I read a while ago a decent post from the Linkvana Reviews guy, called Twitter Link Wheels. Without going into detail (you can read his post) it discusses using twitter as a hub for all your RSS feeds, the benefit being the syndication value of Twitter (correct me if I’m wrong Daniel ) .

Today I would like to discuss something similar using Identi.ca and a couple of other Web2 sites. This method will get a Super link wheel going on and all fully automated!

Unlike Daniels post suggesting to use twitterfeed to help syndicate ALL your rss feeds, I want to discuss syndicating the posts from One of your WordPress sites only using a free Plugin called WP-Statusnet, and using Identi to push those links to other properties.

So for your Identi Link Wheel here is what you will need

A wordpress blog that updates regularly
WP-Statusnet installed on this blog
An account on Identi.ca
An account on Twitter
An account on Delicious
An account on diigo
An account on Packrati

Once we are signed up to all those sites, we need to link them all up together. From within your Identi account you can link it to twitter and now all your identi posts will also get posted to twitter. Next thing you want to do is put your account details for Twitter, Delicious and Diigo into your Packrati admin panel.

What you have now done is setup a “Mini Web2 Linkwheel”, when you make a post on Identi it will get published on Twitter aswell, Heard by Packrati who will then republish the post as a bookmark onto Delicious and Diigo.

To get this rolling all you need to do now is install the WP-statusnet plugin into your wordpress site and load up your identi.ca details. So every time your site makes a new post you will get some juicy web2 syndication on complete autopilot!!

Try it out yourself and let me know how it goes, it’s really simple to setup and gives a nice boost to the posts you are syndicating.

Massive thanks goes out to The Internet for even being here and letting us do this stuff, and a special thanks to the creator of Link Velociraptor, who claims full ownership to all the secrets revolving around this method and deserves full credit for the ingenuity

First and foremost, the pride of getmorepie.com and the official Representative of the More Pie mantra is the Get More Pie Pimpin Dude!  Our dudey is a completely unique,  made to order piece of artwork from a guy we found on ebay classifieds ads – Liam Brocklehurst.  I saw a couple of his pieces on the website and thought he would be worth a shot, so I emailed him my brief.

Would you like to read my brief?

I wonder if this is something you could do/would be interested in.

I have a website that will be providing webmaster tools and marketing or money making tips.

The name is Get More Pie, with pie being the euphomism for success/traffic/money etc.

Could you design a character based logo, I envisage some kind of Manga style Pimpish business man with a fist full of cash, a face full of Pie and a plate in the other hand holding a money pie.

The concept sounds cheesy, so I wonder if you would be able to do it and if you think you could pull it off in style.

What do you think, did he pull it off in style?  I think he did an Excellent Job, so does Ben too which is nice coz we dont always see eye to eye!  If you need any artwork doing, give him a shout - http://liambrocklehurst.com

Now as for the theme itself, I wanted to do it all myself instead of using one of our normal guys,  I am a competent coder and developer but often I’m not the one that does all the hardwork, and to be quiet honest I lack that creative flair (this is why we have a team!).  All that aside I was determined and I knew that enough resources and even completely free themes and frameworks lay out the in the wilder-web, so I set about finding some stuff.

I had decided based on previous websites that I should use Thematic for the theme framework and save myself the daunting task of coding the theme files from the ground up.  And for the graphics, I love Smashing magazine and the free stuff they always have.  If I’d have felt brave enough, I would have done a tutorial step by step but instead I cheated and took 2 PSD templates and mashed them up together(Delistore and WordPress Fun).  If you look, you can still see some elements of both templates in this theme, but also it is very different too.

Even though I had some pretty decent freebies and an uber awesome Feature graphic, I wasnt quiet there with the finer points of the WordPress Code, like the wp-query for custom loops and pulling images on my front page all neatly etc, so thankfully as he always does Ben managed to save the day with some slick snippets of php to get me where I wanted to go.

So with the help of a cool Graphic artist, Smashing Magazine, the guys from Themeshaper and most of all my brother, partner and site contributer Ben(oh and a good many hours of stress and sweat)  I managed to put together what I like to think is a pretty cool looking theme!  I’m afraid I’m not going to be giving it away any time soon but themes is something we would like to get into pretty soon.  We’ll see what the new year brings

Oh and for anyone intersted, I intend to write a more detailed explanation of some of the steps I took to put this theme together, I think it wouldbe helpful for some readers   I’ll do it just as soon as I actually finish it!  As you can probably tell even though it is nearly there, this is still my “Work in Progress”.

PS – noone was around apart from google to help with the previously mentioned bug!  DOH! I think I gave myself a bald patch over that problem!

For the life of me I couldnt figure out what on earth the problem with my theme was, but there definitely WAS a problem, resulting in two main symptoms, let me tell you what they where (there could have been more but these where what effected me)

1 – Rss feed not working

Whatever was after the [CDATA] code in the php template for my rss feeds, was not getting parsed into valid xml.  This resulted in a dirty looking rss feed which was nothing more than a txt file containing my links (maybe I will re-enact later and give you a screenie).  Suffice it to say, no feed = no food!  I was unhappy.

2 – My Download links where not working!

They where being rendered in the browser instead, and showing gobbledeegook txt and characters all throughout the page.  This meant anyone who had bought anything from the website was confronted with a dissapointing page of gibberish when they came to download.

FIXED!!

Who wants to know what it was, and how easy it was to fix?

well I had read that my config.php file might have an error in it, but noone said anything about my functions.php file!  After hours and hours of searching I stuck a search in google and one of the first results mentioned “Line breaks” in the functions.php file.

DING DING!

I didnt even bother opening the page, I couldnt believe I hadnt checked that, and yes indeedy there was about 3 extra line breaks at the end of my functions.php file.

Moral of the story?

Check your settings/config/functions file and make sure there is NO extra whitespace or line breaks!

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Overall it works though, and I think it looks real nice! Hopefully we can have all the bugs worked out this weekend and have another bash at going “fully live” on monday.

Happy Link Building

Today I would like to remind some readers of an often overlooked Fundamental link building strategy…

Directory Listings -

A pretty well known method of generating backlinks, however with all the “5000 directory listings” etc products being touted that dont produce any real results (probably loaded with tons of fake directories) it is easy to overlook it.

Couple that with the fact that any decent Directory site that has any Google juice to pass doesnt accept any old spammy shitty autoblog MFA clickbumping type of site, it’s no suprise the “Backlink Bandwagon” and “SEO Shortcut” people pass it off as being Old and Dead.

Far From It!

If you have a half decent site with a little content then there are some quality directories out there that will help your rankings.  I’ve got a handpicked list of 500 directory sites that suite my needs and only accept non-spammy websites, anytime I submit a quality site to this list I see a noticeable boost in my serps.   Quality Geo targetted directories can be enough to get top listings for many smaller Local type keywords.

I personally use a mixture of large volume Directory submitting using Sick Submitter on any and all sites, hoping that some links might stick (typical machine gun spam) and a handpicked list that I semi automate with firefox.  Not all sites deserve the Handpicked list, but those that do like it!

check out info.vilesilencer.com for good Directory info, the forum will show you whats going on (quality sites dont like spam!)

Well how about phrases with silent words?  I’ll bet you never knew they existed did you?!

Here is a perfect example of a Phrase with a silent word in it…

Building Backlinks with Comments

Hold on, you may have missed it, did you see the Silent word in that phrase?  Let me show you again…

Building Backlinks with blog Comments.

Did you see it that time?

I’ll bet you never even thought about it before, but if you have a little think about it now, did it ever strike you that the only comments a large portion of the Backlink Building community ever talk about is “Blog Commenting”.   It’s almost as if it is a silent word that everyone assumes goes in front of the “Commenting”.

Today however, I would like to discuss Commenting that does not involve blogs.  There is such a thing out there and in fact, you could find a veritable Backlink Goldmine if you put your mind to it.

Here are some types of Comment Backlink you can get without having to post on a blog…

Picture Galleries - As mentioned in my Scrapebox Pro tips #1 aside from having blogs and forums, expressionengine sites have Galleries too.  You can usually leave a dofollow comment on one of these gallery photos aswell.  There are other types of Photo Gallery software out there too, some of which will also leave you a nice AutoApprove Dofollow Anchor Texted backlink in your comment.   One or 2 gallery platforms I use regularly arent heavily spammed yet,  so I’ll not get anymore specific than that.  I first found a couple of gallery links when doing some Backlink analysis on some Ezine articles that where ranking top.  Guy had spammed a few hundred gallery photos and nothing else so I figured hey, thats a cool trick!

Articles Comments -

A lot of article sites allow comments, so while you’re signed up to them you might aswell pop some comments in.  Nowadays, there are a lot of Hybrid WordPress-Article sites around.  Often, if you have registered at these sites you can pop a comment on someones article and it will be autoapprove.  A lot of them are still no-follow but there are other article platforms out there that allow links and are dofollow Although admittedly sometimes you wont get anchored links in the comments just raw URL links (which have their value)

Wikis -

Several free hosted wiki platforms allow comments on wiki pages.  A lot of them require you to be a member before posting a comment, but this should be no problem, register an account and use scrapebox to find as many pages of a particular platform as you can and then sort by PR.  Pick the high pr comments and use them to boost your pages PR.  If you hit one platform all on one IP you wont get a great serp boost but you can boost your PR juice this way.

It stands to reason if they only come for playing games or whatever they dont want to click the adverts, so I have to choices…

Aggressively place adverts in sneaky positions, perhaps risking my adsense account, or perhaps using a CPA gateway frame of some kind.

Finding some decent ways to monetise on the CPM level with banner impressions and popups.

Although I really dont mind travelling the naughty path, I’d feel better with a legit CPM model.  After all, potentially a good games site could get 10s of thousands of page impressions in a month especially with bookmarkers!

So anyway, I’m going to be looking into CPM sponsors, PPV sponsors and popup/under/whatever types of sponsors and affiliate programs.  It’s a murky area I’m beginning to discover, with either real low payouts or risks of not getting paid (if using new companies)

Lets see how it goes…

Essential WordPress Plugins

Before I start covering the usual superduper army of awesome Power Packed plugins that you may be hoping for, I’m going to kick things off with a few plugins that will keep your blog ticking over even after you pound it with thousands of posts and GBs of spider traffic (and hopefully some human traffic too )

The last thing you want is to setup the perfect WordPress setup (autoblog/reviewsite/rubbish/good/whatever) and wake up to an empty page!  Or an account suspended email in your inbox

“Sorry but you have been hammering our resources and other webmasters are crying, we’ve turned off your gas for now”

Cache Those Pages!

Ok, so probably the most important one to start with is the saviour of many a Digg prone website or Superspam autoblog, and that is the Cache Plugin (I’ll link my favourite in a second).   WordPress has its own way of dealing with caching, that is, saving a webpage as a static version so your site loads faster and hits the databases less.  But we all like a nice plugin to do it for us.

I use Lighttpd a lot on my VPS servers so that swayed my choice a lot, but my favourite Cache plugin is Hyper Cache.   I tried some other popular ones such as WP-Cache and Super-Cache, but for whatever reason (maybe me just being a dumbass) Hyper Cache is the only one that worked for me on my Lightty Webservers with no extra steps apart from installing and adding one line into the config file.

So for Speeding up your webpage loading times, try Hyper Cache

Clear that Clutter!

If you have been running any amount of wordpress sites for some time, especially those of the Set-it-and-Forget-it variety, you’ll no doubt be overrun with useless comment spam.  It doesnt do you any harm, except it just sits there in the pending cue just building up.   One day you’ll feel like deleting them all,  only to be confronted with the ever-so daunting task of deleting 1500 comments 25 at a time!

Enter Delete Pending Comments a simple plugin that does exactly what it says on the tin, deletes all your pending comments in bulk!

Whilst we are on the keeping things tidy subject, another important plugin to load up straight away is optimize DB plugin.  You may not need it straight away but in time if you keep pumping out those posts your DB will tend to get slightly untidy.  Nice handy plugin from Yoast is, again simply named, Optimize DB.

Get some organization!

I like to keep things nice and simple, and have found a really simple way to make sure my category pages arent just skinny indexes of my posts, but have some juicy on topic text and content waiting for the Spiders to eat it up.
Using a plugin called Category Page I create content rich pages to use as my Category Archives.  Dead easy to setup all I need to do is drop a shortcode on the page and assign it in the admin panel, and it saves me getting knee deep in wordpress code to get unique and content rich category indexes.

Extending on the idea of merging pages and posts to keep things single and optimised, I also use Page Category Organiser, which allows me to assign pages a category.

The yellow swordfish page that hosted this plugin has vanished and I can no longer find a download link for this plugin so I have found an alternatvie that does the job just aswell – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/map-categories-to-pages/admin/ this will add a categories selection on your Page edit dashboard, allowing you to put pages into categories to allow for true Silo structure using both auto-published posts AND manually published Pages!

Combining both these plugins basically allows me to have posts pumping out on auto all the time, while being able to sneak in and add unique pages here and there when needed, with no fear of straggly orphan pages or unindexed sections of content.

And one final part of the organisation pie is the Sitemap.  Not one for bells and whistles, I just want load and go, the closest thing I found that doesnt need no extra tweaking and is perfect for your Pump and Dump army, Simple Sitemap.  For your Premier sites you may want to go for something traditional like Google XML Sitemaps or DagonDesigns sitemap generator,  but I like simple and Simple sitemap is Simple indeed!

Important Ommision!

I have neglected to go over the SEO/meta/header plugins that I use,   I would like to make a complete post on that shortly.  I will however say that I am more a fan of hardcoding some SEO into your header using some WordPress magic, it is much more suitable for the automated type of blogs, and done correctly works really well with the standard blogs.

Using Shortcodes to grab post and Page specific Tags, Excerpts, Categories and other unique snippets can just as easily prove as powerful as any SEO Head type plugin, not to mention the fact doing it hard-code means you can forget about it when you’ve finished.

More on that later….

Honourable Mention!

Goes out to YARP.  We like the functionality, but after much testing me and a couple of buddies have found it can be a real strain on CPU, so quiet simply it has proven impracticle for Automated content sites.

It is however a really useful plugin for your real content sites, blogs or whatever, so dont forget it if you want to have good bookmarkers and rss subscribers…

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/

Thats me Signing out ,

Happy Link Building

Backlink Bully

The first in a series of slightly more “aggressive” Backlink tips.  Not the most Bullyish of tips but a good one to start us off with…

Backlink Stalking

Finding other peoples backlink portfolio and using it to increase your own portfolio, hence cutting down a lot of work in scraping, filtering testing and waiting etc.  At the very least you will find a bunch of fresh places to find links, and if you’re really lucky someone will leave you a footprint to follow on to a whole bunch more backlinks

There are a number of professional tools on the market for doing this kind of thing, but I like to keep things down and ghetto as much as possible, and where ghetto just aint good enough, scrapebox usually helps

There are three main areas or “hunting grounds” I like to use when looking for Victims to stalk.

Victim #1 – Product sellers and Service Providers.

Not always the most exciting of backlink portfolios,  the people who sell backlinking products or sell backlinking services often use pretty standard techniques.  Occasionally you will find someone who is on the ball and may have a decent assortment of backlinks,  but mostly you will be using these guys to simply find solid long lasting backlinks.

Pick any random forum about SEO or internet marketing and there will usually be a “For Sale” or “Special Offers” section, in which you will find people selling the latest and greatest Backlinking tool or Indexing Formular or whatever, and an array of service providers selling link building for a fee.

A quick 10 minute scan through a dozen or so threads will usually yield several potential Victims.  What we are looking for is signature links, both from the providers/sale starters, and there customers.  Finding stuff that is a couple of months old is good as if you pick a good target and find some links they will usually be more sticky, meaning less chance of wasting time on making links that will later be deleted by some moderators.

Once we’ve copied a bunch of potential domains into a txt file or whatever you do, it’s time to fire up scrapebox and do some backlink checking (or you could use yahoo site explorer normally through your browser 1 domain at a time)  More on that side of things in a moment.

Victim #2 – Your competition

Dont forget to properly scope out your competition.  I really love finding strong backlinkers competing in a niche I am interested in.  It helps me to up my game a little, sometimes people are purely bruteforcing there way to the top and then I just need to crank up the gears a notch or two, but occasionally you stumble across new techniques, new platforms to drop your links on, or just new neighbourhoods that you hadnever thought about before.

Again,  grab a load of domains in the top 5 spots for your keywords and stick them in Scrapebox.  Avoid checking obvious whitehat and straight ball sites like the Wikipedia/amazon/ebays/straight big news sites like Cnn/etc/etc.  The EMDs and .info domains should be the ones standing out, and they are the ones you want to investigate.

Victim #3 – Pharma Spammers

Now with these guys, I wouldnt call it as much stalking as I would call it Shadowing, or even chasing a few streets behind.  These guys are usually on the ball with new techniques and vulnerable platforms that havent been mainstreamed yet.  Obviously a lot of these guys just use Xrumer and following a xrumer trail can be easy but not much more than following a 10 ton tank and looking at the sheer devestation it has caused.  Not every pharma spammer is blessed with elegance!

However take a googley at some or other Pharma keyword and take a look for the “saw thumbs” in the first 2 or 3 pages of results.  Often some or other Forum profile/social profile/hacked webpage will be in the results.  These will be shortlived flash-in-pan affairs but always remember this…  A short sharp burst will often get a page to the top for a day or two, and the harder the keyword the more links you need.  So picking one of these “Saw Thumb” pages is a great way to find a TON of backlinks.

Also you will often have a treat too of finding a new way to abuse a platform, for example many pharma spammers will literally take over an enitre profile page with html code, virtually embedding their affiliate/money sites making the original site seemingly dissappear.  Other things I have found is putting links in different fields (hint – occupation-al hazzards) so as to disguise and hide them better, and even finding ways to slip links in pages and comments where links normally shouldnt go.

Finally – the Stalk itself

A lot of people are quiet satisified with mining the backlinks from someones Site Explorer list.  I find this nowhere sufficient data, as on a prime target I want to be looking at many more links than the 1k YSE limits me too.

Here is how I make my stalking go deeper.

Firstly lets ditch scrapebox for a minute and do the good old fashioned YSE.  Stick your domains in there and pull up the backlinks.  If you have been doing any backlink work by now you should be fairly adept at identifying patterns in URLs in turn identifying the types of backlinks (ie difference between blog comments/profiles/directories/homepage links/etc etc) all of which are identifiable at a glance.

Once you’ve pulled up the results for your first domain, and it has yielded a good few K of links, scan and find common linking.  Are they doing a lot of blogengine spam,  meh, leave em to it.  Can you see a lot of profile spam, hmmm,  lets see if we can pinch there lists of sticky profile sites…

Openining new sites from now on in a new tab, leaving YSE open, we start to pop open a few interesting URLs, lets say we found a bunch of PunBB and IPB, more than the average person and you want these links.   When we look at the profiles, can we see a common factor?

Perhaps the user has used the same username (oh no {forgot|neglected} your spyntax!} so theres an easy footprint, copy it into a txt file.  Perhaps they used the same anchor text in all profiles, theres a small footprint, copy that.   Now instead of putting the backlinkers domain into scrapbox backlink checker, we have started to build a list of footprints to scrape with the Harvester, and in turn raising our potential count way past the 1k and closer to the victims true count.

And finally, we must not forget to check the Backlinks of our victims Backlinks!  Everyone does it nowadays (backlinks to there backlinks) it would be foolish not to investigate.  What you will find here is peoples best methods for getting urls indexed.  Some people post to Identi.ca, other people make an rss feed, some people do both, others just spam raw urls across message and guest books.   I have found some great auto approve backlinks simply by following other backlinkers BACKLINKS, not there main urls.  Some platforms I would never have found otherwise!

As ever, enjoy and feel free to comment below.

Happy Link Building

Scrape Box Pro Tips

This is a slightly edited version of a post I made over on Backlinks Forum….

Did you know Scrapebox can post comments on a whole bunch of sites, not just “WordPress, Movable Type, Blog Engine”

In fact, straight out the (scrape)box it can also post to “B2Evolution, Drupal and ExpressionEngine” blogs since as long as i’ve been using scrapebox.

Today we learn how to post to ExpressionEngine comment enabled pages, using scrapebox and “Slow Commentor” mode (please note, it may work with fast commentor too, but I have had most success using Slow Commentor)

Slow Commenter mode is the same as “BlogEngine” mode.  To use Slow Commenter select BlogEngine.

Dead simple really, scrape as normal using “Custom Footprint” mode and some special ExpressionEngine comment dorks like these…

Google dorks for gallery pages
(wont work in Yahoo or others because of inurl: )

inurl:/index.php/gallery/comments/

inurl:/gallery/comments/
All SE dorks for general Comment Pages

"Powered by Expression Engine" "Notify me of follow-up comments?"

Now I probably should add some more dorks,  but you’ll have to start finding your own sooner or later anyway so I’ll leave it at that for now(And dont forget to use a big keywords list too!!) 

once we’ve scraped a good list and removed the dupes (if thats what you do) simply use Slow Commentor (no need for accurate mode enabled) to post on these pages just like you would normally using scrapebox and say the blog Engine blogs.

Done??
now that was easy wasnt it!!!

The beauty of ExpressionEngine blog comments is a high number of them are AutoApprove, and most I have found are Dofollow!

BONUS TIP -

Some people have asked me “what about B2Evo blogs”.

To post to b2evo blogs using Scrapebox is easy, simply select WordPress Poster (fastcommentor) as if you are posting to wordpress.  It will post to your list of b2evo just the same way.  There are not a shedload of b2evos out there, but a good amount of the ones that are out there also have autoapprove still on.

Happy Link Building