So the latest Mega Guru Internet product launch happened yesterday amidst the usual horn tooting fanfare.
Ironically, the product was named Guru Slayer.
That’s not the story for today however. I think you will find this much more interesting. On launch day, the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) looked quite odd and out of whack. Although they haven’t changed yet, they will shortly so I took a screenshot which is below.
 This is what Google displays in the top 20 results page for Guru Slayer:
You’ll notice some interesting oddities even at a glance, not the most shocking of which is I failed to make it on the front page for the time being.  ;)
Having a top position for a product name like Guru Slayer on launch day will get you a good percentage of several thousand searches. Money, money, money.
I’ve numbered the results and explained them below:
1) Silly Blog:
Why silly? Common, this blog is brand smacking new. It still has the new car smell. There’s a grand total of 4 short posts on it.
Only one of those posts is about Guru Slayer. The domain is a 6 month old PR0.
All that to say, this site should have zero chance of ranking number one for the term without some pretty neat tricks. And it uses those tricks, which you’ll see quite plainly if you don’t already.
2) The Author’s Site:
Now this is where I really kick myself. The author’s site is ranking second? The site is brand new, zero links on Yahoo!’s site tool and only one indexed page. The only thing it has going for it is the product title in the domain name. Grr, it would have been so easy to rank for this.
3) Software Directories:
As you can see, 3 is all over the board. The reason for this is very simple. Richard Legg, the guy who’s silly blog is in position number one pulled a nice fast one on Google. Kudos to him, it worked great.
He just went and submitted Guru Slayer as a software to all these directories. Many of them give the user benefit of the doubt and list the “software†without running the listing through an editor first. The listing is automatically approved.
This gets Richard a whole bunch of keyword targeted one way back links from established sites. Not only does his site rank number one, but nearly half of the other results point directly to it.
Nice move, Mr. Legg.
4) Ezine Articles:
Bum Marketing anyone? If you ever doubted it works, do you need anymore proof? This is a classic, enough said.
5) Craigslist:
Another classic. Takes 30 seconds to write an ad and get it listed on craigslist. Guru Slapper anybody 
?
6) – 7) – 8. Wordpress, Big IM site, Digg:
These are all high authority sites and that’s why you see them ranked here. They’re way down on the page though so I would expect they didn’t scoop up much in commissions if anything at all.
So here are my conclusions:
Firstly, that’s a damn sweet little trick Mister Legg used to suck huge and hungry launch traffic to his page.
Secondly, the SERPs are rather weak right now for the term, which means they will change any time soon, but the top results already cleaned out.
Thirdly, no one had the foresight to make a good squidoo lens about Guru Slayer. Done a couple of days in advance, it would have ranked top 5 for sure, with little effort.
All in all, while internet marketing on ebooks and the like seems very saturated, it’s still pretty much wide open on launch days. I’m sure you can also grab some grayish black SEO tips in here along the way to use for your ugly sites and blog farms yes?
Before we close this off, let’s play a little SERPs guessing game. Within the next 12 hours, the top ten results will change. Here’s my prediction:
Position 1 will go to Aojon, with his “ebooks are shit, download them from one of my warez links†antics.
Position 2 will go to yours truly with this Guru Slayer review, and possibly position three with my previous post. A double listing would be nice, eh Google?
Position 3 will go to Richard Legg’s blog, until Google sandboxes it or penalizes it for too many similar links.
Rest of the page: the author’s site might linger for a bit but will soon disappear, never to be seen again on the first page. Ezine Articles will keep a spot, USFreeads will gain one and so will Squidoo. Up to you to grab those places before the hype dies…
Popularity: 19% [?]
Excellent post, Alex! I now must try these tricks in my niches.
I tried to do something along these lines when Undercover Profits launched. I did snag the #2 Google listing, but that was all…. nothing on the scale of this. And of course, my $0 earnings showed too.
I’m truly impressed – this guy did the work, and no doubt he raked in some cash to show for it. Kudos.
Yup, these big launches are turning out to be quite the cherry picking fest for those that know how to benefit from them.
What’s nice about this trick is you can use it for just about anything.
Thanks for your comments.
Hey Alex,
Hope you are doing fine.
I think you are right. Websites ranking already for this kwd have almost no incoming links. And many are not even optimized in anchor text.
allintitle:guru slayer. Very few results. That´s the key I think. So, probably authority & good established domain names will take the lead later (we know how G works) unless some serious incoming links campaign occurs from these websites.
This is a great example I think of the benefits of anticipation on a niche product.
Cheers,
Nick
Hi Nick,
Yup, a simple submitter would allow you to dominate a “one-time” niche like this one quite easily when it really counts.
And Google really needs to lay off the authority overload sometime soon…
check out msn…..notice anything? this is also me http://www.squidoo.com/groups/antiguru
http://www.squidoo.com/guru-slayer-review. (this isnt showing, don t know why)
wish I could dominate Google like this (damn new blogs)
Nice find, great analysis!
Opens the flood gates for “anticipatory high level keyword marketing” or, possibly “pre-ranking” for short.
If you’re going to play the “major launch” brouha spiel, this is now the new standard mode to adopt.
The link above should be http://www.squidoo.com/guru-slayer-review
the period at the end breaks the link.
Nothings cooler than a guy who optimizes different looking sites the day of his launch in order to strip, rob, and screw over his own affiliates. Too cool!
@ Rian: Squidoo chooses which lens to display at the top for a given search based on it’s quality rating, that’s why one of your lenses is high and the other low or not showing. You also made them too late to rank for launch day, although you will rank shortly I think.
@ Fantomaster: “anticipatory high level keyword marketingâ€
how is it you alwasy find the exact right term. Always get a rush seeing you comment here, thanks for dropping by.
@ Larry: Lighten up on the conspiracy theory. Andrew Fox is very smart but not a tech guy at all, I’d be surprised if he could think up something like that, much less implement it to harm his affiliates, which are the life of his business…
thats not Andrew doing that…I can tell by the style. Richard Legg I think is the guy to whom all the spammy Guru Slayer entries link back to.
I thought I did get my lense done in time..that was the first thing i worked on..started bout 3/20. I didnt really promote it hard, other than a few web 2.0 site submissions.
it’ll be interesting to watch.
hey Rian,
Just checked your lens and it’s darn good. A bit of duplicate content but besides that I can’t see what the problem might be. I suspect you’ll fly into the serps any time soon.
That’s freakin awesome. Using software directories is a bit greyish vs. normal web 2.0 sites like Squidoo which I consider to be totally white hat. But I can’t help but be inspired. Nice job Richard
I think you’ll find Jon @ aojon (dot) com will dominate the serps soon. He’s on a mission against these shinky e-book promotoers.
ermm..excuse the bad engrish in the above post….it’s on the wrong side of breakfast here….
Hi Eric,
Nice to see you here. I agree, squidoo is white but Richard tactic was great. You can use squidoo in a more or less trashy manner though…
@ Steve: Thanks for commenting, I edited your post because I won’t permit links to Jon’s site any longer. I’m not entirely against the way he thinks but I don’t agree with his approach and I won’t be encouraging people to infringe copyrights here. I don’t think that’s right either.
for a cool tutorial on getting in the top 100 of squidoo (within your category), check this out:
squidoosuccesskit.com
This helped me structure the lense in a way that would boost rankings, get some traffic to my site. I figured out how to insert an aweber opt-in on my own, he doesnt talk about that. its easy..just link it up with a .html page on your server. Done.
The next big boom!
This is a crazy canadian dude I found another day! LOL
Alex,
I’ll have to email you later, but noticed the Roger guy who spammed Google has taken over even more. How are these junk software sites getting ranked higher than say EzineA? I noticed my article disappeared. I finally found myself in Yahoo though. How’s the SERP fight coming?
Hey Rian,
Yes I see what you mean. The software sites are old and established. More so than Ezine Ads? No, but they have fewer pages sucking their PR, that’s all I can imagine for now.
My SERP fight is very disapointing so far but the updates aren’t finished. Aojon will get a top spot and he doesn’t appeart yet. Google acts strange when a load of results suddenly pop overnight for the same term. We will see shortly how it pans out.
how does he always get it? I already saw on digg that aojon is posting links to the guru slayer’s download page. luckily andrew installed the .htaccess protection recently.
He gets it because his blog has authority and his forum too. Got links for lots of strong sites and has tons of gooey followers helping him out.
well i was out of town on a business trip and just got back, reading my feeds, and i noticed there is still nice posts on this blog to find…
always interesting things to read and learn from, thank you alex for sharing again and again… have my full review soon…
regards,
jean
http://www.jean.ghalo.com
Excellent thread on Legg’s gray-hat SEO. Too bad his landing page stinks. If it was good he would have cleaned up.
I’m glad to see forum moderators deleting links and threads relating to aojon. He does nothing but vent his spleen; the site contains no useful information about marketing and he flames anyone that dares ask. I know the type – the wife walks into doors and the kids fall off swings a lot.
As for his warez, most people do not steal even when the opportunity presents itself. Those that do are irrelevant anyway. They are trying to get something without working for it. A manual on how to do IM *work* is an odd thing for them to desire. They would just ask for refunds anyway.
Hi Walter,
Thanks and I agree Legg could have done much better with his landing page.
I pretty much agree on Aojon also, there are some rare quality threads in his forums. Nothing special or beyond the norm. Somehow that gives him the right to get all huffy.
I’m not sure I can second you on people not stealing. Unfortunately, it’s very anonymous and has a real impact. Not when one of the forum cronies steals but when the pages rank for the brand names, the merchants see sales go down quite a bit. I know some of the guys who have been ripped off and there is a definite impact.
[...] A few simple tricks and ‘games’ can get you in the first page results during the launch period. You can find more information here at this link. [...]