Articles for April 2013

What’s The WORST Link You’ve Ever Seen? SEOs Share Their Stories!

Face collage title image

The mighty Jon Cooper of Point Blank SEO fame recently published a sequel to his Creative Link Building post, the latter/original becoming the most popular article ever to be shared on Inbound.org to date.

Inspired by Jon’s posts, I had a light-bulb moment when chatting to good friend and fellow SEO Emma Barnes:

Instead of the best and/or most creative links SEOs had built, what about the worst they’d seen on their SEOing exploits around the Web, whether it be through link analysis or more randomly?

I decided to ask a number of SEOs in the industry about their experiences, horror stories and/or funny encounters. There were a few caveats though:

  • No outing! All examples must be anonymous so as not to implicate anyone specifically.
  • It didn’t necessarily have to be the spammiest link they’d seen – I was also looking for links that had been poorly executed, incorrectly implemented, etc.

When asking for contributions, a few people declined, feeling a little uncomfortable with getting involved. I could understand, given the nature of the content. However when I had the idea, I never saw it as this negative or hateful post, and so I’m hoping people will see it as a good teaching point – i.e. certainly how not to build links! – and also get a few chuckles out of it.

NOTE: Even with the above caveats, it goes without saying that some of the examples are NSFW, so be careful if you’re reading at work! (I’ve labelled the ones that this applies to.)

Ok, so I’ll kick things off…

Steve Morgan photoSteve Morgan
@steviephil
SEOno.co.uk / boxuk.com

As many SEOs will know, you have some clients who don’t want to get involved with the SEO at all (they just want you to do it all for them), but there are those who like to get stuck in and involved as well. I once had a client while at a previous agency who wanted to help out. I won’t say what industry he was in – let’s just say it was household furniture. Anyway, we’d had discussions about our link building process before (e.g. keep it relevant, keep it high quality, etc.) and so I assumed he had a good idea about the good ways and bad ways to obtain links.

A little while later, he got back to me and told me that he’d just bought 100 links! I was concerned immediately. 100 links at once? Paid links?! I asked him for examples – and that’s when I started to panic. 20 of them were on ‘health’ sites (yep, you guessed it: the ‘v’ word)! The funniest was one that had a blogroll containing a dozen links: 11 of them had anchor text such as “buy [pill name]” and “[another pill name] 100 mg” and in the middle of them? One link all on its own, the odd-one-out, with the anchor text: “buy pine furniture”.

Click to read more!

Getting Your Face In Google: My Cardiff Internet Talk

A week ago (on 16th April) I gave a talk at Cardiff Internet, a local monthly internet marketing event aimed at small business owners. My talk was all about rel="author" implementation and its benefits, containing a live implementation demo on a WordPress blog using the Yoast SEO plugin.

The venue – Porter’s Cardiff – was awesome: the ‘Other Room’ which can be hired “houses a cinema style projector screen and theatre seats:”

Greg (@gregbednarski, CI’s organiser) also took some photos, which can be found on Facebook (you’ll have to login to see them though).

Click to read more!

Introducing… Whose Line 365

* Update: Unfotunately WL365 is no more… *

I’ve been busy! I’ve just launched a pet project called Whose Line 365: a blog 365 project where I’ll be sharing a clip of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (both the UK and US versions) each and every day. It started on 6th April and will continue until 5th April 2014.

If you’re a fan of WLIIA, why not check it out? If you want to be updated as-and-when posts are published, then follow it on Twitter: @WhoseLine365

Whose Line 365 screenshot

Rorschach’s SEO Journal

Given that I work in SEO and that Watchmen is one of my favourite films of all time, I’ve had this idea on the back burner for a while.

I have just one request of you though, dear reader/fellow SEO/fellow Watchmen fan. Please don’t take any of it seriously. Read, laugh and enjoy! 🙂

Full credit for the original text goes to its writer, Alan Moore, who’d probably weep if he knew I’d desecrated his excellent work. Or bludgeon me. Or both. Simultaneously.

OCTOBER 12, 2015:

Rorschach image 1Panda dancing in the algo this morning, version 155. This search engine is afraid of me. I have seen its true SERPs. The results are extended sewers and the sewers are full of spam and when the drains finally scab over, all the black hats will lose rankings. The accumulated filth of all their link wheels and keyword stuffing will foam up about their backlink profiles and all the directory submitters and article spinners will login and type “Save us!”…

…and I’ll look at Google’s search bar on my screen, and type in “no results found.”

Click to read more!