Macalua.com

With all the press generated so far, the first SEO milestone for 2006 may well be the V7N SEO contest. The pot’s huge and people are talking about it. In this interview, we feature Dan Freakley aka googl3r, the proud sponsor of the 30GB iPod for the winner of the V7N contest.

Just who is g00gl3r? Where’s he from? What’s his official job function?
g00gl3r is Dan Freakley, the domain name was registered as a throw away domain and I just used the name to register on a couple of forums with too, you never do know what to use really do you?

I live in the Midlands in the United Kingdom and my official job function is difficult to categorise. Ive never enjoyed working for other companies and sticking to ‘big company policies’ that are put in place for EVERYTHING! I have qualifications in ceramic wall and floor tiling (I think you guys call it tile setting?) , wall and floor tiling training (teacher), html and web design and also carried out many sales training courses which was my original career path option (sales).

I now host a few websites and have been known to setup one or two e-commerce sites for small local companies. Although I actually own an electric underfloor heating supplies company and also trade under the name untold.media for bits of web design work.

So actually I just make money out of anything I can do, as one wise man once said to me “play to your strengths”, and although I haven’t yet found what my strength is, as I cant make money out of playing the guitar, I just dabble in a few things here and there which keeps me busy, clearly not busy enough though J as I have time for interviews.

What can I say, Dan loves the world :)

How’d you start out with SEO?
Just through needing my own sites ranking high. A few years ago I got addicted to registering domain names, I used to have one for everything. This helped each of them rank pretty well as they were heavily cross-linked. Although this still might work for Yahoo! Search and MSN Search, Google is obviously something else, so now I’m back in the SEO world taking advice and playing trial and error with a whole bunch of new websites.

Your take on the whole whitehat / grayhat / blackhat debate. Which hat do you predict will win the V7N SEO contest?
I’ve never felt there is a grey area in SEO as I think you follow guidelines or you don’t. I think the winner of the V7N SEO contest would have had experience in white and blackhat SEO, but what the winner would have used to win the contest I can’t predict. I hope whitehat as it would help me out with my own future web projects as I could perhaps take on board some of the helping factors.

I see you’ve just started the blog. 1) Why blog? and 2) Why just now?
g00gl3r.com isn’t new and hasn’t just been created although I have just erased the old blog which was using blogger.com and have replaced it with wordpress. I thought I’d use it for the SEO Contest along with a few other things.

Why did you decide to sponsor the V7N SEO contest?
Clearly not because I want to promote my SEO company or services as I only take on board business from local companies. I think reading through pages and pages of websites looking for information on the older SEO Contests sparked my interest and knowing once upon a time just an ipod was enough to get people joining in made me choose the ipod as a giveaway. I’m not really too sure why actually, but it’s fun!

Do you expect any SEO benefits from it other than me interviewing you?
I’ll be gaining experience which will help with my own sites and company aims, I’ll gain a few backlinks to g00gl3r.com which will not benefit me much as the only content on there so far, is a blog or two about the contest itself.

If you were to join the contest, what techniques would you focus on?
I will be joining the contest, hopefully the V7N winnings and the cash from the other guys will all go into one pot so I only have to build one site but if there are two separate pots with different rules then I’ll be making a site / page for each.

Techniques – I’ll be copying the guys that are ranking high during the beginning of the competition as much as possible but have no secrets of my own. ha-ha

Got a picture of the iPod?
I picked the 30gb from this page: http://www.apple.com/ipod but will probably actually just give John Scott the money to give to the winner for them to buy it themselves. Perhaps they would prefer to buy a new sweater instead?

Be honest, are you from Google?
Excellent question! but eerm No, although I do wish at times I had contacts there. Have you seen the pictures of the working environment where the girl is rolling round on roller blades and another guy has taken in his dog and they are all having a laugh? Maybe if my first company was like this I would be still working for a company and not for myself. The closest I’ve got to helping Google out in any way whatsoever is paying them monthly for Adwords bills and I’m an editor of the ODP which is used by Google for their directory. I can assure you the only payment that I take from Google is from my Adsense account which isn’t much.