I’ve been putting together a fairly simple forum, to gather feedback and promote discussion on the SEO Tools. However, it occurred to me, I get a whole bunch of e-mails asking me about SEO, or explaining something specific in one of my posts, so I thought - why not make forums for everyone?

I’m pleased to launch the Digerati SEO Forum

I’m looking to get a whole bunch of you clever SEO people in one place and really push what we can come up with together. I’ll of course, be browsing around on a daily basis, so if you have a question for me, have mercy on my inbox and post it in the forum! (:

If you’re a Digerati Tools Subscriber then PM me on the forums (MarkDigerati) and I’ll add you to the Digerati group, which will give you access to hidden forums for SEO Tools members.

You say something about a competition?
Indeed, competition time! I will giving away a 3 month free subscription to the Digerati SEO Tools for whoever is the most helpful and active poster on the forums between now and the end of February.

Well, why not sign up and introduce yourself?

P.S. The signature links are followed, so feel free to get some extra link juice to your sites.

P.P.S Did I mention I posted a thread on how to easily get PR3,4,5 links to your site?

It’s a busy time here at the Digerati Labs. There’s lots of sweat, coding and shackled up monkeys working around the clock to bring you some sweet stuff.

In final testing, to be released this week for the Elite SEO Tool Subscribers, I present:

Stumble Crawler

What does the new kid on the block, do?
If you’re running a website with loads of user generated content, viral content or disposable stuff you need this app. Or perhaps you just have too many sites to keep under control? I hate having to click “stumble” and review all of my posts individually, it takes bloody ages.

So, whack in your websites URL and this lovely app will crawl through your website and return as many pages as you so wish. Bung in your Stumble login details and it will set to work, stumbling your pages/posts at random intervals that you specify parameters for. Got a 500 post blog? Give it an hour while you drink tea and watch Adsense earnings go up and it will get the lot Stumbled for you.

It works with newly discovered and adult pages, too. Boom.

Well, we’re there! All 157 of you that were on the pre-subscription list have been e-mailed. If you think you’ve been missed for any reason, I will be taking in another 43 people - then that’s it, doors are shut for a while.

Once the community is full, I will be adding in a few things which won’t be mentioned outside of the our walls… Um, website. We can’t have everyone knowing what we’re up to can we?

Last chance, public subscription is open for 43 places at http://tools.digeratimarketing.co.uk. If you miss the last 43 places, you’ll be put in a queue system for (if) and when people leave.

Thanks everyone for your support and patience with the waiting list!

Mark.

As you can imagine, with the current roll out of my SEO Tools, I am keeping a close eye on their progress and how well they are working in different niches and on different sites.

I noticed an interesting side effect of the Link Backrub tool that we made. One of the tasks Link Backrub has to do is profile your inbound links, which means it has to use all sorts of techniques to work out where you have links from. One of the methods it uses to do this, is by tracking referrer data. If a visitor lands on your website, the Link Backrub bot will scuttle off to the referring site, check that it links to you and does a few health checks, making sure the link is followed and not present in the robots.txt file.

Once it has confirmed you have a valid inbound link, it will check that this page is indexed in Google, if not it will put it in a queue to get Google to look at it. Here’s what takes the biscuit though…

For my regular readers you would have seen my post on getting search pages indexed and dominating rankings. Now, obviously a lot of people find some of my sites via things like the Tesco Search. Imagine my surprise, when for one of my niche search terms I have my site listed #1, then at #2 a Tesco’s search page featuring my site as well!

Basically, the Tesco’s authority and having the keyword all over the search page outranked my ocmpetitors’ sites and gave me extra precious SERP space!

Howdy, guys! Hope you’re all having a profitable (and fun) January! I’d like to share with you a little tip I picked up on how to get authority links from sites such as Slashdot.

Credit where it’s due. My good friend, Andrew, from Dirty Melon shared this with me, so he’s been kind enough to do a guest post and share the wealth with us all….

Over to Andrew:

“If you’re anything like me you hunt for links like Sherlock Holmes on speed. And if you love a good trick, try this slice of BlackHat Forest Gateau:

1. Fire up a browser and get yourself over to Slashdot’s story submission page.

2. Bash your keyboard until you’ve spammed the form enough, whilst dropping a link into the “scoop” field which features your keywords.

3. Grab something like the Firefox Web Dev toolbar and convert the form methods from POST to GET.

4. Hit the button which says “Preview story”

5. Bookmark the url with something like del.ico.us, stumbleupon or onlywire (Note from Mark: basically drop links anywhere to it, to get it indexed)

Voila! You have a link from Slashdot - Now run along and chase your tail in the yard, until the happiness wears off and you’re ready to find 20 other sites, with similar submit pages to exploit!”

Pretty neat trick, huh? Now yes, before someone cries, “but that page won’t have PR9 like the homepage!”, it doesn’t matter. There is a different between getting links from high link equity pages and getting links from trusted domains, they are both important. Authority links are an excellent way to get a new website trusted in Google and get you off to a flying start to rank quickly.

As Andrew points out, there are actually a whole bunch of high authority sites you can use with this technique. We’ll let you figure that part out (: