Answer as truthfully as possible for best results. You are anonymous.
Imagine yourself in this situation after you have had a bad day, not when you're feeling jovial.
It's your actions under duress that measure what you are capable of doing.
1. You stumble across an abandoned directory. Out of curiosity, you hit /admin and see a login screen.
You type in admin/password? Nope.
You try admin/blank password? Nope. Damn.
You try admin/admin? Poof, you're in.
What do you do?
Leave immediately. That site is not yours. You feel ashamed for having tried it at all.
Raid the directory inserting your links on selected pages with PageRank.
Immediately change the admin password, this is YOUR directory now. You add your links, replace top listings with your own affiliate sites, mod the code so other links are no-followed. Finders, keepers.
Login and poke around a bit. Curiosity got the better of you today. You don't make any changes but you IM your friend and have a good laugh.
Create a free account within the directory and use the ADMIN to upgrade it to premium. That's good enough. Hehe
2. You are running a PPC campaign for retail product sales and your primary competitor keeps outbidding you. You know they have to be running a PPC-loss to outbid you. This looks personal. What do you do?
Try and target a longtail keyword that your competitor is not going hard for. Something is better than nothing.
Click on your competitors ad from your browser each morning by 'mistake.'
Form a twitter network and get several people to click on their ads and drain their budget, skew their conversion numbers. Then, swoop in with your PPC campaign. Do this for months on end, relentlessly.
Not only twitter network & PPC-click-drain strategy but you then click on their ads not only from your home computer, but your PDA's browser, cell-phone's browser, and use ANONYMIZER software to route requests through proxies to fool Google.
Abandon the campaign as there is too much competition.
3. You've just heard about a new post distribution platform that allows you to post a blog entry with your inbound links. That post is distributed to any one of hundreds of blogs with PageRank thoughout the network. However, the company keeps their blog network a secret.
The result is lots of inbound links scattered throughout the blogosphere all pointing to your site with your anchor text.
How does that sound to you?
Innovative. Sounds effective. Where do I hear more about this?
Sounds like a link farm to me. I am not touching it.
Link farm? Link network? Blog network? Doesn't matter. Sign me up for this one.
4. You stumble across a highly-successful website directory that is fairly new. You see that they are charging a recurring yearly fee for their listings and there are several signups.
What are you most likely to say to yourself?
"What a great directory! I am going to buy a listing."
"Nice revenue model. I am going to form a similar site."
"I am going to download Directory Software, mimic the look-and-feel but just change it up slightly. Then, I can buy a sound-alike domain name. Instead of MYSITE.COM, I'll buy MY-SITE.COM and run Google PPC. Users will be confused and won't be able to tell. Sweet."
5. You decide to hold a training event at a local conference room that is available for rent downtown. For no reason, the owner cancels on you citing 'personal reasons.' You've already sent invites, built the website, made a reservation interface. It's all ruined.
How do you react?
Re-schedule the event somewhere else. No need for conflict.
Tell the bitch she's gonna pay for that mistake. Start a 1 year long blog campaign getting disparaging blogs to rank for her company name. Cheers.
Look up her company in the merchant listings. Give her an unfavorable review.
6. You get an affiiliate website to rank in the Top 5 for a highly trafficked term. You are making money. However, almost 50% of your traffic doesn't click-through to the external website which hosts the Cart and Payment.
What decision do you make?
Concentrate on specific conversion marketing components. Fine-tune your campaign.
302 Redirect the site directly into the cart.
Make every outbound link on your site hyperlink to the cart.
302 redirect, report lower ranking sites to Google using their 'Dissatisfied? Help Us Improve.' link.
7. You're trying to rank organically for a SERP. You notice that many of the top rankings are stuffing keywords in their title and description tags as well as the content itself. It doesn't read well but it seems to be working.
Do you modify your campaign?
Hell, yes. If Google is letting it rank, then I have lots of room for improvement here.
You increase your keyword density only slightly. You don't want it to read funny.
You don't make any changes to your campaign. It's only a matter of time before Google figures it out.
You form an alternative, similar site. Then you try out your new keyword density experiment. You don't want to experiment with your main site.
You re-define keyword stuffing in your content to new heights. You know that keyword density is rarely penalized and detected.
8. You form a sales relationship with an fast-growing company. You agree to build their website, get their brand noticed, and generate sales. You do it all.
Just as you start getting sales to the company, they cancel YOUR account and your agreement citing some BS legal reason.
They are clearly out to get you and found a way to get out of their agreement with you.
What do you do?
You write to the President of the company and complain of your treatment.
You start a blog spam campaign with the URL of the company as the target.
You start another SEO campaign to get your website to rank for the Company Name. You then detail your negative experience with the company.
Nothing. Next time, you'll be more careful with whom you partner with.
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