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Archive for the Category "Design/Hosting/SEO"

Angelas Backlinks – 6 Weeks On…

May 13

A month ago I did a follow up review for Angelas Backlinks which I had been running for a couple of weeks. Since that post I have received another packet from Angela, and also unsubscribed.

I received Mays packet and worked through the whole packet in one shot. A couple of days later I went through and checked what links were still there and which had been deleted. 3 or 4 of them had been removed and the rest were still in place. I also noticed that my IP, domain and email had all been blacklisted on a VBulletin spam site. This prevents me from signing up to any new VBulletin sites which use the same plugin. With about 25 new links built the site moved up in the rankings from 5th & 6th to 3rd & 4th and then finally up to 2nd & 3rd.

So for each site I have built the links for I have had a decent jump in SERP, so why have I unsubscribed? The simple answer is the amount of people using these packets is too high. As soon as the packets are released the sites get a massive hit of traffic and start putting measures in place to stop the unwanted traffic, including marking users as spammers. What I will say though is that the TYPE of links do work and Angela’s backlink packets also do work! So rather than buying the link packets and hitting the same sites as everybody else resulting in sites being blacklisted, links being lost etc I have decided to find my own links.

The links are the same type of links as Angelas except I can sneak a handful of profiles in over a couple of weeks, rather than the site being hit with thousands of new users within days. Sure it takes longer as I have to find the sites in the first place, but once you have a decent list you can use the same sites over and over again without being noticed. Not only that but you can find niche specific pages!

As an example, I was looking for some video games links, I managed to find 36 at PR4-PR7 in about 45 minutes. If you count all the sites I found, PR1-PR7 (didnt record the PR0 sites), I found a total of 59 sites! 59 sites, all with dofollow links, in the niche I want to target that arent going to get spammed and my links removed!

Tips for helping your profiles go undetected…

1) Do not use a product/website name as your username. For example if the site you are promoting is “BlueWidgets.com” do not sign up with the username “BlueWidgets”. This makes it obvious that you are there for one reason only! Use a ‘normal’ forum name such as “John1456″.

2) Do not use an email address linked to your website. Again if you are going to be promoting BlueWidgets, dont use the email address admin@BlueWidgets.com. If the website has accounts manually approved the chances are you arent going to get through!

3) Some people think that by posting in the forum it will help your profile get indexed quicker. This is true, but if you just spam the forum your account will get deleted and you will lose the links anyway. Only post in the forums if you have a valid post to make.

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Angela’s Backlinks Review – Part 2

Apr 09

Last week I posted my Angelas Backlink Packets review after a couple of days of using them. This is an update of how well Angela’s Backlinks are working for me.

On Monday, I received an email from Angela with links to the April backlink packets. To try and stop spammers and people distributing the lists around the internet Angela has taken steps to protect the documents. The protection comes in the form of you needing to enter your email address, which is then checked to make sure you are allowed to open the document. There are several problems with the new protection though, including only being able to open it on one machine, not being able to copy it to a word document, or even print it!

I also had a problem with the first document saying I had opened it on too many machines, despite only opening it on one machine. I eventually got everything sorted though and can now view the documents, but still cant print them which is quite annoying.

Last week I said about 2 sites I had linked to, one sitting at 3rd & 4th and one which was sitting at 11th. Those positions were still steady last night when I started doing this months Angelas backlinks. I went through the first 10 links from the packet and added a link to each of the sites (some sites only allowed 1 link, so I linked to the higher ranking of the 2 sites). I wasnt expecting to see any change in rankings for the first couple of days, however this morning after checking the links my site which was ranking 3rd & 4th is now 1st! The other site hasnt moved yet though.

During the week, I created about 5 more pages from marchs backlink packet with links to 2 more of my sites. These sites had been sitting at 9th and 11th before I created the links, after creating the links to these sites they have moved up to 2nd and 9th respectively within a few days.

So the overview of my Angela’s Backlinks Review, a must for anybody using SEO. The effects seem of building these backlinks seems to be almost instant and just a handful of links can send you fromthe bottom of the first page to the top within days!

The only negative to these links is the time taken to create them, although I am looking into different methods of speeding the creation of them up, and also ways of making sure that all the links are indexed and stay indexed in Google. Once I have done a bit of research I’ll post again so everyone can benefit.

If I get through Angela’s packet quick enough this month I may take a look at Pauls backlink packets as well, which is 50 links, PR4+ for $8 (Angelas backlink packets are 30 links, PR 6+ for $5). On paper it doesnt appear as good value as Angelas packets as they are slightly more per link, and the PR is 4+ rather than 6+, however if they have anywhere near as much power as Angela’s then they are definately worth it, even if just used as a backup list of links.

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Angelas Backlink Packets Review (So Far)

Apr 03

As I said in my previous post, I have recently signed up for Angelas Backlink Packets which I started working though on Thursday night.

Firstly, as I didnt get the packet until the end of the month, most of the other users have already jumped in and done their links so some of the sites had either closed registration, removed link fields or changed the fields to plain text only. So far I have gone through about 20 of the sites and probably 5 are “dead”. I was expecting this anyway though so its not really a problem.

When you subscribe to the backlink packets, Angela will send you an email with a link to a page containing that months packets. I thought it was a bit odd that a package of 30 links was spread across 7 zip files at about 2MB each, however once you have downloaded the packages it becomes clearer. This isn’t just a list of URL’s, there is a guide for each and every site, showing you where to sign up, where to put your links and what code to use for the links.

The backlink packet for March contained 32 backlinks, or which there were 2 PR9 sites, 1 PR8 site, 9 PR7 sites, 19 PR6 sites and 1 PR5 site. One thing which I already knew, but is worth pointing out with Angela’s links is that these are the Page Ranks (PR) of the homepage of the site, your link will be on a newly created profile page, or an inner page on the site with lower or no Page Rank.

From what I have seen so far, there are 2 different types of links in the packet. The most common one is a profile page on a forum or networking site which contains your links, and the others are sites where you will need to leave a relevant comment on either a blog or forum to squeeze your backlink in.

The content of the sites vary widely, covering an array of niches. In this months packaet there were web development sites, health sites, law sites and many more. Obviously this will vary from month to month, but if you do find a site which is in your niche then it may well be worth a bit more than just a profile link.

As I said at the start, I’ve gone through about 20 of the sites and created the backlinks. I did 5 on Thursday and 15 yesterday. I have put 2 links on each site, pointing to 2 of my sites. Is it too early to expect results? Yes. Have I seen any results? Yes.

One of my sites which had been sitting comfortably at 6th & 7th on the first page has now shot up to 3rd & 4th, with only one site outranking me taking positions 1 & 2. The second site I linked to was more of an experiment. A site I had created a month or so ago and hadnt got around to do any backlinks to. The site had been indexed, but wasnt in the top 200 for my targeted keywords. The site is now ranking top of the 2nd page, at number 11 for the targeted keyword!

I thought I would do a little more digging. From what I can see in Google, only 2 of the links I created have been indexed! Once I have added the rest of the backlinks, I’ll go through and collect all of the backlink URLs (should have kept a note of them from the start!) and either create an RSS feed to submit, submit them to a social bookmarking site, or post them on a blogger/blogspot blog, or possibly a combination of all three!

So, my review so far… This backlink packet costs $5 (£3) per month for a minimum of 30 URLs. From the 30 URL’s probably 20-25 of the links will still be working at the end of the first month and I would imagine this will drop to 10-15 with time. However, provided my results dont drop too much from their current rankings then its definately worth the $5. If adding the extra links, and getting all the pages indexed pushes the rankings up even further then that will be even better.

The main “problem” I am having is the time to create all the links. I have seen a few WSO’s for automation or speeding up of these link packets so I need to do a bit of digging around and see if any of them are any good.

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Advanced SEO Course From Business Link

Apr 01

As some of you may know I had booked myself on an Advanced SEO course which was provided FREE by Business Link.

The course took place on Monday and unfortunately I was quite disappointed in it. I had hoped the course would take my SEO to the next level; however all I found it useful was for measuring my current level, which based on the course title, I would say is “Advanced”.

Everything which was covered I already knew, and someone with “basic” knowledge could have picked up within a day browsing over at Warrior Forums and reading a few decent Internet Marketing blogs. A lot of the content was dated as well (screenshots dated 2006/2007), some was quite vague and other sections that could have been covered in 5 minutes were dragged out to 30 minutes.

The course pretty much consisted of:

Onsite Optimisation: Where to position your content and links in order to rank as well as possible, also the importance of Title tags etc. Shouldn’t this have been covered on the basic SEO course?

Keyword Research: A couple of sections on how to pick your keywords which could have been summed up as “Use Google Keyword Tool”.

Viral Marketing: Possibly the most disappointing section of the day. I was really hoping to pick up some decent info here, instead it was a case of “release your content free for everyone, but put a link back to your site in it”.

Link Building: The final and most interesting section of the course. This covered a few places we could get links from. A lot of the sources were questionable, for example, a link from your Google profile and submitting your site to as many directories as possible. The lecturer then went on to talk about how he currently buys 30 links per month for $5 and that there are certain forums on the internet where you can go and find these cheap links and keep up to date with changes in the SEO world. I automatically assumed he was talking about Angela’s links and Warrior Forums, which he confirmed. I had looked at Angela’s links several times before but always been put off by the bad reviews on the net so I took this opportunity to ask an experienced and professional Internet Marketer about them. In a nutshell, he said that they do work when used properly, but they need to be backed up with article and directory submissions, natural links from other sites and blog/forum comments from relevant sites.

So, a 7 hour Advanced SEO course, and all I learnt was that its worth giving Angela’s Links a go. I suppose I shouldn’t complain really, it was a free course and it confirmed what I already knew, I just feel the content needed bringing up to date and that the course was only a basic course, intermediate at best, not an advanced course.

I’ve now signed up for Angela’s links and received March’s package this morning which I will be putting into action over the weekend. Once I have done so I’ll review the package and hopefully within a couple of weeks I’ll be able to review the results.

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Hosting Switched!

Feb 02

So after selling a few more sites off at Digital Point I had more than enough in my PayPal account to cover the cost of a years hosting. So I ordered my hosting online, and within minutes it was set up and working. Changed my nameservers on this domain, did a dnsflush, magic the site was resolving to the new wordpress installation done through the TSOHost control panel! From the first going to TSOhosts website, changing the nameservers, installing wordpress and import my old posts and theme, the whole process took no more than 10 minutes, at least 5 of which was waiting for 123 reg to update the nameservers.

So now I have lightning fast, UK based hosting with the best support I have ever had for my main site, I just need to transfer the rest of them over.

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99.99% Uptime! Yeah Right!

Jan 29

When I decided I was going to give affiliate marketing a go, the first thing I did was sort out a “decent” hosting account. I thought I had found a great supplier in the form of ScalaHosting! Pretty much unlimited (for my needs) reseller hosting for $6.95 a month, great reviews and the online technical support chat was always online (when I checked).

So I signed up with them and started creating my sites. First few weeks was great, then it got worse, and worse and worse! Firstly all my sites got hacked! Not too much of a problem I thought, I’ll contact the online tech support. Within minutes I was chatting to someone – everything was good! That was, until I asked a question. For every question I asked I simply got referred to the FAQ and told to “just restore the site”. I got the sites back up and running eventually anyway, at which point, the hosting went down, for 4 hours! I decided to set up some free uptime monitoring. During the time I was with them, then averaged about 92% uptime!

So, I decided to switch to another well recommended site, EZPZ hosting. UK hosting and WHMCS thrown in free for £8.99 a month. Not too bad, got to be better than Scala! First month, suprising was fine. The only problem I had with them was the slow response to tickets. They state a couple of minutes on the website. I didnt have a response to a single one in less than 3 hours, most where 4 hours or more. Since I renewed my hosting a week or so ago it has gone down (quite literally) hill a lot! I have had at least 2 or 3 emails per day from the monitoring sites saying that my sites where down.

So, I’ve decided that as I am expecting these sites to evolve into a sustainable income I need a decent web host. Fortunately for me, I already know of an excellent web host – TSOHost (Click here to go to their site)!! I use this company to host my current full time jobs websites on and have been using them for a year now without a bad word to say about them. Uptime is incredible, support is even better! I’ve sometimes broken my website and the guys over at TSO have either fixed it for me or told me how to do it within minutes of reporting the problem! Even if you accidentally delete your website, it doesnt matter – you have full access to a backup, which is done every 15 minutes!!! Now the reason I didnt use these guys from the start is simple, price. I wanted to invest as little as possible to start off with so wanted my hosting as cheap as possible. An account to host 50 domains costs £9.99 per month, or £99.99 per year. I can not recommend these guys enough and as soon as I have sold off a few more of my sites on Digital Point I will be transferring to TSO. The only “downside” is that they use their own control panel and at the minute it isnt possible to import your CPanel accounts into it so I will have to manually transfer each website and database manually.

Plus with TSO, unlike the previous 2 cowboys, if they dont make their 99.9% uptime, you get a month free! I just wish I had saved my self the hassle of changing hosts twice and gone with them from the start!

Click here to go to TSO Host!

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Spring Tidy!

Jan 28

New year, new start. I started playing around with SEO & affiliate marketing towards the backend of last year – and of course, I made plenty of mistakes! The main one being spending literally hours looking for domain names that had been dropped or I thought where good enough to resell. End result, I ended up with about 20 domains which, some partially developed, some with nothing on at all.

So now I have decided to get rid of all my unwanted domains and websites which I wont be developing any further. As I was listing some I couldnt help but think “Why the hell did I register that!”. As most of the domains are .com they only cost me about £3.50 each so I wasnt too fussed if I didnt get anything back for them but thought I would try my luck over at Digital Point.

So far I have sold 3 websites and 1 domain for just under $200 (about £120) which Im happy with. It covers the time I spent on the sites and the reg fees plus it gives me £100 I needed to transfer my hosting to a better host (I’ll post later about this as I’ll rant on forever about it!).

I’ve still got about another 10 sites/domains to sell which will hopefully raise a bit more cash to get me started with a decent PPC campaign.

While I’m cleaning out my virtual space, I’m going to get my home office sorted as well. I chucked a couple of desks in one of the spare rooms when we moved in and dropped my computers on them but Its not almost impossible to get in the room due to the amount of rubbish piled in front of them!

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