As an SEO and web publisher, who has multiple side projects going, I have learned that some of the best traffic comes out of the corporate workforce. Depending on your niche, you too might be able to capitalize on the high dollar traffic that comes from the legion of Cube Dwellers who spend 8+ hours at their computers each day.

Banging your Head against the Firewall

If you are lucky you will have someone inside the corporate world that can test your site from the inside. One small benefit of being in corporate America is that I am behind the firewall on a daily basis, and I have been able to gather some insight on how to get blacklisted, and more importantly I have learned how to get off that list. But first, how do you get blacklisted?

Most Common ways to get Blacklisted

1. Have a forum that gets overrun with spam, and let it sit a few weeks. Even if you delete the spam, you are quite possibly dead in the water.
2. Have a page that is cash parked via godaddy. Note: I have not had any issues with the shared revenue service and getting blacklisted though, I have had issue with sites that are parked at godaddy and godaddy displays the godaddy free parked page.
3. Have a site with “Coming Soon” as the only content or either has no content at all.
4. Have a legitimate site which uses words that could trip their filter.
5. Have your site hosted on a C Block that is known for spam. Example: If your site is hosted by Dream Host then chances are you are blocked. Any server that hosts 1000’s of domains probably has a certain percentage of spam sites hosted on it, which will trip their filter a bit quicker than with some lower profile hosts.

Case in Point

A while back I had a legitimate site submitted to a web directory I run. I tried to approve the link, but SurfControl would not let me visit the site. The link was being requested from someone at an SEO Forum I frequent, so I knew that they should not have been SurfControlled. I decided to see what google would tell me. I knew that the site had a forum so I check to see if they had a bunch of spam entries that they were not aware of. The query [site:example.com sex], pulled back 20 hits. The funny thing was that the word sex was completely appropriate for this site because the forum is about breeding a particular animal, and the word sex was being used instead of the word gender.

Getting around the Firewall

I purchased a great little domain name a while back and had it sitting for quite some time. I finally decided to get around to using it, and after spending the weekend getting the site going, I returned to work on Monday and decided to look at my handy work. Lo and behold I was blacklisted! I knew immediately I was blacklisted because the site had no content for more than 6 months.

I was now faced with the fact that I was going to have to throw away the domain name and start with a name that was not as keyword rich as the one I was hoping to use. Out of pure frustration I headed to the SurfControl site where I hoped to find an email address, so I could request to have the site re-included.

Thankfully SurfControl has a place to request for a site to be tested. The nice thing is that it only took 3 days to get my site off their blacklist. If you want to get your site re-included then here is how you do it: Go to http://www.surfcontrol.com/, and on the horizontal navigation bar click the “Test Site” link. The Test Site link pops up the window below.

SurfControl test site form.

If you first want to see how it works then enter google.com and click the Test Site button. You will notice that they have google categorized as a search engine.

Once you have entered your site it will take no longer than a week for them to categorize your site.

Site Topology is Wrong

While entering your site through the Test Site link you might have noticed that your site was already in their list. Chances are they got the high level topology of your site correct, but if not you now have a choice to make. If they categorized you as a news source and you are really a blog then you are in good shape because some corporate settings don’t allow blogs where most allow news sites.

If you are a blog and they have you labeled in a high risk category then you will want to request to have them review your site. To do this, just submit your site on the “Test Link” and select the appropriate category. At this point it is up to Surf Control and you will have to take what they give you.

Example: Behind the firewall here at work I am able to view all cached pages that google provides. The problem is that, unlike google, both Yahoo and Live are under the Proxies & Translators topology, which for whatever reason is blocked at work. I have resubmitted both Yahoo and Live, to have them re-categorized as Search engines vs. them being under the proxies & translators but they have yet to change it.

Final thoughts

Surf Control is only one of many companies that filter web traffic in the corporate world. I hope to compile a list of some of the larger Surf Control type companies in the marketplace. If you know of another company that other SEOs and web publishers should be aware of then please leave a comment.

All that said, over the last few weeks we have started to rank fairly well for a few long tail searches. While adding a new post to the site yesterday I noticed that we had gotten a really great backlink from a PR5 blog. The problem was that the backlink was a link to an image. The link looked like this:

<a href=”http://SITE.com/img/Political-Topic-1.jpg”>REALY GREAT KEYWORDS</a>

So this is what I did. I renamed the original image to Political-Topic-2.jpg. Then I went in and updated my post to point to the new image. After I updated the post I then went into my .htaccess file and added this line.

RewriteRule ^img/Political-Topic-1.jpg Post-Name/ [L,R=301]

I am not sure why it took me so long to think about doing this. I run about 15 sites and I have images on almost all of them. There has been a time or two where I have gotten dugg on an image and the image has received a ton of backlinks.

So do you think it will work?

I have never done this before, so I am watching it closely to see how the search engines react to it. Would you consider this experiment Black Hat? Will it pass the keyword value to the post? Will it pass PageRank? What do you think?

I would be interested if anyone else has done this to know your results?

In retrospect I can’t believe it took me so long to see the light. I remember spending my time building backlinks for just the keyword phrase I wanted to rank for. I am amazed that I had any success at all. The two reasons I had a bit of success was the fact that all of my copy was completely unique and that I would occasionally get the rogue backlink with some really whacked out anchor text, which would make the search engines realize that I was too much of an idiot to be trying to spam them.

What is the Long Tail?

I try to explain visually in the graph below. The long tail comprises all the searches that surround a larger niche. I use the example of widgets in the graph. You can see that the term “widgets” receives about 100 queries per month. What is really important to notice about the long tail is that the sum of all the other search terms hanging off of widgets is more than widgets itself. In general the rule of thumb is that the long tail has more hits per month than the big keyword in the topology.

Why I love the Long Tail

The long tail is truly the SEOs best friend. It enables you to have small amount of success with a site in the matter of a few months. It really does not matter if you have an online store, a MFA (Made for AdSense) site, or a forum. As long as you keep the longtail in mind when writing your copy, you can capitalize on those micro niches. Personally I use tools like WordTracker and Overture for getting an idea about the long tail, but you do not need them. One thing that makes the web so exciting is that there are an infinite number of niches that have yet to be created or discovered. The internet really reflects the uniqueness of each individual and industry, and allows for like minded people to congregate together. It is just a matter of finding a niche and writing some really unique content. The key to being successful is not necessarily liking the topic you are writing about, but rather having the discipline to write about the topic whether you want to or not.

For more information check out The Long Tail over at wiki.

Excerpt taken from googles Business referral Representative FAQ:

As a Google Business Referral Representative, you’ll visit local businesses to collect information (such as hours of operation, types of payment accepted, etc.) for Google Maps, and tell them about Google Maps and Google AdWords. You’ll also take a few digital photos of the business that will appear on the Google Maps listing along with the business information. After the visit, you submit the business’ info and photo(s) to Google through your Local Business Referrals Center, and we’ll pay you up to $10 for each listing that is approved by Google and verified by the business.

Yes you heard it. They are willing to pay you $10. That’s right a whole $10 dollars. I guess you could make a $100 a day, but you would really have to put in the hours. I normally would never call google cheep, but 10 bucks! It almost seems wrong.

I have decided to stop pushing the reddit, digg, netscape, and Stumble Upon angle except for picking up new readership. I am going to limit it to once a month, and that will be only if I need it. If it happens on its own then that is fine, but as far as me pimping my own site on a regular bases… I am out. I find that once a really good stumble gets started it can take well more than a week to die back down, so pretty much my profits drop over %70 for that week period.

In one respect I would like to do away with ever being stumbled. I really don’t have any hard proof of this, but I find when I have not been stumbled or dugg for several weeks that google starts throwing the really high dollar ads my way. I have found that when my site moves to all bookmark, rss, and organic traffic for a period of a week or more that I start hitting those coveted ads worth $2, $3 or more per click.

In the past, the only valid delimiter between your file names was the dash "-". Because of this you see a lot of directory and file names like http://example.com/widgets-for-sale/example-widget.html. Using the dash in between the file names and directories told the search engines that the file name was actually a set of keywords, which were then used as one of the many onsite factors used to rank your page.

My take on this is if you already have pages that are using the underscore you might or might not want to keep them, but for the foreseeable future I would not start creating pages using the undersscor on any new pages. We will want to hear from yahoo and live to see if they are going to follow suit. Remember google is not the only search engine out there.

You thought you used to hate Wiki, just wait

At first I was pretty excited about the change to allowing an underscore. Mainly because I have some pages going back to 2001 where I used the underscore, and I never got around to changing them because of their lack of priority in my seo work. It will be nice to see if google will give me a little boost on those pages once the change kicks in.

As a SEO, I have always disliked wiki because the engines favored them because of their authority. Often times you will see wiki rank in the top ten SERPs when there are better sites out there, that just don’t have the authority that wiki has.

On one hand I like that they rank well because it shows how google splits the top 10 SERPS amongst different types of sites i.e. forums, stores, information site, blogs, etc. On the other hand I hate to see wiki where I want to be. One nice thing I have always counted on was that wiki has the nasty file names using the underscore, but going forward wiki is going to be able to get a larger portion of the organic results because their file names are going to count as being keyword rich.

What is a Mini Page?

Mini Pages are websites that contain only 1 content rich page. They depend on purchasing a good generic domain name and succeed because of their extremely unique content. The copy on a Mini Page should be between 500 to 1000 words.

Why create a Mini Page?

The idea behind a mini page is to try with a minimal amount of effort to create a site that makes about $2 a week. Mini Pages are a compromise between a full blown website and the ubiquitous parked domain that just tries to gather PPC money without any real content. A mini page looks to be a good idea because you can generate some cash flow while waiting the year for google to really start to trust the content on the page and to trust the page’s back links. What I like about the mini page is that after a year you can come back to the site once it has a bit more authority to try and expand the site to garner more click troughs.

My Mini Page

Being that this was my first mini page it took me some time to get the infrastructure set up. In total it took me 11 hours to get my first page going. I already have ideas for other mini pages and I think my next mini page will not take more than 2 hours to get up and running. For this project a breakdown of my time spent goes like this:

1. Picking Niche: 2.5 hours
2. Picking and Purchasing a Domain name: 2 hours
3. Installing and Styling WordPress: 4.5 hour
4. Copywriting: 1 hour

I do plan on revisiting the copy once I get a few dozen hits and can see what the search engines are picking up on. I only hit about 600 words so I will have room to add another 400 words to further capitalize on the long tail. Or if the site is a complete dud the 400 extra words will give me enough room to try a different angle in the copy.

I kept coming back to the fact that I know I have something to offer. For me the process of hacking out my corner of the internet has been a long hard process. There has been many times I have felt extremely sorry and burdened for all those people that have entered the world of having a web business, but never really had a chance because they did not have the education they needed to succeed. That said, my primary focus on this blog is going to be to help the small business owner. More specifically, I will be looking to help those husband and wife teams who have a home bases business.

In the next few weeks I will go more into my background and why I have chosen to start this blog. Please check out my about page.