Who are you?

I’m ReviewMe Roy.

What are you?

I’m the official mascot for ReviewMe.com.

What is your inspiration?

I wake up every day and the first thought in my head is, “how can I provide both valuable feedback and buzz to advertisers in the blogosphere, simultaneously allowing bloggers to increase their revenue while mainting their editorial integrity and true voice?”

That’s what drives me, and that’s what we’re trying to do here at ReviewMe.

What’s your favorite part of the job?

I enjoy traveling to exotic locations. I do this as part of my duties to increase ReviewMe’s brand awareness. What happens is, for instance, I go to Tahiti and walk around on a beach and people go WOW! look at that guy who looks like a giant ‘Me’ with legs and arms, he’s so cool, let’s go to ReviewMe.com and check it out!

Any favorite blogs?

I really like reading Chartreuse.

Welcome to the ReviewMe Blog! Along with Roy and other members of the ReviewMe team, I’ll be posting on official ReviewMe announcements and support issues, as well as ideas and tips for reviewers (bloggers) and advertisers. I’ll also be asking for a lot of feedback here, as ReviewMe is a work in progress and conversation with our users is going to be key to make our system as good as it can be.

Anyway, Roy is calling me to his office, so the rest of this post will have to wait a bit. Cheerio and don’t forget to bookmark the the ReviewMe Blog!

About Andy Hagans: He lives and breathes online marketing. ReviewMe is his Mona Lisa.

About ReviewMe Roy: He’s the ReviewMe Mascot. Read more about him here.

About ReviewMe: Aims to provide both valuable feedback and buzz to advertisers in the blogosphere, simultaneously allowing bloggers to increase their revenue while mainting their editorial integrity and true voice.

*Minus the buzzwords: Advertisers, you pay to get your stuff reviewed by bloggers. Bloggers, you get paid to review their stuff. And it’s not payola.

Publishers using Ruby On Rails looking to monetize their website can now use our new ad script to sell Text Link Ads!  Special thanks to Pascal for his help on the development of this ad script.

TLA Publishers, we are excited to have added a script exclusively for Serendipity Weblog System users and also a Drupal module for our publisher script!  Special thanks to Garvin Hicking for his work on the Serendipity script and special thanks to Robert Douglass for his work on the Drupal module.

We still are working on pushing Ruby on Rails and also .NET scripts out for TLA publishers.  Are there any other specific scripts that you would like to see?  Thanks again!

You know me by now. I’m a link lover, link builder, link swapper, link whore, link monger, link monkey, link-link-link-link-link-link-link-link link-link-link-link-link-link-link I LOVE LINKS.

But there are two situations where I like slowing the linking waterfall down to a small trickle.

1. The new site launch – I grab it a Yahoo! directory & bcentral listing plus 1-2 Premium TLA links, then let it bake for a bit… under no circumstances should you push it in Google with tons of low(ish) quality links, as when a new site goes beyond ‘the threshold’ it appears it’s pretty unlikely it’ll ever come back (this year, at least)
2. The old domain aquisition – You know the scenario "I just scored the ol’ 2000 pr4 domain (transfered not expired) and bwahahaha boy is it gonna rank" – but in the first 3 months I only go Yahoo & bcentral listing plus 1-2 Premium TLA links, then let it bake for a bit… (why risk the trust you just bought?)

MSN still loves the sledgehammer approach but sometimes in Google you have to think more like a surgeon.

Ok Alexa data is not the most accurate traffic measuring tool in the world but it is very good at showing traffic trends.  One of my favorite sites to play around with and compare trends against other ad systems is Alexaholic.  Here is our graph.  This graph represents Text Link Ads compared to other top blog ad systems.

As you know the end goal of building links to your site is increasing your site’s traffic.  This can come from the direct traffic from the links and from the indirect benefit of higher natural search rankings through the increase in link popularity.  Try comparing your site’s Alexa data to some of your competitors and see if you are seeing the right kind of trends, if not, it may be time to get your link building in gear!

One of the biggest changes in the seo world in the last few years is the time it can take to rank a website, particularly in Google.  A bit back Rand noted that even established "trusted" domains were taking 10+ weeks to see some traction in terms of higher rankings after building links to these pages.  The amount of patience needed to see results is even greater when talking about new domains.

Our own LinkBuildingBlog.com has not earned top rankings in Google until just the last few weeks when we have spotted our blog jump from out of the 100’s for "link building" all the way to the top 10 on most data centers.  We registered the domain May 12, 2005 and our first post was May 16, 2005.  Our blog was a site that seemed to receive all the right links since the first day Andy and I started posting.  A quick search on Yahoo shows over 20,000 links into our domain!  Even with this nice linkage from many quality sites it seemed we had to wait for our domain to age past that magic one year mark before we saw what we thought made sense for our blog… a top 10 ranking.

The good news for new sites is I have personally seen three unique sites (12 to 14 months old) that I track recently break out of no where into the top 15 on Google with their latest index tweaks.  Andy is also reporting some sites that were created much more recently showing signs of ranking in Google much faster than what we have seen in the last year.  Now we all know results can be seen in MSN and Yahoo much faster but the holy grail is top Google rankings for most sites.  As a very general rule for link building (always exceptions of course)…

Established Domains (domains that are over 1+ year old or are already ranking for many terms)   
*build links -> 10-12 weeks later see results.

New Domains (domains under 1 year old and are showing no strong ranking results) *build links -> 12 weeks to 16 months later see results. 

There you have it, I have oversimplified a very complicated issue.  Readers, what are you seeing in terms of time it is taking you to see traction in search rankings after building new links?

Let’s get one thing straight — I disagree with a lot of what Michael Martinez posts on SEOmoz. But I have to credit where credit’s due and I think his comment on an SEOmoz post should get an award for ‘best SEO advice of 2006′.

When what you’re doing doesn’t work, do something different.

I know, I know, duh, it’s so simple, etc. But when a recent site launch has been mediocre or even subpar, how often do you really step back, overhaul your strategy and tactics arsenel, and then implement the new one without falling back to those same old tricks?

I have to confess I’m guilty of this a lot, especially with churn and burn (not autogen, but thin-ish) affiliate sites. I use mostly the same methodology I used in ‘04 (then, targeting Google… now, targeting MSN/Yahoo!). The system is efficient and profitable. Why mess with a good thing?

(For the record, I can still get a site to rank in G. It’s just for many sites I get faster & higher ROI by going for the other 2.)

But anyway back to the subject at hand. For a ‘real’ site for a ‘real’ business, you need to rank in Google. And every one of us — from me, Todd, and Aaron to your local neighborhood amateur SEO — has launched a site this year that’s not performing as well as it should in Google. You readers who do client work, or have several sites- my guess is that you’re in the same camp.

Ask yourself this: "Am I actively using new and different tactics?"

Maybe the extra push you need is something you’ve written off years ago (personalized link requests), or something you think isn’t applicable to your theme (a niche real estate page getting on the Digg homepage?), or maybe even what’s old is new again (need trusted links? Submit to directories).

The bottom line is, if it’s been 9 months and you’re still sandboxed, it’s time to:

• First, admit that the tactics you used were insufficient, and that something needs to change.
• Second, concretely plan some new tactics you will use to to defeat the sandbox.
• Finally, implement those tactics (the perennially underrated step).

OK…go!!!!!!

LBB’ers, I am a guest co host for Shoemoney’s new "Net Revenue" show tonight at 6pm EST.  I will be giving out four $250 coupons for Text Link Ads during the show too.  The show can be accessed here and you can hit the chat room here.  Jeremy (Shoemoney) is a very smart and talented internet marketer, should be fun!