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PIN’s: The Future of Private Link Building1116 CommentsWordPress SEO: The Only Guide You Need528 CommentsUnmasking the Biggest Tyrant in Blogging445 Comments
167 Comments 
13 minutes
A few weeks ago I was one of the tens of thousands of people who enjoyed reading a blog post on Priceonomics about “The SEO Dominance of RetailMeNot”. It was an absolutely fascinating read because, being a total SEO geek, I rarely find information in this space that hasn’t been repeated 100 times before. I knew about the company already, but I had no idea about the scale in which they were absolutely annihilating their competitors.
For the thousands of popular search terms that are out there in the coupon world, you’ll see RetailMeNot as the number one search result for the vast majority of them. The Priceonomics article was a great read, but it’s clear that a number of their readers were disappointed with what the article lacked, rather than what it included. I’m always up for doing some digging into the SEO background of a website, especially when 63% of their traffic comes from search and they’re valued at $1.7 Billion dollars.
Priceonomics readers seemed to want a little more, so I hope to fill that gap with this article.
A Fiery Start That Pissed Off All Their Competitors
One of the reasons I loved the movie The Social Network is because it really dug into the beginning of Facebook. Although things may have been a little exaggerated for entertainment purposes, I find it far more interesting to hear about a company’s struggles and mini successes rather than just knowing “Oh cool, now they’re worth $1.7 billion dollars” or in Facebook’s case “Oh cool, now they have 1 billion active users”.
After doing a lot of internet detective work for this blog post, I came across a post on a forum from a user identified as bclark. Undoubtedly the handle of Bevin Clark, one of the co-founders of RetailMeNot along with his business partner, Guy King.
Here was that very first forum post announcing RMN 7 years ago:
Just 18 days after that introduction post on the forum, RetailMeNot became the highlight of a 15 page thread from other coupon site owners highlighting their dirty tactics to make their website relevant.
I’ll save you having to read the 15 pages yourself, but here’s pretty much what they contain: Webmasters and ad networks doing absolutely everything they can to stop the growth of RMN. Keep in mind that 7 years is a long time in the internet world, and back then people were dealing personally with networks to get coupon codes. Many of the people frustrated with RMN was because they were posing exclusive codes on their website that weren’t theirs to share.
Coupon codes that other people had worked hard to get.
One person did interject in the thread – not as an affiliate owner, but as a coupon user – saying that he doesn’t understand the problem as long as he can find coupon codes. The rest of the members of the forum quickly turned on him, stating that he has no idea how much work they have to put into their coupon websites just to put food on the table.
These days, the both Clark and King aren’t involved in the website after its acquisition. In an interview with Delimiter, it doesn’t seem like they had too many problems on their journey before the sale:
“From then on in, the entrepreneur describes the process of building RetailMeNot to where it is today — with around $30 million in revenues this year and some 90 million global unique visitors over the past year — as being “a lot of sweat”. He says there weren’t any really hard pain points or tough bits in his company’s evolution — but it needed to keep on moving so that it could deal with the site’s increasing scale.
While it looks like they started out by infuriating every single competitor in their industry, it’s not something I can really judge either Clark or Guy for. Primarily because I know nothing about them, and also because I’m sure a lot has changed for them both personally throughout their internet careers. If you haven’t heard of RetailMeNot, maybe you’ve heard of other ventures they’ve been involved in like BugMeNot, TrendsMap, CushyCMS or even their LIFX product, a reimagination of the lightbulb.
All hugely creative ideas from people who clearly know what others will respond to.
A Company So Clearly Influenced With Google’s Direct Help
I don’t want to rehash what was covered in the Priceonomics article so let’s get into the nitty gritty of it: Google Ventures are an investor in Whiteshark Media, the company who purchased RetailMeNot then renamed themselves to RetailMeNot, Inc.
Jacob King was the first person to discover this back in 2013 and prompted Barry Schwartz, owner of Search Engine Roundtable to question whether Retail Me Not and other brands under Google Ventures’ watch would ever be subject to Google penalties.
I have to say that I agree with Barry’s conclusion in his post that I do believe Google would give Retail Me Not a penalty, but then side with his commenters in that it would purely be for public display, and it’s something that would quickly be dealt with and revoked if it were to ever happen. Only a large public backlash against Retail Me Not tactics would likely ever result in this happening, though.
Aaron Wall of SEO Book had a different take on the subject. Aaron is someone even more frustrated than me with Google’s favourable treatment with big brands compared to small-time webmasters.
He showed that back in 2010, Retail Me Not were basically paying people to put the Retail Me Not widget on their websites (a widget which came with a dozen internal links to different pages of RMN – do-followed, of course).
This also wasn’t a once-off promotion either, as Aaron continues…
“That free t-shirt for links post was from 2010 – the same year that Google invested in RetailMeNot. They did those promotions multiple times & long enough that they ran out of t-shirts! Now that RMN is a publicly traded billion Dollar company which Google already endorsed by investing in, there’s a zero percent chance of them getting penalized.
To recap, if you are VC-backed you can: spam away, wait until you are outed, when outed reply with a combined “we didn’t know” and a “our competitors are spammers” deflective response.”
A quick search on Google for text that was included in the widget shows there are over 100,000 results with links from websites directly back to Retail Me Not.
Of course, the linked text in all of the widgets is “popular coupons” and not Retail Me Not, as you might expect.
But those widgets don’t exist any more, and the removal of the widget page on RMN’s website is just one of many things that makes me believe Google have had direct communication with RMN and what they should be doing regarding their SEO tactics. After all, that is one of the selling points of having Google Ventures invest in your business. As Chuck price states…
“For the uninitiated, Google Ventures is the venture capital arm of Google. They provide seed venture and growth-stage funding to companies – including Uber, Nest, and RetailMeNot. They are financially motivated to build a company, and then sell it at crazy multiples. One means to do that is to drive gobs of organic traffic to their ecommerce holdings.
Websites owned by Google Ventures have direct access to Google. Quoting from their own site “We provide unparalleled (and real) access to Google’s massive network of employees and alumni.” I assume this includes people that know how the algorithm works and how to optimize for it. I can’t imagine a better resource for competitive or comparative analysis.”
Now, I don’t just want to jump on the Google-hate bandwagon and say RMN are getting some favourable treatment, but the removal of their widget is not the only change.
Example #2: No More Community Sponsored Posts
For a long time, Retail Me Not were promoting a sponsored community page known as their “blogger network”. Among other things, this would give participants ‘Priority access to premium content for your blog’ and ‘Sponsored Content Posts’.
What’s more interesting is that I did not find this in Google cache, but it’s still live on the RetailMeNot.ca version of their website, here. It used to be available on their .com website, but can not be found anymore.
Example #3: Paying for Blog Posts But Linking With Bitly
This was one of the stranger things I’ve seen for a brand worth so much money and only continues to confirm my belief that the very real access companies get from Google Ventures has made sure RetailMeNot don’t do anything stupid they can be called out on.
Here’s a small sampling of some bloggers showing that their support for the RMN blog, The Daily Deal, was a sponsored promotion and readers should be aware of that.
Surely they would have been able track visitors much better by linking to their website with a no-followed link? I know with Bitly you can easily track how many clicks a URL received by adding a + to the end of it, but this seems a little odd to me.
Not odd, however, for a company operating under the close assistance of Google.
Let’s Analyse Some Rankings
The original report on this topic by Priceonomics showed that “Retail Me Not ranks first in Google search results for an astounding 187 out of the 263 keywords we track“. That’s a huge number of rankings to be dominating, especially in an industry with such high conversion rates.
For my analysis I’ve decided to look into the links they are getting for three of their biggest keywords (in terms of search volume) which they rank #1 for. I’m primarily covering referring domains here, since I think the total links to each page ranking is a bit of a skewed metric. If one large website gives them a sitewide link then that really messes with the numbers.
I’m well aware that the number of domains that a website gets links from is not the only important factor when it comes to search engine rankings. It matters where those links are coming from, whether they’re from relevant websites, how Google view the domain as a whole and so on. However, just for some quick birds-eye-view analysis I thought this had the potential to be interesting. And it was.
The three keywords I chose to cover were:
- Amazon Coupon (150,000 searches per month — including slight variations)
- Bed Bath & Beyond Coupon (550,000 searches per month)
- Kohls coupons (550,000 searches per month)
The data in the charts below was compiled from a combination of the data in Ahrefs and MajesticSEO. They always showed varying figures for each website so I added them together and divided them by two to get the average. Though the figures differed, they weren’t wildly crazy. Meaning, there wasn’t a case of Ahrefs showing the page had links from 50 domains and MajesticSEO showing it had links from 500 or even 250. They were fairly close.
Amazon Coupon
Amazon are thought to be one of the biggest sources of income for RetailMeNot. They pay a 4% commission to the company on everything that a customer buys if they go through RetailMeNot’s affiliate link, no matter what RMN are promoting.
And as far as competition goes, here are the Deals websites in the Google search results from the first page of results. Please note that this is not the position of their ranking, but the position of their rankings among themselves. So TechBargains are actually ranking third in Google (not second), but above DealCatcher and below RetailMeNot.
- RetailMeNot
- TechBargains
- DealCatcher
- Coupons.com
- CouponDunia
- Dealspls.us
- Slickdeals
- Bradsdeals
With the success of RetailMeNot it’s clear they have a lot of competition in the search results but in this case, they have the most sites linking to them.
Bed Bath and Beyond Coupon
Another big earner for RetailMeNot is no doubt the relationship they have with BB&B, the domestic merchandise store which has outlets in the US, Canada and Mexico.
And as far as competition goes, here are the Deals websites in the Google search results from the first page of results. Notice that RetailMeNot actually take up two of the top 10 spots.
- RetailMeNot
- BBBYCoupon
- DealCatcher
- GoodSearch
- Valpak
- Coupons.com
- RetailMeNot.ca
The results here are quite interesting as besides one website, RetailMeNot once again has the most backlinks to one of their internal pages. However, GoodSearch are clearly getting a lot more links for this one yet the rankings just don’t seem to be there.
Kohls Coupons
I’m not totally sure why people search more for ‘Amazon Coupon’ and ‘Bed Bath and Beyond Coupon’ but when it comes to Kohls, people like to use the plural coupons.
And as far as competition goes, here are the Deals websites in the Google search results from the first page of results.
- RetailMeNot
- DealCatcher
- FatWallet
- Coupons.com
- GoodSearch
- Sites.Google.com
- Printable-coupons.blogspot.com
Once again, RetailMeNot simply have more people (number of websites) linking to their internal pages then their competition. From a purely link building based standpoint they deserve to be ranking well for those terms. Or do they?
Link Analysis
It’s very clear when you spend a lot of time looking into links to all of these websites ranking that none of them have high quality backlinks. Not one of the sites I looked at seemed to have more than one or two links which were actually on websites of any credibility.
Allow me to delve further into the Bed Bath and Beyond coupon rankings to give you a better example of how links are being generated in this industry. For the RMN page that is ranking, here are the anchor texts that are pointing their way:
Just in case the above screenshot isn’t clear, people are actually using phrases like: “20% off bath bed and beyond coupon, 2014 coupon and codes” as the actual link text. So instead of just saying “click here” they have this huge long phrase. I don’t have to tell you that these are from low-quality, majorly automated websites which appear to simply be scraping RMN.
A good example of this is the links they are getting with the anchor text “20% off”.
As you can see the text surrounding the links is identical, even though it’s posted on different websites.
Now, this isn’t to say that they don’t have any authoritative backlinks. They’re a well-known brand and no doubt pick up a lot of natural links. When they raised rounds of funding and were eventually acquired by WhaleSharkMedia (who rebranded themselves to RetailMeNot, Inc.) they picked up links from the likes of TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Mashable and other large tech sites.
Also, a large number of online retailers, both big and small, try to entice people to buy their products by sending them over to the RMN website to pick up discount codes before the purchase. However, the vast majority of their backlinks, if you take the time to look into them, are very, very poor. The thing working in their favour though, is that so are those of their competitors.
This is an industry where it clearly isn’t easy to pick up backlinks. Sure they do get them to their homepage, but who really wants to talk about Amazon coupon codes on a high-value website.
Go ahead yourself and look at the backlinks for pages like:
The reason I linked to the anchors portion of Ahrefs is that you can clearly see the majority of their links come from anchor text which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Meaning, there’s no way a human manually put together those links. That is a big risk, but as I’ve mentioned already, nobody else is coming along and doing a better job with their backlink profile.
More Proof that Widget Spam Works
I’ve personally analysed thousands of links to RMN in the last week and, as stated, I find very few of any quality. Luckily their competitors aren’t doing a better job when it comes to links either. Since Goodsearch actually have a lot more links pointing to their Bed Bath and Beyond page, let’s see if their source of links is any better.
A quick glance shows you that Goodsearch have a ton of links from authoritative websites, but guess where they’re coming from…
…widget links. Exactly what Godaddy, Symantec and Houzz are using to absolutely dominate Google and get millions of free visitors. GoodSearch are just one more in a very long line of companies abusing a tactic that Google still don’t seem to know how to handle. Here’s the source code for one of the Goodsearch widgets:
And these widgets are absolutely everywhere on the web. Actually, the majority of their entire backlink profile is built using nothing but widget links and it’s working on a great scale:
That’s an estimated 130,000 visitors per day from search that they’re likely making a huge amount of money from. Not bad just for ignoring a few Google guidelines.
The Wikipedia of Coupons?
Who really deserves to rank in this industry?
Coupons.com is a pretty horrible website. There’s no obvious search function and you have to wait for some Ajax-spinning wheel every time you click on a category.
Slickdeals is a little better as there’s community engagement happening, but it’s a very ugly and cluttered website that seems to need a spring clean. Brads Deals is more attractive but there’s no discussion related to any of the links. They simply open up in a new tab and that’s it. The offers could be a lot clearer as well.
Dealcatcher is also attractive, but they’re missing out on the community element (discussions and “does this coupon work”) in clear places which Retail Me Not utilises so well. Valpak is their smaller, uglier brother.
I’m not going to claim to have reviewed all of the sites in this industry but as someone who hasn’t ever used coupon sites, I’m instantly more attracted to how RetailMeNot handle their website than any of the competition.
Whether you like it or not, they seem to be the best search result for the majority – if not all – of the terms they are ranking for, and that’s why they’re worth 1.7 billion dollars.
The concept that Clark and King came up with when they started the site – to allow the community to share and rate coupon codes – was a blast of genius at the time and an idea that has clearly resonated with hundreds of millions of people who have landed on their website. Their app for iPhone has now had millions of downloads as well, further solidifying their focus on branding.
Interestingly, the industry they’re in may actually be getting smaller, even though they’re sitting right at the top of it.
This dip doesn’t just show in SEMRush, but in Quantcast as well. Obviously their traffic is going to spike at busy shopping months like the Christmas holiday period, but that’s a real drop for almost one year of operation.
How to Build a Billion Dollar SEO Empire
That’s the title I enticed you with at the start of this post, so let’s sum up the main points that we’ve covered:
- Find an industry that has an (almost) global appeal: real estate, interior design, insurance, fitness, hosting, making money, etc.
- Preferably one where it’s hard for your entire industry to get backlinks so other factors come into play
- Approach it in a way that makes you stand out from the crowd. RMN did this fantastically by putting the focus on their community so they didn’t have to moderate every single coupon to see if it was still working. They let the community do that for them.
- If you aren’t pissing off your competition you’re probably not doing something with enough appeal
Have Google Ventures on your board so you can abuse the Google guidelines for a few years then later clean up your act.- Focus on what the audience wants when it comes to on-site SEO. Look at the title tags they are using sitewide. They’re not the typical standard title tags you get to play around with in WordPress. Kohls coupon title tag differs vastly from BB&B. They’re also updated very regularly to entice clicks from search results
- Design your site in such a way so that from a quick glance, you instantly look to be the “right” website a searcher wants to land on
Those steps may not sound easy, but when it comes to owning a billion dollar business, they aren’t meant to be.
Secret: Their Biggest Threat is Your Biggest Opportunity
Towards the end of the excellent Priceonomics article, they had this to say:
“At some point, Google will change the rules, RetailMeNot will trip up, or competitors will catch up. It’s not really a matter of if Google pulls the rug out from under you, it’s a matter of when.”
I don’t agree with this at all. I also think the ending of their blog post would have been different if they knew that Google Ventures was indirectly a RMN investor.
The biggest threat to RMN right now is not Google pulling the rug from under them or having a competitor catch up, but small teams or even individuals building coupon sites for specific websites.
What I didn’t tell you earlier in this post is that from my vast research, in nearly all of the hugely popular search terms that RMN are ranking for, there’s a 3-5 page website on the first page of the Google results with just a few hundred backlinks.
The reason I’m not going to tell you what they are is because I’ve decided that I will no longer ever mention the SEO strategies or rankings of smaller websites. Big brands can take it because nothing is likely to happen to them, but small niche-site owners who have had the initiative to build a website in an industry don’t deserve myself or anyone else “outing” them and their strategies.
One such site with 3-5 pages and only 100 backlinks was already mentioned in this post. It ranks for a search term getting hundreds of thousands of exact searches per month. Although I’ve just mentioned it, ignore that one. 1,000 people will go for it after this blog post.
Whack RMN into SEMRush, find some coupon codes for specific companies with insane search volumes, and see what you can do (only if you have the time — don’t let this distract you from what you’re working on already).
There is a plus side and a downside to operating in this industry.
The plus side is the huge conversion rates. People look for coupon codes just as they’re about to make a purchase. For every 10 visitors to your coupon from search traffic you’re probably going to get 5 using your code and earning you a commission.
The downside is likely the CTR from search results. I can’t verify this as a fact, but if you’re not ranking first or second then there will be little point to be ranking at all. Once someone has a coupon, they’re unlikely to keep shopping for more.
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game”.
I put a ton of work into this blog post and really hope you got something out of it. If you did, please do leave a comment (good or bad). I have nothing to sell in 99.58% of my blog posts and comments are really what I write for in the first place. Either way, thank you (as always) for reading!
167 Comments
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TL;DR
Kidding.
Amazing. So interesting. Really makes you rethink the smaller ideas.
TL;DR Lots of full stops.
😉
Great post!
The dark side of Google 😀
A lot of detailed data here…really interesting.
Thanks, Glen!
Glen,
Definitely an interesting topic to cover. Like Aaron Wall, I’m also pissed off at the favoritism that big brands get in serp results but it motivates me to get creative and try harder.
The best point you make here is that if it were way to make a billion through SEO, everyone would be doing it. I think RetailMeNot is here to stay and has built a long term business. Ok sure they’ll continue to rank well and stay on top of google changes like the rest of us. I also agree that the biggest threat to RMN will come from a couple guys in a garage in blue jeans…or in flip flops in chiang Mai 😛
Cheers,
Jordan
You didn’t get the memo on the new coolest place to work in Asia? 😉
Appreciate the comment, Jordan!
Where’s the new coolest place to work in Asia?!
Definitely didn’t get the memo!
Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam
I second Saigon 🙂
Great article Glenn, enjoyed it!
Glen!
Glad you tackled this one. That Priceonomics article left a lot to be desired!
Fascinating post, here. 🙂
Thanks Sean,
Appreciate it!
Very interesting read, Glen – well done.
The amount of big brands that user widgets to build exact match anchor text links is intriguing. At least RMN were being clever marketers with the free t-shirt idea.
Looking forward to the next post.
Cheers,
Josh
Thanks Josh!
I think this one has killed me for a while though 🙂
Glen, this post is incredible as always. Really interesting to read.
However, I just wondering on smaller idea than 1B project – how to create backlinks for me website….
p.s. went to do backlinks and design.
Hey,
Make sure your check out the links in my sidebar. The top one sounds like it’s what you’re looking for 🙂
Glad you liked the post!
Glen – Great post. There is a lot of new information that I haven’t seen before.
Keep up the excellent work.
“Google Ventures on your board” haha!
Thanks
Great article Glen! Pure gold as always 🙂
Thanks Chris!
Glen, you gave me some “evil” ideas to test this market in Brazil! 😛
I will have so much fun…lol
All I can say to people is don’t get pissed, get even. Go get yourself some as quick as you can and make it happen.
Glen has displayed in other previous posts that these things are still possible. Be better, be smarter. Don’t screw other sites over :/ but there are definitely ways now that you can still come on top.
With Glens help and assistance (High PR network plug folks :p) I identified some things I could apply to another site and that site generated a shed load of money (unfortunately not for me) and it wasn’t even difficult
If you dig into the links of the top ranking sites on Google, even if they’re so called “authoritative”, you’ll find that most of them have dirty back links pointing towards them.
What does this show?
It shows that blog networks work, if done right.
Not really. Crap links could have been (attempted) competitor sabotage. Big sites get crappy links all the time for unknown reasons. You just have to hope that all the other positive signals outweigh the negative.
And nowadays, it’s impossible to know what part of the link graph counts, since it’s so easy to discretely disavow links.
Nice post Glen and good analysis,
I remember years ago I found Retail Me Not and I was looking at their link profile this is back in 2011, I remember seeing some suspect trends back then, I also remember the founders were locals from Australia. But as you note most of their heavily paid widgets have been removed so yet they probably did get some advice from Google to remove much of the suspect activity. I mean PR disaster if a Google backed company gets hit right…
Coupons is a competitive niche, even if the links in the niche are low quality many sites are in this niche, its not exactly a niche where high authority sites are going to link to it is similar to market place sites, that is why people push for promotions and sponsorship. I have talked to a few industry players in that sector over the years and heard some interesting stories.
I guess time will tell too see if they are hit, if they are.
I’m losing count of the examples of Google abusing their power to give some companies permission to break the rules.
Though on the bright side, now I know why 99% of the affiliates that join me on ShareASale are coupon directories! 🙂
Another top post Glen. Their approach is very reminiscent of what a site called HotUKDeals have done in my neck of the woods. They have been going since 2004 and very much rely on their community of users to submit deals. They don’t just have coupons though but other great deals too (even offline deals).
I once thought about going down this route too…I’m kinda wishing I had done now!
How would you recommend someone start something like this? I’m part of BacklinksXXX and I was wondering if you could do something related to scraping because it seems like a lot of these sites like ViralNova are utilizing scraping scripts. Could go more into that? Thanks for the post. It made me aware of something that I wasn’t before.
Both of these articles were really good. I like reading these success stories. But, Google will eventually just rule the world anyway. 🙂
I wonder if you purchase adwords, and do a lot of spammy seo shite if Google will still penalize you?
Great post Glen. I wish I had the time and resources to do this kind of research!
What’s really interesting is looking at the widget links themselves. They’re placed in a div with a class that’s set to display:none. I’d think Google would quickly and easily discount the links based on this – in fact, I thought Google ignored display:none content entirely. I guess not!
Glen,
You should have a podcast where you are a dective… uncovering crazy internet marketing tactics used by big/successful tech companies.
I would listen 🙂
Been done– Digital Due Diligence did this for a while, and then got into the business of being hired by bankers to dig up SEO dirt on VC and IPO investment. Now the founder works for SAC Capital, the largest and most successful hedge fund in the world.
Very interesting!
Excellent article. I’ll certainly be looking into building a widget to share my content.
Just so I’m clear: It’s not something I’m advocating. At least in a way that abuses guidelines (do-follow, on by default, etc).
I’m just showing that it works, very well. If you ever do anything that pushes the boundaries, never do it with your primary site.
Really very interesting article and I appreciate the research that went into it. Even though we can guess that G wont give them a slap for their naughty behavior it still speaks to the amazingly fragile nature of relying on G for your livelihood.
I have to admit though my main take away is to pick up SEMRush! 🙂
Hah,
I had SEMRush for such a long time but barely ever used it so cancelled my account. They gave me a freebie and since then I’m used it like crazy (weird how that works).
The free account still has some valuable stats 🙂
Thank you for the comment!
1.How did retailmenot focus on their community so that they didnt have to validate every coupon?
2.whats a good tutorial for widget link building (not the wordpress widgetlinks however)?
I don’t live in USA, so these big coupon sites are completely missing me, but still it’s great to get this kind of information once in a while. 🙂
Interesting post as always, Glen!
PS: I hate you for writing “there’s a 3-5 page website on the first page of the Google results with just a few hundred backlinks” and not revealing how they are doing that! :))))
Hi Glen,
Kudos to your website! It has a big reputation!
Do you think there is any way that the little guy can get into the lucrative coupon niche or have the big guys just got it all sewn up?
Thanks!
Re-read the entire last section 🙂
Great post Glen.
The question is – how do small to medium sized businesses copy the strategy, and do “widget link building”? Am thinking if the business owner can come up with a cool concept, and program the widget to have a wide range of anchors, it would be interesting to see how it could impact rankings in the short term…..
Glen,
Wow man. Thank you for taking so much time to dig into this in such detail. I’ve never played in the coupon space myself but have only grown more and more curious after listening to Jacob King talk about his trials and tribulations in his podcast on Ian Howell’s old Halo18 website.
In any case.. I think this sheds a lot of interesting light and only serves to raise more questions..
Cheers man!
Nick
Fantastic, spell-binding read, just like the rest of your posts.
I really wonder what Matt Cutts would have to say about this … doesn’t he respond to ANY of your blog posts?
Cheers (and thanks!)
Jonathan
If I were Matt Cutts, I would make a point of ignoring ViperChill. He probably knows all about the Streisand Effect.
Some notes from my insider’s seat over at Brad’s Deals…
I’m not surprised that widget spam is working so well… Coupons.com has a pretty awful widget running right now as well, but Google has been going after them. I ran across the same info you did for the old RMN widgets last week and figured that they’d been taking them down and likely disavowed the ones they couldn’t, even after killing the widget feed. TechBargains has a widget too. Every player in the space with the resources jumped on that bandwagon before the tactic went bad. Some are more worthy of a penalty than others.
We’ve known about the WhaleShark connection for many years, well before 2013. That’s just the first time that someone with a platform outside of the niche ran across it, and we noticed when it happened. but it wasn’t exactly news.
Did you check out the old archive.org snapshots of BugMeNot? Holy coupon backlinks, Batman! Don’t miss the teeny tiny one in the footer. Even today there’s a very convenient link with anchor text and BMN continues to be RMN’s top authority backlink.
I agree that Slickdeals is an ugly site, but its ugliness is the thing that keeps that community going. It feels more authentic than a site that is just a little too pretty.
You left out all of the bit.ly and sbwire spam, but the google sites made one of your lists… I’ve personally been trying to figure out why Google can’t seem to keep this obvious doorway crap out. Especially if you buy into the Google Ventures conspiracy theory, since this activity outranks RMN on some competitive keywords and thus constitutes a threat to RMN’s bottom line.
Beauty post Glen.
WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A Lot of research will have gone into this…………
annihilating their competitors wont be easy if they have not done their homework.
everything one does has to go with Plan.
Thanks for this great information
Hey Glenn, another great post from you. I think it’s interesting how these big companies get away with breaking the Google rules and ‘game the system’ (even though the entire system seems to be a game at times). RMN is definitely an interesting case study, and with the backing of Google Ventures I don’t think they’ll ever be penalized (but coached on what strategies to eliminate, as it appears from your article).
Hey glen,nice one.
So how’s utilizing the “powered by optinskin” working for you?
It’s no-followed and an image.
Also optional (off by default) since it’s for affiliates.
OptinSkin doesn’t even have an SEO’d title tag. Does that work for you? 🙂
Awesome! Really good post.
It’s funny that Goodsearch is using same Widget tactic as RTM early days. So Goodsearch is proof that widgets still working and are great way to get links? Maybe I should also build widget for my non english coupon website. Or what you guys think?
Make sure you check out my latest posts.
I’ve showed a number of companies abusing widget links pretty hard 🙂
It’s not something I can advocate doing, but it works.
Good read glen. Is interested in how much money is ranking for the right keywords.
A lot!
Thanks Glen! I’m really enjoying this blog… soon i will write you about the viral case, last week i just built one website in spanish! Cheers
Thanks Pablo,
best of luck!
Great post as usual.
There is a major problem with how Google has to decide to rank commercial sites.
2 sites sell cameras, site 1 has better pricing and customer service, site 2 is more expensive and has a history of bad customer service.
Site 2 has better “SEO” and always ranks above site 1.
Google basically forces site 1 to become a content producer when all it wants to do is give great customer service and the best pricing.
Of course there is always AdWords.
Insightful and inspiring as always Glen!
OK now Matt Cutts will be on the case in 3..2..1.. as if!
Great article as usual. Viperchill – the Roger Cook of SEO 😉
I appreciate your hard work on this post, Glen.
Learning a lot about seo from your posts.
Looking forward to your next one.
Thanks Matthew!
Great post Glen, a very interesting read for me as I have a small discount code website based in the UK.
It’s sickening to see my suspicions on such a big scale, the industry is littered with many examples of this. I look at all my competition and their link profile is just spam spam spam.
And what makes it worse, you can’t really get natural links for your pages or get people excited about the subject. As soon as someone sees you as ‘commercial’ they don’t want to know.
I’m desperately trying to get links to my pages to stay a float and compete, but it seems spam is winning the race yet again.
Thanks for such a detailed post, now, let’s look into widgets 🙂
I can see that you are shocked, Shocked!, SHOCKED!! at Google’s corruption. Not.
The message is quite clear (at least to me): Don’t depend on Google for *anything important*. I’m even in the process of migrating away from GMail, a process I expect to take another couple of months. Right now, I’m going back and changing every account I have associated with any of my gmail.com addresses, and using an address on one of my own domains. Right now, all of those addresses are funneled through a single email address (again, one of my domains), which in turn forwards to my main GMail account. When the time comes, it will take about 10 minutes (after the last ThunderBird download) to make the switch entirely to the POP account on my own domain and Thunderbird (where the email filters still work).
As for SEO, I think that paid traffic is cheaper than “free” traffic. Right now, FaceBook appears to be the best source of paid traffic, but I expect that to change, and soon. Simply because more and more people are learning that it’s the best source of paid traffic, and are piling on.
Not sure what to do about my YouTube.com account (which is tied to GMail) just yet. I’m looking for alternate video hosting. And I don’t mind paying for it, because I like the role of “customer” far better than “sharecropper” or “serf”. So far, Amazon seems to have the best deal for that sort of thing, but I’m seeing some competition in that arena. I would welcome any feedback on video hosting tradeoffs.
Of course, YouTube is where a video is most likely to be seen, simply because it is owned by Google, and gets special treatment because of that. Which in turn means that YouTube is currently the best place to post a video you want to be found — but I expect that to change, too. And soon (see above).
The great thing these companies are doing and what bloggers should take note of is that these big websites are using their fan base as little soldiers that go out and get them backlinks by putting these widgets on their websites.
People starting up building a blogging business should utilize this technique as well to get others to “work” for them and help promote their website.
Great work again Glen with all of your research.
Best,
Maher Abiad
Actually, most of the time they’re either paid placements or getting a cut of the affiliate revenue. Very few are posted out of the goodness of anyone’s heart.
Very interesting, Glenn
I think one of the key reasons for their success was getting users involved. Especially at the time they grew the most more and more people were liking how they could interact and be involved. Overall they also made a very good site that gave people what they wanted and made it easy for visitors to find what they were looking for.
This is very true. One of RetailMeNot’s major strengths has been growing a very devoted community that fills in a lot of their content gaps. Many of their coupons are submitted by users. (It’s also the biggest reason why most of their coupons don’t actually work.)
Great article, I actually found yours first and went to read the priceonomics.com first. After seeing how they left us hanging I am REALLY glad you wrote a more indepth follow-up. As the SEO Manager for an online retailer I find RMN’s rankings admirable but frustrating – they outrank us for our own darn name + “coupon” – argh!
P.S. – I have no doubt that this took a lot of time but I would LOVE IT if you created more posts like this one.
Awesome read!
Charles
While I envy the big sites, I think there is a huge advantage to having multiple, medium-sized sites.
The nimbleness to dance around the big guys with enough size to get a lot of long tails.
I have a little, failed coupon site I started. I should go brush it off.
Hi Glen,
Just wanted to thank you for the excellent content. To be honest, I found it a bit heavy to digest, but through no fault of yours. I am quite evidently not a shining example of your target reader hehe. However, rest assured that once I start turning more of my attention towards this subject matter, you’ll be the authority I’ll be looking at.
Keep up the great work.
Cedric
Really short in time now because I have some coupon sites to setup, but thanks thanks thanks for showing the big guys’ tactics in your latest few posts. I hope you at least follow Glenn’s blog Matt, and maybe just maybe change your focus off the little guy.
Yes,The retailmenot has been ranked at top for Keyword Coupon codes ,i have already made lot of purchases from theme like Godaddy coupon purchases etc.
Great post Glenn.
I’m one of the small competitors to RMN and I think its interesting you mention the widget scheme. It is used on many sites that are in your list up there. Some are incentivized while others a clearly outright paid for.
I also understand where you are mentioning the (pretty much) blackhat methods those smaller websites are up to and I for one don’t enjoy the way Google is quantifying widget links and the way those smaller sites are ranking. We both know those two methods are pretty much exactly what Google is against.
Its sad to see but people that play by the rules don’t always win, but at the same time breaking the rules can be pretty detrimental, whether that be for the business as a whole or the individual’s job.
Google needs to shape up.
Thank you for the comment, W.
Interesting to hear from someone who actually operates in the industry 🙂
Really amazing post here Glenn – I used to be very familiar with this industry, and RetailMeNot was always the Goliath.
Question on this phrase – “The biggest threat to RMN right now is not Google pulling the rug from under them or having a competitor catch up, but small teams or even individuals building coupon sites for specific websites.”
Do you mean that last part about building coupon sites for specific websites, or did you mean for specific niches? I’ve personally been dissatisfied with RMN and the other big guys’ coupons for WordPress or Hosting stuff, but have found other WordPress sites that are good for that! Think there’s opportunity in going niche and building real content like you do around blog posts and such.
Thanks Glen for yet another amazing post!
A few years ago I tried to start a coupons site. Thought I would throw all those coupon codes from the hundreds of affiliate programs I had joined over the years on the site. Then I found out just how many of these sites were out there – when I was trying to register my domain name (coupon[whatever].com) and found that every single catchy domain name I could think of in the first 15 minutes had ALL been registered!
That wasn’t the only thing that made me give up on the idea of building a coupons site. Another big turn-off was the fact that many coupon codes are time-sensitive, and having to update the site on a daily basis wasn’t a very attractive prospect at all, back in the day when I was a one-person gang.
Thanks again and keep ’em coming! 🙂
Amy
Great Article. it’s Really Helpful for Every Blogger. Thank you very much for Sharing with us.
Funny to read this for me as I set up a site-specific coupon site a couple months ago.
Though, their affiliate program is currently close and I can t get any coupon to share lol.
Cheers
Time to build a different one? 🙂
Good idea 😉
I m on french market though, so volume is a lot less.
Any good script to recommend?
Hi OP,
I really don’t follow your website, but was given a link to this article from a respected colleague.
Thanks for this write up. It’s been a long time coming.
There are those of us (me) who have coupon code sites…..and we work our asses off “building a great user experience”.
Then RetailMeNot comes along and just fucks everything up by creating a thinly veiled affiliate page…..shit that would get me or anyone else here banned or penalized.
Curious as to what Cutts/etc has to say about this clear favoritism? Whatever happened to the “build a great site and they will come” mantra?
All horseshit, smoke and mirrors.
I also have some evidence that Google purposely sends “shit traffic” to the sites beneath RetailMeNot. This is moreso evident in the “subscription” genre of coupon codes.
Retailmenot gets the good traffic (that converts) and everything beneath that gets nothing.
Me thinks someone needs to call Cutts out on this one at the next SEO conference. Curious as to how RTMN is allowed to get away with murder. I mean, I get it….they turn a profit for Google. As such they will NEVER get fully penalized.
This post here is why I subscribe to you, Glen. I have only one word for you: Tremendous!
Hah, thanks Wayne!
Hey,
this is the only site i read the whole post + comments !
Can you please publish content 2 – 3 times a week 🙂 i love reading your writing.
Hey Codie,
If you give me the ideas, I’ll write them 😉
The techniques get exposure / back links – white hat or black hat seo Google does not care so why should they?
Hi Glen,
An interesting article, as usual. Many thanks!
What makes me come back to your articles is that you are a researcher at heart. I am a researcher too (not in the SEO though) so I really know how much time it takes to collect the information, organize it and find the patterns. It is a huge effort and I’m glad you do it, because you are good at it :).
I keep learning about things I would not be able to learn otherwise. I like your in-depth approach.
A question still arises concerning good long term strategies for entrepreneurs or small companies as with the growing online presence, the competition for being found, gets more difficult. I know you wrote an article about it, yet I would be happy to read some of your novel thoughts, if you have them to share.
Best wishes,
Ela
Thank you Ela,
You’re right — it is a lot of work, but I can’t say that I don’t love it.
I’ll see what I can do in the near future 🙂
Once again, your attention to detail blew me away. Great job. Thank you for sharing your work. I’m hoping to give you a little business in the next couple of months.
Thank you Harry!
If you had to choose between Ahrefs and MajesticSEO and were on a budget, which would you go with?
Ahrefs all the way 🙂
Your in-depth research and reporting are impeccable, Glen, as usual. The images you add to help illustrate, the formatting to aid readability and the editing/proofreading cycle(s) necessary to so clearly present your findings must amount to an incredible investment of your time. Thank you for educating and entertaining me so well… and free of charge, to boot! I always learn something here, and my appreciation for what you share is genuine.
I need to learn more about Google Ventures and how it manages to structure those investments so as not to fall afoul SEC regulations. In my current understanding, it would seem to me very difficult for a company to even be able to refuse an offer from Google to invest. In theory, they have the marketplace power to say something like “we want 20% of your business; here’s our $X” and call it an “investment”… when, perhaps, it’s not that at all. (“I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse” is running through my mind at the moment.) There must be something I’m missing.
Oh, and I haven’t read all the comments so perhaps I’m repeating someone else, but your finding re Kohl’s coupons (vs. coupon) made me smile. That predominantly brick-and-mortar chain structures their deals to be by department rather than just a percentage off the total purchase. Since its stores are set up for singular check out, I can only imagine the tactic entices buyers to visit more areas in the store. Macy’s is another U.S. chain where I suspect the plural has higher volume, but that’s because it has checkout by department. Anyway, again, your attention detail is awesome and appreciated! 🙂
Glen
Clearly very well researched. I was intrigued by the use of bitly for links. Does bilty provide any SEO value at all?? I also wonder if there is any google hypocrisy if smaller businesses were to use links in widgets and if they would be penalised?
Great read as usual. Look forward to yur next post. Damon
Using URL shorteners (sole purpose is to redirect urls) is quite a common technique to use as a buffer, i.e. as a go-between something “not so okay” (like a guestpost) and a “money site”
This could sound a little spammy: great post 😉
I think that the widget strategy is clearly not dead, just need some improvements. Take a regular widget, make it smarter (inserting diferents pieces of text/images, doing anchor variations, etc) and find some places to put it on.
Of course, that is agains Google guidelines, but who gives half a sh¡t when you can make a billion or two.
Dude, you are killing it with these posts. Keep it up! Really awesome stuff!
Thank you Tate!
I have been learning a lot from you over the few months that I’ve been running my site. Still have A LOT of work to do especially when it comes to your advice.
Let me not ramble on. I appreciate the tactics we I’ve been learning especially with what Ramsay said about how this post makes you “makes you rethink the smaller ideas” ( spot on ramsay )
Thanks Dash!
Thank you, again. Posts like this would take 10x (or more time) as compared to posts that we get elsewhere. But are 100x more valuable for the reader/assimilator crowd.
Glad you think so, thank you Prashanth 🙂
Glen,
As always a great read and plenty of info.
I must admit as I came to the end it did get a bit of a chuckle with this,
Have Google Ventures on your board so you can abuse the Google guidelines for a few years then later clean up your act.
Shame on you for suggesting such a thing even if you put a line through it…..lol it still makes me laugh.
Loved this piece. Especially the pissing off your competition. Being a woman I am always worried about pissing off the people in my niche…Not anymore! Thanks 🙂
great Work!! Some days ago i read a post at SEL regarding retailmenot.com’s SEO strategy. But that was missing in depth search.
My Question is will Google now investigate it deeply and punish it just like they did with expedia???
Great post…Its crazy how these very large companies seem to be not playing by the rules that are being put out….Just create “Good Content” and the magical ranking fairy will come out and put on you the 1st page of Google b/c you deserve it and everyone is a winner…hahaha
Some sites just manage to get good rankings from the start and then build it on with spammy links. I have just been penalised on one affiliate website for 3 inbound links from a MBG blog, its frustrating to see competitors using hundreds of paid links and still getting excellent SERPs.
Great post, well worth the read.
Great post! Really enjoyed reading it and I appreciate all the hard work and research that has gone into it!
Just out of interest I clicked on the “here” link in your “Example # 2” – and guess what? The bloggernetwork page for Canada now redirects to their contact page, just as for the USA!
Well done, means all the “right” people are reading your article 🙂
Crazy!
Thanks so much for letting me know, M. I had to share that on Facebook 🙂
Wow what an absolute beast of a post!
It’s great to hear that even though the big brands are dominating, there’s still room for small business owners to get in on the action.
I’m definitely going to be delving into keyword research to see if I can crack open a niche! Thanks 🙂
The bitly link thing doesn’t seem strange to me at all. I work on the digital side of a PR firm and when we aren’t involved at all the PR teams will send all of their links through bit.ly. They do this because they don’t use analytics at all and bitly provides them with a small amount of information.
I think using bitly is more common than we would think. We know why you should or shouldn’t use a url shortener, but in other industries they just see a tool that will tell them about clicks.
Hey,
I am the guy you mentioned in your post (in ss of priceonomics) .
Yes i hated their post, and loved your post. Thats what i am searching for.
Thanks for your great analysis
Hey Serbay,
Great to see you here. I hope you don’t mind me using your face in the post.
No, no … I am very glad that you mentioned from me in your post. One of my friends told me that you mentioned me.
As i said my previous comment, your analysis is really great i enjoyed reading it.
Great post as usual. With Google’s investment in RMN, doesn’t it seem likely this is their way at playing in the affiliate marketing game while controlling(knocking off) their primary competitors? Or better yet, showing their intention to expand their shopping dominance into coupons and targeting Amazon.com?
Thanks! I appreciate your intense efforts, dedication and drive. I look forward to your posts always.
Ann
Definitely what was missing in the priceonomics article. Awesome work Glen.
This point make me laugh “Have Google Ventures on your board so you can abuse the Google guidelines for a few years then later clean up your act.”.
By the way, I like the new posts. I’m sure you are pissing off a lot of people 😀
I think what’s being underestimated here (and often is in the SEO world) is the fact that Google returns answers. And more often than not, RMN returns a coupon that actually works and often times has an exclusive coupon with deeper discounts than others… and people remember that for subsequent searches. I’d venture to guess that most search visitors have tried other sites, bounced, and ended up at RMN for their answer.
Don’t get me wrong, backlinks is still the #1 driver for SEO. But as you showed with the BB&B coupon search, even the company with the higher PA/DA + Maj. Trust/Citation did not trump RMN.
Cutts today just talked about returning answers in the WMT video, and RMN is a strong case for that.
You wrote Whiteshark media in the beginning of the post, I think you mean Whaleshark?
Yeah Whiteshark in one place, Whaleshark in another.
thanks for the great insights.
Very interesting read, great post! I think it´s right that Google favor big brands in the serp. Usually when I search the brand page is the right one.
Great analysis, Glen. Will add the post to my favorite list. To be frankly, the SEOer at RMN is pretty good at spamming through. It’s hard to spam Google these days with continues high rankings.
You smashed it Glen
Thank you 🙂
Another really great post. Like many other people I was curious exactly how RMN was dominating rankings and was disappointed that the original article on Pricenomics didn’t go into more detail.
The only problem with reading posts like this is that now I want to go out and create my own targeted coupon site, and I definitely don’t have time for it now. I’ll add it to the list.
Great article!
You put a ton of work into this blog post!
Awesome, thank you a lot. The effort you put into these articles is just incredible!
Keep going!
Greetings from Germany!
Great post. Just a note- Amazon Associate program pays 4% on electronics and a tiered rate on everything else, ranging as high as 8.5% for 3000+ items sold per month.
Exceptional detective work Glen. This really isn’t just a normal blog post. It’s a podcast, a special report, even en entire webinar. I’m sure a dreamer could build an SEO service business providing widget-spam consulting.
Your writing is approaching a level of Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone. Pure unadulterated investigative reporting coupled with a distinct opinion. I’d encourage you to up the tension and be fearless with your voice.
I know you’ve been at this for what seems like many years…but…I have good news and bad news. The good news is you’re on the verge of breaking through to the next level. The bad news is a new flavor of critics come with that breakthrough.
Keep this in mind…you are greatly appreciated out here.
Great article. One thing that I absolutely love about Viperchill is the detailing you do in each article. I appreciate the amount of research it needs to write such a detail article. Kudos Glen 🙂
Congratulations to posting this!
I think SEO is essencial for using to every business plan or business men!
Really interesting read thanks Glen!!
I hate to say this because the work I do definitely involves peripheral SEO stuff, but articles on the nuts and bolts of SEO minutiae often drive me to tears. However, this is definitely the most fascinating post I’ve ever read on the subject – what tangled webs they weave. Thanks a bunch, Glen, now wonder ViperChill generates the buzz it does. (poet)
Interesting topic. SEO is always controversial. RMN is a good example. You simply can’t succeed without SEO.
Great info Glen, cheers for the post.
Glen you nailed it! …. consistency is the secret
Great Article. it’s Really valuable Post for Us. I Recommended this Post as a Blogger. Thank you very much fro Sharing with us.
Thanks, Glen, for sharing!
Glen, thanks for the great post, BILLION is eyecatching as heck in the title.
Question: do you ever convert any of your content to pdf? Especially your podcast transcriptions. Here’s why I ask.
I have an iPad, and its got hundreds of ebooks on it. The minute an interesting book comes out on Kindle, or an IM launch, I quickly search for a pdf version on Google.
9 times out of 10 I find a 2 page pdf of the keyword search, with several hundred sites that have it. It like a couple of guys own a thousand dot info domains, loaded with keywords and titles as subdomains, and they link in the pdfs to their affiliate redirects.
Is this a viable tactic for seo? I am constantly bumping into that guy’s web of junk pdfs as I search. Somehow duplicate content isn’t an issue, because they rank hundreds of times for the same pdf search.
Awesome, thank you a lot.
Thanks for sharing this information. Will help me in my projects.
The business model sounds quite interesting. I am a little concerned about the legality of the images that get shared though.
I have to say you displayed some great detail here, I appreciate the post.
Definitely an interesting topic to look forward. Awesome, thanks a lot. The all you put into these articles is just incredible! Keep going!
Hello Glen,
I enrolled in your SEO program almost a week ago and did not receive access. Can you please look into this matter? Would love to get this going right away and Im sure that it was nothing more than a glitch in the ordering process.
Virgil
Just wish to say your article is as amazing. The clarity in your post is just excellent and that i could assume you are a professional on this subject.
Well along with your permission allow me to seize your
RSS feed to keep updated with impending post. Thank you 1,
000,000 and please continue the rewarding work.
Very very interesting article.
Hi Glen,
Your posts have always unusual information and they are always very relevant for webenterpreneurs.
Thank you a lot!
Excellent tips again, will keep most of those key ideas in mind when i focus on my content
Hey Glen, You always come up with some interesting stuff and this time I loved your idea about coupons stuff. I have noticed Retailmenot is ranking everywhere, they might be generating loads of money from such coupons stuff.
I am also planning to a\start with this coupons kind of affiliate marketing now. Thanks for inspiration.
Cheers
Interesting post. You’ve definitely got me at “Billion Dollar”. But I can’t stop thinking about how it really goes behind Google Ventures.
Great read, Glen!
It does go to show that Big-G bends the rules sometimes, and gets away with it.
In my neck of the woods, CouponDunia has been doing well. Wonder what their strategy is. 😉
Really good post, can see you put the time and effort into it. Retailmenot I believe is just one site that are using these strategies, but as you say because it is a Coupon site the customer is pretty much already sold.
Keep up the good work!
Great post. Probably one of the longest I’ve ever read 🙂 Those who know what they’re looking for can certainly learn a lot from RetailMeNot!
Fascinating article – RetailMeNot makes a great case study – thanbk for investing such a huge amount of time and research into this – very useful indeed!
Congratulations to posting this!
I think SEO is essencial for using to every business plan or business men!
Hey, man! I’ve just found your website, it is great source of information. Keep up the good work!
First, this is what quality is all about; great job Glen. You also quoted one of my long time friends in this article so I sent the link to him to make sure he sees this post.
Second, I find it amazing that a site can be worth $1.7 billion and this is the first time I’ve ever heard about it. That they were able to get Google Ventures to support them shows that they were obviously in the right place at the right time. I’ve often thought that some of the newer coupon sites like Groupon could have used something like this, although those guys seem to not know a real opportunity when one was presented to them anyway.
Violating rules by being backed by Google; I don’t think that surprised me one bit. My question is why the guys decided to write the article in the first place. If they were out by this time, what could they gain, or was that even their intention? The things people do…
Glen,
I came across your blog through a research on link building. I have spent close to 2 hours on it already, and I am amazed at the level of understanding that you demonstrate in these posts. The ViralNova blog post was a gem, and this one is even better. For the uninitiated, there are so many creative ideas for someone to work on. Good job and I will definitely consider you and Aaron (Seobook) as two guys who are doing it right when it comes to the big brands and their tractics.
I am fan, already.
Thanks,
Rajesh Dhawan
Hey Glen,
I am one of the co-founders of Vpnwise Inc.
i have been trying to reach you, but there is no other way i found besides through commenting.
I have watched your videos and i am inspired by your marketing methods. after reading this article too, i was wondering why youre against interlinking to your sites, isnt that the point of having multiple authority domains in the first place? please touch on that more if its possible.
Also how do I officially sign up for marketing inc. and if i am interested in becoming a client, how do i put myself on the waiting list.
Cheers,
Abe.
Hi Abe,
All is answered here: http://marketinginc.com (just go through the videos).
I’m against interlinking my expired domains, not against linking to money sites 🙂 Interlinking expired domains leaves too risky a footprint.
Hey Glen, great article, as always!
Lot of insights from this one…going through the others posts as well.
Thanks for sharing all the information!
Cheers!
Very interesting! the topic is so well researched. Would feel like bribing the users to visit my websites by offering coupons though…
Glen: Good job I removed the link in your comment then so your Wiliam Hill Coupons don’t get any traffic.
very good … enjoyed it!
Thanks Grey for Sharing !!
This works in Brazil also 🙂
Glen you are awesome! I love your stuff dude…
Thanks Mark!
Glen thank you for this awesome blog post!
Hands off sir ,
Mind blowing post. Great research !! I am really speechless
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