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!

Mwaha, despite the rumours, I’m far from dead. I moved house just before Christmas and it has taken absolutely ages to get broadband sorted, so I can finally stop hanging out the window trying to pick up a stray wireless access point. Anyway, you don’t care about that do you? You care about the exciting news!

Elite SEO Tools Invites are now being sent

After what seemed like a forever wait, everything has finally fallen into place. The networks are on the new servers, the tools are robust and tested and everything is looking rather peachy if I do say so myself. I have started sending out invites to those of you who pre-registered for the Elite SEO Tools, so if you haven’t got an e-mail yet, please be patient.

Deployment is planned as follows:

Friday 11th January: Invite #1-10
Saturday 12th January: (Final bit of load testing)
Sunday 13th January: Invite #11-20
Monday 14th January: Invite #21-31
Tuesday 15th January: I’m away today
Wednesday 16th January: Invite: #31-50
Thursday 17th January: Invite #51-80
Friday 18th January: Invite #80+

Hopefully, this schedule can see everybody accommodated for in the next week or so. If you’re not on the waiting list to join and you’d like to be, pop me an e-mail to: tools [at] digeratimarketing.co.uk.

While everything was shifted about, we had the chance to give some of the tools a bit of a polish. Here’s the releasing functionality of each tool:

Link Backrub
Link backrub aims to make the “invisible” web, visible - letting Google know about all of your backlinks. This tool works on a site-wide basis and you can enter up to 5 domains to use it on (unlimited pages per domain).

Install some code in your footer section, to help backrub analyse your incoming traffic and build a better picture of your link incoming links. Link backrub will actively scour the Internet and make a master list of every link it can find to your website. It will then check if these links are followed (and not included in a robots.txt) and if the link is indexed in Google.

It will systematically and constantly work to get your un-indexed backlinks indexed in Google. By making Google aware of all of your incoming links, you are increasing your sites link popularity in the eyes of Google and helping your site rank better.

Flashdex
This tool uses several advanced techniques to lure Googlebot onto a specific page and get it indexed. This process usually takes around 10 minutes, however due to the techniques used being somewhat “delicate” all requests to this tool will be approved by an admin to make sure the system is not being abused. This tool can get just about any page indexed in Google, incredibly quickly.

Social Storm
Social storm is an aggregated, randomized and multiple social bookmark submitter. Adding a website profile will result in the page being bookmarked at over 20 major social bookmarking sites, over multiple accounts.

Due to the randomization, safeguard and multiple accounts, this process can take up to 3 weeks per URL, to leave no footprint that social bookmarking sites can pick up on and insure all of our accounts stay active. This can generate you thousands of visitors and a good source of backlinks.

Currently this tool has access to approximately 225 bookmarks, this is planned to be expanded to over 1,000 over the coming weeks. Social storm can be used on upto 5 URLs per month.

Link Buster
Link buster is a “soft probe” link building tool. This tool will take a look at your page and decide on the content and give you a constant, good spread of incoming links.

Some of these links will be built automatically - such as linkbacks from image hosting sites, which will give you a wide variety of links from different IPs and domains, with a good mix of PageRank. This tool also produces a work-list which is then out-sourced and your links will be built by hand at authority sources such as Squidoo and Amazon pages.

All of these links will build your followed link profile and increase your site authority, giving you a boost in rankings.

Due to the intensity of this tool, it can only be used on 1 URL at a time.

StumbleXchange Automater
The StumbleXchange Automator, uses the Stumble Exchange system at www.stumblexchange.com, which you will need an account with, as well as StumbleUpon.

With these two accounts, you can use StumbleXchange Automator, by filling in the username and passwords for both of these accounts and clicking “Start”.

Raising the maximum connections to 3 will increase the speed at which the task can be completed. The URL being stumbled, will be that in your StumbleXchange.com user control panel.

Please note: This tool may seem to be taking a long time to work, this is due to the StumbleXchange servers being incredibly slow. The tool will soon be upgraded to work with mutliple stumble exchange programs such as suexchange.com

Why should I sign up?
Firstly, the most important thing I’d like to stress is while these tools are working great and already producing good results - the tools are always getting stronger. Every week I am adding more accounts to social storm, expanding the networks that the tools depend on and increasing the scope of the tools. I have already started planning new tools (both online tools and offline apps) which will augment your search rankings and provide new and effective “push button” marketing.

As has always been discussed, the spaces for tools are limited - I have to carefully calculate the amount of people that can safely use these networks without breaking them or compromising their usefulness. I’m being quite cautious - but these numbers will eventually increase as the tools are scaled.

If you’d like to get on the waiting list and be e-mailed an invite when there is room for you, send an e-mail to tools [at] digeratimarketing.co.uk.

Hopefully, even the most dedicated of my search marketing, webmastering, online money making friends and readers will be taking some time away from the Internets for the Christmas holiday.

For this reason, I will be moving Digerati Marketing over to a new server during this time, so they’ll be some downtime for a bit, while the DNS resolves and all that.

If I don’t get another chance to post, I’d like to wish all my friends, readers, subscribers and everyone else a very happy and safe Christmas (:

From the feedback I’ve got from my the current Elite SEO Tools users, we have totally revamped the StumbleXchange Automator program.

For those of you that use StumbleXchange, you’ll no doubt suffer from the same problem as me - it’s incredibly slow and the server times out loads. This means it takes absolutely ages to do your stumbles and makes it almost not worthwhile doing it manually.

The online application to automate stumbles worked okay, but it had a few hiccups when the StumbleXchange server was timing out. So, not being one to be beaten by a problem, we have developed an offline application with multi-threading to do the task.

So. Um. What does that mean?
Basically, you can download the application, and it will open multiple connections to stumbleXchange, grabbing several URL lists at once - meaning when the server responds, we can do a much larger chunk of work. Also, the program is relentless! No matter what happens to the stumbleXchange server, if it takes ages to respond, or if it times out, this will bugger will just reconnect and keep doing your job for you.

So, download, enter login details, hit go - then do whatever the hell you want. This badboy will keep going until the job is done!

I’m really happy how this tool worked out. Everything is working absolutely pucker now and as soon as a reliable, well priced dedicated server is sorted, we’ll be taking in the waiting list!

Right, I’ve thought for ages about whether to post this or not. I’m not one to complain or slate people, companies or stuff unless I’m really pissed off. I’m really pissed off.

After my SEO Tools update, I mentioned that my biggest hurdle was the fact that the network of sites the SEO Tools use, was taking up way too much in the way of server resources and I really needed to move to a new dedicated server.

After doing this post, I was contacted by a guy called Aaron from FastServers, apparently a manager there. He made me a no-brainer offer, saying he would be willing to donate a pretty ace spec dedicated server to host some of the SEO tool network. He didn’t even want anything in exchange, but maybe an advert for FastServers would be nice.

I, of course, agreed immediately and said it wouldn’t be a problem having a “sponsored by FastServers” link/graphic on the site for the backlink juice and because it’s a great place to advertise and most people that read this blog and use SEO Tools would be webmasters. Also, I’d chuck in a free subscription for him. He said he would sort it at the end of the week.

So, I chatted to him some more and waited a week. It hadn’t been done, but fair enough, he’s probably a busy guy. I contacted him over MSN and he explained it would be done next week for sure, no problems. So again, during the following week - I was careful not to bug him, just asking him every couple of days if he had an update. Again, nothing got done.

Three weeks on, I was getting a bit concerned. So I again, contacted him via MSN and explained to him, if it was a problem or he had a change of mind, that’s okay. They don’t owe me anything, just let me know what the score is so I can move ahead accordingly. I stopped getting any response whatsoever. I tried contacting Aaron multiple times over the next week, he was definitely online, just ignoring me. So, I gave up.

At the end of the week, I gave it one last ditch attempt and asked why he was ignoring me. I got the response of “Really sorry, have totally been ignoring you, I’m in New York at the moment. I’ll definitely sort everything when I get back”. Fair enough I thought, everyone’s busy and he still wants to go ahead.

I gave him a few days to get sorted and return from NY, then try and contact him again. No response at all. Which was needless to say, frustrating. He was online, just ignoring me. As a last ditch attempt, I went to the FastServers.net website and logged onto their live chat. I spoke to a helpful assistant who added me to MSN and I explained the situation to them. They assured me Aaron was “a stand up businessman” and they would contact him for me. I would definitely hear back from him soon. So, they left him a note on his desk. Twice.

Now, I know I don’t owe him anything, but why make a promise with your company, not deliver then just ignore me? That’s just damn bad practice and makes me write posts like this. I’m really pissed off with FastServers.net and I’m damn pleased I’m not paying them any money.

If anyone has any recommendations for good web hosting (dedicated servers) then I’d be glad to hear from you (leave a comment). Or if you’re from a web hosting company and you can provide a dedicated server and you’d like to strike and advertising deal, I’d love to hear from you also.

Until then, I won’t talk about FastServers without giving them a link.

Bad hosting company

There you go, Aaron.