Ten years ago, you used to be able to get 100 backlinks with and anchor text of “dedicated server” and you’d rank in the top 10 for that search phrase. Those days are over.

With anti-google-bombing filters and other spam filters, sites that use the same anchor for their backlinks are not ranking well, or are being filtered out completely.

The search engines are looking for unique backlinks from trusted authority sites.

Anchor text matrix

If you want to rank quickly and stay ranked, you need to use a variety of anchor texts. Here’s how to do it, and get ranked for your main keywords at the same time.

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Is it just me, or did the jackass that owns beijing.com just leave a suitcase of money on the table by running a parked page on his site for the past 2 weeks?

From a user standpoint, the parked site is useless. You keep clicking links and more links and never really get to the information that you’re looking for.

Missed opportunities

The owner of beijing.com could have done so much more with the domain, and made much more money too!

Here’s some of my suggestions:

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Unfortunately, Bido has been experiencing some down time lately.

After I wrote about Bido’s launch, I suspected that there were going to be issues with handing load and scaling. It looks like these are the issues the team is facing now.

I don’t know the specifics of how the Bido platform is configured, but from the notes and emails I have seen from the Bido team, it looks like the whole shot is running on one server.

It could be separated into one web server and one database server, but trust me, that’s the same thing as running it all on one server.

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There is a lively discussion at Mike’s blog today about taxes and domainers.

Mike points out the following:

Many domainers are US based, but other major domainers are located in tax free countries thereby giving those domainers huge advantages over the US based domainers.

Being a Canadian who moved to the Bahamas more than 10 years ago, I have seen a lot of corporate, legal and banking carried out by some of the world’s best. If you didn’t know, many of the richest people in the world call the Bahamas their “official residence” for tax reasons.

There are several legal ways to minimize your taxes. Depending on your citizenship, your mileage may vary.

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Have you ever wondered how that email address listed on your web site gets onto those spam lists or how copies of your web site content ends up in places that you don’t want it to?

Well, many times the reason this happens is because bots and crawlers are spidering your web site data for nefarious reasons.

But you can block a lot of this from happening by simply adding a list of the bad bots and crawlers to your web site using a robots.txt file.

I’ve managed to block most of the bad bots as you can see from the chart shown in this post. Only bots you want to visit like google, yahoo, bloglines etc are spidering my site.

When a bot or crawler comes to your site, they normally check first to see if you have a robots.txt file and then check to see if they are listed in the file. If they are listed using the disallow setting, then the bots will go away and not spider your site.

I block about 100 bots from this site. Have a look at my robots.txt for the full list and feel free to copy my list of bad bots and use it for yourself.

To find out how to use your robots.txt file to do all sorts of other things, please check out the official Web Robots Page for more suggestions.

NOTE: Be sure to put your robots.txt file in your web space root because that is where the bots look for it. If you place the file anywhere else, they will not read it, or follow it.

Ever wonder why you get very little organic search traffic from google or yahoo even though you write great posts filled with unique content?

Wordpress is a great blogging tool, but out of the box it uses a link structure that creates duplicate content and unfriendly links to your posts. This causes problems for your search engine rankings as well as user navigation.

Whether you are starting a new blog or you have a blog with 1000 posts already, there are a few easy steps you can take to fix these problems.

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Have you wondered why your wordpress blog doesn’t rank very well, even for long tail terms like “build dynamic header and footer in php“?

One reason is that you might need to fix your permalink structure.

But more likely, you have five or six ways to link to your posts and this creates a massive duplicate content problem on your blog.

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There is a lively discussion going on at Rick Latona’s blog this week about domain’s being sold and what the buyers do with them.

Rick makes an interesting observation:

Then, of course, there are those names you sell which are now dead links or even better, they still point at your name servers! This is much more common than one would think.

And he is right, this is much more common than you would think. I can tell you that in the web hosting business, people leave their domains pointed to the hosting company DNS all the time, too. I expect that Rick’s position - like our web hosting policies at Secure Hosting - is to remove the DNS entries and notify the domain owners that they should point their domain to new DNS.

But there are some disturbing comments by readers of Rick’s post where people are saying that they take advantage of the domain owners oversight and they are still parking the domains and making money off them even after they sold them.

This is just plain immoral. I bet the readers making these comments are the same sort of people who would find a lost wallet on the street, take the cash out of it and throw the wallet, ID’s credit cards etc into a garbage can and not think twice about it.

It’s no wonder that domainers get a bad reputation !!

After writing on his blog that he recently acquired the domain SushiRestaurants.com, Elliot has now announced that he is selling the domain name for $24,000.

I don’t think he will have any problem getting his BIN price and think that perhaps he should be asking more.

Here’s why.

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Have you ever wanted to redirect visitors to a special promo page based on how they were referred to your site?

You can enhance the visitor experience by checking the referer log for the visitor and then showing them a custom page that relates to the web site that referred them to you.

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