Alternate Title: How You SEOMoz/Google + Guys Are Failboating Hard With Your SEO "Analysis" Of The Situation

In an attempt to cover my tracks from prying webmaster eyes after winning a public SEO contest on Wickedfire, I 301'd my domain to seoMOZ thinking it would be a funny blog post later. LOL at me.

Rand gets wind of it, tweets about it, people confuse it with a negative SEO attempt, misunderstandings everywhere.

This guy pretends to have sleuth'd out the 301 via "advanced queries" but digging deeper, most likely he read about it on Wickedfire and just tried to play it like he had l337sauce ninja skills (ie, ran it thru ahrefs).

Then again, he used to work for Google Web Spam, so who knows?

Which brings us to...

Was going for the big dog term in the niche, dog snuggie, but only had the juice to get it page two. Shame, you lost out on some serious revenue potential there. High value term, no? No, but I digress...

First, let me backtrack a bit...

• I apologize for the sweet WP default theme and lack of fancy plugins (something tells me that caching plugin is going to come in handy tho), I was hoping to write this post in a couple months when you ranked #1 for dog snuggie but alas, some people can't keep their mouth's shut.  This is why we can't have nice things...
• There was no malicious intent behind the ranking, I had just won a SEO contest over on the gay webmaster forum you erroneously labeled a "black hat forum" and figured I was going to get my site and methods analyzed deeply and rather than let people poke under the hood too hard, 301'd snuggeez.com over to you, figuring it would be 1) fairly innocuous with regards to the safety of your site and 2) good test of unrelated link juice to an authority domain like seomoz. And it behaved exactly like I thought it would, albeit slightly slower.
• Hmm, thought I had another step in the way back machine here, but apparently not...good thing I used this cool unnumbered list feature.

So let's get down to it then, shall we?

Some link spammers at one of the black hat forums apparently ran an experiment targeting SEOmoz's home page with the anchor text "snuggie dog bed." The results are surprisingly effective: http://bit.ly/IQbL1V

Actually, I (a couple others followed suit,  I'll leave them out of this unless they want the credit) only 301'd a single site at seomoz.org. I'm not sure if you'll be able to follow this or not, considering the appallingly bad SEO "intel" you tweeted in the above quote, but there's no anchor text involved, at least directly. Instead I passed the cumulative link juice and backlink profile of my site onto you, or ~95% of it.

Pretty blackhat, amarite? Wait, what if I'm a brick and mortar business, say a dry cleaner, profits are up, and I buy out every other dry cleaning business in my town and 301 it to my site? Am I still a blackhat? Or just a shrewd businessman leveraging his assets (knowledge and cash) to improve his business while minimizing his tax bill? Pretty sure I know which side of the fence you'll stand on but I painted the picture, I'll let you name it.

Apparently, anchor text link bombing, even from very questionable sources, still works. I'd be surprised if they leave the links up for long given that Google/Bing webspam can use this as a honeypot, but it's an interesting glimpse into how linkspam and anchor text operate.

 

I've read the above quote multiple times now and quite frankly, I'm shocked that you've managed to brand yourself as an SEO "expert", let alone get people to overpay for your suite of outdated tools (serpIQ and MicroSiteMasters, ladies and germs, get with the times).

Anchor text link bombing....NOPE

Very Questionable Sources...I outranked the product site for "dog snuggie", do you have any idea how much that term is worth? Not very much actually, I was shocked that people built sites targeting such low volume crap...why not flip burgers, pays better. Still, I built a site with 100% unique and high quality content, linked out to related sites, and waited for the natural links to come in...for about three minutes, then I got to work.

How you say? Sure let me join the parade of fools not bright enough to keep their mouth shut when something works and works well, that should end well. On second thought, that's a no...let's just say nobodies site was hacked, no links injected, none of the true "black hat" methods were employed. Now I did build links on other sites with the intent of improving my rankings and traffic, however, you're doing the same thing with your blogger outreach and guest posts. Kettle, meet pot.

But It's An Interesting Glimpse Into How Linkspam And Anchor Text Operate....actually, It's an interesting glimpse into how assumptions based on previous experience without the depth of knowledge to correctly assign the correct factors plague the SEO industry, and you, as a SEO professional, should be held to a hotter crucible in this situation. It's bad enough when the Wickedfire tools knee jerk assumption every algo change that comes down the pipe, now we get you misleading your flock of blind sheep too? No wonder nobody understands basic SEO principles anymore. For shame...

I'd love to dive into some of the comments on your google + page, the pure lack of SEO insight perpetrated over there astounds me, but unlike your toadies who think posting in your circles = being a webmaster, I've got a new Google algo update to decipher...plus some of my old autoblogs popped back up, need to find out why. I'll revisit the rest of that at a later date.

Rand, I'll finish with two thoughts:

If you want the 301 taken off, just let me know, no harm no foul. Either hit me up on twitter or leave a comment here and I'll sort it out.

And finally, I gotta give your social media game a plus rep, your twitter/google+/seomoz engagement is really top notch (as you can see from my 6 followers, mine not so much) and I commend you for your participation. While I think your SEO worldview is extremely short sighted and misleading to the newbies you rope into high monthly fees, your social media game has me slightly jelly. Maybe we can become BFFs and I'll teach you upper level SEO concepts while you teach me about representing some big brands?

Much love,

Grind

P.S. Testing my lander sales copy, nothing to see here.

P.S.S. Anybody reading this that wants to rank for big terms and has a big budget for some seo consulting, well hell, dog snuggie...need I say more?