When Netpost.com becomes EricWard.com

I love Eric Ward. Coolest link builder out there. I have read every article by him. Any guy who gets to email a Yahoo founder in his student account about opening the Web Promotion section of Yahoo Directory is a Godfather of Internet marketing in my book. Having said that, and knowing his busy schedule, I just wanted to give him an SEO tip through my blog.

Please 301 redirect netpost.com to www.ericward.com to prevent duplicate content and get your website power up. It really is SEO 101 and I know you dont care about your site as much (as you probably get more referrals than any of us in SEO business but I just had to say it). I guess after you do this business for a while small things bother you a lot (and this is one of the pet peeves for me). Anyhow let’s count this as a lesson to people who want to learn SEO. To prevent any duplicate content issues and to maximize your link power to a website you should 301 redirect all domain names pointing to the webpages of the website that they want the domains to be redirected to. Have a wonderful day from your big fan, Eric.

Sociable becomes SEO Friendly Antisocial at last.

Sociable becomes Anti Social at last…. For those who don’t know the plugin, this will be a biq question mark.I have been using the hacked by Andy Beard version of the famous Sociable bookmarking plugin. The hack had nofollow links on it. The hack has been nice but since the original plugin had not been updated in over 8 months it was also creating problems for me. Joost de Valk took over the original plugin maintenance and also nofollowed the original plugin like Andy and fixed a number of issues including the Stumbleupon. So Sociable truly became Antisocial (just the way we like it) and I thank Joost for it.

Submitting your sitemap to all search engines easily

An easy way to submit your sitemaps to all search engines is putting a simple code in your robots.txt file. You can also create a robots.txt file if you do not have one in your domain folder with FTP access.

The code you have to enter is

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

(of course the sitemap can be in any file format and of course you have to replace example.com with your website name.)

This is an acceptable practice that all major search engines accept. It has been just over a year since the top 3 search engines adopted this and I am sure the others followed their example.

How to win an SEO competition

Many people asked and even used the I double triple dare you to join a recent SEO competition. I refused claiming that it was a ridiculous concept to “prove yourself” while getting in Google’s radar. If I was to join in the competition though this would be the strategy I would use to win the competition.

The competition has a basic rule.

The goal is simple to rank for a keyword no matter what right?

Here is the 4 steps to victory.

1-Create a blog post within your blog with the title tag being the desired keyword.

2-Install SEO for Firefox Plugin (thank you Aaron Wall for the best plugin ever)

2-”enable commentluv” (copy paste the command in the left to the google toolbar in your firefox browser with the SEO extension switched on). The goal is to identify blogs that use the commentluv plugin with dofollow tendencies.

3- Go down through the list and leave really nice and thoughtful comments on the blogs that do not have red highlights. Some people remove the dofollow capability of the commentluv by removing the below line from the plug in (thus the SEO for firefox plugin step)

remove_filter(’pre_comment_content’, ‘wp_re l_nofollow’).

4- It will probably take you a while but a weekend of commenting in blogs should get you the coveted #1 spot in any SEO competition in addition to the extra bonus of a few hundreds links to your blog (if the commentluv is in a dofollow blog, you get the extra bonus of getting a link to the blog’s homepage.

Pirate Code - a tale (SEO version)

Disclaimer: Below is a “tale” of the doom of the Carribean Pirates. This whole story is not a historical fact but another pirate tale where the facts are told like a fairy tale. The implied similes are simply perspectives rather than facts and the perspectives are not necessarily the “popular” or “true” versions. Please take in the story with a grain of salt. The references and examples are only done to make the story more interesting rather than factual. Some believe in the tales and some do not. Here is our story.

Once upon a time,

For over a century, (late 1500s to late 1600s) the Carribean was full of pirate ships. The pirates ran their own distinct code of law in every ship. It was an honor code of sorts with common themes in the Carribean . It covered benefits for the people who lost limbs, punishments and loot sharings in writing. The world was a happy world for the average pirate at the time. In late 1500s and early 1600s, British, French and the Dutch were perfectly content on letting pirates run under their flags to loot the Spain’s Treasure Fleet and cities. There were many small cities that became pirate safe havens.

The nations awarded the early pirates for sharing their Spanish loots with land, money and nobility ranks. The old pirates started their own plantations and created their own lands and became the governors of their old safe heavens in many cities such as Tortuga, Port Royal and Curacao that became the hubs of the Carribean. The old pirates realized the value of taxation of merchants and pirates “legally” rather than risking their lives in the open seas. They gave pirates, for a fee, “letter of marque”s as a legal warrant to pillage Spanish Main. Though, this revenue by itself was not enough. They formed military alliances to control trade routes and revenue sources. They banned ex-compatriots from these routes to protect their income sources. They broke the pirate code that they adhered to in their earlier lives by allying themselves with the old enemy, the governor of Havana, representative of Spain in the Carribean. The Havana Governor, encouraged by these “lawful” allies decided to make the Carribean a hell for the pirates. The old pirate code was broken again as the pirates of the sea lined up to reap whatever little prize money is there from Havana and became pirate hunters.

By early 18th century, the monopoly and stranglehold of the main powers (nations) was so strong, the old days became tales like a Hollywood movie. The veteran pirates cried in the slump bars of Port Royal over their glory days. Desperate for even a mirage of victory, they even started to cheer for the rich “innocent” merchant gaming the “evil” Spain’s economic system as if they were re-living the good old days of pillaging. The Spanish power was also in decline living its own sunset in the hands of the corrupt aristocracy and merchant class. At the end, the pirate code became nothing but a great Hollywood movie where the good guys do no evil.

Re/Max - MSN Alliance?

Following the alliance of Prudential with Yahoo in Yahoo Real Estate section, RE/MAX is testing an alliance with MSN and taking it one step further. After a long research of MSN/Live combined data by RE/Max on visit/lead rates comparing the MSN Real Estate, MSN organic results and paid results, RE/MAX has published a press release stating that they have chosen MLS/Live search in an organic result partnership where Remax is promised all the organic results by MSN in the metropolitan cities as the RE/MAX name will clearly create a quality search result for clients giving them the option to choose any RE/MAX agent they want. The first test result of this alliance is Atlanta Real Estate market search result. We can clearly see from the search that the first attempt on this alliance was a complete success. Re/Max has established 100% domination by allowing MSN/Live search visitors to choose from 488 agents in the top RE/MAX franchise in Atlanta by dominating the first 49 pages of the organic search results for the Atlanta Real Estate Keyword.

MSN Spokesperson Liv Sarge Sox stated by giving a full roster of agents in the search results we offer our clients a quality search experience and a boost in the paid advertising revenue. Both companies have also stated the continued relationship between two companies will continue in other major cities.

Disclaimer: The above news, press statements, and people mentioned are products of fiction and this whole post was just one big hoax. The only true fact is that on April 11, 2008, MSN results literally showed only one single website that belonged to RE/MAX for 49 straight pages. I believe this is a new record in Search Engine World history where a single domain with 488 subdomains can dominate 49 straight pages in a “respectable” search engine for a very competitive keyword.

Footprints and Big Foot prints in SEO

OK guys, the below blog post is a secret magic code language that only very advanced SEOs will get.. This is really a question rather than criticism because the whole thing does not make sense to a big fan of Greg Boser.

Greg is a great SEO. I have no doubt of it. One of my first posts in this blog was about him talking about not leaving footprints for Google. Greg just pulled off a great marketing stunt for his Property town site through a SEO competition that he and I criticized (below quote from that post).

The thing that most contest participants don’t consider is the fact that everyone is watching. (Including search engine engineers).

That great marketing move also created not a footprint but a Big Foot imprint in the snow for Google and your competition. Next question is from a great admirer who himself is an SEO. Is Property Town really worth it?

UPDATE April 10, 2008: Greg Boser has put a robots.txt command that blocks all bots. Still not sure if the site got penalized or not. I like the “Go Away” message.

Best Boy Scouts blog

WordPress blogs are looking more like Websites every day. I go through many of them every day. I used to live in Brazoria county, Texas at the beginning of the century. I still have friends there whose kids grew up to be the age of boyscouts. I mean check this wordpress blog of Brazoria County Bay Area Boy Scouts and say that you are not impressed since these guys are truly a low budget boyscout operation. Fear the small guy, always… My hat is off to you guys.

Trulia domination

There has been a steady increase in rank for major city real estate keywords for authority sites such as Trulia and Yahoo Real Estate sections. They are rising rapidly in ranks for <city> real estate keyword. This is clearly an issue of authority trumping links in the Google algorithm. At least for now.

Wanna Network profiles.

Ok, I think Wanna Network guys do not realize this but I think they have a redirecting issue in terms of their profiles.

Here are the two profiles of mine.

One is http://www.wannanetwork.com/user/?P=Mert and the other is http://www.wannanetwork.com/Mert.

The first url shows a cached copy and the second has no cached copy in Google even though the first url is redirecting to the second one. I am assuming an improper redirect issue here. Just letting you know.