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I received a private message at a forum I have been a member of for many years and it was from a relatively senior member that was promoting some discounted listings reviews in his network of web directories.  The directories themselves look pretty nice, good templates and category structure but I took a quick look through the backlink profile of one of them and I was quite shocked!

I found backlinks from porn, coming soon sites and even from a page that was simply 10k+ links jammed full of porn, gambling and rx - I was going to post a screenshot of the page but it crashed my browser twice so I figured I better not push my luck.

Most good SEO’s always check backlink profiles before building links but there are many ‘cut-rate’ services out there that won’t spend the extra time doing this type of due diligence.  So be very careful or your website might just become part of a ‘bad neighborhood’.

It seems SEO’s are fairing well these-days, even in a bad economic environment - salaries for SEM/SEO related positions were up in 2008 and that just shows that decision makers are continuing to see the relative value we bring to the table.

2009 yearly salaries for an individual contributor with 1-3 years relevant experience range from $40,000 to $80,000; senior manager salaries range $70,000 to $120,000; and vice presidents with responsibilities for large SEM campaigns or a team of specialists earn from $160,000 to $250,000.

While the salary range for those with 1- years experience is quite wide I think that the majority of those getting the low range, $40k - $50k are in the 1-2 year experience range.  Once you have 3 years plus under your belt I don’t think you would even consider a position for under $60k.

It seems the spending on SEM will continue into the distant future and that is sweet music to anyone that is involved in this industry!

So Google finally stepped up to the plate with a post over at GoogleWebmasterCenteral on blog comment spam but the real question is did they give us good, useful information or just open up a Pandoras box of ways to ‘kill’ your competitors in the search rankings?

FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people’s hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords.

FACT: Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one’s site in the long run.

Now many folks are drawing the obvious conclusion, should I just go buy a blog spam commenting package from overseas for $10 and hope the dozens of spam comments will sink my competitors rankings?  Google answers back that if your competitors link profile is otherwise healthy then this type of offensive won’t make a difference but what happens if your competition is relatively new and has a really small link profile with just a few dozen links?  Will I then be able to sink them for all the semi-competitive keywords they are beating me out on because of their high quality content?

I just wish Google would do away with their shroud of secrecy and start being more transparent because this sounds like they just opened the door with a sneaky, under-handed method of playing dirty.

The LA Times is reporting that the judge in the MySpace Mom’s suicide killing case has overturned his decision about the ‘criminality’ of breaking the Terms of Service of a website. And that is really good news for all those SEO’s out there that have ever purchased a link.

I know a few SEO’s that were considering leaving the country because a few of their paid directory submissions were in the ‘gray’ area. Now they can remain in the USA and Canada and live out their lives not fearing the long jail term that should be associated with breaking the ToS of companies like Google.

Spinning articles has become a favorite pass-time of overseas link sellers and I find it very annoying, here is a little excerpt from a blog post titled: The best with. Real estate of loan of financing of UNO to find comment conditions

By against the, strong one of agreement of like and well the loan of is encore in the medium of the real estate, Moreover in more the loan specialize in expert in software in the financing of financial of organizations real estate. Particularly projects of financing of customers of provision of at organizations the same ones put of these enticing.

I have written some shallow articles and blog posts in my time, but this is ridiculous!

For those of you new to the SEO world you can rest assured that if the sky has not fallen yet - it soon will, any second, maybe…this same drum has been beating for the past 5 years and every few months a new SEO Prophet has some newfangled reason for it to be the truth, THIS TIME!

Here is a posting from a forum on Feb. 2006

Here we go again…besides the fact that 5000 directory submissions will probably get you banned it seems there is no shortage of folks offering this SEO (Stupid Egghead Option) on DP and we are supposed to believe they are working for $0.50 an hour.  I understand that there are some countries around the world where the average hourly salary is quite low but I seriously doubt you are getting many folks using computers for the $0.50 an hour range.

and they are offering this with up to 5 titles, etc…the length of each manual submission is probably close to a minute a site but when I called them out in the post I said the following:

“Your prices seem quite low but I am curious, if a manual submission takes at least 30 seconds and you do 5,000 of them it will take over 41 hours of work, and you charge $38, so I am to believe you pay your workers less than $1 an hour and there is still money for profit? Please explain and I might give your service a try.”

The reply I got is great, not sure what it means but I know it is GREAT!

“yes, you are right. I am offering dedicated link builders to work on your projects. so they can work efficiently and take care to Google spam penalty. I have sent you PM. Plz check and waiting for your reply.”

I think I will be passing on this service but I can promise you that many fellow DP’ers will be using it.

There was an interesting post over at SEO Book titled:  Buying Links vs Buying Rankings vs Stealing Content vs Selling Scams

It focuses on the hypocrisy that is present when it comes to link building, buying rank and the morality of it all.  Personally I have a problem with Google passing judgement on any site that sells advertising links, saying they are attempting to game the search results but then they go ahead and sell top sponsor ad space to the highest bidder.  So how exactly is that providing their searchers with the most relevant results?

Around a year and a half ago Google unleashed its’ wrath on general web directories.  With bolts of lightning (not quite but just as painful to the directory owners) it struck down the page rank of some of the best know directories for buying links.  Let’s see how they have faired 18 months later.

http://www.ewebpages.org/ still sitting at page rank 0

http://cdhnow.com/ stuck on page rank 0

http://www.dirspace.com/ zero it is

http://www.linkforever.net/ zero page rank bar love

and it goes on and on….it seems that almost all of these directories have remained in Google’s ‘bad’ list and in addition to having their page rank stipped they also don’t rank for their domain names.

One in the list that stands out and seems to have found a way to get back into Googles graces is http://www.avivadirectory.com/ they have a page rank four and also rank for their domain name, with site links no-less.  I know from reading the webmaster boards that the owner of avivadirectory put in a ton of time trying to rectify the problems that landed them in hot water with Google and it looks like they found the magic formula (perhaps an ebook is in the works).

well, really bad…

Here is some content I found that was written exclusively for the search engines - it uses the keyword multiple times but sounds absolutely terrible.

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