74 Comments 9 minutes

In 2010 I received an email from Adnan Ebrahim. He was telling me about this new site he had started, Car Throttle, that was starting to get some press. At the time it was getting around 45,000 pageviews per month but he wasn’t sure how to take things to the next level. (No credit here, I had no advice since I didn’t know a thing about the car space online).

Today, Car Throttle has more than 1.2 million Facebook fans. Car Memes, which he also owns, has 1.4 million. He had record traffic days last month when he reached 1 million pageviews in a day for the first time ever. The day after, traffic records were broken again.

Comments Off on Pausing my Facebook Series: A Personal Update 11 minutes

It has been a while since I wrote a personal ViperChill update. It’s funny, I love reading them on other sites but don’t really like writing them. I much prefer getting to actionable tips and advice instead of just talking about myself; something I’ve found some bloggers to do a little too much of.

That being said, there is a time and a place for them, so today I have one big request and a few little updates on what is happening in the life of Glen. I’ve honestly never been so busy or so excited about future prospects, so I’m in a great place right now. I’ll start things off with what I really want from you: Your email address! (Please?).

152 Comments 18 minutes

Today I’m going to show you how I’m (probably) the only advertiser that can reach all of Moz.com’s users via Facebook. I’m also going to show you that for every industry you care about, you should have at least two fan pages to cover it. I’ll also show you how you can steal the best content ideas from any of your competitors right under their nose.

Welcome to the guide I’ve been hyping up for a long time. I call it the $1,000 Facebook guide partly because I had planned to sell this information as part of a premium product but mostly because I think it will be worth far more than that to any Facebook advertiser. If you’re looking to promote any type of website on Facebook these days, this guide will show you information I haven’t seen elsewhere.

212 Comments 19 minutes

In early 2007 I fell asleep on a bus home from college. I had a weird dream that I saw Jane Copland, Rebecca Kelley and Rand Fiskhin (all of SEOmoz at the time) sitting at the front of the bus. The conversation we had wasn’t very interesting, and it probably shows a very geeky time of my youth, but it does highlight one thing: Even at 16 I was crazy about SEO and the communities discussing it.

In the last 72 hours the SEO world has gone crazy about the news that PBN’s (Private Blog Networks) are being hit by Google. The one person I’ve looked up to all of this time, Rand Fishkin, was quick to label anyone involved in the practice as a Blackhat SEO. It was an interesting comment from someone who recently emailed me to thank me for the transparency I share in this space, but not one that I agree with. If I’m a Blackhat SEO now, I’ll continue to be one: Because I’m not slowing down the growth of my own private link network.

93 Comments 14 minutes

We all know that Google updates can be highly frustrating, especially when Google are never forthcoming about exactly what changed and what you can do about it if you feel you were unfairly penalised. For some though, Google changes can slice millions of dollars off the valuation of your company. When Panda 4.0 was rolled out on May 22nd, Retail Me Not’s stock dropped 10% or in other words, Google’s change helped to wipe $170 million from their market cap in a single day.

While eBay also took a hit on the same day, estimated to have lost rankings for up to 80% of long-tail keywords, their stock didn’t take much of a hit. This is likely because Paypal is the big driver in eBay’s stock price. The Yellow Pages however, trading as Yellow Media on the stock market, were estimated to have lost around 20% of their organic search traffic. Since a high in April their stock has dropped 29%. What if you could predict Google hitting other companies hard? Could you get rich trading their stock? Let’s find out…

75 Comments 10 minutes

As a result of so much of my time being spent focused on building an SEO company and ranking websites, I’ve been fortunate to come across a number of people who are on a similar journey. Today I would like to introduce one of those people, Matt Prados, to the world. Matt has managed to build a 7-figure yearly revenue stream running his SEO business by targeting two specialist niches in the medical field.

Matt, from Southern California, is someone Diggy and I have been in touch with for all of 2014 and thought it’s about time we got him on the site to share his knowledge.

144 Comments 9 minutes

Five months ago I published what turned out to be one of the most popular posts ever on this site: A guide on how to reach 100,000,000 (that’s 100 million) unique users in just six months. The whole idea of the post was to show that people are “stealing” viral content, posting it on their site, and getting more visitors from Facebook than you ever thought possible.

I later published a follow-up article showing a reader of this website who made $100,000 in one week and I also dismissed some of the ridiculous claims by both Business Insider and a ‘Click Fraud’ video that was making rounds online. Now it’s time to do part three: What happened, and can you still make money with this model?

110 Comments 9 minutes

It still amazes me when SEO blogs blindly tout advice we’ve all heard before. “Write great content, build a quality site, don’t get shady backlinks” and so on. Of course, I know why they’re sharing the advice, but the “right way” certainly isn’t the only way that works.

Take paid links for example, an SEO tactic that has seen Forbes, JC Penney, Interflora and Expedia penalised by Google. It’s probably the first thing that new SEO’s hear not to do when it comes to link building. Surely it’s not still working, right? Grab your favourite beverage, we’re going in…

132 Comments 12 minutes

When I first started out with SEO I was determined to be as “whitehat” as possible. I wouldn’t do anything to potentially risk my site being penalised by Google. In fact, after just one year of running this website I had the opportunity to get a link from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of web spam.

Matt emailed me privately to ask that my content was only preaching white hat SEO and that he wouldn’t regret linking to me. I had nothing to hide and told him as such. Later that day I got the link I was hoping for. I’m sure that was the first and last time such a thing will ever happen.

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.