that's pretty smart. i hired someone already - scary how many people applied for the pittance of a fixed project fee i offered - and created a user account for him. hopefully he doesn't nuke the site - he has lots of good feedback. next time though i'm gonna go the route you just mentioned.

I like to believe that having a social connection to the people you're working with will make them somewhat accountable, and if possible I like to do it.

My web developer is luckily very capable irl and as a developer and happens to live two blocks from me / is a an aqquaintance of mine, but a really good friend of my best friends.

I found my graphic designer through pretty much spamming all my artsy friends on facebook until one of them recommended a graphic designer with a decent portfolio.

I think that the graphic design,restucturing of the website, and content RE organization will be fairly straight forward, but the link building will be more creative / a challenge?

Mainly because my approach will be to first get links using the desired anchor text from people hes already in business with. And geo local, then content, then industry and lastly a few random. But im certainly not banking on the random.

This is out first client, so we charged way below market rate for the work and it was through word of mouth. We are looking to set up a company in the next week or two to provide these services to other companies.

Sites that are subpar or nonexistent would def be a target market!

I doubt you will have to go much further than leveraging your business partners for links just a gut feeling. The best linked site in the industry is pretty attainable and because this is a local business (right?) the benefits are primarily going to be coming from local targeting I would guess. I will be interested to see how it turns out!

http://concrete washout .com/

this is the main competitor. should be fun attempting to knock them off the number one slot

well first experience with ODesk was sucky (but I'm addicted to the site anyway). Guy had like 70 hours under his belt and 4.9 rating. I had 7 tasks listed in my job posting. He does 2 of them and tells me he is done. And the two he did were sloppy. Finally got him to do 6 out of the 7 things (at this point he had been working 4 hours and i was tired of dealing with him since his English was so bad, which made every little piece of communication a pain in the ass).

And after all that, the work was still sloppy and it seems he probably did half-ass programming shortcuts (like using jpegs, instead of creating boxes) which makes editing my WP homepage a pain in the ass, especially when I view the page in different resolutions.

Lesson learned. Next time i'll be ultra-specific in the job ad. And I'll make sure the person actually read the job requirements because honestly I don't think they really do. I think a lot of these guys bid first, look at the job later.

I hope you gave him a bad rating

A trick I learned is have a random question / request in the job listing so I know they read it ie name the current president of the USA.

I use this too. Put it at or near bottom obv, so you know they read the whole thing. That way you can just snap eliminate a % of the candidates who can't follow instructions or didn't read the whole thing.

yeah that's a good idea

have since hired a another guy for a quick project and he was really good.

That site doesn't look bad at all. Not sure why you think there is a lot to be done.

I will post a before and after thing in like a month. stay tuned

Okay. Well if you're redoing the site, again, make sure you properly 301 the older pages before you update/change them if you edit the URL structure.

I have built (and am continuing to build) my own private network of sites for link building purposes. Basicaly what I am doing is buying websites and then doing some things to try and trick the crawlers into not knowing that it has changed owners. This is so that the site keep their "trust" and "authority." I then place contextual links within a story contained on the homepage (contextual homepage links are the most "powerful" links). I am doing this for my business and a couple other friends of mine - in other words my outbound links are needlessly low. If you think you might want to rent some links on my network pm me. I am not sure how much I am going to charge yet so...

As far as how powerful the network its too early to say. I have a criminal attorney who placed his links on the network and hit page one within about two weeks. (however he also did an ALN submission blast so its tough to isolate how much the page one was due to my network)

So you are manipulating the server and whois information? I have heard of some instances of this coming from very strong branded authority sites making backroom partnerships but it seems fairly likely you will get caught and penalized just based on link profile of sites not in similar industries. That said it's one of the better black hat ideas I have heard and if executed well maybe get some results even though I dont think black hat is particularly worthwhile if you are going to that much effort.

Yes, I use whois privacy etc. As far as getting caught I use the hide in a crowd methodology where I have multiple accounts on popular hosting companies shared servers and populate the sites throughout them.

More importantly "getting penalized" really isn't an issue. I have a churn and burn mentality in the sense that if they do find parts of my network they'll de-index those sites (and that will stink) but I'll just go get more. What matters is my money site and that they will not get penalized. My money site right now is PR5 and considered pretty authoritive and it has hundreds and hundreds of links to it from sites that later got deindexed. My point being it isn't going to "hurt" where it matters.

There is a bad neighborhood effect where your main PR5 site is likely get found out eventually, in addition there have already been penalties for unnatural organic link profiles handed out a plenty. When are talking about branded authority sites in this sense we are talking about sites that literally cannot be removed from Google (because they would make Google less relevant, JC Penny/BMW de-indexed examples), relatively few PR5's would fall under this category IMO Cardrunners being the only one I can think of off the top of my head (and thats the nature of the poker industry link structure not really a statement on PR5's).

Just a guess but I would imagine there are better ways to spend a budget if you're going black hat and it's all about link profile for non-authority sites going blackhat IMO which just makes it not worth the effort.

whois privacy does not work. google is a registar they can see that information.

Use fake whois.

With all due respect (and i mean that sincerely cause you are a smart dude) this is just wrong. Mind you, it is a popular sentiment and one that I don't mind, it makes my life alot easier. Google is not the all seeing artificial intelligence people make it out to be. Not to pull out this old canard but there is nothing stopping me from adding your site or anyone elses to my network. Under your theory I now have the power to take out my competitors sites and that is just silly.


Also as far as the blackhat-whitehat thing. I never understood that. Not to state the obvious but Google doesn't own the internet. They are an arbitrary company with arbitrary rules. i am no more obligated to listen to them than I am to wear a suit jacket to the dinner table because there is a a really cool country club down the road that mandates one at their restaurant.

yeah I do a bunch of different stuff

lol this. I swear I said this before in this thread or a similar one WRT buying links and link farms and ****. If it were that easy to get a huge penalty you could destroy your competitions rankings super easy. Usually the worst that happens on a suspected manufactured link is that it just doesn't pass juice.

Roland, how many niches does your network span? If you're in anything I dabble in, I'd love to guest post some decent quality articles on your site for a link or 2. I'd obviously understand if you're not interested.

Like I said it's not an inherently bad idea but unless you are a serious student of link profile which is quite complex IMO I think the chance is that Google's understanding is greater than yours and you will eventually get caught and penalized. Your example is absolutely correct you can add me to your network but to capitalize on what your are building you have to reveal your hand to some degree and with Google continually iterating I think this eventually leads to being caught a lot. In terms of "black hat" techniques I actually think the ones that attempt to get your competitors removed/penalized are the strongest (as the downsides are minimal ethics aside although still not worthwhile IMO).

I would agree Google doesn't own the internet but the game you are playing is almost strictly a Google/Bing game because the value you derive from this strategy is purely based on Google. You don't have to listen to them but what they do will affect the success or failure of your investment. For that reason I typically build something that can stand alone without Google for the very reasons you state because I don't want to abide by the whims of a single company.

Google certainly isn't perfect either but they have strategically placed themselves against spammers/bh beautifully because it is almost impossible to scale up an operation that manipulates their results to a level where it is profitable enough to be greater than a mediocre job (Mahalo would be the most successful which had a large budget and an oddly brilliant anti-SEO branding/marketing effort behind it and they got burned in the end too). Unequivocally yes spamming/bh/paid links all work but they do not scale well given the risk:reward scenario created by Google and any long term brand has an easy decision to steer away from those techniques (until you're really big then spam away, they are the Adwords advertisers anyways so you're aligned with Google anyways). Most of the black hat money these days is made abusing the temporary gains the linking schemes can provide by charging clients.

No hard feelings on my end quite an interesting discussion

This is one of the most common pieces of wrong information spread around.

If you read around any IM/SEO forums you'll see heaps and heaps of high PR homepage contextual backlinks networks.

I sell these types of services, too, and have been since November 2010.

I've bought 150+ PR2-5 domains that were expiring throughout this time and in terms of keeping them under the radar all I do is ensure every domain has whois privacy and is hosted on a unique C Class IP.

I've had domains slapped as some will inevitably be found in these types of networks but for the most part, they are all good.

I know several others who own similar networks who have even tested it, albeit over a small sample size, and they've set up mini networks without privacy and had them slapped almost immediately but whenever privacy is activated on everything they very rarely get found.

Obv I'm not saying to not run networks. Just saying to protect yourself from manual reviews so when your sites do start to rank in good niches that you're not getting the sites penalized.

It's not going to be difficult for a reviewer to see all the domains you own along with other footprints and feel confident that you gamed it.

All I was saying was to just use fake whois.

I wish eli still blogged fwiw.

The sites in the network don't rank for anything and purposely so. the only people viewing these pages are spiders. their sole purpose ins passing along authority