Archive for May, 2006

Radio Show, Consulting, Forum updates

I just wanted to inform everyone that I have to push the radio show, forum and consulting stuff off for a bit. Maybe a week or two or even three. Reasons for this is I have one very large project launching, and the damn thing has been lagging due to some business issues that must be resolved and are taking up a lot more time than expected. As soon as it’s all resolved, I will get crackin’ on the webmaster project (radio show, forum, consulting — in that order). I do apologize to everyone for keeping you waiting, but my priorities are business comes first, everything else comes afterwards. I’m sure everyone can understand too. I still plan on doing and discussing everything I said. If anything this push allows people to submit more questions for upcoming radio shows.

The first show will be Me, Lee Dodd, and Shawn Weeks.

The second show will be Me, Shawn, and Tyler “Durden” Cruz.

I plan on having a good search engine cloaker pal of mine come on sometime soon to discuss what works and what doesn’t. Since I’m no longer involved in these blackhat tactics, i figured brining someone who is onto the show would be a good addition, and would help answer the huge amount of questions everyone has.

5/15 Updates..

Some new updates for everyone to check out..

1- Webmaster Forum.
I’ve registered a seperate domain to launch my forum.. It will be FREE for everyone to join, but there will be a premium membership available for those who want to boost their knowledge from a more serious standpoint. The domain will be wickedfire.com. Why Wicked Fire? I don’t know, it sounded like a cool domain, and has nothing to do with anything really. I hope to make it the Wild West of webmaster forums. No censorship whatsoever, banner/image signatures, a real place to discuss whatever is on your mind with your peers. I’m not trying to go against my buddy Chris (Aspen) or any of the other forums out there now, I just think that as far as freedom goes on webmaster boards, they are lacking it. Enough of this “let’s be professionals” crap. Time to let loose, and talk about everything and anything.

For those of you that are serious about your work, and want to also focus on things that are important in the industry, along with gaining extra perks that won’t be included in the regular forum, there will be a place for you. No worries. Premium members will also have more pull on the forum itself, and we’ll have a voting structure to nominate moderators, etc for specific categories.

2- Affiliate Consulting.

I’ll be using my old SEO firm domain name for this, but with a new site layout obviously. The prices will remain the same, but the plans will be very flexible so if you are planning on purchasing one of the questionnaire plans, you’ll be allowed to spread it out. For example, say you purchase the 25 question plan, and you don’t have 25 questions right away, you can spread them out until you do have them. So you can get the answers you need right away, and save the rest for up to 3 months until you have something else to ask.

3- Radio Show.

Finally, it appears as if allergy season is coming to a close. I can now speak without sounding like a duck. Awesome. This means that the radio show is one step closer. I have so many damn people lined up as co-hosts and guests that you guys are really in for a treat. All shows will be available via podcast too! I am going to go the pre-recorded route for a while since I’m in no mood to figure out the live version.

***First Radio Show Episode***

The first guest will be Lee Dodd, the famous forum developer who has made millions with online forums that he starts from scratch. He’s also a good guy to talk to, and he’s agreed to come onto the show, and answer your questions, so post them over at SitePoint or WebsitePublisher in the pre-made threads (Affiliate Program threads), and when the show is ready to go, Lee will pick out 5 or 10 questions to answer. This is a GREAT way to get information on your forums, how to go from zero to hero from a true master of the art. I don’t know anyone else that has ever done so well on so many different niches of forums at one time. He is definitely a super publisher. The co-host for the show will be Shawn Weeks, who is also a funny guy when he’s not watching NASCAR or doing whatever people in the South do for fun.. So spread the word boys and girls, and get ready for a really fun show!!

Want to get a PageRank of 10 in 3 months for FREE? Here’s how..

Now that you’ve seen the title of this post I’m sure you’re thinking “wow Jon, you must be on crack if you think you can get a PR10 in 3 months”. Well, I’m not on crack, but some of my ideas may be. But for this trick, I cannot take credit, as I am not the one who founded it, but I will report it here, because it’s just more proof on how useless the PageRank tool is.

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS A GOOGLE PAGERANK HACK. THIS HACK USES BLACKHAT TECHNIQUES. IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY BLACKHAT TECHNIQUES, PLEASE DO NOT READ BELOW. I WILL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR PEOPLE USING THIS HACK FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT. THIS HACK WAS POSTED FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.
(Pretty weird to see a blog post with such a serious disclaimer on it eh? Well, I don’t feel like stirring up the hornet’s nest over at the Google compound…)

So for years we’ve been told that in order to make the PageRank green bar slide to the right and increase our PR overall we need a ton of inbound links to that specific page, or we just need a bunch of direct links from PR10’s and PR9’s to transfer over their magical PR to our page, and poof, instant high PR. Well, I guess there’s some truth to that, but that little green bar won’t help you get on the top of Google just because it’s greener than the next guy’s green bar (confused yet?). These next few steps will show you how to get your green bar to be whatever PageRank you’d like. Want a PR6? Follow the steps and you’ll get it.. or maybe you want to be conservative and just want a PR9, well, same deal as the other guy. And guess what, it won’t cost you a dime either.. But I must warn you, doing this will not pass any PR onto pages you link to, nor will it get you any high rankings in Google or any of the other engines, hell, you probably won’t even get a single ranking whatsoever, but at least you’ll have your pretty green bar!

On with the show..

Step 1 - Buy a new domain.

Step 2 - 301 Redirect the domain either in you .htaccess, PHP header (anything server side) to a page with the desired page rank. It’s better to redirect to something relevant. For example, if you are doing a mortgage site, redirect to a mortgage site.
for php the code is:

< ?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("location:http://www.whatever.com");
exit;
?>

Step 3 - Link to the page with the redirect from another of your sites that gets regularly spidered by Google. Since you use the Alexa Toolbar, you should have several sites that are spidered daily by google.

Step 4 - Wait for the Google update. Usually once every three months or when they feel like it.

Step 5 - Use cloaking software that has the following in it:

< ?php
if(ip is in list) (list of google IPs){
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("location:http://www.whatever.com");
exit;}
else
{
header(’Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1′);
//Show your site
};
?>

Done.

Following those lovely blackhat steps above will spoof the PageRank tool and give you whatever amount of PageRank your new site needs.

The biggest drawback to doing this is that your site will not actually be indexed by Google as long as you are redirecting the Googlebots to your competitors site, so it’s really only good for showing off your new PageRank on forums and lying to everyone and convincing them you are a solid SEO.

Also, this practice has been used by people who sell links on sites with high PageRank. For those of you buying worthless PageRank from high PR sites that have little or no indexed links, well, now you know how they are doing it.

I’d also like to point out, that if you use the techniques above when trying to sell links on your new fake PR site, that is 100% fraud, and FRAUD, in any shape or form is illegal. So if you’re going to attempt it, do it for fun, and not for profit. Buyer beware.

I do NOT recommend anyone to actually use this for their real sites, it’s just another sign of how useless and overrated the PageRank tool is. 

Special thanks to Quadszilla over at Seo Black Hat for the original article and securty alert.

SEO: Linking Strategy

Here’s my take on what you should do..

For reciprocal links.. Do it yourself and BY HAND. Don’t use one of those 1000+ link directory sites. Keep your links relevant to the PAGES you want to link to. Don’t always use your homepage as the page that the incoming reciprocal link is coming to, and try and mix up your anchor text so it’s not the same damn thing over and over. If you add more keywords and turn your anchor text into more of a one liner description with your primary and secondary keywords inside, you’ll see better results on a broader scale, rather than just hitting one keyword at a time.

For direct links.. outsource it. I always do. Don’t buy those pay per month links either, because those aren’t permanent if you decide you don’t want to shell out $50 a month anymore. Get someone from elance or RAC or somewhere like that and make them understand that you want RELEVANT and TOPIC RELATED direct links. They’ll probably charge you a one time fee of $10-$20 per link, but it’s a premanent link so it’s probably worth it. Don’t worry about pagerank either, because it’s fairly useless. Make sure the pages that are linking to you are ones that are visited often by the engines and are RELEVANT to your PAGES. Follow the same anchor text rules as above..

Be patient and once the link has been established LEAVE IT ALONE. Don’t play around with it. Let the engines take it’s course and keep updating your links every month. Don’t get greedy either. A maximum of 30 links per month is just fine.

This should give you substantial rankings over the next 3-6 months. Follow this method and I can almost assure you it will beat out whatever current method you’re using. If you’re worried about using this on a primary site of yours, then you should have test/dummy sites where you use them for testing out new seo methods without risking your primary sites.

Radio Demo Coming Soon

Quick update for those of you excited about my upcoming radio shows, I’ve decided to record a quick 5-10 minute radio demo without any intro voiceovers or bells and whistles. I’m going to address a few questions from the Radio Show 001 comments page and test out the quality and whatnot. I’d really appreciate as much feedback from it as possible. Expect it early this week. I may even do it as early as tomorrow. It will be available via an internal flash player, so if you don’t have the required plugins (to avoid that annoying FireFox window that comes up) get it from Macromedia.com.

Hopefully after the feedback from the demo, and as soon as the voiceover intro’s are done, the radio show will launch in full swing. As I’ve said before, I have a lot of great personalities from the industry that are very excited to participate. No one is getting paid to do any of it, and I’m not making any money off it either. It’s just another way of giving something back to the community and helping it grow.

I’d like to give special thanks to Zain from Professional Designers for supplying the player and hosting of the mp3’s, and also to Deron from Creation Nation for hooking me up with a voiceover firm to professionally produce the show.

When the first radio show launches I’ll release the full lineup of guest hosts, and which types of topics we’ll be covering a week in advance or so before it airs. For now, all shows will be pre-recorded, but I’m trying to work something out to have it as a live show with webmasters being able to call in, participate in the action, and ask questions.

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