The Stompnernet reference was just a throwaway. I thought I might see Dan here - as he’s the subject of the post - but that’s about it.

I totally disagree with you about putting no-follow on editorial links. The web and search is not a zero-sum game. Share and you are both richer.

The bookmarking services are on every page of one’s weblog and are not editorial content, but administrative. But I can see why you think there is some small contradiction here. The distinction is clear to me.

For the record, I have done the trial edition of Stompernet. My full thoughts on that will have to wait for another day, but it is an awful lot of money every month for video tutorials and pep talks. I could see it working if someone had a single corporate account and was training a clueless IT and marketing department on search.

Interesting to hear your perspective as a six month member of StomperNet. I’d be interested to hear in your own words what you find most valuable about Stompernet and what makes you feel that it’s worth $800/month to you.

I wish you a very pleasant Sunday afternoon. Thanks for stopping by.

I’ve been a Stomper since January 2007, and even read Dan Theis’s recent guide as well, because I do a lot of coaching myself, and don’t recall seeing ANYONE suggest no folowing all of their outbound links.

In fact, you even speak of the wisdom of nofollow yourself on your own post -
http://foliovision.com/2007/06/20/bookmarking-plugins/

where you say…
“The PR drain would be terrible but Denis de Bernardy very sensibly allows us to automatically put no-follow tags on all bookmarking services with a single checkbox.”

But you did get Dan Theis, Andy Jenkins and Leslie Rohde all to comment on your blog, and I guess that’s what you set out to do.

For the record, I’m a staunch advocate of nofollow, and it makes perfect sense to “no follow your no money pages” (to quote Leslie) as well links to any other site that you simply don’t want to bleed off your link juice to for any reason. It’s too valuable to just give away to everyone.

What you call “channeling” your PR is really all that Dan and Leslie and the rest of the faculty have ever advocated, and believe me, I’ve read most, if not all, of what they’ve ever written, (right down to their forum posts) at Stomper.

Again, “hoarding” your PR all for yourself, and “No follow all of your outbound links” is advice I’ve NEVER seen given anywhere.

As far as Stomper being a value or not, until you’re a member, I can’t see how you can criticize, and the personal attacks on some of the biggest names in internet marketing seem pretty unnecessary, but that’s part of what link baiting is all about.

MWF isn’t the only site affected. I’ve seen hundreds of examples. I couldn’t tell you whether “horseplay” has anything to do with whether a site is more likely to fall victim. I hope this never happens to you, but if it does you have to play defense.

All spider visits (UAs like Googlebot, MSNBot, etc) you get should be validated. Lookup the IP to get hosthame/domain, check the domain against the valid domains for that search engine, then lookup hostname/domain to make sure the IP matches. Any visitor other than a validated search engine spider gets noindex.

I had a look at MyWeddingFavors.com source code and I see that you have robots=”noindex” there. Strong medecine.

I do have to say that I am somewhat concerned that such a profitable site, with the resources that Brad, Andy and you can bring to bear - cannot be reindexed properly. This suggest to me that Google at least tacitly approves the MyWeddingFavors.com bounce - otherwise they would at least do you a favor with a manual reinclude.

Isn’t the issue here is that there has probably been so much horseplay with MyWeddingFavors.com promotion (Brad and Andy are a lot more grey hat than you are) that it’s difficult to insist on a reinclusion with rank?

If not, why wouldn’t most of the big website be bounced (they aren’t as they’d be complaining vocally if they weren’t properly indexed in Google)?

In any case, it all goes to demonstrate your own point in SEO Fast Start that it just doesn’t make any sense with a long term business site to get involved in any shady optimisation or promotion - sooner or later it will come back to bite you.

Thanks for stopping by with your story. An interesting perspective.

On the other hand, if you had read my post more carefully I didn’t say that I cared about what college the faculty graduated from - I could care less - I said I would like to read a testimonial from someone who’s had success before joining Stompernet and has good academic credentials.

Why? Because such a person would have good critical faculties, an eye for bunk, an ability to learn from written material on his or her own and would be able to express his or her viewpoint articulately.

I am also somewhat sceptical about your comments for two reasons:
a. tone (aggressive, sarcastic chest beating)
b. no last name, no website, no mention of the business (i.e. anonymous)
c. guru style language (nobrainer, spamming the crap, plans into action)

Please see this post for more information on anonymous testimonial.

Not that I’m saying that this is your case, but it would make it easier to credit your testimonial if you would step out of the shadows.

In case, I do appreciate your contribution.

$800/month is a lot of money, to be sure. That’s why I joined the program with intentions of cancelling inside the refund period. What happened? I grew my business from $12k/revenues/month to over $65k and I haven’t even turned on PPC yet. I went to *gasp* a state university! Not that I’m the next Wal-mart, but $800/mos is a nobrainer at this point.

Personally, I could care less where/when/if the faculty members graduted from college. As long as what they teach makes me money and builds my business bigger/faster/more profitable. Maybe I should start READING the SEO Ivy League Elitists who talk down on ‘putting condoms on links’ because it’s not what the web is about. All the sudden they get very Mother Theresa-ish when talking about nofollow, but they have no problem spamming the crap out of every other spot on the web if it works to their advantage. It’ll be a good story to tell their buddies at the next conference.

So it’s either being cynical/criticizing/compaining about SEO practices with the SEO Elitists. Or it’s watching video, learning from people that actually make money building real businesses, and then putting those plans into action. Hmmmm.

I’m afraid I can’t tell you the details of how Brad Fallon’s site was hacked out of the Google index, because Google still hasn’t fixed the bug yet, a full year after I discovered it.

It wasn’t a penalty, it was a hack, and it could happen to anyone, in fact, it happens a lot. If you can control enough links, you can do the same to anyone.

If you’re super curious, look at the source code for MyWeddingFavors and read the robots meta tag - that’s only removed when we have a validated spider visit. If we didn’t do that, they’d be right back out in a week.

The education stipulation for the testimonials is a bit of a red herring - as I wrote it I knew that some people would jump all over it. Good point about Yale bending academic standards for the son of the director of the CIA to graduate.

The reason I included an education requirement is not because I think everything is learned in university - as far as I know Bill Gates did not graduate. On the other hand, in a good university with good professors one is taught critical thinking, how to learn independently and how to express oneself coherently.

The kind of testimonial that I am very tired of reading dates back from the late Corey Rudl’s big campaigns. He’d get some guy sitting up on the back of a pickup truck and here would be his story:

Hey y’all Jim Bob from Alabama and I don’t know nothin’ ’bout dem ‘puters. Been in the truck tarp business seven years but tarp busiiness is tough. Barely enough to run electricity for ours trailer. But since I went online the first time and just bought myself this really great big course from that boy Rudl up in Canada I sell more tarps than any other body in Christendom. I sellin’ 500 tarps a day and rankin’ number two for tarps in that Google and number one in that old Yahoo. We been bought ourselves a luxury trailer now. Still don’t know how the internet works, but from here it looks like just a giant ATM in the sky. If you just buy Corey Rudl’s course, in a few months maybe you’ll be living in a brand spanking new Beaver Contessa just like me. See y’all.

And at the end of the day, it would turn out that Jim Bob was a test case and that his whole enterprise had been set up by the IMC for him. Who had been spamming left-side, right-side, upside-down on Jim Bob’s behalf. And that at the present time, Jim Bob’s website had been banned from the search engines and he’d had to sell the Contessa for chicken feed, and was working overtime shoveling cattle dung to pay off consulting debts on his Mastercard for the Internet Marketing Centre advisors who’d set him up in the whole sham. I think it is interesting to note that the poster site for StomperNet (MyWeddingFavors.com) has also been banned in Google (PR 0). I’m sure the site is clean now but at one point it must not have been. [Update: MyWeddingFavors.com is showing up in the top ten for Wedding Favors albeit near the bottom.]

The other kind of testimonial which is worthless is anything from somebody like Joe Vitale or Mike Filsaime (I’m just naming these two as a couple of the most promiscuous and prominent offenders - there’s lots more names where these guys came from). Those guys have given testimonials to more trash (although they also have their name on a few quality offerings) than the garbagemen in Mexico City. Whores have a great deal more discretion about who they sleep with than these guys do in what they will do for an affiliate cut. A lot of their own products are rubbish for that matter - mainly incestuous internet marketing materials to sell to internet marketers.

The endorsements that I have seen for StomperNet are generally in one or the other of these categories. If you could point out to me some specific testimonials that don’t fit into either of these categories - I don’t have time to go through dozen of gushy videos, I’d rather read something coherent - I’d be delighted to take a look and post a revised opinion.

I’d also love to see numbers on income. StomperNet members income pre-StomperNet and StomperNet members income post-StomperNet. I know such numbers would be difficult to gather but would be very persuasive. Not just the top end, but across the whole membership.

About SEO Fast Start, I have downloaded it and had a quick look at it on the screen (before Aaron made his post. I’ll be printing it out and reading it carefully. I am on your mailing list and have always enjoyed your newsletter. I will review SEO Fast Start in detail next week.

SEO is going through a huge transformation right now so it’s kind of your to release your latest findings. Have a good weekend.

I don’t think that blog does justice to the evolution of this thing from an “internet marketing” product to what it’s become, but we’re not super focused on external communication right now. (Secretly, I welcome distractions like your post…)

The most recent case study probably won’t be up to your elitist educational standards, since she didn’t finish college, but I can assure you she’s quite educated and far more intelligent than at least one Yale grad I could mention…

For the rest of them, I couldn’t tell you where they went to school, because I just don’t care. When someone asks me to help them, I don’t ask where they went to school, I ask them what their goals are, and try to assess their current level of knowledge and experience.

As far as using video for instruction, that’s certainly not all we use. However, when you’re talking about web-related stuff it’s kind of helpful to be able to see it on screen. If you do it right, video is actually quite flexible.

You have to design your courses well, so that it’s a sequence of short sessions, where we can replace one piece or several if it’s necessary, to keep things up to date. If we have to chuck a 16-hour course and start from scratch because there’s been some major change, we’ll do that, but so far we’ve only had to change individual modules.

One of the major challenges the faculty took on when we joined Stompernet was figuring out how to organize the content, which is growing faster than most members can consume it. A bunch of information, no matter how good it is, can be somewhat overwhelming even for experienced marketers.

So developing a modular e-learning system that can give it sufficient structure has been the highest priority for us. The scope of Stompernet’s content is much more than Brad and Andy planned for when they launched, but the members need what they need so we try to deliver it.

We’re building something that has never existed before. It’s fun, but as Leslie said, we also “sweat blood” with a lot of long hours… and sometimes we have to put up with people who have done nothing, sniping at us because we’re doing something new.

One more thing… SEO Fast Start is my best effort at creating a free beginner’s guide to SEO after 10 years of doing SEO, writing about it, and teaching it. It is not “flypaper.”

I’m happy to discuss the pros and cons of different aspects with anyone who has actually read it. There is always room for improvement, for greater clarity, etc. especially since I decided early on (1st edition in 2001) to limit the length to 100 pages.

That’s why I have a support site and newsletter, so if I didn’t make something clear, or got something wrong, I can communicate with my readers.

In fact, an update on “linking out” is coming this weekend, because if Aaron felt the way he did, others may have interpreted it the same way - especially since so many seem to have read nothing but Aaron’s post.

I think I suggested I would like to see the testimonials of 4 or 5 smart, well-educated paying (not honorary) members who were making good money off of their websites.

Saying something is so, does not make it so.

I do wonder about the value of immortalising so much of this know-how in video. I know exactly how expensive good video is as I used to produce and direct television commercials. But technology/internet is changing so quickly, I’m not sure more than a quarter of this video has a shelf life of more than a year.

In any case, I do want to be very clear, I have no interest in any kind of a flame war. These are honest questions I am posing myself. These are my frank impressions at this point. If I’m wrong, please show me how and why.