Could it be that Google is beginning to role out Google Caffeine in the UK? SERPS seem to be on the move, and fluctuations seem more frequent in terms. It used to be that Google updated Keyword positions in intervals, but recently things have been more frequent and less controlled.

Google Caffeine is Google’s way of resolving the “Real Time” search issues. In a sense this Algorithm change is Google’s way of bringing in results like news items and videos into the top SERPS faster and more effectively.

We have already had faint wisps of the change, because Twitter and News results have been brought into the SERPS for general terms like “Christmas or Valentines Day”. However could this now be being spread across our web-sites in general? After heavy Link Building for many sites, terms have begun moving up and down, in a strange pattern.

Terms move every 15-20 minutes, more frequently than I have ever seen before. One client has seen movement in the term “Safari holidays”, moving from position 1 to number 4 and back again. Double checking that web history is disabled and I am signed out, I also tried on other computers seeing the same results. In one day this particular term changed position over 18 times. Movement for any terms like this is very rare, and I have not seen this for any of my clients in previous years.

The effect that this could possibly have for small business owners in monumental. This could give them the chance to out manoeuvre the Vince Update (Brand priority) and get a top ranking position even if only for a short time. This short space of time could be enough for a couple of conversions and maybe the click through could help the sites ranking position (although this isn’t a confirmed ranking factor).

If Caffeine is being released out in the UK and is slowly being introduced into our search engine, how long before we see some bigger and faster moving results?

Marcus is and experienced SEO and works for Jaz Travel a tour operator dedicated to selling holidays in Egypt.

I have been using textbroker.com for some time now, but decided to do a post both reviewing the service, and comparing the quality levels between 2 stars – 5 stars. I couldn’t find any good reviews from a content buying point of view, apart from this one at wolf-howl.com.

I should point out that Textbroker do not know I am doing this review, when I ordered the articles that I will be showing you here they were placed through their system (and paid for with my own money) like any other order.

An order was placed for a 2 star, 3 star, 4 star and 5 star article. Each of them was given the exact same article briefing, and asked to write between 950 – 1050 words:

A weekend in New York City: Things to see and do

Please write an article giving British tourists some suitable options of things to do in New York City if they are visiting for a weekend.

Textbroker quality/pricing system

For anyone who is unaware, I should probably describe how this works first. When you set jobs, you can choose what quality/price you want.

Textbroker.com order process

The system is extremely easy to use – you simply need to register your email address, then you can deposit funds by Paypal. Once this is done you can create new projects, which in turn can contain as many jobs as you like.   Each project can only be set to one quality level, so for my experiment here I created 4 projects.

Click to enlarge

Once this is done, writers can then login and accept jobs. They then complete them and add them back to the system for your approval. Typically this will all happen very quickly – 3 of the 4 articles here were back in my account for approval within 12 hours of the job being created.

At this point you can either accept the article, or ask the writer to fix any mistakes or make any changes.  I should also say here that I never requested any changes to any of the articles.  I wanted a review of their first efforts. I doubt many people will want to waste their own time proofreading and editing content, so I felt that it would give a better reflection to simply review what was returned first time, to allow anyone reading to make better choices of what level from 2-5 stars suited them best.

The results

I have posted all the articles, links below. I have not edited them whatsoever – the layout and styling is exactly as they were given to me by the authors. In order to avoid fragmenting any discussion, I have disabled comments on the articles themselves. Please leave any comments on this main post.

2 star article - cost $10.59. Click here to read.

3 star article – cost $13.45. Click here to read.

4 star article – cost $19.74 . Click here to read.

5 star article – cost $70.50 . Click here to read.

I am struggling to see any value in the 2 star article whatsoever – it is littered with mistakes and is blatantly not written by a native English writer.  I would be the first to admit my own writing is not the best, but this one is appalling. In spelling  errors alone we have:

• ou’ll
• york
• withouth
• YOu
• endosed
• Conservatoin
• auquatic
• exampe
• ethusiastic
• entrall
• gaurantee
• NewYork
• everthing

And this is before we even start looking at parts which are spelt correctly, but make no sense whatsoever (The most famous street in New York is Broadway. Though it from all the way from Manhattan to the Bronx, is home to the famous Time Square, and Broadway theaters) etc.

The 3 star article is of reasonable quality – I would certainly use this for filler content, or for link building on external sites. For my own sites I would definitely pay the extra money and go 4 star though. Looking at both side by side, its not hard to see where they extra money went. The 4 star seems better value for money.

Unless you are running a content mill, an MFA site, or doing something extremely spammy, I can’t think of any reason why you would want to pay $10 for the 2 star quality – and that view is only magnified when you read the excellent 4 star one, which came in at a mere $9 more.

The level 4 and 5 content is perfect in my opinion. Whether you think the 5 star is worth 3 times the price as the 4 star, well that is more going to come down to your own site and business model than anything else.  If I needed 2-3 articles for a site I would certainly consider the 5 star. If I was creating a new site and needed 100 pages of a few thousand words each, it would be an easy choice – 4 star all the way.

The Conclusion

In whole, I think TextBroker.com is an absolutely brilliant service. I will definitely be continuing to use it both on my own sites and with client projects.  It is an extremely quick and hassle free way to get your content. I had been using rentacoder.com for content creation, but after a couple of nasty experiences there recently, Textbroker is definitely the top dog for content.

I would like to see a couple of improvements though.  Right now Textbroker are forcing you to send content back for revision before you can outright refuse it. If I am paying the 2 star writer  $10 to write 1000 words, I simply do not think I should be forced to do his proof reading for him because he cannot be bothered to run a simple spell check on it before submitting.

I think perhaps Textbroker.com need to introduce a 1 star level, and put the non native and low quality writers in it, or failing that, they should remove these writers from the system altogether.  This was obviously only a sample order for review purposes, but if I was genuinely wanting to use that on a travel site it would need extensive work to fix it. Even going back and forward with the writer and having them do it, I would be quicker (and it would be free) to simply have written it by myself from the start.

All in, don’t let those downsides put you off – simply avoid the 2 star stuff and the service is perfect. It definitely gets our recommendations. If you want to test it out yourself, why not head over there and give it a go. There is no minimum order, you can try a single $5 article if you like and let me know what you think in the comments.

It’s Official! Site Speed is another SEO Ranking Factor!

It has happened, the speed of your website will have a direct impact on the ranking of your sites (maybe now is a good time to put some money aside for a redesign). It’s true, Google have now announced on their Webmaster Blog that the speed of your site will have an effect on your overall rankings in Google.

Now it appears that Google could be working against some large websites, especially those that have “heavy back ends” and require time to load pages. The smallest business can now make a bit of a comeback against the Brand Update (Vince) with potentially less complicated websites that load quickly.

Of course it makes absolute sense for this to become an SEO factor; people like to sift through sites that work with them, not against them. If you have certain fluidity about your site that allows customers to pass from page to page and easily through a transaction process, customers will be more likely to convert. However if your site runs slowly and it takes minutes for someone to complete a transaction or find a product that they want to read about or potentially buy, they may be put off or get bored with the wait!

Google works for the searcher and therefore the client, not for the websites that it displays. So this is just another update for the people that use Google to find products that they want. By removing or penalising the websites that take time to load then Google is doing them a favour by eliminating the sites that take up the user’s time.

There are a number of ways that this can easily be fixed though, and one simple way is putting more money into your server or hosting business. If you increase the speed of your server then your sites performance will improve as well. This can unfortunately be quite expensive so you need to look at ways of tidying up your website first. Things like Flash and image based websites need to cut down a little more to the basics and indulge in a more simplistic way of working, yet still keeping the attractiveness and beauty of their website design.

Now the overall weight that Site Speed actually has on SEO rankings may not really be all that much, and in all honesty compared with other factors like Link Saturation and on site content, Site Speed will be one of the lower ranking factors. Although this does give more weight to those sites that have been designed to help people convert and to save them time, so the general user should be happy that this has happened!

Marcus is an avid Travel SEO blogger working for a Safari holidays Tour operator, and enjoys sharing his knowledge around the world.

April 16th Update – Submitedge contacted me in response to this post. I said if they removed my links and refunded me, I would remove their url’s from this post. Both have now been carried out.  I think if you don’t have a public facing blog you will be out of luck – I could only get a reply from them after they went to Google and checked that my post was in fact ranking for brand searches…

Referer 1:
>> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=submitedge&start=10&sa=N

I was replying through their own ticket system and was getting no reply. It took a public blog post to even get them to admit their was a problem….

—————————-

This is a warning post about using the “link building” services from Submitedge.com.

We had a client wanting to use them for some cheap link building,  but since they had a new site we decided we would test it on one of our own sites first.  I will outline the results from this “ethical seo company” (their choice of words, not mine…) below.

The order was placed on 10th March for 10 one way backlinks.   On the 11th someone else showed me a batch of the links that Submit Edge had placed for them. The quality was horrendous, there is no way you would want these links pointing at your site. Dropped domains, spam sites, and some of the pages having 80 outgoing links to completely unrelated pages etc.  There is no possible way they are passing any benefit, and depending on circumstances there would be a real possibility of these links doing you harm.

With this in mind, I sent them this message less than 24hrs after ordering:

Someone just showed me a sample report of this service – removed

All of those links are absolute spam, and you are linking 80 things per page. This will do more harm than good. Please cancel my order and refund it to Paypal.

thanks

Even although they have a “100% service satisfaction” they completely ignored my reply. On the 15th March they then uploaded a report saying the job had been completed.  Lets take a look at where they placed the links:

http://www.removed.info/ – pr1, 12 links in Yahoo.  52 external links on the page. Adword ads displayed from google_ad_client = “pub-removed“. They have not even bothered to use a logo, leaving “site name” on it.

http://www.removed.net/ – pr2, 25 links in Yahoo.  29 external links on the page. Adwords ads displayed from google_ad_client = “pub-removed“;. Dropped domain, proof removed. Linked to first site by same Adsense ID.

http://www.removed.com/terms-conditions.html – pr2, 120 external links. And it seems this is another dropped domain, proof removed.

http://www.removed.net/Search-Engine-Optimization.html – pr2, 30 links in Yahoo. 62 external links. Another dropped domain – their pagerank comes from unrelated links on a Thai government site, removed.

http://www.removed.com/Search_Engine_Optimization.html – pr2, 20 links in Yahoo. 100 external links. With the domain name “removed” it’ll come as no surprise this is yet another dropped domain. You can see the proof here, removed.

http://www.removed.org – pr3, 50 outgoing links. Dropped domain.  I guess the whole “don’t have any content on the homepage at all, just stuff it with paid links only” thing kind of gives that away.

http://removed.com/ – pr3, 73 external links. Yup, another dropped domain. Proof removed.

http://www.removed.com/ – pr2, 29 links in Yahoo. 90 external links. They also seem to have removed all the real content to make room for more paid links. Dropped domain, used to be a web design company – look at the proof removed.

Do these look like the type of sites you would want linking to you?  Bear in mind the external links numbers above are just the number of links on that specific page – every other page on the website has similar numbers of links also.

We decided these links were potentially far more harmful than good, we definitely did not want to be associated with this type of link building.  This was sent to Submit Edge on the 15th March:

Those links are all absolute garbage – please remove them and refund the money. I think those links potentially do me more harm than good, I want this resolved quickly. Thanks

They simply chose to ignore this message. So much for their “ethical seo” and “100% service satisfaction”!

We left it another 9 days after that, then sent them this:

Are you not even listening to me? Fine if you want to steal the money, you can keep it. I want those links removed immediately.

No reply yet again.

I really did not want to get involved in outing specific companies or url’s, but I felt we had no choice here. This company are using tactics that have a very high chance of leading to penalties. I would not like to get a lot of these type of links, or to point them at a new or weak site.

Even when offered the opportunity to keep the cash paid ($170) and remove the links, Submit Edge refused to do so. If they had agreed to remove the links when I asked, you would not be reading this post right now.

If you are considering using submitedge.com for link building, I would advice you to read the above very carefully and reconsider. Do not fall victim to the submitedge.com scam…

This is exactly the type of scam service that gives the SEO industry a bad name.

Every single SEO has there own techniques for gaining links, whether it is Guest Blogging or directory hunting, we all have our own differences that make our techniques unique. However we are all aiming towards the same principle, to get high ranking positions in Google.

One question that crops up quite often and even more so from clients. As SEO’s begin to explain some of their Link Building techniques to clients, one common response I get is “So surely we just need to get thousands of links?” Now depending on what technique each SEO uses, depends on the link “exposure” that your site will be subject too.

Personally I work with a lower Quantity of links and work towards a higher Quality of links in order to obtain more power in a small amount of time. However when working with new sites I have found that a large influx of lower Quality links has been able to help boost a sites initial performance.

When I say low Link Quality I do not mean Spam, low Link Quality refers to those links that are on less powerful pages and domains (Low Pagerank and low inbound link rates). Higher Quality links refer to links from Guest Blogs, where you are permitted to place a post on a high ranking and high Pagerank website with a single outbound link. These links will raise suspicion in the first instance because if you have been using Low Quality links, a sudden rise in more powerful ones may be sand boxed (a testing period implemented by Google to check the validity of links/content/site updates).

High Quality links are noticed by Google ore regularly than lower Quality links, which means that the Google Bot notices your website more frequently. The lower Quality Links don’t get “Crawled” as often as the more powerful ones, but because they are in such large amount one link may get crawled and others on a later date.

The main point to understand is that the higher Quality links will pass on more power to your website improving positions at a faster rate (although they are difficult to obtain). The Lower Quality links are much easier to obtain, but do not have the same sort or strength.

Verdict: This may sound as though I am sitting on the fence, but using both of these tactics is the best. Higher Quality links should be used to obtain positions in the top ten, whereas the Lower Quality links can help get to the second page, as long as they are in high amounts. So a mixture of these can help to obtain top results in Google!

Bio:

Marcus Travels around the world in search of new SEO techniques, typically a Luxury holidays Blogger, Marcus explores all aspects of SEO.

A while back, Patrick Gavin announced that he had bought the domainsearchengineoptimization.net and was going to rank it 1st place in Google for search engine optimization within a year.  He picked up a lot of publicity from the fact that he paid $62,500 for the domain.

At the time I made the comment on SEO Book:

The only way you could rank for that term quickly would be to take on tonnes of clients and use footer links in all of their sites, massive nepotistic linking or massive link buying. I don’t see him taking on seo clients, and option 2 & 3 are pretty much ruled out due to the fact he’s making a public spectacle of the attempt to rank.
…
The only chance I give him is if he is planning to 301 his personal site to the new one, since it already ranks first page.

It seems he went the route of  the only chance of success I was giving him, by 301′ing PatrickGavin.com to SearchEngineOptimization.net. This of course lead to his original site dropping out of the results completely (it was originally ranking 7th).

Publicly announcing you are going to rank first for that term, then attempting to do it by 301′ing an existing established site into a $60k domain was always filled with danger.  He was setting his stall out for Google to make an example of him, and it looks like they done it as he has been forced to undo the 301 due to a complete lack of rankings.  Now his site simply says

SearchEngineOptimization.net has gone offline. We will be back soon!

Was anyone expecting much Google love to the man publicly announcing his plans with this, given that he built, ran and sold the largest public text link sales network?

I was reading some affiliate things tonight and I am not impressed at all at how Vivastay.com structure their affiliate program. It seems that rather than pay their affiliates out of the profit margin, they simply increase the price and pass it on to the end user instead.

Here is a typical hotel if you visit the site normally:

And the same hotel if you visit via an affiliate link:

This is disgraceful, Vivastay and Affiliate Window are  just adding on the 5% affiliate commission to the sale price, stiffing the end user and the affiliate in the process.

How can you legitimately build up a loyal readership on your site once the readers realise they are going to get screwed every time they follow one of your recommendations?  The readers who do understand how affiliate links work then need to clear their cookies before buying, even although you convinced them to book that hotel in the first place – how is that fair to the affiliate who sent the traffic, when they get paid nothing for a converting customer?

Thanks to Keep Your Woman Happy for providing the images used.

Further reading on the Affiliate 4 Travel blog.

Matt Cutts divulges yet more “Information”, this time about 301’s!

Well, well, well, you could never guess who has appeared back on the scene with yet more information to help indulge us with. That’s right; Mr Cutts (also called many other names, most not repeatable on this Blog) has come back to tell us all that we are doing something wrong….. Again!

According to the Spam specialist at Google’s headquarters there are several problems with using 301 redirects. Basically he has said that the excessive use of 301 redirects will result in the loss of Pagerank on your site. All of this coming from the Search Engine who announced a few months ago that Pagerank would soon be abolished. There was a panic towards the end of last year about how Pagerank would soon be removed from Google’s toolbar to help prevent spamming and redirecting sites. This clearly has not happened and Mr Cutts is back to telling us information that has no merit.

All of us use 301 redirects and in most cases big web-sites use them to absolute excess. All of these sites that use 301’s still rank very high in the SERPS and also retain their Pagerank. What are we going to do with the stuff that Mr Cutts throws at us, most people throw his comments in the trash, but what if what he is saying is a warning?

There is of course the off chance that MC (Matt Cutts) is sending a gentle warning to those that are trying to sculpt Pagerank. His argument is that your website should be built properly in the first place so 301’s would not be necessary (a bit harsh for small business owners). Everyday we find something that we need to change on our sites, or want to edit, and what if a 301 is what we need. The redirects need to be used by travel agents or hotels, if a hotel is no longer on offer you don’t want people turning up at a 404 page, you want to send them to another more relevant one.

Now I don’t know about you but I think Mr Cutts needs to think about this all a little more.

Bio:

Marcus Travels the world but is very much stuck in the Blogging and SEO world, Australian holidays are a great passion of his, along with Travel blogging.

I blogged about this domain selling for £91,500, but it seems this fairytale does not have a happy ending.

According to a thread on Acorn Domains, the seller is apparently trying to back out of the deal:

So I want to share with you the news that I have just been informed by Sedo that the seller is disputing the auction and claims the name had not been authorised to be sold. I don’t know the precise circumstances yet but will find out.

With the reasonable amount of publicity this listing and sale received, this is the last thing Sedo needs – the amount of publicity is only going to get bigger if this sale is dragged into a court room. If big ticket sellers see Sedo not enforcing what is a legally binding contract, then I see no reason for them to continue handing them a 10% commission for very little.

Sedo have a history of washing their hands of transactions when either a buyer or seller refuse to complete, so it will definitely be interesting to see how this pans out.

The following is purely my own opinion, not confirmed as fact. It looks to me that the seller did authorise the sale of the domain, but got cold feet after it ended at significantly less than they expected.

The domain industry was full of people talking about the sale in the first place, since a bid on Sedo sent it to public auction. I cannot believe that someone who owns a domain like “mobilephones.co.uk” wouldn’t have came across news that it was for sale and immediately raised the alarm that the sale was bogus.

The nameservers of the domain are set to Sedo parking,  and the .com of the same domain are listed for sale, again on Sedo.  Honestly, when you look at all of this together, combined with the fact phones.co.uk sold for £175k, and 6 figure offers have been turned down for mobilephones.co.uk in the past, I am betting on this one being a case of the seller simply changing their mind when they seen the ending price.

The obvious solution to end situations like this arising in the first place would be for Sedo to take control of high value domains as the auction starts. If the domain meets the reserve (which it did in this case), then Sedo process the payment and pass on the domain, leaving absolutely no chance of people just deciding they no longer fancy the legally binding agreement they signed up to.

Reading the background to this, I am amazed and surprised how far this went – and how much money it cost. So I am blogging about it here to hopefully do my part to raise awareness of it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The scumbag Jason Gambert tried to register “SEO” as a trademark, with the intention of holding legitimate companies to ransom over their use of it.

Admittedly I am British and do not know the ins and outs of USA law, but it seems disgraceful that someone can try and register what is obviously a generic word or phrase, then try and extort money from businesses to use it.

Luckily for everyone else in the SEO industry, one brave lady called Rhea Drysdale decided to fight him in court.  If you are not aware of Rhea, she runs Outspoken Media, an internet marketing company.

Thankfully the fight has now ended with Rhea the victor, but leaving her with $17,000 of legal bills to pay.  You can read the full story (and maybe consider donating a few bucks towards those costs) over at her blog.