You see, Warner Bros. Entertainment – the copyright owners of the US-side of the show – have started to request that YouTube blocks clips of its show. I’ll admit that the reason that I went ahead with WL365 was because for years they didn’t seem to care that WLIIA clips were being shared on YouTube – just my luck that they start to care now, but I can’t exactly argue. Regardless… given the fact that a) the majority of the clips available online are for the US version of the show, b) they’re starting to disappear one-by-one with no sign of stopping, c) I don’t want to get into any trouble for sharing them and d) I’m insanely busy in other aspects of my life as it is, I’ve decided to pull the plug on the project.

R.I.P. Whose Line 365. It was fun while it lasted. You may have been a Mochrie, but you went out in Stile(s). Take Care(y).

Earlier this week I shared one of a number of professional headshots I’d had done, taken by the wonderful Peter Rowlands of P & M Photography:

Loving the professional photos I had done by @p_m_photography last week. Here’s one of them: ow.ly/i/2jWCc

— Steve Morgan (@steviephil) June 10, 2013

I chose a green background for a few of the photos to coincide with the branding. However I didn’t expect people to make this observation…

@steviephil Looking good! Is the green background so you can photoshop yourself in front of famous landmarks and underwater scenes?

— Jen Thornton (@jenthornton01) June 10, 2013

@steviephil nice solid background – perfect for photoshopping you into random situations

— Chris Dyson (@ChrisLDyson) June 10, 2013

Uh-oh. Well you can tell what happened next…

I visited China!

@steviephil hehehhetwitpic.com/cwfyv2

— Jen Thornton (@jenthornton01) June 10, 2013

And the moon!

@andrew_isidoro @steviephil @chrisldyson twitter.com/kelvinnewman/s…

— kelvin newman (@kelvinnewman) June 10, 2013

I took Wally’s place in Where’s Stevie? (which I was a massive fan of as a kid)!

@steviephil There he is! twitter.com/nicktaylor3/st…

— Nick Taylor (@nicktaylor3) June 10, 2013

(My favourite thing about this one was that it actually took a while to find me…!)

I even made some high-profile appearances, on the BBC…

What’s this? The BBC have a new celebrity newsreader? cc @kelvinnewman @steviephil @chrisldyson twitpic.com/cwgeoh

— Andrew Isidoro (@Andrew_Isidoro) June 10, 2013

…and on Britain’s Got Talent:

@steviephil @andrew_isidoro @ffion_sian twitter.com/pete_fry/statu…

— Pete Fry (@pete_fry) June 11, 2013

(Move over, Cowell! Literally. You can sit next to me, but out of frame. Got it? Good.)

So… Lessons learnt:

• Be careful sharing photos with a green background.
• …Especially on Twitter.
• People have too much time on their hands…!
• I hate you all.
• The only thing that’s missing? CAPTIONS!

[Meme embroidery image credit: Sarah (Totally Severe)]

In early April I started a blog 365 project: Whose Line 365, a blog dedicated to sharing a Whose Line Is It Anyway? clip from YouTube every day for a year. As it’s just hit its 50th post, I wanted to go into the reason why I started it and also what I’ve learnt so far from the experience.

Well… the first part – the reason – is as simple as this: I love the show. The blog’s About page reveals how I came up with the idea to do it as a blog 365 project:

I once joked with my wife that “watching a Whose Line clip a day is good for the soul.” As a keen blogger elsewhere, the light-bulb moment happened, and the rest should be obvious!

I’ve had a lot of fun doing it so far. Watching a clip a day – or a few in one go – has been awesome. I was watching clips regularly anyway, so it’s not really that much more effort to grab the YouTube embed code and throw it up as a blog post.

That said, I can’t believe I’m only 1/7th of the way through it all. It already feels like I’ve been doing it forever! Even this early on I feel like I’ve learnt a lot and so I wanted to share my experiences so far as well as advice for those thinking of doing a blog 365 project of their own!

Make sure it’s viable

If you’re doing a blog 365 project that’s similar in nature to mine then make sure that there’s actually enough material to last 365 days. Fortunately for me, there’s a ridiculous amount of WLIIA scenes on YouTube. I mean crikey – I could probably do 365 clips of just Party Quirks scenes alone!

For most blog 365 projects it’s fine – if it’s something like a photo a day, you can never run out of ideas and possibilities (unless it’s focused on a niche – e.g. ‘photos of x’ – which might be limited). But if you’re working off a finite list, make sure before starting that it’s able to last. You don’t want to be halfway through the project only to realise that you won’t be able to finish it.

Build up a queue of posts (if it helps)

Going into this, I knew I couldn’t literally upload a post a day. Thankfully, WordPress allows you to schedule posts in advance. Even though a friend of mine told me that my process ruins the authenticity of blogging every day. which is the point of such a project, I just knew I couldn’t do it unless I queued posts in advance.

I try to have a week’s worth of posts scheduled, then add 7 more each weekend or one evening when I’m not busy. For those in a similar situation, who worry that they may not be able to put some time aside each day, then scheduling may be the way to go for you, too.

Make use of proper tagging and categorisation

Although not necessary, making use of tags and categories can be extremely valuable for archiving purposes. Whose Line 365 has three main categories: Scenes, Stars and Version. So whether someone wants to mine through the blog’s Hoedown or Scenes From A Hat scenes, watch all scenes starring Colin or Ryan (or a particular celeb, e.g. Stephen Colbert, Robin Williams or Whoopi Goldberg) or want to watch just the US or UK versions, then they have that opportunity.

As an added bonus, it’s great for SEO. The blog is already starting to rank for keywords where people are searching for specific scenes (e.g. as I type this, it’s on page 1 of Google for “party quirks”), which means that even more people are likely to discover the blog. As the year goes on, this is only going to improve, as more scenes are added and more people hopefully discover – and share/link to – the blog.

Do outreach!

I love Twitter. And I love doing outreach via Twitter. So it was a no-brainer to contact other dedicated Whose Line communities as well as some of the stars themselves (those who are on Twitter anyway), telling them about the project.

I did it from my personal Twitter profile (@steviephil) to make it a little more personal. I also tried varying each tweet slightly so it wasn’t completely a lazy-looking copy/paste job. Lastly, I made sure to spread them out, so I wasn’t doing them all in one blast (and risk getting reported for spam). Here’s an example tweet:

@gregproops Hey Greg. Check out my blog 365 project: @whoseline365 – sharing a #WLIIA clip everyday for a year: bit.ly/WhoseLine365

— Steve Morgan (@steviephil) April 15, 2013

However with people like @DrewFromTV having 650k+ followers, I knew it’d be unlikely that some would even see it, let alone RT it, but it’s worth a shot – it’s not like it costs anything! I also tried to be smart and contacted people when a scene of theirs was the latest one to be shared. The first ‘phase’ got a couple of responses:

@steviephil @whoseline365 Remember that day – it was wonderful. Always adored Peter Cook. Thanks for bringing back a happy memory.

— Josie Lawrence (@josielawrence1) April 24, 2013

@steviephil @whoseline365 Xoxo

— Richard Simmons (@TheWeightSaint) May 9, 2013

Phase 2 will target those who didn’t respond, saying something like: “In case you missed it… I started a blog 365 project dedicated to WLIIA! @WhoseLine365: [link].” Because let’s face it – they might’ve just missed the first tweet that I sent them.

Consider a content calendar

This may not apply to all blog 365 projects but it works brilliantly for Whose Line 365. I can time appropriate scenes for seasonal occasions and holidays such as 4th July, Halloween and Christmas.

Additionally, I’ve made a note of many of the main stars’ birthdays, with the intent of sharing a special scene of theirs that day. So far we’ve had Ryan (22nd April) and Drew (23rd May) and I have Wayne and Josie queued as well (whose birthdays are in early June).

Watch out for duplicates

The big risk with something like this – when you’re working off archive footage – is to avoid duplicates. I have a spreadsheet containing the code of every YouTube video (the random string of numbers and characters after the “v=” in the URL, e.g. “ztlCqKkOIsc” for this video), so that I can check that I haven’t already shared it. I know that by the 10th or 11th month, there’s no way that I’m going to remember what I shared in the 1st or 2nd month.

Heck, I admit that it’s not foolproof… I’ve already nearly shared the same Party Quirks scene twice because the video was uploaded twice by two different people, but it helps nonetheless.

Make sure you can do it (i.e. maintain it) on an on-going basis

Another necessity: do you have the time (and drive) to do this for a year? Post something once a day, or schedule a few in one go once a week? It takes a lot of time – more than you might think.

Fortunately for me, every time I think: “ahh, I need to schedule some more posts for Whose Line 365,” I remember how much I enjoy it – watching the scenes and choosing which ones to post.

And finally… Make sure that you enjoy it!

As I’ve said above (more than once!), I love doing it. So make sure it’s something you know you’ll enjoy for a whole year.

A year is a long time – you don’t want to reach the end and feel like you had to finish it for the sake of finishing it. You want to be gutted that it’s over!

I mean come on, how can you watch this and not laugh?!

[Calendar image credit: photosteve101]

I politely told them that this wasn’t a good approach to social media, to which they replied telling me that while they appreciated the feedback, they were annoyed at me for doing it in a way that was public (i.e. not via DM or email instead). I informed them that in a social media space, others wouldn’t afford them that luxury (and would be a lot harsher than I was), and reiterated that I wasn’t having a go – I was only trying to help. They then unfollowed me (charming… but quite funny).

But it’s true. I wasn’t having a go. I was trying to help. I was speaking from experience.

You see, my first ever online marketing campaign – years before I got my start in SEO – was for myself, as a solo musician. In early 2006 I released my first CD (Bad River, a 5-track EP) and wanted to promote it online. So I did it via the social media website I was most prominent on at the time: MySpace (my MySpace profile is still there by the way).

At the time, tons of bands would leave messages on each other’s pages saying “LISTEN TO OUR MUSIC!” or some such. I foolishly took the ‘well if they’re doing it, I can do it too’ approach but tried to be smarter (and less spammy) about it. I only targeted people I was ‘friends’ with, as I thought that would be a softer approach than targeting strangers – my logic was this: if they’ve ‘befriended’ me, they must want to keep up-to-date with my news. O-ho-ho… how naïve I was..

Not only that, but I prefaced my ‘ad drop’ with a little message. Unfortunately I cannot find a live example anymore (I think MySpace changed its comments section in one of its later redesigns) but it basically said something like: “Just a quick message about my new CD. Hoping you don’t mind me sharing this…” I can’t remember the exact message but I thought I’d worded it well – it basically said no worries if you want to delete it but thanks if you’re happy to share. A bit cringe-worthy really. What I thought would be a nice, polite gesture evoked a very different reaction to what I was expecting…

Then I dumped this image (which linked to my music site when clicked):

I had 1,000+ MySpace ‘friends’ at the time (while I didn’t go around adding randoms, I would still accept randoms’ friend requests – an approach that I avoid these days, especially on the likes of LinkedIn), so I dropped the message on a few hundred pages. Instead of prioritising and only doing a few (e.g. people who lived locally to me and might’ve seen me live), I did pretty much everyone. I actually had to do it across a few days, as I hit the limit on the number of pages you can comment on per day a few times. I tried to personalise the message for people I knew, but ultimately I copied and pasted image HTML onto their pages.

I know what you’re thinking… it was stupid. On reflection, it was. I was naïve.

I had a few people get back to me with a less-than-positive attitude. “WTF is this?” “I don’t care about your bullshit.” Etc. etc. I even had one person say that the prefaced message I’d included was an attempt at guilt-tripping – that people would be less inclined to delete it or that I’d make them feel bad if they did. That wasn’t my intent, but obviously that’s how it came across.

A lot got deleted or never went live in the first place. But a lot made it onto pages – a lot were live on people’s profiles for a good few years, especially if they didn’t get many comments or it was an abandoned profile.

Most importantly though… How many CD sales did I make from my efforts? My first ever online marketing campaign?

I think it was about 3.

Hahaha. Yep. It was a complete waste of time and it bugged the hell out of a fair few people – it probably did more damage to my reputation than provided anything positive.

To be fair, I should’ve known better. I’ve been an Internet user since the 90s, so it’s not like I was new to it and simply didn’t know anything about spamming or anything like that. The worst part is that I’d justified it mentally – it thought it would be ok to do, and it wasn’t until afterwards that I’d realised that it really wasn’t cool.

On the plus side, I’ve learnt from it. It’s made me realise that time should be spent on activities that could make more of a difference, whether it’s improving networking, branding and ultimately ROI. What if I spent that time putting on a gig instead? I probably could’ve sold more than 3 CDs and strengthened my position more locally. Or I could’ve hounded record companies instead. Or got to know more musicians who are similar in sound/style to me.

It’s also fed into my way of working in SEO. I wouldn’t dare do something like that now. In fact when it comes to things like guest blogging, I much prefer getting in touch with someone I already know rather than target a stranger. And it’s the approach I’d advise to clients, too (if they already have connections – if not, then starting making some)!

But there we have it… Hopefully that business on Twitter will realise the error of their ways and reevaluate their approach on social media. More than ever, you can’t just bombard people and expect it to go well, both in terms of reputation and ROI. I learnt that the hard way.

["Subterranean Homesick Fail" image credit: Jeroen Mirck]

For over two years, ever since leaving Confused.com in 2011, I’ve considered going self-employed as a full-time SEO freelancer. However, the timing never quite seemed right. But on Friday just gone, I worked my last day at Box UK, which could be my last day in employment for a while. Yep… I’ve taken the plunge. I’m now officially a freelancer – full-time self-employed.

My family have been a big inspiration. My parents have been self-employed for decades, running their own IT recruitment agency, a Spanish rental property business and my dad is also a landlord more locally. I guess you could say that I want to follow in their footsteps.

So… if you’d like to work with me then please let me know. There’s just a brief bit of info about it on this site for now, but soon I will have a separate website for the freelance side of things: MorganOnlineMarketing.co.uk (at the moment it just redirects to SEOno, effectively sending you in an infinite loop… but it’ll be its own site soon).

It’s also pertinent to mention here, as it means that I’ll probably be updating SEOno less often from now on, especially for the next few months, while I get things going. The goal for SEOno was to publish one post per month, and I reckon I can still hit that.

[Knight/lance image credit: Martin Sharman (and before you think "what a weird image choice," you may want to check out the origin of the word "freelance"... Personally I would've preferred to go for the much more cool 'gun for hire,' but that might've given people the wrong idea about what I do...)]

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:

@ejbarnes89 You must’ve seen some crappy links in your time! Hey, now there’s a blog post idea: asking SEOs for the worst link they’ve seen.

— Steve Morgan (@steviephil) April 18, 2013

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
@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”.

Andrew Isidoro
@Andrew_Isidoro
andrewisidoro.co.uk / boxuk.com

A few months ago I was doing a crawl of a list of competitors websites to identify some good content. Clicking on one that had tickled my fancy revealed something both hilarious and sad. The author had tried to include a link in his first sentence to a resource to give a reference to their argument. Unfortunately this author in question hadn’t learnt how to code a link in HTML and had managed to create a blog long anchor text.

Talk about optimising for the long tail…

Alessio Madeyski
@madeale
alessiomadeyski.com

One case that stuck in my mind is one link to a clothing store inside a wine forum.

The connection? They were talking about red wines and one spammer wrote: “yeah, red wines are the best,” and inside “red” there was a link (dofollow of course) to their page with red dresses.

Now… I get you had a link, and so you have the number to prove at the end of the month… but seriously… the brand is happy with that? Your agency? To me this type of spam is extremely stupid and not only for SEO reasons. It’s stupid because you are not creating anything worth it and so you have to do this crappy style.

SEOs should be artists.

Bill Sebald
@billsebald
greenlaneseo.com

In a past life, my agency team was asked by a VP (who knew very little about SEO) to start encouraging our clients to partake in a link wheel to help promote a new sister company. These were big brand names, so there was no chance I was going to honor this request. The misguided VP had success with a link wheel building vendor with his previous company and was completely sold on its potential. To him, this was good SEO. I gave him my point-of-view, and was immediately looped out of his agenda going forward.

Since he had clout, he was able to get many brands to buy-in; some of which were my clients. I found out the hard way that this project had gone through, when a colleague pointed out that this new company had a link page hyperlinked through the copyright symbol in the footer. To this day the link is still there, hidden from users.

Ian Daniels
@surfpunkian
yarddigital.com

Found a delightful batch of exact match anchors pointing at a client site from a sub-domain on a bust Polish Host, the links were executable malware PHP scripts! Lovely. Very competitive niche and these links appeared late March. Have contacted the owners of the going-out-of-business host but looks like there used to be shed loads of Malware!

Austin Walters
@AustinWaltersUK
austinwalters.co.uk

The worst link I ever came across was whilst doing link profile analysis for a client who I had taken over after they had been using another SEO agency and fell out with them. It appeared that the previous SEOs had been using link networks to generate some of their backlinks. There must have been some automation process in place because the title text of the link turned out to be the Username and Password. They used to login to that link network. I Googled that username and password combination and found all the links they had created using that link network and all of them had the same title text. It was quite a well known SEO agency too.

Russell McAthy
@therustybear
russellmcathy.com / stream20.com

Although not technically an SEO by trade I did have to comment on a backlink profile of one of my clients a few months ago. An agency they were working with at the time had been doing a lot of widget links. These links had become so commonplace in their strategy that they actually not only made up about 40% of the overall links but a lot of them had the brand-name spelt incorrectly (which was then copy-pasted when requesting future links). I suppose at least the anchor text wasn’t all brand terms (technically)

Paddy Moogan
@paddymoogan
paddymoogan.com / distilled.net / linkbuildingbook.com

I guess one that sticks out in my mind was a link to a client’s competitor, I think it was in the SaaS industry if I remember correctly. They had a bunch of links that were the result of some kind of link exchange program. Nothing too bad except for one which I looked at which kept crashing my browser for some reason, after a few attempts it finally loaded. It was a reciprocal links page with over 25,000 links on one page! I couldn’t even scroll through them as Chrome kept freezing on me.

Chris Dyson
@ChrisLDyson
tripleseo.com

[NSFW alert]

I’ve redacted the names of the innocent.

About 11 months ago I had a friend refer me to a small business in Leeds as they had been royally Penguinized. The previous SEO company who were also their web designers had been buying links for their site.

Now this SEO firm weren’t buying the links themselves, no they had outsourced it to a firm in the US, and they in turn had passed it on to a person who specialised in SEO for “special interest” sites.

So what his tactic?

To buy or trade links with other “special interest” webmasters.

So in a HUGE Blogroll surrounded by links to British BBWs, DvDa, Canadian GILFs and Berlin Escorts was a link to this family run builders merchants in West Yorkshire.

But this wasn’t one link it was hundreds. I went through blog after blog with blogrolls full of hundreds of links to porn sites with just a solitary little link to my client in the middle of it – sat there all prim & proper like a eunuch at an orgy.

Gaz Copeland
@StokedSEO
stokedseo.co.uk

Competitor analysis throws up all kinds of stuff and at times you just have to stand back and take a minute to fully appreciate how bad a job people can do at building links, and I’m talking about SEO professionals here. I don’t think there’s a particular link which stands out to me as the ultimate “bad link” but back when I worked a lot with small ecommerce sites there were plenty of campaigns which were… less than optimal shall we say? It was often the case that these guys had been paying for an off the shelf link building campaign in good faith, 50 links per month for £200 or similar, sometimes they’d been shelling out for years!

The things that stand out from a couple of particularly horrific campaigns:

- Links being built to multiple versions of the homepage: domain.com, domain.com/index, www.domain.com, etc. etc.

- Links being built from completely off topic websites. Before all the changes in the last 12 months or so and G knocking out many of the link networks this happened A LOT, in fact many of the of the shelf campaigns were run almost 100% this way. It worked at the time but now these sites are suffering heavily.

- Links to pages which didn’t exist. I found on one particular campaign that there’d obviously been a typo in the details being used to run a link building campaign and about 25% of the links were going directly to pages which 404’d… ouch!

Ksenia Dobreva
@massaraksh_
link-assistant.com

I think that the worst one was a link in a blog comment that included the text ‘Please, don’t delete this link, it’s urgent. Need to make report ASAP’.

This is really funny, because 1) Do we really care? 2) I wonder who was to receive this ‘report’ built of such links, most posted at once in blog comments or probably forums… And this is fun that people care about such sophisticated things like link profiles and reports while doing trash link building. I think this comment has become a meme for all the people I shared this case with. Such a desperate call for solidarity, yet with a hint of hopelessness.

Kevin Ellen
@Kevin_Ellen_
icrossing.co.uk

Perhaps not the worst-worst links ever seen by my eyes, but definitely valuable for a shoutout!

I am browsing the Bing forums for a client, to gain more insights on how Bing works and everything, and I came across pages filled with posts like this…

I don’t think I need to say more

Jonathan Walker
@jonwalkerseo
jonathanwalker.me

When conducting an audit while winning work from a local rival, I found some astonishing examples of spammy link building work, which worryingly had only been implemented within the past few months.

Their previous agency had inserted a link (complete with matching anchor text for their “money” keyword) on a number of irrelevant websites, which themselves featured a mass of links nicely placed within an iFrame on the page.

The topics of these pages were 100% unrelated the topic of the client’s website, they really couldn’t have been more irrelevant if they had tried, they included pages listing “Indian IT companies”, “Indian Animal Resources” and my favourite picks of the bunch which I’ll describe as a performance enhancing “Pharmaceutical” product page!

Looking through these links made me feel quite nostalgic, it reminded me of how link building was when I got into SEO back in 2005.

Matt Ridout
@mridout196
seounique.com / farfetch.com

Not too long ago the company I work for underwent a third round of financial investment. Our company worked with journalists and PR companies to ensure the news was picked up internationally and by the end of the week we had secured a large number of very authoritative links from some great locations. However one internationally known publication that had previously linked to us (on a separate occasion) decided that readers would be better suited following a link to their own internal search results for our name, even though the story was very specifically about us. More than anything it was just a really bad user experience as their internal search results only had 2 news stories on us and one of those was the article with the link – generally when you see a brand name hyperlinked you generally expect to be able to visit that website. Were they hoarding PageRank or was it a genuine mistake? I wasn’t sure but I hope they change their policy moving forward.

Tom Roberts
@tjproberts
sowhatmedia.co.uk

So, I currently carry out some in-house work for a financial services company. We’ve got a number of competitors in the UK and I was carrying out some research on them to identify potential content partners and low-hanging fruit.

All the usual suspects are there – paid site-wide links, blogrolls, advertorials to make Interflora cringe and so on. One competitor, however, really stood out with some of their guest blogging efforts.

Guest blogging lends itself well to this industry, as a number of market commentators can breakdown the intricacies of the sector into digestible pieces. You get a few examples of guest blogs being quite promotional and also those that look artificially placed, but our competitor takes the biscuit. Or rather, they fall fowl…

The competitor in question has decided not to place their content on relevant blogs with relevant audiences. They’ve even foregone writing content related to their site. No, this savvy competitor has simply bought exact-match anchor text links in the middle of blog posts about free range turkeys.

That’s free range turkeys.

We’re talking about an industry that has sky rocketed since the global financial crisis and markets where up to $4 trillion is traded every day. And they have a link in the middle of the blog post about free range turkeys.

It’s safe to say, when Google sees that, I think they’re stuffed.

Russell O’Sullivan
@russosullivan
roland.co.uk

When I was working for Healthspan and did quite a bit of competitor analysis, I was looking at one of our main competitors (a well-known brand) and found that they had an enormous amount of backlinks to their site. Now at the time, they weren’t running a blog either which for me, made it pretty suspicious that they would have so many for certain words… especially outside of brand terms. I did some more digging and found that they were on a host of non-UK (mainly Philippines or Malaysian websites)… I am sure if I did the same analysis today they would all be gone, but if you have back links to your site in this day and age, it doesn’t take more than someone with half a brain to work out whether its paid or non-paid.

Another tactic that stands out like a sore thumb are advertorials. Now we all know where that has got Interflora of recent, but the fact that they were so openly touted from publishing houses makes for a pretty poor relationship from the start. If you are going down this route, then be sure to write a piece of content that’s actually relevant to the host site/area and that doesn’t scream “…I am PAID for…”!

I am not suggesting that you ditch paid links (that’s your call) but be a little bit careful about it and make sure that the host site has some kind of relationship to the business you own or are selling – or sooner or later Mr Cutts will be coming for you!

Ruth Burr
@ruthburr
seomoz.org

I’ve seen a lot of bad links – most of them just poorly done or transparently spammy, rather than bad in an interesting way. One of the worst links I’ve seen was actually more the product of the link builder not really getting SEO than malicious intent. I did some consulting for a company that provided business software. The person whom they’d contracted to build links had gotten the memo that guest blog posting was a good way to build links, and that targeting popular keywords was important, but hadn’t really put much thought into it beyond that. He was simply going out and getting guest blog post opportunities on whichever blog he could, regardless of whether it was related to the product. Then he would choose high-volume keywords based solely on that – high volume. The keywords he was targeting with these posts had nothing to do with, well, anything. Certainly not with the product, and not really with each other, either. Around Halloween he ended up posting on a sports blog targeting a popular keyword at the time: “Dog the Bounty Hunter costume.” Needless to say, the links from that post drove zero traffic. To this day, I think “Dog the Bounty Hunter costume” when I see links in a blog post that have nothing to do with the content of the post.

Branded3 Data Insights Team
@ejbarnes89, @andrewradburn,
@MichaelAuty, @TypeAccord
branded3.com

[Note from Steve: some of the B3 guys wanted to do a joint entry, rather than separate ones]

[NSFW alert]

So these links come from myself [@ejbarnes89], @typeaccord, @michaelauty and @andrewradburn – collectively known as Branded3′s Data Insights Team. Here’s some of the kind of links we found whilst doing some backlink audits:

- Rubber Fetish site (natural link to a client who sold rubber boots)
- Group Sex Forum (natural link to a travel client – some people were planning some kind of group sex trip…)
- Utter spam sites with no common theme and every post is paid, the whole sidebar is spammy
- Sites with the sparkly gifs all over the place that were made in the 90s
- Just found one where in the middle of the word “carpets” they linked from “pets” to a pet-store! Unbelievable!

We see loads of genuine businesses (usually local) that have really spammy “links” pages – full of anchor text links to sites that aren’t always even in the same kind of niche. Obviously someone came to them and said “we’ll pay you money” and they thought “Why not” – it’s just, astounding.

Peter Attia
@PeterAttia
cucumbernebula.com

I’d say the worst link I’ve ever seen was a completely white hat link. The reason it was horrible wasn’t because of the type of link, but how it got there. The owner of an agency had a really big client that he was afraid to lose. He decided to switch out one of their links on their homepage to a link of a page he created. This way he’d get extra traffic to his page and was able to show that it was getting traffic. However, in reality the client wasn’t gaining any extra traffic at all, it was just going somewhere different.

Patrick Hathaway
@HathawayP
saloonofliterature.com / ideasbynet.com

[NSFW alert (sort of...)]

If you ever find yourself bored of life, and just need that little push towards Ending It All, why not try a nice big link removal job? You’ll be tearing your eyes out in no time.

I was there, when I saw it. Right on the brink. As I ploughed through my thirty thousandth link, with the thumb of my left hand gouging deep into the socket of my right eye, it was right there.

I paused, then held a tea towel up to my face to quell the bleeding. After all the syndicated articles, spam comments, worthless directories and Spunshit, this link stood out like a sore eye. I hadn’t come across many paid links that were still live, so whenever I did I was always a little intrigued.

And this was the best of the bunch – a much prized edu link. This rare breed is of course considered the crème de la crème – a link builders dream. Every SEO knows that Google favours such links above all others, due to the indisputable trust our fabled Universities carry. These prestigious learning institutes employ only the finest minds, passing on their learnings to the most upstanding and honourable members of civilization. Their Deans sign off every outgoing link from their websites, such as to maintain the rigour that has stood them firm for generations. Such as the links found below, nestled surreptitiously in the footer of a webpage, for none other than the California Institute of Technology Chess Club (Founded Oct 2002):

Note: No offence intended to any suicide victims.

Oliver H.G. Mason
@ohgm
ohgm.co.uk / seogadget.com

[NSFW alert]

I do a lot of link audits at work, so I get to see a lot of high quality editorially awarded links. All the quality tends to blend together in my memory, so I can only remember unusual anchors, domains or positioning:

- The worst anchors I’ve seen were high volume child porn based pointing to a website selling clothing. Hundreds of explicit anchors were each linking to the site from hundreds/thousands of pretty awful pages.  I think this was more a test than an attack (a variant on spraying a site with Viagra or Poker terms).

- My favourite anchor text was for a website selling football kits going to a product page with the anchor “3D dinosaur cock”. The link was placed outside the html tags on a single page. I still can’t understand who built it, or why. It’s still not ranking for the term.

- The most uncomfortable legitimate links were from a website specialising in user generated Sonic the Hedgehog pornography and roleplay. The linked to website was fairly unrelated, but the users were giving hearty recommendations for their service.

- The most beautiful kind of spam is where the comments are followed, not vetted, and not paginated causing the page to struggle to load under the weight of 13,789 opinions and breaking the styling completely.

- Discovered today. A link on more than one of those penalised newspaper domains, sitewide ( over 45,000 linking pages each), cloaked away in the source code (under the heading “sponsored”) and using the anchor “Used Cars”.

Paul Gailey
@paulgailey
paulgailey.com

The Evil Dropcatch & EMD Pivot

Other than the usual link mistakes that make you wince, be it incorrect syntax or typos I’ve witnessed some vile links in high places because I’ve operated in the PPC (Pills, Paydayloans, Casinos) link neighbourhoods.

The most recent sleuthy tactic that made me draw a sharp breath recently was the case of the dropcaught .org that a decade ago had naturally amassed thousands of DA 90+ links.

Because the third sector has a tendency to spawn volunteer unofficial sites, that are broad partnerships, they often attain a semi-official status when there is a major cause that hits the mainstream. And when I say mainstream I’m talking about global pop icons, like Bono and Sting and Gaga pushing the cause. Thereafter they snowball links from high places, irrespective of their legitimacy to the official status of the lead organisation.

Then over time, the movement either fizzles out, achieves it’s objective, and sometimes the politicisation of the movement ends the grand project amid sour feelings within the movement. The sites run down, the volunteers move on and the bandwagon goes elsewhere.

However, historical links to the site are rarely if ever removed, particularly from high DA domains with archive pages and huge sites. Along cruises a PPC type, scoops the domain at the 10 year expiry, renames their entire business to the EMD and produces content very similar to the .org original keyword universe.

Thankfully, this desperate measure it’s neither common or as effective as you may assume, because the more their site grows, the more the link profile appears to be highly unusual as all inbound links are homepage only.

Tad Chef
@onreact_com
onreact.com

The worst link I’ve ever seen? I’m not sure. In the recent months I have been cleaning up “unnatural links” most of the time and it was awful! I’ve seen so much crap that I had to erase most of it from my memory to stay sane. One particular case was so bizarre though I have to share it with you. At first it seemed it was just a small bad link but the more I looked the worse it became.

In the beginning I overlooked it. I looked for sites with thousands, hundreds or at least dozens of links leading to my client. Then I looked for high PageRank links etc. and this link from a worthless site was neither really important nor one of the most offending ones.

It was on a page called sponsors.php and dealing with sponsors despite not being a paid link. It wasn’t paid for to manipulate PageRank that is. It didn’t use the “nofollow” attribute though. It was simply a page stating that several big brands and my client were “sponsoring” a sweepstakes. So I added it to my long list of questionable links that Google can view as unnatural.

We had to deal with that unnatural links penalty repeatedly so I needed to keep on looking after the first disavows and reinclusion requests didn’t work out. So I looked again, checking every single backlink on that link profile.

Then I’ve found another two sponsors.php links on another two sites. They looked similar to the first one. I thought it was some poor content drone who copy and pasted this elsewhere. Still I started looking for more sponsors.php sites including the company name of my client by searching Google for the [brand] allinurl:sponsors.php and what did I find?

A 12 or more of very similar pages or various low quality sites from different domains. I searched even more using Majestic SEO and finally found approx. 30 pages on 30 domains with these sponsor-links.

Also that’s not even the end of the story. The links have been included on 30 sites automatically but two of them customized them too so our change to nofollow didn’t work everywhere. One of the links was even hidden and only reachable through a tiny “more” link. So we had everything a quality rater would want to ban us for in one single link, a link farm, automation, paid links, hidden links, you name it.

A colleague of mine found them even faster just by checking for links from the same IP.

That’s what a I learned here, do not assume that people aren’t that stupid. Al-ways look for the utterly obvious stuff too. Otherwise you might overlook 30 automated “sponsor” links on the same IP.

Jeremy Rivera
@Ravenjeremy
raventools.com

When I started learning SEO it was as a customer support representative for a real estate hosting company around 2006 and a customer called in to complain that he suddenly had no traffic to his site. Digging into his site, I saw his respectable amount of organic traffic had indeed suddenly stopped, so looking around the site I came upon a page he had linked off the homepage with white text on a white background.

I was amazed at the size of the link farm I had just discovered. The page had over 3 to 4k anchor text outbound links to what seemed to be every directory on the internet and hundreds and hundreds of Realtors. He had apparently used that page to stuff all of the reciprocal links so he could get entered into every single directory and also had contacted hundreds of other real estate agents and convinced them to exchange reciprocal links. Just the sheer scale and time he must have applied to get that done still amazes me. Of course, he got pretty angry and didn’t believe me when I suggested that he had triggered a penalty from Google for unnatural linking because he said something like “How else am I supposed to get links?!” before asking for my supervisor who told him the same thing.

Ahmed ‘Aki’ Khalifa
@ahmed_khalifa
schuh.co.uk

The term “payday loans” has been one of the most talked about keywords within the past few years. In the past, most SEOs will have noticed several innocent looking websites, which has no relations to payday loans whatsoever, suddenly ranking number one on Google for that keyword because of some shady looking work. “Payday loans” is up there with several other notorious keywords such as those within the industry of adult and a certain performance-enhancing drug (I’m going to try and be discreet so that this page will not rank for those keywords.

But that doesn’t stop the payday sites from joining in the fun. I have spotted a seemingly professional service provider, which has a special payday loan links page. This page is not only hidden from the main navigation bar and homepage, but it links to dozens of other similar websites whilst also encouraging everybody to exchange links by either contacting the site or copy and embed the HTML which is readily available to paste.

And they say link exchange is dead…

Stephen Kenwright
@stekenwright
branded3.com

A few months ago I was training new starters on outreach, and I always cited the same example as the worst links I’ve ever seen… you’d probably expect to see Pinay blogs linking out to bingo sites and payday loan companies, but towards the end of 2011 almost every parent blogger in the Philippines started looking for rifle scopes. They all found “rifle scopes” on the exact same site, but couldn’t manage 150 words on the subject… or even a picture of their new rifle scope. No comments… no shares… despite the fact that around 50 people were all looking for the same thing at the same time… and found it on the same site!

A really terrible link that we were (sort of) responsible for – we designed a football infographic for a betting company… and a rival company stripped the links to our client out of the embed code, and linked the (poorly written) description to their own “casino bonuses”…

Gareth James
@SEO_Doctor
seo-doctor.co.uk

I’ve seen hundreds of crap links in my time and built a fair few myself, but it’s difficult to choose the very worst one. Coming from a professional buying background, ‘buying links’ matched my skill set. The aim was to try and get maximum link equity for the lowest price possible. My example is more of a practice, the practice of blindly acquiring competitors’ links whatever the cost, financially or SEO wise.

During 2009 I worked in the ‘sunglasses’ niche for a global brand. I noticed all the major competitors were buying blogrolls on a highly trusted PR7 unrelated site. The price was US$500/mth and half the blogroll was made up of sunglasses brands, placing links because their competitors had them. A link seller’s dream.

My client wanted to buy the link due to a crazed ego. I emphasised that you could get much more value from the US$6,000/yr, but the ego was strong. In the end I convinced them to let me do a link test on the site. Once I showed them the link was giving very little value, I won my argument. I’ve just checked the site today and a few sunglasses brands are still on the blogroll. Here’s a screenshot:

The 2009 archived page is hilarious though, if only Steve would let me link to it

So… what’s the worst link you’ve seen? What’s your favourite story from the SEOs above? Please let me know in the comments!

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

At @Porterscardiff ready for @CardiffInternet. This is the room that’s been hired out – a small cinema. I LOVE IT. pic.twitter.com/I8BdD2K9OA

— Steve Morgan (@steviephil) April 16, 2013

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

I’ve uploaded the slides to SlideShare:

It seemed a shame sharing the slides but for people to miss out on the live implementation demo. So… I created a screen capture video of it!

Video Transcript

Hello everyone. My name is Steve Morgan, @steviephil on Twitter, and in this video I’m going to talk you through how to implement rel=”author” on a WordPress blog using the Yoast SEO plugin. I recently gave a talk at a local event, called Cardiff Internet, where I talked about how to implement rel=”author”, the benefits, and gave a live demonstration as well, as to how to do it in this way, to implement it in WordPress with Yoast SEO plugin. And passing the slides afterwards, it seemed a shame to just give the slides and people couldn’t see the demonstration unless they were at the talk, so I thought I’d record it as well, so that people have that as well. You can have both the slides and the demonstration all accessible online.

Okay. So I’m going to jump into Firefox, and I’m going to be implementing it on this website. This is my colleague at Box UK, Gafyn Townsend’s blog, BrandAge Design. He’s kindly given me his permission to implement it on his blog for him.

So here’s his Google+ profile. One the things I’m asked him to do in advance is to add BrandAge Design in the ‘Contributor to’ section in the About Section of his Google+ profile. It’s the one of the two things you’ve got to do in order to verify to Google that you are attributed to that blog and you are an author of that blog.

So I’m already logged into the WordPress dashboard. You can see here that the Yoast SEO plugin, also known as the WordPress SEO plugin, is already installed. Before I continue, this is the rich snippets preview tool. It lets you see, well, you’ll see for yourself, now. If I preview one of Gafyn’s blog posts, you’ll see it gives you a preview of how it should look in Google, and as you can see at the moment, it’s just showing a plain listing, with just the title, URL, and meta description. As you can see down here, it says: “Page does not contain authorship markup.” So it’s not currently installed. I just wanted to show that first of all.

So if we go back to WordPress, all you’ve got to do, it’s so simple, it’s brilliant… you go to All Users. We’ll go to Gafyn’s user. Now the Yoast SEO plugin adds this field once it’s installed. I don’t think this field was here before. If you don’t have the plugin installed, I don’t think this one’s here. It’s your Google+ field, and basically it wants you to put your Google+ URL in there.

So as you can see here, I’m going to grab Gafyn’s Google+ URL, which is traditionally plus.google.com/a-whole-bunch-of-numbers. Put it in there. Put in [?rel=author] afterwards, which is a way of acknowledging to Google, saying: “hey, yeah, I am acknowledging this for authorship purposes.” We’ll update the user.

And now if I preview it… ta-da! Gafyn’s Google+ profile is now attributed to all of his blog posts on BrandAge Design, past, present and future. So all of the posts, not just that post, but all of the posts on the site that he’s written so far and any future ones will automatically have that sorted out.

And let me just give you a demonstration of what Yoast has actually done. If I refresh the page now and visit the source code, it’s basically added this in the <head> of each page. Not every page on the blog, just the pages where Gafyn’s an author. And it’s basically just a nut and it will do that for every new post that Gafyn writes. It’s really as simple as that.

So I hope that’s been helpful, and thank you very much for watching. So my name’s Steve Morgan, @steviephil on Twitter. My blog is seono.co.uk, and thank you very much for watching.

In addition to doing the talk at Cardiff Internet, I also did a shortened version the following day at Box UK as a Tech Talk, an internal talk for colleagues. There are only minor differences in the slides, but if you’re interested, they’re also on SlideShare.

I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions or hit any hurdles implementing rel=”author” yourself then feel free to tweet me.

I’d also like to thank Sean Grey (@SeanCGrey) of Confidence On Tap and Gafyn Townsend (@Gafyn) of BrandAge Design for being my guinea pi… err, I mean volunteers for Cardiff Internet and the Box UK Tech Talk (and also the screen capture video), respectively. I’d also like to thank Ben Thomas (@Nonentity) for recommending Screencast-O-Matic for creating the screen capture video.

[Cardiff Internet talk image credit: from the Facebook set, with Greg's permission]

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

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:

Panda 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.”

They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good SEOs like my father, or Rand Fishkin. Decent SEOs, who believed in a day’s work for a day’s pay. Instead they followed the teachings of black hat forums and short-term tactics and didn’t realise that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice.

Now the whole Web stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those copywriters and content creators and bloggers… and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to search.

OCTOBER 16, 2015:

[...] Heard joke once: Businessman goes to SEO consultant. Says he’s got no rankings. Says SERP seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening search engine where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. SEO consultant says “Recommendation is simple. Great Googler Matt Cutts is at conference today. Go and see him. That should help you out.” Man bursts into tears. Says “But, consultant… I am Matt Cutts.” Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.

NOVEMBER 1, 2015:

[...] This last entry. Will shortly email to only people can trust. Tell Sebald I need to check my maildrop. He believes me. If reading this now, whether I am ranking or banned, you will know truth. Whatever the precise nature of this conspiracy, Eric Schmidt responsible. Have done best to make this crawlable. Believe it displays a disturbing image search. Appreciate your recent links and hope Web survives long enough for this to reach you. But different results are in Bing and copywriting is on website. For my own part, regret nothing. Have SEOed sites, free from compromise… and step into the SERPs now without penalty. Rorschach, November 1st, 2015.

[Image credits, in order of appearance: Obi-Fran Kenobi; Logan Zawacki; Shaddai Berron]

A fair bit’s happened recently:

• I’ve joined Cardiff Blogs‘ admin team. Even though I’ve had little involvement with the organsation of the March event (due to illness), I will be involved with future events. If you blog and you’re based in South Wales yet you’ve never been before then what’s stopping you?! Sign up here.
• I was also supposed to give a talk at Ignite Cardiff‘s February event (IC10), but unfortunately had to pull out at the last minute (also due to illness). I’m hoping to have my talk pushed to their next event – IC11 – in May.
• Even though I’d previously reported that I’m on my way to obtaining ‘chartered’ marketer status, it turns out… I’m not. My tutor found out from the CIM that the CAM Diploma doesn’t count towards it. However this is bearing in mind that I’ve received multiple letters and certificates of progress from the CIM saying that I’m on my way to becoming chartered. Pretty bad really… it’s certainly soured my opinion of the CIM. Update: The CIM have cleared this up via Twitter here and here.
• It’s not yet been fully announced, but I’m going to be doing a talk at Cardiff Internet in April. My first ever professional talk! I’ll be talking about rel=”author”. Update: Unfortunately the event has been postponed, so… just ignore this bullet-point, heh!
• I’ve been featured on Lancaster University’s Alumni section. Read my profile writeup here.

Posts on other sites

And here’s a couple of posts I’ve written for my work blog and as guest blogs since last time:

• A Homage to Skies of Arcadia – Gaming Memoirs
• World domination (Google style): international SEO best practices – Box UK