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Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

Michael Gray rants on SEO the internet and media

Leadership Blogging, It’s All About LeadingJuly 2

The following post is a counterpoint to the Outspoken Media post titled “Would I Recognize Your Blog In A Dark Alley“, and exists to offer an alternative path to land of unicorns and rainbows.
First off there’s nothing wrong with running a community driven website or blog, in fact in many cases it can be an excellent and very successful path to choose. That said it’s not the only choice, not the right choice for everyone and maybe not the right choice for you, and it’s important you know your options. The direct opposite of a blog which fosters a sense of community is a thought leadership blog.

Leaders don’t seek your approval, then don’t want to make you feel warm and comfortable, like you’re laying on the floor in front of firepalce with a comfy blanky surrounded by puppies, and they don’t lead by consensus. Leaders have vision, vision to do their own thing, speak their own mind, and aren’t afraid to go against the grain and be politically incorrect. Real leaders share their vision, hope t

Can You Get a Website Indexed with No Links and XML Sitemaps?June 30

This weekend I was doing a little housekeeping on some of my domains and hosting accounts and decided to test and see if it was possible to get a website indexed using XML Sitemaps and no external links.

Since some piano player in New Jersey owns the domain MichaelGray.com I had a few options but the best was to go with my middle initial and byt the domain MichaelAGray.com. Since I’m all about wordpress as a CMS I put the files up, put up my theme of choice thesis, tweaked it with the thesis reputation skin, and installed the XML Sitemaps plugin. I set it up to ping all of the search engines as shown below:

Thanks to this Months Sponsors – June 2009June 28

I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

Clasione Directory – Quality directory for listing your business

Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available find out more information.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Invalidate Wikipedia ArticlesJune 16

Recently Google announced they are experimenting with including Wikipedia in Google News. Personally I’m not a fan of Wikipedia, so I think this is the perfect opportunity to share some tactics on how to make Wikipedia a whole lot more fun.

A key part of this strategy is knowing the rules better than most of the other people involved. Why … if you know the rules better than they do you can force them into doing things which may result in their short term gain, but an overall win for your strategy.

Threshold for Inclusion

This rule is a key part of you overall strategy, according to Wikipedia the threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth, really go check for yourself. So all this means is you have to find a reliable source with a history of fact checking to use as your source material for example CNN saying bigfoot isn’t a myth

How to Practice Kamikaze SEOJune 15

One of the key aspects of any SEO strategy is knowing the risks of the tactics you use. As those tactics approach or break Google’s guidelines the more likely they to get you penalized or banned. Knowing where you are on the risk scale helps you know when it is imperative that you take precautions and try to create a barrier of plausible deniability.

Three tactics that I feel that warrant creating that level of plausible deniability are link buying, buying hosted content, and paying to have negative posts removed/changed. Last week a site I’m involved in received an email similar to this at the webmaster account:

From:Jane@WellKnownDomain.com
Subject: Purchasing Direct Advertising

Hi this is Jane from from WellKnownDomain.com we see that you run a website in the widget area and are very interested in purchasing a direct text link from you. We would like the link to be placed directly in the content area of one or more of your posts.

Hoping to hear back from you.

Jane

There are several things wrong with this type of approach:

• If I reply to the email a