Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog

These days it seems like everybody is busy intrviewing Matt Cutts so I thought I’d do soemthing different for a change – a case study. This one isn’t quite as popular as interviews, maybe because the previous attempt by Quadszilla wasn’t taken too well, but I made some preparatory steps before doing mine – I asked my study object if it’s ok with him and he didn’t mind. So, here we go.

Aaron Wall is known as an owner of numerous sites but first of all he is associated with SEOBook.com. He ranks in the top 10 in both Google and Yahoo for SEO. And his whole network of sites (or at least that part of it that I will be analysing here 😉 ) , besides covering the individual sites’ goals, serves the purpose of promoting the SEO Book site, and does it in many ways some of which are not only creative but even completely non-traditional. Notice how I haven’t mentioned the word “links” even once up to now? – Rightly so, as it’s not only about links or not as much about links as it is about community building and viral marketing – the two notions Aaron mentions a lot. So how do these two things work in his own network?

Let’s look at search-marketing.info to start with, the site that was the predecessor of SEOBook.com. It’s one of a few sites that are not blogs – Aaron seems to love blogs. It covers the same topic as the SEO Book site but serves as a sort of an archive of previously written articles about SEO – and naturally, links to SEOBook.com for more recent stuff. It is free of any kind of sales pitch and earns the readers’ trust, hence it is very likely that people who first arrive to sales-marketing.info will eventually end up at SEOBook.com. While a lot of information povided there seems pretty basic, Aaron’s main target audience is not SEO gurus and such but people starting to study SEO – those who are most likely to purchase a book on SEO. They get soem stuff for free, they like it, they get to trust the author and then they buy the book. Seems like a good scheme for converting.

But Aaron Wall goes further than this and offers even more for free: linkhounds.com – free SEO tools, directoryarchives.com – “a directory of most quality directories”, myriadsearch.com – a search engine to look for sites best loved by all the four big search engines at once, bloggoodies.com – practical advice for bloggers… Whatever it is SEO-related that you’re searching for, he’s out there with something to offer you. And then you see that it’s the same guy who wrote the SEO Book! Some people will be searching for black hat SEO for a change – and bingo, he has covered that as well with his blackhatseo.com. This is nothing more than a collection of how-not-tos dating back to probably 2000 when people stuffed their pages with keywords in invisible text and did otehr things no self-respecting search engine spammer would do nowadays – but the site catches that bit of traffic and points that to SEO Book as well as a counter example of how things should be done. When examining this network, besides “community” and “viral marketing”, the third notion that comes to mind is “niche marketing”.

And if all the mentioned sites were not enough, there is also a personal blog at aaronwall.com, talking of different things (some actually refer to him as “the peanut butter guy”) but of course referring to SEO related stuff every now and then – so even people who first got into Aaron Wall are bound to get into SEO Book eventually – love me, love my dog principle in action.

Though all these sites are totelly legitimate with the search engines, he works at truly black hat volumes – as a result his network covers every conceivable topic and through his personality as the centre of this network ties it all to SEO and consequently to the SEO Book.

Now, for those wondering if I’ve been living under a rock and unaware of aaron’s recent purchase of Threadwatch, I think this was a brilliant move. While everybody’s buying old domains, he takes it one step further and buys an aged domain with an already formed community- what an elegant idea indeed! Instead of building a community, he just got one with an established site. Sure, there are no direct links to SEO Book there, but look at his username – what better exposure can one wish for? Of course just buying a site like that doesn’t yet do the trick, if not taken proper care of even the best established site can eventually lose its community, so it is now a huge task for Aaron to maintain the quality of Threadwatch, and if done properly, it can bring great results. I have already noticed how the number of comments on SEOBook.com increased right after this purchase (to be honest, then it decreased slightly again as the initial interest wore off – but this only goes to prove once again that sites/communities of this scale require constant attention and hard work. I notice Aaron’s doubts every now and then as to whether it is the right route to go – spreading your effort on several sites instead of focusing on one – sure it’s more pain but the potential effect is greater as well.)

While the whole idea of such a network has a great potential, I’m not saying it’s perfect in this realization. There are always technical details that can be improved. Aaron told me he had sitewide (haven’t we all had them till not so long ago?) and same anchor text links on his sites that he recently removed due to Google’s penalty. No matter how great the network idea is, if you do anything more or less long term you still need to watch all the SE changes and stay flexible. But the lesson that both white hats and black hats can take away with them from from here is how combining the best of both worlds can work for your benefit.