How did you become an seo expert ?

POCCAKE,,
jus by doin hard work
reading articles from various sites and ofcourse this forum
improving knowledge day-by-day

 

that's good.......SEO is about experiment and practice..

 

1) I cheat? I'm sorry, but you're not entitled to a ranking. I take certain risks in my business model, and you take some in yours. This is not a contest. This is business. Deal with it. If you can't compete, sorry. Get a better business model.
I signed no contract with Google. I agreed to no terms of service. And I'm not in the habit of letting an arbitrary business set rules for me.
2)I run a blog that talks of some of the basics. But why in the hell would I turn over my entire revenue model to Google? I already point out more than enough.
3)Why are you turning this into a personal attack, rather than actually addressing the point of the thread.

 

1. It is not personal. I do not know you whatsoever. In business people speak about each others business practices daily...not knowing this shows little knowledge on business.

2. The post was about how you became an SEO expert, being as you cannot get top 3 rankings without using deceptive tactics, wouldn't that preclude you from posting??........ but yet you still did.

3. Your business model is not a business model whatsoever, you take liberty in calling what you do a business.

Now this may seem harsh I am sure but if you can show me where any of the Fortune 500 businesses decided to start, get caught at deceiving people, and then restarted again, and again, and again.... I will agree you actually have a real business model.

4. Your methodology of trying to attain rankings (we can all say we do, but few will prove it) makes it harder for those who practice the white hat version to be seen as legit, and you taint the industry & profession.

5. In doing 4 above you then muddle business men & women who want ethical whitehat SEO.

Lastly it would seem be very bright to publish a blog and make public posts about how your business, attempt to "circumvent" the search engines.

That's akin to video taping yourself committing a crime... and posting it on Youtube.....absolutely brilliant

and again it's not personal......strictly business.

 

Good point, although I'm sure it will be lost on the holier-than-thou, self-described "White Hatters." I didn't sign any contract with G either. Why should I be forced to play by their rules? I don't remember seeing either Larry or Sergey's signature on my paycheck, and they are not final word in the search market, believe me.

Pardon my cynicism, but this whole discussion of "ethical SEO" is laughable. The only people who complain about ethics are those who can't compete. They're the equivalent of the snivelling little schoolchidren who go running to the teacher because they didn't get picked for kickball.

Not to single any particular Ftard out, but virtually every Fortune 500 company got there by exploiting every competitive advantage they possibly could. If they can find a shortcut or a loophole, believe me, they take it. To claim anything different shows a stunning misunderstanding of how successful companies actually compete.

It's not personal... strictly business

 

Learning never stops, no one can call themselves SEO experts

 

Calling me a crook and whatnot is personal.

I only came to this thread because I was mentioned in it already, and someone said they could poke holes in my post. I never declared myself an expert necessarily (I do not believe it's possible to judge whether I myself am an expert or not. I have a biased opinion no matter how you cut it). Allow me to say though that many people in the SEO industry(Rand Fishkin and Michael Gray come to mind) are definitely more knowledgeable than myself. Given time, I hope to catch up someday.

I provide high volume traffic and sales to businesses ranging from herbs/plants to dating to magazines. That is a business. It provides a very positive cash flow, and I've yet to have any affiliate network or company complain of my methods. In fact, I run 100% whitehat on any network that has not explicitly okayed blackhat. But most will okay it once they realize the volume I can produce through either white or blackhat methods.
And btw, I never take on clients for anything. I'm fine with risking my own sites, but would never do so to a 3rd party.

I don't follow the fortune 500 much, but here. Let's take a look at a doorway page that get the pass from Google because it's from a large company. (If you don't believe there's a double standard, you're insane)
Matchmaker.com Doorway
[URL='http://blytheville.date.com/dating/arkansas.htm"]Date.com Doorway[/url]
Date.com's is not a typical doorway, but matchmaker.com's sure is. They have a template text and it just substitutes in any city you can name in america. Google knows about it, but hey. They don't do crap.

And btw, half the diet products online are rebranded copies of the same product. Welcome to the internet buddy.

The only thing I deceive is Google. And I will NOT feel bad about that. Their entire business model is based around copying/caching content they were never asked to access, or given permission to. In the same way they allow me to "opt out" via robots.txt, I allow them to "opt out" by banning my sites.

If I took on clients, I may agree with you. But I have never billed myself as a commercial SEO or anything of the sort. I've given assistance for free, and when I do so I give out whitehat advice. Competent blackhats don't taint anything.
If you really want to know who's tainting the industry, look for "new dehli SEO", "100000 directory submissions for $10" and "Manual submission to 2000 search engines"
The more Google tightens down on SEOs(paid links=evil, widgetbait=evil, etc) the more they're forced into sneaking around. Blackhat is growing like mad. Not because of cloaking or link spam, but because people are tired of getting their websites with legit content penalized because Google decides their links are purchased.

Blame Google, not me.

The reasons I publish are my own. But it's provided me with relatively good name recognition amongst SEOs, a good subscriber base, and more I'd rather not get into. And yeah...if blackhat SEO was illegal, you'd be right...but unfortunately for you, it's not. So therefore your analogy is quite far off base.

 

Funny, I never used deceptive or manipulative methods and I see get my websites and my clients websites to out rank any manipulative practicing sites. I actual take pride in reporting these sites that effect the relevancy of search results.

Don't worry, a smart competitor will do it themselves one day, if not someone you anger in this forum.

You are doing a personal attack as well, it's called in-direct attacking.

 

And I have some sites that do the same. And some that don't. I'm running a business, not a charity. However, I go to relatively extreme measures by query analysis that allows me to place users where they were looking to go. And congratulations, taking pride in that is fine for now, until one day what you're doing is outlawed by Google, or made completely ineffective.
Talk to those who bought links or used widgetbait about that. Or maybe you use worthless directory submissions.

Hahahaha. I'm not worried. They've yet to actually eliminate a technique, or make it unusable. Did you know sites still rank that use external javascript redirects? That's been around forever. Google took months to even be able figure out when someone is using their own search box as a way of getting backlinks.
And even if they get it, MSN and Yahoo are even worse. MSN hasn't even mastered the robots.txt file yet, and passes do-follow links if you know how to get them(no, I'm not talking about spaces).
I expect people to report my sites. Sites get banned. I'm fine with that. I've also yet to have a site that wasn't profitable. Most of these sites people are reporting take under 10 seconds to generate, and have fully automatic promotion. It takes longer for you to report a blackhat site than it does for someone to create a new one.

I'm defending myself, same as I've always done. I'm not exactly new to this debate. People who feel they should be rewarded for working harder instead of smarter are not exactly a rarity.
Geez, I don't even run 100% blackhat. Much more towards the gray area lately.

 

Directory submissions? Ya, thats how for example my Civic SEO knowledge database gets some of it's natural backlinks... for example AT&T's Internet Marketing Kit.

Sorry, I use quality unique content to build natural backlinks; there is not need for me to use manipulative methods for search results and getting quality backlinks.

Last I checked all 23 of my sites (including my clients sites) are indexed properly in MSN and it's following the robots exclusion protocol correctly. No clue what your doing wrong.

Defending usually involves indirect attacking.

 

Fair enough, I apologize for the insult.

Ohh but that little statement about not having built a site that wasn't profitable shows your bullshitting......I guarantee you did not just fall into what you do.....you had to try and fail a few times first.

 

Couldn't help myself with this one

 

lol lol lol

Sad we impeached him.... but bushwhacker who basically bankrupted the USA is still in office......I need to become a politician.....

Those are the true blackhats lol!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Ah. Good catch. Allow me to modify this.
The domains I've had have all profited at some point, but with the first few that was courtesy of Live and Yahoo. I'll admit my first couple blackhat sites did get caught by G pretty quick. I made money off of them after a few modifications(I'm a coder, so I can do this) but that first income was Yahoo and Live. Back in those days, I used .info domains, so it didn't take much to profit.
Nowadays I use .com, .biz and .net (for user confidence), and have little trouble with G. Although they're unpredictable as always.

God bless those who taught me by the way. They are the reason I've been fortunate enough to keep sites profitable.

Don't confuse a mis-statement(or one I didn't expand on much) with me bullshitting.
If you have any doubts, feel free to shoot me some instant messenger information and I'll put those to rest.

On a side note, I think we should stop hijacking this thread. It was never my intention, and no one has actually responded to my statements about experimenting. So now this is just killing the thread. If someone wants to post a blackhat debate thread or soemthing and PM me the url, I'd be glad to take part. But this thread needs to get back on track. I just came because I was mentioned, not to sidetrack the thread.

 

I'm still confused as to how you can tell people that watching their rankings as well as their competition ... and watching the big boys ... is bad advice. If we never watched the search results we would have never found out that links are good and title tags do carry weight in the algo. You are trying to discredit the basic lifeblood that is SEO. Not going to the books to study sounds like bad advice to be getting from a "teacher". Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree here and let the readers make sense of themselves.

Crappy student pages don't get passed link weight without a link, which is deep in the .edu site if it exists at all. People who sell these links because they can make a buck off the .edu myth. Here we agree for sure.

Read closely, there are a level of sites below these which are black hat auto blogs or markov sites. These are the bottom feeding sites at the base of the empire. These are used for nothing more than to push link power to your WH content sites (who pass link juice to money sites). The spammy sites are really the million+ page foundation of his version of an empire. That screams "out of context" to me as it's not his "proper way" to start building. I disagree with Eli here but that's a side point as there is more than 1 way to skin a cat.

Fine, lets use wikipedia's version of cloaking

Sounds pretty close to mine

So please tell us what your's and Google's definition is that's so much different than mine, you've sparked my interest. Also, how does this make what XMCP said on his blog incorrect about expert-exchange?

He's adding this here for link building, which very much so applies to SEO. While you and I agree that bots that build links on del.icio.us is not a wise move is it too far of a stretch to say that a "less spamming way" of using programming to help building links would be a great tool? Something like a program that finds all blogs that allow external (do follow if you are into that) comment links and are on theme with your sites content. Just click a link and add your human typed content ... this could save a savvy link builder hours rounding up relevant pages to hopefully place a link. So by watching and reading about captcha busting might give you ideas like the one I just mentioned. That's exactly how it applies to SEO and helps even the WH SEO.

It's my personal opinion that anyone serious about SEO will hire awesome programmers to make their life easier, that's if they are not a competent hack themselves.

Also, if you are hoping for natural links only, your site will get noticed sometime around 4 years after it's built. No directory links, no comment links, no paid links, nothing ... difficult to build popularity and "natural" links that way. We all cut corners to speed up the process.

I think we can adding watching the SERPs to one of those blind spots.

Well in that case, I'll have a kiwi peeling a kiwi in a kiwi fur bikini placing her plump and lucious kiwis in my mouth :]

I mean understanding them and being able to use them for offense or defense (developer's choice). Experts have incredible knowledge & awesome tools. This point answers the thread's question completely: How did you become an seo expert ? By watching and analyzing the SERPs and understanding how and why the true experts are ranking. Then using that information how you best see fit.

Showing different content is cloaking regardless if you redirect, show hidden content, display different ads, or change the page around. It's all modified to be the right tool for the job.

Sorry for posting your links and getting you involved over here. Sounds like you are more welcomed when surrounded by other gay webmasters.

Watching the SERPs does sound like good advice then. It does sound logical to think expert SEOs flourish that way.

Those daily algo changes catching up to you Dan?

Really? I though showing different content to the user and the bots are a big no-no. But I'll give you this one because I'm too lazy to look at the moment.

hehe, way to close the deal. Now that we have the king's final word we can all crawl back under our rocks.

Can't wait to see this one myself. Better take some notes over the weekend

... no comment

[2] Experts rank whether you agree with their tactics or not. You can self proclaim them a cheat but you can't really do much about their rankings except beat them at their own game. That does not exclude those who use deceptive tactics (much like expert-exchange as we all see their rankings) from being labeled an expert.

[3] making money is a business model. You don't have to agree with their tactics but they pay taxes and have a game plan to make loot none the less.

The cost of doing business is very small compared to a traditional business model so ROI would be outstanding. I would hope the best in the BHers business would make around 20-30 million profit each year. This places them among many companies in the F500 (profits, not total revenue). Not to mention the fact they never lose money, this can't be said for a brick and mortar.

[4] I think that's him showing you that kahunas you were looking for. It's silly to think that anyone would go expose anything to google that might be looked at as shady anymore than it would be to ask you (or any of the rest of us) to list EVERY site we have in a public forum for ridicule.

These are great points, I just want people to read it again whether or not they play by the rules. Adsense and what not is a different story, but SERPs ... unethical ... I can't draw that correlation. Let them opt-out of indexing your site if they don't like it. We all run that risk ... one day they might decide that my db sites are spam since each page is not "hand sculpted". Then I'm labeled unethical ... I think not. Just watch what you call people as one day that might be you with the label.

Another good point to quote for people to digest. They make their money off of adwords, no doubt, but without taking our content without asking, they are pretty much left with nothing. I'm ok with it as I like the 10's of 1,000's they send my way monthly but they still never asked for permission, they just took it.

Back in your holster there froggy. We've been down this road ....

Agreed, I call BS.

Great quote, here's my favorite

Yep if you ever wanted to call someone a scammer or cheat ....

Nobody likes a crybaby or a tattle tale.

And so you understand why reporting sites is bad for YOUR ranking. BHers watch which sites get banned because it's usually the result of someone like you turning them in. At this point most consider this to be a profitable market, and one to exploit. We like analogies so here's one ... Never pull a gray hair because 10 will come to his funeral.

1 month from now you might have your #3 ranking still but you are about to get hit with an endless supply of spammy sites that will make your profit non-existent. Your new full time job for that site is clicking the results and reporting them over and over and ...... You should have just beat them by being an expert and out ranking their spammy arses.

Sounds like logic agrees with me ...

couldn't have said it better myself.

 

I may take you up on the IM......your methods intrigue me to say the least..

Don't worry about the bullshitting statement.....I think most driven people make them, myself included,,,,,,look at my sig lol........

As for hijacking the thread I'll drop back to reading,....after EADs novela above.... I think your right......

 

Dan Schulz really said it all. DigitalPoint is definitely not the place to look for SEO advice or tips. Like he said, many are misinformed and will just say what they heard or believe they know, when in reality, what they may be saying is completely wrong.

 

Dude... too fishing late... bwaaa ha ha ha ha.... woot

 

to become seo expert try to gain lot of knowledge and also do it on your sites. when you learn more it will help you to do something better and one day you will become seo expert . read seo book or other seo related books and try to use seo tools and how they work and which one is better and give good results.

 

Search What, why, how about SEO. Then practice seo techniques and analyse websites and their keywords ranking in SERps.

Continue analysing for years and you will become SEO expert.
Cheers