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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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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Well, as you all may remember, there was a class action suit launched against Google a few months ago with regards to click fraud. I joined into the suit, and recieved my settlement just a few moments ago. 5 minutes ago, I just recieved the following email:

Dear Google AdWords advertiser:

We are writing to notify you that we have processed your claim for
Account Number *removed* under the Lane’s Gifts v. Google class-
action settlement. We are issuing credits to the AdWords account
identified in your claim.

To view your credit award, log in to your account and open your
Billing Summary page. Your credit award will appear under the label
‘Adjustment - Click Quality’ between the dates 10/27 and 10/28. In
some cases, it may take a few days for an award to be reflected on
this page, so if you don’t see it at first, please check back soon.

You don’t need to do anything to redeem your credit. Google will
automatically apply it to future invoices for your credited AdWords
account. The credits are valid for one year from their date of
issuance and may be canceled at any time after that.

Credits are awarded on a pro rata basis, taking into account these
factors:
- The amount you paid Google for advertising
- Google’s revenues from online advertising since January 1, 2002,
and your claim percentage
- The total amount of credits available in the settlement, which is
US$60M.

If you have any questions, please contact us at
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py?hl=en_US.

Thank you for your continued support of Google.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

Being somewhat excited by this, I quickly logged into my Adwords account to see how much I recieved back. And, *drumroll* I got $0.48.

Yes, you heard correctly. $0.48 bloody sense. This is a touch rediculous. now, I am not a large scale advertiser. But when I filed my claim, I claimed $198.42 on my account, at an estimated 30% click fraud rate, in line with the numbers resulting from a variety of studies which had been reported around the time that I had filed.

Just to emphasize how rediculous this compensation is, I was compensated for 0.24% of my advertising costs. ie, Google is compensating me for an estimated 0.24% click fraud rate. Now, I didn’t expect to get the full 30% I claimed back. I would have been happy to get 5% back.

We all *know* that there is a higher click fraud rate than that. If this has proven anything, it has proven that the only people who actually are making good on this suit were the lawyers arguing it.

At any rate, I will relish my 2 free advertising clicks. With any luck, at least one of them will convert. If anyone else has recieved their settlement, let me know. I want to know if what I recieved is in line with the settlements other people have recieved.

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Today, Adbrite launched some great new features to publishers.

New IAB Ad Units: A bunch of new ad unit sizes have been released in accordance with the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Standards and Guidelines for Internet Marketing Units. This will allow even more flexibility when placing ad units into layouts.

Reserve Pricing: Are you an Google Adsense user? Well, now AdBrite has a new feature in which you can enter your Adsense client code. The AdBrite unit will then show Google Adsense ads until the estimated CPM for your site falls below a certain reserve level you set. At that point, AdBrite will step in and display their own ads, if they can deliver a CPM above the reserve you set.

From the Ad Zone setup page

We want you to earn as much as possible from your ad placements, whether that’s through AdBrite or the networks you’re already working with.

You can run ads from your current ad networks within your AdBrite code, and we’ll always show the ads that earn you the most money. In other words, when we can earn you the most, we’ll show our ads. When we can’t, we’ll rotate your other ads back in. You can’t lose.

If you go to my main InfoHatter site, you will see an AdBrite skyscraper on the left hand side. At the moment, it should be displaying Google ads wrapped in the AdBrite box. And I apologize in advance for the horrible look of that page!
It seems that AdBrite has been working quite hard launching many new features lately. I guess they have to; in the arena with Google, MSN and Yahoo! no doubt means that they have to step up to compete. I think we can expect to continue seeing great features from AdBrite in days to come!

P.S. When I tried to create a new text link zone, the form now say ‘Text and Banner Zones’. I guess this means that AdBrite’s long-awaited banner advertising network is soon! I would hazard a guess that this is no more than a week or two away!

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My wife was checking her e-mail earlier, and was reading an e-mail from a friend concerning an upcoming wedding for her cousin who will be getting married next summer. This ad was on the sidebar of her Gmail account:

Honor this Special Time
Puberty can be a tough time for
parents too. Chinaberry can help
http://www.chinaberry.com

This struck me as somewhat funny, since it seemed to be accusing the Bride and Groom of only just hitting puberty themselves…

The wording struck me as a little strange as well. since in my Dutch background, puberty was something that either was not talked about, or was teased mercilessly; hardly, an ‘honored time’. I guess it may apply to Jewish or other backgrounds where puberty *is* an honored time. Either way, doesn’t really fit with the whole wedding thing in general.

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So, as some regular visitors may have noticed, I have placed a Performancing Partners ad spot in the left sidebar. I have been long-resisting the urge to try to monetize this blog; upon reading about Performancing, I’ve finally caved. I’ll give it a try for a couple of months or so; if the return is good, I ‘ll leave it up. If it is poor, then I will get rid of the ads, and make this blog ad-free once again.

That said, the Performancing Partner Network looks like a decent setup. They target only blogs, but seem to have an ‘Adbrite’-style mentality in that the ads are purchased specifically on a blog-by-blog basis by companies. This means you only earn if an advertiser chooses to run his ad on your site. At other times, you have a relatively non-intrusive block as can be seen currently in the sidebar to the left.

Also cool, you receive 5% of the income generated by any bloggers you refer to their site. This is kind of nice, especially if you only have low-traffic blogs - refer a few high-traffic users, and you are making more than you otherwise would.

For advertisers, this is a nice system - it wouldn’t be hard for an advertiser to buy up a variety of advertising on low-traffic sites - there wouldn’t be nearly as much competition as their would be for more high-profile sites, hence lower costs. The traffic difference can be easily made up by purchasing multiple small blogs.

At any rate, we’ll see how this works out - this looks encouraging so far, so here’s hoping!

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I just read an interesting post by Andy Hagens called ‘Four Trusted Links You Can Build Today‘. I have a few comments on the article I thought I would share (lucky you!)

In his post, Andy writes,

“A lesser-known Wikipedia page: Do you have an investment-related site? Do not try to add your homepage link to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock. Instead, add the deep link to your “The Forward P/E Ratio Explained” page from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PE_ratio… it’ll have a much better chance of still being there tomorrow.”

Now, I have some good and some bad things to say about this.

The Bad: First of all, any one who spams their link to Wikipedia merely for the sake of the link should be stoned. And I don’t mean in the nice, familiar Western way. I mean with rocks. Really, really large rocks.

The Good: That said, this can be a really effective link building method, if your sites contain quality content. Again, if you are merely spamming links, see above.

When I originally started looking at this method some time ago, I came across some interesting realizations - many of the ‘deeper’ subjects are not covered. Just this evening for instance, I was trying to find ways to build Wikipedia links to a site of mine, when I realized that a number of subjects and topics I covered in the site DID NOT HAVE EXISTING WIKIPEDIA PAGES.

So, I did whatever any web designer would do in that situation - I created the pages. I wrote some good, high quality content for the Wikipedia articles. Obviously, they were subjects I was already interested in, since I had created web pages and complete sites around some of these subjects.

So, in essence, I have a bunch of Wikipedia articles which now contain my page among very few others.

Regardless of how you get your links into Wikipedia, there are a few methods to ‘pimp’ out your Wikipedia links so that they pass on the most linkjuice possible.

1. Interlink the pages - In short, search Wikipedia for all instances and mentions of the subject on which the article containing the links to your page, and link them to the page in question. This, to some extent, raises the profile of the article on the Wikipedia domain. It is a well known fact that Google includes internal links as well as external links when determining how important pages are to a site.
2. Maintain the pages - As with any web page, the more regular the updates, the more often the pages get spidered. Staleness of a page may be a major factor in Google’s algorithm, although there is some debate on the fact. At any rate, by making constant contributions to the article, and constantly improving the quality of the page, you will gain a site rep, and your changes are less likely to be immediately reverted.

Another site I noticed that is an easy mark for a good, albeit nofollowed link is AboutUs.org. This new site is gaining popularity recently, and I have begun noticing it linked to from the Domaintools.com tools. It is actually really interesting - it immediately will grab a site thumbnail, an excerpt, and isolates contact information, maps it with Google Maps, performs a bunch of other interesting feats, all in a great MediaWiki format. For a good example, check out the AboutUs.org page for Oilman’s blog.

Let me know what you think!

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