Busby SEO Challenge SEM/SEO Tips

This was an interesting topic brought about by Marc Macalua in the SEO Philippines mailing list, where he pointed out an article by Andy Beal David Temple on Marketing Pilgrim on Certifications for SEO/SEM. And I have also shared my experiences in talking about SEO/SEM education. As some of the members in the email group has shared, education may be important but in the SEO business, there are just too many trade secrets that some people are not willing to divulge. Thus how can this certification take place and who certifies the certifier? Which was a good point raised by Jonathan Casuncad of SEM-Pros.com. And he did also mention that certifications may be done for PPC campaigns since this is pretty straight forward with no hidden tactics but simply plain strategy that can be certified by the Search Engine companies themselves. One of the popular certification bodies, SEMPO does not certify you for passing a certain level of skill or knowledge, but simply certifies you that you have undergone the training. Although mentioned by Andy Beal David Temple, for him the only certification out there is Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSetâ„¢ since it is his tools, thus he can certify people in the proficiency of using his tool. And if this is the case, then WebCEO is also a valid certification for using their software as well. But one thing’s for sure, this certification may not necessarily mean someone has more knowledge or skills in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, and someone without any official training does not also mean they are inferior, but I agree that certification of whatever kind can sometimes be good enough proof to a prospective client, or prospective job in order to get the deal.

In the SEO Philippines group mailing list, there are people that have some good amount of SEO experience but there are still some newbies as well in the list. And for some people, it may still be unknown how to submit to search engines.

If you don’t submit, but you have websites linked to you. You will still somehow get crawled when the bots (also called robots, spiders, crawlers) go over your site. These bots are nothing but programs of the search engines that go from one site to another tracing every link. Unless there is a nofollow attribute, (but i really don’t think so, I believe it is still crawled, but not given the ranking credit for having a link. This is my personal opinion only.)

But if time is a factor and you want to be crawled earlier, you can submit your sites to Google, Yahoo and MSN.

• Google Add URL
• Yahoo Submit Your Site
• MSN Submit to Live Search

For advanced stuff, you might want to look into Google Sitemaps and Yahoo Feed Submissions via SiteExplorer beta.

I am encouraging all newbies to join the Ituloy Angsulong SEO contest. Don’t be discouraged by other more experienced members. Ituloy Angsulong is not only a contest of knowledge. Ituloy Angsulong is also a contest of who has more time and effort to invest in the contest. Ituloy Angsulong is also a contest of creativity. And for the *ehem* some of the blackhat people, it can be a contest of technical programming knowledge. If you may not know the knowledge in some basic skills. You can learn them along the way in the Ituloy Angsulong SEO contest. And use your other talents to make your site rank higher. In this SEO contest, win or lose just try everything you can learn and observe how it goes. This alone can teach your SEO already.

Marc Macalua talks about nofollow on his blog. Marc is the founder of SEO Philippines, who is very much an authority in SEO in the Philippines talked about the nofollow attribute in anchor tags and why does comment spamming still exist.

Even before Isulong SEOph, I was pretty much aware of the nofollow attribute in anchor tags. And during the Isulong SEOph SEO contest, which was my first SEO contest, we have seen a lot of comment spam that got the attention of SEOBook author Aaron Wall and popular V7N contest competitor Jim Westergren. I have also blogged about the nofollow attribute before.

Marc currently has a nice post about the nofollow showing that Yahoo still seems to follow the nofollow. But personally, my gut feeling is giving me doubts. In the previous SEO Contest, Isulong SEOph, domains were not older than 2006. Some had keyword rich domains and many also did not and just used the power of subdomains and folders. Several things I noticed with other high ranking sites was they were ranking high even most of their backlinks were nofollow links. I decided to look further into these competitors websites and I noticed these:

• I paid attention to the top sites in the SERPs of the Isulong SEOph contest and many of them did not have many links. I believe the 1st and 2nd place winners had less links than others. And many of them also had a large amount of nofollow links.
• Their keyword density was not that high as well compared to others.
• All the links were not all relevant and some not with high PR.

And why am I mentioning all of this? Because many of the links of the winners were nofollow links, which makes me start to doubt that the nofollow is not being followed.
But before you start believing in me, and start spamming the world, here are also some things you might want to consider thinking of first.

• Some of them could be ranking high because of the time factor? And they did their efforts early and as other were working in a later point in time, even if they have better links, it just did not pay off in time for the awarding.
• We all know number of inbound links from a website increases ranking. But maybe a link with a nofollow attribute is not counted as a link that helps ranking, but maybe perhaps it is still read in a way to help search engines investigate the topics of websites just to do a relevancy check. There is no proven statement about this and this is just based on personal observation. But the length of time of my observation may not be sufficient enough to say these observable results are a good hypothesis and everything is just a case of coincidence.
• Some have added links slowly, some pretty fast, which we also know is a factor with regards to ranking.
• Some websites were updated more often than others. And a site that updates more frequently, is crawled more frequently.

People that spam everyday, do it even if they do not know if it works or not, simply because for spammers, it is easy to spam. It is just a push of a button. i have seen work like this before with a Russian friend of mine that uses a software, I can’t remember if it is xRumer or xRummer. But I tried checking the domains xrumer.com, xrumer.net, xrumer.org, xrumer.info, xrummer.com, xrummer.net, xrummer.org, xrummer.info and none of them seem to be the official site. But I remember getting to it through a link one of these domains also. When I saw this software in action, it can post to 30,000 website with a push of a button. It can post on forums, blog comments and guestbooks automatically. So there are still tons of spammers today simply because they do not care, since it is so easy for them to spam anyway.