Mike The Internet Guy’s Blog

Howard Owens has some great coverage of the currently running Drilling Down on Local Conference. Today he posted some notes from Hillary Schneider’s (Yahoo Local) presentation on local search efforts:

Local search on the web has grown 28 percent over the past year. For Yahoo!, local search intent has risen from 11 percent of all Yahoo! searches to 14 percent.

Stay tuned to Howard’s blog for more conference coverage!

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Frank Fuchs just posted this fantastic resource page containing direct links to the submission pages of quite a few Internet Yellow Page directories. I wrote about Piggy Back SEO for the do-it-yourselfer yesterday on the First Page Fitness Blog and pointed out that for the query ‘gym in denver’ 7 out of the top 10 results were IYP sites offering a free listing! I would encourage anyone with more links to send them to Frank for inclusion. For some reason the IYPs don’t always make the submission option easy to find.

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Matt McGee launched an NCAA Tournament Contest over on Yahoo Sports. It is free to join, so head on over. Matt has the information posted on his blog here: seo march madness.

Good Luck to all, even though I will tear you a new one in this contest

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UPDATE CHRIS S. FROM LINKEDIN REPLIED THE LINKS ON THE PUBLIC PROFILE ARE NOT REDIRECTED. THE REDIRECTS ONLY HAPPEN WHEN VIEWING A PROFILE INTERNALLY AS A MEMBER. THANKS CHRIS

Up until recently anyone with a LinkedIn profile had an ability to create a few “free” anchor text rich links back to any websites of your choosing. If I am not mistaken these used to be “clean” links meaning they were not redirected or nofollow’ed. I am not sure when this change occured at LinkedIn but I noticed today that all the links from within the profiles seem to be redirected through a PHP redirect script. This script generates a 302 redirect, rendering the links somewhat worthless for SEO purposes.

Guess I’ll take that one out of my bag o tricks

PS Let me know if these links were always redirected, but I am pretty sure they were not

PPS If my LinkedIn widget didn’t link directly to my profile, I would be adding a nofollow right now. In fact I still might …

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As far as buying links goes, $20 for a link for a ‘lifetime’ on a decent site in your ‘theme’ seems like a pretty good deal! Well that is exactly what the folks over at V7N’s contextual link program offer. I don’t typically buy links through brokers, but here is a quick list of what makes these guys different from TLA or Text Link Brokers.

-The links you buy are contextual
Your link will be featured inside a paragraph on a blog posting. It won’t be grouped with a bunch of other links in some “Sponsors Section’.

-they don’t publish their list
This makes things a little scarier, because while you can specify what type of sites you prefer, you don’t know where your link is going until it is placed. However it reduces or even eliminates the ‘footprint’ which SEs might be able to detect a ‘paid’ link.

-every link is the same price
This makes it a breeze to budget for link buys especially when a client is involved.

-most of the links they get come from blogs
This means as soon as the post goes up containing your link the SEs are pinged, and will hopefully come and index the page quicker.

-You can specify multiple sets of anchor text
This makes the links even harder for SEs to detect as paid links.

Overall I had a pleasant experience buying links from V7N and would recommend their service. However there are a few things I would like to see added/changed.

• offer a link package for somewhere between $20 and $1000.
• start an affiliate program
• offer more details on if the links you buy will be launched over a certain time period or all at the same time

This has NOT been a paid review (although V7n if you want to give a squirrel a nut I am all for it).

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Last year it was SES Local, this time it is the SMX Local and Mobile conference. Denver has gotten lucky again for being able to host a local search conference. This one will be programmed by Chris Sherman and Greg Sterling who both participated in last years SES Local conference. I went to SES local last year, and I can tell you it was worth attending (especially since I didn’t have any travel expenses). I am looking forward to another great conference this year.

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So everyone and their mother is now giving out local SEO advice about getting listed in the local search engines/internet yellow pages. Recently articles were published on Entrepreneur.com and MSNBC which both of course suggested getting listed in these local directories including Google Maps. Sound advice indeed.

So finally when I have time to start working on one of my own websites that has severely been neglected, the first thing I do is try and get a Google Maps listing. The listing is for my rental condo in breckenridge. I get through entering all the information and finally I am asked how I want to verify the listing: by postcard, or by phone. This is when I noticed that the verification by phone option had been grayed out and was unavailable.

For most businesses this would be no big deal as they would just choose the post card option and move on, but for me of course it is not that easy because there is no actual door to door mail service in Breckenridge. You have to have a PO Box at the post office or get mail sent to c/o General Delivery at the post office where they will hold it for you temporarily. Of course you still have to show up at the post office in Breckenridge to receive the mail either way, and since we are sold out for the rest of the winter, and with any luck at all I don’t plan on being in Breckenridge anytime soon. So I looked into what might be causing the phone verification option to be disabled.

I found this post on the Google Maps Help Group. In the post Maps Guide Jen writes the following in response to a fellow business owner with a similar problem:

-An incorrect or invalid phone number was submitted.
-The phone number you gave us doesn’t match your business address.
-Phone system issues (e.g. a bad connection).
-Someone at your number may have requested not to receive further calls from
the Google Local Business Center.
-No touch-tone phone available.

….I would say that verifying via PO Box is probably your best
choice, especially if you don’t have any ability to receive mail at your
business locations. If you’re worried about people finding your business,
you can always add a note to the description section of your business
listing in the Local Business Center to help direct your customers to your
location.

This quote seems to make sense at first so I tried to figure out how to get around this phone verification bug without actually having to show up in Breckenridge to receive mail that may or may not have arrived yet

I went to Grand Central and registered for a free 970 area code number which forwards to my cell phone. (this service also has a ton of other really cool features which I’ll describe some other time). I then tried to use this phone number as my business number in the listing since it could have easily been a Breckenridge number. No Luck. The phone verification option was still disabled.

Looking back at Map Guide Jen’s advice, there is really only one bullet that may apply “The phone number you gave us doesn’t match your business address.” Now I don’t know what source they are using to match numbers and addresses, but either way mine won’t work.

I guess until Google figures out a secure yet convenient verification system, I will be stuck hoping my post card has arrived(and hasn’t been returned) next time I show up at the post office in Breckenridge

Also for the record, I respect Maps Guide Jen and all, but telling someone to use an incorrect and possibly far off address for a business listing and then putting the correct address in the description is a hack at best. Google Maps has got to come up with a better solution than that.

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Are you an SEO, SEM, affiliate marketer, or just interested in search marketing? Do you live in Colorado? If so you may want to consider joining (free), The Colorado Search Marketing Professionals Group. You can find our blog on our website http://www.coloradosearchmarketing.com. There is also a link to our new forum where anything from jobs to technical questions can be posted and discussed. Every member gets an account to blog on our domain (we must meet you first). Forum accounts are also free, so hop on over and join the discussions! The group was founded recently by Everett Sizemore and myself. We’d love to have you, so start contributing today.

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Link reclamation is usually the first tactic I employ in a link building campaign for a client. Link reclamation is simply taking some existing links (or near links like mentions) and making them work a little harder for you. Typically web designers place a “credit line” on the bottom of every website they create. This is for the most part an acceptable practice and pretty commonplace. My tip to those that do use the credit line(or a credit anywhere else on the site) is to at least use keywords in your link. Here are some examples

Designed by Phases Studio graphic designers in Denver
Another White Ink Creation, a web design firm in Boulder

You get the idea.

Now don’t go running out and changing all your credit lines to the exact same thing. In fact don’t even worry about changing them all at once. Come up with a few variations and then slowly make some changes. You might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

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UPDATE: INSTANT DOMAIN SEARCH IS NOT MOST LIKELY NOT STEALING YOUR IDEAS PERSONALLY. THE NAME RESEARCH IS BEING COMPROMISED SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY. THE FOLLOWING SCENARIO MAY HAPPEN THROUGH ANY DOMAIN RESEARCH TOOL. BE CAREFUL

I am working with a few associates on project for a client who is starting a new website. Part of the project is to “brand” the company which includes naming the company and acquiring a domain name. I have been using Instant Domain Search for while now as it is a quick and easy way to find available names. My associate has been using what looks to be a GoDaddy affiliate/clone that she calls Name Intelligence.

We came up with a list of names(that contained some keywords of course) and my associate checked quite a few on Monday to see if they were available. I checked through almost all the names and then some on Tuesday. We went back to purchase a few and found that most of the names we had searched for had been bought up by the same company on Wednesday(damn it). This was too weird to be a coincidence so I did a bit of research.

Here is the company that bought the domains:
Organization: Maltuzi LLC
Email: admin@maltuzi.com
Address: 800 West El Camino Real Suite 180 Mountain View, CA, 94040
Phone: 1.6508146730

According to IPWalk, Maltuzzi LLC owns 1,768,141 domains (WOW) as of Jan 21,2007.

I found a thread on Webmaster World that discusses the same thing happening to some other folks by Maltuzi.

So as you can see these Maltuzi guys are a bunch of bastards. However I must ask, why in the hell did they want these domains? I can’t tell you the names we were thinking of, but really they weren’t gonna be the next Amazon or anything.

How Did Maltuzi Hijack my domain name research?

While I am still not sure which of the above querying services contributed to my research being comprised, I did find some information in an article by Larry Seltzer in eWeek titled “Who is Hijacking my Domain Name Research“. Larry does a great job of explaining the possibilities of how this “name research” may have been compromised. In Larry’s case it was a company name Chesteron Holdings buying up the domains after they had been searched for using CNets domain research tool.

Here is what’s possible, based on what I know:

* CNet, or someone at CNet, could be passing the requests on to Chesterton. I don’t believe this for a second.
* One of the hosting services that CNet is checking with (and there could be more than they indicate) could be passing data on to Chesterton. This seems unlikely to me.
* Chesterton could have compromised one of the servers involved in the process, for instance the whois server used by one of the hosting services. This seems possible to me. There are a number of other hacking techniques, DNS cache poisoning for example, that could indirectly give Chesterton access to data from these queries.
* Verisign could be passing the data on to Chesterton. I don’t believe this, either.

How can these companies afford all these domain names?

Larry has another article about “Domain Tasting” which explains how these companies can afford to buy all these domain names. The short explanation is there is a 5 day grace period on domain name registration so the companies buy a domain, throw up some ads, and “taste” to see if the site makes any money. If no ads were click during the tasting period the domains are released and a refund is given. If the domains show potential, they are kept.

So who can you trust for domain name research. I am not sure at this point. I am hoping that a command line whois query is still safe but I am really not sure. I think you just have to have a list ready to go and if a name on your list is available, make the purchase right away.

I can only hope that my names will be freed in 5 days. I’ll post back with in update. In the meantime, be careful when you are searching for an available domain to buy!

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