Link broking by WebsearchPR in Brighton

Now I’ve learned how Brittish SEO companies with questinable reputation market themselves. I just received the below e-mail from an employee at WebsearchPR in Brighton, UK. The first impression is that this SEO company needs to do something about their own Google PageRank. For me it would be the first sanity check to do before starting an email marketing (unsolicited) for link broking.

Also, Google only knows about one single page from the site. It’s just as bad when querying Yahoo! They cannot find one single incoming link for Websearch PR. I admit that the site seems to be new, (Netcraft displays a 100% risk), but shouldn’t one get just one tiny incoming link before contacting site owners about buying links?

Also, the Firefox plugin WOT shows a very bad trustrank, which is another sign that WebsearchPR probably isn’t the best company for this kind of service…

from “websearchpr.com”
reply-to “websearchpr.com”
date Sep 20, 2007 4:03 AM
subject Your Complimentary Website Popularity Check

Hello,

I’ve just performed a complimentary link check for you to highlight how popular your website is around the web.

Here is the result:

www.drinkalizer.com is currently linked to by 572 websites. I have used Google to find these links because for most people this is the most important search engine.

A higher number of links pointing to your website means you can achieve far higher rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN – meaning that you attract more customers, make more profit, and benefit from an increasing return on investment.

To achieve the above, the full service we are offering you includes on-going link campaigns plus the peace of mind that your website is always correctly “tuned” to the search engines’ current algorithms (extremely important these days).

To make sure you get the results you need, your actual search engine results are backed by our 2 tier Top 10 Promise:

1. If we don’t achieve first page rankings for your selected search terms on Google, Yahoo, MSN we’ll refund your money!

2. If we don’t then keep you on first page rankings for your selected search terms on Google, Yahoo, MSN we’ll refund your money!

At every stage of your campaign you will be kept fully up to date, with regular reports detailing exactly how your search terms are performing across the search engines.

We are offering you our Top 10 Promise because we are confident in our methods, having achieved excellent results for many of our clients using extremely competitive search terms.

To find out what kind of results our clients have experienced, we are happy to provide you with their contact details so you can contact them directly.

You will also benefit from your own personal account manager whom you may contact at any time should you need any assistance or have any questions.

For full details either reply to this email at enquiries@websearchpr.com, phone 0845 055 9413, or visit our website at www.websearchpr.com.

Also – Newly Released – you can now benefit from entering the massive Chinese market on the Chinese search engines in the Chinese language. Contact us for full details.

Best Regards
Frank Johnson
Senior Promotional Assistant

WebSearchPR.com
Friese-Greene House
15-17 Middle Street
Brighton
BN1 1AL
United Kingdom

Tel: 0845 nnn nnnn
xxxx@websearchpr.com
www.websearchpr.com

I know I shouldn’t, but I just cannot help it. I just have to write a reply asking them if they shouldn’t attend to their own site before looking down on the 572 incoming links that Google reports. We are very happy with them, and even happier about the fact that Yahoo! reports 13,129 incoming links. That’s a pretty good result for a site that has been unattended for more than a year…

from Nikke Lindqvist
to “websearchpr. com” <xxxx@websearchpr.com>
date Sep 20, 2007 1:59 PM
subject Re: Your Complimentary Website Popularity Check
mailed-by gmail.com

Hello Frank,

Thanks for your complimentary link check. I’m very pleased with the
572 incoming links that Google reports, and even happier with the
13,129 incoming links that Yahoo Site Explorer reports.

However, you might want to take a look at your own site’s position in
the search enging results pages. A GooglePR of 0, no incoming links
reported either on Google or Yahoo, only one page indexed in G and Y,
plus a risk rating of 10 from Netcraft…. It just doesn’t look good.
Maybe you should apply your own services before selling them to
others?

I also couldn’t help to notice that you have a very poor trust ranking
with WOT, something you might want to look into while you are at it.

Best regards,
Nikke Lindqvist http://www.lindqvist.com

I’ll get back with their reply if I ever get one.

This post is also available in Swedish as Länksäljarmail från WebsearchPR i Brighton

Google proxy hacking

Via Elias Kai, I found Dan Ties, voluptous account about the black-hat SEO method called Google proxy hacking, and the mesures he and his client has taken to fight malicious use of this weeknes in Google.

It’s a long read, but well worth the effort, and don’t forget about the comments as well.

Akismet counter for locally hosted blogs

One of the perks you get when using a WordPress hosted blog, is the ability to display the Akismet counter as a widget in the sidebar. Today I set out to do something like it on my locally hosted blogs. It’s maybe not as elegant, but it works.Just place this piece of code anywhere outside the loop (I recommend to put it in the sidebar):

<ul><li><h2>Akismet Counter</h2><?php$AksimetCount = number_format(get_option(‘akismet_spam_count’));
if($AksimetCount){
print($AksimetCount.” spam comments blocked by <a href=\”http://akismet.com/\”>Aksimet</a>.”);
} ?></li></ul>

The conditional if is only there in case you ever turn Aksimet off. I did yesterday when updating one of my older blogs, and when I turned it on again after half an hour I had to manually delete 20 spam comments.

If you use it, I hope you leave the link to Aksimet, which I regard as the single most important anti-spam project ever.

This post is also published in Swedish as Visa antalet spam-kommentarer som stoppats av Aksimet

WordPress 2.2 hangs with Google sitemap generator 2.7.1

Did you upgrade your own, locally hosted WordPress blog to WordPress 2.2? Does you browser suddenly hang whenever you try to save, save and continue editing or maybe publish a post?

Take a look in your plugin directory, and if you happen to have Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress version 2.7.1… well that’s the reason your browser hangs on you. It took me a couple of hours to figure out.

Go update to version 3, which is still in beta, but works so much better, and has lots of improvements.

How to effectively hide a site from Google

I just wrote an article in Swedish titled 25 saker som sänker din sajt hos Google. That’s 25 things that will get your site in trouble with Google. It’s an attempt to summarize the mistakes that I see every day on sites with really clueless webmasters.

Here’s a localised summary in English of the  25 points:

1. Don’t use any text on the site’s front page. (Use an image or a Flash movie and some javascript that opens a popup or accesses a deep frameset).
2. Don’t use a title tag, or put something totally meaningless in the tag. Then use the same technique and the exact same title text on the entire site.
3. Use Flash or an advanced javascript for all navigational menues on the site. Make it impossible for Googlebot to connect an url with any linked text.
4. Use framesets where all empedded frames are orphaned, without links to the site’s main page and without any text based navigation what so ever.
5. Use a CMS that requires your visitors to accept cookies, and which, if a visitor won’t accept cookies either will add mile long session variables to your URL’s, or even better, redirect any visitor (including Googlebot) to a page explaining that cookies are required to visit the site.
6. Do not use H-headers. Instead code any headers on the site with larger font or even better. Use images for all headers and just don’t use the alt attributes for the img tag.
7. Only link to sites covering other topics than your site.
8. Don’t strive to get any links from site covering your own topic. Ask for links from off-topic sites.
9. Use as many and as long parameters in your urls as you can (asp.aspx?page=928908987s98s&context=klh28979s87987989&nav=liki987879879898…)
10. Place long javascript elements early in your html code. Overall use a lot of code on your pages before you get to the little text there is. (It is, of course more effective to only publish text as images or flash, but that can be a little too complicated at times…)
11. Build your site with very heavy pages consisting almost entirely of javascript, flash and images. Never use the alt, title, noflash, flasccontent codes and attributes.
12. Use a mixture of various html-dialects in your html code, i.e. let pages presen themselves as xhtml and then code them with various html 4 specific attributes.
13. Use a lot of public domain text or even borrowed (stolen) content on your site. Text elements that can easily be found on other sites that are older than your own.
14. Make sure that your robots.txt-file shuts any serious spiders out from the site. (Too easy, I know, almost like cheating.)
15. If you can. Use a technique where every URL on your site is parsed through a 404 page which leaves the 404 server response.
16. Do not display any contact details on your site.
17. Use a server that has a lot of down time, so that the site is gone for days at times.
18. Use a server that is very far from your potential customers. Why not try a server in Korea for your US customers?
19. Code the wrong language version on your pages. Use <html lang=”de”> for pages in english.
20. Don’t code the character set, or use the wrong character set for all pages. That will tell Google not to come searching for any words containing characters such as ü, æ, ä, å, ö, ç…
21. Don’t update your site very often, and if you do, make sure that no updates or changes are reflected on your sites main page. (Don’t change that intro flash…)
22. Link to really questionable sites on the web. Spammers, pron sites, sites banned from Google’s index…
23. Use a domain that has been banned from Google’s index.
24. Avoid deep links to your pages. See to it that it is impossible to deep link to any page other than the main page.
25. Try to contact other webmasters linking in to your site and ask them to link with words such as this, here, click here, that…

I know. There’s more. Please feel free to use the comment feature…

How about a theme with image replacement for text?

I’ve been thinking about a WordPress theme where you let a connected image (one of the images uploaded to a certain post) replace the textual content on the page, while still displaying the text in the html code.

The idea came up today when David and I where looking through Mirande July’s image driven site for her new book No one belongs here more than you. Her site hides all p text, while blowing up images tagged with the ID slide to 100% of both height and width of the available browser window.

Here’s the css code she uses:

*                     { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; outline: 0; }
html, body, p, #slide { height: 100%; width: 100%; }
body                  { font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif; color: #000; overflow: hidden; }
a                     { text-decoration: none; color: #000; }
#nav                  { position: absolute; right: 10px; bottom: 10px; list-style-type: none; width: 200px; height: 60px; }
#nav li, #nav li a    { font-weight: bold; font-size: 40px; height: 60px; line-height: 60px; width: 100px; display: block; color: #ea008b; text-align: center; }
#nav a:hover          { color: #000; }
#prev                 { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; }
#next                 { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 100px; }
#content              { position: absolute; left: -9999px; }

That css code is of course almost useless for picky search engines such as Google, since it states that certain elements, such as the body content should be hidden by default. Not a good idea. It would be very possible to show them by default and then set them to display: false with a javascript at loading time.

Remember, I would never do that to game Google or any other search engine. The image would have to have the very same content as the hidden text.

I think I’ll try it on my Daily photo site at http://200.se/daily-photo/. That site was never really meant to rank in search engines anyway.

We have already started the development. I’ll post here (and here, here and here) when we are done.

Now, the SE angle can seem far fetched for for some people, but searchability is very important to me. It is, after all, what I make my living from. I write a lot about it in Swedish, and those of you who can read Swedish and have an interest will find more of my views on this under sökmotoroptimering and sökbarhet.