Caydel’s SEO Blog

Text Links Ads, one of the premiere companies in the link-sales industry has now launched a new Link Baiting service. In short, they offer two plans, one at the $5000 level, and one which will cost you $10,000. With both plans, they create a link bait item, submit it to the major social media sites, and mail them to appropriate bloggers. The $10,000 plan also gives you additional creative ideas in addition to the idea for the link bait, they submit to a wider range of social media sites, email twice as many bloggers, and, if possible, submit your site to CSS galleries.

Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagens are two of the top names in the Link-Building field, and the price of this service reflects that. Would a service like this be worth the high cost? This is cheap in comparison to some of the other link baiting services available, but I can hardly believe that this is worth $10,000. Let’s be honest, the major time is spent in coming up with the idea. If you are somewhat skilled at crafting your own headlines and summaries, you could do the submissions yourself, in addition to emailing relevant bloggers.

So, is the idea worth $10,000 to you? I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has purchased a link baiting service in the past. Tell me how well it worked! I want to know hat type of ROI you think you received from this service! 

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After nearly 3 months of constant rejection from Technorati, I have been taken back again. An hour or so, I noticed the Technorati Spider was travelling my site, so I checked the Technorati page for this blog, and sure enough, I was indexed again! I still haven’t heard back from Technorati supports about any of the support tickets I’ve submitted, but hey - I’ve never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. This is really nice, since I’ve already seen traffic coming in from Technorati as well.

I guess I now have to take back some of the mean things I’ve said about Technorati with respect to this issue. I’m back in black…

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Well, we all know that MySpace pages have the potential to drive a ton of traffic. Sure, it takes some work to build an extensive network, but eventually many people have gotten their MySpace pages to the point where they might have 1000+ uniques per day running through these pages.

Many slightly devious minds have realized the selling potential of these pages, and place affiliate programs on their MySpace pages, hawking everything from ringtones to jewelry to pr0n and other less ethical products. Now, if you are using MySpace for affiliate marketing, I am sure that you must be somewhat frustrated with the limited freedom you have in creating Myspace pages. In short, they suck.

So, wouldn’t it be nice if you could redirect all of your MySpace visitors to a landing page or website of your choice? Well, this isn’t nearly difficult as you might think. Let’s set up a Flash redirect. To pull this off, you will need a Linux box, and a text editor, and a server of your own somewhere.

First things first, you must install the Ming package. Ming is a library for generating Macromedia Flash files (.swf). This can be done in any Debian based Linux distribution by running:

apt-get install libming-util

Now, in your favorite text editor, create a file with the following text:

getURL("http://www.example.com");

Substitute the URL for the site you want to redirect to in place of ‘www.example.com’ above. Save this file as redirect.as. Now run the command:

makeswf redirect.as

This will produce a file called out.swf. Upload this file to a webserver where you can now fetch it from an external page.

The final step is to include the new flash file in your MySpace page. Include the following code somewhere on your MySpace page:

<embed allowScriptAccess="always" allowNetworking="internal" enableJavaScript="false"
src="http://www.example.com/path/to/out.swf" quality=high
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="200" height="200">
</embed>

Make sure to change the src tag in the code above to point to the location of your out.swf. This will enable you to redirect your visitors to the page you specified when creadting your redirect.as. Good Luck!

P.S this may not work for much longer. MySpace is upgrading to Flash 9. This code may or may not work. The issue is that MySpace is now forcing allowScriptAccess=”never” on all embeds, which stops the browser from redirecting. If anyone knows how to avoid this, please comment!

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A recent blog post by ZDNet’s Donna Bogatin indicates that at some point yesterday, Google had a large box on the Google.com homepage promoting the Google Toolbar. According to Bogatin’s screenshot, there was for a time a large box in the upper right hand corner of the Google.com homepage which contained an image of part of the Google Toolbar along with the text

‘Put a Google search box in your browser’.

An arrow pointed from the advertisement box towards the top of the browser viewport.

Why would Google do this? I guess they want to spread the Google Toolbar; the more people who install it, the more market and mind share they own. But this goes against their long-standing tradition of a nice, clean, almost spartan front page.
This screenshot is borrowed from Donna Bogatin. I was unable to confirm this siting with any other sources. Has anyone else out there seen this?

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