There were two hooks that got me.

1. I was able to specify multiple forms of backlinks that the bloggers would use.
2. The Commissions that Blogadvertising Store was going to draw from seemed rather small.

Taken direct from thier website, this is thier charges.

As you may know, many blog advertising companies charge advertiser 30-35%/order and there is also a campaign creation fee of $5-10. Other blog advertising companies don’t charge the advertisers but charge the bloggers offering them 65% from their income.

1. Our commission is ONLY 5% (other blog advertising companies will charge you for at least 20%). Using our system, an advertiser can save at least 15-20% from their blog advertising budget. Sounds good?

I actually did two campaigns with this company and the SEO benefits were significant. I was totally sold on thier service and was even telling friends about them.

Then I recieved an email from one of the bloggers.

I have tried to help your cause by promoting your website and your mission and all I asked was to be paid on time. Here is the post I have written for your company: URL deleted

I have gone out of my way to contact people from www.blogadvertisingstore.com (Paying Post). I have sent e-mails weekly and still no reply. Here are some links to what others are saying about their site. I guess they don’t have a good reputation. I have no other choice than to contact YOU (The Company) that I posted for directly since they aren’t paying me! I have also written a post promoting their site and if I don’t get paid, all my posts WILL be deleted and I will start blogging about how BAD the company is. This in return might hinder your success and I hate to do that. Will you please try contacting them as well. My payment is already a month late! Thank You- Sorry it has come to this.

This person also included the following link in the email which was really eye opening to me.

Blog Advertising

She included a couple other links as well, but this was the most informative. Evidently Blog Advertising Store has been gaining a reputation for taking money from the advertisers and only sometimes paying the bloggers. I soon paid her for the post that she did for me.

Conclusion – I need to find another solution for my pay per post needs. While this seeming scam is to my advantage as an advertiser, I would prefer to take my business to an establishment that works reputably for all parties involved.

I have been recomended to check out these three: PayPerPost, Blogsvertise, and IZEA. These three seem to have a better reputation among the bloggers.

I will keep the details sparse as I do not wish to give away who my client was. While I never personally spoke with the individual who serviced me, his name is Agam and this is his email address – agam@wildnettechnologies.com. He quoted me at $7.00 per link for US based blogs. I took a chance and sent him $140 by PayPal. A few days later, he sent me this spreadsheet.

The positive is that they did what they said they would do. The links are legitimate one way inbound links with the desired keywords embedded in the link. And they are in the US blogsphere. Furthermore, they were in blogs that had related content.

The negative is that they were mostly all Blogspot blogs. Blogspot is not bad. However, I would prefer more variety.

In the end, I would say that I do plan to use their services again. However, just like anything else in the SEO world, I would not use this approach as the only approach at getting ranking – nor as a one stop shop for all of your incoming links. Agam could probably tell you more about their additional services. I personally was only going after this service that they were willing to provide for me.

- Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

This statement has now been removed.

So much uproar had been given to this one simple statement. DMOZ had become a coveted directory which became very difficult to get into. DMOZ even got its own discussion forum where webmaster after webmaster would vent about the corruption of DMOZ as the webmaster could not get their site listed. Frankly, nobody would have cared about DMOZ without that statement in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Now that this statement is gone, I am sure the cries of anger will be soon gone as well. After all, how could there be corruption in a free service maintained by unpaid moderators who do not make their presence known. Furthermore, who really uses DMOZ to go shopping anyways? Do people that are listed in DMOZ get a significant amount of referral traffic from the site? Since I was never able to get my sites listed in DMOZ, I may never know.

The Yahoo Directory was the real one in question. You could pay Yahoo $299 and get listed – well, that is if they accept you. That is a nice chunk of change for one incoming link. The question is whether or not it is worth it.

For my Tire Chain website, I decided to give it a try. The webpage that holds the tire chain companies had a whole two companies listed. Now it has three companies listed since Tire Chain Dealer is now on the list. The page of the tire chain sites has a Page Rank of 1.

Here are the results.

1. The Yahoo Directory Listing made no know impact on my organic listings.
2. I recieved some solicitations during the first few days as some internet marketing companies use the “New Listings” section to find leads.
3. Since removal from the “New Listings” section, I have recieved no referral traffic for about 6 straight weeks from the directory – and I am in season for tire chain sales.

My conclusion is that the Yahoo directory is not worth $300. Instead, consider spending your $300 getting a good press release written.

Frankly, at this time, I had never heard of a 301 redirect. But being open to learn new things, I researched the 301 redirects and found this post by Matt Cutts, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/.

In a nutshell, a 301 redirect is a permenant redirect. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect. The new domain name recieved a 302 redirect from the original domain name and hence a penalty in Google probably for being duplicate content of an existing domain. The original domain name was simply being considered as temporarily offline.

So I dug in and figured out that the redirects I had set up in IIS did not have the “a permanent redirection for this resource” box checked. Problem solved? At least now I have the redirect set up properly.

Here is an example of what a 301 redirect looks like in IIS.

Here are a couple of examples of doing 301 redirects when using Apache / Linux.
http://trisummit.net/2008/07/01/using-htaccess-to-redirect-a-single-webpage/
http://trisummit.net/2008/05/30/how-to-redirect-a-website-to-remove-the-www/

It still took another 6 weeks or so for the page rank in the toolbar to change. It remained showing up in the toolbar with a ranking of 0/10 throughout this time. Then finally on July 31, it changed to a ranking of 4/10.

Affect on Search Engine Results
While I do not have clear knowledge of how the Quest site was affected in the search engine results, I do have a second example where I do know how it was affected.

My tire chain website had a name which I chose to get rid of. Originally, this obsolete website was the catalog for my new site. I was reluctant to ditch the orginal name at first for one reason–the placement on the long tail search results for “Rud tire chains” was good. While the results for “Tire Chains” was horrible on the original domain name being on page 35, the results for “Rud tire chains” was perfect in the number 2 spot on page 1–right behind the manufacturer’s web page. Now the new domain name showed up on page 15 for “Tire chains” – much better. However, it as in position 5 on page 1 for “Rud tire chains”. I did not want to lose that number 2 spot which the original domain name had. Also, I had already changed about as many of the links as I was going to get changed to the new domain name and I believe that mostly all of the link changes were already saturated in Google for about a two week time period.

I took a chance to see what would happen if I put up a 301 redirect from the old domain name to the catalog directory of the new domain name and placed all of the contents of the old site into the catalog directory of the new site.

There was no change in Google for about ten days. Then finally the 301 redirect kicked in with Google. The old domain name disappeared as I had expected. Then new domain name jumped up into the coveted number two spot that I was afraid to lose. I even jumped up two pages on Google for the keyword search of “Tire Chains” to where I am now on page 13. This was a total win for me. Now I have the domain name I like, the positive ranking of the old domain name, and improved ranking of the new domain name.

Conclusion
A 301 redirect is a critical piece that all SEO experts must be familiar with. Google appears to handle it very nicely. I have been warned in other blog posts that the other search engines may not be so friendly to the 301 redirect. Since the vast majority of my traffic comes from Google anyways, I am not all that concerned with it.

Redirect 301 /old.php http://domainname.com/new.php

If you do not have an .htaccess file, simply create the file in the directory that holds the html page and add that line.

This solution only works for Linux / Unix based servers. I use it on the Red Hat flavor of Linux machines.