I get a lot of e-mails and questions about trying to SEO against big companies and established websites. A lot of people seem to get stuck in the mindset of “Oh, no MegaCorp(tm) has a $79 billion SEO budget per month, there’s no way we’ll ever beat them!?

The fact is, you can. You can eat them for breakfast, then wipe your month with their over-inflated legalise Terms & Conditions page(s). This can be especially satisfying if you decide to take down a company you’re not particular fond of. While you’re sitting on your balcony at home having breakfast taking in some sun (or rain, if you’re a Brit), you can daydream about them running around their shiny boardroom pointing at the big graph on the wall that’s going down, generally shrieking at each other as their search empire crumbles at their feet.

Let’s get going, comrade.

Dedication to SEOs everywhere
I would like to dedicate this post to all SEOs who work on their own projects and have tackle big businesses trying to elbow them out of the game at every stage. While you may have the better sites, the better content and more passion that what you’re doing, you’re messages are oppressed by greedy companies who want to fill the Internet with their mediocre content, their brand and of course, their ads. I give no apologies to the companies we will disrupt, but sorry guys, that space belongs to us (and our ads).

General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare
To win a Google war, you must have a detailed understanding of your own strength and weaknesses, as well as your enemy’s. Everyone has their own areas of the web they excel in, whether it’s programming, design, content writing or networking, however to be consistently successful, you will need to develop a wide range of these skills either yourself, or in your guerrilla band. Large enemy armies (err, I mean companies) share many common weaknesses. It is these weaknesses which you will learn to relate to your own skill sets and exploit until the enemy is utterly demoralised, scattered, beleaguered and exhausted.

If you attempt to face your enemy, overtly on the battlefield, you’ll lose. However, there are many advantages to being a small entity, you can operate unseen, you can move quickly and your personal interaction can sow the seeds of descent which will turn the enemy’s own populace against them.

Guerrilla Warfare Strategies

Weakness #1:A Large Army Requires Lots Of Supplies

Okay, so MegaCorp has more dozens, or even hundreds of staff and you’re on your own, or it’s only you and a couple of comrades working from your small base in the woods (or whatever you call home). This can actually be an advantage!

Large businesses only want to get involved in projects which are of course, profitable for them. However, for these businesses to make profit, they have to pay for office buildings, web developers, designers, agencies, sales staff, editorial staff, marketing staff, the coffee machine and keep replacing the tea spoons that staff is nicking. This means you can have a better core offering than your enemy.

Have a look at their business model, how are they making money? Are they filling pages with advertising? Are they selling advert space? Perhaps they’re offering a service that other companies are paid to be included in? When it comes to monetization you can; show less adverts, charge the same advertisers less to be advertised on your site, or offer the same service for cheaper or free!

So take the model where companies are being paid to be listed on your enemy’s website. As an individual, you could quite easily make a decent amount of money showing some contextual advertising, or selling some advert space. So collect all the names of your enemy’s allies and e-mail them, offering the same benefits – but for free (or cheaper!).

For instance, “I noticed you are listed on website xxxx and you are paying $250 a month for this service. I am running xxxx website and I am prepared to offer free listings for your company for life, if you will display this badge showing you are listed here.”

Most companies would much rather chuck you a link than pay a monthly subscription, so in this instance, you’ve gained exposure (from the link), a couple of steps forward in terms of SEO (you’ve got some quality links from relevant sites) and you’ve made your enemy look bad by offering the same service for free (or a lot less).

The key here is research. Use the fact you’re small and unknown to research, spy and gain information. Pose as a potential client or advertiser and contact your enemy, asking for rate-cards or prices, ask for visitors stats. Use all of this information to build up a picture of their revenue model. From this you can calculate their revenue, and work on a counter-revenue model, which offers better value to visitors or participating entities.

Whatever money they’re making, you can afford to make less and still be far, far more profitable than them. Use this to your advantage to out-do their offer on all fronts and make your website more appealing.

Weakness #2:The Army Must Control The Populace

Big companies have a big brand to protect. Dispute their dominant appearance most companies are absolutely terrified of damaging their brand and will do anything to avoid taking risks. This is war, and risks need to be taken! From talking to hundreds of companies about their websites, one of the most common fears is UGC (User Generated Content), they are terrified to let people speak their minds for fear they might speak against the current regime! The CEO sits quivering in his chair that someone might say “FUCK” on his website and he’ll have angry people writing letters and bashing on the doors of the ivory tower.

You can really press the advantage hard here. It seems common sense to most savvy web developers and entrepreneurs nowadays, but open your site to the masses. Let them submit content, comment on content, talking in forums, whatever way you can allow them to have some interaction and control over their website. That’s right, it’s not your website, it’s the peoples’ website – so let them have some control!

Some more forward-thinking enemy do allow YGC on their sites, but it is typically heavily moderated to give the impression of free speech, when in reality, everyone is suspicious about the 5 out of 5 star user reviews on every product going. I recently saw a keynote, where 2 very similar forums launched at the same time, one moderated and one not. 1 year on, the forum that wasn’t moderated had six times the monthly traffic. People like some freedom when they’re giving you content.

Depending how you’re operating, you can take as many risks as you like, all the way to making black hat versions of your website (suicide sites). Make sure you separate these entities well away from your core troops (different servers and WHOIS) so they are not traceable, but any noise you can make will disrupt and demoralise the enemy. This tactic may not be appropriate in all circumstances, however if you’re competing with an e-commerce site, why not make your genuine article site while working on a few blackhat suicide versions? So what if they get banned after a few months? You’ll have made some money and damaged the enemy.

Weakness #3:Large Armies Are Slow To Manoeuvre

Large companies regularly have this trait in common. It takes them absolutely fucking ages, to do the most simple of things. If the colour of the text is going to be changed you’ll need a pre-meeting, a meeting, a post-meeting debrief, a spec produced, changed, put in a developer queue, tested, have a review meeting, blah blah.

The enemy is likely to be dependent on multiple sources when they need something changed. To have changes done quickly it will likely cost them an arm and leg, infrastructure changes are avoided like trench foot. Exploit this weakness to the fullest.

Take the time to evolve your website, if there are beneficial changes, make them. If there’s something in the news about your niche, respond to it. If there’s breaking news, get it out first. You can move quickly without encumbrance and seize the initiative while they’re still packing their bergens. Carpe Diem, Comrade.

Weakness #4:Lots Of Soldiers = Lots Of Cannon Fodder

While chasing profits and having to maintain a large work force, many companies try to save money by hiring slightly cheaper staff, or “just as good as” guys. That’s right, they’re taking rookie soldiers and putting them on the front line.

As any good General knows, sending untrained troops into battle is no better than herding sheep onto the front line, you’re going to lose. Hard. It may be that the enemy has got a lot of adept people working for them, but there have been communication problems between the ideas guy and the end developer. I have yet to see a website that has been built by a non-web specialist company that is flawless.

Spend time looking around the enemy’s terrain, see what they have done well and do it yourself. Immediately benefit from their expensive end-user research, at no cost to yourself. Find what they’ve done badly and improve it on your site. It seems that coming second carries with it, its own set of advantages.

Large armies tend to be sloppy, assuming victory by sheer size. Take all of their small weaknesses, poor internal linking, non-SEO friendly URLs, no use of “nofollow” tags and stack them so you have a distinctive advantage. The underdog leaves no bone un- scavenged.

Weakness #5:Large Armies Leave Big Tracks

A large army cannot move undetected and thus it is easy to track their movements. Once you have your website battle ready, why not check out the enemy’s backlink profile in Yahoo! Site Explorer? A lovely, juicy list of their entire link building activity. You’ll want to get on that procuring links from every source they received links from, so you’ll very quickly draw even. If they are actively link building, take note of the kind of sites they are targeting.

Pay special attention if there are any “suspicious” links in there. You know the type, site-wide links from ring tone websites, MySpace Layout websites or obvious link networks. If there are, it is your civic duty to report these war crimes under the Google Convention! You’ll find cash-rich companies tend to involve themselves in these tactics quite quickly as it seems the most cost-efficient way for them to operate, so if you catch em, get em in stocks, pronto.

Weakness #6:Large Armies Have Slower Communications

It is likely that a lot of the time, the left hand won’t know what the right is doing. Staff working at large companies won’t be able to communicate their detailed daily operations to each other. Use this along with any skill shortages and your previously gathered intelligence on what sites they link up with.

Set some booby-traps for them to walk right into! Create a few quick websites with some mashed up content that fits the profile of sites they want linking to them. Get in contact and offer a link from your homepage to their website, if they link to an obscure article on your website.

Of course, on your homepage you can use “X-Robots” in your header-delivery to nofollow any links on that page, which will be totally undetectable by nofollow plugins, or even by viewing the source code. The only way they’ll discover it is if they view the header information being sent by the site, which they won’t of course. Once you’ve done your link exchange, you’ve got 2 options:

1) Spring the booby trap! Why not 301 that page they’ve linked to, to a spammy blackhat website. Google will love that, along with their visitors!

2) Use their own resources against them! Or you could 301 that page to your own website, so the enemy is very kindly helping your efforts.

The great thing is that this will work dozens of times. Dealing with different people each time, they enemy won’t know what’s going on until it’s too late and they’ll soon start fearing other websites, not knowing who will help or harm them!

The Ongoing War

These are just a few of the many weaknesses that plague large company websites. I hope I have inspired you to take up arms against your would-be oppressors. When you divide and conquer, you’ll find that you can win a lot of battles against seemingly impervious web-giants and eventually bring them to their knees.

(Just stay out of Bolivia)

Right, lets kick this thing in the nuts. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a decent list of SEO Ranking Factors and more specifically, tell me exactly what you need to rank for a key phrase?

Well, SEOMoz went and done this.

You’ve probably all seen it before, the famous SEOMoz Search Ranking Factors, the highly regarded opinions of 37 leaders of search spread over a bunch of questions. It sounds slick, it looks cool and it’s a great introduction to SEO. There is, however, a rather major problem. None of them pissing agree! 37 leaders in search, closed ended questions, yet almost ALL of the answers have only “average agreement”, just look at the pie charts at the end, there is massive dispute between the correct answer.

I find this interesting. It leaves two possibilities

1) SEOMoz’s questions are flawed and there is no “correct” answer – this kind of kills the whole point of the project.

2) If there is a “correct” answer, then it would seem that 25%-50% of “leading people in search” don’t know WTF they are talking about.

Now before I continue, I’m not going to claim I have all the answers, far, far from it. I do some stuff and that stuff works well for me. The other thing I would like to point out is that I actually really like the SEOMoz blog and I think they provide extremely high quality content in high frequency, which is bloody hard to do. So please no flaming when I seem to be bashing their hard work, I’m simply pointing out a few things rather crudely. Oh, they’re nice people too, Jane is very polite when I stalk her on Facebook IM.

Anyway, back to slating. I think it is very hard to give quality answers to questions such as, how does page update frequency effect ranking? From my experience, I’ve found Google quite adaptive in knowing, based on my search query, whether it should serve me a “fresh” page or one that’s collecting dust. Eli from BlueHatSEO has also made some convincing arguments that the “optimum” update frequency of a page depends on your sector/niche.

Also, these things change. Regulary. Those clever beardies at Google are playing with those knobs and dials all the time. Bastards.

Okay, I now hate you for slating SEOMoz, do you have anything useful to say?
Maybe? Maybe not. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m going to talk about some projects I’m working on at the moment and one of these is specifically aimed at getting some SEO Ranking Factors answers.

I could of course just give what I believe to be the “correct” answers to the SEO Ranking Factors questions, but like everyone else, I’d be limited to my own SEO experience. We need more data, more testing, more evidence.

There’s loads of little tools floating around the net that will tell you little things like, if you have duplicate meta descriptions, your “keyword density” (hah), how many links you have, all that stuff. Then you’ll get some really helpful advice like “ShitBOT has detected your keyword only 3.22% on this page, you should mention your keyword 4.292255% for optimum Googleness”. Yes, well. Time to fuck off ShitBOT. These tools are kind of fragmented over the net, so it would take ages to run all 101 to build up a complete “profile” of your website, which really… Wouldn’t tell you all that much. It wouldn’t tell you much because you’re only looking at your own website, your own ripples in the pond. You need to zoom out a bit, get in a ship and sail back a bit, then maybe put your ship in a shuttle, blast off until you can see the entire ocean.

Well, crap. It all looks different from here..

Creating a Technological Terror
I can’t do this project alone. Fortunately, one of the smartest SEO people I know moved all the way across the country to my fine city and is going to help.

Here we go….

1) Enter the keyword you would like to rank for.

2) We will grab the top 50 sites in Google for this search term.

2) i) First of all, we will do a basic profile of these sites, very similar, but a bit more depth than the data SEOQuake will give you. So things like domain age, number of sites linking to domain, how these links are spread within the site, page titles, amount of content, update frequency, PageRank etc. We’ll also dig a bit deeper and take titles and content from pages that rank for these key phrases and store them for later.

2) ii) The real work begins here. For each one of these sites that rank, we are going to look at the second tier, which I don’t see many people doing. We are going to analyse all of the types of sites that link to these sites that rank well. This will involve: Doing the basics, such as looking at their vital stats, so their PR, links, age of domain, TLD and indexed pages.

Then we’re going to take this a step further. We are going to be scanning for footprints to work out the type of link. This means, is it an image link? Is it a link from a known social news site like Digg or Reddit? Is it a link from a social bookmarking site like StumbleUpon or Delicious? Is it a link from a blog? Is it a link from a forum? A known news site? Is it a link from a generic content page? If so, lets use some language processing and try and determine if it’s a link from a related content page, or a random ringtones page. Cache all of this data.

3) We have a huge amount of data now, we need to process it. Ranking for the keyterm casino, lets put it onto a graph showing their actual ranking for this keyterm vs their on page vital stats. Lets see the ranking vs the types of links they have. Lets see how the sites rank vs the amount of links, the age of links etc.etc…

4) We can take this processing to any level needed. Lets pool together all the data we have of the 50 sites and take averages. What do they have in common for this search term? Are these common ranking factors shared between totally different niches and keywords?

This is the type of information that I think I know. I think it would be valuable to know the information I know (=

So I guess you can expect a lot of playing with the Google Charts API, scatter graphs showing link velocity against domain age and total links and all that shit.

You get the idea.

There’s actually all other kind of secondary analysis that can be pumped into this data. For instance, even though it’s a kind of made up term, I think “TrustRank” has some sauce behind it. (There’s a good PDF on TrustRank here). Lets think of it in very, very simple, non-mathematical terms for a moment.

One fairly basic rule of thumb for the web can be that a trusted (“good”) site will generally not link to a “bad” (spam, malware, crap) site. It makes sense, generally very high quality websites vet the other sites that they link to. So it makes sense that Google select a number of “seed” sites and give them a special bit of “trust” juice, which says that whatever site this one links to, is very likely to be of good quality. This trend continues down the chain, but obviously the further down this chain you get, the more and more likely it is that this rule will be broken and someone (maybe even accidentally) will link to what Google considers a “bad” website. For this reason, the (and I use this terminology loosely) “Trust” that is passed on will be dampened at each tier. This allows a margin for calculated error, so if they chain in essence is broken, the algorithm maintains its quality, because it allows for this.

I think most people could name some big, trusted websites. Why not take time to research these sites, really trusted authority sites – one’s that it’s at least a fair bet has some of this magical Trust? Say we have a list of ten of these sites, why not crawl them and get a list of every URL that they link to? Why not then crawl all of these URLs and get a list of all the sites THEY link to? Why not grab the first 3 or 4 “tiers” of sites? Great now, you’ve probably got a few million URLs. Why not let Google help us? Lets query this URLs against the keywords we’re targeting. What you’re left with is a list of pages from (hopefully) trusted domains, that are related to your niche. The holy grail of whitehat link building. Now pester them like a bastard for links! Offer content, blowjobs, whatever it takes!

Wouldn’t it be interesting if we took this list of possible Trusted sites and tied in this theory with how many of our tendrials of trusted networks link to our high-ranking pages? There’s a lot of possibilities here.

This project will be taking up a significant chunk of my time over the next months. Maybe the data will be shit and we won’t find any patterns and it will be a giant waste of time. At least then I can say with confidence that SEO is actually just charm-glasping, pointy hat-wearing, pole chanting black art that so many businesses seem to think it is. At least I’ll be one step closer to finding out.

Apologies once again to SEOMoz if you took offense. I love you x

This blog is changing focus. I haven’t posted since I returned from Tulum (yes, I know I said Cancun, but it turns out I don’t listen as well as I should) because I’ve stopped myself from doing so. There’s been a lot of things I’ve wanted to talk about, such as Lyndon’s run in with Google over hoax linkbait, Google really getting to grips with forms, big sites that are cloaking and even geo-hashing. It’s like a trap for me to fall into, seeing all these opinions flying around and wanting to throw my 2 cents in. Of course, I have opinion on all of these topics, but one of my only objectives when starting this blog was to keep every post as informative as possible and try and dig up some strategies, techniques, theories or research that isn’t in a million other places. There’s an incredibly annoying echo effect on my RSS reader as these stories reverberate around the (gag) “blogosphere”. So, rather than post what everyone else is posting, I’d rather post nothing at all, so when you are here, hopefully you’ll get something really….. Nice.

That being said, any decent sized post I do, takes in total around 4 hours as I try and decode the gibberish noise in my head into something tangible enough to put on display. The process helps me organise my thoughts, however it is time-consuming and at the moment I’m incredibly time-starved.

At the moment, my time is broken down between a few major projects:

1) A massive (as of yet unnamed) project to analyse search ranking factors

2) The further development of my currently released SEO Tools

3) The growth and refinement of AutoStumble (now over 300 users!)

4) I’ve also just started work on niche, white-hat community site which will need a lot of attention.

5) Various other websites/maintaining current web property

The change of focus for this blog is going to be looking more closely at the SEO, programming, technical and marketing principles behind these projects – which will benefit everyone, as once again, blogging will become “integrated” in what I do and there’s still a lot of valuable stuff to share.

I ask you.
You’ve taken the time to subscribe (or at least) visit my blog, thank you. If you have a specific topic you’d like to see me write about, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Would you guys like these single, sporadic and very detailed posts on more advanced SEO concepts on their own? Or would you like “lighter” reading for insights into current issues as well? Answers on a postcard, or in the comment box – whichever is easiest for you. I’m going to be checking out everyone’s sites and blogs who comments here so I can see who’s really reading this stuff

I’ll shortly be posting detailed overviews of the above projects.

A quick note before I leave tomorrow..

“…Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a FORM element…”

If you didn’t already know this, it is worth reading about.

Does this mean we finally have proof we (the SEOs) have won?

Every SEO this last week or so has been wetting their panties and tonking on about the Google Spam Quality Guidelines being leaked. Whoopie frickin’ do. What an amazing insight into Google we all have now. Or not.

Has anybody actually sat down and read though this crap? Was there anything there that anybody didn’t actually already know or at least, very safely assume? No, not really. However, I think a lot of people missed the one important thing about this document. It’s written for noobs!

Do you realise how serious this is?
I heard rumours over a year ago that Google employs over 5,000 people to “hand review” websites, this document would suggest to me that number has grown considerably. From reading the document, it would seem Google is employing monkeys en masse to trawl the web.

I can see it now….

Welcome to your first day at Google!

Step 1: Sit on this chair

Step 2: Go to the websites that this program tells you to go to.

Step 3: Without using brain, rate these websites based on what this PDF says

Step 4: Goto Step 2

I believe the “Web Quality” room in Google will look similar to this:

Rows upon rows of imprisoned Web Quality rating minds searching a never-ending Internets.

Am I being overly harsh? C’mon, wake up and smell the drool, this document gives you explicit instructions on how to “identify a parked domain”. If you can’t identify a parked domain yourself, you don’t deserve a modem, let alone being allowed to run amok rating websites.

The Big Truth
I’m always having discussions with people about pushing the boundaries of SEO and being told “oh, Google could spot that. They could rate this and look at this, etc.” The fact of the matter is, with newer web technologies (see “multi-variate” testing), more RSS and syndicated content than you could mash with potatoes, Google is having a damn hard time reliably identifying spam and crap content, so they’ve had recruit a manual review army. For just about any “you can’t do this because…” scenario, I can give an example of similar techniques being used for legitimate purposes, which is bad news for Google – they really don’t want to throwing out false positives and automatically booting good sites out their index.

Google’s algorithm is suffering, big time.

Want some proof?
This document only confirms what I have suspected for a while now. Over the last 6 months I’ve seen a large increase in the amount of manual reviews done on my own sites. Algorithmically, they would rank perfectly – even with 100% scraped content – then they’d hit the top 5 in Google for a key term, which obviously ups them in the hand review priority (why manual review a website that doesn’t rank?) and they get punished. Fair enough, they are just pawns in a larger game – and you learn a lot about what you can get away with sending websites to their death.

Even though Google denies it (they hate admitting their algorithm isn’t great), you see all of these Google Bombs being defused manually. I wrote ages ago about how to spot a Google Bomb from an algorithmic point of view, so people just adapted. Last month I saw the Scientology* homepage ranking for “dangerous cult”, pretty smart as they’d chosen words that were already present on page, therefore getting around one of the main Google Bomb filters. So it ranked #1 for quite a while, then magically, “poof!” it’s gone. If that doesn’t reek of a web quality monkey, I don’t know what does.

But Google can, detect, um, it can, uh…
What’s the main reason (most) people don’t go around committing crimes? Generally, it’s fear of punishment. One of the big reasons a lot of people don’t link spam/blackhat/cloak whatever your cup of tea might be, is, you guessed it, fear of punishment. The more Google can get you to believe it can magically detect certain trends, the less likely you are [the content creating mass] to produce spammy/poor content. Which is great for Google (and end user of course), because it makes their job a whole lot easier!

Think of an off-page technique that you’d think would get a site penalised or banned, we’ll say guestbook spamming for our example. That’s a nasty little old-school trick. So, like most people at DigitalPoint, you believe that Google automatically penalises sites for guestbook spamming. Let?s say this is true, Google has admitted it – they can algorithmically spot guestbook spamming no problem and they’ll penalise your site for it. I can guarantee you if Google openly admitted this, guestbook spamming would go up a billion and seven percent. SEOs would be spamming the hell out of their competitors to get them penalised and all Google has done is make its job a hell of a lot harder – they have encouraged people to make more noise to signal.

This holds true to most techniques, if it’s off-page, you can generally do it for a competitor, so Google punishing algorithmically for it would create more spam and a worse search experience. This my friends, is a prime example of “Catch 22″. Now, I’m not saying that you can’t damage other peoples’ rankings, it’s quite possible – especially on newer sites. However, it is a lot more likely that if Google identifies a guestbook that is heavily spammed, it will simply kill link juice going out from that page, not penalising, just reducing the effect of spam, this is how most “low level” spam is treated.

What about the bigger stuff? The algorithm will definitely raise flags. For instance, I [albeit accidently] built 15,000 links to a brand new domain (oops) and it actually started to rank very well. However, checking the logs after it was nuked, it was evident the site has been given a “hand job”, for being a “thin affiliate” page.

Search Disruption
I’ve seen a lot of people, like fellow Brit, Dave Naylor talking about SEOs considering “disruption budgets”. Meaning, dedicating some time and money to rocking your competitor’s boat, rather than fixing your own sails. With Dave’s write ups on buying links I see this as a viable option of late. Google is been swinging damn hard for link buyers and sellers, which is different to how I thought they’d handle it. I assumed they would continue with the “devalue the sold link” avenue, but they’ve been racking up the kills, giving out fatalities easier than Sub Zero’s finishing move (forward, down, forward, punch).

The final tip
Take one this away from all of this: Nowadays, I would be less careful about link building and more careful with presenting your site to look natural to a manual review. Maybe this is a topic we can cover later? How to make your site pass a manual review..

Also, put up to a vote. Should I buy Dave Naylor a VW Camper so his life is nearer to completion?

*For more information on Scientology, see Xenu.Net