As some one who has owned and curated several forums in the past, I can’t 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.

She would be fun to sit down and chat with for hours. Smart, charming girl. I hope you invite her back sometime soon.

Good interview none the less, Erica is obviously a great entrepreneur.

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 😉

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?

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.

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”.

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 it… 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 “I raised awareness of my other start-up Pluggio and made $20,000 revenue as a result” to something like: “I raised awareness of my twitter for business start-up Pluggio and made $20,000 revenue as a result” 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