“Coolest Guy on the Planet” - Do We Really Care?

So, I get an email from Jonathan Leger today. He usually has some good stuff to share, but this one … well, it just covers all the aspects that irrate me about internet marketing.

For whatever reason, he seems to have “Brad Fallon” envy and he’s going after the keyword phrase “Coolest Guy on the Planet.” Like he could even hold a candle to Brad. He brags that he is #6 out of 984,000 results. Let’s be honest here Johnathan, it isn’t close to a million competing phrases. It’s less than 50,000. You gotta put the keyword in quotes to constrain the search to the actual phrase.

Every SEO with a brain knows that. Don’t paint a picture of something bigger than it really is.

… and focusing on a keyword phrase that will do absolutely nothing in terms of generating revenue is a joke in my view. Please, if you want to do an SEO experiment that will impress people, do one on “mortage loans” or “viagra” or “pay day loans” … something with substance.

But let’s take a quick look at what Johnathan has done so far …

The domain was registered on April 18th and thanks to the good folks at Domain Tools we learn that he is hosting at The Planet, has an Apache server and has 154 other domains on the IP address he is using. Maybe his is virtually hosting, maybe he is just packing all his domains on one server to cut costs. We don’t know. Either way, he’s not putting care into this project.

Friends don’t let friends virtually host. And friends never let friends allow for an important public domain to be placed on a non-dedicated IP.

He submitted the site to DMOZ, and here is a big shocker … it isn’t listed yet.

He submitted a Site Map to Google

But he doesn’t have a robots.txt file and complains that his AdSense ads weren’t exactly accurate to correspond to his content.

He states that he submitted his site to a large number of directories, although he doesn’t mention which ones.

He then created a Squidoo lens and a bunch of free blogs and it took him from #10 to #8. Let’s be honest. In other words, he spammed. Let’s not mince words here. Spamming takes on many forms, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is bad, but bragging that you moved up the rankings because you spammed isn’t an accomplishment.

That is like me bragging that I overtook three competitors because I scraped their content, posted the hijacked content on my site, bought a bunch of links, and took control of the rankings in the industry. I did nothing special in that example and I would be the first to admit that I spammed.

But instead, the techniques are called “white hat.” Let me just be upfront. I have no problems with what Johnathan did. I just have issues with what he called it. This isn’t “white hat marketing” Johnathan. It is far from it.

Just a note of caution. Be careful when an expert will do a test for a keyword phrase that no one cares about and tells you that “Hey! I did this and it made my site go up! You should do it too!”

Don’t fall for it. What works on this project that Johnathan is doing will not work as stated in the mortage, pill, hotel industries. Ones that are highly competitive. It takes real marketing strategy in those arenas to make it fly. This is why when I release my testing numbers that the information is coming from sites just like yours. Down in the trenches, earning every visitor and every sale.

No one cares about fads. You care about results. About conversions. That is what I have been about since day one when stepping onto the SEO scene more than ten years ago.

I don’t claim to be the best. I just claim to have the best information. And my belief is: the best decisions are made by the people with the best information. That is what we keep delivering with the SEO Revolution.

Parts 2, 3 and 4 of the Link Building series is out tomorrow. We had a little issue with the files not being converted properly to Flash.

Also updates on our Link Building Guide, On Page Factoring Guide and the Google Best Practices. All coming out soon!