Mert Sahinoglu

I will be speaking at WordCamp Milwaukee 2013 this year talking about Multilingual and International WordPress coding and content strategy with something to learn from the beginner to the advanced developer to reach your content out to a global/multilingual audience. I will place the presentation and video here when they are ready.

I have organized and spoken WordCamps in the Midwest in the past and it’s always a good chance to network with the WordPress community. With many local and national speakers, WordCamp Milwaukee will have something for everyone.

For a $20 tag when you enter my coupon code “sahinoglu” to save $5 at checkout; it is definitely a great opportunity to learn from the best and network with fellow WordPress community members.

My grandpa was an air force colonel so I have always been a fan of history and Warfare strategy. Mark McNeilly wrote a book called “Sun Tzu and the Art of Modern Warfare.”

The book talks about 6 basic principles taken from Sun Tzu. Most seasonal e-commerce websites who are not top 3 in their business usually carry SEO strategies that are identical to the leader so it plays to the leaders’ strength thus they fail.

The six principles discussed in the book that might help them are;

1. Win all without fighting (only fight for the terms when they are important),
2. Avoid strength (do not try to fight them in unseasonal short term anchor text)
3. Attack weakness (Concentrate external and internal link structure to strengthen seasonal page authority)
4. Deception and foreknowledge (Try to block your backlinks from backlink checker sites and always research the sandbox your competition likes to play with.)
5. Speed and preparation (Site Speed improvements for search engine indexing and making sure to create seasonal webpages’ links to the front of your site)
6. Shaping the enemy (Allow them to believe that they are still the leader by not trying to rank high for high profile lower conversion short tail “celebrity” keywords.)

In regards to link building you need to create a strategy where you have a solid mobile reserve of URLs that can be redirected at all time with flexible anchor text. A good SEO knows how to do this (the secret sauce so to speak).  This mobile reserve is also needed for promoting your seasonal infographics/video/link bait  to actually get them exposure which in return will build you  white hat links.

Let me know if I am missing something. Thanks for reading.

Note to self. Do not advertise in Facebook.
The quote in the next paragraph is a Facebook post from Limited Run. The post URL no longer exists since they deleted their facebook page.

Hey everyone, we’re going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn’t verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here’s what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn’t on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn’t have JavaScript, it’s very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What’s important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we’d keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That’s correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let’s move on, because who the bots belong to isn’t provable.

While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we’re not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That’s correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage. So we did what any good hardcore kids would do. We cursed that piece of shit out! Damn we were so pissed. We still are. This is why we need to delete this page and move away from Facebook. They’re scumbags and we just don’t have the patience for scumbags.

Tom Mango, co-founder of Limited Run, explained further:

Technically speaking, we used about 6 different analytics services as well as built our own analytics system to try and confirm the ad click throughs from Facebook. The way client side analytics works is that it will try and load some JavaScript on the page and, if that doesn’t work, it just loads a single image. On about 80% of the incoming page requests from our ad campaigns, neither the JavaScript or the images were being loaded. Normal web browsers, used by normal people, will load both JavaScript and images. However, bots, such as ones that crawl the web or bots that attempt to hack into websites to leave spam comments on blogs, don’t usually load those extra things like JavaScript and images. This is how we came to the conclusion that the majority of the click throughs we were getting were from bots. We have no idea who the bots are run by and don’t think Facebook has anything to do with it.

These allegations are very damaging as they follow many other lawsuits targeting Facebook for fraud in the past. Can every marketer test for phantom traffic? Probably not. Can you imagine how you would explain this to your non-techie boss?

When you grow up in a country where everyone is Turkish, the concept of multiracial relationships is not defined by the color of your skin. Sherman Hemsley AKA “Mr. Jefferson” changed that concept for me as a young kid when I was growing up in Turkey.
Here is to you Mr. Jefferson for teaching me about life from so far away. Rest in Peace.

With all due respect to all these back link checker tools, I am tired of bots going through my website eating my bandwidth. They do not help me and possibly hurt me

Here are some reasons you should block them

A) They eat bandwidth and slow down the website
B) Paranoid webmasters report every backlink to their site to the search engines when the traffic goes down even the slightest.
C) People who want to sabotage other sites fill out purchased link reports about your site if you link to that site.

I do not want this hassle. Use the below commands in your robots.txt to hide your linkout/redirects to other sites from common link trackers. Let me know if I missed one. Blekko is also a minor search engine but your traffic loss will be minimal.

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: exabot
Disallow: /

User-agent: MJ12bot
Disallow: /

User-agent: dotbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: gigabot
Disallow: /

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: BlekkoBot
Disallow: /