Caydel’s SEO Blog

I just read a very good, in depth post by Erik Vossman about how he makes money by selling gold and silver bullion on eBay. It’s a really interesting concept; if you can get the bullion from a mint or reseller at roughly market price (with a small premium on top), you can turn around and sell it on eBay for as much as 30% above the market value.

It seems like a good venture idea - with a weaker economy, people are investing in gold and silver at greater rates than ever before. Erik’s article is almost a year old, yet in that time, the value of both Gold and Silver have jumped by nearly 50%.

Check it out - it’s a good read, and provides some great information on how to get started at a low initial investment!

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Update: the mystery is finally solved

Setting

This yesterday, I mistyped the URL as I was visiting Google this morning; I accidentally typed http://www.google.cm. This redirected me to a page on the domain of http://www.agoga.com, which actually looked like a somewhat convincing, spartan page, very similar in style to what you would often see if your browser. Except that it also contained a search bar, and a few unobtrusive links to subject like ‘Travel’, ‘Cars’ etc., the kind of subjects you would see on a typical parked domain page.

I thought that was kind of interesting, a way of monetizing typos that looked to me at least like it would be somewhat effective way of squatting a typo. At the time, though, it didn’t seem noteworthy enough to me to give it further thought.

A little later, I was trying to get to Paypal, and again I accidentally typed http://www.paypal.cm. Once again I was at the same page. I was intrigued, and began experimenting by checking a variety of other domains with the .cm extension. Many big names in the industry had the .cm TLD pointed to the same page I had viewed earlier.

That also, is not that notable. A squatter could easily have registered a whole variety of company names in that TLD - it’s done all the time, and is considered a valid tactic for making some money off of parked domains.

What made it notable finally is when I started entering random domains, and sequences of characters in the .cm TLD. such as http://sdfjhksd.cm and http://www.oiyt.cm. These also are pointing to a landing page on agoga.com, albeit a different landing page from the ones used on major domain mispellings.

Agoga.com has every unregistered .cm TLD pointed to their landing pages!

While there are a bunch of legitimately registered .cm sites which resolve elsewhere, any other .cm domain, whether nonsense characters or misspellings of ‘real’ domain names resolves to the same IP address which is a cluster at agoga.com. The only way this could be accomplished is to change the default site settings of the master DNS serving the .cm TLD. Agoga must have either hacked the .cm registrar in Cameroon, or paid the registrar off for this. Either way, I suspect something illegal has occurred here; I doubt this type of redirecting is approved by IANA.

Opportunity

How much type-in traffic would you think would be generated by people misspelling .com as .cm? Agoga.com has an Alexa Rank of 6,915 which indicates thousands or tens of thousands of visitors per day by some estimates. Keep in mind that this site has not been running for even three months yet; today’s Alexa rank was 2,913.

Since Alexa ranking is biased towards a technical crowd, I think it is safe to assume that the true numbers are fairly large. Now, it is easily attainable that a proper landing page optimized for Pay-Per-Click advertisements will result in a 30%-40% click-through-rate. Especially if one was to put some effort into ensuring the advertisements were targeted around the domain name or keywords at the similar .com page.

It is obvious that with this type of traffic, Agoga.com could be pulling in some huge advertising revenue - as much a $1000-$2000 per day. They should have it made in the shade, for all intents and purposes. But, they have screwed up royally.

How did they screw up?

Agoga will return you to one of two landing pages, depending on what type of domain you enter. One version, which they seem to use when squatting the domain of a large company or popular website, can be seen at . The other, which they seem to use for the domains of smaller websites and nonsense or misspelled domains can be seen at http://www.oeiurt.cm (note the random domain name…) or http://www.caydel.cm (a typo of this domain) or at the Agoga main page at http://www.agoga.com.

The first type of landing page is broken - The first type of landing page is relatively well done - it is minimal, and could easily get the user to click onto their main site. The problem lies in that no ads are served if the user enters certain search queries. While an advertising page is shown if the user enters a query such as ‘digital cameras’, ‘dvd’, ‘knitting’, other queries such as ‘infohatter’, ‘caydel’ or whatever return nothing. Sure, probably nobody is bidding on that term; wouldn’t it be a better plan to grab the first result from a Google query for that term, scrape it for keywords, and return ads based on that? Potentially millions of long-tail opportunities are being missed here, thrown away for no good reason.

The second type of landing page broken - The script that Agoga used to generate the second style of landing page is broken. Any search query or link click redirects you to the same page you just left, with a nice photo of a mountain range, or other scenery visible in place of the advertisements that should be shown. They are making nothing from this type of landing page; in fact, they are losing money due to bandwidth costs.

Opportunity Missed

I would be willing to bet that the majority of the traffic that Agoga.com receives will end up at the second landing page, the broken one. While they probably have their highest traffic domains such as http://www.google.cm pointing to their ‘working’ script, they are missing out on the whole long-tail of domain misspellings. Think about it this way - any mistake made by anyone anywhere when he misspells .com as .cm will send him to the broken script. This could be anyone typing in one of a billion domains.

Additionally, a fair number of people who misspell the the domains of large sites such as Google will make multiple mistakes - they may mispell google.com as google.cm, but how many are prone to make multiple mistakes such as gogle.cm or googel.cm and be sent to the broken page?

What Are You Trying to Tell Us Here?

The point of what I am trying to say should have become clear by this point, but I will write it out nice and neat anyways: an neglect of details can lose you a lot of money. I do not know if this second landing page has ever actually worked for Agoga. Perhaps it has, and only stopped working 15 minutes before I stumbled upon it the first time. Perhaps it has never worked. The fact of the matter is, the person or persons who own Agoga.com (Whois data indicates Nameview, Inc, BTW) are losing thousands of dollars per day. It is probably safe to assume that they don’t even realize this; if they did, they would fix it in realtively short order.
The people responsible for this had an amazing idea, which they ran with 90% of the way to the perfect money-making opportunity. But they have missed a few small details which are costing them perhaps thousands of dollars per day. If they were to fix these small problems, they could probably nearly double their income.

I appreciate your comments and feedback!

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I just came across a post on Eches Blog where he espouses the idea of filtering all the MFA (Made For Adsense) sites from your Adsense ads by using the Adsense competitive ad filter. He also mentions that by doing this you may cause your adsense earnings to increase. Additionally, the post also links to AdsBlackList.com, a site which lists a variety of MFA and low-paying sites with the idea that you use the competitive ad filter to remove these low-paying ads. From AdsBlackList.com:

Why would I use AdsBlackList?

There are three main reasons.

1) Increase your adsense revenue up to 50%
2) Increase the reputation of your website by NOT linking to Made for Adsense sites
3) Save the quality of contextual advertising in global

In other words, subscribing to ABL and submitting MFA sites that you’ve discovered, you will be helping yourself to make more money and helping your customers to find quality information when they click on your adsense ad

I am not sure I understand how this could lead to higher adsense revenues. Adsense works on a priority system where cost and relevancy are balanced in order to bring you the best blend of relevancy and price available to you. By blocking certain ads, the ads you do get are likely to be priced lower than the original ads. So, how can they justify the theory that creating a blacklist a mile long and blocking ads which Google would normally show as the best paying ads for that block can increase your revenue at all, let alone by as much as 50%?

Somebody, enlighten me, please!

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Text Links Ads, one of the premiere companies in the link-sales industry has now launched a new Link Baiting service. In short, they offer two plans, one at the $5000 level, and one which will cost you $10,000. With both plans, they create a link bait item, submit it to the major social media sites, and mail them to appropriate bloggers. The $10,000 plan also gives you additional creative ideas in addition to the idea for the link bait, they submit to a wider range of social media sites, email twice as many bloggers, and, if possible, submit your site to CSS galleries.

Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagens are two of the top names in the Link-Building field, and the price of this service reflects that. Would a service like this be worth the high cost? This is cheap in comparison to some of the other link baiting services available, but I can hardly believe that this is worth $10,000. Let’s be honest, the major time is spent in coming up with the idea. If you are somewhat skilled at crafting your own headlines and summaries, you could do the submissions yourself, in addition to emailing relevant bloggers.

So, is the idea worth $10,000 to you? I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has purchased a link baiting service in the past. Tell me how well it worked! I want to know hat type of ROI you think you received from this service! 

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Well, we all know that MySpace pages have the potential to drive a ton of traffic. Sure, it takes some work to build an extensive network, but eventually many people have gotten their MySpace pages to the point where they might have 1000+ uniques per day running through these pages.

Many slightly devious minds have realized the selling potential of these pages, and place affiliate programs on their MySpace pages, hawking everything from ringtones to jewelry to pr0n and other less ethical products. Now, if you are using MySpace for affiliate marketing, I am sure that you must be somewhat frustrated with the limited freedom you have in creating Myspace pages. In short, they suck.

So, wouldn’t it be nice if you could redirect all of your MySpace visitors to a landing page or website of your choice? Well, this isn’t nearly difficult as you might think. Let’s set up a Flash redirect. To pull this off, you will need a Linux box, and a text editor, and a server of your own somewhere.

First things first, you must install the Ming package. Ming is a library for generating Macromedia Flash files (.swf). This can be done in any Debian based Linux distribution by running:

apt-get install libming-util

Now, in your favorite text editor, create a file with the following text:

getURL("http://www.example.com");

Substitute the URL for the site you want to redirect to in place of ‘www.example.com’ above. Save this file as redirect.as. Now run the command:

makeswf redirect.as

This will produce a file called out.swf. Upload this file to a webserver where you can now fetch it from an external page.

The final step is to include the new flash file in your MySpace page. Include the following code somewhere on your MySpace page:

Make sure to change the src tag in the code above to point to the location of your out.swf. This will enable you to redirect your visitors to the page you specified when creadting your redirect.as. Good Luck!

P.S this may not work for much longer. MySpace is upgrading to Flash 9. This code may or may not work. The issue is that MySpace is now forcing allowScriptAccess=”never” on all embeds, which stops the browser from redirecting. If anyone knows how to avoid this, please comment!

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I just read an interesting post by Andy Hagens called ‘Four Trusted Links You Can Build Today‘. I have a few comments on the article I thought I would share (lucky you!)

In his post, Andy writes,

“A lesser-known Wikipedia page: Do you have an investment-related site? Do not try to add your homepage link to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock. Instead, add the deep link to your “The Forward P/E Ratio Explained” page from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PE_ratio… it’ll have a much better chance of still being there tomorrow.”

Now, I have some good and some bad things to say about this.

The Bad: First of all, any one who spams their link to Wikipedia merely for the sake of the link should be stoned. And I don’t mean in the nice, familiar Western way. I mean with rocks. Really, really large rocks.

The Good: That said, this can be a really effective link building method, if your sites contain quality content. Again, if you are merely spamming links, see above.

When I originally started looking at this method some time ago, I came across some interesting realizations - many of the ‘deeper’ subjects are not covered. Just this evening for instance, I was trying to find ways to build Wikipedia links to a site of mine, when I realized that a number of subjects and topics I covered in the site DID NOT HAVE EXISTING WIKIPEDIA PAGES.

So, I did whatever any web designer would do in that situation - I created the pages. I wrote some good, high quality content for the Wikipedia articles. Obviously, they were subjects I was already interested in, since I had created web pages and complete sites around some of these subjects.

So, in essence, I have a bunch of Wikipedia articles which now contain my page among very few others.

Regardless of how you get your links into Wikipedia, there are a few methods to ‘pimp’ out your Wikipedia links so that they pass on the most linkjuice possible.

1. Interlink the pages - In short, search Wikipedia for all instances and mentions of the subject on which the article containing the links to your page, and link them to the page in question. This, to some extent, raises the profile of the article on the Wikipedia domain. It is a well known fact that Google includes internal links as well as external links when determining how important pages are to a site.
2. Maintain the pages - As with any web page, the more regular the updates, the more often the pages get spidered. Staleness of a page may be a major factor in Google’s algorithm, although there is some debate on the fact. At any rate, by making constant contributions to the article, and constantly improving the quality of the page, you will gain a site rep, and your changes are less likely to be immediately reverted.

Another site I noticed that is an easy mark for a good, albeit nofollowed link is AboutUs.org. This new site is gaining popularity recently, and I have begun noticing it linked to from the Domaintools.com tools. It is actually really interesting - it immediately will grab a site thumbnail, an excerpt, and isolates contact information, maps it with Google Maps, performs a bunch of other interesting feats, all in a great MediaWiki format. For a good example, check out the AboutUs.org page for Oilman’s blog.

Let me know what you think!

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It appears that Adbrite has performed a nice visual update to their advertisers’ interface. The new interface allows for more clearer organization, allowing AJAX-powered updates of your live bids etc. According to Kevin Weatherman of Adbrite, there will a corresponding update to the publishers’ interface ‘Coming Soon’!

(Click to Enlarge)

Additionally, advertisers will soon be able to create unique channels, or groups of sites, and run their ads solely across that group of sites. Sounds like there are a bunch of improvements coming soon from Adbrite - I can’t wait to see what else they have planned!

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