Now… the second article that I read and can’t let go was from Barry over at Seroundtable.com and had to do with the “penguin update”.   My beef isn’t with Barry it’s with the individual he quoted within his article.  For your convenience here is the transcript of an individual complaining about the update in the Google help forums

I am now scrambling to figure out how I am going to: pay my daughters tuition pay my car payment pay my health insurance pay my car insurance pay rent and all the utilities that go along with renting a house not to mention putting food on the table.

I followed your good webmasters guidelines and done nothing spammy at all about my businesses and websites and I get shut down and put out like that.

SHAME ON YOU GOOGLE! SHAME ON YOU MATT CUTTS!

As if it weren’t hard enough to find a regular type job, even with my education and background, now this.

All this and in a time of bad economy, how could you do this to YOUR America? Instead of trying to help build the economy your making it worse.

Seriously!? I don’t want to come off as an arrogant individual who doesn’t feel for another webmaster but this person sounds like  a little whiner.  Google doesn’t owe you, me or anyone else a damn thing.  How arrogant is this individual to blame his problems on Google?

This person claims that they have “done nothing spammy at all” but I would love an opportunity to look at this persons website.  I can guarantee they did something wrong.  Thin content, paid links cause they don’t know how to do it right, shitty links, over optimized anchor text, etc etc I can go on.  I’ll also tell you something, arrogance isn’t an excuse.  They claim they didn’t do anything wrong and i’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that THEY believe this.  However a lot of webmaster these days go around building links and websites as a whole treating SEO the way it was done 10 years ago.  Just because you don’t know better doesn’t make you immune to Google’s wrath.

Even if they can rationalize everything I outlined above I would ask them why in the world aren’t they diversifying their income?  It’s just plain stupid to rely on Google 100% (or anyone for that matter) to support yourself and your family.  For instance just a few different ways I make money are below:

• Full time SEO consultant job with an agency.
• Take on SEO clients via the NickLeRoy.com website.
• Personal websites monetized with Adsense
• Personal websites monetized with Affiliate offers.
• Personal websites monetized with private advertisements

Now granted the above mentioned income is based heavily off Google but if one income source were to disappear I would still be able to pay my mortgage and feed my family.  Even if Google disappeared completely tomorrow I should be able to react and adapt to the next big traffic generator whether it be Yahoo/Bing or Facebook.  My intentions are not to gloat or to say I’m better then anyone the example is truly just to illustrate the value in diversifying your online income.  I think it’s absolutely ridiculous for anyone to blame their tactics, income or even misfortunes on Google.

Now because i’m not a complete jerk I want to offer this individual a couple suggestions.  Granted I don’t know the whole situation but here is just a couple idea’s for what you can look into to “fix” your situation.

• Start up PPC.  You obviously were making money from your site and have an ROI.  You currently make nothing so it would be your best interest to invest in some PPC or other advertising to supplement your traffic.
• Heavily research the reasons why “Panda” and “Penguin” have been taking down so many sites.  Be honest and tear a part your site looking for flaws.
• Re-evaluate your sites links and if you see any that look fishy see if you can get them removed.
• Consider purchasing a new domain and moving your content over.  I would only do this if you think your absolutely screwed and can’t fix any existing issues.
• Go work at Taco Bell.  As a family man myself I wouldn’t sit by and watch my family starve as this individual claims Googles changes will do.  There are a lot of people worse off than you and I and they truly are doing everything they can to support their family.  Who cares what you think your education entails you, go get a job (any job – have you looked into SEO for a local agency since your have an idea of what SEO is?) and fix all your sites issue on your “off time”.

Remember – Google doesn’t owe you shit, whether you like it or not.  If it we’re true please forward to Mr. Google that I have been eyeballing one of the new 5.0 Mustang GT’s and I only need $30,000 this month in my Adsense account to pick it up.  K? Thnx!

You know what? I commend Home Depot!  Congratulations on pulling off a great negative PR SEO campaign.

It’s Easier To Beg For Forgiveness Than To Ask Permission

Before I elaborate on the header above im going to give you my take on the letter they sent out.  All “white hat” SEOs routinely tell people they should reach out to their connections and ask for a link to their site.  Home Depot did just this so good for them.  They even gave them a suggestion on how they could link back to their site. OK some people don’t like this but it’s still fine.  They even mention that by linking to their site it would increase their authority and help them in the SERPS.  This is where it gets hairy.  Many SEOs swear that linking out to authoritative sites in your niche helps improve YOUR sites authority and could possible increase YOUR sites search rankings.  This is why you routinely see Wikipedia links on affiliate sites and other authority sites that aren’t direct competitors.

If that’s not enough reason for you to think twice I ask you to take a look at these images and tell me what the “value” is to having them on your website.

These images and badges offer trust and authority to a website.  When you visit a service providers website and you see an A+ BBB rating plastered on their site it instills confidence in their service.  When you see PayPal or Visa on a e-commerce site you know your payments are protected.  So why wouldn’t a link back to home depot through an image be any different?  Home Depot is an authoritative and respected source that many service providers would love to be associated with.  PLUS if you use an image with alt text your technically HIDING the link.  Take a look below.

*note* As far as I know Michael Gray didn’t bitch about Home Depot but this tweet came at the perfect time.

I personally have blogged for all the reasons above as I stated in my 3 years in review post.  Now I do it for a couple reasons:

1. I still accept a very limited amount of contract work so getting some fresh eyes on this site is always nice.
2. As of recent I tend to blog about some more controversial SEO topics.  It’s nice to get peoples opinions and ruffle the feathers of the “White Hat” SEOs that scream ethics.

Most importantly I blog about SEO because its a passion of mine and its something I truly enjoy.  If I didn’t enjoy it I wouldn’t have any reason to give out tactics or techniques that others can reproduce.  My time would be better off geared towards working on a site that makes more money but this industry is one of the best for having open and productive discussions… I tend to learn something new when a good discussion is had.  Which in my opinion is enough to warrant blogging about SEO all together. 

So… Why do you blog about SEO?

As of this month this blog is turning 3 years old.  A lot sure has changed in the “SEO World” since I started 3+ years ago.  When I started blogging it was a way to learn, experiment and hopefully become “e-cool” someday.  These more traditional SEO posts that you guys read every day did OK.  I acquired a few nice links naturally, a couple comments here and there and even a lead for a nice SEO project occasionally.  I’ll be honest with you — It wasn’t worth it.  Nothing was really that unique on this blog and I always felt constrained by posting what would be “accepted”.  Then this year I changed the direction of the blog completely.

My new blog posts were going to be about whatever I felt like writing regardless of hat color or what would be accepted by the mainstreem SEO clique.   I wrote posts about buying links, reusing expired content to build links and  even intentionally accepted a blog post that I knew would push the limits of what is acceptable in the blogging/SEO industry.  Many people wrote comments or privately emailed me asking what I was doing and stating that I was hurting my brand or risking the client work I had already acquired.  To be honest, things couldn’t be any better.

Since I turned around the direction of this blog and started posting about the topics that people are less inclined to talk about traffic has soared.  Comments have increased (both positive and negative comments of course) and most importantly I have received significantly more requests for consulting work.  It was a little bit of a shock but a lot of potential clients saw these types of posts as “outside of the box” thinking.  Regardless of what the mainstreem SEOs tell you clients are interested in SEO for one reason… TO MAKE MONEY.  Most are willing to do whatever it takes.    This all plays a role into several things that I have learned over the last year or so.

Things I have Learned

• Stop trying to be one of the “popular” SEOs.  So much time and effort is put into brand management and sitting on Twitter you have to wonder when there’s time for real SEO to get done.
• Do what you want:  I’m not talking about being reckless or sending your brand management guy on a long vacation.  What I mean though is don’t be afraid to be confrontational in your blogging.  My most successful blog posts are ones that are full of controversy and contains a lot of good arguments/debates in the comments.  You wont get this type of attention/engagement with your “5 ways to be a cool SEO” type posts.
• If you can’t monetize it then its not worth working on.  For 3 years I spent so much time working on projects that didn’t make me a dime.  Yes I enjoyed most of them but as you all know SEO and building out a successful site takes a lot of time and energy.  With a wife and new baby boy its not a luxury I get to have anymore  so now when I work on projects its with a focus of not only pursuing my SEO passion but also making a buck.
• Knowing when to quit.  This one was hard for me but I have let several projects die after months or years of not realizing they weren’t worth my time.  Outside of client work my personal projects better be making me money or satisfying an interest of mine.   Being able to call it quits or change the direction of a website completely around is one of the most valuable lessons I have learned within the last year or so.
• Less client work.  I have a very few select clients that I do consulting for but I have really begun to see the value in taking my “extra” time and putting it towards my own projects.  The main reason is that I have FULL control over the site and SEO.  No excuses for why new content hasn’t been developed or why a budget is so small for acquiring links.   The clients I do take on are willing to let me stir the ship and are fully engaged in their SEO campaign.  Because these types of clients are really hard to find I have become extremely picky in who I take on and try to limit it to just a few.  The extra income is a nice way to fund my side projects which ideally will make up the difference in what I would make by the dealing with unstable client work.

 Changes

Just as SEO is ever changing I hope to continue to change as well.  I have started up some new projects that really will test my SEO knowledge/techniques and that I hope will allow me to learn even more.  Continuing to challenge myself will be one my biggest goals from here on out.   While I don’t plan on posting on a regular basis I hope to continue to only add value providing posts to this blog and to share more of my experiences.  As with many of my previous posts, some will find then interesting while others will simply be upset over the concept that anything by “white hat” works these days.

Here is to another 3 successful years in the SEO industry.

Note from Nick: This is this sites first ever guest blog post.  It’s from a very tall friend of mine who chose to remain anonymous.  For simplicity reasons we will just refer to him as “Hattori Hanzo”.  As mentioned below in the disclaimer this post is all in fun SEO satire and not intended to be taken seriously.  If you’re offended feel free to remove yourself from the RSS feed.

Disclaimer (Parental Discretion): Before you read any further, please know that this post contains plenty of vulgar language and quite a bit of sexual innuendo. It is all written in good fun. If you feel that you cannot develop a sense of humor or tolerance for the certain words (fuck, being one of them) by the end of this fucking paragraph you shouldn’t keep reading. You need something a little bit more vanilla.

The Cold Hard Truth (PPC vs. SEO)

Regardless of what people like to think, all Internet Marketing disciplines are not created equal and do not work the same. To better understand that concept we need to examine a Webmaster’s relationship with Google as a real-life relationship.

• The “Art” of PPC (aka Paid Love)

  In this analogy Google is the high-class hooker that you meet at the casino bar. She will probably buy you a drink (the $100 AdWords voucher), she will talk sweet nothings into your ear and convince you to spend your harder earned money on a wild night with her. At this point, you are thinking that this girl is special and that she probably really likes you. She’s fun. She’s hot and most likely swallows (assuming that you pay enough). If you are a high-roller, she will keep coming back to you, but if you are not, chances are that you will wake up in the morning, she will be gone with all your money and you will be left behind holding your meat.

• The Real Art of SEO

  We all know that lasting relationships do not get built that way. Dating a money-lovin’ hoe (even if she’s not an actual hooker – no, I don’t want to pay your bills) will only get you into trouble and leave you heartbroken. And this is where SEO comes in. SEO represents how a successful and long-standing relationships should be built. You need to put in the time and effort to make things happen.

Below is a balls deep … linking blueprint on how to successfully seduce, date and satisfy Google.

Dating Ain’t Easy: You Need to Put the Time In

You have asked Google to go out with you and she said yes. Maybe she heard you have an awesome keyword-rich URL, a .org TLD, and an awesome SEO-friendly CMS to go with it. So you are waiting all week for Saturday night and getting your shit together (yes, this is fucking high school). You have written some kick-ass content, optimized the shit out of it and have even talked to some friends of yours to put in a good word for you (quality links) during the week. Google has probably also done her homework by doing a background check on you and looking at your Webmaster Tools. You have taken care of that shit and you know you are golden.

Saturday night is here. You are looking fresh in that brand new WordPress design and all your plug-ins have you feeling good and confident. You take her out for dinner and a movie (possibly a roco) and you are giving her a chance to get to know you (you are a swell guy and have nothing to hide afterall). You are treating her like the lady that she is, but at the same time you do want to show her that you are the alpha-wolf and that you are the next big thing in the insurance vertical.

At this point you also know that she will put not out on the first date. This is insurance Google that you have taken out, not Duluth MN SEO Google (she puts out much easier). The date goes well, you drop her off at home and you ask her out again. Assuming that you have not done anything to fuck it all up, she will say yes. Fast forward a few weeks or couple of months and you are now on your 10^th date. You are still putting in the time to get to know her, show her what you are all about (more content) and have some more people around the school tell her how awesome you are (even more contextual links baby). At this point you can also introduce her to your brother who is in college – unless he is an asshole, he will of course give you a glowing review (and there goes the .edu link – boom goes the dynamite).

And just like that you are out of the sandbox and very close to her box. You 10^th date went as well as you expected and you my friend have earned yourself a trip to the show. You are now making out on her couch for a while and when light touching turns to heavy petting it is the time to play a game we like to call …

Just The Tip … Linking

At this point, you are probably thinking to yourself: “Holy shit, this is actually happening!!!!” and this is the point where most Webmasters blow it. Don’t be that guy. Don’t get overaggressive. Keep putting the work and time in and keep showing Google that organic growth that she is looking for. Remember, so far she has only seen and heard good things about your awesome home page and even though she knows of your deep pages, now is the time to show her the quality. Deep inside you knew this day was coming so you prepared. You probably man-scaped (is that a word? I think it is) by already building some pretty good links to your “content package” and it pays off. She is thoroughly impressed and she is ready to make some bad decisions. This is where you suggest playing that little game called “just the tip … linking”. Just for a second, just to see how it feels. As expected, IT FEELS AWESOME, and up the ranks you climb. 3^rd page, still climbing and you’ve only started. Time for some advanced SEO moves. Go after that long-tail like a boss.

Balls Deep … Linking (Advanced SEO)

Take your linking, balls deep to levels she never even knew existed.

The diagram below shows how you how to do it! This technique – “The Triangle of Love”, is based on the premise that you have an additional site with some PR that you can use to your advantage and that a 301 redirect transfers 1.5 times the link value of a regular links (Matt Cutts confirmed). It also makes temporary use of the power of the 302 (you don’t want to let that juice out too early) as a temporary buffer to algorithmic ecstasy. This is what you should be working on while in the sandbox.

The graphic above might resemble a link wheel, but it’s not a fucking link wheel. It’s a link triangle. Big difference! Here are the steps:

1. From the awesome content of your secondary site at the bottom of your triangle you link to two other sites with similar anchor text to the one you are using on the deep page (Awesome Blossom Deep Content Page) of your money site.
2. You 302 redirect those sites to another 2 sites (no content needed)
3. You then again 302 redirect those sites to one final site at the tip of the pyramid. (no content needed)
4. From the tip of the pyramid you place one final 302 redirect to a page on the site with similar content as your money page – Near Duplicate Awesome Blossom Balls Deep Content Page.

Needless to say, you have just set the stage for something magical to happen. No juice yet, but all the piping is there and ready to go. The two final steps to this technique is what we call …

The Money-Shot

And now, it’s time to blow … Google’s mind and put the finishing touches to an outstanding SEO performance that will have Google keep coming back for more. Take a look at the updated diagram.

1. Turn the 302 redirects to 301 redirects and transfer all the juice you have been working on to the tip of the triangle and then on to the near duplicate content page! At this point you might be wondering why the fuck I would transfer all that juice to a duplicate content page (Google doesn’t like that after all, or does she?) instead of an original content page. If so, keep fucking reading and stop interrupting. There is a very good reason.
2. CANONICAL and release all that juice to your Awesome Blossom Deep Content Page (Money Page) at once.
3. Listen to Google scream the 3 little words that every Webmaster wants to hear: “NUMBER 1 RANKING!!!!!!!” and “Double listing for the canonical”. Happy now? You better be.

Warnings

1. Remember that this was a few weeks/months worth of juice (depending on how long you were in the sandbox) that you just released on your money page! That is almost 11.4 points of PR awesomeness – 5 301 redirects and a canonical = 1.5 worth of PR juice to the sixth power (remember the premise of this technique). That is a lot of juice for a page 1 to handle and you might want to grab a towel. You need to be mindful of the sites that now rank below you. Actually you don’t and your link juices are the least of their problems, because you also just shit on them on your way up. Good times! Welcome to the Google layer cake folks.
2. Throughout this beautiful experience, you might have noticed that there is a big-ass Panda bear sitting in the corner of the room watching the whole thing, fondling itself (pervert) and waiting to pounce on you if you get out line – the closest you might have gotten was the duplicate content page, but you planned and you came through. Needless to say that pulling off an advanced SEO technique like this, gives you the right and the responsibility to tell the Panda (on behalf of the entire SEO world) to “shut the fuck up” and go eat some bamboo or you will straight up murder its almost extinct ass.

That is all. Rinse and repeat for the next page and next page and the next page. Google is smitten and you my friend can do no wrong. Monetize like your life depended on it. If you didn’t murder that Panda though watch your ass. You never know what the crazy, furry bastard might do.

Find Content Through Expiring Domain Auctions.

My favorite way to find potential content to re-use is to checkout expiring domain auctions at GoDaddy Auctions.  You want to first go to their “advanced” search on the right side of the screen and click on the “keywords” tab.  At this point change the first drop down to “contains” and add your sites topic below.  What this will do is narrow down the list of expired domains to ones that include your keyword in the URL.  Finally you will want to scroll down to the “Type” tab in the advanced form and click on “Expiring Domains”.  Then go ahead and click “Search”.

To illustrate this technique I will use the finance niche for my example.  Starting with the screen shot to the right you will see that I added “finance” to the keywords tab and clicked on the expired domains.  After hitting the “search” button you will see the following results.

Pro-Tip: Sort the list by 100 results and even by traffic/price to help find quality sites.

 Search For Quality Sites & Utilize Archive.org.

Here is where you will likely spend most of your time executing this technique.  You will want to visually look for domains that are of quality.  You may even want to sort the domains by bids, traffic or valuation.  At this point you will want to copy the domain URL and open it up in another tab.  99% of the time you will land on a parked / this domain will expire Go Daddy page.  What you want to do here is click on the Archive.org button on the SEOBook toolbar or manually add the domain to the search field on the way back machine at archive.org.

Continuing with my finance example I sifted through the list of sites that were displayed and found toptenfinance.com.  After plugging this URL into the way back machine at archive.org I saw that this site was first registered in 2001 and that this site has been crawled many times.

Clicking on the December 1st date I was taken back to the record of the website.  From here I was able to navigate to the “articles” section of this website and gain access to all the unique articles that this website had published way back in 2008.  This is exactly what your looking for.

From the main articles pages I was able to dig through and find some really good content pieces that are no longer live on the web and is fresh for the picking.  For instance this post on mortgage loan finance ideas:

Avoiding Duplicate Content & Maximizing Value.

So by now half you reading this post are shaking your head ready to rip me to shreds in the comments.  For the rest of you salivating at this opportunity keep on reading.  The first concern with re-purposing this content is to make sure that Google doesn’t already have it in their index.  Depending on how long the site has been down will increase your chances of it currently being indexed.   The best way to check whether or not its been indexed is to copy the first 3 or 4 lines of the article and search for it in Google with quotes.  With the example shown above Google currently has the page indexed but it will likely fall out of the index quickly as its already cached with the GoDaddy expiring domain page.

Since Google has already cached the GoDaddy landing page its only a matter of time before they remove the old page from the index.  At this point the content is free for you to use.  Once the old content is removed from Google and you publish it on your site it will be completely unique to your domain.   It’s important that you wait until the old page falls out of the index as you want to make sure your domain is the only one that is publishing and getting credit for the content.  If you did a Google search for the first couple sentences and nothing came back in the search results you are free to publish it right now!

Is This Technique “Wrong” / Advanced Link Building

This is a technique that you have to decide whether or not your comfortable with.  People can argue copyright and such so you might want to be careful where you lift the content.  If you are questioning this technique because you simply don’t want to take the risk of re-hosting this content on your own website I have the perfect solution for you.  GUEST BLOG IT OUT! It’s not difficult to find guest blog opportunities.  In fact a simple search for Finance+”Write For Us” returned over 1,700,00 results.

Do you think one of these websites would be willing to accept this content as a guest post which would include a link pointing back to your website?  Be creative people – don’t let others convince you that you have to work hard to build links.  You just have to work smart!

Now here is the part where the people screaming ethics and morals get to respond in the comments below.