WideCircles Blog

New ad task type called “Link Spy” was added to help advertisers spy on their competition and beat them at their own game. Yes that’s right, you can now enter up to 5 URL’s or domains into the “Keywords or URL’s” box when creating ad task. The system will then analyze the URL’s entered and generate up to 500 unique target sites for each entry.

These 500 target sites are sites that link to the URL’s entered. The publishers then recieve these and can post on them. With this task type you can easily place your links on same sites where your competition did. Then you would supplement these with your own fresh ones to effectively beat them. Please note that publisher cannot always post on site where your competition has a link, due to access or certain rules for example.

We have also extended the PR Threshold option menu, you can now choose either:

* Do Not Generate Page Rank ( This option is default and allows website target list to be built much faster, because no PR calculation is involved, usually within 1-2 minutes )

* Generate Page Ranks But Do Not Filter ( This option allows you to still generate Page Ranks for every single website in the list but do not perform any filtering. You can then filter the websites yourself manually at later time by examining their generated Page Ranks for example. )

Lastly you can choose PR threshold ( from 0 to 10 ) to control auto filtering i.e. to select only the sites which meet the specified threshold.

In the Keyword or URL’s box you can now specify keywords or URL’s by using either newline or comma format. For example you can separate your entries using newlines like this:

mykeyword1

mykeyword2

mykeyword3

or you can use commas, like this:

mykeyword1,mykeyword2,mykeyword3

Also please remember that you should only use URL’s for “Link Spy” task, so for example if you wanted to spy on domain “cars.com” you would enter the following into the keywords or URL’s box:

cars.com

or you would enter:

http://cars.com

We have been experimenting with immidate search engine pinging as a method of auto post discovery and results are excellent to say the least. You can now set this option from the Advanced SEO panel when creating ad task in your campaign. It will help you with having more links discovered and thus enhancing the power of your link building campaign. We have found that on the average about 5%-25% of the links are not discovered, thus forcing this option results in more indexed pages and links helping with overall result.

Next we also added small summary statistics for the dofollow/nofollow counters on the campaign report page so you can see exactly where you stand. More exciting features coming next week including support for social bookmarking, so stay tuned.

WideCircles development team has added support for PR ( PageRank ) pre-analysis/filtering and post dofollow/nofollow summary and per post statistics. This means you can now fine tune PR settings when creating ad task, so only websites which match the given threshold will be included. It takes slightly longer to generate given set of resulting targets, once the ad task is created since we have to analyze each one of them in real time through our propriatery network.

Second improvement concerns of nofollow/dofollow statistics. You can now see the summary of how many active dofollow/nofollow postings you have ( breakdown per ad task ) and also you can get detailed overview under view sites interface, which will show each target and whether it is dofollow or nofollow signature.

Nofollow is often ignored and one assumes it does not leak any link juice. However based on case studies conducted recently by WideCircles, this assumption is very wrong. There is also an independant article from Michelle MacPhearson on this issue as well found by clicking here.

Our internal findings ( when analyzing or sampling our client campaigns ) confirm that lot of juice is actually leaked ( even from the big G ). A sample test consisting of 25 comment postings all targeting nofollow pages with PR between 2 and 5 yields rank boost of almost 35-40% in google/yahoo and 65-70% on msn utilizing low to mid competitive keywords where page being ranked starts outside of first 100 search results and then is brought into this 100 result set, sometimes at very high rank. Contrary to popular belief lot of nice and organic seo can be purely done utilizing nofollows only.