robots.txt, a protocol that helps search engines to find out which part of a website should not be included in its index. According to Wikipedia

The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable.

As an SEO, you must have tried this search operator in Google: [site:example.com]. This simply returns the pages from example.com that have been crawled and included in the Google index. The Google bot does not crawl any pages that are ‘disallowed’ by the robots.txt file. Everything makes sense till now but what if your robots.txt file started to appear in Google search results?

To be honest I thought somebody is poking fun at me. It doesn’t sound logical at all. After reading a tweet by Peter Handley aka @ismepete I took it seriously though. He is one of the brightest minds in the search industry!

Shocked, amazed and I guess somewhat a mix of both, I quickly jumped over to Google to see it for myself and guess what I found?

You see, Peter is not the only one dealing with this but websites like

• Dailymail
• Webmasterworld
• Last.fm

and many others… all have their robots.txt file indexed in Google.

You see, it’s simply illogical to block ‘robots.txt’ in a robots.txt file. This didn’t make any sense to me:

Why Google actually indexes this file and how to de-index from the search engine?

Why does Google index the robots.txt?

There can be multiple reasons why Google indexes the robots.txt file but I have figured out two as the most common reasons why search engines index particular pages and later show them as results for a query.

1. Links:

Google follows links, you know it, right? From one link to another and the chain continues. When links are pointing to the robots.txt file from external sources (different websites pointing to your robots.txt file) or internally (some page of your website that points to robots.txt file), Google will probably index it.

1. Social signals:

The faster way to get Google’s attention to a page I know is to share it on social platforms like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook (Google currently can’t see private Facebook sharing activity). When for some reason you or someone share your robots.txt on social sites this can be another common reason that makes Google index the page file.

Consider Rishi Lakhani who wrote a letter to Google in his website’s robot.txt file: Check this out, it’s still there on his website. Rishi Lakhani shared his creative robots.txt on Twitter and it went viral. According to Shared Count, Rishi Lakhani’s robots.txt file got:

• Facebook Likes: 21
• Facebook Comments: 8
• Facebook Shares: 33
• Twitter: 1232

Now, you know why Google will probably going to index your robots.txt file so let’s talk about action now!

How to de-index the robots.txt?

Don’t link, don’t share:

This is not always in your control, especially not to make people link a specific page on websites like the “Webmasterworld” forum or Last.fm. Theoretically though if you don’t link it and don’t share on social platforms, Google will not show it.

URL removal request:

That’s the only idea I have found, simple yet powerful and safe way to get your robots.txt file out of the Google index. It’s great because the user’s site ownership is verified and shows even the progress for each request.

These are two of the ways I know how to deal with the above mentioned issue. In case you think you have a better solution for the robots.txt indexing problem, please share it with the community in the comment section.

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Link building or attracting links is quite hard these days. Most people are looking for short cuts like paid links in spite of them being outside the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

While some big brands may get away with paid links at least as long Google buys them as well most average website owners have to sift through forums or trust clandestine text link ad market places. Most people new to SEO simply don’t know where to buy links. Your search is over!

I’ve found a place you can buy links by the millions without ever getting caught.

Where is the land of all links you can buy? It’s Turkey. It seems Matt Cutts has never been there and thus the site in question openly advertises their link selling business. The company is called Ülker and their scheme is quite ingenious! After buying the link you can actually drink it! Yes, it’s no joke. You can drink the link! It’ even prepackaged in cans or bottles. Also there are plenty of flavors.

Long story short: Buying links by Ülker is completely risk free. You won’t get penalized for them whatsoever.

Unless of course Google finds a way to crawl your intestines. So next time you ask where to buy links at least don’t ask Google. You may find dubious offers like this one. Also it’s like asking a police officer where to buy pot!

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It has been almost 3 years ago when I started the SEO 2.0 blog. SEO 2.0 is stale by now. There is business as usual by now. No innovation. No next big thing. At least when it comes to SEO 2.0!

On the other hand there really is the next big thing around the corner! It’s SEO 3.0! I’ve joked about SEO 3.0 in the past already but today I want to write about it for real.

SEO 3.0 is all about local, mobile and social mixed together to form the new Web of real people. The locomoso (short for local, mobile, social) is a game changer. The Web as we know it with people hiding behind avatars and “surfing the Web” on their personal computers is so last decade, the zero years so to say.

From now on real people will socialize location based with their mobiles. So in short SEOs will be hanging around with the hipsters.

Today web based early adopters are already late. Hipsters are not limited to the virtual Web. They form a real Web with their

1. GPS devices
2. real time reviews
3. Foursquare t-shirts

We had WiFi detectors in the past both on backpacks and t-shirts. Today you can detect your local friends via Foursquare t-shirts. You review

1. shops
2. restaurants
3. bars
4. clubs
5. concerts

in real time and tell your friends:

“I’m at the Lady Gaga concert. She sucks big time, a giant plastic dick. We’re going to the suicide karaoke bar next door.”

Such messages are common these days. People move from one location to another, tell their peers and within minutes your shop, bar or concert hall might become empty as a church on Sunday.

As a SEO 3.0 you can’t just stay online with your computer. You take your iPhone or Android smartphone, purchase the latest apps and mingle with the hipsters. Or rather you become a hipster yourself!

How to become a hipster? No problem:

• Nobody ever says s/he’s a hipster so don’t tell anybody you are one.
• Dress in ridiculous colors. Pink jeans, long hair, glitter hats, “eat the rich” t-shirts.
• Make sure you have the latest and most expensive trendy hipster products by Nike or Apple.
• Hipsters don’t care for slave labor Made in China as long it’s cool so make sure to never speak about politics.
• Drink cocktails you never have heard of.
• As long as you’re undercover you even have to take drugs (or better take placebos and behave like drugged).
• Be arrogant and aloof. Somebody wears the wrong brand or has a Windows mobile phone, ridicule the fool.
• Use Web slang like “epic FAIL”, “LOL” and “OMG” in real life as well. Hipsters are both online and offline all the time.
• Never have a boy or girlfriend. Hipsters are only mating randomly when drunk.
• Make sure to post your “wasted” pics while drunk or having sex in real time.
• Never care for tomorrow: Peak oil, climate change, LHC black holes? Forget the doom, consume!

When you’re a hipster SEO 3.0 becomes a completely natural part of you. You don’t have have to optimize anymore. You become SEO 3.0 while becoming a hipster. Are you SEO 3.0?

This post was last updated on April, 1st 2010.

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Most traditional SEO techniques are boring. Even worse: SEO is actual work in most cases. I’m lazy like hell. I wish I had a 4 hour work week or something.

Other people automate everything but I suck at programming.

Or they outsource to some overseas sweatshops to poor comment spamming Indians with basic English skills (“thank you for this great post” anybody?) but I’m too ethical to do that.

As the lazy bum I am I had to come up with some special albeit funny SEO techniques that work for me instead. I came up with a few. I’d like to present you the dirty dozen of funny SEO techniques for lazy bums to use at your own peril but make sure for Mad Cuts the serial SEO killer not to notice!

1. Seek enlightenment in a Korean monastery or just hire a Korean SEO named Seo to comment on blogs.
2. Use a funny name for your blog, something like SEOctopus.
3. Wear a funny hat, it does not have to be a sombrero, any hat hat that is huge enough will do.
4. Employ comics like Dilbert or Ranked Hard to spread your message.
5. Use a ridiculous medium nobody else would ever use in your niche. Ever heard of the Life after death quilts?
6. Use only most awesomely amazing creative & funny language in your writings.
7. Become one with your audience (by commenting yourself on your blog posing a different persons).
8. Insert funny sounding typos into your texts to improve your copy biting skills.
9. Use spell checkers in creative ways, that will defiantly improve the quality of your content.
10. Ridicule cat bloggers who pose as experts for different species.
11. Spice up your blog posts with some political correct sexism bitching around about men and technology.
12. Make your readers actually smell what you are talking about you link horny bastards!
13. Make up really fake secrets and then disclose them as real ones but don’t tell others about this secret technique.
14. Offend your audience and make them fight back in the comments.
15. Insert numbers in your post headline but then make sure not to stick with them.
16. Lie, lie, lie! While at it never, I repeat NEVER use irony! Especially avoid using UPPERCASE, bold and italics to highlight it!
17. Avoid dropping purple cows out of helicopters! Only use black and white cows for that purpose.
18. Ridicule yourself! People will love you for that! People feel better with jerks around than they do with kings.
19. Start a feud with a well known authority in your niche and never let go! Lyndon, I’ll get you sooner or later!
20. When nothing else helps try some good old colon cleansing, you’ll feel like a new born afterwards (or like abducted by aliens).

Do you know other funny SEO techniques? In case you do make sure NOT to add them in the comments, especially you poor Indian guys in the sweat shops. Also don’t read any more posts on this SEO blog and don’t follow me on Twitter.

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Question mark is a CC image by Marco Belucci

With the meteoric rise of Twitter and Facebook the social discovery service StumbleUpon got almost forgotten. Many people still use it for casual browsing though. It’s very difficult to use SU for business though unless you use the StumleUpon URL shortener. Any other business use is basically prohibited, especially self promotional stumbling.

While you would assume that at least the private way of using the StumbleUpon system is in a way desired by SU I was amazed to find out that the just for fun stumbles I submitted rarely got popular.

Popular SU submissions still get substantial traffic in the thousands which can work financially if you have CPM (cost per mille, paid per 1000 impressions) ads on your blog or publication.

Many stumblers by now send out their submissions to all of their followers to spread the word.

This can get quite annoying if the same person sends such “shouts” daily and even mediocre content gets send out. I use the “share this” functionality rarely (the last time I tried it was broken anyways). Also I preferred the old “pull” way of StumbleUpon. Pushing your submissions or favorites by sending them to everybody is just not the way SU was intended initially.

So after a while of looking closely at what happens or doesn’t while discovering new pages on SU I came up with 7 factors that influence whether a submission will work on SU:

category
Which category do you want to submit your discovery? Is there a matching one (for SEO there is by now)? Is the category popular enough or should you choose a broader one (like Internet instead of SEO)? Submitting something about SEO in the SEO category will get you only a few visitors but in case it’s SEO only you are off topic in the broader Internet category. Try “marketing” or “web development” then.

general interest
Is the submission of general interest for a wider audience or is it just valuable for o very small community? Is this community on SU at all (the SEO community is partly)? How can you make your submission interesting for a wider audience? You can make it humorous, bizarre, geeky to gain the attention of a larger group.

friends
In order for a submission to work on SU you need friends but not just any friends but those who subscribe to the same topics as you. SU sends your discoveries to your friends first. Ask yourself: Are your friends interested in this topic? Mine are interested in SEO, search and marketing but most ignore my art, bicycling or feminism stumbles. Would it hurt a submission when you submit it due to your lack of friends in this interest group? Do you know somebody who stumbles often in this category? Maybe it’s better to let someone else who has more friends.

time
Do you submit while most stumblers (in the US) are asleep? Do you submit on the weekend when most of the business stumblers are off line? Do you submit a story too late, when several others have already submitted other sources? While SU is not as US centered as some of the social sites still the largest part of the community are US users. On weekends most people interested in SEO and other business won’t see your discovery. Also submitting a story after several have submitted it already will not lead to success.

preferences
Sometimes submitting a post in the “right” category won’t make you succeed. For instance an article like “Why Feminism Sucks” certainly won’t work in the feminism category. So ask yourself: Does the group of people subscribing to the respective SU channel approve of your message? Does a certain audience prefer images or videos? People interested in the “birds” category want to see images of birds not texts about birds. People subscribing to “animation” most probably like Flash files. Does a submission have the right hook for the audience you wan to reach?

pitfalls
Does your submission contain NSFW for imagery or strong language? Some people will disapprove of that or downright mark it as r-rated or x-rated content and it’ll diappear. Does your submission display a certain political bias? Is the source you submit from a low quality site nobody trusts? Try to minimize such pitfalls and work with main stream topics and sources. I don’t do that and that’s one of the main reasons most of my submission don’t get popular. I often submit radical art, weird bikes and pro-feminist articles from obscure sources that only a few people are interested in or agree with. Btw. Art is one of the most popular topics on SU.

push
Is the page you submit attractive enough to work by itself or does it need an initial push? In case it needs one send it out to your friends or just those you know are leaders in a certain category. Can you motivate your friends outside of SU to stumble a submission? Twitter or Skype might be your tools here. SU devalues stumbles by friends when they were informed through the system. Will the submission work after the initial push? You can ask dozens of friends to push you but with other people approving as well you won’t succeed on SU, the traffic will rather equal the number of friends.

The SU system is very complex.

The right answers to these 21 questions do not guarantee that you get it right. In case you need a simpler tool for spreading the word try Twitter. SU also disallows actual business usage. You are not allowed to advertise your brand like you do on Twitter. StumbleUpon might ban you out of the blue for that and never disclose the reasons.

The best thing of SU is the longevity of your submissions.

Once you get a submission really popular it can work for years or get popular a few times. I still get a steady trickle of traffic from submissions that got popular in 2007. Discoveries that get hundreds of reviews basically stay popular all of the time.

Last updated: March 27th, 2011.

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Moreover I’d like to encourage you to write a post with reasons to follow you as well!

First things first though. Here are the 10 reasons to follow me/SEO 2.0 on Twitter. You can:

1. Look at the biggest sombrero in Twitter town!
2. Read daily updates, not just a few times a week.
3. Get fresh SEO, social media and blogging links you in many cases don’t on SEO 2.0 and on my Delicious feed either
4. Find out who’s cool at Twitter and in the search and social media marketing sphere by watching me communicate with these people
5. Get some hard core rants: I’m fervently anti-Digg, wary of Google and I kick fake Web celebrities like Jason “SEO is bullshit” Calacanis in the butt
6. Enjoy my one of a kind humor while I ridicule bogus media phenomenons like the swine flu
7. Endure my limitless arrogance while I tell you what SEO, social media and the Web are about
8. Get some bizarre world views fueled by my diverse background in Eastern Europe, Hip Hop, media activism, vanguard art, web development etc.
9. Learn how to network with people you’ll never actually see or meet in real life watching me doing it
10. Experience the benefits of anti-SEO or SEO 2.0, me retweeting, stumbling and sphinning your links in case they’re worth it

Now think about yourself:

• What makes you truly unique?
• What do you tweet about people could really care for?
• How do you support your virtual social network?
• How do you contribute to your industry, subculture or community?
• What are the reasons you’re on the Web, into social media and Twitter in particular?

Take one or two of the best answers for each question and devise your won list! Tell me several reasons to follow you on Twitter. I might do it! Did I just convince you? OK, then. Follow me now @onreact_com

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Now that I think of it my life wasn’t that boring. This is just a part of the interesting things that I did or happened to me. So do you still like me, a former “bum” ;-) Well, in fact I wasn’t homeless for real like people sleeping on the street.

Anyways here are the rules of the 7 unknown things meme:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see above)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they’ve been tagged. (you’ll just have to trust trackbacks and such)

So I have to find 7 people who still haven’t take part, and whose dirty secrets I want to expose. That’s not that easy. OK, let’s try:

1. Wiep of Wiep.net
2. Steven of Traffikd
3. Marty of AimClear
4. Kevin of SEOptimise
5. Lyndon of Cornwallseo.com
6. James of Online Marketing Banter
7. Roger of on.eti.me

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These are the top 12 search referers this month on SEO 2.0:

SEO 2.0 has much more direct, social media traffic and other referers than search traffic so it might be a bad comparison. Nonetheless the word “alone” brings 10 times more traffic than the term “SEO blog” I’m globally in the top 10 on Google.com (at 7 recently viewed with an US proxy).

So do I need to tell you why image optimization is important for blogs?

• art
• photography
• design
• gadget
• ecommerce

oriented blogs can get big amounts of image search traffic.

Image search as part of Universal Search is a must optimize for in SEO 2.0

Some bizarre aspects of it:

• I’m at number 1 in Google.com for “WordPress” in image search.
• I’m not even on the first page results at 10 in the US for “alone” in image search so there must be a whole damn lot lonely people out there.

Next week I will tell you how to optimize for Google image search. It’s different than most people tell you. Forget all the alt-attributes etc.

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CC: Eye am feeling silly by Cayusa.

OK, I admit it, I’m part of the problem here. It all started with link baiting a few years ago. Then blogging for a social media audience has become so common place that sometimes it seems there is not a single sane blog post out there anymore.

I’m guilty of popularizing blogging for social media too.

Yeah, I write lists all the time and I use “top 10″ and “10 reasons why” lists all over the place. Over the recent months I have been rethinking my strategy and on the look out for alternatives.

First let me explain though the top 10 most awesomely amazing creative & funny reasons why blogging for social media sucks:

1. “Amazing, Awesome, Creative, Funny, Extreme, Insane Headlines”! These and other adjectives are so widely overused, especially by Asian content thieves with basic English skills that I already bounce once I discern one of these terms in a headline. I don’t need insane software, funny architecture and even creative design. I don’t like them especially if they are the most insane, funniest and amazing or creative. Software must be useful, architecture sustainable and design usable.

2. Top 10 this, Top 10 that. There are already blogs that offer only top 10 lists. While numbers in posts work, 7 is my favorite, thinking in lists makes your posts shallow and just an overview without deep insight. Sometimes it’s better to focus on one issue in depth instead. Your subscribers will honor that.

3. Tips, Tools, Resources Lists. I use Delicious almost daily and do you know what? In most cases I never return to the lists I bookmarked. I always think: Well, great list; I’ll save it for later when I needed it. I rarely do. In most cases I don’t have the time to check them out later. So all the tips, tools and resources just get thrown away and stink in data nirvana without ever get read. Considering the long time Delicious traffic which is barely existent I’m not the only one.

4. Social Media Focus. Blogs that are geared towards social media like Smashing Magazine, Mashable or WebUrbanist still work well. Sometimes it seems they already have listed everything at least twice and they attempt to venture into new fields of expertise. The broader the less targeted though. I end up seeing the same amazing, awesome, creative, funny stuff here again and again. The content thieves make it extra redundant so that everything gets recycled at least half a dozen times.

5. The next big thing. Mixx, Plurk, FriendFeed – they’re all great not so new services anymore. The hype around them didn’t make them the next YouTube or Flickr though. The attention economy can’t be fooled. People have only a limited time to spend online and they get used to old services no matter how basic or bad they are. So the next big thing can’t be a thing that takes away more of my life time while adding workload. If it’s better then the last one I need at least a way to export my data and in the best case my network (aka “friends”) to the new one. Just because I buy a new car I don’t throw away my clothes and family either and search for a new one.

6. Make Money Online with Whatever. It worked for a few people with hard work and the unique selling proposition of being the first but hundreds of thousands of bloggers can’t get rich by blogging and most of them don’t. Get real. The whole MMO niche is a parody of itself by now. I earn my money blogging by now but mostly due the fact that it’s connected to my SEO business. It was somehow a transition from SEO to business blogging for clients. They make money by ecommerce, that is selling stuff online or helping other sell stuff online.

7. Best Hosting, Ebook, Premium WordPress Theme. Come on guys, I won’t buy that Bluehost is the best, your ebook makes me this and that and the Thesis WordPress theme will enlarge my penis. Even the most trustworthy bloggers tend to become low level gray hat marketers when they try to sell you something via their blogs. I don’t believe you because I know myself what the best hosting is and I can’t even find the time to read all the free ebooks I downloaded. Also my penis is big enough, no sorry, I mean a new WordPress theme doesn’t have to be pushed and shoveled down my throat. I know there are commissions for them.

8. Friends, Fans and Followers. Who are all these people who want to be friends, are my fans or followers? On some services like BlogCatalog or StumbleUpon I completely stopped checking who is befriending me. It might sound antisocial nowadays but I like to know my friends. Yes, I’m quite conservative, I must have at least some eye contact with you before befriending you. People whose avatar I have never seen before (or after) want to or are my friends, fans and followers. Give me a break. Don’t ask me to be a friend, behave like one, at least a virtual one. Do something with or for me, contact me, vote for me.

9. Banning Members. Social media like Digg or StumbleUpon tend to become quite antisocial once they become big enough to be sold. You are social capital for them. They want to sell your relationships with other people and the work you did for free for them for years. You are not allowed to have a personal gain out of those services though. That’s why Digg and recently StumbleUpon have banned many power users and bloggers who dared to submit their own stuff once in a while. I don’t mean the regular obnoxious spammers. I mean legit technology, self improvement and even green bloggers! Social media is like slavery : You work for nothing and they can do whatever they want with you. You have no rights.

10. Amorphous Masses. Who are the thousands of visitors that flock to your site to disappear in seconds or minutes if they stay reaaaally long? These people are similar to the audience in a subway station. You’re the street musician. They enter the trains and you’ll never see them again. Even if you play again and again in the same place daily, most of them won’t become your true fans. They will recognize and forget you in the same minute. The subway or the Web is not TV and you’re not Madonna or Micheal Jackson.

Is this a doom and gloom post? Am I suicidal? Nope.

What’s the alternatives, the solutions? I repeat: It’s the 1000 true fans mantra as of now. I’m not sure myself yet. I guess it works. Even the numbers work. In case 1000 people spend 100$ per year for you it’s 100k dollars you earned. That’s enough for a decent living in most countries. Also 100$ means less then a 10$ subscription per month for instance. Would you spend 10$ for your favorite singer in a month? You probably already do by going to one concert per year.

The information should become deeper not broader, easier digestible without being shallow. Useful and unique instead of “lowest common denominator and extremist”.

You could argue that I don’t need social media anymore with more than 1600 subscribers – I already have an audience but exaggerating doesn’t work that well anyways and it will less and less. The audience is already well saturated and tired of the same headlines and postings over and over.

Are you my true fan? Come on! Tell me that my penis is big enough!

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CC: Santa chucks the finger by BoSoxBrent.

It’s this dreaded season again and all of us in the SEO industry will have to endure humiliations we have to face each year. To lessen the impact of the Christmas SEO woes I compiled a list of 10 holiday no-nos for SEO specialists to avoid at all costs:

1. Do not tell your relatives you practice “SEO”. Tell them you’re an internet specialist. If they want to know more, tell them you optimize websites. Then change the topic of the conversation. Remember, some family members will always want to know but will never be able to understand. Then all of a sudden everybody in the room will ask whether you work for Google, manipulate search results and whether it’s illegal.

2. Do not tell your girlfriend or wife that your PageRank got bigger or worse, smaller. Especially as she might get it wrong that your “paycheck” got smaller.

3. Don’t try to explain to anybody that Google rankings are not “natural”. You shatter world views! People either won’t believe you or they will become cynical and detached when they realize that Google is not God and rankings are not based on traffic or a website “being the best”.

4. In case someone asks whether you’re a computer specialist say you are not, you only use your computer like other people use cars. Otherwise they will make you fix their broken Windows XP machine. Don’t try it! You will spend hours and hours with it and give up in the end anyways. You’re an internet specialist, you have no clue how computers work.

5. Do not tell relatives that their websites do not rank well or are not optimized. In 2009 they will want you to optimize the meta tags or the PageRank, for free. Most importantly they will not want you to change the site or add some content because they love the site the way it is. “You just need to do some SEO, nothing else.” ;-)

6. Do not tell younger cousins that they should not post their private party images (where they are drunk or naked or both) on MySpace or Facebook. They will hate you and think that “you’re sooo conservative!”

7. Don’t try to explain to average citizens why you use Twitter. People will think you are crazy to tell the world what you have for lunch.

8. Don’t try to point out to your (potential) parents-in-law that the “search results” on top of Google are actually ads. You make them look stupid and they won’t like you anymore for the next 10 – 20 years.

9. In case the conversation touches topics like spam, blogs, hacking etc. leave the room instantly. Otherwise you will be the person to have to explain yourself why SEO is spam, comment spam and SEO hacking no matter how white hat you are.

10. Don’t criticize Google for anything. People love Google. So you telling them about privacy concerns, a monopoly or China will make them assume that you are a crazy conspiracy theorist.

I’m pretty sure that there will arise more problems like these. Try to generalize this advice and in case you do not want to take any risk, just say that you do research most of the time (you do, keyword research).

Related posts:

1. SEO 2.0 Reality Check: What’s True What Not?
2. 3 Way Link Exchange with SEO Spammers Is a Dead End
3. PageRank Superstition: 200+ Signals Are Not One Google Juice

1. SEO 2.0 Reality Check: What’s True What Not?
2. 3 Way Link Exchange with SEO Spammers Is a Dead End
3. PageRank Superstition: 200+ Signals Are Not One Google Juice