SEOing and MariOing

This morning and most of this afternoon I was working on sorting out the meta keywords and description tags (still) for my photo website/blog.

In the afternoon I did a bit of work on my photo website about page, and played on Super Mario Bros Wii with Moccle and L a bit.

After dinner I played on Super Mario Bros Wii with Moccle and L for quite a while, then I watched a replay of a webinar with Gauher Chaudhry and Mike Liebner about Free traffic strategies. Mike Liebner was basically just promoting his ArticleUnderground.com scheme, which is a subscription site where you get PLR articles, but the USP is that he has a lot of blogs where you can post a keyword article with a good link(s) back to your own site.

Now, Mike reckoned that his blogs are full of good content, and not link farms, so Google likes them, and thus links from the blogs back to your site with a keyword rich link surrounded by other keywords in the article is very valuable. One of the example sites he gave was tipsanswers.com.

Now to me, that looks like a collection of content poor unrelated articles. I had seen some sites like this with collections of totally unrelated articles, and wondered what on earth the blog owner was doing (just scraping unrelated RSS feeds I had presumed), but now I know.

In the webinar, Mike Liebner kept going on about how you can't trick google, or your site will be banned, so you need to play by their rules and give them what they want, which is high quality content. However, looking at the link farm blog Mike had said as an example, it doesn't seem that he or his members follow that strategy (at least in terms of posts on that link farm blog).

Another thing he (Mike Liebner) said was about ArticleUnderground.com's PLR articles, he said that he started writing the articles himself because most of the PLR articles available were junk. He now outsources his article writing, but said that the articles are good quality, and not third world sweatshop style written by someone in a foreign country who hasn't been to school and doesn't know much English, let alone know anything about the subject they're supposed to be writing about.

Now I clicked through to one of the sites linked from one of the posts on Mike's Link farm blog I mentioned earlier: Example of a badly written article. Now I can't say if this is one of the PLR articles from ArticleUnderground.com, and even if it is, it may be that the user chopped and shaped it, and introduced errors themselves that weren't in the original article, but it doesn't really come across as professional (the website design looks pretty amateur as well).

I'll just go over the article quickly. I don't want to quote the whole article as that may be seen as stealing, so the article they've posted may change after I've written this, and then my comments might not make as much sense, but will quote the bits with mistakes in.

First paragraph looks okay.

Second paragraph starts

As you likely already know, all computers offer Windows software now. That whole issue in the past about Macs not being compatible with Windows is long gone.

Ermm... I think they are trying to say that you should buy anti-virus software even if you have a Mac. The fact that you can run Windows on a Mac has nothing to do with anti-virus software, so this sentence is pointless at best, misleading at worst (you can run Windows on a Mac, but not Windows software unless you also have Windows or something like parallels installed).

Still on the second paragraph:

I am talking about viruses. For some reason the majority of them are created to attack PCs.

For some reason? Obviously it's because PCs are what most people are using.

Well, no one is telling you to look over all PCs

I think they mean overlook PCs.

In reality, PCs are not near as expensive

Should be nearly

remember to attain some good antivirus software for Windows

I've heard of trying to attain enlightenment, maybe good antivirus software is similar? I think they mean obtain some good antivirus software.

The rest of the article isn't too bad actually (though I would still say it was full of fluff rather than rich content), just that second paragraph sounded like it was written by someone in a foreign country who hasn't been to school and doesn't know much English, let alone know anything about the subject they're supposed to be writing about.

Going back to the Webinar with Mike Liebner, one of the things that he said, about 1:21 through the Webinar, was that if Google sees a tag that says 'dofollow' on a link, they won't give it full link juice.

I had heard of nofollow before, but not dofollow. Looking up 'dofollow', I found that is doesn't exist, and is just the same as a normal link. Obviously what Mike had meant was 'nofollow', rather than 'dofollow'. It doesn't give a good impression of his SEO credentials though, if he can get 'nofollow' mixed up with 'dofollow' (though I suppose its better than not knowing about nofollow at all).

What useful info was there? Well, there was lots of info the same as Jeff Johnson had given out before, about using separate hosts on separate IP blocks to host your 'feeder' sites. Having good content, as well as using keyword rich links surrounded by keyword rich text to link to your site, are both quite basic, but good advice. Don't spam article sites with the exact same article linking back to your site - again quite obvious.

I don't think I learned anything new from the Webinar, but it's always good to have some points reinforced.

The weather today was a mixture of mostly cloud and a bit of sun in the morning, then overcast all afternoon and rainy a bit until sunset. The sunset was really nice, with a large grey cloud in front of the sun, lit up orange underneath from the low sun. It was raining, so I didn't go out to take any photos, but the rain also created a nice rainbow looking in the opposite direction to the sun.

Food
Breakfast: Lemon marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese sandwich; Clementine; Small sponge cake with buttercream; Piece of chocolate cereal and biscuit crunch cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Pasta; Carbonara or whatever it is sauce; bacon; ground black pepper; mixed veg. Pudding was 2x Caramel Wafers (delee). Coffee.