal yet vague …with a high conversion rate!

June 30, 2009 – 11:11 am
A friend/customer recently forwarded an email he received from an SEO company.  The company sent a personalized form letter appeared to specifically created for the customer's site.  It pointed to specifics and generated some concern and fear.....  I'm sure the response rate for these emails is high.  Here's the short email conversation where he asks about some specifics that this SEO company pointed out. ----------My Response--------- Sure, no problem. First of all, this email was, most likely, not written by hand and it was not created after someone reviewed our site manually. It's just specific enough to be personal and seem relevant. This is really good spam. I assume you already know this. ....My partner firm uses this tactic and it works well for them. Point 2: One question... relevant to what? This depends on the search term, the content of the page and ...

Posted in Everything else | No Comments »

To Compete or not to Compete

February 20, 2009 – 1:14 pm
 A friend asked me about link building systems.  Specifically, he wanted to know if the email he got from an SEO firm for link building was "fooling Google". I want to make sure you understand that this technique is considered "black hat" by some and Google too.  If Google were to actually recognize and take the time to investigate the site using it then it's likely that the site would incur a penalty and possibly loose search results in Google's listings or be banned outright.   Though, Google (Matt Cutts) also states that there's "almost" nothing that someone can do to harm a sites ranking.   Well, if I can link to a site using a link building system without the site owner knowing and Google will punish sites for using such a system...   You're seeing contradiction right?  I could also report the site to Google for buying links. The problem for entrepreneurs and ...

Posted in Search Marketing Perspective | No Comments »

Network Solutions using 302 redirect on E-commerce customer sites.

February 9, 2009 – 11:09 pm
Recently a new client was referred to me.  He was having a difficult time getting his site to rank after taking over the site from the previous owner and having the rankings drop significantly.  We discovered several problems that made his situation what it is. That is, hopeless until the problem gets resolved. His site had been indexed using http and https urls at some point in the past.  He had duplicate content problems there, but that is not is main issue. When he took over the site he moved it to the Network Solution E-commerce platform. Network Solutions uses 302 temporary redirects to to divert content from https URLs to the non-secure version of the page.  While redirecting https URLs to http URLs is a good idea, it's a really bad idea to tell the search engines that it's only temporary.   Basically, what NS is doing to say "hey ...

Posted in Search Marketing Perspective | No Comments »

What about the number of back links some of these sites have? That’s helpful no?

January 30, 2009 – 12:49 pm
A friend of mine recently asked this very question.  He had been given a "Search Engine Optimization Process Summary" (impressive huh!) from an SEO company.  The summary included information about competitor sites and text on these sites home pages.  The report was a mix of partially useful information and, in my opinion, misleading geeky dribble.  Over all, it painted a very concrete picture of what the client needed to do. Unfortunately, describing "what it's going to take" is rarely concrete. The question was: "What about the number of back links some of these sites have?   That’s helpful no?". I answered in a way that would break up the concrete impression that had started to set. "yes and no.  Back link count and it's relationship to rank is not as empirical as they make it out to be.  The value a link carries for a specific term varies.   There are many factors involved.  A simple ...

Posted in Search Marketing Perspective | No Comments »