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I’m a observing soul and my curiosity tends to get the best of me at times.

I’m participating in this year’s Thirty Day Challenge being presented by Ed Dale and gang. I must say the information that they are providing is top notch, with one exception. That exception would be comments on other blogs to gain links back to your main content.

As any good search engine marketeer knows, backlinks are the #1 way to get the search engines, Yahoo in particular, to take notice of your content. This can be done in many ways. The best and easiest way is to post comments on the blogs. Ed tells the participants of the 30DC to be relevant when posting comments on others blogs and I couldn’t agree more.

But..are these relevant comments?

- It can occasionally become problematic to set apart the good vintage text from the dreadful
- Also the natural next question is: ‘What’s if Worth?’
- So for the collector - what are the key things you need to know?
- There is just not enough information on this topic as far as I am concerned!

Ed has created a blog about Vintage Electric Guitars, which is a great market. I have been watching the progress the backlinks that are being created for the blog and I must say I’m a little disappointed. To my dismay, the backlink strategy that is being employed is verging on the edge of spam.

First the backlink results:

40+ backlinks in less than a week….pretty damn good!

Now the comments I pointed out above, taken in the right context and found on blogs about music and guitars would be perfect, but these comments are not on relevant blogs at all. In fact, many of the sites are far from the topic of Vintage Electric Guitars. These links are coming from blogs about wine, pruning shears and photography. Don’t get me wrong, there are comments on blogs that are targeted to music but they are far and few between.

I have followed Ed for 3 years now, learning about him while I was a member of StomperNet. He is the genuine deal. With that said, I’m a little disappointed to see this type of comment tactics being used to game other blog’s comment sections. Now to be fair, Ed is probably not building these back links himself, rather he has the lab doing it for him. I lean towards the lab doing the linking and if that’s the case, the lab folks need a little better training.

Now I’m sure Ed (or a lab member) will see the incoming link from this post and thats ok. I don’t mind spreading link juice to his guitar blog. Like I said, I think he is a stand up guy and I know he’s into guitars. The point I wanted to make here is when making comments on another person blog, try and be respectful and interested in the owners content. If your going to post a comment at least post a comment because it interests you..not just to gain a link.

Edit: One thing that did not occur to me when writing this post this am was it may be possible the there is a campaign to smear the work and teachings that Ed and team are graciously sharing with the world. After a little investigative reading and contemplating, the incoming links that are showing up for Ed’s blog are more than likely the work of people who have bad intentions. It is a shame that this is happening to his blog, of which is actually a true passion of his and could have worked well for him. It’s a real shame that a few ‘turd balls’ are ruining it. My hats off to the 30DC team. The information they are sharing is far and above what most people deserve to receive for free.

I just had to do a little more digging into Knol. The site is so new that I may have made judgments about pages being indexed without knowing the whole story. The page structure is so clean and in true Google fashion there are no meta descriptions or keywords. I was baffled why a page constructed in the basic would not be indexed.

Needless to say I was pleased to see a post describing how Ryan Moulton’s How To Backpack knol was already showing up in Googles search results at the number 3 spot just days after it was published. Wow! Thats pretty damn fast. Now I’m aware that some think the Google will favor it’s own content and rate it higher and it could be just that, but I think it’s too early to tell. I’m kind of partial to the idea that Google may be showing us what they want to see but who knows.

Back to backpacking -The first thing I noticed about this knol is the amount of content that Ryan has put onto it. Currently 8 tables with titles that are focus on several aspects of backpacking and excellent use of related terms associated with backpacking; what to wear, how to hike, where to camp, et. Latent Semantic Indexing anyone?

The second thing I noticed; there are no meta descriptions or keywords, only a title meta and the title is actually appended with the authors name (- a knol by). Not much help in the old school SEO basics here.

Third thing - The front page of Knol. Using meta name="robots" content="index,follow" /

I wonder what it takes to be featured on the front page?

Back to the post describing the serp’s - at the time of writing, Ryan’ knol was listed in the number 3 spot for the phrase ‘how to backpack’. I just did a check and the knol now sits at number 1.

Digging deeper using SEO Elite I discover Yahoo reporting 46 incoming links (Blogsearch shows 53). Most of the anchor text is Knol or Google Knol and only four or five actually have the keyword backpack in the text. From looking at the screen shot below you can see the domain linking to the knol as well as the anchor text. BTW- Most of the incoming links are from blogs, which is expected since the knol is being used as an example all over the Internet.

What keywords are being used?

Like I said, the knol ranks #1 in Google for both broad match (7,810,000 competing) and exact match (30,100 competing) for - How To Backpack; according to Gtrend’s you can only expect 21 visits for being in the #1 spot for this phrase. Not much hope there. For the phrase backpacking,: expected traffic from #1 position - 8,917, the knol ranks 21st.

I also generated a keyword list using the phrase “backpacking” in Gtrends then ran all those keyword phrase through SEO Elite. From a list of 100 phrases, none of them returned results for Ryan’s Knol. You can use Wordtracker Gtrends to generate the list of keywords I used.

My conclusion to all this is , well….undecided. Although Ryan’s knol is ranking ok, the keywords it may be ranking for have little traffic, at least from what I have checked. I have questions though, like - What is influencing the SERP’s? Google?

I will continue to observe the Knol’s that make it to featured status - I might learn something.