What If You Could Walk Through The Internet

This is a very funny video that anyone will get. The greatness of Dave Chappelle and his skit on walking through the internet.

You can visit the website providing the video or watch the video directly.

Points of note:

• Enlargement
• Continued Adult Props
• Adult plus goats
• Timelines of each adult session
• Excessive Pop-Ups
• Being tricked into one thing that turns into another

Pure greatness and enjoy the laugh.

Buying Text Links and Economics

We posted previously how Google contradicts themselves by telling people to ‘get links to your website so we can find you’ and then their minions tell people ‘don’t buy links’ to scare people. One guy in the market speaks his mind to great lengths about buying text links and economics, pointing his finger directly at Google.

I am not a link communist. I freely buy and sell links based solely on their value to search engines. The marketplace for search rankings is a valuable one that will not disappear anytime soon, and I hope to continue to take advantage of it while the opportunity remains. Competition, contracts, property rights, appropriate incentives, and market forces serve us well, and I think those principles of capitalism should be observed and respected rather than decisions that cater only to fear, uncertainty, and doubt for short term solutions.

Link buying exists because of the high margins created by ranking high in natural search engine results if you are looking to get links, you can get newspaper backlinks from Freshlinks using the link. These margins give merchants the ability to use their adspend on areas that will increase their likelihood of top rankings. The competition will fuel itself to a point of saturation and diminishing returns. At this point the “problem” will cease. By allowing the market to run itself, resources will be allocated more efficiently.

He definitely speaks his mind and says exactly what every person feels on the subject. Read the full article. . .

A Quick “How To” for Publishing Text Ads in WordPress

One of our partners posed the question on how to publish our ads in their WordPress blog. This made me think posting it in our blog might make sense. WordPress has so many different themed styles, it can really go anywhere on any template. So this is what our partners have been doing to this point.

Login to your wordpress admin section and navigate to PRESENTATION >> THEME EDITOR. From this screen you should be able to edit the different files located on the right side. If you cannot update the files, WordPress will give a message on setting file permissions.

Click on the file you wish to show the text ads on and it will show the code in the text editor. It could be the foot, sidebar, header or one of the other files. Inside the code, you will need to place your php file inclusion code snip, provided in your LinkWorth account, exactly where you wish the text ads to appear.

One important thing to note is if you are placing your LinkWorth code inside php tags ( < ? and ? > ), you need to omit the php tags provided in the LinkWorth code. If the code is being placed outside of opening and closing php tags, then you need to make sure to include our exact code.

If you have an RSS aggregator, you can also use our RSS feed in place of the file inclusion code.

Of course, if you have any questions, our support will always be there to help.

Straight From The Horses Mouth

After reading a great discussion about buying text links today, many valid points regarding Google being contradictive and possibly violating the anti-trust laws made complete sense. As mentioned over at Threadwatch, Google tells webmasters directly in their guidelines:

If we haven’t picked up your site after several months, it’s possible that our spiders aren’t able to find your pages. If you increase the links pointing to these pages, it’ll improve the chance that we’ll find your site.

Yet, their minions proceed to tell people they wish to abolish companies that help customers do just what they instruct. As the readers point out on the discussion, Google and their employees might be violating the anti-trust laws because what is good for their own pocket is not good for another.

Let this one marinate. . .text link advertising like we provide, has not a single thing to do with any search engine. It happens on a website to website situation and we facilitate the transaction. Is it right for them to dictate what occurs on real estate that is not their own? Then again, with all those billions of dollars, I’m sure they could buy their way out of this one. 😉

How Much To Expect to Spend

Anyone looking to promote their site through optimization and/or link building efforts will have the common question, “How much will it cost?” Unfortunately the exact price is a tough one to say truthfully but one thing for sure, if the market is competitive, it will “take it to make it”. SEO companies that focus primarily in detailed optimization of your site can be extremely pricey. I just read recently of one individual that quotes a minimum start price of $12,000.00 for seo services. That is very high, but not surprising.

One great part of link building is, any type budget can be used. Whether you use LinkWorth or any other service, if your budget calls for only a couple hundred dollars, you should be able to do some link building with it. If you hit the right network, there should be plenty of low priced websites that will fit nicely into your budget. As mentioned above, if your market is very competitive (for example, web hosting), a low budget can be used, but probably not very effectively. On the flip side, very niche markets can be campaigned for low budgets and be very effective.

Promoting your website should be a very important step and money will be required to do so, but make sure to shop prices. There are no guarantees in this business so definitely make sure you do not get locked into any contracts with high monthly bills.

Common steps to become an advertiser

With our process for partners, it only seemed fit to do one for advertisers. 😀 To become an advertiser, there are a few more steps involved, but not too many. The obvious first step would be to visit our advertisers page and read the information provided. Following this, you would need to click the create account button to proceed to our signup form. At this point it will ask for your information, billing method to fund your account with an initial $25 deposit (your money to spend 😉 ) and the creation of your first textual ad. Each field has a question mark that will explain what is required in that field if you get stuck on anything. Then submit your info.

From this point, your account has been created and awaits your email confirmation. Check your email account provided to LinkWorth and it will contain a link to click. This will verify the email you provided is real and you will receive further communication. After verification, you will have access to your account and your first textual ad will be placed in our editorial queue awaiting approval. Pending submissions are usually approved within 12 to 24 hours during normal business days (Monday thru Friday) with weekends possibly lasting a bit longer.

Once your first textual ad is approved, you are ready to start building your campaign. We have the “buy” section setup so you can sort by many different variables. We’ve learned that everyone has their beliefs in what works best, so rather than say don’t buy based on this or don’t buy based on that, we just provide all the available stats available and let you make your decision. Our philosophy is to match apples to apples or even apples to fruit baskets. The more related, the more successful your campaign will become. You must also have a well built site, optimized with plenty of well written content. You want to keep the people around, so give them something they want to read and not put down. Our suggestion is to select partner listings and put them into a wish list.

A wish list is a great middle ground section between selecting prospective sites to advertise on and actually paying for them. You can thumb through initially and only add the sites you have interest in, even all with the same text ad, then you can go to the wish list and dig deep on each weeding out the one’s that do not fit. You can also set which text ad you wish to use (considering you have built additional ads to use) on each individual site. It is also a great place to set the location your text ads will appear with price, total everything up and see exactly what the monthly price is.

It is now time to buy your advertising from the wish list. Select the ads you wish to purchase, then click the buy button. You will be provided with a confirmation page to review what you have selected, then the option of how to pay. Submitting from this page will finalize payment with a deposit of money into your account and set all of your purchases to pending. An email is sent to each partner selected and they get the final decision to either approve or decline your request. If they approve it, what we call a DEAL is created between you and the partner. You will be notified of each approval or decline, and many other details regarding your campaign. But from this point on, our software handles the rest.

Other situations that could arise are partners approving but not publishing the text ad, in which time will expire and cancel the deal. There is also the chance the partner never responds, which our system will expire and cancel the deal. This situations might require you find replacements. Once the ad is approved and published, our system looks for it to put the final stamp of approval. If our system locates the text ad in the correct location, it is stamped with approved at that point and billed to your account. So a rule of thumb is, you will never be charged for any text ad that our system does not locate on their site. They may approve it, but unless it is published, you are not charged.

These are the simple, yet a bit detailed steps in creating a new advertiser account and getting your first camapaign setup and running. There are many facets of our system so if you ever get stuck, please contact support for help.

What is the next step for a new LinkWorth Partner?

This is a common question we receive from new partners and although we have it listed in a couple of places, we thought speaking about it here might help if someone is searching. 😀

To become a partner, it is very simple. First, visit our partner page and read through the initial information. Once you are ready, click the “create account” button. Then follow the signup process. Once you have created an account, you will need to confirm your email address to activate it. Once the email is activated, your website will be placed in our editorial queue and account will be opened up. You will have access to your account at this point and can login to begin thumbing around.

Once your new submission is approved, an email will be sent to you alerting you that you are successfully listed in our database. At this point, you are up and running. Another common question is “how can I sell ads on my site once my account is live?” There are a couple of extra things you can do to make your listing(s) stand out from the rest; make your listing a featured listing for a small additional charge or enable your account to become a preferred partner.

Featured Listing: This allows you to upgrade your normal listing to a ‘featured’ or ‘sponsored’ listing. These listings are either shown on the top of all the pages where advertisers purchase ads or highlighted within the regular listings, or even both. This brings attention to your site(s) and featured listings tend to have a higher percentage of ads sold than those who are not featured.

Preferred Parter: LinkWorth staff purchases a large percentage of ads through our system. We typically do it on behalf of our customers. As a preferred partner, our staff will first attempt to place ads on your site before we give consideration to non preferred partners. There is never a guarantee because we must match like sites together, but we do give preferential treatment when buying ads. In addition, these listings will also be highlighted within the database to make them stand out as well.

From this point on, it is waiting for people to buy from you. Once you attain your first advertiser, the ad must be published quickly and you have taken the first step. History has proven that partners with at least one ad achieves a higher selling rate than those who have zero. The only thing we can attribute it to is, people like to gravitate towards chartered territory. In other words, they feel someone already did the research if the partner has an ad published, so they tend to pick those first.

There might be smaller tidbits that could help, but this is the main steps in becoming a new partner. Other partners are free to respond with any suggestions they might have below.

Looking for a full service SEO firm

We are currently looking for well established, full service SEO firms that would be willing to help our clients that need the help. LinkWorth is growing at a rapid pace and we are aligning ourselves with options for all clients. We currently provide free advice if it is simple for the client to implement or that we can quickly do for them, but when it comes to a client who truely needs a big facelist with quite a bit of optimization, we need to refer them to someone we know and can trust.
LinkWorth is full of SEO companies using us as a means of advertising for their own clients, so rather than us contacting all of you, we felt it would be more effective to make a post on our site. We will probably take a few firms on due to the demand we have been receiving lately, so if you are looking to provide SEO and can handle a possible big load of referrals, please send a request to NEEDSEO at our domain.com email address. Each request will need to include a minimum of two references of existing or past clients that you have provided work for with contact number and url (information will not be shared with anyone and will be deleted once checked), your company name and website address and direct office phone number with minimum of two contact names with extensions (if applicable).

Again, please send only serious inquiries to NEEDSEO at—linkworth–dot–com.

ihelpyou, inc – a spammer and problem in the SEO industry

One thing fun about the seo business is, anyone can put their horrible picture up on a website and call themselves an expert. We were notified of a guy and his minions that chose to make a few shots at us. At first, we were going to send a simple email to Doug Heil and request that he remove the libel material from his site, but we did a little research and began to see the real story about this guy and his tactics.

We did a search for his company name, and the negative remarks about him being a spammer and problem maker, go on and on. It was at this point we realized they have about as much credit as a street hustler living in a cardboard box. The many sites we found that spoke of him and his minions seemed to follow a similar pattern; they call names and lose more and more credibility. It seems this guy’s sole purpose in life is to flame other individuals and other companies. “Why?” We have no idea, other than possible jealousy, greed, attention or maybe he really thinks he is an expert. It is obvious this guy practices what he preaches … he is a spammer. A great comparison that comes to mind is, take a relationship where a girl is extremely jealous of everything her guy does. . .it is 99% of the time due to the fact she has been the guilty one.

The actual individual that fought for us over there is the one that informed us of the find, contrary to their poor investigative work. A city of several million, one in which we reside and do a large part of business in, yet we are the only one’s in it. 😀 Anyhow, that person found some great reading material to crush any credibility they thought they might have had and it only made sense to include it here with some descriptive anchor tags:

Doug Heil Wanker

I’m not sure if I should be flattered,

 

By WebGuerrilla at Thu, 2005-08-18 13:49 | reply | top

WebGuerrila

I think you are more inclined to contact a lawyer about that.You are 100% correct, there is a huge difference in how you handle a corporate client and how you handle your own domains. I’ve done some bad things on my sites that I wouldn’t even mention to an actual client. Some of the best whitehat SEOs I’ve ever seen have extensive knowledge in blackhat tactics.

I would consider that libel, by labeling you a spammer and someone who should not go near a client. I personally would hate to see my name show up in the SERPs someday in a thread like that. Then again, consider the source. A bunch of guys who are so talented at “whitehat SEO” that they are crying about the price of a plane ticket to a show.

By thePhenomenal at Thu, 2005-08-18 14:15 | reply | write to author | top

I’m not sure if I should be flattered,

or if I should call my attorney. There’s a bit of an entertainment factor involved with being the only person singled out by name.

I just wish Doug would tell the truth. Everytime he gets on his “SES and Spammers” rant, he always fails to mention the fact that he was once given an opportunity to speak at SES. The end result was a bad vaudeville act accept we couldn’t find any rotten fruit to throw at him.

I’ve never seen so many people stand up and walk out while someone was speaking. I’ve also never heard of a speaker getting a rating of zero before. When everything was said and done, he was never asked back because none of the paying attendees wanted to hear what he has to say.

The other point of his rant that is completely absurd is the idea that the “Notorius SES Spammers” are the same people that take on clients and engage in black tactics whitout the clients being aware. That is utter bullshit. (The companies that do that can usually be found in the exhibit hall, not on the speakers podium).

99.99% of black work that has been done by anyone willing to speak about it in public is done on their own personal sites. We’ve all spent time doing pharmaceuticals, debt consolidation, gambling, mortgages, etc. but that work in no way has any bearing on how we apprroach a mainstream client. And it also has absolutely zero impact on whether or not a mainstream client decides to hire us. If anything, they are less apprehensive because they know exactly where we stand because we are willing to answer whatever questions they want to ask honestly.

By WebGuerrilla at Thu, 2005-08-18 13:49 | reply | top

ihelpyou,inc – spammer

Yep

I got to see the fight, and managed to save a copy of danny’s response. Here’s a couple of choice snippets:Doug

Besides, Danny Sullivan just told me that if I posted this “in public” in here, he would ban me for good at the SEW forums. Go for it Danny! Be my guest.

That place is a sham and a shame. They only want people who can agree with spammers and “get along” with spammers. Not a community that’s good for “our” industry in any way, shape, or form.

It’s a sad story when we see our industry being run and used by a bunch of people who condone and “teach” and “celebrate” spammers. I am actually ashamed to be a part of this industry.

Jupiter will go down one day. I’ll be laughing my arse off when they do.

He rants and raves for quite a bit longer but it’s just much of the same…

Danny

quote:
I’m done with them.

You were apparently done with us nearly 300 posts ago. As a reminder, this is what you said when you swooped into our community with your very first post:

quote:
This is my last post in this place.

That was a grand entrance into a community you’d never been part of before. Sort of like kicking a door down, saying I’m here, you all suck, and I’m never coming back. But you did keep coming back, and you were welcomed to as long as you could follow basic rules of behavior. But as explained in my email to you on being premoderated, you didn’t.

I wouldn’t normally discuss this at all, but since you want to make it a public matter on your own board, I’ll spend a few minutes telling my side. Then you can ban me or delete me or just leave the post up as you decide.

Let’s share the post that finally made me decide that — after you’d been warned previously not to flame or be rude to other community members — that you needed to be premoderated.

quote:

Massa; Shut up.

No one listens to you. You flame me. I flame you. We are even.

Very nice, if we were on a kindergarten playground. You hit me; I hit you. It’s not a playground. We want people to respect each other — and as you had been previously told, if you feel others are flaming you, ask a moderator to help. Don’t get into a fight.

You feel upset that the post still counted even though you yourself deleted it? Perhaps you might have followed up with me or Elisabeth on that issue privately. You didn’t do that at all, which makes me think the intent was never really about being able to actually participate in our community.

Instead, you decided you had to go and do a post about how we’ve terribly wronged you. As promised, that’s now resulted in you being banned on our forum. You run a forum, Doug. It’s not easy — well, for you it is perhaps, if you ban people right and left. We don’t. I think we have three or four people banned and one or two on premoderation. By and large, we work to help everyone get along. Someone recently called our board the “Geneva” of search marketing forums, and I loved that. I think the industry could use a Geneva or two.

If you make a decision that you ultimately think is in the best interest of your forum, I think you’d want someone in your community to either respect that or leave. That’s what I told you in my email to you:

quote:
As said, you are on premoderated status. You can post, if those posts are approved. You can live with that decision, and it may be lifted in the future, if Elisabeth feels it is warranted.

If you dislike the decision and feel you need to squawk in whatever “big way” you seem to have in mind, that’s your choice. But if you do so, you won’t be welcome to post here anymore. We’ll simply move you to banned status. The decision was made for a good reason. You can live with it or leave. Being threating isn’t going to change that. Better behavior will.

Apparently, better behavior — after a long history of being warned — wasn’t an option for you. So, you aren’t an option for us.

quote:
Spammers are put above everyone else. I guess it’s because of the “money” they give to Jupiter Media? Money drives greed. Those of us who would never give Jupiter one dime are out of the picture.

Spammers are not put about all else on our forum. Your characterization of our forums in that way is insulting and perhaps even slanderous. The fact that you personally do not want people to discuss things does not mean that others shouldn’t be allowed to do so, nor that there should be usefulness in that, nor that doing so is telling the world to spam, nor that money is being spent to somehow shield “spammers” from talking to the greater world.

We’ve had this discussion before, of course. People can find us doing the back-and-forth here or on our own forum. So I’m not going to get into it again. You have your position; you’re locked to it, and that’s that, I guess.

quote:
So go ahead and threaten me with a ban Danny. See if I truly care what you do. lol Watch me “shake in my shoes.”

As for being threatening, I think you need to spin that mirror around. When you got in touch, let’s remember what you said:

quote:

I want to know exactly why I cannot post anymore? or being “moderated” or something?

If this is indeed the case, you all will hear and see this “in public” in a big way.

Was I supposed to scurry back and worry that because you might be upset, I shouldn’t premoderate you but instead have you continue to perhaps flame people in a way you’d been warned not to before? Were you expecting that you should get some type of “Flame & Get Out Of Jail Free” card? I’m not going to do that for anyone that I think is harmful to the community, sorry.

 

ihelpyou,inc spams

The SEO Fundamentalists Speak Out:
The fact that Nandini’s about 2 month old SEO forums just showed me over 10,000 pages listed in Google and get most of its inbound link popularity from WebAtlas (while linking back to WebAtlas from most of its pages) would indicate to me that this issue is probably a technical glitch, but some SEOs use these sorts of situations as marketing goldmines to promote their own holier than thou^TM SEO beliefs.

Ihelpyou forums moderators showed their truely nasty selves when they wrote digraceful threads on multiple SEO forums.

I’ve read that IHU thread. It’s nothing short of a vicious, malicious, personal attack by a bunch of low life cowards who delight in other peoples misfortune.

With one or two notable exceptions, the thread is populated by the scum of the web community – a poor bunch of outcasts that can find no better place for their whining self justification for poor skillsets than the deranged chuch of heil. Nick W

Lets not forget that this is the same IHY group that was falling all over themselves stating that Nandini and WebAtlas were great just two months ago. Doug even requested a link to his forums.

Of course Doug would not like to be reminded of these types of things, and some of his moderators such as Srikanth state:

none of the members at ihelpyouforums are trying to abuse her. Or, are not against her. We wish her success only.

You do not support a persons work by throwing arbitrary tags on it.

Legitimate Directories:
Doug Heil posted a short list of legitimate directories apparently based upon who frequently posts at his forums. The now good directories include WowDirectory, which Doug Heil also accused of being a spammer in the past.

Keyword Stuffing and What it REALLY does

A lot of sites are guilty of keyword stuffing. There just is no way to honestly work in all of our keywords into readable content we write, so we have to resort to just listing keyword after keyword on the bottom of the page. Some of us even hide it. Does this really work, or does it cause more problems?

I will be honest, I’ve done it before. About 8-10 years ago when I was merely a struggling online vendor, I would try anything to get more traffic to my site. This included stuffing the foot of the page with every keyword I could think of. My thought was, “If I have the keyword on my site, people will find me.” I’m sure better than 90% of the online market thinks this exact same way. Unless you have spent years learning the art of optimization and search algorithms, you have no idea the “do’s and dont’s” of site optimization. Of course, if you are reading this, then you obviously have some knowledge of how things work. 😀

You should definitely understand that stuffing the bottom of your page with tens of hundreds of keywords will not only do no good, but it can easily get you penalized. Search bots are smarter than most people think and while I question they are as smart as the search employee’s make them out to be, they are definitely smart. Something that is laid out like keyword after keyword is very easy to spot. With what limited programming knowledge I have (which is almost none), I can visualize a way to spot keyword stuffing, so these PHD nerds can most definitely spot it.

So be wise and refrain from stuffing your pages with tons of keywords. I know it’s a lot more work, but write real content using your keywords. It will take some time, but eventually you will have a powerhouse site that people will visit just for the information you provide. The old saying that I seem to read every day “Content is King”, is more true than you’ll ever know. . .well, unless you build it. Set aside an hour or two a day, or even a week and put your thoughts down about your product/service. Make sure you use several of your keywords in each topic. It will do much more for your search positioning than keyword stuffing.