Have you ever completely fucked your sleep schedule by staying up later and later until you’re going to sleep at 1 in the afternoon and waking up at 8:30 pm? I’m there right now and feel like a vampire. On to today’s question . . .

Cristoph Asks:

I really want to know how best to leverage your existing sites to promote new ones.

I have a large number of sites, some in the same niche that i’d really like to leverage to promote my new sites.

How best to do this?
I would interlink but dont fancy losing all the sites if something happened

I’m in the same boat. I may be leaving money on the table, but I do very little cross promotion between site that are not in similar niches (among higher traffic, money sites). If I want to interlink within particular niche I generally ask myself:

“Would it make sense for a non-purchased link to be here?”

One of the main benefits for having more than one site in the same niche is for protection against a huge search engine traffic penalty. Assuming the rest of your footprint is spotless (and most people’s are not!) there really shouldn’t be a problem. But links are easy to build – So is the risk worth the reward?

One example of aggressive cross promotional linking can be found if you look on the bottom of bloglines.com, you’ll see they have this link trading scheme on the bottom of their pages with their partners:

Partner Sites: NASCAR | Match | Citysearch | Dictionary | MerchantCircle | ServiceMagic | Pronto | Gifts | Shoes | Expedia | Hotels | Hotwire

It’s the old school footer links. They do work. For those partners, they don’t need to care because of the brands. Those sites are going to show up in the search engines no matter what they do. For the rest of us, we’re probably better off finding other ways to cross promote. And there, everything is on a case by case basis.

There are plenty of other types of cross promotions that focusing on “non-Link Juice” benefits (mostly it’s exposure or customer acquisition). If cross-sale or cross promotion made sense from financial prospective without the link juice, then go for it. Don’t shy away from an upsell or cross promotions because of the Google Boogie Man.

On the other hand, you may have noticed that although seoblackhat has a lot of trust in Google, I never use it to link to any of my other projects. This is, of course, a somewhat extreme example, but a similar principle applies. If it’s just for links and rankings, why not just buy or trade for them off network?

Do you better Idea on how best to Leverage existing networks for new sites? If so, please share them in the comments.

SEOktoberfest 2009 sold out 20 mins after Marcus announced it on his blog. I didn’t even get to press post on the announcement before every ticket was sold. However, we had the idea to auction off the last ticket for charity and reserved one especially for that.

Click here for the charity auction. All proceeds will benefit AMAZONICA.

You´re bidding on the last ticket for the sold out SEOktoberfest 2009 (22nd of September till the 24th of September)

The original ticket price is 5.000 euros, and the 15 tickets were sold out after only 20 minutes!

15 International Online-Marketing Experts, 15 Attendees, and 10 former Playmates – one conference – one big Party!

Here´s what´s happening at SEOktoberfest:

Tuesday, 22nd of September:
10 a.m – 4 p.m. – SEOktoberfest Conference
4 p.m. – 10 p.m. – Oktoberfest at famous Käfer Wiesn-Schnänke
open end – After Party at P1 Club

Wednesday, 23rd of September:
11 a.m. – 8 p.m. – We got a whole luxurious Spa completly rented out for everybody. 6 massage therapists etc. will get you fit again!
8 p.m. – open end – Friends & Family Dinner at Munich´s No.1 Wine-Restaurant Die blaue Donau

Thursday, 24th of September
10 a.m. – 4 p.m. – SEOktoberfest Conference
4. p.m. – 10 p.m. – Oktoberfest at Schützen-Festhalle
open end – After Party at a secret location

What´s included in the price?

Everything!

Every Attendee gets a whole Oktoberfest Outfit – Shoes, Lederhosen, Shirt etc., and everything you eat and / or drink, as well as all the transfers etc. – everything´s included!

Who are the Online Marketing Experts?

Todd Malicoat
Chris Winfield
Bob Rains
Johannes Beus
Brent Csutoras
Cygnus
RSnake
Greg Boser
Barbara Boser
Todd Friesen
Marcus Tandler
Quadszilla
Frank Watson

Sorry there aren’t more slots and that this is turning into an invite only type of thing. I guess it was bound to happen. On the bright side, you can still come if you win the auction and the money goes to a good cause. Happy bidding!

Horizon Realty Group must want Googlers to find that they are a sue first ask questions last kind of company; I’m certainly glad to help!

That’s pretty much the opposite of online reputation management.

Thanks for the great questions yesterday – I’m working on the responses tonight.

PS: AS of right now that podcast story is about 9th on Google search for Horizon Realty (depending on how you count).

I’ve gone through most of the questions that were asked and now I’m looking for more. Two things are required to keep this blog going: 1) Motivation (which i’ve been pretty good with this month) and 2) Topics.

The well is starting to run dry as far as what to blog about in the SEO space; what do you need help with? What questions do you want answered?

If you want me to go the offtopic rout and link to things like the theory that time is slowing down and will someday stop or this article that shows has a pic of Endeavour and ISS as it transits across the sun

I can do that. But I have a feeling that most of you would rather me blog about SEO topics. If that’s the case, then please fire away a new set of questions.

Groneg writes:

“I really would love to hear how a good Expired Domain Snapper should work!”

First off, the Domain Space has matured quite a bit in the last 3 years. The days of finding month old dropped page rank 5 domain with their trust intact are behind us. There are just too many people hunting the same prize.

Moreover, Google has gotten better at resetting the trust from domains that had expired. This may have to do with them being a registrar or it could be just them getting better at what they do.

Registration Status of a Domain

Active 1-10 years
Expired 1-45 days. (normally 35 days)
RGP (Redemption Grace Period) 30 days
Pending Deletion – 5 days
Drop / Available – when a domain can be registered

So, from 36-80 days after the site stops working and the domain is “expired”, it drops and becomes Available. Every top level domain has a time the domains become available at different registrars. So for example, the registrar might say:

.com and .net: Drops between 1 PM and 1.30 PM CST

.org : Drops between 8.30 AM and 9 AM CST

.info names : Drops between 3.30 AM and 4 AM CST

.us names : Drops between 12 AM and 12.30 AM CST

etc.

To catch the dropped domain, you just have to register it after it drops and before anyone else does. Any remotely decent (and most terrible) dropped domains get picked up within 1 second of their drop. Servers are set up to ping registration / buy requests and the dropping time for the domains.

As disheartening as that may sound, it gets worse. Many well known firms like SnapNames, eNom, and Pool plus many of the lesser known domainer whales have insider connections with all the registrars. So even if your server sends the request at just the right time and technically wins the race, odds are the game is already rigged and you lost even though you won.

So to answer the question “How should a good domain snapper work?”

1. Get a list of all the domains you want that will drop each day from each registrar.
2. Flood the servers with buy requests around the time the domains become available. There is a limit to how many requests you can send per minute, but it’s on a per server or IP basis. More servers = more requests.
3. Get insider connections at the registrar to rigg the game for you (it’s not like there’s any oversight.)

For my time and money, there are much lower hanging and tastier fruits. But hey – your mileage may vary.

It’s too bad.

Not because twitter is useful, but because it destroys productivity.

Banning twitter makes them more likely to pass more bad laws.

See the video where it’s mentioned here.

Oh, and it’s not that I think that Dem laws are any worse than Rep laws. They both really suck and the fewer new laws each year the better.

TC had some pretty good questions here on competing with authority sites.

My brain hurts trying to cut through his sentence structure, so I’ll dissect it and answer piece by piece.

“How do you beat a site that is 5+ years old with a few authority links . . .

You need as many authority links as you need. I never said that a few would do. When your link farms do not produce enough, you link buyers and link ninjas need to be working overtime. Buying links really does work if you do it right.

. . . most of the links are just from pyramids/splogs/1 page sites as you described in your previous posts . . .

No. That’s just one source of links.

. . . and they are really bad as the anchor texts are all almost the same. . .

Yes. That would be terrible. That’s why you need to dramatically vary you anchor text. No more than 5% of your links should have the same anchor text. And you should only hit the 5% mark once: if your sites name is KeywordDeals.com, then you can have 5% of your anchortext say “keyword deals.” Other than that, look at natural linking structures. The distribution is huge. Any time you see 5% of links or more with the same anchor text, you know those links were spammed.

. . .with very few deeplinks . . .

Again, that would be terrible. Why would you have very few deeplinks if you know that you need a majority of you links to be deeplinks?

…. I know this is an awkward question… but any ideas would be great

Very awkward (but only in how it was written).

- The only way I seem to be able to get authority is by buying it (via old domains – dmoz/yahoo listed seems to work very well)

Yes they do. Those are just 2 good quality indicators, though. There are many more.

even when you do “buy it” it can become problematic as you have to get the niche absolutely correct otherwise things tend to go tits up.

Not true. You just need to spend more time on the transition. If the site you bought is offtopic but will be at the top of your pyramid, spend some time to make the transition slowly from the site it is now, to the site it will be. Do it in stages. Consider not deleting the old content, but transitioning them to orphan pages that link to the pages you want. This method is still the best way to bypass the age requirement.

another way I have found is by making a site that “gathers” some new content & links frequently and has done for over a year,

That’s generally not enough time: as you have seen. Unless you got a blockbuster site.

even then it is a struggle… is there some way to get authority in a shorter time span (besides buying it or waiting months?)….?

A site that is naturally a super hit: But the two ways you mentioned work much better and are more reliable.

I don’t expect you to hold my hand through this, but even a slight sniff in the right direction would be great… as I have been struggling to beat rather ordinairy sites with “trust/age” for a while now in multiple niches and just can’t seem to do it, 2nd & 3rd place is great….. but I want 1st…

What’s cool is that you already know all the right answers, you just seem to be struggling to implement what you know to be right. You know the mistakes not to make, but assume that certain methods have those mistakes built into them.

Your assumptions are wrong about what is a constant and what is a variable.

If you know something is a spam indicator (like not enough deep links, not enough authority links or all the same anchor text), the answer is not “oh well, I guess this is gonna look spammy.”

You know the answers. They are so obvious they are staring you in the face. Make the changes in your methods you know you need to make and get those number 1 rankings!

Got a question yesterday asking what I read.

Well, I stopped reading several blogs when they started getting other people to blog for them. I’d rather have someone post once a month and have it be good, than have them post every day. I REALLY wish there were a way to subscribe by author.

Also, most of the stuff I read is not SEO related. This is what I read:

popurls.com
news.ycombinator.com

I find the comments on slashdot to be some of the most insightful and generraly best on the web.

and this is what I subscribe to:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/QuadsZilla

That’s what I read on the Net. I also like to read books and will probably do a list of 50 or 100 of the best books I’ve read at some point in the not too distant future.

Alright. . . go ahead and spam my comment section with all those great sites I and everyone else should be reading.