One-way Incoming Links from Directories
As with everything in life, there is an easy way, and there is a way that works effectively…
There are plenty of software tools out there that will submit your sites to the free directories…BUT, they come with a price, and I aint talking purchase price either.
It’s the same old story. If you try to cheat the system, the search engines will just ignore your efforts, which defeats the purpose of submitting to the directories in the first place.
Submitting the same entry (via software)Â to 50, 100, even 200 different directories is much the same as posting a copy of the exact same article to 1000 different article sites on the web. It will get indexed, and then promptly ignored, except for MAYBE 1-2 entries, by the search engines.
The search engines are wise to this spamming of the directories, and are ignoring entries that are the same.
Also, another thing about submitting a link to 200 directories is that those links will all show up on the next crawl of the spiders, and all of the major SE’s now monitor the growth rate of links to websites. If they see a massive level of growth in 1 day/week/month, and then no more after that, they automatically flag that site as suspicious, and it suffers for this. So, using a software tool to submit to a pile of directories in 1 shot is just a waste of time.
What’s the only way to avoid this problem? Submit a different entry to each directory, and the best way to do that is to do them manually… which is what everybody wants to avoid.
Think long term people - don’t spam the search engines, and your sites will perform better and last longer. If you can create sites that last for years in the SE’s, even if their rankings aren’t huge and their traffic isn’t massive, you get a much better bang for your buck than thinking short term.
That’s why just building scraper/spam sites for adsense earnings is a short-term tactic. At the end of the day, you will have to keep building new ones all the time to replace the ones that fall over after a month or 3.
Tag and Ping Disaster
Poor Sean Wu!
I wrote about him & his upcoming release of Tag and Ping the other day. I am guessing things went well, sales-wise, but the poor guy has been visited by Murphy (that famous Irish gentleman, whose law has been one universal constant in our world since day dot!) since then.
I just got home this evening, and found an email waiting for me from Sean…
Seems he had a major snafu with his autoresponder system:
Today I woke up to check my email - only to find
out in HORROR that my autoresponders from my
automation system has been sending me ALL of the
pre-programmed messages in the sequence
repeatedly… to MY inbox!At first I thought it was only doing this to me -
until I noticed that I’m getting a few complaints
from some people telling me that they’ve been receiving
up to 10 or more emails from my autoresponders,
in ONE day.Also, I’ve also noticed that some people are NOT
able to “opt out” of the sequence - even after
they’ve removed themselves from my autoresponder’s
database (I checked and their records have already
been removed - but the emails won’t stop for some
reason).*I’m also getting emails from ALL of my autoresponders
to MY inbox repeatedly too (and I can’t even “opt out”
of my OWN autoresponders!)
I hope the poor guy manages to sort this drama out! I’m sure its probably freaking him out a bit…
However, much more importantly AND significantly from my point of view is the latter part of this email, which says:
Third and finally - a BIG WARNING I want to give to
you:http://www.tagandping.com/warning.html
I’ve warned repeatedly, in EVERY teleseminar I did and
also on my Update Blog at http://www.tagandping.com/updates/,
as well as on the “Download Page” you are forwarded to
after purchasing the course…To NOT, in ANY circumstance, attempt to abuse or *spam*
the “authority sites” I mentioned in the course. I’ve
warned repeatedly that you should “go slow” AND add
valuable links & content… and NOT just links to your
own sites.The methods presented in the course are powerful -
BUT you MUST use it ethically.I’ve already seen some attempts to flood the authority
sites mentioned in the course with links to “page
generated” sites… and if you’re doing this - I ask
that you please stop.You should use these services the way that they’re
designed to be used - by adding valuable links that
other people will also find useful (in addition to
links to your own sites).DON’T overdo it!
Sean, you should have thought of the “possibility” of some morons using your techniques to spam and/or abuse these sites BEFORE you released this product…
Where I live, we have a saying for this - something along the lines of locking the barn door AFTER the horse has bolted!
This is why I often describe the Internet Marketing field as a shark infested pool…Along with all the nice fish, there are plenty of sharks who really don’t give a damn what they do to get traffic and sales on the net.
It’s not just the black hat crowd, it’s also the unethical, the ignorant, and the stupid that screw things up for the rest of us, who are happy to earn a living online without crossing the line into inappropriate tactics and techniques that just muck it up for everybody else.
Let this serve as a warning to those of you who think it’s OK to cut corners and not care about the consequences of your actions. If you’ve ever complained about all the trashy spam sites in the search engines now, then know that these unethical people are responsible for them. Makes Google and Co’s life hard, so in order to deliver the best deal possible to their REAL clients, they are now making legitimate internet marketers lives difficult, just to cope with the spam and dirty tricks brigade.
I truly hope Sean Wu won’t be looked upon (in 1-2 years) as the guy who started the downhill slide for tag and ping, and destroyed the value of this technique and these social bookmarketing sites, etc. I wonder if he thought about this properly before he decided to release this product?
I wonder…
Tag and Ping Launches…
Yes, it’s true. Tag and Ping has finally launched onto the market, and the hype surrounding this product from Sean Wu has got a large portion of the internet marketing world up in arms and semi-fighting between each other!
Wu, a 24 year old ‘kid‘ from Thailand claims to have cracked the ‘secret code To Instant, Unlimited Supply Of PageRank 5+ Backlinks From AUTHORITY SITES…‘. Further, he claims tag and ping is so effective that it puts the (in)famous blog and ping to shame!
Big claims for a young guy I’ve never heard of before (which means squat, ‘cos if he’s smart, he’s been under the radar for a few years making big bucks using Tag and Ping, before releasing it into the shark infested waters of the Internet Marketing fraternity). 
Now, anything I say from here onwards is just opinion, since I haven’t seen a copy of Tag and Ping.
The short version to Tag and Ping, as I understand it, is that it involves getting links from Social Bookmarking sites such as Technorati, Del.icio.us and Furl (just to name a few). These links can generate web traffic back to your website IF they get a decent level of popularity from the net denizens who vote for them (this is the social bookmarking).
To give you an overview of Social Bookmarking, here’s what the folks at wikipedia have to say about it:
In a Social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.
They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.
This system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with present-day (2006) search engines.
Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will “rank” a resource based on its perceived utility. This is a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.
The 3 obvious bonuses here are:
- You get traffic to your site to read your content if its popular (and this traffic is free), and
- If you are lucky, you’ll also get the link to your site on the front page of these high PR sites, which may just lead to it spidering your site quickly, and
- If your content is popular enough, you’ll also likely get links to it from other sites, which will improve your site’s link popularity (PR), which will also bring increased search engine traffic.
Now, ALL of these things are fantastic. I wouldn’t turn down any of them for a second…but here’s my biggest concern about this whole Tag and Ping thing…
It’s going to attract a bunch of black hat types (and the generally dumb) who will use and abuse this technique to get traffic to their sites (many of which will be little more than spam sites built to earn money from adsense with little real value to the internet - as if we deperately need 1 more spammy adsense site on mesothelioma cancer!!!).
If they use and abuse it too much, the whole benefit that these sorts of sites offer will be comprimised, and once again, they will spend a lot of their time and resources fighting the tag and ping equivalent of content spam!
So, while I believe that tag and ping (as a concept that has been freely available for some time now) is a valuable tool, and Sean Wu may well be a top bloke, I just hope that if you read this blog post, you might just take heed of what I say, and not go crazy with this whole tag/ping thing.
Please, do EVERYBODY a favor and be responsible in the use of it, and it will be there to benefit us all for years to come.