I was recently asked by members of Collective Thoughts if I’d like to join the group and contribute to its social media blogging adventures. I happily accepted the offer and the new alliance was announced today on the CT blog. I previously knew about half of the CT crew and I’m excited to get to know the others. The current members include: David Harry, Andy Beard, Mark Laymon, Shana Albert, Tim Nash, and Brian Wallace. I look forward to blogging with all of you and contributing to Collective Thoughts.

Happy clients and years of experience, providing social media, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing services to New York City businesses and beyond.

This post is a ranking experiment for search engine optimization services in New York. If you found this post through Google, Yahoo, or MSN well then it’s working :). For more information about Squareoak’s seo, sem, blog development, or viral content services please click here.

Since Squareoak is located in New York City it’d be nice to rank for the keyword phrase which is the title of this post. Not that location matters when working remotely but still, local clients are always nice. After a bit of KW research I found that search engine optimization pairs geographically with Michigan first (which I thought was a bit strange) and Seattle second in terms of search volume. New York was not in the list so I guess that volume’s a little low, but no matter. Google is telling me that there are 3.1 million instances of this keyword phrase in its index.

There are a few things I’ve done to maximize this post’s exposure using only wordpress and without any sort of link building. Using the All in One SEO Wordpress plugin, we’re autogenerating the description tags from the first paragraph of the post. Hence the slightly cheesy intro. Then, I’ve gone to Wordpress’ Manage tab and then to the Writing sub tab. Scroll down and you’ll see the services that Wordpress pings when you publish a post. The default service is http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ but I’ve updated mine to include the following:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping/
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://fgiasson.com/pings/ping.php
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pinger.onejavastreet.com/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.pingmyblog.com/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

If you decide to enter all of these services into your Wordpress you’ll have to be aware that Wordpress naturally pings all of these services the instant you press the publish button. Wordpress will churn and churn until all of these services are pinged and more often than not, Wordpress will time out. So what we’ll need to do is install the No Ping Wait Wordpress plugin which does exactly what it sounds like.

After we get this in order the post is published and I view it through my feed reader. I’m checking out my own feed because with Feedburner you can add Feed Flair. My flair is setup to include a great site called outside.in which will allow me to geo tag this post.

So that’s it. That’s all I’m going to do for now so we’ll see how well this works. And if you’re worried about content scrapers, let them do a little link building for you by adding the RSS footer Wordpress plugin.

One of the most interesting and exciting parts of search marketing for me is the competitive necessity for adaptation. A tactic I laud to no end. This post will be a short one since it focuses on one particular website but a very important one. One that i depend upon for consistently replenishing my social artillery. The site name has an odd and almost anti-mnemonic quality to it; Go 2 Web 2.0 is a constantly updated directory of new sites that are attempting to help us (and sometimes themselves) make the world an easier place. There are all sorts of tools, apps, rep management, bookmarking, social utilities, etc, etc, that are listed here. You can hover over each logo and a little informational blurb will pop up. You can also sort by tags. This site is a phenomenal resource which can help introduce you to new tools, apps and ideas that you may be able to leverage to beneficial ends.

I’ve used SU advertising once before but wanted to do a revisit and take a second look at how effective…or not this service really is. At just five cents per page view it seems like a pretty good deal but I’ve noticed some discrepancies in my analytics that could make me think twice about advertising again.

I started a campaign with $100 and budgeted that for $10 per day. This equals 200 page views per day. So every day the campaign is running I should see 200 page views in my analytics right? Well, not quite. As of 4:00PM Friday SU was reporting 200 page views but my analytics (Mint) was reporting 156 and Google analytics reported 163. Today being the fourth day of this campaign, SU is reporting 801 page views, Mint is reporting 690, and GA is reporting 631.

A friend suggested that this discrepancy might be due to fast clicking where people are hammering the SU button so it’s recorded as a page view on SU’s end but not within analytics.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? I’d love to hear if others have noticed this.

Sometimes I get so caught-up in work that I forget how important it is to read through my list of seo feeds. Glen posted a nice article on Five Sneaky Ways to Build Website Traffic. In his post he mentions the RefControl Firefox Plugin. First time I have seen this one, thank you James Abbatiello for creating it. Nifty little tool which allows you to control your referring address. Just enter your site’s domain and every site you visit will think it’s where you came from. There are some tactics out there which talk about ways to abuse this (not recommended) but if you’re into that sort of thing then I’m sure you’ll find the tips you’re looking for. I was talking to Tim about this a bit who mentioned you can set up your user agent switcher (another Firefox plugin by Chris Pederick) to make it look like your user agent is your domain. Tim also suggested making a landing page for RefControl so that when people visit your referring address they know why your domain is seen as the referrer. Good stuff guys, thanks for the great tips!

Today I was doing my due diligence on a client’s site and noticed that their robots.txt file was much different than what I remembered it as being. I thought this was mildly odd but just racked it up to my own oversight. I uploaded the new robots.txt file and the appropriate changes were made, no problem. I then figured I’d just check this site’s robots.txt file to make sure everything is as it should be and noticed something peculiar. The robots.txt that was being displayed was not the robots.txt file that was in my root. What was going on here? For a second I half thought that friends had managed to get into my blog and mess with me a little but soon found out it was something more. I logged into my FTP client and deleted the robots.txt file. I then returned to my browser, cleared the cache and refreshed. Still, the file was there. It wasn’t MY robots.txt file and according to my FTP client, it was no longer present in my root. So…um…what? Google Webmaster Tools is reporting the robots.txt file as I had it written. Google Webmaster Tools is not enabled through GoDaddy, and there are no Wordpress plugins that could be causing this phantom file to exist. I had several people on other IPs check it and with different user agents all returning the same phantom robots.txt file. Then, this article about GoDaddy uploading their own robots.txt files to customer sites was brought to my attention. I called GoDaddy and unfortunately some sort of clueless grandpa answered the phone. He was really nice and patient but he didn’t know what was going on. Didn’t even know what a robots.txt file was. I was on the phone with them for about an hour until I got through to their Advanced Hosting department. The new rep recognized the issue right away and opened a ticket for me and this is where it was left. Hopefully they’ll resolve this problem. To say that this is a bit disconcerting is a gross understatement. If GoDaddy is intentionally messing with customer’s accounts I’d rack this up to business fraud. Needless to say I’m searching for a new host so if you have any recommendations by all means let us know. Also, if you have GoDaddy horror stories or stories similar to this we’d like to hear those as well.

Update: GoDaddy seems to have resolved the problem and the robots.txt file is as it should be. Seems as though the issue has been resolved for now but needless to say, this makes me rather wary of GoDaddy and their hosting services.

Second Update: Just received an email from GoDaddy’s tech support:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for contacting Hosting Support.

We have reviewed the issue with a non existent robots.txt file being displayed on your squareoak.com site. While reviewing this issue we were able to determine that the robots.txt file is being displayed due to the .htaccess file in the root of your hosting account. There appears to be a mod_rewrite rule that is accessing the wordpress install in the /blog directory. Wordpress is dynamically generating the file displayed. If you do not want this to happen you will need to modify the .htaccess file.

Please contact us if you have any further issues.

Aaron P
Hosting Support
Hosting Operations

Yeah thanks guys. That was about as helpful as the hour long phone call today with your Gomer Pile-esque tech guy. The issue had nothing to do with my .htaccess file. My .htaccess file has been the same for months and has never had any bearing on the robots.txt file. The file was deleted and was still visible via multiple browsers, user agents, and IPs. This issue has recently been resolved and I’m guessing you guys did SOMETHING and I thank you for that. I just hope it doesn’t happen to anyone else.

Word’s out that Comcast was hacked last night. I guess it serves them right for “throttling activities“. What this means precisely I don’t know but I’m guessing that the download speeds for torrent related activities probably had a governor placed on them.

This is a great bit of media that fits the Digg demographic perfectly. Apparently there are loads of other people who think the same thing. If we go to Digg and search for stories submitted with the word ‘Comcast’ in the title and sort by newest submissions first, we can see who’s submitting this story, who was the first, and who’s received the most Diggs so far. In the image below, the submission with 10 Diggs was the first person to break this story on Digg. But even though they were the first, they’re obviously not the most successful. The story right above it has 39 Diggs, probably because it is accompanied by an image. Two submissions up from that has 32 Diggs, note the word HACKED is capitalized.

So what’s this telling us? It really doesn’t matter when the story was submitted, what matters is the way in which the title was written, the amount of apparent information you use to support your submission, and your influence within the network. So when submitting, maybe a good acronym to remember would be TRI:

• Title
• References
• Influence

I wanted to create and easy way to search for the things I sought within a targeted list of sites. This translates into a customized search engine. I know Google’s had an app like this for a while but I wanted to give Rollyo a shot. I was reminded of this service when reading SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 award winners. Rollyo allows you do create your own little search engines. I say “little” because unfortunately Rollyo only allows you to add 25 sites to your custom engine. I have 469 SEO and SEM blogs that I need to enter into a CSE and Rollyo couldn’t cut the cake. So I went over to Google’s CSE app and created my own. I’ve pasted the search box code below. Have fun!

It’s nearly 80 degress and sunny outside today in good’ol Brooklyn. It’s unfortunate that we have to be inside on a great day like this but to make things a little better, I’ve decided to give away free stumbles today for the entirety of the workday (for me until about 7:30-8:00 EST). All you have to do is post your to be stumbled link in the comments section and I’ll give it a thumbs up or submit it if it hasn’t been already. The only condition is it has to pertain to seo, sem, social media, wed design, essentially anything pertaining to this site’s industry or niche. So let’er rip and have a good weekend!

I decided to have a little fun today and created a page publishing tweet scan feeds based on search terms like linkbait, link building, and social bookmarking. Potentially, I can now find out about new sites and strategies pertaining to these topics all on one page instantly. Leave a comment below if there’s anything else you’d like me to add.