How’s that for a spamtastic title! This is going to be a fun post about how I accidental built 9000 links from over 400 domains with virtually no work. You probably won’t want to do it for yourself but you might just learn something.

About a year ago in the early stages of setting up my first blog network I built a little article directory site. The idea was to use it as a sort of private ezine articles. Anyway I must have got sidetracked or forgotten about the domain because I never touched it again until about a month ago when I started getting emails from cpanel telling me I was running out of bandwidth on the server this thing was setup on. Strange I thought given its a site with no content and I presumed no traffic. So I checked out the site and to my surprise I did have content – 150,000 pages of it in fact…

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Optimising Internal Link Anchor Text with WordPress Menus

November 2, 2011

One of the points I suggested in my post on SEO theories which I can’t prove was that “Internal links are more important than external links” In this post I’m going to show you how to get much more value out of your internal linking using a simple technique, but first let me put some [...]

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My BrightonSEO presentation on Building Private Blog Networks

September 13, 2011

I spoke at the BrightonSEO conference last Friday on the slightly controversial topic of building blog networks for your link building campaigns. I have included my slides from the presentation below: Building a private blog network – Brighton SEO – John McElborough View more presentations from johnmcelborough. I really wanted to make this session as [...]

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How to Beat A Panda

April 19, 2011

Run for your lives it’s another post about the panda update! I don’t usually blog about SEO news and algorithm shifts for a couple of reasons- firstly it’s boring and other sites will always be better for that sort of thing. Secondly because of the approach I take to SEO I rarely get effected by [...]

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Yahoo directory listing- is it worth the money?

March 14, 2011

The Yahoo directory has long been part of the staple of many a link building campaign. A lot of SEO’s still seem to recommend it (although I doubt many have tested it properly) but is one directory link really worth $300/ year? Sometimes but usually not is the short answer, read on for the long [...]

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What keywords should I optimise my homepage for?

February 22, 2011

If you’re doing SEO for a big ecommerce site which sells everything including the kitchen sink – department stores, catalogues that sort of thing this is a question which will undoubtedly come up… We’ve got 1,000,000 products in 5,000 categories – what keywords should we optimise our homepage for? Usually the homepage’s of these mahusive [...]

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How to beat Q & A sites at their own game

February 9, 2011

Another quick post today… I really hate Q & A sites, they’re 95% morons asking questions and other morons wasting their time answering them (if you’ve got that much time on your hands get a blog and make some money people!). However I can’t deny they have something of a magic formula when it comes [...]

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Quick SEO Wins!

January 28, 2011

There are parts of internet marketing which take a lot of time. I’m a big advocate of doing things properly, especially when it comes to link building. However sometimes the quickest things actually have the biggest impact. So clear a couple of hours in your day and run through my list of the best SEO [...]

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Finding similar sites for your link research

January 24, 2011

One of my favourite ways to build up a link building prospect list is to find a few sites which I think I can get a link from, either with a simple link request, a guest post, a payment or something more creative, then to dig around for similar sites which might also make good [...]

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Best of the Web Advertising

January 11, 2011

I’ve been using site sponsorship on botw.org recently and been getting some really good results so I thought I’d do a quick write up. For those who don’t know Best of the Web is one of the oldest web directories about, and one of the few which have managed to maintain a decent editorial standard [...]

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Content Development with Raven Tools & Textbroker

January 6, 2011

When I wrote my Raven Tools review before christmas one of the points I made was this… What I’d really like to see here is an integration with the textbroker API so you can order content and have it dropped straight into your Raven account to push out to your blogs. Sure enough Raven announced [...]

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Getting the edge with manual link building

January 3, 2011

When most people think of manual link building they think high volume, low quality, low skill labour. This is one of the reasons link buildings got a bit of a bad name and most SEO bloggers prefer to talk about more exciting stuff, like link bait. The truth is though manual link building still works [...]

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Online Casino SEO

December 21, 2010

There was a talk on this subject at the SEOmoz pro seminar earlier in the year which I was looking forward to but which I felt really didn’t give anything useful away so I want to make this post as detailed and useful as possible. If I miss anything you think should be included let [...]

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Raven SEO Tools Review

December 13, 2010

Don’t you hate it when SEO blogs start doing reviews to try to shift shitty tools with big affiliate paychecks?! I’ve wanted to do a review of Raven tools for a while but have resisted it until now for that very reason. As a precursor to the first review type post I’ve written here I [...]

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SEO theories I can’t prove

December 7, 2010

This is a post I started writing ages ago and didn’t finish. This week people have been talking about Google’s latest revelation that they’re using Tweets and Facebook likes as part of their organic search algorithm. If you read my post on building links to ecommerce product pages you’ll know that this is something I’ve [...]

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