Searchlight

At Netconcepts, we often work with clients who have portfolios of domains. Some of these may be domains from other businesses or sites that have been acquired that are no longer active, while others are typo and brand protection names, and still others may be used for marketing purposes. These portfolios can range from a handful to hundreds or even thousands.

When kicking off work with a new client, one of the things we look at is their portfolio to see which domains are in use, what other sites they have, and which domains are parked or have redirects in place. We want to establish whether any domains are being used inefficiently. If a domain is returning a 404 Not Found and isn't currently in use, then we'd like to redirect it to a more appropriate destination to capture any traffic or link juice that may be going to the old domain.

What is more likely to be the case though is that the domains are just redirected to the main site. So what we are really interested in is how they are redirected. Many times, these domains are set up with 302 Temporary Redirects. While these redirects will still get the traffic and search engine spiders to the right destination, unfortunately these redirects will not pass along any of the PageRank or link popularity.

Once this has been identified, it is a pretty easy thing for the client's IT group to make sure their domain portfolio is working optimally. As you can imagine though, when working with a portfolio with hundreds or thousands of domains, this can be quite a task. There are individual header checkers like Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer (which is great and there is rarely a day that goes by that I don't find myself there) and Firefox add-ons, but that can still be a task with several URLs. There are some bulk checkers, but even those tend to have limits on how many URLs can be checked at a time.

But here is a quick and easy solution, demonstrated with some of CNET's own domains, that anyone can use to check a ton--maybe even two tons--of URLs using Excel and a simple formula and one of my favorite Firefox add-ons, Link Counter (see that link for an earlier post on using Link Counter and download).

Step 1 - copy and paste the URLs to be checked into Excel.

List of URLs in Excel spreadsheet.

Step 2 - if "http://" wasn't already present for the URLs, place it in a cell by itself.

Step 3 - write out this simple formula (adjusting your cell references if need be):
=HYPERLINK(CONCATENATE($A$1,A1),A1)

*if the URL list already includes the "http://" protocol, then the formula is even simpler:
=HYPERLINK(A1,A1)

Hyperlink formula to create live links.

Step 4 - copy that down for your entire list.

Step 5 - go to the "File" menu and select "Web Page Preview"

Web page preview with live links.

Step 6 - when this opens in Firefox, right-click on Link Counter in the browser status bar and select "Check link status."

Server status overlay using Link Counter.

Step 7 - now would be a good time to do some spot checking on some of the URLs, but otherwise, rejoice in the time that has been saved.

This can also be a way to double check whole lists of domains for canonicalization being in place, similar to the examples used here.

It's interesting how aspects of our lives come into play. Prior to joining this Web revolution, or evolution, depending on your point of view, I worked in the world of consumer packaged goods. I developed and managed some of the office products that most of you probably use everyday. I became fairly familiar with even more products that I didn't manage, but was naturally exposed to. One of these was the Rolodex brand card file products after that parent company was acquired.

Even though I didn't manage the product line, there was always something intriguing about the products. In this highly electronic world we live in, business cards continue to change hands every day. At some point or another, I'd guess that nearly every TV sitcom has someone pulling a card or looking up contact information from a card file; or at the very least, one is seen prominently on someone's desk. It just lends credibility and is something we've grown to expect.

By no means do I see business cards disappearing anytime soon--so pull those boxes back out of the trash. But, keep in mind that even business cards can only take you so far. Beyond business cards, everyone (and every business) should make sure that they are adding LinkedIn.com to their marketing mix.

While there are a number of services that can help keep you up to date with your contacts--probably better actually--the mix of features as well as the huge and continued adoption of LinkedIn by professionals makes it a worthwhile Web marketing venue.

So how can LinkedIn fit into your SEO and Web marketing mix? Here are three key areas to focus on.

Links & Linking

Every LinkedIn profile is able to add three links to other sites. These could be anything--perhaps to your company home page or to your blog. What many may not realize is that these links are live, direct, and not "nofollowed" on the public profile page...which is the page that is openly available to search engine spiders.

Rather than using the default choices that LinkedIn provides when adding links though, select "Other:" to add relevant anchor text to your links. Of course, you also need to make sure that your public profile is set to actually show these links within the Web site section of your profile. Since these public pages are accessible to search engine spiders, they'll also pass PageRank and contribute to overall link popularity.

Now that you've added links, be sure to link to your public profile URL from other sites when appropriate. This way you'll drive a little traffic to the profile, and depending on the link, also flow a little PageRank through the profile page to your chosen Web site or sites.

Answers

SEO of course has a strong focus on-site and in regard to search engine spiders. But SEO is also part of the much bigger picture of search engine marketing (SEM). This becomes especially clear when looking at the social media arena. And no where is this more evident than in the LinkedIn Answers section.

The Answers section provides members a forum for asking as well as answering questions posed by other members. While search engine spiders may index and even return these pages, more importantly, these pages are seen everyday by real live human beings who may well be potential customers. Participating within the Answers section is an ideal opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership within your industry, draw additional attention to your Web site (since you did of course add a link to it from your profile as discussed above), network, and further build your brand image.

Optimization

Did I mention that your public profile may be seen, indexed and more importantly, returned within search results? What this means is that you have one more opportunity to rank, and not only rank, but rank via content that you control. LinkedIn is a great reminder that optimization is mostly focused on-site, but we should never lose sight of opportunities to optimize content we can control, residing on sites that may lead visitors to our site. And actually, LinkedIn may provide even more than one opportunity to rank since every employee's profile within a company may be one more potential search result.

Now this isn't a license to spam your LinkedIn profile. What it does mean is that it may be beneficial to give a little more attention to the summary information that you provide. Write it intelligently but also incorporating strong keyword-rich signals that are related to your brand, industry and Web site that you wish to be found for.

Best of all, even if LinkedIn decides to "nofollow" all links within profiles, or even block search engines from indexing member profiles, LinkedIn will still serve as an online marketing and networking channel to connect you and your business with potential clients and customers, which in the end, is what SEO is really all about.

But as I said earlier, don't go throwing out your business cards, or your card files. Who knows though, maybe in the future, business cards will look a little differently than they do today, and perhaps something more like this:

Brian R. Brown
http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianrbrown

Certainly allows for plenty of white space.

So I've been meaning to do some write-ups on some browser toolbars and plug-ins that may be useful for SEO purposes...and leave it to Rand at SEOmoz.org to remind me of this with his review of 12 popular browser toolbars.

Link Counter (download) is one that I absolutely love both for what it does and its simplicity. Links play a very important part in SEO, both internal links as well as external links. Are they live or broken, 301 redirected, HTML or JavaScript based? Unfortunately the one thing it doesn't seem to manage is showing "nofollow" links, but there are plenty other tools out there that do that.

The best way to get a feel for Link Counter is to see it in action, and one of the best places to see it in action is on an e-commerce site. E-commerce sites are often rather complex with many links on a page, links out to external sites, to product pages, JavaScript windows, and more. Let's use Onlineshoes.com for our demo.

Like many companies, Netconcepts recently celebrated the holidays with a little staff get together and mystery gift exchange. There were the usual, but always popular gifts of coffee, tea, chocolates, and wine, as well as a very popular Atari console ... and as we did the "you can open one or steal one" gift rule, it certainly was the most fought over gift.

Unfortunately due to timing, Stephan wasn't able to make it as he was out visiting our friends in Seattle and participating in a great SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday otherwise he might have been torn between the Atari and the unique gift that follows and shows that even search geeks have a sense of humor (twisted as it may be).

Every search marketer has their bag of tricks and tools, but why settle for a bag when you can have a kit ... or more accurately, a box with built in carrying handle? And at $15 or less, the cost limit for our gift exchange, within range of even the budding search marketer.

What comes in a Search Marketer's Kit? I thought you'd never ask. Luckily, each item in the kit comes with its own identification tag.

Official Super Deluxe Search Marketer's Kit

MSN, please say it isn't so.

As earlier reported, the MSN Live Search team had reinstated the link queries, though with a twist... now requiring a "+" in front of either the link: or linkdomain: query operators. But now it appears that the query is no longer working again.

But right now, it appears there is no love to be found at MSN for link queries:

Live Search link query results.

Nor linkdomain queries:

Live Search linkdomain query results.

Hopefully, this is just a glitch, but if not, then hopefully the Live Search team will make up their minds once and for all and either reinstate the special queries or kill them altogether.

The problem is that search marketers and Web site owners alike use these queries to measure and benchmark their visibility on the Web, as well as the success of their link building. These queries were originally decommissioned due to extreme load from automated queries.

Now that MSN has launched its new Webmaster Center, there is a thought that it will build this into its interface. While this may help alleviate the automated queries, it will probably be limited to the site that is validated within Webmaster Center. Unfortunately, this means that there won't be any way to measure against similar or competitor sites.

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.

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.

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.