Well I’ve been working extremely hard this coming Christmas season. Got several personal big launches coming out as well as loads of other fun business. I’ve been writing nearly every day on SEO Empire Part 2. I also got several large followup posts in draft. It occured me though, as if I couldn’t with the flood of emails, that I haven’t updated in a month. So I thought it would be fun to throw out a few short and to the point posts before I dig down into my presents and finish up this bitch of a season. 
So lets take on a few open questions. A public dialog between yourself and I and the other readers. I know theres lots of great SEO and marketing questions out there and frankly I can talk about it all day. Fire off any questions you got in the comments and for the next week I’ll be answering as many as I have time for.
Have fun and happy holidays!
Hi Eli, I know how you feel, the holidays are a crazy season! I love your site, it’s really eye-opening. I was pumped to find that you posted today.
Question: What do you think about possible legal issues involved with scraping, link-building through the use of your base sites, etc… any general thoughts you have, how to protect yourself, general best-practice techniques to stay out of trouble…
And also, do you have to separate your real, legit sites a lot from the base sites… like, do you use different mailing addresses and account information for all AdSense and server hosting accounts? Or am I just being paranoid… I am just worried that even if I start getting really successful, a few years down the road it might all bite me in the ass since I left some trails on the internet and all signs lead to me… do you think that laws could be passed pretty soon that would put us at risk? Thanks a lot!
He’s alive!!
Can’t think of a question right now but looking forward to SEO Empire pt.2
Hi Eli,
Great site!
Question: Could you post a simple list of top link-building opportunities/techniques in order of effectiveness, in light of the changes at Google over the past year or so?
how big is the waiting list on squirt?If i contribute with something on vault can i get a free pass
?
How many weeks does it take Google to handle a reconsidaration request these days?
Is it still 99% sure that first time offenders will be reincluded if they fix the problems and say Sorry?
what color underwear are you wearing?
just kidding
i read in one of your posts about how you think porn webmasters and marketeers are leading the way in the way the internet is headed,
I just wondered what you think the future of the internet is? what direction do you think it will take? do you see anything in the way porn masters are doing things that you think will filter down into mainstream in the near future?
T
If we have 20 database sites(each one with 10k+ pages) on 5 ip s - how much does the share ip affect the foundation?
It is refreshing to see a new post here Eli. I’ve been watching your blog for a long time and asking myself when will you reappear. The wait paid off
My questions is (to you and everyone else here): did anyone notice that Google is slow at indexing websites these days or is it just me? A new site I launched: googlebot showed up and crawled around twice already, but the site still isn’t indexed. The website is even featured on some of my whitehat websites that have a high PR, and are crawled daily. I also managed to insert the new site into some directories that aren’t considered spammy. Still, to no avail. Nothing showing up in Google. Nor in MSN or Yahoo.
Is it Google being slower these days or something else? Does anybody know?
And, the website is pure whitehat stuff. WTF?
G seems as fast as ever for me. Any new site I link at is in the index and ready to rank within about 2 - 4 days (Yahoo are MSN are still sitting around like wtf). I have never had a site take longer than about a week to get into G. How long is it taking you?
Extreme Webmaster,
Did you take a look at your code? Did you make some obvious (but easy to make mistake) such as using the font tag to define a white color to a certain section of the site (Some P tag or something)– while using CSS for the rest of the page (thus making it look like you are attempting to keyword stuff when the CSS is pulled)
The fact that it isn’t in any of the big three screams that you’ve made some sort of mistake, at least in my book.
Paul,
I don’t ever use deprecated stone-age junk, like the font tag. Only pure crystalline CSS
And yes, I did check the stuff you told me, but no: everything looks fine. No such glitches, as a same font and background color.
What’s even more strange, is that the SERPS contain other website pages, while the index is the old one (a cached version of a sort of “website coming soon - under construction” page). How did the bot manage to crawl through the other pages if it didn’t go through the new index page? WTF?
I am sure that there aren’t any links to other pages of my website on the web, I’ve checked it a number of times already. Stats show clearly.
Really, really bizarre. Arrrgh.
Do you ever use iframes to display affiliate offers? What’s your technique when it comes down to the money pages?
extreme webmaster,
I have released 2 new site and have not had any problems getting them indexed in Google
Eli,
I can’t wait for your SEO empire 2 post.
One question I have: Do you know if Google has a maximum number of pages of one particular site/domain they take into their index?
Thanks
DG
1. For each domain do you split your subdomains up in multiple C Class IPs or do they all stay on 1? Does it depend?
2. For each domain do you link from your subdomains to other subdomains or do you keep each one as its own stand alone “site”?
3. Do you set up in the 100’s of subdomains or in the 1,000’s of subdomains (or maybe more) per domain?
Appreciate the help man, you kick ass!
1. For each domain do you split your subdomains up in multiple C Class IPs or do they all stay on 1? Does it depend?
– All the same
2. For each domain do you link from your subdomains to other subdomains or do you keep each one as its own stand alone ‘’site?'’
– Keep them as sites or else link out to different class-C’s on different second level domains
3. Do you set up in the 100’s of subdomains or in the 1,000’s of subdomains (or maybe more) per domain?
– If its similar subject matters a few 1000 is fine, if it they are different subject matters and not great content, i keep the numbers low.
Hi Eli,
I’ve read through your blog and its amazing info. Thanks. I have a question. I’ve read through and I find the link building stuff (black hole SEO) a bit too complex, could you suggest any other effective link building techniques? I’ve heard great stuff about TNX.net.
Thanks!
Oh boy these are some great questions. I’m going to have fun. Keep em coming.
do you pick your nose with your left or right hand? Seriously, I want to start out as a cyber stalker and I think this is good info to have.
A couple questions regarding rolling out networks of very large sites…
- Which nameservers do you use? Do you make any attempt to differentiate or does google not care if you have an interlinked network with each site using the same nameserver?
- Once a madlib-type site is done and there are 10k+ pages available, do you make any attempt to roll out the site slowly? Is it seen as spammy if a huge site suddenly appears out of the blue?
Thanks
Do you outsource SEO work to indians and have them do manual labor?
Do you plan on releasing the dashboard you use to manage your backend
and how about Jews for the banking and orientals for all the heavy math?
Can u tell me some JavaScript Technique for scrapping Links??
I am not comefortable with PHP, still sticking to the ASPx and JavaScript.
And Eli…
Your Site is greate, nothing to compare with it…
ThanX Man
You wouldn’t scrape links in javascript.
The only way that would make sense is if to scrape them all on the current page.
But for that their is:
Ctl-i Alt-l Ctl-a Ctrl-c Ctrl-p
in FF of course
SEO,, if you are comfortable around ASPx, you might just want to scrape using .net, but really, PHP should be no problem.
::emp::
What do you think about hiding content in a hidden DIV? Do the search engines ignore it, penalize you for it or treat it like it was part of the main content?
What about putting SEO friendly content in clear view, then covering it up with a DIV containing the real content you want people to see. Good idea?
I need a good SEO guy with programming skills, but it seems impossible to know if someone is as good as they say. What would you recommend someone trying to hire an SEO/programming guy do to seperate the wheat from the chaff?
The big problem with that is, that the best SEO guys work for themselves.
Indeed, but they could also work out a deal on increased earnings. non?
I have a site with 20M such pages & am just starting to catch on to SEO… it’s a bitch to find someone who actually knows what he’d doing.
I’m interested in the link building issue too. And therefor a question:
Is link injection via xss a tactic, which works for the ranking on google?
What are your predictions for the effect of googles new treatement of subdomains in the SERP (i.e like folders, two per search), both in terms of short and long tail terms.
1) The using of audio and visual media on the sites are growing. Is there any savvy way to seoing the multimedia site.
2) The facebook is growing exponentially. It open its door to allow people using their advertisement. The unique of advertisement is demographic driven and there is facebook page, fan, and becaon. Is there any seo possibilities. This question also extend to social networking. Myspace? Linkedin? niche social networking?
3) What are ways we can stay ahead of game in search engine trends? The search engine continues to change. For example, I have Matt Cutts on my watch list.
4. Is there a way we can build backlinks faster that looks organic and natural? Doing it yourself by visiting forum and blogs is time consuming.
My question has to do with the management of your network:
Can you give us some hint as to how you publish hardlinks across your networks of sites (I’m guessing in the thousands) from one central dashboard?
I’m fairly decent at php/msql, but to publish hardlinks across multiple domains hosted on multiple servers is where my knowledge ends. Any push in the right direction would be highly appreciated.
Thanks for all the great posts.
Actually, I thought of one more question regarding the management of your site network:
In the SEO Empire post, you state that you have a complete database listing of all the pages on all your websites for the purpose of categorizing your pages based on keywords. My question is, how do you update this database for the sites that are autogenerated via rss feeds? Do you have a script that spiders these sites and returns a list of newly generated pages and stores them in the database?
Thanks Eli…Appreciate all your help.
Got any blackhat ppc?
Here’s an idea. Lots of people using tracking scripts to track their PPC ads. Tracking scripts write data to a database. The owner uses that data to determine which keywords are bringing in traffic and converting. You could always screw up their database if you wanted to get rid of your competitors. So many tracking scripts can be easily exploited this way…
Hi Eli,
Thanks for your amazing blog. I re-read it every day.
I recently bought my first database with 25000 hotel records and have built a site around it.
Would I be better off seperating the database into geographical regions and build a few different sites out of the database?
Would the value of the each pages linking power not be greater if they weren’t all on the same domain but spread over a few sites?
Do both! Get as much utility out of that database as you can. Make multiple sites using the entire database. Make multiple sites per geographic region. Make multiple sites partitioned by hotel type. Hotel class. etc. etc. Mix up the templates/footprints. Add random content to unique-ify the sites. Build the first set of sites, then templatize them, then introduce automation. Spread them across multiple domains, multiple subdomains, multiple IP addresses and C-blocks.
Thanks darkmonk.
Right, use the DB to death then… you can see I’m new to this
Couple questions…
What are footprints?
What do you mean by automation?
Is subdomain.mysite.com considered a different site as www.mysite.com by google?
I searched on one of the hotel descriptions in the database and found 5000 occurances on google. Should I be worried about that. I’m wondering at what point duplication becomes a problem…
Thanks for your advice and patience.
James
Do you ever sell any of your sites?
What’s the going rate for a black or gray-hat SEO property as a multiple of earnings?
I loved your SEO empire post.
But I was wondering how much effect does a lot of links from a lot of indexed pages from the same domain have?
I always thought that the search engines looked mainly at the number of different domain linking to you.
Can you give some more info on this?
Or do you use these pages to link to a lot of different domains?
Hi Eli,
is an old domain just worth if it has quite a lot backlinks or is an old domain also worth if it’s just in the index of search engines, but has almost no backlinks (0-20).
Regards
Till
Eli,
1. When linking from blackhat hosted/spammed sites to foundation sites, do you feel it would be fine to directly one-way link from the BH site to the foundation site if they are related?
2. If the BH site and foundation site are unrelated, would it then be best to use the concept of synergy linking (link the unrelated BH sites to a related blog/trusted platform and then to the foundation site)?
3. Do you feel directory submissions (done manually) are still worth the time or money?
Thanks,
nogenius
how does one create an url rolling site when google no longer has a API for such a thing (instead having that javascript AJAX shite)?
they still have an api you just have to borrow a key from someone who got one back when it was available.
Perhaps you could ping me???
Can you give us some rough numbers?:
According to your advice, what is a acceptable, PR, ROI per activity (long-term basement/blackhat short term activity), monthly income, indexed pages per site, etc?
There is no lack of “seo experts” on sitepoint/digital who with tons of advice who think $20/mo is awesome. LOL
You sound like your number objectives are much higher, but it would be helpful to peg your advice to some standard. Shoemoney has his (one?) big check which, though ambiguous, pegs him pretty high in the seo/webmaster community. How about some indication of what level game you’re playing?
With your big, +5M page, basement site(s) do you bother with submitting sitemaps or rely on deeplinking from outside sites to direct google’s crawlers?
Eli,
where’s the Dildo?
Is there a BlueHatSEO forum? If so, where do I apply?
Lets say I can afford to spend $50 per day right now. What would you do with this to make even more money if you are quite new to this business… I was thinking about affiliate marketing and terms like ETC and CPC are known for me.
I cannot get the blue hat SEO forums to work it comes up with a “cannot be found” in wordpress, and i can’t find any signs in your previous posts that the forum was closed, whats up there?
Happy holidays as well
Can we see some about your new projects???
can i get some info about your future projects….do reply me back….happy hoilday…
Holidays are long over and i still don’t feel like working.
you way of talking tells me that you are quite a busy person:P
Very soon I’ll be throwing questions at you too!
How do you react to Google slaps in adwords?
What can i do to get strong linkpartners or blogs to make me in their blogroll???
Your willingness to help others is truely amazing.