10e20 Blog

While I enjoy writing about what I am learning from the extremely informative SearchMarketingNow webcasts, I recommend that you take some time out of your day to hear from experts on all matters related to online marketing (they only occur 1-2 times per month). This week’s presentation was given by Eric Ward, master “link baiter,” though he surprisingly did not use that term at all during the webcast!

Eric is known as “the original link builder” with over 14 years of experience. Interestingly, this was something that he has been doing before there were search engines. The experience has allowed for Eric to watch how search engines have evolved and how search engines are now paying more attention to the links than they previously did.

Introduction

Links are generally important. They can have an impact on your click traffic or search rank. Some people don’t understand the role or power that links may or may not have in driving traffic and driving PageRank to your site.

Eric has performed inbound link analysis (by checking the server log or using third party tools) and noticed that certain types of links can have very different purposes, effects, and outcomes on your site.

Simply Speaking…

There are two audiences for links:

• Links that can be clicked on by people. This was the original intent of the web when Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW.
• Links that the search engines can analyze. Search engines and search bots began thinking that they can analyze the documents that are being linked to and can therefore make assumptions about what sites may be good. They can count and judge them by measuring the number and quality of links.

In SEO, links became important because search engine optimizers realized that search engines can reward them for these links. But this is a potentially true approach - not everybody should approach link seeking that way.

Types of Links and their Effects

There are four types of links:

1. Links that help you with direct click traffic. A person encounters a link and clicks on it. It may not help with your search ranking, however, because the search engines don’t think that it is trustworthy. An example of this is a paid link or banner ad. It will send you traffic but not affect your rank.
2. Links that help your search rank. You can get a lot of opinions on this. The truth of the matter is, for every given site or content, the types of links needed for this purpose can be different.
3. A link that does both. These would be known as the “holy grail of links” or the “mother lode of links.” They help your traffic and search rank. These links are trustworthy and useful.
4. A link that does neither. It doesn’t help with traffic and search engines consider it worthless.

At this point, Eric elaborates on the variety of links with illustrations (screenshots).

Example 1: Links that help you with direct click traffic but doesn’t help your search rank.

The best example of these types of links is an advertisement, either via Pay Per Click or a paid link services such as Text-Link-Ads or Adbrite or a paid press release service like PRWeb. This does not help your search rank. Why not? If buying links would determine search rank, then the person with the biggest pocketbook would be easily able to rank higher than someone who does not have such a budget.

Despite this, there are still good companies that you would want to buy links from. By buying links, it represents an opportunity for you to increase exposure or traffic but not necessarily get ranking improvement. Many people mistakingly think that buying links is a negative, but almost every website has a legitimate reason to buy a link.

Eric shows screenshots of Text-Link-Ads and Adbrite, and says that he admires the approach they are taking to help people find appropriate content to find links from. When you buy links, your intentions, goals, and objectives should be because you feel the audience of the site represents a legitimate logical place for your ad to appear. The most obvious example, he explains, is that if you sell plumbing supplies, you want your ad to be on a site that is geared to plumbers. It also helps to match the proper demographic.

Example 2: A link that does help your search rank.

If the search engines feel that a site is very trustworhty (in its own merit) and that site links to your site, some of that trust “spills over” to your site and improves your search rank.

The illustration in the webcast is of www.stormwaterauthority.org. This is a huge content-rich site devoted to the topic of storm water information, news, and events, such as gutter issues, building codes, etc. If you have a site devoted to that topic, what kinds of links would you want to go out and get if you want search engines to reward you with a higher rank? What would you consider trustworthy if you were Google? Eric shows us this links site from the EPA, which is a government site and is trusted. The particular page is specifically geared to stormwater sites — in fact, the header of the page says “Links to other stormwater sites.” The trust from the federal government is giving a tremendous benefit to stormwaterauthority.org in their search rankings. On the other hand, if stormwaterauthority.com was being linked to from CNN or ESPN, even though it would be in front of millions of people, would that make sense? Probably not. Search engines are looking for the perfect type of synergy (the “yin” and the “yang”).

Example 3: A link that helps with click traffic and search rank

This is very difficult to achieve but very nice to get. It is extremely hard to earn. These are typically not something you can get by asking for them: on such sites, there’s high-quality content, and the people selecting the content are picky.

In the illustration, Eric shows us a screenshot of Forbes Favorites. There are several categories - “collecting,” “education,” “the good life,” “health,” “investing,” “shopping,” etc. A user who finds links here would be inclined to trust the editorial choices.

Example 4: A link that does nothing.

The examples provided include the MFA (Made for Adsense), FFA (Free for All), and Splog (spam blog) sites. It doesn’t help you.

In particular, MFA sites are used when you see a page that is not created for any reason but to get someone to land on it by accident and click on an advertising link just to get away with it. The owners make a few pennies as a result. This is an unfortunate consequence of Adsense because people have created junky content to slap ads on its to make some money.

The illustration is a FFA page which slaps on all these ads on one page and serves no useful purpose. There are so many links on unrelated topics (make money fast, flash games, luxury condos, etc.) A reader cannot tell the objective or intent. This kind of page shows no useful practical business purpose for any search engine or person. You can spend your whole day trying to get links for sites like this but it will do very little for you.

Recap

Links can improve search engine rankings if search engines feel they are a trustworthy indicator of quality, but this would be different for every site.

There is a polling question that shows that 75% of all respondents are spending $1000 or more on online advertising. Upon looking at the results, Eric mentions that this is probably why Google’s stock prices are valued at what it is. It makes perfect sense, and some websites do have to do this to survive. Not every site is meant to have great content that people gravitate toward. He looks back and mentions that there was a time when online advertising was met with such backlash. An example is the OpenText search engine — in the mid-90s, they suggested advertising, but the outcry was so strong that they gave up. Ten years later, this is Google’s core business model.

Recognizing Your Site’s Unique Link Potential

Every website has its own inbound link potential. A new site about Britney Spears will attract links of a different type and volume than a site about Aboriginal Spears. You should look for a perfect inbound profile for both search engines and people.

We compare the results of “aboriginal spears” (813) versus “britney spears” (over 25,000,000). From a linkbuilding standpoint, building for Britney Spears is a “nightmare and impossible to do” compared to “aboriginal spears.” For the latter, this is the kind of link building project that you can have an impact on — it’s a very niche topic — ten or twenty links in the right places could substantially help. Very few people would be effective in doing this with Britney Spears and it may not even be possible anymore.

Linking for Publicity vs. Linking for Search Rank

One of the things that I’ve noticed over the past few years is that the role of publicity and public relations and SEO and SEM related disciplines is merging. There’s a lot of overlap. As links become more important to a variety of people, the people in your company responsible for obtaining those links can be in these different areas. You might be attracting links for your search rank inhouse but using a PR firm for publicity links. The goal is still similar: to acquire those links to achieve an objective.

Some of the possible objectives for linking:

• Improved search rank
• Awareness among a niche audience (e.g. stormwaterauthority)
• Coverage by mainstream media sites: sites like CNN, MSNBC, or on the tech side, like CNET or ZDNET.
• Buzz among bloggers, social media, and bookmarking sites, or from online editors and site reviewers.

The classic example for all of these would be when a movie studio launches a website on behalf of a movie. The Spiderman 3 website is live now even though the movie is not coming out until the summer. The folks behind the site are interested in building everything (search rank, awareness, coverage, and buzz among bloggers). But not every site needs these potential objectives.

Beyond Google

Some sites can be found in other ways besides searching in Google. Thousands of editors write about and link to websites.

Some examples: Yahoo Picks of the Day, NY Public Library Best of the Web, The Scout Report, Child and Family WebGuide from Tufts, Exploratorium’s Web Picks, Berit’s Best Sites for Kids, BestHistorySites, Best of PhysicsWeb, Classroom Earth Best of the Web.

Some of these sites may not have as many page views as others, but they are all trustworthy.

Eric shows us Yahoo Picks and says it’s good for buzz and click traffic. The majority of the benefit is that the sites selected as a Yahoo pick will have thousands upon thousands of views. In fact, you can even submit a site for Yahoo’s consideration, though not every site has a submission form.  If you want to be listed, you should actively seek out the editorial staff.

User-Generated Links and Social Linking

Those of us who use the web on a daily basis could potentially have a site somewhere where they bookmark or share sites with people in some form or fashion. There are many user-driven site discovery tools.

• Social bookmarking sites (furl.net and blinklist.com): Links are in a publicly available location so that anyone can see them if you choose to share them. Search engines are starting to pay attention to which sites are earning the most bookmarks from these sites. More bookmarks may indicate higher quality.
• Tagging services (Technorati and del.icio.us — the latter is a hybrid). It is driven by the user base itself. Millions of people encounter the content link to what they find. The search engines try to mine this data to help with results.
• Community content submission and voting services (Digg and Reddit). Chris Sherman calls these “harvesters.” These are sites where people can submit news stories, link to websites, and comment, and depending on the popularity, it is voted up or down. From a social standpoint, looking at this interaction is fascinating. On the other hand, people were sharing content this entire time (e.g. “Share with a Friend”) and now there are tools that just ease the process. This really is a logical evolution.
  • The illustration of the Digg homepage shows people continually promoting a news story. “Like coffee, it percolated and bubbled to the top,” Eric says.

  There are only certain types of websites that will benefit from this though. If you are a small company that does business in a small city, do you really care if people all over the world see you on the Digg homepage? Not really, and it may negatively affect your hosting fees too. It’s useful for some content but not all.

Link Building in the Social Web

From a link building standpoint, all of the aforementioned sites are opportunity. From Google’s standpoint, how much would you trust them? How much weight would you give? Any content that makes it to a social bookmarking site can be abused and people can game the system so that you can fool the search engines. There is this question of the tipping point — at what point is no useful from an algorithmic standpoint? I’m not saying we’re there yet, but you will find hundreds of these sites that make you scratch your head and ask why it made it to the main page.

Conclusion

To conclude, there are different types of links to be had and it should depend on your content and objective.

Should you do it yourself or look for outside help? The best solution: don’t outsource 100% of your link-building efforts to a third party. There is no outside party that has the passion to help you as much as you want to help yourself. You can definitely work alongside someone who can teach you the ropes, and that will help you get an edge. But if you work with a linkbuilder, you are one of a bunch of different companies that they work with, so they may not emphasize your relationship as heavily as you would expect.

In my experience, the best success is when people in-house work alongside the link builders, and the in-house folks become more and more comfortable with the process.

The challenge is to find the right person or service that is right for your content and site. I don’t think any link builder can be an expert in the pharmaceutical industry and the music industry. One of the biggest changes for me is that I am doing more and more work putting together the right people than doing it for them because there’s a lot of specialization involved.

Questions and Answers

Question: With Google in general, how do we deal with personalization?
Answer: Google is starting to look at your individual searching habits especially if you have a Google account and are logged in. Different results will be presented to different people depending on your search habits. If, for example, you are a teacher that has had a history of searching for animals and you are looking for “jaguar,” Google will serve content related to the animal and not the car. Right now, I don’t think this will have an impact on SEO. SEO firms that do the wrong type of linking may have an issue. Then there are other questions outside of this, such as privacy issues (how much of the stuff do I search for do I want Google to have?). People may feel frustrated for not finding desired results. The search experience may become less pleasant.

Question: Can you be penalized by the organic results, and can this hurt you in Google’s eyes?
Answer: If you have links that you didn’t actively seek, I won’t say it’s impossible, but it’s probably a mistake or fluke if you are penalized for links that come naturally. If this were the case, you’d see competitors wanting to ban each other, like Nike and Reebok.

Question: Is the PageRank for each page unique or does the website share PR for all pages?
Answer: The answer isn’t uniform for every site. If I have a site with PR6 and I write a new article and post it today, will the article now show PR0? A month-old article may have a PR2-3 but not a PR6. It can trickle down and bleed over to other content, but it depends upon the overall site and Google’s perception of that site. The older the site, the more trust it has earned. Rightly or wrongly, Google loves old sites.

Question: What about reciprocal links?
Answer: I’m not against reciprocal links as much as many people who are. There are no absolutes with this method. You have to give me the specific scenario. But sometimes it makes perfect sense and other times it’s foolish or crazy. Think about the focus of your reciprocal links. In the plumbing example discussed earlier, if you intend to do reciprocal links here, reciprocate away. But don’t reciprocate links with a tanning salon, beauty parlor, or grocery store. By doing that, you’re sending off a signal, algorithmically speaking, where you’re not very discriminate about the kind of content you want to link to. If your goal is to show new sites related to the same content, then you should do so, but don’t do it for the search rank because it’s a quick way to failure.

Question: Why don’t PRWeb’s links count for search rank?
Answer: PRWeb is a press release distribution site. There are others like BusinessWire, MarketWire, etc., but PRWeb has done a fantastic job dominating the online press release distribution market. While I think that press releases should be part of your marketing strategy, you need think like Google: if I were Google, would I trust the links that appear in a press release? After all, it’s a paid link. The press release itself may be beautifully written and have great content, but it is coupled in with bad press releases on the PRWeb site. I would not say that the tactic is flawed or bad, but can the search engines feel that the link is truly trustworthy if anyone who can afford to do this utilizes this method of posting press releases?

Question: What’s the best way to obtain an .edu link?
Answer: You have to be careful and not trick anyone (like a professor with a blog) — it’s not a core business practice that you want to use. If your site is about something related to something covered by academia, it is easy. For example, if your website is about civil engineering, find the professors who teach about this topic, and check if they have an online syllabus or a “resources and links” page for something like “Infrastructure Related Content.” Reach out to the professor and let him know what you want to accomplish. Make the letter personal. Don’t approach them with the standard “To whom it may concern, please link to our great content.” Contact them politely and that can work.

Question: Is link building a long-term effort?
Answer: In my opinion, it depends on the content. It can be interrupted by huge spikes or a frenzy of activity. You should continually attract links by building great content. You can attract natural links without even asking in some cases. It doesn’t always happen though. You might also have content that is appropriate for a certain time or place. For example, a recent volcanic eruption caused for a lot of volcanic related content to go forward. There’s a spike related to items for Valentine’s Day. Now that it’s past February 14th, these sites may not be getting as much traffic but they can still begin preparing links for next year.

Question: I’m a smaller site and am just getting started. How do you compete with people with 30,000+ links?
Answer: It’s definitely a challenge. I’m a small site with 60,000 to 70,000 inbound links. It will depend in some regards to what the topic or subject matter of your small site covers as well as how competitive the niche is that you are in. If you are a small mom and pop business and you make hand-carved hummingbird feeders, my hunch is that you will have an easier time building links in your topical area in comparison to a ticket broker selling tickets to the Super Bowl. It is all dictated by the competitive nature of your niche. What any competitor is doing can be analyzed. You can look at what they do to help your link building effort. It is like breadcrumbs and you can follow the trail.

Question: When linking in a blog from a corporate perspective, are you better off getting such links to the blog or to the main site? Which has more impact, linking to a subdomain or to the corporate page?
Answer: I’ve done it both ways. Every corporation should make a blog on their own domain if possible. But you can also make stuff that is fun, like promotional items where you can have a Coke advertisement linking to a related site like olympics.blogspot.com. You should not feel like you should restrict your work in any way.

Question: How does “nofollow” impact the linkbuilding effort?
Answer: Nofollow is something that is appended to an anchor link in HTML. It was not intended initially for search engines to discredit the link, but it began being used as such. We saw it first in the blogosphere where owners approved of comments but didn’t want to vouch for the sites of the people who commented. Then, in paid links, it was also used, but there was some backlash because people wanted the rankings. If you are buying links, you may want to make sure that those links are nofollowed if your intention is purely for click traffic. You don’t want to give off the wrong signal, not because you don’t want to get banned, but because it’s an issue of trustworthiness — and someone may get the wrong idea about your approach.

Question: If a website links to you, is it worthwhile to ask them to format it in any specific way, or is it good enough alone?
Answer: If it is an extremely popular site and has a high PageRank (I don’t know how much value PR has but it’s still used as a measure), it has more trust and the link itself can be valued regardless of the content in the clickable anchor text. If it doesn’t have critical keywords, it can still carry tremendous power. Anchor text should be treaded with carefully because it can be measured. If there are 8,000 links for a site and 4,000 links have identical anchor text, this doesn’t appear normal and people might want to take a closer look. In my 14 years of requesting links, I’ve never once asked for a link in a specific manner. I have made suggestions, but it depends on what kind of site I am linking to, and I think it’s rude to ask.

Question: Regarding trustworthiness, how does a site like Forbes become an authority in the first place? Further, if the links are coming from an SEO company, is there trustworthiness?
Answer: If you removed the human judgment factor out of the equation, you will see on the search engines that there are thousands upon thousands of sites that link to Forbes. Algorithmically, Forbes carries authority as it has links from a variety of places: public libraries, universities, etc. You can analyze a complete inbound profile to forbes.com and find out that there are links from, say, 70 different countries, and 22% of the links are from .gov and .edu sites — this is how it becomes an authority and is trusted.

Question: How important is it to monitor inbound links to look for faulty links? Is it worth it?
Answer: I think you should look at it but not obsess over it. Google recently released a Webmaster Tools link profile last week which shows significant analysis of inbound links. There are other tools out there that also help you with it. If you have faulty links to you, you can serve either a 301 (redirect) or a 404 (not found). There are a number of different ways to recapture the link popularity and it all depends on what happened to the content.

Thanks Eric, Third Door Media, and SearchMarketingNow — this was a very detailed and incredibly helpful webcast!