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Google Needs Snitches! No Pay, No Vacation Time, Nobody will like you!

Deat Matt Cutts and Google,

I used to love you. I would tell my friends about the “car Google bought”, the mortgage “Adsense was paying for”, and so on. Now you are trying to destroy what you helped create.

In an outright foolish blog post Matt Cutts said, “I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms.”

In other words, “We need data in order to be able to stop people buying links from anyone but us. Please screw other webmasters by being an un-paid rat, we’d appreciate it.”

Google, if you want my advice, stop fighting against webmasters, because if it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t have anything to offer searchers.

Webmasters don’t put content on the internet anymore because they want to. They write and spend money building sites so they can make money.

We don’t need a puppet giving us little tid bits of not actually useful help in “ranking better“.

But now you want us to stop making money by selling text links for page rank? Matt Cutts said, “Ash, there’s absolutely no problem with selling links for traffic (as opposed to PageRank).” How can I, as a webmaster, know what the intention of other webmasters is going to be? How can you, as a search engine, punish me for selling related text links? After all, I must approve links that are put on my pages. So even if they are paid, they are deemed relevant by me. It’s my site, and my content, leave it alone.

Oh, and on another note Cutts also said, “For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt.” Why should I punish people who are buying relevant links on my site by nofollowing them?  After all, didn’t you just say there is “absolutely no problem” with selling links for traffic?

They want a link, I think their site is worthy, they offer to give me money, it’s a win-win-win. It’s a win for me, I get paid. It’s a win for them, they get a relevant link. It’s a win for you, you find another relelvant site.

However, punishing paid links is a lose-lose-draw. I lose because people are scared to buy links. Advertisers lose because I won’t go to the trouble of giving them a link without getting paid. You won’t find the relevant site as easy, even though you’ll find it eventually.

I know with as many minor SERP updates, you can easily filter out 99% of spam. You aren’t going to catch that other 1% of spammers this way.

If you are going to alienate me and tell me that what I’m doing, and will continue to do, is against your rules, does that make me a “black hat”? And since you are saying that I’m on the wrong side of the line, what stops me from going all the way over and joining SEOBlackHat (No nofollow)?

If you still think this “Calling All Snitches” post is a good idea, keep it up.  You’ve just lost a follower and forced someone to the dark side.

Never again yours,

Brandon Hopkins

By |April 15th, 2007|News|5 Comments

My Most Underused WordPress Feature – Post Slug

In a recent post by Glen Stansberry at ProBlogger, Glen talks about blogging’s most underused feature, setting up future posts.

For two of my blogs I actually use that feature pretty often. Every so often something spurs me to start writing for one of these sites, and once I’ve posted 3 posts that day, I start using the future posts option. I schedule one post every day until I run out of steam. Once the steam subsides I usually have 3-5 days worth of posts.

Wordpress Post SlugFor me, the most underused WordPress feature is definitely the post slug. The post slug allows you to set the URL for each post, regardless of what the post title is. Here is an example.

This post is titled, “My Most Underused WordPress Feature – Post Slug”. However I know that most people are going to search for those exact words. Those are words for the readers. For my post slug I want something that is for Google and other bloggers who might link to this post.

My post slug is, “how-to-use-wordpress-post-slug”. So as you are reading this post, look up at the URL. You should see, “https://www.brandon-hopkins.com/how-to-use-wordpress-post-slug“.

The reason I did this is because every little bit of SEO helps. Google will see the url and when someone searches for “How do I use WordPress post slug”, or “WordPress Post Slug uses”, or “How to post slug” they’ll find this post.

There are many other ways to use a post slug. Post slugs are especially wonderful if you post short titles without any keywords, or you post really long titles that mess up your url structure.

Can you imagine seeing this URL on a blog:

https://www.brandon-hopkins.com/my-most-underused-wordpress-

feature-post-slug-how-to-create-post-slugs-and-the-most-

effective-ways-to-use-them/

Pretty ridiculous. But when using post slugs I can make that URL anything I want.

By |April 14th, 2007|SEO/SEM|5 Comments

How To Get 29 Free Links

Here is my personal list of places that I go when I start a new site to get free links. These 29 links always get the ball rolling and help natural links come in.

Blogs

Blogs have become some of my favorite places to get free links. All you have to do is register a blog and post a short article relevant to your site and then post your link. Below you’ll find 24 free blogs in which you can link to your site.

Make sure that you interlink these blogs somewhat so that they all get found by the bots.

1. Squidoo.com
Create a free account, write an article and post a link embedded in the text back to your site.

2. WordPress.com
Create a free blog, write a short post and link back to your site.

3. Blogger.com
Create a free blog and write 3 posts, one linking to your Squidoo lens, one linking to your WordPress.com blog and one linking back to your main site.

4. MindSay.com
Mindsay offers free blogs and wikis. Like the others, create a free blog and post a link back to your website. Also link this blog to your Squidoo lens.

5. BloggerParty.com
Another free blog site. Link your post to one of your other free blogs and your site.

6. BraveNet Blog
Bravenet has been around a LONG time. Like the others, post then link.

7. 3Steps.com
3Steps is new but also free…make sure to continue interlinking these blogs so they all get found and indexed.

8. The Right Blogger
Site seems to be down right now…can’t create new blogs. Check back later.

9. BootsnAll TravelBlogs
You must first be approved as a member, then apply for a blog. Might not be worth the effort. Blog posts must be travel related. Hopefully your niche is travel related as well.

10. iUpload Blog
Another free blog…

11. TravelPod Blog
Travel related free blog site.

12. Bloggates
Free blog, slow site. Many good subdomains are still available.

13. Livejournal
Old, established, easy to use.

14. BlogText.com
Sites don’t seem to index well, but allows a lot of outgoing links.

15. Xanga.com
Does Xanga allow outgoing links? Couldn’t figure it out.

16. Blogigo.com
Allows outgoing links, even had a spammer listed as an example blog in a category…

17. SoulCast.com
Soulcast gives free blogs and allows you to insert your Adsense ID and they’ll automatically publish Adsense code blocks.

18. MyDietBlogger.com
MyDietBlogger offers health and diet blogs for free. Perfect for someone in a health related niche.

19. BlogNow.com.au
Free blog site touting their “No Ads” approach. I don’t know why they’ve chosen to not display ads, because not monetizing and not selling the site doesn’t seem like a good business model. I don’t think you have to by Australian to signup.

20. 20Six.co.uk
Good looking blogs, 1000+ template designs, outgoing links.

21. Vox.com
More free blogs…large site, established.

22. Tripod (remember them?)
Tripod, home to thousands of amateur webmasters has free blogs.

23. Aeonity.com
Free blog site, themes are all similar. Small user community.

24. Blogslive
One of my new favorites. Lots of themes available. Quick loading, outgoing links.

Comments on .edu Blogs

Personally I don’t think SE’s actually abide by the nofollow code. With that in mind I give you some of the best places to post comments.

The reason most of these are great places to comment is because they have PR or are popular posts.

25. PR6 – How the Cookie Crumbled: A Recap of the 2006 Creative Services Holiday Party
Most of the old pages are PR6. Comments are held for the moderator so make them legit.

26. PR4 – Blog comment spam with plagiarized text: hard to spot
Interesting discussion in 2006 relating to blog comment spam.

27. PR4 – Google bombs – Voice option and collective action

28. PR4 – Additional Comments Regarding Computers

29. PR3 – Blog is back to normal
First comment is moderated.

Most of those were found using this method and applying a few more keywords.

Hopefully those 29 locations will inspire you to find other places that will give you a free link!

By |April 13th, 2007|Link Building|72 Comments

Advertise On Any Post With Text-Link-Ads.com!

Text-Link-Ads.com sent me an email this morning about the new ability to allow people to advertise on popular posts on my websites.

This is awesome because some of my sites are full with 10/10 advertisers and therefore fully monetized with text-link-ads.com. This new product will allow me to continue to monetize by writing popular posts.

This will be perfect for people that are popular with Digg or people who have a very strong and loyal following.

Personally I can’t wait to find out more about how it works and to see it in action. I’m sure there will be some bugs to work out, but TLA has awesome support and usually can resolve an issue within a day.

By |April 10th, 2007|Make Money Online, News|0 Comments