“What SEO firm would you recommend?”

Man, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that, I might be able to afford some paid links. It’s just so hard to find a good SEO firm that you can trust.

First of all, there are a lot of SEO firms and individuals that have no clue what they’re doing. Second, some might know to build links, but the way they go about it is just pathetic. Third, you’re not going to find good testimonials for a good firm, because they have to keep their client list private.

So you need to get personal recommendations from friends and colleagues, and then filter out the testimonials that are based on nothing more than referral commissions. In my case, my list of worthwhile SEO firms was whittled down to just two incredible firms: Ranked Hard and Black Magic SEO.

But considering that both are great firms, we have to investigate some more. The first thing is that the Black Magic SEO site (linked above) does a great job at keeping their client list private. They are so secretive, you can’t even see their website at all!

Since I have connections, I scored a phone call with Lucy (or was it Lucifer?) from Black Magic SEO, and she assured me that they know their stuff, but their services are a little out of my price range.

So next in line, Ranked Hard. I spoke with Bradley, who seemed like a nice guy, and very intelligent. Despite their very simple formula for SEO (somehow they do it without the cauldrons,) he gave me some examples of how it worked and even a few “tricks of the trade.” And you know what, I believed him.

So, for anyone that needs a legitimate SEO firm, take a look at Ranked Hard, a true SEO firm!

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If you’re not careful when you’re messing around bad neighborhoods, someone might just attempt to bust a cap on yo ass.

That or get you a Google penalty. You can decide for yourself which is worse.

But there is a new type of neighborhood watch out there. It’s called the Bad Neighborhood Text Link Tool. Instead of watching for crooks, burglars, and sexual predators, they protect you from the most heinous of villains - black hat webmasters!

While other webmasters blindly link to these impure websites, you are wise to the hidden text generic Viagra links in the footer. You refrain from linking to them and in return, you get to survive another day in King Google’s land of the internet.

So if you’re buying or selling links through TNX or doing sketchy link exchanges with someone from Nigeria, do a background check first.

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SEO Blackhat brought some joy to me this week, with this post:

‘Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.’ - TS Eliot.

Spoken like a true SEO Black Hat.

So true.

(And don’t forget to look at the post to see the picture.)

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How hard do you think it is to get .gov and .edu links to your site?

If you said hard, super hard, or impossible, you’re wrong. I already uncovered easy and free ways to get .edu links, but now I’ll show you how to get .gov links the easy way. (But note, I didn’t say it’s the cheap way…)

You start the process by reading up on how to qualify for a .gov domain name.

Then just start your own city.

Once that’s taken care of, you can request your .gov domain!

(OK, maybe starting your own city does qualify as “hard” )

But seriously, you might be able to start an organization that is part of your local city government, and end up with a domain name like myorganization.mycity.gov. Or, slightly easier, try to partner with some agency that’s part of your local government. Maybe you can convince them to link to your related website.

Then it just becomes a question of “How much is a .gov link actually worth??”

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Most people believe that Google places extra weight on backlinks from the .edu and .gov TLDs. Just search webmaster forums and you’ll find tons of threads like “WTB: .edu backlinks” along with plenty of people selling them.

I don’t know that anyone has proof of .edu backlinks being any more useful than a .com backlink, but if you want some easy .edu links, all you have to do is use Google…

Put this in Google:

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in” -”comment posting closed” -”comment closed” “keyword”

or

site:.edu inurl:blog “post a comment” -”you must be logged in” -”comment posting closed” -”comment closed” “internet marketing”

You can just copy and paste that into Google, making sure to change “keyword” to whatever your preferred topic is.

Then you’ll get a list of crappy blogs that have been spammed by tons of webmasters already. But if that doesn’t turn you off, go ahead and make a comment with your link in it!

You could probably do the same thing to look for forums, guestbooks, and other sites where you can leave links. Just switch the “inurl:blog” to “inurl:forum” or “inurl:forums” or other synonyms. Or switch the .edu to .gov, whatever you want.

If you change the search terms enough, maybe you’ll find a good site that hasn’t been spammed way too much already! (But I doubt it.)

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Jon from WickedFire and AOJon.com is pretty infamous in the internet marketing world. If you don’t know why, just browse his forums and read some of the link bait on his blog.

But if you check out his blog, you’ll see it doesn’t shape up to what all the SEO and blogging gurus say is the best way to do things.

For example, there is no big RSS button promoting his “full feed.” There’s really no mention of RSS other than the little Feedburner badge.

If you scroll further down, the monthly archive links get in the way of the real categories. Who cares when you wrote what?

Then if you go to a full post, the blog name comes before post name in page title. That totally screws up his SERPs!

Well, either Jon…

Doesn’t know what he’s doing is “wrong,”
Does not care what he does on his blog,
Or knows something that the gurus don’t.

Considering he has lots of money and the blog is a PR5, I think he’s doing just fine as it is!

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Bad news for all you comment spammers trying to increase PR for your site - comment links on myspace profiles won’t do you any good. Myspace has implemented a redirect system that takes any external link in a comment and turns it into a redirect. Without a direct link, it’s like your link doesn’t exist.

But the good news for comment spammers is that people might still click the link and end up at your site. You might not get the PR but you’ll still get the traffic (which is more important, IMHO.)

And the bad news for legitimate myspace users is that comment spam is not going to decrease. There are numerous spam comments that don’t even use live hyperlinks anymore, so I doubt that these redirects will slow them down. They will keep spamming as usual and add more obtrusive methods as they find more exploits in Myspace’s code.

I’m really getting sick of it. Lately it seems like 45 of the latest 50 comments on my profile are spam. And it’s mostly from phished accounts.

Will Myspace survive the spammers? Only time will tell.

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