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The Art of Link Cloaking

posted on March 21, 2007

Have you ever looked at a set of very competitive search results and wondered how in the world a certain website was ranking so well? The link profile just didn’t support their position. There’s a chance that website was using link cloaking to hide some of their links and prevent fellow SEOs from reverse engineering their rankings.

Link cloaking is the practice of linking to one site, an intermediary if you will, while sending bots, humans, or both to a completely different site. This has several benefits depending on how you setup your redirects.

So that the following examples are uniform and a little easier to understand, I will use the following terminology:

  • Site A – The website containing a link to Site B.
  • Site B – Website being linked to from Site A that may or may not redirect users and / or search engine bots to Site C.
  • Site C – Website receiving web traffic and / or search engine bots from Site B through 301 redirects.

All Inclusive 301 Redirect
The most common form of link cloaking is a simple 301 redirect. Both bots and humans who click on a link from Site A to Site B are forwarded onto Site C through a 301 redirect. The link juice and anchor text are attributed to Site C while the link itself does not show up in a backlink search for Site C. This allows you the ability to send link juice and traffic to a bad neighborhood without actually linking to it.

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Viacom Sues Google YouTube for $1 Billion copyright suit vs Google, YouTube

posted on March 13, 2007

MSNBC is reporting that Viacom is suing Google and YouTube to the tune of $1 billion dollar. The suit stems from alleged unauthorized use on their programming.

In a statement, Viacom lashed out at YouTube’s business practices, saying it has “built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to other’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google.”

Viacom said YouTube’s business model, “which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.”

Viacom owns such channels such as Comedy Central, VH1, MTV, and Nickelodeon.

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Yahoo Updates Answers Algorithm for Main Search Results

posted on March 12, 2007

It seems Yahoo has updated the algorithm used to determine which Yahoo Answers questions get posted to the main SERPs. So what’s changed?

Before the change, the results on search.yahoo.com were directly related to the search results that where given on answers.yahoo.com/search. For example, “what color is the sun” would include only answers that where returned here and in the same order but minus certain listings. The difference being Answers search results included listings that could be open or closed and may not have had a best answer while the main Yahoo SERPs included only listings that where closed and had a best answer chosen.

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Increase PPC Conversions Based on Audience & Searches

posted on March 9, 2007

There are loads of cash to be made in affiliate marketing using PPC but it takes time, experience, and a lot of testing to do it right. No one that I know does more testing than Diorex.

He not so recently posted about some of his findings that I thought I would share. To sum it up:

  • For Content Match ads, landing pages should be informative and sell the visitors on why they need the product.
  • When targeting competitors, give the user ad copy that differentiates your product from competitors.
  • For Exact Match ads, give the users the “Get it Now” landing page and the “Get it Now” ad copy.

Using these three steps his company managed to turn a loosing account into a winner.

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Blogs That Probably Aren’t in Your Reader But Should Be

posted on March 7, 2007

In the world of Internet marketing blogs the noise to quality content ratio is turned up way to high. One look at the almost 400 marketing blogs listed by TopRankBlog.com shows one of the reasons why. There just isn’t enough news or original ideas to make even a minority of them unique.

Every once in awhile though I come across a site or blog that is one of a kind. A place where you find the type of unique content that makes you remember there is always something new to learn. For me, there are two such sites that stand out in the crowd.

OneBoxer
OneBoxer is the work of Brian Mark. He discusses from experience how to get your products listed in the Google One Box. At this point in the game it’s easy pickings if you follow his advice and there are loads of cash to be made.

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Faster Indexing Through Pinging Google Blog Search

posted on March 6, 2007

I’ve launched a number of new sites lately in an effort to test different theories. Most but not all of them have been based on WordPress as I can launch a new site with a few pages of content within an hour.

With these site launches I have noticed some interesting patterns. All of them which I set to ping Google blog search were spidered within minutes and the site was in their index within days. On the sites which I did not ping Google, the sites took weeks to get indexed, even when I pointed strong links towards them.

WebmasterWorld has a thread where some people are noticing similar patterns on more established sites. They claim to have posts from established blogs in the index within hours, not days.

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Yahoo Panama Conversion Tracking Broken

posted on March 5, 2007

Panama has been live and growing for a long while now so you’d think the major bugs would be worked out. Well, apparently not.

One of my clients has a premium account and put off upgrading until Yahoo forced it about three weeks ago. Everything seemed to go smooth except the conversion tracking and full analytics that Yahoo provided with the new system seemed to be off.

That lasted for about a week and then the conversion tracking went completely blank. It has been that way for two weeks now. A call to Yahoo premium support informs me that they are aware of the problem and my clients account is one of many affected. To top it all off, they have no ETA on a fix which tells me they don’t even know what the problem is after two weeks.