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.

It is interesting that Amazon.com has launched a new program called the Mechanical Turk where people in the world can earn small amounts of money doing tasks that are not suited to computers/artificial intelligence. Amazon bills it as "artificial artifical intelligence."

So, if you wanted to have a whole bunch of images organized and tagged, you could pay Amazon for the use of this system and they, in turn, would pay the people that are actually doing the work. Human robots in other words. Or if you wanted your blog posts submitted to Digg or Slashdot. Or various other Turk tasks (as imagined by Richard McManus of Read/WriteWeb).

The Turk is an interesting idea, but isn't totally new. The business model is kind of unique, but spammers have been using a "Mechanical Turk" of sorts for quite a while. It is the way they get past "captchas."

A captcha is a graphic with some letters and numbers in it, and is basically a tool that tests whether you are a human being or not. You type the letters and numbers as you see them into a box in order to gain access to a certain web page or function of the website, such as posting a comment on somebody's blog. Here is a captcha taken from the comment-posting form on Matt Cutts' blog:

Captchas are only a moderately effective way of stopping blog spammers, because spammers have figured out a way to get humans to help them out for free. The spammers create porn sites and require the visitor to fill in a captcha form in order to access the site. But the captcha the visitor has to solve isn't some random captcha. It is a captcha taken from a site that they are trying to spam. Then, all the spammer does is take what has been typed in and submits it to the blog to post their spam.

So it's really the spam and porn people that are the innovators in this space of artificial, artificial intelligence. Ironic isn't it!

RSS seems unlikely to stage a takeover anytime soon, according to panelists at a MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit on email marketing held earlier this year.

Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net and author of the seminal e-book on RSS, "Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS had this to say:

Given the relative maturity of email marketing compared to RSS, you would be hard pressed to find the same level of marketing functionality, targeting, personalization, and metrics capabilities that "come standard" with most email marketing packages in RSS.

"RSS technology is progressing rapidly, but email technology is not standing still either," said Neil Squillante, president of Landing Page Interactive. "Much is being done to eliminate the spam problem. Mainstream media continues to report that the amount of spam being sent is increasing, but what they are failing to report is the amount getting through is decreasing. What the recipient is experiencing matters, and a lot of recipients are experiencing less spam than they used to."

Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk added that in the end, it is all about user choice. "Just as we have seen with email, some consumers simply won’t want to embrace RSS. But as Yahoo! rolls out RSS and MSN makes it available, consumers will have more exposure to RSS, and marketers will be looking for an additional tool to distribute the marketing messages they couldn’t maneuver past spam filters."

I agree with all these guys on this. Email marketing isn't on its way out, not by a long shot. I'm not unhappy about that either, since my company (Netconcepts) owns the email marketing service provider GravityMail. With that said, however, I think it would be foolish to ignore RSS as a marketing channel. It's about to enter a huge adoption phase.

NOTE: Don't miss Rok's webinar on marketing through RSS, this Thursday at 12pm Eastern, on MarketingProfs.com. Sign up HERE.

Well, it’s been six months since his last State of the Blogosphere address, but Technorati’s Dave Sifry has been busy tracking and mapping the latest trends, comprehensive results for which are to be found in his latest five-part blog post series.

Part 1 on Blog Growth reveals the number of weblogs out there has been doubling in size every five months. The folks at Technorati have found a burgeoning 14.2 million weblogs and over 1.3 billion links. 80,000 blogs are created daily and a new weblog created every second, and 55% of new bloggers are still posting three months later. Those receiving top marks for attendance are the 13% of blogs that are updated daily (yes, I am aiming to be one of them, but haven't gotten there yet... sigh!). Dave’s report on Blog Growth here.

Whether a single post is a long essay or a short entry, each qualifies as a post. The State of the Blogosphere Part 2 reports on Posting Volumes, the aggregate number of posts per day. As at July 2005, 900,000 posts were being created daily - that’s 37,500 per hour or 10.4 per second, with obvious spikes during world events such as Live 8 or the London Bombings. The full research findings on Posting Volume here.

Over 25 million blog posts now use tags for categories or topics. 12,000 are being discovered each day, and photos and links are now being tagged too. The State of the Blogosphere Part 3 Report on Tags here.

Part 4 Spam and Fake Blogs dwells on the darker side of the blogosphere – created to influence results on a search engine by filling the results with spam or fake postings, usually to some advantage. here

In Part 5, Dave Sifry reports on the The List and the Long Tail - the impact of weblogs on mainstream media, the A-list, and the measure of influence or authority of a site or blog by the number of people linking to it. here

All interesting stuff and a great place to check out if you love statistics, graphs, and a one-stop update on The State of the Blogosphere.

You can't just ask a Search Engine Optimization vendor if they are ethical. Of course they will say "yes." So if you are shopping for some SEO help, how do you screen out the baddies?

A while back I blogged about how to be objective with your SEO vendor selection, but I didn't specifically cover how to screen out the unethical ones. I will do that now.

First off, interview the vendor extensively. Get them to explain the techniques they will be using. A "yes" from them to any of the following questions is a warning sign:

• Do your techniques involve any kind of deception?
• Do you use proprietary techniques?
• Do you use doorway pages or anything similar?
• Do you do deceptive redirects?
• Have you ever had sites banned?
• Do you offer rank guarantees? (You can’t guarantee something you have no control over. The only way you can get a guaranteed rank is through pay-per-click.)
• Do you send email to prospects with whom they do not have a prior existing business relationship or permission from those prospects in advance? (If so, that's spam! Never do business with a spammer.)

During your discussions with the vendor, if they describe their SEO tactics as short-term, you might want to reconsider. SEO, when done right (i.e. when following "best practices"), has long-term sustainable impact — for years, in fact. For proof, just read this.

After you're done quizzing the vendor, talk to their clients. Ask those clients:

• Does your SEO vendor teach you how to fish, or do they always do the fishing for you?
• Have your traffic and sales gone up a lot because of the vendor? If so, do you believe the increase to be sustainable?
• How long have you worked with the vendor? How long do you plan to continue working with them? Any idea what the vendor's client churn rate is?

Then you'll need to do some of your own investigating. Check the HTML code on their clients' sites for hidden text, hidden links, and so forth. Also examine what their clients' websites are serving to the search engines. There are a couple different ways to view a website through the eyes of a search engine spider: one is through a Firefox browser extension called User Agent Switcher; the other is through the cached version of the page that was indexed by the engine, available from the Cached link in the search results. Compare and contrast the page meant for the search engines to that corresponding page off the native website as seen by a normal visitor. If the content served up to the search engines is something completely different than what is served up to visitors, then they are spamming. Things to look for when making your comparison: if the title tag is significantly different, and if keywords have been stuffed into the body copy, the meta tags, and into parts of the website to help the version that was shown to search engines rank better. Finally, search the online forums and SEO directories like SEOPros.com and SEOConsultants.com with Google for complaints about the vendor.

Got any horror stories or lessons learned to share from dealing with a less-than-stellar SEO vendor? Post a comment.

Most email marketers agree that ethically, email address harvesting and sending unsolicited opt-out messages are taboo and should be avoided. I of course agree. It's always fun to talk ethics, but let's bring the discussion to a practical level. I contend that harvesting and opt-out are both impractical for legitimate email marketers.

Let's look at why...

Harvesting of email addresses from the Web will inevitably pick up "honeypot addresses" that will end up in your opt-out database. A honeypot is an email address hidden in the page somewhere where no one will click on it, but email harvesters will still capture it. Any emails received at the honeypot address will then get the IP address of the sending mail server "blackholed" for a period of time, so that emails to other addresses on the receiving email server will not get delivered.

Frequently the ethical question is posed as to whether the opt-out email is spam if the content is squeaky clean. The answer is an unequivocal YES. It's still spam because you do not have a prior business relationship with the recipient, you were not granted permission by the recipient in advance, and your email is unsolicited. It doesn't have to be "bulk" to be spam. Spam is spam to the recipient regardless of whether you sent 100 or a million; it's immaterial to the recipient what is going on outside of their inbox. And spam does not need to be a sleazy message to be considered spam. A church could "spam" people with donation requests by email if they are unsolicited.

So back to the practicality and repercussions for a moment... Imagine this: you send out unsolicited emails requesting people to opt-in and you have no prior business relationship with them. Some of them inevitably will report you to SpamCop. Your ISP will be notified by SpamCop, and they will need to either give you the boot or justify in a response to SpamCop why you don't deserve the boot. ISPs take SpamCop very seriously, as they don't want their SMTP servers blacklisted. More than a couple SpamCop complaints and your ISP is going to be very grumpy with you.

So in all, this whole approach is quite an impractical one. Spammers must be very good at hiding their tracks (e.g. by sending spam out through "zombies" which are PCs compromised by viruses/trojans) or must 'move house' constantly. Unless you're willing to live like that too, you'll find that the email harvesting and opt-out approaches will burn you.

With the one year anniversary of CAN-SPAM passing into law now past, I am seeing a number of articles (like this one) all concurring that CAN-SPAM has been totally ineffective in stemming the tide of spam emanating from the United States. In fact U.S. orginating spam has grown significantly. I can't say that I am surprised, however. Disappointed, yes.

The reality is that CAN-SPAM has failed miserably. It's not just that it's failed to put a dent in the spam problem. It's needlessly complicated the lives of legitimate email marketers.

MarketingSherpa, in a recent article, brought to light another CAN-SPAM compliance headache — an often overlooked requirement within the legislation called "Do Not Email." A simple opt-out is not sufficient. You have to provide an opt-out to ALL promotional mail that you might EVER send to that email list from ANY email address or staffer ever again. This could be a major problem for marketers because a lot of times email addresses are kept in separate data silos (e.g. prospect lists, distributor lists, affiliate lists, lists that might be rented from list houses, address books, etc.). Ugh!

It's time to ditch this watered-down law that doesn't work and start again — replacing it with a law that has some real teeth.