SEO is not fair, see one deadly black hat SEO stuff
We all hate the black hat SEO world but then all is not fair in this SEO war, after all it is about money. A ranking shift can cost a good amount of money. When we were in the finance industry every ranking drop cost us good amount of money. We were on our toes to maintain the ranking. When we think of black hat SEO, we often think of hacking or serious web site penetration (you may like to visit http://www.ivizsecurity.com/blog/penetration-testing/how-search-engine-security-testing-can-improve-website-ranking/ to know about website security and ranking) but black hat SEO can sometimes be simple wrong work too. We are giving a small example here.
SEO rivalry is natural
Wherever there is money on stake the competition is fierce and sometimes dirty too. When it comes to ranking, there are only 2 ways to maintain the ranking, either improve your ranking by doing right or pull down your competitors ranking by doing wrong. The first one is white and the second one black but in all cases the SEO rivalry is natural. Here is a simple Black hat SEO trick to kill your competitors ranking.
Killing Google’s preferred queen, the links, using The Google Spoof Email
We all know that Google loves links and also we know that all links are not equal, some are really powerful and some are weak. Powerful links contribute a lot to ranking, even one link drop can bring down the ranking and thus traffic and sales. If you can bring down the top 10 links of your competitors you may win it the black way. You can check the top link by using search operators combination with keywords in Yahoo. The Google Spoof Email:This one is an email that spoofs the famous “DONOTREPLY” Google email address with the ‘malware’ notice email: Google notice, “You are linking to a site that has been identified as a malware host. Your listing in Google will be removed.”
There are other ways to let competitor’s linking website remove the link like requesting them to change the URL based on trademark violation etc.
The best way to protect yourself is to keep monitoring your best links and keep your website secure.
SEO for Clients existence was killed by Google
Some 2 years back when I started working with clients instead of our own websites, I saw the difference and started hating the service industry. I decided to create a platform where I could train the SEO companies on how to be a good SEO company and educate clients on how to be a good SEO client.
My whole purpose was:
- To simplify the knowledge
- To make it practical for clients
Today when I stumbled upon a document by Google (Feeling so sorry that I did not read this document seriously then), I felt quite meaningless as this 1 document explains so much in such simple terms. Felt almost killed by Google on this, Google rocks.
I am talking about this document http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf.
SEO for Clients is anyway a new avatar now
Now we do more than client education, we make client successful along with educating the client (at various level). Thanks Google for providing such a document and helping us in doing a better SEO for Clients. We want to relaunch the whole education series once again http://www.SEOforClients.com/edu as this helps the clients.
Setting up a new SEO business in India
“How do I set up/extend my SEO business in India” This is a query that hits us once every month or quarter. Extending your SEO business to India is a viable and advisable option because:
- SEO Knowledge is no more a scarcity in India (and on web): When we started in 2003, it was tough to get quality information, many was kept secret and we had a good of mentors and consultants to help us. Now the things are changed, we have a pool of free info and knowledge base available on web. There is organized data that is available on web. Very now and then we get knowledge input for all the team members.
- Many conferences in India and thus many people taking it seriously: Even tomorrow we are attending a meeting (kind of closed door among some of the web related companies) on web hosting. The knowledge is floated across the companies to improve the overall standards. Also the innovation is more frequent here.
- All type of work can be done (Many top B School students are open for web marketing career): We have been handling some of the brands and I am very happy to see that many B-School students are doing wonderful work at online brand building.
- Cost factor: Every time I hear the cost difference, I get excited. The costing is too wide, here when we can get a person for INR 10,000 per month, that is less than $250 per month, US and UK companies are ready to pay $1500 to $2500 per person, that is with a margin of profit.
- English factor: I think Indians do offer a good standard when it comes to English speaking segment. I recently met a team from China and they were explaining us about the advantage we have because of our English speaking talent pool.
- Technical advantage: We get many technical fellows here. Many of the technical stuffs are taken care of.
- Scalable: We consult for some of the local SEO companies and I see how frequently they scale up and scale down. They pull it from the vast talent pool that is available and are put on training for few weeks to go live on projects.
- SEO growth in India: Huge growth, I should write a different post on it.
How to start a business in India?
If you are company outside India and want to take the Indian advantage, please contact VSMC to setup a business in India.
How to use Social Media and Website for jobs
For startups, SMEs & companies with irregular jobs, getting new CVs can be a pain. Also paying those stupid consultants who forwards all type of candidates can be avoided to a large extent if the web and social media is used properly.
Here is a quick post on it:
- Have a career page on your website where you can describe the culture and explain all the queries that you come across. I like http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/index.html the most, they have cool stuffs. Create craze around your organization to attract the right kind of guys. Innovative people like crazy environment where there is Independence of expression.
- Have a jobs sections where people can upload their CVs. Even if they are not interested in any of the job, they can still upload their CV. Here is a good example http://www.webspiders.com/careers/general-info.aspx
- Have your twitter account like http://www.Twitter.com/TechShuJobs where people can follow to get notification. Some of them may want to keep themselves anonymous for them have a email subscription as we have mentioned at http://www.seoforclients.com/career.
- You can also use Facebook integration and Facebook page for community around Jobs at your organization. We generally ask all our team members to share/retweet all our job requirements. This gives us a wider visibility.
We have Jeetbo.com where we keep on interviewing people. We get good candidates from there but still I feel the best guys are missing on all the job portals 
. For the best guys, we have a policy where we keep observing people on web and catch hold of the right person at different events.
Personal note: To start you must get a monster/naukri account id, search all the candidates and call them to make a part of your community.
Why our competitors rank better than us for our own content? Video ranking too [FAQ]
Hey Aji,
We’ve noticed that when searching for some of our most popular widget like Indian Truck or Maxx Machine, other sites rank higher than us in the search results.
Many of the sites belong to the ABC Group, the leading online widgeting group in the world, whose claim to fame is SEO.
Their sites include www.awidget.com, www.widgetwidget.com and www.a10.com, among others.
Could you tell us what the sites ranked above us for our own widget are doing in terms of SEO? We’d mainly like to imitate what they are doing, since these are the activities most relevant to our industry.
Regards,
Another one in the same line
On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 7:59 PM,
Aji,
This is important.
Search for ‘Indian trucks online widget’ and see what happens on google.
Why are there so many sites before us (the original creator of the content)?
Do they have text, blogs, or what??
I will readily do what they do coz there success with seo is clearly demonstrated…
This is what we need to crack!!!
Also most intriguing is how widgetwidget.com is getting ‘video links’ tags for our flash widget?
I mean after seeing that thumbnail, anyone will go there!!
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
My answer to these queries
Logic is very simple.
Google can’t understand who owns the widget …
example kbhwidget.com/swf/indian_truck.swf is where the widget is hosted, what is inside it is hardly visible to Google.
Google though claims that they can read flash http://goo.gl/yrH9
Google can index following files
http://goo.gl/apI5You can get the video indexed using video xml http://goo.gl/HYdn
We can also rank a video in Google, examplehttp://goo.gl/Rk5P ..
We generally use Youtube to Rank because it is easier, we can do this with site hosted videos as well.
How Google Ranks:
- It checks the title
- It checks the content of page
- It checks the other pages that are linking to this page. (I have checked other webpages, most of it has good internal linking structure)
- It checks the external pages that are linking to this page.
- It also checks the power of the overall site. (We are lacking here) The company’s marketing can do a lot of contribution at this level. We need to get links whenever it is possible, when we are giving interview, going for lectures and for all possible places. Such links matter a lot.
Let us improve the ranking for “american trucks online widget” and then give our logic behind it.
Can you pass us another 4 widget related keywords where you feel we need to rank (just for a test basis).
Best Regards,
Aji Issac