SEO Blog - Marcus Westberg

Exciting stuff!

Only 2 weeks before John Scott announces the winner for the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem contest!
The question now is who will win? No one knows the answer for sure and the top 10 sites are all good contestants with a good chance to win!

SEO is not easy at all! and I thought that determing the winner would be easy with one month to go but I changed my mind when I realized the power of 301 redirects! Recently this domain was down because of a webhost rape procedure! but meanwhile i redirected my v7ndotcom contest site to a domain that had the SERP position 10 and it just flew up to number 4!!

If I get my Swedish teammate to partner with my site I strongly believe that SWEDEN will have both 1´st place as well as 2´nd place in this contest!
Not entirely true since I had a lot of help from my friend Steven Hargrove and he is not to be forgotten!
All these small details count at the last two weeks of the contest and I wish all contestans good luck!!!
I have had fun! I hope you also had fun with this V7ndotcom Elursrebmem contest!

THE V7n.com SEO contest

I decided to team up with my friend Steven Hargrove for the 2 last weeks of the contest!
We made a deal that if my site hits the number spot on May,15 he will get 30% of the price money.
Steven is a flash developer and a SEO hobbyist

Steven has good skills in SEO and we have been following each others project during the entire contest.
For a little more information about Steven check out his personal blog: Steven Hargrove Some great stuff can be found in there!

It would be hard for any one of us to reach the nr1 spot for ourselfves so a team-up is a good solution and now I am very excited to see what will happen!

Let us hope that me and Steven Hargrove can make a difference in the serps at this V7ndotcom Elursrebmem contest!

And man! am I glad to have my blog back online!!!!!

What a waste of time

This blog has been offline for about 2 weeks due to (I would call it) sabotage from an inresponsible webhost admin. The problem is now fixed and this domain has been transfered and is now officially hosted on Godaddy.com which I find is a good host. A lot of people complain on Godaddy.com but I never had any problems with them so far and they have good support so I´ll stick with them.

Google removed some of my pages from this domain from their index but luckily they have not yet removed my SEO contest page: V7ndotcom Elursrebmem contest.

I had to redirect my contest page to my other contest site: V7ndotcom Elursrebmem dot nu during the downtime and because of this the .nu domain ranks at #4! Amazing how much a redirect actually can do.
Before the redirect the .nu was ranked #10 so it was a big jump.

However my main contest site fell down to rank #6-7 but I hope I can get it back up to nr 4 again.
My main goal right now is to stay in the top 5! I have to be realistic, the number one spot is kind of unreachable espacially after beeing offline for 2 weeks.

Depending on how my webhost (the one who disabled my domain without notifying me) is handling the situation from now on I will later decide on what action I will take against them. The least I could do is to WARN!! everyone else about them if they dont answer my questions.
Their support is currently choosing only to answer a few of my questions (the questions they feel is easy to answer) and I honestly have no clue what will happen to the rest of my sites I have hosted there.

There is also another incident with this host that happend about 6 months ago and it is important that I tell everyone about it so no one else would be loosing money that is rightfully theirs!

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IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A PERFECT HOST?
I guess we will never know

Only one month left in the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem contest!

On may 15 v7n.com will announce the winner for the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem SEO contest and right now there seems to be tough competion for the top 5 spots!
Jim W is back in the game from a temporary break and with his 15,873 backlins currently reported on MSN he has now taken the first place again.

My V7ndotcom Elursrebmem contest site is currently ranked as Nr-2 but I sense it might get raped by the guy who watches paint dry (Alek)
Alek´s site was recently what it seemed to be penalized by Google for gaining an unatural high quantity of backlinks in a short time period, but right now it seems to be released from the penalty and with his 30684 reported backlinks on MSN he is currently one of the top favourites to win the whole thing.

The mysterious V7ndotcom Elursrebmem hotel

One of the sites that always seems to crawl its way to the top is the mysterious hotel site, apperently having the keyword in the domain name and end it with a dot com seems to be a good tactic to get a huge advantage in the rankings! But hey! I´m not exactly sure what makes this site rank so high I have to check it out more.
Anyway this site jumps like a rubber ball on crack, one day it´s nr 1 next day nr 6 and the day after that nr1 again. So pls! If you are the hotel manager for the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem hotel can you stay still for a while??

Other then that we have also seen some new contestants poppin up on the top 10 the latest month, one of them is the transformers site which seems to have a huge amount of link supporters (but not as many as “paintman Alek”) and of course the “site-sift” promoter.

To determine a sure winner at this time would be hard, but if I would make a qualified guess it seems to me that the paintman is gonna steal the show!

Good luck to all of you contestants!

I had to do it! I had to go to that site and check how much my blog was worth!

Hehe but this time I didn´t get a zero value

Hey for those of you that never seen it these numbers aren´t real and doesn´t mean anything really, it´s just a funny tool which happens to amuse some of us

So this time the total value was over $2000…
What kind of person buys personal blogs for $2000 is another question we never will have the answer to

List your SEO Contest sites in the SEO contest directory

New Directory! Made for webmasters who participates in search engine optimization contests. For every new contest there will be a category just for that contest since there aren´t to many contest around right now there shouldn´t be a problem to keep the categorie number low. This is really a niche directory and most people wont like it at all hehe, but for us that comptetes in all these SEO contests it can be kind of interesting.
All that is asked in return for you to get a listing is that you provide the seo contest directory with a indexed backlink from any kind of page, I wouldn´t mind seo contest pages

Go and get yourself a listing here: Seo Contest Directory

I found a really nice template for this dir to you can check it out by clicking the design link at the directory.
As usual PHPLD is used!, still the best free directory script around.

Marcus Net Ezine

My article site: Marcus Net Ezine has now officially been pimped!
I used the script from Article Dashboard which is a very nice and easy to customize script.

The basic idea about the site is that authors should be able to submit articles and choose themselves which category to place them in. In fact with a new add-on I found they can now suggest categories also while submitting.
So if you gotta minute to spare please submit an article or two

The nice thing about the script is that it was free to download, and I also joined the Article Dashboard forum which I later found out was also very active! I recommend this script to others without hesitation it´s really a good script that they are just giving away…. Well you gotta have a link back to Article Dashboard but that is a small price to pay.

I knew I would get in contact with this Black Hat crap sooner or later

Oh! my! God! I tried a black hat method just for fun and I was so impressed of it that I have to write about it here. First of all I would like to point out that I don´t ever do Black Hat SEO myself and nor do I want to promote it any way… But it is a problem for Google therefore it is important to remind you all that it exists and you don´t need to be a computer wizard to make it work.. that´t the most scary part!

So there are a lot of Black Hat techniques out there and the one I got involved with was this “Automatic Content Generation” or as we also call it spamdexing.
Basically what you need is a few programs about 2-4 and some webdesign + SEO skills + a whole lot of domains to store all this crap you get auto generated.
Now the big bad black hatters usually bulk register domains 100-500 at the same time to get a discount…. Your not going to believe this but there is also software for making domain names that matches your also autogenerated keyword list, nothing advanced really all it does is that it adds a hyphen between eventual spaces in keyphrase and also adds a .com or a .net in the end of the keyword.

What amazes me so far is that every single little step is fully automated and made for a huge amount of sites.
Ok next step was the keywords! there are several ways of finding those keywords for example overture sr or wordtracker….. Now the list is complete and next step is the layout and design etc.

What it´s all about is really like white hat seo when it comes to page structure, but then again all is automated! (scary). There are several ways to make good page structure using all you know. For example FEEDS and guess what that is also automated, the software imports a highly related feed from a high ranked site and mixes it into your content… Some other things are included such as PHP commands that calls random quotes etc. Man! there are a lot of other things to but I am not sure if I want to write all of them I just want you to understand what it´s all about. What I am trying to say is after doing all this stuff you have a highly optimized site for the search engines because you form the template + design yourself and if you know SEO pretty good you can make it as perfect as you wish.

So anyway I made all modifications needed to be done and then started to autogenerate my sites, I went for a snack a when I got back I had 21,000 pages all about SEO (which was my selected main keyword) all sites was optimized for specific terms and I thougt well the pages must look like crap now! So i uploaded some of the files + templates and css etc. to my test domain.

The Results of this Black Hat crap

It actually works! all pages where different and with some more modification you would never guess that the site was auto generated. Of course I didn´t spend to much time on this to perfect my templates etc but the general idea about how this works was now clear to me.

What is needed to be done to stop this?

Well you tell me? this is actually a real big problem to the search engines as I see it.
Something needs to be done about this! that is crystal clear but the big question is how to do it?
I am not in to this Black Hat SEO crap myself but I can imagine what the Black Hat Pro´s are up to.
There are much more to be said about this, but hey! I will let someone else find out about the rest of this mess… To messy for me!