Searchlight

In the process of reviewing a client's Flickr account with my colleague and fellow Searchlight blogger Brian Brown, we noticed that Flickr has recently added nofollow tags to links placed within its Web site. Flickr has been one of the few social-media entities to continue to offer "link juice" from links placed with user-generated content (in this case photo descriptions), making it a viable entity for improving inbound links to a given site.

While it's understandable that Flickr implemented nofollow tags for the exact same reason other social-media sites have--misuse and spamming--it nonetheless marks another step toward the end of major social-media sites passing on PageRank.

It's not all bad news with Flickr, though...at least not so far. The nofollow tags have not been implemented throughout the whole site. While links embedded in individual photo descriptions are nofollowed, so far, links in Set and Collection descriptions continue to be free of them. Will this change? Only time will tell. SEOers everywhere are certainly hoping not.

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.

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.

Search engine optimization is one of those ongoing tasks. SEO only has two directions...forward or backward, and the day you stop paying attention to SEO is the day you start moving backwards.

If you are one of the so-called little guys, you may feel overwhelmed with how you can ever compete against the big guys. Well good news, as you'll see, even some of the big guys miss the mark on some of the most basic concepts.

Canonicalization

Simply put, in regards to SEO, we might describe "canonicalization" as identifying and consolidating to one, definitive source. The most basic and simplest example of this is www.domain.com versus domain.com. In most cases, both of these lead to the same "page," that is, there is no discernible difference in content between the two. This doesn't have to be the case, but let's not worry about that for now.

This is so often overlooked because it generally doesn't present any noticeable issues. After all, your visitors and search engines get to your site with either version. It's important to understand that search engines see pages based on the URL, which means, to them, these are two different URLs, and therefore two different pages--even if the content is 100 percent identical.

On a basic level, this means duplicate content. Search engines have gotten much better about handling duplicate content and will eventually choose one page or the other to serve up. On a more critical level, what this means is that you may be dividing up your link popularity in all the engines and PageRank specifically in Google.

PageRank dilution

When it comes to link popularity and PageRank, you always want to consolidate your efforts. If you don't force all the PageRank you've earned through to one canonical version, you may split that ever important "link juice" between two different URLs. That's because some folks will link to your URL without the www, just out of convenience or laziness. This SEO issue is one of those simple basics that every site should take care of, especially if it ends up being the difference between one of your pages showing up above or below your biggest competitor.

So which do you choose? Whether you go with the "www" version or the "non-www" version isn't really an issue. What is important is that you use a 301 permanent redirect in order to redirect traffic to the version of your choosing. Then you'll consolidate and flow all of the link juice to the canonical version regardless of how others link to your site--rather than diluting or splitting it.

As you can see by the list below, there are still a lot of big-name sites that haven't addressed canonicalization. Each of these sites can be reached by their www and non-www URLs. Is this negatively impacting their rankings? Maybe, maybe not, but why pass up on the simple stuff.

• levenger.com
• dwr.com
• dresses.com
• footlocker.com
• harborfreight.com
• hickoryfarms.com
• jeffersequine.com
• petco.com
• pfaltzgraff.com
• pier1.com
• qvc.com
• systemax.com

Contrast the above with the following big-name sites that DO properly redirect:

• zappos.com
• llbean.com
• wards.com
• potterybarn.com
• cabelas.com
• and of course... cnet.com