Link building is one of those challenging subjects that carries a lot of technical undertones. It's a subject that often requires some explanation, depending on the audience, as to why it is so important to begin with.
The importance of building links to a site is something that SEO (search engine optimization) practitioners understand all too well. It's not just a quantity thing, but a qualitative measure. Links aren't just a conduit for traffic; they serve as an important signal to search engines. Of course, it is the significance and understanding of this signaling that often steers the explanation of link building into a much more technical discussion.
Just last week I was in New York for an on-site training with the Institute for International Research. IIR is a great organization to work with and very interesting from an SEO perspective. IIR puts on large-scale events on a wide array of topics and an even wider array of industries, like the upcoming conference that search engine optimization expert Stephan Spencer will be speaking at called The Conference On Marketing.
So I found myself explaining link building to an audience that was nearly as diverse as their topics...varying responsibilities, positions, and technical expertise. This meant discussing the importance of quality versus quantity--that links from pages and sites that are authoritative within their topical area, with thematically relevant anchor text, hopefully from pages with lower numbers of outbound links, and higher PageRank may carry more value than other links. Of course, all of this is on a relative scale, though the ideal is finding links that score high on all these, and other, signals.
On the flight back, as exhaustion was starting to settle in, I found myself trying to come up with some image that could encapsulate these concepts of link building. One of the great things about being in a state of exhaustion is that simple visuals often come to mind over more complex ones. At some point, my mind settled in on the image of a mobile...as in the sculptures you hang in the air, based on counterbalanced components. Some of these feature pieces that are larger, counterbalanced by a pair of smaller ones, and so on.
I thought this image was appropriate, how the largest piece represented that most ideal, highest-quality link. Every site has a link profile, composed of all the links coming into it. Some are highly relevant, some highly irrelevant. Some come from authoritative domains, others not so much. We really, as do search engines, expect to find a diverse mix of links, many of which we have no control over. But while those ideal links may take more effort to achieve, they often carry considerably more weight, and value, than a handful of low-quality links.
Link quality illustrated as a mobile sculpture.
It's important, when link building, to remember that most links have value and we must find balance--spend too much time just looking for ideal links, and your link profile will remain stunted, but just building links for links' sake will leave you out of balance, with links that convey no real value, off-topic from spammy sites.
Link building, like much of SEO, is about balance.
There is still time to capture search traffic, even though the holiday season is half over. Here are some great tips that will give you a quick impact to encourage more shoppers to visit your site.
- Add a few keyword-rich links to your home page: In P.J. Fusco's article "Holiday Shopping: Wrap it Up," she had talked about how you shouldn't "trash the current navigation structure, rather embellish it with a few additional links containing well-targeted, keyword-rich anchor text. Doing so helps create one- or two-click shortcuts that efficiently channel search-referred visitors to all your great gifts and goodies." Did you remember to add one or two highly visible links on your site, directing traffic to your holiday specials?
- Revise your meta descriptions for the holidays: Are you promoting a holiday sale or specific items on your site? If so, don't forget to polish your meta descriptions so that searchers will recognize the keywords they're looking for. Last-minute holiday shoppers will be attracted to descriptions that speak to them, so remember to mention seasonal search phrases to encourage them to click through to your site. After you do this, make sure to make a list of the pages you affected so you can change them back after your New Year's Day sale.
- Be social: In my post "Last-minute tips for retailers for the holiday shopping season," one of the tips I had mentioned related to social media. The great news is that it is not too late to get out there, create viral content, and build your network of friends. Whether it's on YouTube, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg, etc., it can be as easy as giving a killer list of gift suggestions on UnSpun or Sk*rt. For example, the Great Gifts for Teenagers list was featured on the UnSpun home page recently. Note that with UnSpun, Amazon.com "employs" (probably through Mechanical Turk) an army of folks to spam the heck out of your list with Amazon products; it tends to happen a few days after you create the new list.
Well, there you have it. Just a few tips and friendly reminders that you can still ensure your holiday season is an SEO success.
With Google's recent crackdown on Web sites the sell PageRank--which really means selling links--a new era has begun for backlink building. In Google's eyes, links coming into a given Web site from external, quality sites increases that site's PageRank, and therefore its standing in the search engine's eyes. Until recently, there were many sites that had quality in Google's eyes (in other words, they had great PageRank) and also sold links. Anyone could get a piece of that good PR for a price.
Google is now actively lowering the PageRank of sites that deal in that sort of business, especially the larger, better known ones. These sites are often directories that require a fee to get a listing, and so far they are the hardest hit. I saw this firsthand in a listing of directories I keep. Going through the top-level directories on the list, one well-known directory's PageRank had dropped from eight to three. Another had gone from six to a flat zero. Still others directories simply don't exist anymore, most likely closing up shop to cut losses and avoid pesky questions from paying customers.
So, are there still ways to buy links to improve PageRank? Well, first off, it has never been a practice that I've necessarily endorsed. At the same time, there were--until recently--certain directories that seemed trustworthy and respected by Google as represented by good PageRank scores. Now that many (dare I say most?) of those sites have lost that endorsement, it's hard to recommend those that remain--some of the lesser-known directories that have thus far been spared. Still, a good Google hunt will turn up paid-listing directories that have decent PageRank. Whether or not such entities are a sound investment or a "proper" moral choice remains to be seen.
The best bet is to stick with directories that are free. So far, if they don't charge for the listing and have good PageRank, they can generally be considered acceptable in Google's eyes. Make sure, though, that nofollow tags aren't in place. If they are, while the listing may generate a little traffic, the listing does little to help the PR of a site.
If you really want to invest money into links, another option might be buying sites instead of links. It's easy to spend several thousand dollars on a link-buying campaign, and with Web sites possessing decent PageRank selling for as little as $10,000, at some point buying such a site makes the best sense. But don't fall into the trap of turning it into a link farm! Google will notice sooner or later, and your investment will be nullified or greatly damaged. Instead, buy a site for which you might have legitimate need and use it in that regard, making links to your other sites a secondary, but useful, focus.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, kicking off the 2007 holiday-shopping season...apparently in full force.
As you are probably aware, Black Friday is the term in the U.S. for retail shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday refers to online shopping on the Monday following Thanksgiving.
These have become milestone shopping days that retailers use as indicators for the health of the holiday-shopping season. While they are often referred to as the busiest or even biggest shopping days, they are quite often trumped by other days leading up to Christmas.
Retail, probably more than any other business, seems to live and breathe on year-over-year and comparable-day sales comparisons. Ask even the smallest retailer you know how they are doing, and without a blink they can probably quote how the day, week, and month are stacking up compared with a year ago.
While economic conditions, weather, and countless other variables can greatly impact sales, I have to imagine that most retailers would feel like a high school football team losing their homecoming game if sales fell even slightly below the previous year. Nothing seems to soften that blow.
What really struck me this year, though, was hearing reports of malls opening at midnight and other stores opening up earlier than ever before. I couldn't help but wonder: how sustainable is Black Friday sales growth?
The National Retail Federation reported that Black Friday weekend traffic was up 4.8 percent over last year, but average consumer spending was down 3.5 percent from last year. The NRF projects that holiday sales will rise 4 percent, though, so perhaps it will all be worth it when all the numbers add up after the season has come and gone.
But in the back of my mind, when I start thinking about extra staffing, overtime pay, holiday pay, and perhaps even lower gross margins or even losses on some of the door-buster specials, I wonder what the result of net sales is and whether it is really all worth it? How quickly will the point be reached when you can't open any earlier, drive any more store traffic, or offer enough hot deals to justify it all?
Enter Cyber Monday
Based on survey research from Shop.org, this fact isn't lost on retailers. While Black Friday won't be disappearing anytime soon, many retailers are looking to how they can further tap into the online market to drive sales. I'm sure their data includes retailers that are strictly online-based, but seeing how 72.2 percent of them planned special promotions for Cyber Monday, up from 42.7 percent from two years ago, online holiday sales look to have a pretty solid future.
And if those numbers don't indicate retailers' interest, perhaps the prime-time TV commercial I watched while writing this does. It was for a very well-known national electronics retailer with over 600 retail stores in the U.S. alone, yet the commercial focused solely on its Web site.
Perhaps the number that has online retailers already smiling this year though was from the Shop.org survey that revealed that 72 million Americans--11 million more than last year--planned to shop online this past Monday. Maybe next year more shoppers will measure the shopping season based on remaining online shipping days than store shopping days, and more retailers will start planning their holiday calendar around SEO.
One of the best ways for an Internet-based company to enter the social media world is through the creation of a Facebook.com application.
A successful app will drive traffic to the company's native site, create direct sales, and promote online reputation.
So what exactly is meant by a Facebook app? Well, it could be a simple as the Vampires application that allows members to "bite" one another and become "vampires." This application is fun, simple, and has gone viral (in the sense that it has become very popular). The application is monetized by way of advertising horror movies in the application's interface. And because Facebook is all about sharing, all of one's friends can see one's Vampiric status via the same interface.
But complaints regarding privacy are starting to surface in regard to such apps.
Facebook applications can be based solely on direct sales. Companies like Overstock.com allow--or should I say encourage--Facebook users to purchase from its Web site through its application, without ever leaving Facebook.com.
The problem is that people's purchase information is being shared. After making a purchase, the Overstock.com app displays a small box in a corner of the browser interface following a transaction. This box alerts people that information will be shared with other Facebook users unless they click on it to negate the sharing. The box fades away after a half minute or so, after which consent is assumed, and all your friends can see what you bought.
I'm no lawyer, but that sounds kind of "iffy" to me. And even if it is a legally binding procedure, it certainly isn't going to do much for customer satisfaction!
There are, evidently, other large e-commerce sites with similar or identical interfaces, and my instinct is that Facebook and these large companies will solve the problem quickly. It makes a good example, however, of social media gone awry. The term "social" does not automatically imply that sharing is the default; part of being social is having the choice to share or not share.
Purchasing items, especially during the holidays, often involves gifts, and the surprise of a well-chosen gift to a friend (who may well be in your Facebook world) is as social as it gets.
Seeing how it is nearly Thanksgiving here in the States, what better time to take a look at the SEO industry and give a little thought for some of the things that I give thanks for.
Search Engines
First and foremost would have to be search engines themselves, since without them, SEO would not be as important as it is. This isn't to say that SEO's value is only tied to the existence of search engines. SEO has really become much more encompassing than the acronym it is as SEO continues to evolve more as an extension of traditional marketing.
Ability to Rank
While every client and site owner feels challenged when it comes to ranking...... Read more
MSN's Live Search team announced back on August 22 that they would be launching a set of tools for Webmasters. At that time, this was strictly a private, by invitation beta. Even then, Webmasters and SEO practitioners alike were excited and hopeful as one of the much awaited features was the ability to pull up backlink information. MSN had previously turned off the special "link" and "linkdomain" query operators that provided a count of links pointing to a page or entire site, respectively.
The Live Search team is really trying to give everyone something to be thankful for. Karen Blakeman reported in October that Microsoft had restored the link and linkdomain queries, though with the slight modification of leading them off with a "+" sign, like:
+linkdomain:www.cnet.com
With apparently no official announcement from Microsoft, news of this seems to have just now picked up notice after Barry Schwartz reported it on Search Engine Land.
And now the Live Search team has ... Read more
Inbound links control PageRank, which in turn has a deep impact on Google rankings. Other search engines work similarly, rating the quality and number of links a given website receives as if they were votes for that site. So, how does one get a good take on inbound links for a site? There are many advanced linking softwares out there, like Advanced Link Manager, that can perform complex and deep analyses. But many webmasters or site owners may not need that much power, or would prefer to invest software dollars elsewhere. In most cases, simple link queries can offer a good overview of a site's inbound linking status.
What exactly is a link query? It is essentially a command line, followed by a web address, typed into a search engine. Most commonly, it looks like this:
link:www.yoursitehere.com
This line works for both Google and Yahoo. Each will return results listing websites that link to that address, but they will also list total numbers of inbound links as each engine counts them (note that currently Yahoo is a bit quirky in that it returns different numbers depending upon whether or not you?re logged into Yahoo). These numbers are rarely going to match between search engines as they use different methods to crawl and define inbound links, but taken together they draw a good picture of the linking popularity of a given site.
At the beginning of the year, MSN Live Search stopped offering the link query command. Though there was a rather cryptic work-around, it s no longer needed as MSN recently re-introduced the option with a slight variation: a plus sign (+) must be added to the beginning of the command:
+link:www.yoursitehere.com
Check it out for yourself here. Now anyone can get free reports on inbound links from the big three search engines. Use the information to gauge and build a link building strategy. Check out Stephan Spencer's earlier post on link building for more information.
After what felt like a long hibernation period, Google has recently made at least a partial PageRank update of the visible or public PageRank, often referred to as Toolbar PageRank. And boy was it noticed--not so much with the update but with the PageRank drops targeted at sites that were buying and/or selling text links.
A lot has been said already by many who have a much deeper understanding and forecast this event. What I find particularly interesting is how PageRank has become a form of currency, yet who can say what precisely that value is? Of course, I guess that is true of currency in general. Ironically, this currency is probably unknown to the majority of Web users. After all, do your family and friends outside the industry know what PageRank is? Do they even care? And more importantly, does it affect which sites they frequent?
PageRank is especially challenging since it is hard to even arrive at a consensus within the industry. Does it impact rankings? If so, by how much? Is it merely a visual representation of other signals? And is Toolbar PageRank any real indicator of true PageRank? All good questions. Like many things related to SEO and rankings, we must accept that we may never have a completely, air-tight answer. It seems that one can always point to an example that appears to defy the answers, but perhaps that is exactly how Google likes it.
Google Trends results for 'pagerank' and 'page rank'
(Credit: Google Trends)If you have been buying or selling text links and seen your PageRank drop, then you should turn to your analytics program or log stats to see if any noticeable changes appear there. If you have been tracking keyword ranking, you should check that as well to see what changes, if any, appear there. And hopefully you'll share your results with the rest of us.
At least for the time being, if PageRank rating is at all important to you, I'd stay away from buying or selling text links. Maybe this will blow over, maybe not. Unless detecting paid linking can be truly automated and handled algorithmically though, it's hard to imagine a scalable way of handling this long term. But maybe Google's hope is that by targeting highly visible sites and getting the industry talking about it, many sites will fall into line on their own out of the fear of repercussions.
As a result of all this, Google has perhaps just raised the cost of PageRank-based links. Certainly, links bought will now have to appear completely natural without any hint of commercial motivation. In this way, we can expect to see the black market of PageRank selling to grow and to see the cost of PageRank-based links to reach all-new levels.
For the rest of us, this will only reinforce good old SEO practices. Develop great content that authority sites will want to link to. Participate within your online community not only as a way to develop links, but to interact with your target audience. Make social media part of your online plan. After all, what's better than top rankings but being so well known for whatever it is you want to be known that people go directly to your site to begin with?
And clearly, as we can see from Google Trends reporting, Google PageRank falling does at least create quite a buzz.
A Gulfstream V jet
(Credit: Wikipedia)Mark spoke to attendees in the afternoon keynote at the Blog World and New Media Expo yesterday (Friday) in Las Vegas. (Great conference, by the way! And great parties too, including the bash that Zappos threw right after Mark's keynote!) During the Q&A, there was one comment that Mark made that peaked my interest in particular. Mark shared with BlogWorld attendees two companies he would love to buy. Alas, he confessed he can't afford either one of them. One was Facebook. The other was Verizon.
Facebook
I agree with Mark's assessment that Facebook is hot. So I have to admit that, at the right price, I think Facebook would be a great buy. But Internet users are fickle, and so it could be a risky purchase. For example, MySpace isn't as hip — particularly with teenagers — as it once was, whereas up-and-comer Bebo has gained a lot of ground with the teenage set, especially internationally. Will users see Facebook as old and tired in a year or two? Will Google's OpenSocial initiative level the playing field and thus lure users away to other social networks, taking market share away from Facebook in the process?Verizon
From Mark's talk at BlogWorld, it was clear he sees immense value in the pipes bringing high-speed data (Internet, video, voice,..) into the home. Could Verizon be the one to deliver on the dream of HD (high definition) video over the Internet? YouTube's video resolution sure does su... um, leave something to be desired. Personally I'd love for Mark to own Verizon and drive it hard towards that nirvana for all us bandwidth-hungry entertainment consumers.
I feel bad for Mark that he can't afford these two companies. Perhaps we could all pitch in with a few bucks of our own and lend him a hand so he can buy at least one of them? ;-)
