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Justin and Jason interview Erica Douglas, founder of Whoosh Traffic, about how she built and sold her web hosting business for $1.1 million at the of age 26, why and how SEO works despite what you may have heard to the contrary and what her rules are for success in business.
Great show. Plenty of food for thought. Any chance we could at the lesser known research tools that Erica mentioned? š
This is a repost since its only visible in Chrome due to tag mess up, sorry guys, maybe you can remove the one above.
Hey guys,
Great cast and another great guest. Erica brings up a lot of interesting points.
I have been exposed to SEO for almost a decade, primarily through my business partner who is an amazing SEO consultant and it helps me to always keep SEO in mind regardless of what app I am working on. I am a lot of times surprised how many great startup developers missing that basic SEO knowledge that can really improve their visibility. Reminds me of the time when developers would give no attention to UI design and while this situation is much improved now we are still lagging behind. Hopefully developers will start catching up on SEO as well as so many great projects will never get any exposure because of that.
One of the techniques that Erica mentioned, however, falls into a grey area. Ultimately, creating profiles on a multitude of websites, forums, social networks just to promote a link back to your website is not something that google views as an acceptable practice. It does work, in volume, but it is not clear how long this will be allowed by google. Just like google modified its algorithm to ignore spam comments (even without nofollow tag), pay per listing links and link farms, it will eventually ignore back links from fake and inactive profiles as well as auto generate content pages
This google info is great to start on what SEO is, what to do and what not to do:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291
Google is really trying to index and rank content in a same way as human reader would so get the basics of SEO, work on engaging and unique content and yes if you can do hire and SEO consulting company that will employ white seo tactics as we as developers simply do not have enough time to worry about everything.
For example, read your latest post at http://pluggio.com/blog/2011/06/01/how-to-get-more-followers-on-twitter, loved itā¦ few tips on how to make it more seo friendly:
1. find a few keywords you want to come up for and make them bold (strong) this way spiders know those words are important and your readers can pay closer attention to that section.
2. change āI raised awareness of my other start-up Pluggio and made $20,000 revenue as a resultā to something like: āI raised awareness of my twitter for business start-up Pluggio and made $20,000 revenue as a resultā Making Twiter for business a link to pluggio because you want customers to find you using this keyword and not just typing in pluggio into google.
3.Change your (See how Pluggio does it) to have actual keywords in the link so See how to automatically tweet using Pluggio
I am sure you get the idea
Hope it helps a bit, sorry for long post.
Oleg
This episode was a great example of what makes TechZing great: mixing story telling and experience about a given topic. Thanks Erica for sharing the personal aspects of the story. Her blog has some other interesting non-tech related stories too.
One of the salient SEO point she makes (Rob Walling does talk about it a lot too) is that startup founders should really do some market research ahead of time using keyword tools.
In the spirit of sharing I had found this interesting summary of factors affecting site ranking: “List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website”.
Loved this interview with a fascinating guest. I enjoyed pretty much everything Erica had to say, right up until she mentioned the techniques that Whoosh Traffic uses to build backlinks for her clients.
I have no doubt that creating profiles on hundreds of websites is effective in building Google juice on targeted keywords and that Erica is providing real value to her clients. But isn’t this just gaming the system?
I see a couple of downsides:
– As Oleg mentioned, surely Google is aware of this type of behaviour and the clock must be ticking on it continuing to work? Will there be a pagerank penalty for Whoosh Traffic customers once Google fixes this exploit?
– There is actual damage done to the the proprietors of the websites receiving these ‘spammy’ profiles. They have to deal with the extra traffic and any data analysis they might be doing on their user base is going to be compromised by these empty accounts (I regularly get spam profiles created on my hobby project and it is an annoying distraction).
I wonder how Erica might respond to these questions?
Again, I loved the interview and think Erica is an amazing entrepreneur.
Intriguing interview with a very talented guest. However, I’m going to take an alternative view.
Google ranks sites by popularity, relevance.
Google does this by determining how many sites have backlinked to the site.
Users go to Google to find sites that best match their searches (e.g., “cooking classes in Boston”, “plumbers in Sacramento”).
NOW, if a business starts going to websites and starts creating fictitious user profiles with links back to their business, sure this may elevate their Google rank but doesn’t this strike anyone as a bit unethical? If nothing else, the same unsuspecting users who search for “plumbers in Sacramento” will not get the *best* businesses in their search results but the businesses which have managed to game Google results through fraudulent backlinks.
I’d love to be proven wrong on this, but isn’t the right way to develop good content that people *want* to link to? How is this any different from the business owner creating fake user profiles and writing glowing reviews for their own business?
The forum backlinks that Erica describes sounds a whole lot (like I’m 99.999% sure) her company is using a program called XRumer that spams forums with profile links (among other things). She tap dances the fact that Whoosh isn’t buying links but that is only because they paid for an expensive product that looks for foot prints of sites running common forum software like phpBB or vBulletin (the purchasing of the links has been shifted into the cost of the automation software). XRumer then simulates the registration process, even clicking activation links in email or breaking CAPTCHA when necessary.
I’m not hating on Erica, SEO is a zero sum game and Black/White/Grey hats are all relative terms based on your perceptions of the rules of the game, what you see as breaking the rules versus bending them. But only somebody naive who doesn’t know the industry would accept at face value that Whoosh doesn’t “pay” for links. Go hang out in SEO forums like WickedFire or BlackHatWorld to learn more about spam automation tools like XRumer or Scrapebox (Scrapebox does the blog spamming Erica mentioned).
Kudos to Erica on her success, and her ability to spin her company’s services š
I just listened to the remainder of the podcast and heard Erica say that no software is used for their back link building, so I guess I retract my statement above about Xrumer, but I remain skeptical.
Good interview none the less, Erica is obviously a great entrepreneur.
Erica was such a great interview. I’ve been doing SEO for almost as long as she has (I started messing around w/ Red Hat around the same time too), and I agree with everything she said.
She would be fun to sit down and chat with for hours. Smart, charming girl. I hope you invite her back sometime soon.
I just saw that Whoosh Traffic has a deal running this week at AppSumo… http://www.appsumo.com/whoosh_traffic_premium_plan/
I got a kick out of Erica condemning people who spam blog comments while her company is using an equally, if not worse tactic of creating profile links.
As some one who has owned and curated several forums in the past, I canāt tell you how many hours of my life have been wasted moderating signups from profile spammers like Erica and Whoosh Traffic. Creating profiles on communities you never intend to participate in just for a targeted anchor text backlink is as spammy and unethical as it gets. It became apparent to me as the interview progressed that Erica has little knowledge of ethical link building and about SEO in general.
Her recommendation to start out building 500 profile links per month is just ridiculous. Whoosh Traffic is taking sites that have attained very little to no natural inbound links and then suddenly adding hundreds of new specific anchor text backlinks every month. This is totally unnatural and a great way to get your site penalized. It would be incredibly easy for search engines to spot algorithmically.