joel-comm – Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation | Internet Marketing

Blackhole SEO: Has Google’s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?

Andrew Wee — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:37:26 +0000

Hegemony (from Wikipedia): is a concept that has been used to describe and explain the dominance of one social group over another, such that the ruling group or hegemon acquires some degree of consent from the subordinate, as opposed to dominance purely by force.

Have the forces of blackhole SEO spread beyond the reaches of Wikipedia and eBay to dig it’s claws into Twitter, as Sugarrae has asserted?

Though Rae mentioned the issue last September, SEO specialist Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl tweeted about it yesterday, together with some choice thoughts:

i mean – do you really believe that twitter links are passing NO credibility, NO juice, NO nothing…?? just like wikipedia ….riiiiiiight.

maybe implement a sandbox for new users
certain threshhold until they are trusted enough to get into a non-robots.txt directory

why not utilize robots.txt solution…instead of nofollow?
i guess nofollow in general just gets me riled up and pissed off

What would happen if twitter got rid of the nofollow on all links? How would it affect the web?

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So why’re we revisiting this issue?

Blackhole SEO is where an inherently social site like eBay or Twitter decides to shut it’s doors and stick “nofollow” tags to outgoing links. So in SEO speak, you won’t get any “link juice” or benefit to your Google PageRank from the PR you’ve built at the site.

Taking a survey, Twitter profile pages (the page that is twitter.com/[your username]) does garner pagerank over time.

A rough survey with either the Google toolbar or the search status firefox plugin yields:

Google PageRank (PR) 4

PR 5

PR 6

PR 7

PR 8

Twitter Home page

How do these profile pages build up PR?

It’s unlikely that many twitter users would link build to their user profile, especially since Twitter resides on a public network (ie you don’t own this piece of virtual turf). So it’s likely that these could be links might have resulted from links pointing to your profile page from other twitter users’ profiles, or high authority blogs including blogroll or blog post links to your twitter profile, etc.

If the weight of inbound links is high enough, your twitter profile will earn pagerank. If that’s the case, labelling all outgoing links from your twitter page with the “nofollow” basically tells Google (whom “nofollow” most clearly influences) that the content you’re pointing at does not merit much weight/authority/value…

So given that a PR 5 backlink or 2-way link would be beneficial, the “nofollow” tag may put a downer on twitter users perception of their value to the community, especially since the “blackhole” structure favors twitters own efforts to increase its pagerank.

Granted, there may be some logic in preventing spammers from sqeezing twitter for link juice, but a blanket “nofollow” on links within tweets and on the user profile page (use “view source” to verify the nofollow flag), puts a dampener on things.

As Todd mentions, this blanket approach could be remedied by either a temporary sandbox/holding area for new accounts, or handled via a robots.txt file.

If sites like Squidoo can be effectively managed, and pass link juice to external sites, couldn’t twitter do the same with a little additional intelligence?

If users are spending 1-2 hours each day on your site, why this continued distrust of sites that users are linking to?

If users pointing to poor quality content is an issue, couldn’t the whiz kids at Twitter use some suitable metric to filter the social scammers out?

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Followup post: “DoFollow or NoFollow: The I Can Has Backlink Dilemma“

Affiliates Do Death-Defying Stunts On The Segway…

Andrew Wee — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:35:31 +0000

Have you heard the one about Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins walking with a mock limp along the hallways of the Rio, only to have a sympathetic hotel employee offer a Segway. Shawn gets onto said Segway and rides off into the sunset…Or does he?

Uncensored and via “fake live satellite” (to quote some Jim Kukral Daily Flip parlance, we present spy video and spy pics from the hallways of the Rio.

Note: Please note that these acts are performed by pure amateurs who did not undergo any professional training. Please do not try this at home, or anywhere near beloved household pets…

The Shawn Collins video montage with obligatory pounding bass dance track back:

Monday Question: What’s A Good Niche To Get Into?

Andrew Wee — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:14:30 +0000

Starting this week, I’m kicking off a series of answers to readers questions which will appear every Monday (hence…the “Monday Question”).

Here’s this weeks question: “I’m a new Internet Marketer, which Internet Marketing product do you suggest I start promoting as an affiliate”

My answer: You should pick the area in which you have the greatest affinity.

Note that the most successful Internet Marketers will brand themself in a specific manner, with one identity, for example, you might have:

Joel “AdSense” Comm
Mike “Viral Marketing” Filsaime
Chris “Super Affiliate” McNeeley
John Carlton “The Marketing Rebel”
Michel Fortin “The Copywriting Doctor”
Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse
Gary Ambrose “Viral Listbuilder”

You hardly come across someone who brands themself as a adsense/PPC/eBay/super affiliate/seo/product creator for a reason. You lose credibility because most will not believe you can master so many specializations just a couple of months into the industry.

You might have a few “Godfathers or Grand Daddies of Internet Marketing”, but they are fairly few and far between.

I don’t think any self-respecting individual will refer to themself as a “guru” either and that’s a leading indication that you should run in the opposite direction as fast as you can.

When you brand yourself, you should pick an area that you genuinely have an interest and forte for.

If you’re an ace programmer who can spit out applications coded in PHP and C# in your sleep, there’s no sense focusing on copywriting if you’re more proficient in HTML than English. It just doesn’t gel.

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As an aside, although everyone and his mother seems to be going into Internet Marketing, the Business Opportunity niche and the Make Quick Money niche, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should too. Look what happened to the Pied Piper of Hamlin’s rapt audience…

A better metric to help determine which niche you should get into is to objectively look at your affinity and your time ROI (return on investment).

If the same investment on time means you could have marketed 200 copies of a skincare product, as compared to 35 copies of an Internet Marketing product, shouldn’t you be focusing on the skincare product which would give you a higher return instead? [assuming the same level of return].

The key is to spend time sufficiently researching your niche to determine it’s popularity and propensity to spend to solve it’s problem [This goes beyond doing a keyword search and measuring KEI], and positioning yourself and branding yourself effectively in order to succeed.

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The bottomline is that 9 times out of 10, you should have a rough idea whether you have the tools at your disposal to succeed.

If you’re launching a site and don’t have sufficient confidence in your product and are unsure how well you might do, it could be a harbinger of darker times ahead.

Internet Money Secrets Day 2

Andrew Wee — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 18:18:54 +0000

It’s a late post today as yesterday was a long day.

But Internet Money Secrets was well worth attending.

First up was Joel Comm, who came in live via video link from Oklahoma.

I like Joel’s approach to creating content.

He strives to create original content, rather than scraped content.

Among the sources he uses:

Writing it yourself
Outsourcing it
Having site visitors create it (blog comments, forums)
Using public domain works
RSS Feeds
Teleseminars and other audio
Repurposed material (reusing your old stuff)

Pretty interesting, especially for those of us who’re constantly striving to create original content for our blogs and webposts.

Incidentally, if you didn’t already know, the best performing adsenseunits are the:

Large rectangle (336×280)
Leaderboard (728×90)

And if you didn’t already know, the best color combination to use for your adsense blocks are:

borderless ads (color code #ffffff)
blue links (#0000ff)
black descriptions (#000000)
gray URLs (#666666)

This combination makes for the most readable ad format.
Wow, I just gave out the essense of his seminar.

Well, not quite, because he gave away some other strategies too, about why people fail at adsense and his winning formula.

We had an interesting presentation from the Master Copywriter.

Master Copywriter Jo Han Mok and Andrew Wee

It just seems inevitable that I pick up tons of strategies and tips each time I listen to Ewen and Jo Han speak.

I guess it’s not surprising considering that they’re rolling a couple of hundred thousand dollars every month.

It didn’t help that Jo Han didn’t give the powerpoints for his presentation and I filled up the better of 3 sheets of papers with lots of notes.

Here’re some nuggets from his presentation:

Metrics are critical to your success as an information marketer.
Test, test, test and test again
Instead of doing a split-test (2 options), consider doing 5 campaigns adjusting the variables. This will give you a better idea of what works and what doesn’t.
90% of Internet Marketers lose money of Pay Per Click advertising because they don’t know what they’re doing. Don’t be a statistic.

Tips to significantly increase your list opt-in rates:

Do not imply that anything is being sold.
Arouse their curiosity.
The terms instant and free will cause your opt-ins to jump significantly

In summary, Internet Money Secrets was a very useful convention and I picked up a set of useful strategies I’m waiting to test out.

I’d expect that they’d easily hike up my results by an easy 30%.

I’m already seeing a number of new sign ups for the DigitalKeiretsu.com mailing list.

Just in time for some groundbreaking announcements later this week.

If you haven’t already joined, you can sign up here: Internet Marketing enrolment.

Internet Money Secrets revealed!

Andrew Wee — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 14:06:39 +0000

I’m looking forward to October, because the face of Internet Marketing in Singapore and possibly Asia will never be the same again.

That’s because the NTUC Auditorium at Marina Boulevard in the heart of the city will play host to the Inaugural Internet Money Secrets convention.

The event is intended to focus in on generating Internet Marketing income through two revenue streams:

Google Adsense
Affiliate Marketing (my favourite!)

Beyond just the knowledge, I’m looking forward to the great networking opportunities.

Just imagine, 350 Internet Marketers all gathered in one place, exchanging ideas over two days, with the possibility of teaming up and forming joint ventures.

I’m looking for more joint venture partners and Internet Money Secrets will be THE place to scout for motivated and powerful partners.

You may have seen the publicity in the Singapore papers over the last couple of weeks and we’re now in the final lap.

My buddy, Stuart Tan, says there’ll be one, maybe two more preview seminars before prepping for the big event.

Internet Money Secrets is intended to equip new and experienced Internet Marketers with more skills and strategies to kick their business building and income monetization to a new level.

Whether you are a newbie or an experienced Internet Marketers, I’m confident you’ll pick up a whole host of new skills from the host of Internet Marketing gurus involved in the project.

Hot off the press, I got the brochures for the event.

Here’s the lineup:

You’ll get a whole truckload of strategies dealing with traffic generation, search engine optimization, Google Adsense strategies, affiliate marketing and automation strategies.

I saw the investment for the seminar and stopped for a moment.

I don’t know about you, but Stuart’s price seems a little wonky.

Granted, it’s the inaugural year.
Granted, he wants a huge turnout.
Granted, he wants to grow the Internet Marketing community in Singapore.

Ok, it IS wonky.

Still, to charge less than a third of what the other gurus events are going for?

It’s a little nuts.

Ok, very nuts.

Oh, and you may have read about the $2,984 worth of bonuses.
Here’s what you get:

a 10-hour MP3 suite covering Internet Marketing strategies
a set of tools to build SEO-friendly websites (there’re 2 of them and I believe the value’s something like $500 or so. I’m looking forward to using them!)
a number of SEO tools and other guides

plus a number of insider secrets bonus audio courses on SEO and traffic generation. I think it’s about 3 hours worth of solid information and strategies you can apply immediately.

But wait! That’s not all (cue sell-a-vision music… dum dee dum dee dah!)

I think the best part about it though, is that you will get something that no other Internet Marketing seminar has done so far.

You will get the entire mp3 recording of the seminar, so you can listen over the speakers presentations long after the event is over.

I know during seminars especially, there’s a lot going on.

So this will be really useful to be able to listen to the presentations again.

So if you’re up for it, you can head over to http://www.imoneysecrets.com and go for possibly the last preview next Wednesday , 4 October, 7pm to 930pm.

Stuart’ll will go into some Internet Marketing fundamentals as well as cover recent Internet Marketing case studies (yes, they involve Asians and Singaporeans, so it’s not some pie-in-the-sky case study).

Since there are limited seats, attendance is only confirmed via pre-registration.

ps: by the way, as one of Stuart’s marketing partners, I have some special incentives to offer, plus I’ll include some DigitalKeiretsu.com strategies too.

If you’d like to register through me, you will qualify for another $300 worth of bonuses.

You can fill in the ContactMe page, including your name, email address and contact number, and I’ll get in touch with you.

I’ll see you on the inside.

Blown away by Internet Money Secrets!

Andrew Wee — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:01:15 +0000

Singapore –

I went to Stuart’s session yesterday and was blown away.

That’s the session mentioned in my post:F.ree Internet Marketing training? No way!

If I had to place a value on the information given, gee… but it’s safe to say those ideas are invaluable in launching sustainable profit-driven businesses.

The rollcall of speakers at October’s event reads like a Who’s Who of the Internet world:

Jo Han Mok (Copywriting specialist responsible for many successful Internet campaigns)
Ewen Chia (Super Affiliate to the Super Affiliates like Marlon Sanders, John Reese and the Internet Marketing Center)
Kelvin Hui (Hong Kong-based Search Engine Optimization specialist ranked among the top two in the world)
Peter Drew (Australia-based Adsense specialist who operates solo and rakes in revenue in the hundreds of thousands EVERY month)

There’s a special guest who’ll also be presenting at the event.

His book has hit #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list AND #1 on Amazon’s best sellers list.

This guy is the 800-pound gorilla of Adsense.AND HE’LL BE PRESENTING SOME MIND-BLOWING STUFF!
If you’re smart, you might figure out who he is from the tags at the top of this post…

To top it off, the price Stuart offered is frankly, crazy!

Whatever the other guys in the market are charging, he’s going at it at merely a fraction of that.

But don’t take my word for it.

Here’s what one of the guys at the session said:

Do you want to be financially free? Stuart Tan does it again, revealing all the secrets there are to Internet Marketing. YouÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ll learn about Google Adsense, marketing affiliate products online, making your money work for you rather than the other way around, the power of Viral Marketing, the potential revenue from just sending out emails.. and more! And everything can be done from the comfort of your own home! Best of all, itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s FREE to attend! Do yourself a favour and sign up for it now! You wonÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t regret it!

-Leong Chee Shan
http://www.ShredGuitarNow.com

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If you don’t already know the 20 different Internet business models, you’re missing out.

If you are making less than $1,000 per month in Google Adsense, you really need to go.
If you’re making more at your job, than you are from affiliate marketing, you must go!

The session is tomorrow (Friday) from 7pm to 930pm at Keppel Towers on Hoe Chiang Road.

Limited seats are available. Pre-registration is compulsory.

If you’ve serious about creating a passive income stream, or if you are tired of your current job, you owe it to yourself to come for the session.

Fill in your name, email address and contact number in the Contact Form.

Once confirmed, the details will be mailed to you.

PS: Some of my Keiretsu Internet Marketing team were not able to make it last night, so I have a limited number of ‘special places’ which I am willing to give you if you take action now.

I can’t tell you what they are, but the Keiretsu members who took it up, left with smiles on their faces.

Go to the contact us page and register your name, contact number and email address now.