Italian style SEO blog

A lot of time has passed since my last post, but I hope it’s been worth waiting: you should know I don’t write if I haven’t any good ideas to share, and I think the one I’m going to explain you is an interesting one.
Anyway, I don’t want to waste your time and I’ll go straight to the point so you can judge.
Every SEOer knows that an easy way to get links with little effort is to acquire domains that actually have incoming links and redirect them to your site.
And nowadays every SEOer knows that this might easily turn into something dangerous, in this post-Penguin world.
But in my opinion playing the redirect game in a safe and effective way is still possible if you get the right domains and you point them to a similar website (or page). Nothing new here. Besides the fact that I’m going to share with you the real domainers goldmine so that you will not scratch your head asking yourself where the hell you have to look to find these right domains, when you’ll need one.
Because, of course, even if you’re not very into domaining, finding expiring/ed domains is not that difficult. But finding good ones usually requires a lot of time and it’s not easy to have relevancy and links at the same time.
Here’s where I’m helping.
Let me ask you: have you ever thought of an industry in which every year lots of domain are registered and lots expire; an industry that might fit almost every need?
Are you saying film? Yes. You’re right!

Stars, lights, and forgotten domains

The film industry is our unwilling ally, and we’ve to thank it for being so kind with us.
Because every year hundreds of films are released, and each of them has its own 1or2YearsNiceDomain-TheMovie.com. Usually these domains exist for a couple years, then are shutted down, unless the movie is an important one.
Have you seen I Can’t Think Straight? I haven’t. But this movie had an official website, cited on Rottentomatoes…

Go click on that link, now. You’ll end up on a parked domain…

Defining your plan

You can now easily see that there are many opportunities here: many official films websites are let expiring, and not all of them are re-registered by others s the one I’ve shown you. Moreover, whatever your website is about, you can be sure there’s a film about it, or that can be related in some way. And this kind of websites have usually good links and if you stay in topic they will certainly help your rankings.

So what you’d want to do, maybe, is this:

1. Compile a list of movies related to your business
2. Check if any of them had an official website
3. Check if any of these websites has expired
4. Register the domain
5. Create a relevant page on your site
6. Redirect the domain

Does it sound hard, uh? Yes, it is. That’s why we’d rather want to do this:

1. Compile a list of movies websites
2. Check if any of these websites has expired
3. Register the domain
4. Think how it might be related to your website and create a relevant page
5. Redirect the domain

There is a big difference between the two processes, of course:

• The first is time consuming and you might end up with zero results at all, althought in theory it should provide an higher relevancy.
• The second is quicker and even if you might find domains with little correlation with your site, it’s still up to you to choose wheter register them or not and find an angle to legitimate the redirection.

I’ve followed the second path for my researches but I won’t show you the exact details, since I’m sure that, if I showed here the method I used to find the movie domain I’ve uses as example, it would be abused so much that it would become unuseful in a few time.
Anyway, I’ll give you some hints.

1. Old movies don’t have any official website so refine your search.
2. If you use advanced queries on Google, I suggest including -inurl:”themovie.com” (if the domain is still indexed it’s unlikely that it’s available to be registered).
3. Crawler like Xenu have nice responses like “no such host”…
4. SeoMoz APIs and SEO tools for Excel will speed up checking the status code, incoming links and registration status.
5. If an English websites still exists, maybe a non-English version has expired (ie. Italian, French, Spanish, ecc…)

Final note: I was kidding in the post title. It’s not as easy as I promised and spammers and domainers are on it. But there’s room for good opportunities if you understand how to look for them.
Your Oscar is waiting for you. Go and catch it.

If you read this blog, you probably know I don’t write frequently as I’m strongly convinced it’s better to post less and say something (hopefully) interesting that to regurgitate concepts already covered by others better than me.
So, when I decide it’s passed too much time since my last post, I force myself to think to something different to write about.
Last month I challenged myself (and not only) to find a kind of link that’s not on Jon Cooper’s Link Building strategies list.

#SEO Challenge: finding a link type that’s not in @pointblankseo‘s link building strategies list (I’ll accept rewards in case I find one).

— Giuseppe Pastore (@Zen2Seo) Dicembre 13, 2012

If you know that monster piece, you should understand is not that easy to win the bet. And I admit I’ve had a hard time trying to find the right key to approach the problem. I didn’t want to focus on a different way to get a link. I wanted to write of a different type of link, and this was even more difficult to achieve. I blamed myself after a week I hadn’t found anything.
Then I started re-thinking about the entire concept of link.
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The 2012 is almost at its end and many blogs are already publishing “advices” for the next year. Rather than adding another post to the accelerating 2013 carousel, I just want to share a list of SEO’s I want to thank for what they’ve given me during this year.
In most cases motivations will be personal, so I guess many of you will be not interested that much in them, but if you look at my Twitter followings you’ll see they are less than 200. Not so much, I’d say. And I was already following these people before I had any occasion to chat or talk with them. This should tell you that, although reasons I’m citing them might be personal, you should still consider looking at them as noticeable personalities in the SEO industry and follow them in 2013.
And after this short introduction, let me start (following the order of my Twitter scraping Excel).
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Before you read this post, I’ve to make it clear you will not learn tech stuff from it. I usually don’t write personal posts, but anyway I felt I had to put down into words my SEO path, one day, at least for myself. So, that day has come and if you want here it is…

A terrible year

My SEO life probably starts in 2003 when, one night, exiting from a discobar I was run over by a car. I was 23 years old at the time. And I went very close to die. I had my left leg and arm broken, and almost every facial bone too, that was the worse thing. I had to stay one week the recovery room and 45 days in a hospital, with four surgeries (out of a total of seven) in that period. Several months passed before I was able to walk again and my mouth was able to chew properly. Definitely it’s not been the best year of my life. But it left me something.
A renewed way of looking at life, for sure, having touched real troubles and known in the hospitals people that had been less luckier than me.
But it isn’t only this. That year left something else too…
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I know, guys, this title is misleading, but before you start yelling “Black hat! Black hat!”, give me some trust and read a few more of this post.
The idea for it has come from some comments to my Guide to Hacked Link Building: if you haven’t read it maybe you’ll want to check it, anyaway I was basically tweaking broken link building strategy, by suggesting to find hacked abandoned websites and contact those ones still linking to them to kindly advice changing the links to other resources (guess by whom?).
That post has received some great endorsements, but also a couple of comments that have led me to this new one.
One was from Chris Dyson:
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I don’t think I’m (kind of) a big deal… anywhere. But sharing and getting information is of monumental importance to me. Often, I’m met with challenges related to sharing and getting particular (and desired) information.
Readers, let me begin by conjuring a few images you may relate to:

• It’s the morning of June 11.  I dismiss the sleep from my eyes, nestling out from under multiple Musetresses (J) to check my phone.  Oh shizzle!  My man, Alessio, has included me in his ‘Meet Your‘ series!  How (the f) long has this been up?  Homeboy is in Berlin, Germany, eight hours ahead of me in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
• Similarly, it’s the morning of August 24.  Alarm goes off to Sonny and Cher’s, ‘I Got You Babe’ (Groundhog Day reference).  Christopher Miller of Serperture, a fine gent, has posted an interview of me.

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Being organized is something I’ve learnt to be more and more important when things to be done increase and your time to finish them diminishes. This evidence hit me hard last week, when I needed to check a post I found useful but I didn’t save at the time I read it, some months ago. I spent several minutes trying to remember who had written it or what was its title, and I was to give up when finally I found it.
This led me to decide to define a (hopefully) better way to keep trace of posts I’ve liked and could come in handy one day, and after having considered a few alternatives, I’ve found a solution that responds well to my needs and that I think could be useful for some of you too (that’s the reason of this post): IFTTT.com.
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