50........

WG have you ever considered cutting pieces of the project,and splitting them among different outsourcing companies and have someone you trust compile it....If it's something like a programming project this can be done easily..

Now those are good examples. The categorizing one I don't like so much because I think that would take more time than just approving/denying. If you don't mind me asking, did you guys have an inhouse person manage your list's QA or was it up to each PPC / campaign manager to deal with it?
WG

Do you do your keyword filtering yourself slapass?
WG

1) Perhaps that's intentional given that I don't want more competition.
2) It would need to be spread amongst multiple outsourcing firms if this route is actually used, otherwise its rather simple to just merge the portions together from different staffers.
WG

It's a possibility I'm considering.
WG

Hit the nail on the head...I like the way jayeff thinks.

But what do I know. :pimp

Been robbed, will never do it again. NDA won't help shit when they are on another continent.

Was this for something SEO related or something else you had a bad experience with?
WG

Seriously. Already as it is this thread has some nice SEO knowledge in it.

SEO is all about knowledge and reading and testing some shit out ;)

but there is some good SEO info in this thread

WG is a black hat :1orglaugh

Wasn't SEO, was a traffic source we were working with.

but hey maybe you should just ask someone here to do the work, since you already explained it all and stuff. :1orglaugh

Have you considered hiring a first/second year english/history student for a few hours a week?
They'd present minimum competition and would be glad to work a few hours a week for 10 bucks an hour - pizza money goes long way when one's a student.. you're in a prime location for that too.

I'd never use an outsourcing company for this though, too risky.

If it's that valuable, you just answered your own question. That means it IS WORTH THE COST.

Oops, same thought process I had. :)

I wear many hats.
WG

so basicly you admit what you say here is justo t alieanate the other people and in the same time expect truthfull advices...talk about double standarts :disgust

I'm not sure what bong is referring to exactly, but I meant it in a humouristic way, such as the quote in my signature.
WG

Initially we didn't really care. The only filtering we did was to remove obviously child-related words from the list. When we started none of the ppc's checked for relevancy, which was how we ended up with such gems as "Gaza Strip" (strip club related) and "Legal Briefs" (underwear related). The philosophy of the time was that irrelevant listings wouldn't be cost effective and would fall out on their own accord. Most of the PPCs would take and list anything we gave them. Overture would do a cursory review but I think the size of our keyword lists intimdated the editors. I don't know for a fact but I'm pretty sure Overture's authorized adult keyword list was in response to some of our shenanegans.

Eventually the ppcs figured out that relevancy couldn't be achieved by bid alone, and started setting various guidelines. Overture in particularly got quite harsh with us and if they found more than a few inappropriate words would just reject the whole submission. It was tedious and time consuming but cleaning the keyword lists really wasn't that bad. We had various people in our company do it, sometimes even having all office categorization parties. Usually it fell to the new person to do this since nobody else wanted to do it, and we figured it was a good way to increase their vocabulary. Getting to explain the word 'bukkake' was always a treat.

These days we're a bit more cooperative with the search engines so the relevancy checking is sort of shared between our campaign managers and the search engine's people. We also don't harvest keywords in the same way we once did so there isn't too much garbage in our lists.

Since I got a bit nostalgic writing that last post, I decided to poke around in some of my old files. I guess there won't be much harm in releasing this "trade secret" now.

adult
porn
porno
sex
smut
breasts
tits
bobs
ass
arse
hahahaha
pussy
cock
dick
fuck
suck
cum
sperm
semen

The was the original keyword list that we thought up, to prime our GoTo and Altavista keyword harvesters. After we finished running these words through AV/GoTo and feeding the results back into AV/GoTo it turned into a list of about 100k phrases of which about 25k were adult related and made semi-sense. I hope nobody copies our technique. :winkwink:

I love the smell of SE spam in the morning

There are those of us who run outsourcing companies that value the clients far more than the clients trade secrets. It would NOT be in the best interest of the outsourcing company to take the things they are doing for one client and use it for another client, simply because things like this always get back and when they do, you have lost not only one but TWO clients. Losing long term business isn't near worth it to me in my opinion. To anyone that would abuse this, they aren't serious about what they do and shouldn't be in business anyway, much less in a matter such as this. :)

This is how I think anything should be though, it should just be a given that there is a measure of confidentiality, whether it is for outsourcing companies, designers, mainstream, porn or any other business, it should be held at a standard that shows respect for BOTH parties involved. :)

He he, Chuck told me about the gaza strip example. That one was rather funny, seeing your sites coming up for that listing. And as I recall, yes, Overture used your initial lists as their master adult lists because of the sheer size. Although OV's editors have become inches away of being nazi's, their quality sure has increased. One thing I did like about doing the keyword research myself though was the vocabulary, learning tons of new words I would have never thought of. Hell, it was an accident I discovered what hentai was and now it makes up a nice percentage of media buys.

Thanks Brian :)
WG

Similiar strategy here, going from a handful of seed basewords and then exploding into hundreds of thousands of keywords. Its the manual labour of removing those useless keywords that's the time consuming part. I'm surprised you kept over 25% of your initial phrases though, I typically keept 5-7%.
WG

I was glossing over some of the details. Our first havest which was based on the list above found about 100k phrases which certainly didn't yield 25k cleaned words. 25k was our peak adult list, we didn't achieve that until a year or two later.

fgrep -v microsoft inputfile | fgrep -v yahoo | (... more bad keys ...) > outputfile

that will help you clean your list quicker

I already have white and black lists that are run against many regexp's to help automate some of these steps, but there's no replacement for the human brain to evaluate if something is relevant or not.
WG

I must say it's impossible to know how he functions simply because of anything he's said so far.

Matt

I definitely understand and agree with your concerns of outsourcing; I have the same. It's a lot of work ...

Oh, and I don't think keept is a word. :pimp

Matt

Be carefull or everyone will be saying there is no money in SEO :winkwink:

There truly isn't for most people; just following the white logic Neo.

Matt

The question seems to come down to should you outsource it to a college student or to an outsourcing company. Either way, you are outsourcing the work, so no matter the option, you will have certain risks.

I personally think the outsourcing company works best because of more natural barriers to entering as competition (though none are a major obstacle) such as language, connectivity, skills, etc.

Of course, the cost savings may make it easier to have multiple people doing different tasks. I personally trust Rick and iWebmasters. However, there is no way to eliminate risk in any business endeavor (there's your free legal advice!)

Just my :2 cents:

Matt

IWebmasters is still based somewhere, in the Philipines specifically, and they have managers, and even the emloyees have access to the lists / copies of them. I had a bad number of ordeals with outsourcing, and now I just don't trust it because of how much I thought I knew the person in question and trusted them; maybe I'm just unlucky though.

I am doing everything critical to myself, and I actually hope anyone who knows what they're doing do the same; so there's less actual competition, and if there's a top 5 SEOs that join up ... can do a lot with that much. :) <- WiredGuy - Do you understand what I mean?

Matt

It's not even about double-checking the work, they could do a good job, because they want the best list possible for themselves as well ... they want to profit / benefit from the information you provide them.. not all, but honestly no way to know who.

Matt