Carolyn Shelby posted an interesting article at her blog about a website that is using one of the oldest an obvious spamdexing techniques there is at

http://www.cshel.com/seosem/2007/05/how-well-does-the-google-algo-catch-spamdexers/

I was actually a little surprised. I know many of us build a few sites to send some linking juice to our sites, however parking 5000 or more domains on a parking page template meant to send links to the main site is a tad overboard, especially when they are all identical replicated website. That should trip a few filters here and there, or so some engines would have us think… But it sure works and I do notsee any of the engines doing anything about it since her article was posted. I expect more than a few black hats are already on this bandwagon.

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A lot of people are looking for free traffic nowadays and they hope that a submission to Digg will magically appear in the frontpage and send a ton of traffic as well as links. Well, it doesn't. Digg doesn't supply long-term traffic, but many websites syndicate their feed (I believe) and many bloggers would probably blog about the story if they find it interesting. This supplies long-term links to your website.

Now getting to the frontpage of Digg isn't easy. The more traffic they get, the more Diggs are required to get to the frontpage. That's why there are services like Subvert & Profit come to light. The launch of this new website really got me thinking how people are desperate for Diggs, that they would pay for them. This ruins the whole point of social media marketing (in my opinion), since you are trying to market using the community, instead of marketing AT the community.

When you market something using a community, more people are involved and have a better acceptance rate. When marketing towards the community using companies like Subvert & Profit, a good amount of people won't even notice your website/content because it is not something they are interested in. Tons of times good Diggs go unnoticed, and helping these diggs rise to the frontpage would be more beneficial. Simply put, don't spam Digg just to get in the frontpage since it won't be as beneficial as actually creating something that deserves to be on the frontpage and simply needs a push to be noticed!

Social Media Marketing should be done by actually setting up relationships with people on the web, preferably users on Digg that enjoy topics relative to your website. It may take time, but it would help you earn Diggs correctly and would help your future Digg submissions as well! It shouldn't take a sneaky company like Subvert & Profit to help people find out the correct way to social marketing, maybe this post will help you!

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Okay, this is not really SEO related, but it could well be the biggest marketing opportunity this year or next.

 I got new computers for our office and in doing so, found that they came with windows vista. That was all fine and dandy, I have been wanting to play with vista anyways. Now when I first started up the vista machines, I noticed that vista, by default, loads up a sidebar on the right hand side of the screen. Cool. So I click the button to add some "gadgets" to the sidebar. Vista comes with 13 gadgets by default in the gadget manager console. These are run of the mill things, so I clicked the "Get more Gadgets from the Windows Live Website" button.

I see 400+ gadgets in a variety of categories. ok cool. I click install gadget links on the ones I want. It is a super easy thing to install these things.

Then I started thinking about how many millions of people will be using vista in the next 6 months now that vista ships with all new computers….. The projected numbers after 12, 18, 24 months are staggering…. Microsoft projects 200,000,000 users in 2 years alone. 200 MILLION.

And like me, they will all go see what gadgets are out there to play with….

This started me thinking that I needed to have some gadgets for my websites up on the windows live website…

So I get a couple coders who do gadgets and are willing to do them for money. I found 2 out of over 18 gadget coders I emailed that were willing to do so. I have a new site created http://www.semtutor.com I have a gadget made for a "Daily Marketing Tip" and this gadget uses semtutor.com's rss feed to power it.

We released the gadget 4.x days ago on the windows live site and semtutor currently has 500+ readers according to feedburner stats.

The Gadget has been downloaded over 1600+ times from the windows live site in those 4.x days. (http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?l=1)

Needless to say We quickly locked these 2 coders up into a contract partnership and thus is born: http://www.gadgetspark.com

Getcha Some!

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I recently discovered the concept of having a soft launch for larger sites so that Google and the other search engines wouldn't think that the site was simply auto generated. I never really gave this much thought in the sites I build because they are usually fewer than 100 pages.

My question that I've asked is what should merit a soft launch?  What is considered too large and what would fly under the radar?  I've received several responses and the most common I receive is that anything over 1,000 pages should have a soft launch just to be safe.

Personally my conclusion is to launch any website in segments. If search engines like to see that your website is fresh and frequently updated then why not plan from the beginning to include a soft launch?

If you are building a larger then life website then you will want to make sure that your SEO firm has a soft launch plan. No matter how large or small your website is, having a plan is a big step towards whatever you want to call a success.

If anyone is interested in reading the soft launch article it can be found on SEO Rockstars - Soft Launch For Better Results.

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This question is asked of me at least a few times a week, so I decided to develop a tool to check it. While I am not going to let everyone and their brother use my API key and google no longer gives out new keys for the SOAP API, I will explain how to do this task. It really is not difficult and I am sure some of you will be making your own tools to do it quickly enough after reading this anyway.

First let's find out how many pages of your website that Google knows about using the query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.yourdomain.com

Next let's see how many pages of your website that Google has listed in it's supplemental index using this query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.yourdomain.com+***+-view

Now simply do the math to get the percentage of your website in the supplemental index.

How did your score turn out?

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