Razvan Antonescu

I have a 2 months old domain and I need optimization for a highly competitive keyword, 100 millions website competition and I need it done in 10 days?

If you are not a scammer you will throw him out or if you have some spare time you will sit down with him and explain it that what he wants is quite impossible.

Breaking News: It is possible. No black hat, no tons of content no links bought.
How about that?

Ajax. Initial a popular detergent and in the past 2 years a geek buzzword mainly attached to what is now called as Web 2.0. 100.000.000 websites competition according to Google. Obviously a suicide job for most of the white hat SEO companies.
Ajaxwrite.com did it. #9 in 10 days and climbing toward the top 5.

Facts:

www.ajaxwrite.com is a fresh domain. Spotted by Alexa in 7th February 2006 (looking at the detailed contact data it seems that it was manually added by the owner). EDIT: Whois data shows the same thing (Thanks Elvsoft for the tip)
On March 23rd almost simultaneously appears on: Slashdot, Digg, Techcrunch, Ajaxian, Solution watch and in another 1075 blog articles since than (according to Technorati) – What is curious is that Technorati says that there are only 159 links pointing to that domain.

I will not go again rambling about the quality of the service. Many others have done it and will do it from now on. My point on that is here.

Instead let’s see what Google optimization myths were shattered:
Myth: Only old domains score for high competitive keywords
Truth: As I said probably registered in February or January. That counts 2-3 month max

Myth: Sandbox
Truth: What sandbox? Is #9 in 10 days for a competitive keyword. We already know that spiders are reacting fast on new domains, but many have claimed that even though you are indexed you will score only for low quality keywords.

Myth: You need external links from high PR sites.
Truth: Really? I wonder how many blogs from those 1075 have a PR higher than 3. And probably Google indexed post pages that most of them due to their age have a PR 0

Myth: The age of the links matters
Truth: Probably. But in this case links were not older than 10 days.

Myth: You need a lot of quality content to get in top 10.
Truth: Really? Never thought that 1 page of cheap bullshit marketing is called “quality content”

Myth: Any burst of external links using the same anchor will be marked as bought links and will have no value
Truth: Great one Matt Cutts. I think that India was shacked by an earthquake when all the Indian link builders saw that and started to laugh. The seed of truth is that a sudden burst of external links site wide MIGHT be counted as advertisement and thrown away. Keep in mind that the magic phrase is “10 days”.

So. What to learn from that.

1. Nothing is impossible
2. Most of the things said in SEO forums are myths based on heuristics AND on negative examples (that might have other logical explanations). As an example of what that means: psychanalysis was developed by Freud on psychiatric hospitals on pacients and in time it showed no value for normal people
3. Links are valuable no matter their source (don’t aim for PR 5 or higher links, it might cost you more than is worth)
4. One way links MIGHT be the key
5. Always when you launch a product be aware of the power of the blogosphere. It’s almost free and all it takes is to know it and to be nice with it
6. Don’t trust any SEO advice or excuse. SEO is based mostly on reverse engineering and heuristic. There are no facts only theories and results

Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization | 6 Comments »

links for 2006-04-05

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Automattic » WordPress Widgets

Nice Wordpress plugin that allows custom widgets in your blog sidebar

(tags: ajax blogging wordpress widgets plugin tools)
Nokia - Free Nokia PC Suite Software

(tags: software cellphone nokia)
deviantART: suzi9mm

Dark female artist from Finland

(tags: deviantART gallery photography)
Visual Tooltip (Vista like)

Show thumbnails of the apps from your Windows Xp taskbar

(tags: free tools windows desktop)

Posted in Daily Readings | No Comments »

Google Launches Y!Q Search 2.0 (beta)

Tuesday, April 4th, 2006

Google Launches Y!Q Search 2.0 (beta)

Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.

More than one year after Yahoo launched Y!Q Search, Google launches version 2.0 (like in web 2.0) and calls it Google Related Links. Of course a beta product and worse than the original ideea. Probably another brilliant project from the 20% series.

Most likely is based on the same set of Common Words that are shown in Google Sitemaps in site analysis section or on the Adsense indexing engine. Probably in the near future one of the killer features that will be added will be to allow webmasters to target through html tags only partial content of a page (feature that was from the beginning in Y!Q search).

This would have been a good April Fools joke but unfortunately is real.

More coverage on:

Solution Watch: Google Labs releases Related Links

Research Buzz: Google’s Got a New Related Links Feature

Googlist: 9 Notes on Google Related Links

Search Engine Journal: Google Related Links Launches For Publishers

Edit:
What seemed to be a hunch is confirmed by a quick test done by seside.net. Google Related Links uses the same boot as Adsense….that’s what I call rocket sience

Posted in General, Google, Yahoo | No Comments »