Ranking too well in the search engines and want to give your struggling competitors a more level playing field? Then follow these 3 easy steps to alienate those who already link to you and torch your best inbound links...

1. STEP 1: Collect a list of your backlinks and associated anchor text.
2. STEP 2: Scrape WHOIS domain information from all the linking sites. The email address of the administrative contact for each domain is what you're after.
3. STEP 3: Spam the admin contacts like there's no tomorrow! Make the email generic so it's clear you haven't ever visited their site or that you are aware of any existing business relationship the linker has with you. Make sure the email reads like it's written by a non-native English speaker (nothing makes a recipient feel more special than the knowledge that they've been outsourced to an overseas spam/call center!) To top it off, suggest specific anchor text without regard to whether the anchor text makes sense in the link's current context.
4. (Optional) STEP 4: Laugh all the way to the bank. Once at the bank, make a large withdrawal and promptly flush that cash down the nearest toilet.

(I figured I had better add Step 4 so it's extra-clear that I'm being facetious!)

Here's an email I received yesterday that follows the above Three Easy Steps, from a valued former business partner (I'm sure it's actually their new SEO agency)...

(Names have been changed to protect the guilty.)

Subject: A request from Widget Emporium
Date: August 5, 2008 5:01:41 PM CDT
To: sspencer@netconcepts.com

My name is Heather Irwin and I am Rep for Widget Emporium. I have noticed on your website page: http://www.gravitystream.com/, which provides visitors with some great Retail information, you have a link to our site http://www.widgetemporium.com which reads Widget Emporium.

Thank you so much for the link -- we really appreciate it. However, I am writing to ask if you would make one minor change to the listing so we can improve the brand awareness of Widget Emporium.

Can you please change the link text to Home Decor by Widget Emporium?

Additionally, if you can also change the link URL to point visitors to http://www.widgetemporium.com, we can work together to provide visitors with more relevant results for their search.

Alternatively, you may use the following HTML code to update our link:
<a href=”http://www.widgetemporium.com”>Home Decor by Widget Emporium</a>

Please let me know if the above provides you with the information you need to make the necessary changes.

I can be reached via email or if you’d like to talk about this by phone, my direct number is 480.282.6052.

Thank you for your time!

Heather Irwin

When it comes to link building, it's all in the approach. The last thing you want to do is relegate this critical task to what are sometimes referred to in the industry as "link monkeys" -- underpaid non-experts in link building, usually interns or overseas workers. Particularly if it's immediately obvious when reading their emails that they aren't native English speakers.

I've suggested in past Link Building presentations to "mine your existing backlinks" for opportunities to improve sub-optimal anchor text (like "click here" or your URL) then lobbying to get the anchor text changed. But you can't just do this en masse and spam everyone to hell. Be selective about who you target. And when you do reach out, craft a unique message that makes it clear you understand the relationship the linker has to you and that you are familiar with their site. Start a dialogue. Build a relationship. Even consider picking up the phone. (Now I've really shocked you!)

I know this is difficult to scale, but "get links quick" schemes rarely work.

P.S. "Heather" (if that's your real name), I'll be removing your link shortly.

Earlier this year, I had talked about my daughter Chloe and her success with Google ads in this blog post entitled, "SEO is the new first job for teens; flipping burgers is so last century." Well, her success story has made the local news and I am a very proud papa. She's quoted in The Capital Times by saying,

"Most people earn money by babysitting or working at places like McDonalds," said Spencer, 16, who has earned up to $1,000 monthly from her site, Neopets fanatic.com. "I figured if I earned minimum wage I'd have to work 25 to 30 hours a week to make this."

To read the entire article, please visit "Online cash flow McFarland teen makes money off Google ads."

Enjoy, and have a great Thanksgiving! :-)

Last weekend in Chicago at the BlogHer conference, my 16-year-old daughter Chloe got to give her very first conference presentation. The topic: professional blogging. Chloe got to share her story of "making money while she sleeps" -- through the creation of a blog about the popular virtual pets site Neopets.com.

Attending and speaking at BlogHer really inspired Chloe to start more blogs, to do more speaking, and to do more face-to-face networking with other bloggers. Her plans also include adding a forum to her blog using bbPress, WordPress' sister project. What a great experience it was for her -- at only 16 years of age -- to present in front of an audience, to receive kudos from so many bloggers afterwards, and to get interviewed by BusinessWeek. To top it off, Danny Sullivan says he wants to have Chloe on a panel at an upcoming conference!

Here are some highlights of Chloe on her panel at BlogHer...

It all began when my daughter was 15... she turned to SEO and blogging instead of babysitting or running a paper route as her part-time job and turned her love for the Neopets into a profitable venture -- with the help of a few smart SEO decisions. For one, Chloe used the keyword research tools Google Suggest and WordTracker to select both the name of her blog and its categories. The name became "The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site" because it included the highly popular search term "neopets cheats." She set up her blog through WordPress.com, and within a couple weeks it appeared on Page 1 in Google for "neopet cheats". Chloe also devoted a bit of time to link building, through trusted blogs like Blogger Stories.

Wanting to turn her blog's popularity into dollars, Chloe was excited to add Google ads onto her blog, but found out the hard way that this wasn't possible due to WordPress.com's restrictive terms of service that forbids the use of AdSense or other third-party ads. Chloe soon moved her entire blog to the domain neopets fanatic.com.

Now, I'm pleased to say, Chloe's site currently ranks #6 for "neopets" (out of 6.2 million results). Her blog's traffic has grown to produce $20 to $30 per day in AdSense revenue. Best of all, Chloe only spends a few hours a month blogging and maintaining the site. Not a bad ROI!

That equates to somewhere around $700 to $900 a month. If Chloe wanted to earn something comparable through a typical minimum-wage first job -- at her age, this typically means flipping burgers, babysitting or operating a paper route -- she'd have to work somewhere around 25 to 30 hrs per week. Because she's built an income-generating asset (versus working dollars-for-hours for "The Man"), Chloe can take a paid vacation whenever she wants without affecting her take-home pay.

One of the key things to keep in mind about Chloe's story, is that she's proven that SEO is not "rocket science." Heck, a kid can do it! (Note that I've only given her a few hours of guidance, she has done this all herself.) So if you have a solid foundation of SEO knowledge, why work for a living when you can create assets that work for you? :-D

I'm here at the Web 2.0 Expo. Sat in on the session today "An Overview of Badges and Widgets: The Fast Rise of Viral Web Parts".

Before I get into the content of the session, I have just a couple of remarks. These come from me and not from the session presenter...

• Badges and widgets CAN be amazing link bait. If it's a useful widget and if it's launched properly AND if the widget incorporates links back to your site in the right way, it can go viral and start building up your link popularity and PageRank.
• Inherently the widgets placed on other people's websites aren't helping your PageRank. That's because most widgets are based on AJAX, JavaScript, or Flash -- and links that are inside a Flash movie or within a JavaScript program are not treated like normal links by the search engine spiders. You need to think out-of-the-box if you want to capture PageRank from the page on which the widget is placed. That's not to say you won't get PageRank from bloggers talking about your widgets on their blogs, because you will. It's just that the widget itself won't (typically) pass PageRank.
• I think plugins (e.g. WordPress plugins) should have been included in the presenter's list of viral web components. Plugins can be amazing link bait. We at Netconcepts are starting to witness this for ourselves with our SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress. I'm hoping to get to the point that the plugin page on our site beats out our home page in terms of PageRank score. Which is a tall order when you consider that our home page fluctuates between a 7 and an 8!

Anyways, here are my notes from the session...

• An emergent phenomenon is web sites with "portable" content and functionality.
• Forrester Research says portable content is a key trend.
• There is limited business value in being on a single site.... YouTube and Google are showing the industry what's possible.
• There's a trend towards the "atomization" of content. Small pieces are easier to reuse and more general purpose. Microformats are the smallest pieces.
• Exploit Jakob nielsen's Law of Web User Experience, that "users spend most of their time on other websites". Design your products and services to leverage this fact.
• Spread your product beyond the boundaries of your site: badges, widgets, gadgets, apis, syndication.
• It should be end-user friendly.
• Build on the shoulders of giants: leveraging widgets and APIs from Yahoo, Amazon and thousands of others.
• It's automated mass servicing of markets of low demand content and functionality (The Long Tail).
• Widgets are small applications or bits of functionality that can be embedded on the web -- can be AJAX or Flash.
• Badges are displays of content pulled under the covers from other sites.
• Gadgets are more formal widget models from Google and Microsoft.
• There's a widget standard under consideration by the W3C.
• Netvibes offers a universal widget architecture.
• Google and Microsoft have their own gadget initiatives. Both have a developer community.
• Ease of consumption and distribution is critically important. Copy and paste is best -- e.g. a single line of Javascript or object/embed tags for Flash.
• Connect to their underlying sites to provide value.
• Have a business model baked deeply into it -- driving site traffic, content consumption, advertising, etc.
• Widgets are often virally self-distributable, triggering network effects.
• Build a simple "dashboard" and applications (aka mashups)
• Google Gadgets directory is broken down into desktop gadgets and web-based gadgets.
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets gadget is an excellent example of a widget for your website.
• Microsoft's gadgets directory is in the Windows Live Gallery.
• Huge directory of widgets at widgetbox.com.
• Google's AdWords widget is probably the most successful widget in history. It turns the entire web into Google's ad platform (The Long Tail of content/advertising). Purported 80% of Google's revenue comes from advertising, and 80% of that 80% comes from displays within the widget (i.e. from Google's "content network"). Key aspects of the widget: good user incentive, extreme ease of use, strong viral feedback loop.
• Widgets and badges are your front end to your APIs.
• Key design considerations include: Scalability (cost effectiveness, reliability, exploitation by others, global reach, security), Clearly thinking through the cross domain issues (sharing of personal data, will it work on mobile?, selectively allow users' personal data such as pictures or video, no security holes), IP issues (do you have a license to redistribute the content you have, can others violate the IP protections of others? and if so, what will you do about it when you put other businesses at risk with your widget?, do you widget make it hard for others to take content out of the widget?), Ease of consumption (really must be a simple copy and paste to deploy), Leverage network effects (encourage every viewer to share it with others, letting users copy the widget), end user motivation (must do something useful for them, hsaring interesting content, providing shared access to their personal data such as photos or audio or even paying them, e.g. AdSense)
• According to Programmableweb.com, there are currently over 1700 mashups.
• Small pieces, loosely joined.
• Reuse the web palette.
• Service level agreements (SLAs) will get much more interesting in a highly composite world.
• Get experience now: begin trials to offer your capabilities via services.

You may or may not have heard of a blog carnival. Blogging colleague Toby Bloomberg first introduced me to the concept and I must say, as a link building afficionado, my eyes lit up at the potential these traveling columns have for building links.

A blog carnival is, in effect, a column on a particular topic that is passed on from blog to blog, with each blogger adding their own thoughts or findings to that topic.

If you have expertise, for example, in nonprofit marketing, you can join the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. There you will find other members of the nonprofit blog carnival adding posts on this specialty topic.

Think of the potential. By participating as a host (dare I say, carny?), all the other host members of the blog carnival will link to you.

Each issue/edition will link to a handful of blogs and sites as well, so if you have something useful and intelligent to say on the topic, you should submit your link for consideration by the host(s). And even if you don't actively participate, it's good to get on the radar of those contributing to it. You never know, they may see one of your articles or blog posts and discuss it within the carnival. Just by reaching out you may see your site mentioned as a useful resource. Now that's potential.

I got permission from MarketingProfs to post an archived version of the webinar Eric Ward and I presented last year on link building. It is 90 minutes long and has some good actionable advice and tips and tricks, and it looks at link building from a more wholistic perspective than just SEO. I hope you enjoy it.

Check it out

I blogged last month about Wikipedia and SEO. There are a number of considerations when making edits, creating entries, and passing the "Notability" test -- practices to avoid so you don't run afoul of their guidelines and so on.

Well folks, the game has changed. Wikipedia just instituted nofollows on all external links. This had already been in place for a while on some of their sister sites. This effectively removes a lot of the incentive to contribute to Wikipedia. Or does it? It does if your end goal is receiving PageRank to your own sites. But not if your goals are traffic (a top ranking Wikipedia page that links to you will still drive plenty of direct clickthrough traffic your way), credibility (companies with entries give the impression of being bigger and more legitimate), and reputation management (because a favorable Wikipedia entry for your company will probably occupy a spot in the top 10 in the SERPs for searches on your company name).

So are legitimate SEOs going to give up on contributing to Wikipedia? I hope not -- at least for the ones who are adding value to Wikipedia. I think we'd all like the spammers to leave (I certainly would!), and I know that is Jimbo Wales' intention, but I doubt that's what will transpire. Nofollowing blog comments didn't drive the spammers away; I can't see it working for Wikipedia. Especially as long as Wikipedia holds the top spot for important keywords such as "marketing" in Google. (sigh!)

More discussion on this development at SEOMoz.

It's getting a bit ridiculous how often Wikipedia shows up on the first page of Google for just about every search imaginable. Micropersuasion has noticed it for brand searches. Google's getting a bit lazy I think to give Wikipedia carte blanche access to page 1 of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Often times Wikipedia doesn't deserve to be there (like when it's only a stub, for instance).

But because Wikipedia does dominate the SERPs, it makes it pretty darned important for your company to have a good, balanced, accurate entry in Wikipedia. Not a stub. Not conspiracy theories written by crackpots.

Do you know what your Wikipedia page says about you? Better check it now:

Do you have all the "External Links" you deserve on that page? For example, I see on REI's entry there is no link to their REI-Outlet.com site, or to their REI Adventures site either. That's a missed opportunity -- both in terms of clicks and in terms of PageRank. Here's another example... on the Budget Group entry, I don't see a link to their Budget Truck Rental site at Budgettruck.com. When adding links, contribute other things too in the same edit, such as fixing typos, adding additional copy etc. That makes it less likely your changes will be reverted. External link only edits are looked on with suspicion, and rightly so, since most of those are spam.

Don't have a Wikipedia entry for your company? Then work towards getting one -- assuming you're noteworthy. (Don't just add your company's entry yourself, as it's against Wikipedia's NPOV guidelines.) Why is it good to have one? Because it's a lot easier to get internal links from other entries to your own. External Links are anathema to many Wikipedia editors. They much prefer internal links.

Because External Links are so hard to add (at least to make them stick, for longer than 5 minutes before Wikipedians delete them), try adding References. References are desperately sought after by Wikipedia editors. Indeed, many entries are flagged to display a big message at the top that "This article or section does not cite its references or sources. Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations." So help out: add some references that back up assertions made in the entry, some of which could happen to be articles on your site (assuming they're relevant and add value to the entry). And of course you need to make your References links. Don't only add References linking to your own stuff, as that looks just a wee bit self-serving -- it will stick out like a sore thumb and your References will get nuked.

Surprisingly, despite the fact that anyone can edit anything, and can do it quickly and easily, Wikipedia maintains a high level of quality and accuracy. A study published in the academic journal Nature concluded that it is "nearly as accurate" as Encyclopaedia Britannica! That boggles the mind.

BTW, anyone notice how lousy Wikipedia's internal search engine is? Try searching for "recreational equipment inc" for example. Oops, "No page with that title exists"! Doh, you forgot to include the dot! ;-) Try "recreational equipment inc." instead and then it works. Ugh. SLI Systems, you guys should donate your "Learning Search" to Wikipedia. They need it bad.

A while back I did an information-packed 90-minute webinar for Marketing Profs called "Google in the Real World: How Links Boost Your Ranking". I obtained permission from MarketingProfs to post an archived version of all the webinars I did for them on my site. I just created a screencast of this webinar on link building and uploaded it. Check it out...

Watch it as a streaming Flash video »

Or, alternatively download/watch as a Quicktime movie (72 M.

Stay tuned and I'll be posting many more!

If you're burned out from business travel but still want to partake in conferences / trade shows on ecommerce and online marketing, then a virtual trade show like eComXpo might be just the thing for you. eComXpo opens today and will go on for three days (Oct 24-26).

With such intellectual powerhouses as Chris Anderson and John Battelle keynoting, I'm sure the show will be a hit.

I'm speaking as part of their "eComXpo University," their on-demand portion of the show that covers various aspects of Affiliate, Search and Interactive Marketing. My session, "Link Building Your Way to the Top of the Rankings" is a joint presentation with link building guru Eric Ward. Many of the University presentations (including my own) will be available free of charge to attendees (registration to attend the virtual trade show is free, btw) during the 3 day event. Check out Eric's and my session if you get a chance. The University sessions will continue to be available to University Subscribers for up to 6 months following the close of eComXpo.

I've got 5 four-month Univerity subscriptions to give away to my loyal readers. That's a $100 value. Email me at sspencer@netconcepts.com if you want one, but BE QUICK!