Seo Adventures

Ok with my foray into massive crappy reciprocal linking out of the way lets see what I did wrong next.

Next up I signed up with digitalpoint.com’s link sharing network. Essentially you place code in your page that displays 5 random links every time the page loads. This was fine back in 2005 when I was using it and this was before the big Google update which essentially killed this network.

So I put these links at the bottom of GameBrink, built up a bunch of weight (measured by how many pages were non-supplemental in Google) and pointed all that weight at another site. This other
site was for “video codes” which was a way of embedding videos from say yahoo and having them link back to your site. AKA before Youtube. So within 5 days I was ranking extremely high for the term “html video codes” which netted me around 30k hits a day just from Google.

Then came the Google update that checked for link relevancy and random links. Bleh. Not only did GameBrink go almost entirely supplemental but I lost the video code ranking. Boom. So as if GameBrink was enough in the shitter with Google, it was now piled higher and deeper probably still flagged as a SEO offender.

So at this time I gave up on GameBrink and decided to just use the digitalpoint weight to spam MSN/Yahoo for some quick rankings for what I like to call a one page wonder.

A one-page-wonder is a page with very few real links, some text content, and tons of adsense that looks like content.

The lucky domain I used was ffxi-gil.com which is a decent keyword phrase as ffxi = final fantasy xi and gil is the currency in the game that people buy for real money.

Next up I’ll talk about how ffxi-gil.com made me an insane amount of $ (most I’ve ever made online from a single source) with practically no effort. It’s a sick thing that to this day makes me angry as I and many others work their asses off while these little effortless things can make you rich.

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seodude :: Oct.08.2007 :: Case Study - GameBrink.Com :: No Comments »

In 2005 link farms were all the rage. They worked extremely well on MSN and Yahoo and even partially worked on Google back then. Essentially you’d sign up for this service past some code and you’d have a massive directory of everyone else who signed up. You could filter things somewhat but not a whole lot. This is a great idea but here’s a list of the problems and why Google can detect these and hates these.

1. They’re full of spammy sites that steal your authority.

2. They used to have direct links back to the stinking originating site which was a huge idiotic giveaway.

3. They used to let you host your freaking link directory on their server which is another huge red flag.

4. You can never really filter the directories well enough to make it worthwhile.

Ok so being the idiot that I was I signed up for a few of these and threw them up and voila I was tops in MSN and Yahoo for my targeted keywords.

I watched carefully as I jimmied up and down between around the top 30 and top 70 on Google anxiously awaiting the day when I would be #1!

And then a few weeks later I disappeared completely. I was still fully indexed but I didn’t rank for anything, not even long tail keywords. You had to, and still have to, type in the word Gamebrink with your search to get the appropriate search result back from Google.  Thanks to my idiotic link spamming Google had just penalized me in a big way and unfortunately 2 1/2 years later I still feel the effect. Who knows if I’ll ever break free. I receive 99% of my traffic to Gamebrink from referalls, most of all in the form of link baiting which I’ve come to be quite good at for the gaming industry. As I just started migrating the site to a new design I threw up some stories and sent them to my tips mailing list and voila there we go.

http://www.gamebrink.com/blog/2007/08/28/ds-save-game-transfer-system-for-windows

This went from Engadget to Gizmodo to Gonintendo to Bluesnews and to thousands of smaller blogs and spam blogs underneath.

I’m mentioning this now because this is what I should have focused on from the beginning and not going along with the “easy” route to high rankings from deceptive link farms.

I would go so far as to say never ever have a reciprocal link directory on your site and never ever reciprocal link if you can help it.

Link baiting is viral, it’s natural to Google, it gets you high PR links, and there is absolutely no down side to it.

So to sum things up:

If you reciprocal link with crap sites you will be massively penalized by Google for an indefinite amount of time.

If you link bait Google will love you and your rankings will fly.

Find an area of expertise you like, find out all of the popular sites around the subject, search every day for a topic that hasn’t been covered and is a front page story, post it to your blog, let your tip list know and pray. Do this repeatedly daily for better results.  While that’s the gist of link baiting I’ll do another post later that goes more indepth.

Next time on the Gamebrink case study I’ll take a look at link massacre phase two.

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seodude :: Aug.29.2007 :: Case Study - GameBrink.Com :: No Comments »

After finishing up school I decided to get back into the gaming website business after running Gamingplanet.com from 1997-2004ish.

My first thought was to make an Import Game store that would sell games from Japan to other audiences much like play-asia.com or ncsx.com.

I found wholesalers in Hong Kong, bought some stock and started to craft a site using Yahoo’s Ecommerce platform.

If I was smart I would have done some research about Yahoo’s RTML language, which is used by its Ecommerce platform, and I would have realized that it was outdated annoying and not worth touching unless you wanted to build a store with very very basic features.

Well that or become a master of RTML and all its quirks which I was hesitant to do but did anyways because I had already leaped forward before doing research.

ALWAYS RESEARCH THE TECHNOLOGY YOU’LL BE USING BEFORE YOU COMMIT TO IT.

I know it’s simple but I’ve rushed into projects without doing this more times than I like to admit so I thought it was worth mentioning.

So I bought a book on the subject, read up about it online, and went to work making a site.

Here’s a look at the embarassing site made back in 2005 via archive.org.

I’d like to say it’s so basic and ugly because RTML is awful but that’s only part of the problem, I was just out of practice after doing C++ for 4 years in college.

That being said it was all very functional, it was hooked up to merchant services that allowed me to accept credit cards which was a nightmare, and there I was open for business.

Only problem? Oh yeah people need to know about it, trust it, and actually order from it. Doh!

Thus begins my adventure back into the world of SEO I hadn’t touched since before google was popular so that’s to say everything had changed.

Because of this I made an amazing amount of damaging mistakes with the site that to this day keep it sandboxed, aka out of top 10 rankings, although still completely indexed.

Next time I’ll start to explain the many bad steps I took in the first few months of GameBrink so that you don’t fall into the same traps.

Yes you might be partaking in black hat seo without even knowing it and because of that google may be damning you for a long long time.

Until next time!

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seodude :: Aug.18.2007 :: Case Study - GameBrink.Com :: No Comments »