I was lucky enough to get an invitation to try out BuzzStream which bills itself as a link building management tool.

With the explosion of blogs, microblogs and social media, everybody is online, talking about products and services every day. What they say and where they link is the key to getting found by your customers. And the impact of these conversations on your brand is enormous. BuzzStream can help you cut through the complexity and engage with the most relevant influencers–driving word-of-mouth traffic and building more links.

BuzzStream makes it easy to pinpoint and evaluate your most valuable prospects among millions of bloggers, webmasters, microbloggers, link prospects and the press.

Buzzstream uses a Firefox bookmarklet to record information about sites as you browse. Thankfully it doesn’t try to automate everything, but it does speed up the borking tasks, like information management and tracking communications between yourself and webmasters.

There’s a full review here if you’re interested in learing more.

1. High St Travel Agents
2. Magazine Porn
3. 300 - Especially the line “This is Spartaaaaa!“
4. Productivity at work
5. Spelling and grammar - ever read any Facebook groups?
6. The film and music industry sales thanks to Torrents
7. Arguments about irrelevant points - Wikipedia always puts paid to debate
8. Pub quizzes thanks to mobile phone shenanigans
9. The Royal mail
10. And fax machines
11. Top 10 lists, they have to be at least 50 items long now.
12. Anonymity - Thanks to Facebook and Google it’s now possible to stalk anyone you fancy
13. Ceefax and Teletext
14. The Frosties kid
15. Tall tales and urban legends - Thanks Snopes!
16. People taking motivational posters seriously
17. Voting and elections - Is Rick Astley the best ever? - Thanks to Richard
18. Being uncontactable outside of office hours. Pesky smartphones! - Thanks to Barry

An interesting post over at SEOptimise about Google penalising a beanbag site that appeared to be gaining links from SEO bloggers through sending out free products for reviews.

Now personally having worked on several trade journals myself in the past I’ve seen this technique being used many times to good effect in gaining free editorial. I would certainly class is as a legitmate marketing tactic. It obviously seems to be working for SumoLounge as they have received coverage from publications such as the Wall St Journal and Playboy.

Not legitmate as far as Google are concerned though as they appear to have slapped Sumo Lounge with a homepage PR penalty.

Now that we know that product reviews are no longer tolerated, maybe we should be reporting posts like this, this and this. Looks to me like it ticks all the boxes of being unrelated and using optimised anchor text.

I’m sure anyone that has dealt with Googles “support” departments in any kind of capacity has the same views as me with regard to their effectiveness. Impossible to talk to on the phone and boilerplate unhelpful email responses frequently taking several days to arrive seem to be the norm.

Despite all of this, my most recent encounter had me scratching my head……

Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as xxxx.ws.

Publishers may not place Google ads on pages that violate Google’s webmaster quality guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#quality). While we’ve included the following excerpts from these guidelines, we recommend that you take the time to review them in their entirety.

*  Make pages for users, not for search engines.
*  Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
*  Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
*  Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
*  Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.
*  Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
*  Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful  test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
*  If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

As a result, we have disabled ad serving to the site.

Your AdSense account remains active. However, we strongly suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies ) to ensure that all of your remaining pages are in compliance.

Please note that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Rather confused by all of this as the domin quite obviously didn’t even have any AdSense ads on it I responded,

There are no AdSense ads on xxxx.ws, it’s a Godady holding page.
Please can you clarify?

A couple of days later I received a reply,

Hello Matt,

Thank you for your email.

As your site was found to be in violation of our programme policies, it is
no longer eligible for participation in the AdSense programme. We
understand that you would like to know more about the nature of this
violation however we are not able to provide further clarification at this
time.

Your account remains active and you are welcome to place Google ads on
other sites which comply with AdSense policies.

For additional questions, we suggest you visit the AdSense Help Centre (
http://www.google.com/adsense_help ) or the official AdSense blog (
http://adsense.blogspot.com?utm_source=txft ). Alternatively, feel free to
post your question on the AdSense Help Forum (
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help?utm_source=txft ).

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

Nice to see these guys are paying attention right? I mean, they quite obviously haven’t even bothered to take a look at the domain. Again I replied,

I really don’t have a clue what you guys are talking about. As I said in my last email, I have no content on that site, it’s a GoDaddy holding page. In fact, I just checked and I don’t even own the domain anymore, it
dropped three months ago.

Again, it took a couple of days for them to respond, these guys are obviously busy counting their money,

Hello Matt,

Thank you for your email.

Our AdSense representatives monitor all sites participating in Google’s
AdSense programme according to our Terms and Conditions and programme
policies. It appears that due to a technical issue we sent the prior
warning message in error. We apologise for the confusion.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

Moral of the story? Don’t trust Google employees

The new Wordpress 2.7 release looks fairly impressive. Only a couple of weeks away from release now. It looks like there are going to be some fairly major steps forward in it’s usability and functionality - lots more useful info in the dashboard view, and the post interface looks to be quite a departure from the previous versions.

As you know, one of the goals of 2.7 was to reduce the necessity to load new screens just to access sub-navigation menus; we wanted the most-used screens to be within a click or two at most. If you’ve been using the nightly builds, you got used to the arrow controls that allowed you to expand and contract the menus. Then you got used to the box-style with icons that not only opened and closed vertically, but could be minimized horizontally as well, leaving a remnant of icons to provide a kind of “advanced mode,” though you don’t need to be particularly advanced to use it. Now that we have real button styles (the icons are still placeholders, and we hope to have some new ones soonish), we’ve nailed down the menu functionality.

Sources of link informtion

• Yahoo site explorer
• Linkscape
• Pages ranking for query

Legitimate link sources

• Internal links - menu, breadcrumb, footer, Wikipedia style in-text links. A site I’m tracking for a competitive phrase (not a very old site) has 1888/2044 internal links - only 156 external. Huge benefits in blogging and expanding on-site content.
• Directory links - still some ‘trusted’ directories, e.g Yahoo DMOZ, build up a list of these. Many ‘niche’ directories seem to be worth submitting to.
• Blogs - externally maintained client run blogs.
• 3rd party hosted sites - client profiles/pages on Squidoo, About.org
• Profile pages - Flickr etc
• Social media sites - links on Digg etc
• Forum threads - ‘legitimate’ link dropping in on-topic threads
• Related industry pages - suppliers, clients, distributors, industry bodies, charities
• Press release submissions - PRWeb, PR.com
• Article writing - actively target specific sites rather than rely on article directories
• Linkbait - specific industry related pieces
• Tools, widgets, surveys, competitions
• CSS/Design Portals
• Blog product/service reviews

Actions

• Hire content writers for a) Regular blog postings, b) Syndicated articles c) Linkbait
• Build social media profiles and network
• Create industry specific contact lists of blogs and news sites accepting 3rd party articles/news for releases and notification - from, a) Search results b) Competitor backlinks

Today I booked my ticket to SMX London. As well as the conference sessions it’ll be good to make it to the networking events and meet other SEOs. I spend a lot of time chatting to people online, so it’ll be good to put a few faces to avatars! I promised this year to stop being so lazy and get myself along to these events, there’s no excuse not to really, living so close by compared to some people who travel from all over the UK.