Does Bluehatseo Suck?
For the one or two people who read this blog sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been very, very busy past few days and never had the time to sit down and blog something.
Without further delay I am going to blog about why bluehatseo is underwhelming, or sucks to be blunt. Bluehatseo as many people know is a popular SEO blog. It is run by a programmer extraordinaire named Eli and in the past six months its readerbase has exploded. It isn’t uncommon for one of his entires to get fifty or more comments. Yes indeed that is a lot of comments and indicates that the reader base must be staggering.
While Eli’s growing army of sycophants and disciples are blinded by the bluehat hype, I’m not. There are three three main problem with bluehatseo which I want to address. My previous attempts to criticize the blog on various forums & b logs have been censored but I figure that since is is my own blog censorship wont be as easy as just logging into an admin panel and deleting my posts.
The first problem with bluehatseo is that most of the techniques Eli writes about are difficult to code and only work in theory, not in practice. Other times they are completely wrong and demonstrate a lack of understanding about the mechanics of the major search engines such as Google. While I have nothing against originality, but the line must be drawn when his ‘ideas’ become flagrant.
Eli’s most popular post is how to make a $100 a day which got a staggering 284 replies. His method involves setting up a wallpaper site and getting a paltry 25-30 cent commission for each download through zango. 250-300 downloads a day and presto..$100 a day! Sounds pretty good huh? Um maybe not..The major problem is that there is TOO MUCH completion for wallpaper sites and the vast majority of readers lack the ability to market such a site. Angelina jolie and 50 Cent wallpapers? Wow who would have thunk that one up? You and 1000000 other people. Good luck driving thirty people to it let alone the 300 needed to make 100 a day. He recommends using some $60 promo software to help drive traffic, but if it is so effective why do think the programmer is selling it?
Another problem is the significant decline in posting, which ties into the release of his $100 SQUIRT tool. Usually Eli will blog one or twice or week, but his last entry dates back to July 31st. It has been over two weeks of inactivity, and his most recent entires have been lackluster. Any professional blogger will tell you that inactivity is a sure fire way to lose readers, which doesn’t bode well for his blog should this trend continue. Considering how many loyal readers bluehatseo has wouldn’t it be in Eli’s best interest to blog more often? But maybe Eli has already cashed out having, which leads into my third point…
About one and a half months ago Eli along with a business parter released a widget called SQUIRT. From the SQUIRT sales page here are the most important aspects:
>>you can read this whole sales page here: http://cloakingforums.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8886009592/m/4491036323
What is SQUIRT?
SQUIRT stands for Super Quick Indexing & Ranking Tools. SQUIRT is an all in one and easy to use tool that helps your sites get indexed, deep indexed and ranking faster in the search engines.
What Does It Do?
SQUIRT utilizes over two dozen techniques to get your sites both indexed and ranking very quickly. Many of these techniques range from easy to complicated to very secretive. It is very easy to use and is 100% safe. Every site you submit gets thoroughly analyzed and custom promoted to best fit it’s promotional needs. Everything is 100% automated and all you have to do is tell the tool your URL and what keywords you want to rank for. SQUIRT does the rest.
So in nutshell, for $100 SQUIRT allows you to submit sites to improve its rankings and traffic through various automated blackhat methods.
The problem with squirt is there is no concrete evidence that SQUIRT actually works. I browse many webmaster forums and I have yet to read any testimonials praising SQUIRT. Even on bluehatseo, the blog which SQUIRT originated from, contains no positive testimonials from any of its readers. I am not too surprised by this. SQUIRT appears to be marketed to readers looking for an easy, out of the box solution to rankings and traffic as promised in the sales page, but from what I gather if falls significantly on that promise.
Think about it this way: If such a widget could to what squirt promised why would the programmer sell it? He would use it for himself to rank for competitive keywords and make lots of money.
Thats enough for now. I’ve made my point. With everyone constantly praising bluehatseo as some sort gift from god there is nothing wrong with presenting an opposing view when it is justified.
Basic guide to getting links
To rank well it is important to get incoming links to your website. While onsite and other factors contribute to rankings, inbound links play a major role.
There are two important variable: Quantity and Quality. You can rank will with a huge amout of low quality, low PR links or with a few high PR quality links.
The key is finding a middle ground between quality and quantity.
Frist I’ll discuss the less effective methods of getting links and end the article by discussing the more effective methods.
Waiting. Sometimes people will link to your site out of generosity without you having to pay a fee or providing a reciprocal link. These types of links are rare but tend to be of high quality. Unless you have superior content, a highly established site or are extremely persistant don’t count on people giving you very many links. It just doesn’t happen much anymore.
Social bookmarking. I know that social bookmarkeing is extremely popular but article “Why socialbookmarking is a waste of time??? explains why you shound’t invest much time into social bookmarking. The main prolem is that the links often have no follow atributes or never get visited by the google bot.
Spamming blogs This method of promotion may get you good rankings provided you spam enough blogs or may get your site banned or peanalized from the search engines. In addition, you may get in legal trouble and spamming people’s blogs is a good way to soil your online repuation.
Effective methods:
Link Exchanges To find sites to exchange links with go on a webmaster forum like digitalpoint and simply request a link exchange by creating a link exchange thread. Only exchange links with sites that are relvant to yours; otherwise you may get a google penatly and your site will drop in rankings. Link exchanges are effective because not only are they free but you get traffic and rankings benefits.
Buying Links will usually improve your rankings provided you buy links that are relevant to your site. If you have a legal site don’t cut corners by buying a cheaper link to an entertainment site. Google will notice and the purchased link may be devalued thus wasting your money. Paid links can also provide a steady stream of traffic provided the link is relevant to your site. A new site that desires to quickly become an authority, high Pr site can benefit from link purchases.
Want to launch a new site? Read this first.
Want to make lots of money online with your new site? Sure you do. We all want to make money online but a lot of webmasters fall into the huge trap of putting the cart before the horse and as a result fail.
When launching a new site there is only one thing to worry about: GETTING TRAFFIC. Thats right. Traffic is key. No amount of custom coding, content management systems, layouts, designs, etc will help you if your new site doesn’t get any traffic. But many webmasters make the mistake if investing lots of money in custom designs, CMS (content management system) and other expenses without having a solid plan to actually drive traffic to the site. As expenses mount the webmaster will have to find a solution to the traffic problem of his efforts will be moot.
A much simpler and economical solution is to have a solid marketing strategy in placed before launching the site. That way as soon as your site launches you can begin making revenue off the traffic immediately.
Before you build the site ask yourself these questions:
“Where will I get visitors????
“How much will it cost to get these visitors????
“How will these visitors interact with the site????
“How much traffic will I need to break even or turn a profit????
“How will I ensure that some visitors return to the site and possibly refer their buddies my site????
Once you are able to answer those questions I recommend taking the next step and building the site.
Building a website galaxy
I read a lot of internet entrepreneur/internet marketing/ SEO type blogs and it isn’t uncommon for a blogger to set out on an ambitious project while completely oblivious of that fact that it is doomed to fail because of a fundamental flaw. The goal of this section is to explain why the blogger’s project is doomed to fail by pointing out the flaws.
Today I will be reviewing Eureka Diary Building A Website Galaxy from July 11th, 2007
In exchange for being reviewed the blogger gets a free backlink. The link to the blog be found here: http://www.eurekadiary.com/75/building-a-website-galaxy
In a nutshell the idea behind the website galaxy is to create a bunch of ‘moon’ sites on that link to a ‘planet’.Then each planet site links to a ’sun’ which is the main site. Technically this would be a solar system, not a galaxy, but I digress. The moons, planets, and sun would all have different IP addresses and use RSS based content as well as varying wordpress based templates.
To be blunt, the reason why this galaxy will fail is because driving traffic to any of the sites (planets, moons, sun) will be nearly impossible. Second, interlinking 20 or so PR0 sites together will garner no additional ranking or PR juic to any of the moons or planets.
Regarding the first flaw establishing solid, search engine rankings usually takes a long time. You can’t just slap up some RSS content and expect to start drawing in visitors. It just doesn’t happen unless you target the least competitive of keywords. But it is difficult to monetize the uncompetitive keyword unless you drive A LOT of traffic to them. While you can get a lot of search engine traffic to a new site through various blackhat methods I’m assuming he isn’t going to use blackhat but just use RSS feeds and aggregation. What will happen is that he will get his sites indexed, but won’t get any traffic.
The second flaw is that interlinking a bunch of PR0 sites together won’t give you a search engine or PR boost. One problem is that all the planet sites link to the sun, but the sun doesn’t link to any sites. It would be more efficient if the sun linked to each planet so that way you would only need a single powerful link pointing to the sun to get the entire galaxy indexed. Instead you need to point links ot each individual planet.
Overall, it is a commendable effort but one that is doomed to fail. Hopefully he will take it as a learning experience.