For ages the search engine rankings have been influenced by the links pointing to a site.  Way back when, it used to just be quantity of links but not for long.  People realized it was better to be linked on pages that search engines crawled more regularly and over time this evolved into the race for pagerank.

The pagerank race was easy to understand and track with the Google toolbar.  This helped too many people to be able to game the system and chaos started to prevail as relevancy no longer matter since the link game was too easy to manipulate.  This is when non-internet people started to “googlebomb” the rankings for fun and smart people made alot of money in a very short amount of time.    Read the rest of this entry »

The World category has the most sites and also the most unreviewed sites. 

These categories have more unreviewed sites than listed sites: Adult, Computers, Business, Shopping and Health.  This is probably because these categories are the most likely to be spammed

The categories have the most unreviewed sites (listed in order) #1 World, #2 Business, #3 Regional, #4 Computers  and #5 Arts.  These categories have a lack of editors or high spam or both.

These categories have the most sites (listed in order) #1 World, #2 Regional, #3 Arts, #4  Society and #5 Business.  Kudos to the human DMOZ editors in these categories. 

DMOZ is a huge project and not everything is perfect as I have mentioned earlier.  Before you start complaining about it ask yourself if you have helped the situation or hurt it.  You can help by volunteering.  You can hurt it by submitting your site multiple times with keyword stuffed descriptions.  This increases the work that the human volunteers need to do.  The more work means the bigger the backlog. 

Whether you call it DMOZ, ODP or the Sandbox Buster you should be familiar with it.  Dmoz.org is a powerful and easy tool if you understand it.  DMOZ has been around a long time and people have been complaining it for almost as long. 

It has over 74,000 volunteer human editors that manually review each submission.  Most of these editors are people that are honest.  Some are not.  Some editors because of their personal bias will delete sites and manipulate anchor text and descriptions.  Before you start complaining let’s get real.  Out of 74,000 humans there has to be some bad ones. DMOZ does police itself but because of the great power it carries with its links, Google trustrank and oh yea its FREE it attracts a number of people to try and abuse it. 

If you feel that your site has unjustly not been listed in DMOZ, make sure of a few things.

Did you wait long enough from when you submitted it?  DMOZ has a backlog of over 2 million submissions.  Your submission is probably going to take weeks or months.

Did you follow the DMOZ guidelines?  DMOZ does not allow keyword stuffing.  If you substitute your company name for your keyword, you were probably deleted for that violation.  If your description was longer than 2 sentences and full of CAPITALIZED keywords, it also was probably disregarded.

Does your site has real content?  Would Matt Cutts of Google Quality Control think you have real content?  DMOZ is looking to create a directory of websites not 1 page business card sites. 

If you CAREFULLY read the DMOZ guidelines and followed it and waited and are still not listed, then try to contact the editor for that category.  After waiting a few weeks (don’t forget the 2 million submission backlog) then ask the DMOZ editor for the larger category that your sub-category is a part of.

The concept of six degrees of separation is a commonly understood one.  Pretty much everyone can be connected to anyone through six or less people.  I have a friend in LA, that friend has a friend who is a writer in Hollywood, that write knows an agent, that agent knows Jessica Alba.  So theoretically I could start dating Jessica Alba next week .  Enough about Jessica Alba and moving onto more important things like how does this concept make us money. Read the rest of this entry »

Scraper sites, feed stealers and any other content theivery is not good when you are the victim.  They can create big problems that will hurt your website and possibly lower your traffic.  But they also create a silver lining for all of the havoc they bring.  Be smart and enjoy the silver lining and minimize the havoc.

Read the rest of this entry »

In order to rank you need websites to link to you.  It doesn’t matter how great your content is.  If no one links to you your great content will never get exposed.  How do you find websites to link to you?  Simple - just reverse engineer the backlinks of your competition. 

To reverse engineer the backlinks just do a backlink search for the top 10 ranking sites using Yahoo Site Explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.   Yahoo gives more information than a Google backlink search.  Make sure when you use Y! Site Explorer to use the drop downs to select show inlinks “except from this domain”.  This will remove your competition pages from the results.  Which is good since I doubt your competition is willing to link to you. Read the rest of this entry »

INCUMBENCY

The sites that currently are in the top rankings have the benefit of being the incumbents and it is a huge benefit.  These incumbent sites gain hundreds of free links from scrapers. 

Scrapers sites put up massive amounts of auto-generated content and wrap adsense around it.  Where do these scraper sites get this content?  They simply republish the serps for thousands of keywords.  Thus the link and snippet for the top ranking sites gets republished on hundreds if not thousands of scraper sites.  Read the rest of this entry »

Blogspamming usually refers to automated attacks of jibberish comments that contain links for websites.  I’ve been noticing more people are switching to manual blogspam which if done properly gets past many filters and is profitable.  Read the rest of this entry »

Ever do a search on google.com and have it filled with uk or canadian sites?  It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is really annoying to me.  I don’t want to buy from those websites because it normally means longer shipping times and higher delivery fees.  I want to find suppliers that are close to me (or ones that provide free overnight shipping).

Other countries easily customize their searches to either search the full index or just their country specific tld.  But America has trouble with this feature since .com tld has become so popular for websites around the world.  Search engines can’t really use that as a helpful tool.  And .us tld is not any better since it is not widely used and it is a popular choice for spammers.

Ugh!!!! 

The gang at Sitepal have helped Barry aka Rustybrick turn into a talking cartoon.  They also magically made his voice alot deeper.  This should be very cool the next time Barry covers a conference.  Maybe I can try this for one of my GoodKarma podcast’s.