June 16, 2009

Google Further Clarifies Nofollow and PageRank Sculpting

Earlier this month, Matt Cutts shared with search marketers that Google had begun treating nofollow differently, especially in regards to "PageRank sculpting," the advanced SEO tactic that aims to control where PageRank flows around a site.

Today, he goes into detail on how Google views PageRank sculpting, and how it treats the nofollow attribute in regards to PageRank flow.

Cutts offers a simplified description of the PageRank process, where a page's value flows out to the various pages it links to equally. When the nofollow attribute originally came on the scene, Google would just remove those links from the equation, according to Cutts. So if a page with 10 "PageRank points" to share had ten links on it, and five were nofollowed, each regular link would pass two PageRank points.

Cutts today said that Google changed this practice more than a year ago to keep the nofollowed links in the equation, but not passing any PageRank points. So in that same example, the regular links would each pass 1 PageRank point, and the nofollowed links would still "use up" their allotted points, even though they did not pass those points on.

Cutts once again reiterated his stance that PageRank sculpting is not the best way for an SEO to spend his or her time:

I wouldn't recommend it, because it isn't the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of "PageRank sculpting" has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front-and-center on your web site vs. burying them deep within your site so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products.

There may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page) that I might add nofollow on, just because those pages are different for every user and they aren't that helpful to show up in search engines. But in general, I wouldn't recommend PageRank sculpting.

Why is Google sharing this information now, a year after the change was made? Apparently, they were hoping that SEOs would notice the change and report on it themselves, but they didn't. Then Matt's repeated assertions that PR sculpting wasn't a good use of time went unheeded as well.

One of the biggest ways this affects most search marketers is on pages with user comments that are nofollowed. In the early days of nofollow, those pages would have received a boost over their pre-nofollowed state, since the PageRank taken up by those links would be redistributed by other links on the page.

But as of Google's change last year, those pages should have reverted to their pre-nofollow state, where the nofollowed links did use up PageRank. But with nofollow, those nofollowed links don't share PageRank with other sites, it just dissipates.

But Cutts advises against deciding not to turn off comments to avoid linking out at all:

I wouldn't recommend closing comments in an attempt to "hoard" your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

June 11, 2009

$14 Million For CircuitCity Domain, Brand = Good Link Buy?

Aaron Wall does a great analysis of the smart play by the company that bought the CircuitCity domain and brand out of bankruptcy as the new high end link buying procedure.

The site is well ranked for many many keywords and with the recent boost of brands in the Google algorithm it could be that $14 million was a bargain that could be recouped very quickly.

Aaron does a great job dissecting the purchase and gives one ideas for gaining lift from less expensive domains that have gone into bankruptcy. I wonder if people will now start looking at bankruptcy reports instead of the expired domain lists.

Posted by Frank Watson at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 9, 2009

SEW Experts: Link Building 101, Part 2

Last week, we looked at on-site linking best practices. In today's SEM 101 column, "Link Building 101, Part 2," Ron Jones examines off-page SEO factors, with five methods you can start using right now to build links.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 5, 2009

SEW Experts: Integrating Marketing Campaigns with Link Development

Companies can often make simple modification to their promotions to develop links simultaneously. Other times, the links already exist from marketing campaigns, but they aren't being utilized for their full value. In today's online promotion & linkbuilding column, "Integrating Marketing Campaigns with Link Development," Justilien Gaspard outlines a few ways SEMs and other marketers can work together to their mutual benefit.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 3, 2009

SEW Experts: Using Search to Help You with SEO

Link research can take time, but there are several ways you can use a search engine to find quality links. In today's organic search engine optimization column, "Using Search to Help you with Search Engine Optimization," Mark Jackson looks at queries you can make using your favorite search engine that can help you find places to acquire links to your Web site.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 2, 2009

SEW Experts: Link Building 101, Part 1

The concept of getting backlinks to a page internally is sometimes overshadowed by trying to acquire backlinks from external pages. In today's SEM 101 column, "Link Building 101, Part 1," Ron Jones suggests using the same concept and applying it to your internal linking structure.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 23, 2009

SEW Experts: A Linking Strategy Is About More Than Just Quality Content

Some SEOs seem to think that all you need to do to get good links is to build quality content, but improving the quality and quantity of your inbound links doesn't rest on the shoulders of good content alone. In today's SEM Crossfire column, "A Linking Strategy Is About More Than Just Quality Content," Chris Boggs and Frank Watson remind you to spend the time to develop a sound linking strategy, or no one will ever find your quality content.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 8, 2009

SEW Experts: Don't Overlook These Link Building Opportunities

With each passing year, link development becomes increasingly difficult. Yet we sometimes tend to overlook good link opportunities that are right under our noses. In today's online promotion & linkbuilding column, "Don't Overlook These Link Building Opportunities," Justilien Gaspard outlines a few types of links that may not seem worthwhile, but could turn out to be a useful link.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

December 11, 2008

SEW Experts: Look for SEO Opportunities in these Dire Economic Times

Times are tough, but you can weather this economic downturn by taking advantage of some remarkable opportunities for those willing to think outside the box. In today's online promotion & linkbuilding column, "Look for SEO Opportunities in these Dire Economic Times," Justilien Gaspard shows you some ways to be poised to outrank your competition when the economy turns around.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 13, 2008

SEW Experts: Use Online Public Relations for Link Marketing

Make the most out of these rocky economic times by utilizing your staff during idle time for online public relations. In today's linkbuilding column, "Use Online Public Relations for Link Marketing," Justilien Gaspard offers some ideas for things you can do to build links and increase sales simultaneously.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 6, 2008

SEW Experts: Obama's Link Strategy Fuels Election Victory

Internet link love proves more powerful than old-school politics in the 2008 election, thanks in part to a visionary social networking election strategy. In today's link building column, "Obama's Link Strategy Fuels Election Victory," Sage Lewis looks at what we can learn about online marketing from studying presidential politics.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 5, 2008

SEW Experts: Social Media Link Building: From Fantasy to Reality

Sometimes, a company's marketing efforts can have an unintentional impact from a link building perspective. Such is the case with this fantasy sports community site focused on building communities in Facebook and other social media environments. In today's Web analytics and ROI column, "Social Media Link Building: From Fantasy to Reality," Eric Enge shares the successful strategy of Citizen Sports Network.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 30, 2008

SEW Experts: Use Humor for Link Marketing

Humor is a great form of content that will give people a reason to link to your content, and help it spread virally. The challenge for most sites is coming up with something funny. In today's linkbuilding column, "Use Humor for Link Marketing," Justilien Gaspard offers some ideas that can be used by everyone, regardless of the size of your marketing budget.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 28, 2008

SEW Experts: The Ghosts of SEO Past and Future

When banner ads first came out, there was hardly enough inventory to satisfy advertisers' needs. Paid search and search engine optimization changed all that. In today's search engine optimization column, "The Ghosts of SEO Past and Future," Mark Jackson points out that SEO, too, has changed radically in the last decade.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

October 17, 2008

SEW Experts: Google's New Tools for Site Link Strengthening

Both Matt Cutts and the Google Webmaster Central team recently turned their focus on helping sites address 404 error pages, which don't pass link authority and negatively impact the user experience. In today's SEM Crossfire column, "Google's New Tools for Site Link Strengthening," Frank Watson and Chris Boggs discuss the new tools Google has created to assist site owners and SEOs with a quick way to improve a site's overall impact on search results.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 16, 2008

SEW Experts: Content Promotion for Link Marketing

Even if your content is great and deserving of links, you won't get very far if no one knows about it. The Web already has a ton of great content and more added each day. In today's linkbuilding column, "Content Promotion for Link Marketing," Justilien Gaspard tells you how to promote your content to get noticed.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 9, 2008

SEW Experts: My Wife, the Editor

Editor of any kind of publication -- machining, food, scientific equipment -- is an underground ruling class that very few average people know about. In today's link building column, "My Wife, the Editor," Sage Lewis reminds us that, when approaching an editor of a newspaper, trade publication, or a major publication, if you want the quote, if you want the link, treat these people with the respect they've come to know and love.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 8, 2008

SEW Experts: SEO Link Building Fundamentals

Link building is often a slow and arduous process that unfolds over a long period of time. But the rewards are large and it's a fundamental requirement for marketing any Web site, regardless of how established it may be. In today's Web analytics and ROI column, "SEO Link Building Fundamentals," Eric Enge shows you how creative link research can provide you with some real advantages.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

October 2, 2008

SEW Experts: Link Marketing -- Solve a Customer Problem

Solving customer problems and publishing that information on your site can be a great way to build both brand awareness and links. In today's linkbuilding column, "Link Marketing -- Solve a Customer Problem," Justilien Gaspard explains how focusing on a niche or soliciting input from your customers are two great ways to develop your content ideas.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 25, 2008

SEW Experts: A Tale of Two Links

Be ready. A great link can come to you at a moment's notice. If you don't pounce on it, it very likely will slip through your fingers. In today's link building column, "A Tale of Two Links," Sage Lewis shares his recent experiences of being ready and getting a link, and a missed opportunity.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 18, 2008

SEW Experts: Link Marketing: What Google Can Teach You

Google's success story has many important lessons about link marketing. In today's linkbuilding column, "Link Marketing: What Google Can Teach You," Justilien Gaspard explains that you can learn how to build links to your site by studying how Google has successfully built their business.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 12, 2008

SEW Experts: Would You Endorse this Web Site?

Think of link building as running for president of your SERPs. The candidate is your Web site, and you need all the support you can muster to get there. In today's SEM agency issues column, "Would You Endorse this Web Site?," William Flaiz shows that the right connections can provide the bump you need, and the wrong connections can prove calamitous.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 11, 2008

SEW Experts: Change How You Think About Your Life and Company

Even the smallest thing can make a big difference. Here are some very small things you can do make a difference and serve a cause greater than yourself.In today's link building column, "Change How You Think About Your Life and Company," Sage Lewis reminds us that sometimes, it's more about doing what's right. The links will come naturally.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 4, 2008

SEW Experts: Viral Link Building: Size Doesn't Always Matter

Despite some popularly held ideas to the contrary, viral campaigns don't need to be massive to be successful. You can have a small campaign that has a big impact in your industry or community. In today's linkbuilding column, "Viral Link Building: Size Doesn't Always Matter," Justilien Gaspard explains that the power of viral marketing for link building comes from going after a targeted audience.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 28, 2008

SEW Experts: Get Links Now: Make a Difference, Make Connections

Want to solve the link building riddle? Stop thinking about money and start thinking about something bigger. In today's link building column, "Get Links Now: Make a Difference, Make Connections," Sage Lewis shows you how getting outside of your own little world can expand your horizons, as well as your link portfolio.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 7, 2008

SEW Experts: Link Building with Customers, Part 2

Customers are one of your most valuable link building resources, because they're already sold on your product or service. In today's linkbuilding column, "Link Building with Customers, Part 2," Justilien Gaspard shows that cultivating positive relations with clients is the key to getting them to help with link development and word-of-mouth marketing.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 31, 2008

SEW Experts: Link Building: Understand Where You Are To Know Where You're Going

In link building, if you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up someplace else. In today's link building column, "Link Building: Understand Where You Are To Know Where You're Going," Sage Lewis looks at some tools to help you discover and monitor inbound links.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 17, 2008

SEW Experts: Internal Links And My High School Evolution

Understanding internal linking is made easier by comparing it to high school. In today's link building column, "Internal Links And My High School Evolution," Sage Lewis shows that, just as cool kids in school can make others cool by associating with them, internal linking can spread the "coolness factor" of your site, aka PageRank, among various pages.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 10, 2008

SEW Experts: Link Building via Word-of-Mouth

Get people talking positively about your company or product and the links will follow. In today's linkbuilding column, "Link Building via Word-of-Mouth," Justilien Gaspard offers some tips on how to increase exposure, branding, and build links all at the same time.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 3, 2008

SEW Experts: Three Tips for Creating a Successful Blog

Instead of focusing on where to find links, SEOs and site owners should think about setting up a site so people will want to link to it. In today's Link Building column, "Three Tips for Creating a Successful Blog," Sage Lewis notes that people usually put the cart (the links), before the horse (the content). But the horse is what drives the cart.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 1, 2008

SEW Experts: Some New SEO Services Not So "Special"

Many SEO agencies are running out of ways to draw in large clients, especially when so many offer little to no value over the next agency. This dilemma has given birth to new "special services," which can set an agency apart. In today's Enterprise Search Marketing column, "Some New SEO Services Not So "Special"," Aaron Shear warns enterprise clients to beware, as there are some unscrupulous agencies using these in ways that can sometimes be a threat to your rankings.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 26, 2008

SEW Experts: Link Building Ideas for Local Auto Dealers

The beauty of certain industries -- and the challenge -- is they're international, national, and local all at the same time. Such is the case with auto dealers. In today's Link Building column, "Link Building Ideas for Local Auto Dealers," Justilien Gaspard shares two link building ideas for a local auto dealer that can be applied to various types of local businesses.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 24, 2008

SEW Experts: Combine Freshness and Links for Long-Term Results

Fresh content will help you achieve top rankings right away, and help your Web site become an "authority" site. But fresh rankings don't always last. In today's Organic Search Engine Optimization column, "Combine Freshness and Links for Long-Term Results," Mark Jackson shows you how to create a concerted effort to generate links and traffic to the post, and keep those rankings long-term.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 12, 2008

SEW Experts: Think Links from New Sites Have Little Value? Think Again

It's often assumed that new sites haven't earned enough trust in Google to pass real value. But if you flatly skip over links from new sites, you're losing out on immense opportunities. In today's Link Building column, "Think Links from New Sites Have Little Value? Think Again," Justilien Gaspard advises link builders to think of it as investing in the stock market by looking for undervalued, or unnoticed, sites that have a high likelihood of rising in popularity.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 5, 2008

SEW Experts: 3 Ways to Spy on Your Competitors

James Bond would never have been the greatest secret agent on the silver screen if it weren't for his super-awesome gadgets. Fortunately for search marketers, there are some great secret agent link gadgets that can make you a top notch linker. In today's Link Building column, "3 Ways to Spy on Your Competitors," Sage Lewis shares some of his favorite tools for super-spies...and link builders.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 29, 2008

SEW Experts: Five Traits of the Ideal Link Builder

If you've decided to expand your team, or perhaps hire your first link marketer, there are some important qualities to look for in potential hires. In today's Link Building column, "Five Traits of the Ideal Link Builder," Justilien Gaspard outlines those five traits, which can help you identify candidates that are most likely to be successful and productive members of your link marketing team.

» Full story

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 15, 2008

SEW Experts: Keeping SEO Staff Motivated and Driven

Talented link developers are hard to find -- you want to retain them as long as possible. In today's Link Building column, "Keeping SEO Staff Motivated and Driven," Justilien Gaspard offers tips on some incentives you can use to keep your link marketers productive and driven, while reducing staff turnover.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 8, 2008

SEW Experts: Giving Links Away

There are a few ways of controlling what pages of your site share their link love. In today's Link Building column, "Giving Links Away," Sage Lewis explains the concepts of PageRank "sculpting" and siloing: two methods that use the "nofollow" attribute to control which links are counted in search engine ranking algorithms.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 1, 2008

SEW Experts: There Are No Free Links: Budgeting Resources for SEO Link Building

There's no such thing as a free link. The amount of time and resources to invest for link development depends on the profits your company stands to make from top rankings. In today's Link Building column, "There Are No Free Links: Budgeting Resources for SEO Link Building," Justilien Gaspard explains that being realistic about your available resources, budget, and goals when setting up a link marketing program will save you and your staff from unnecessary frustration. Plus, you'll end up with better results!

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

April 10, 2008

SEW Experts: Link Building Strategies: Apprentice Edition

Great content is only half the battle. Don't forget the other half: getting the word out about your great content. In today's Link Building column, "Link Building Strategies: Apprentice Edition," Sage Lewis shares his past mistakes when building a blog for The Apprentice, and neglecting to tell anyone about it.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

April 3, 2008

SEW Experts: Afraid to Link Out? Think Again

Both people and search engines place more value on information that cites multiple sources. By refusing to link to other sites you are harming your site's relevance and ability to gain links. In today's Link Building column, "Afraid to Link Out? Think Again," Justilien Gaspard outlines the benefits of linking out, for both humans and machines.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

March 27, 2008

SEW Experts: Creating a Link Building System

We, as industry insiders, often lose the pulse of the real world. Sometimes, we all need to take a step back and look at things from a new perspective, and realize that the majority of marketers are not immersed in search marketing as we are. In today's Link Building column, "Creating a Link Building System," Sage Lewis goes back to link-building basics and offers a seven-step plan to get beyond linkbait and start getting ranked in the SERPs.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

March 20, 2008

SEW Experts: Link Building from the Heart: Giving to Get

Traditional marketers and PR folks have been using good deeds for marketing purposes for years; so why not online marketers? In today's Link Building column, "Link Building from the Heart: Giving to Get," Justilien Gaspard shows how giving back to your community on a local, national, or even international level is a great way to build links.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:03 AM | Permalink

March 6, 2008

SEW Experts: SEO Link Building: Budget Stretcher for Online Retail and E-Commerce Sites

Let's face it: most e-commerce sites primarily consist of a shopping cart on steroids. Whether you're selling clothing, car parts, luggage, or even cameras, your approach to link development matters most. In today's Link Building and Social Media column, "SEO Link Building: Budget Stretcher for Online Retail and E-Commerce Sites," Justilien Gaspard takes on the difficult task of link building for e-commerce sites.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2008

SEW Experts: 5 Ways to Discover Link Building Ideas

Coming up with great link building ideas can be a challenge. It requires creativity, research, and thinking outside the box. In today's Link Love column, "5 Ways to Discover Link Building Ideas," Justilien Gaspard reviews some techniques to get your business started in the process.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

February 15, 2008

SEW Experts: The Great Nofollow Link Debate of '08

What started as a way to stop comment spam three years ago has turned into one of the most controversial topics in search. In today's SEM Crossfire column, "The Great Nofollow Link Debate of '08," Chris Boggs discusses the evolution of the "nofollow" attribute and its impact on SEO and link building.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

February 14, 2008

SEW Experts: SEOs, Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!

Conventional business wisdom for the 21st century seems to be that to prosper you must change. In today's Link Love column, "SEOs, Don't Just Do Something, Sit There!," Sage Lewis urges search marketers to adapt. The Internet has changed everything for everyone. If you don't believe and act on that, you won't survive, plain and simple.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

February 7, 2008

SEW Experts: Coffee, Tea, or Link Love?

Developing links for a business-to-business (B2B) site can be a challenge. In today's Link Love column, "Coffee, Tea, or Link Love?," Justilien Gaspard outlines some best practices for a link-building campaign for a site in the restaurant and coffee equipment industry.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

February 5, 2008

Boost Organic Results. Link Build with Social Media

In this evolutionary algorithmic age every search marketer charged with boosting rankings on the organic SERPs knows, with fearful certainty, that building inbound links is essential. Utilizing social media communities to do so is a front-and-center tactic for many.

Sure, we're all aware of mainstream players like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Propeller, etc...

However, there are hundreds of social communities other than the biggies. These niche' player-communities can be terrific venues to engage readers of similar ilk, make friends, drive focused micro-busts of traffic, and build links. Some communities are junk. This post offers niche' social site examples and provides links to lists which index and profile dozens of useful ones.

Dofollow and Nofollow A quick word about Do/No follow. Most blogs (and many communities) these days attempt to discourage spam by removing "link-juice" passed on links dropped in discussion threads. That's called "Nofollow." (Wikipedia is a classic example of Nofollow.) Nofollow links deliver traffic but there's no SEO benefit. If you view the source code of this page, you'll see that some of the social site links are Nofollow and therefore do not pass energy.

When evaluating the potential benefit of social community participation, it's best practice to understand the objective and potential gain. Whenever a site, with decent Pagerank, "forgets" to turn off Dofollow, it's an opportunity of sorts to build links of varying strength and value. The most important caveat is that gratuitous link dropping, without offering true value to the community, is spam and will likely be treated as such.

Every search marketing professional knows that garnering good quality, relevant, and "natural" inbound links to your site or blog is critical to drive your SEO ranking efforts. Honest participation in niche' social communities, relevant to your product & services, is the tactic that many savvy SEMs reach for to build their site's inbound link-profile. In addition to the community site links themselves, "hot" posts can result in feed subscriptions, increased readership, and links from other relevant and valuable sites.

Fark is a social news site in which moderators approve user link-submissions and post them to the homepage. The links are Nofollow but can drive noticeable traffic.

Slashdot is a community where techno-heads hang out and geek-jam. However, users submit stories about entertainment, politics, and other fun stuff. If editors approve a submission and it's promoted the homepage, measurable traffic can result. Also, links in the body of each post are Dofollow and pass juice.

Metafilter is a moderated community, both by site administers and users, in which participants share interesting web content. Links are Dofollow.

Mixx is widely regarded as an up-and-comer in the social news world. A potentially mainstream Digg replacement site, many SEM folks had early-adopter Mixx profiles for fun and future marketing bang. Oh yes, they forget to turn off Dofollow so the links pass juice.

Hugg is a smaller community engaged in dialog surrounding environmental issues. There's social exchanges about technology, politics, and science as well. Links are Dofollow.

Sk*rt is a Dofollow PR 5 fashion, food, and technology community, primarily comprised of females.

Stirr'dup is a smaller NoFollow social news site which categorizes news as technology, entertainment, news and politics.

Linkinn is a PR5 site specializing in offbeat video and pictures. Links are DoFollow and pass juice.

Lists of Useful Social Media Sites: 48 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities Tropical SEO: Top 38 Niche Social Media Sites (That Actually Send Traffic)

Respected blogger Sugarrae has posted a serious interview with industry leading link-building experts and is a must-read. Interviews include: Eric Ward, the Link Moses behind URL Wire Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz Roger Montti, the founder and owner of martinibuster.com Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl and Clientside Justilien Gaspard, Link Columnist for SearchEngineWatch.com, his link building blog and course author SEMPO Institute Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Clientside SEM Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and the The Link Spiel Michael Gray of the Graywolf SEO Blog Andy Hagans, the lazy SEO of the Tropical SEO Blog Jim Boykin of We Build Pages and Internet Marketing Ninjas Rae Hoffman, CEO of Sugarrae and MFE Interactive

Posted by Marty Weintraub at 11:27 AM | Permalink

January 31, 2008

SEW Experts: Recession-Proof Your Business by Building Links

Can you feel the nervousness in the business community? Even search -- the golden child of marketing -- has been getting pushed around by the market. In today's Link Love column, "Recession-Proof Your Business by Building Links," Sage Lewis warns that search marketers need to wake up and stare reality in the face.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

January 24, 2008

SEW Experts: Link Building Case Study for Luxury Hotels

Opportunities for creative link building solutions are plentiful. Just solve a user problem, like a concierge at a luxury hotel. In today's Link Love column, "Link Building Case Study for Luxury Hotels," Justilien Gaspard shows how a hotel's Web site can improve guest satisfaction and branding.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

January 16, 2008

SEW Experts: What's Your Link Building Marketing Mix? - Part 2

If you've been following the search industry at all for the past year, you probably heard about Google's war on paid links. In a nutshell, Google banned paid links; and SEOs split in two camps over the move. What's a CMO to do? In today's By the Numbers column, "What's Your Link Building Marketing Mix? - Part 2," Eric Enge explains why you should never buy links, and why you should almost never swap links.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

January 10, 2008

SEW Experts: Top 5 SEO and Link Building Challenges for 2008

Google's public attack on paid links has caused a flood of scared Webmasters who are scared to link to other sites. In today's Link Love column, "Top 5 SEO and Link Building Challenges for 2008," Justilien Gaspard outlines the top five trends and challenges SEOs, link builders, and Webmasters face.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

January 9, 2008

SEW Experts: What's Your Link Building Marketing Mix?

Do you have a linkbuilding plan that can be integrated into your comprehensive marketing strategy? In today's By the Numbers column, "What's Your Link Building Marketing Mix?," Eric Enge explains the need to understand the value of inbound links to your Web site, and the need to develop a cohesive strategy for building links.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

January 3, 2008

SEW Experts: Search Engine Marketing 21st Century Manifesto

As Web marketers, our time has come. We must stand up to our clients and demand they build sites worth linking to. In today's Link Love column, "Search Engine Marketing 21st Century Manifesto," Sage Lewis explains how to recover from a link building strategy that has been obsessed with the links and completely ignores what we're asking people to link to.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

December 27, 2007

SEW Experts: 7 Tips for Training Link Developers

We all know the vital role of backlinks in search engine visibility. So how do you train your link building team? In today's Link Love column, "7 Tips for Training Link Developers," Justilien Gaspard shares some essential tips for training link developers in-house that are so simple, even traditional ad agencies can catch on.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2007

SEW Experts: Link Building Case Study: Santa Claus

Is Santa Claus a savvy Web marketer? In today's Link Love column, "Link Building Case Study: Santa Claus," Sage Lewis looks at a few Christmas sites that are labors of love -- illustrating that if you want links, you have to find something you truly love and build it on your site. You simply can't build something that's link-worthy any other way.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

December 13, 2007

SEW Experts: Link Building: DIY In-House vs. Outsourced

A white hot debate started last week when Justilien Gaspard presented five reasons to take link building in-house. In today's Link Love column, "Link Building: DIY In-House vs. Outsourced," Justilien responds to reader comments and continues the in-house vs. outsourcing link building discussion.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

December 6, 2007

SEW Experts: A Convenient Truth: To Link Builders With Love

There's no doubt link building is a win-win. The only way to acquire relevant and meaningful links is to provide some value to the Internet community. In today's Link Love column, "A Convenient Truth: To Link Builders With Love," Sage Lewis explains that the question is not, "How do I get links?" The right question is, "How do I become interesting and valuable to an online community?" or, "How do I differentiate myself in a sea of sameness?"

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 30, 2007

Strategic Link Building

A reader sent an email with a great question about the Widget Case Study that I published in my By The Numbers column. The question was as follows:

"If the widgets are built in javascript (presumably), how does it help with SEO? Was it via NOSCRIPT tags?"

Actually, the answer is no. The nature of the benefit has to do with the ongoing evolution of what SEO means. As we all know, link building is a critical component of improving ones search engine rankings. In spite of all the tweaks and changes to search algorithms you hear about, this is likely to remain true for the foreseeable future.

So the short answer to the question above is that one critical strategy for getting visibility for your site and its content and tools. CLIQ accomplishes this. It may not receive links directly (although some of the people who install the widget will link to the site that provided it), but it will create visibility.

The question got me to thinking about the broader strategic question underlying it, and concept I call Strategic Link Building. The rest of this post will focus on that topic, and provide a more comprehensive answer to the original question.

It is generally acknowledged that there is this notion of Trust Rank, where some sites are more trusted than others. For example, if nearly every site in a given market area links to one site, the chances are pretty good that the site receiving the links can be considered "authoritative".

You can also identify people in pretty much any space who are major influencers. Many times these people have their own authoritative sites, but many times they don't. An example would be a highly respected writer for a major newspaper.

An owner of an authoritative site has a valuable asset, as does a major influencer, and it is likely that they will treat this asset quite seriously. As a result, getting a link from them is not easy. I also maintain that it will become increasingly unlikely over time that you would be able to purchase a link from these sites or people.

No doubt we will continue to see stunning exceptions to this guideline, but Google's recent hard line against selling and buying links that pass PageRank will put cause fewer and fewer of these types of sites to sell links. Their reputation is critical, and they must protect it.

Even among non-authoritative sites, you will find a growing reluctance to link out to other sites unless they perceive them to be authoritative themselves. No one wants to link to a bad neighborhood, and if you are going to send some of your link juice to a third party, it better be for a really good reason.

Fortunately, many, many site owners will link to other sites when such good reason exists. The first step in getting these types of links is to become an expert regarding the topic matter of your site, and then make that obvious through the nature and the quality of the content and tools on your site.

Once you have done this, the next step is to create a high level of visibility for that expertise. There are many good ways to approach doing this. Here are a couple:

1. Get links on authoritative sites
2. Earn the trust of influencers in your space

So how does this all relate to link building? If you can accomplish either of these 2 things, you have gotten yourself into a situation that will produce links even if you do nothing at all (except continue to publish great content). That's a great place to be, and it will keep you secure from changes in search engine algorithms.

How do you earn that type of trust? Generally speaking, not by emailing someone and asking them for a link. Here are a few ideas as to how you can develop such trust:

1. Build a relationship by investing time and effort to help out the person whose trust you are trying to earn
2. Syndicate some of your content (showing your expertise) to other major sites in your market space
3. Mount a successful social media campaign that provides regular visibility on relevant social media sites
4. Offer tools to other parties that they can put on their sites

In the case of widgets, it fits in with point 4 in the above list. They can provide an excellent way to get visibility with a lot of people. Or in the case of the subject of our case study, CLIQ, it provides visibility with a highly targeted audiences (the other sites in the CLIQ), and it directly exposes your high value content in a fashion that is similar to syndication.

Posted by at 11:45 AM | Permalink

November 29, 2007

SEW Experts: 5 Best Reasons to Build Links In-House

It's tempting to outsource link development, but that may not be the best move for your site. In today's Link Love column, "5 Best Reasons to Build Links In-House," Justilien Gaspard shares the key advantages to in-house link development.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 15, 2007

SEW Experts: A Winning SEO Plan to Create Buzz, Traffic, Links

How do you engage users, create buzz and generate links all at the same time? In today's Link Love column, "A Winning SEO Plan to Create Buzz, Traffic, Links," Justilien Gaspard presents the idea of a contest to generate traffic, buzz, and links, using the Reservation Road film as a case study.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2007

SEW Experts: Link Building and Brainstorming Content

Nothing's worse on the Web than upsetting users. Building links using great content can save even the most disastrous site. In today's Link Love column, "Link Building and Brainstorming Content," Sage Lewis takes a look at the Reservation Road site, and discusses how links can save a boring site.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2007

SEW Experts: How Site Architecture Influences Link Building

Site architecture determines how successful link building campaigns will be. In today's Link Love column, "How Site Architecture Influences Link Building," Justilien Gaspard takes a look at the site architecture for the Web site for the "Reservation Road" film as a case study, and makes suggestions for improvement.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 24, 2007

Large Scale Link Building

Got a site with tens of thousands of pages? Chasing a lot of long tail terms? If you do, you are probably already aware that this means you need a lot more links than a smaller site, and you need to get deep links as well. In fact, it's likely that you need tens of thousands of links. You also need to obtain some really high quality links to boot.

This means that the rules of the game are quite different for you, and the only way you are going to win is through achieving some serious visibility. You also need to plan for a much higher level of investment in your web promotion strategy than smaller sites. It also goes without saying that the great majority of those pages need to contain interesting and different unique content. Assembling this horde of great content is by itself a hard task, but not the subject of this post.

To win at this game, you need to get to a place where your visibility produces links for you. Here are a few ways that can be done:

1. Main Stream Media: Become the darling of one or more major publications, such as Newsweek, Time Magazine, or any other of these larger magazines. Of course, focus on the major publications that are related to your space. How do you reach these people? The old fashioned way, and perhaps still the best way, is to use a PR agency to help you. Making headway with writers and editors are major publications is best achieved by leveraging trusted relationships. However, social media campaigns as outlined below, can help you get some visibility in these circles as well.

2. Blogs: Here the goals is to reach the major influencers among the bloggers (you could say the same about main stream media above). These are people who reach a large audience of people relevant to your product or service. Developing a relationship with them is exactly like a business development process. You need to earn their trust. You can try to do this directly, or, once again, there are many PR agencies that have trusted relationships with significant portions of the blogoshpere.

3. Social media: This has been one of the hottest areas in web marketing for a while. Sites like Digg, Reddit, and del.icio.us can deliver a lot of traffic and links. But there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, or social media sites out there. Many of these are targeted sites, and finding ones relevant to your site or business would be a great thing to do.

   Getting to the home page of Digg can net you hundreds, or even thousands of links. So this can help with the volume game in a limited sort of way. It's limited because all the links go to one page, and ultimately, you want thousands of deep links to pages all over your site. So once again, it's a visibility game that you playing here. You need to reach the influencers, in main stream media, and in the blogoshpere, and a smart social media strategy can help you do that.

   One last point about social media is that you can't just write and article that is good enough to make a social media site's home page. It also has to be good enough that an influencer will be interested in linking to it. This is a somewhat higher bar. The best social media strategies depend on content that is good enough for both purposes.

4. Facebook Applications, Widgets, and/or Gadgets: This is a relatively new hot area. A successful Facebook Ap/Widget/Gadget (referred to as a "Widget" from here on out) can achieve an awesome level of visibility. Many people are able to get their Widget installed by millions of people. That's impressive.

   What makes the best type of widget is the subject of a long post all it's own, but for purposes of obtaining links, the visibility by itself is very helpful. A really good widget design could draw content from pages all over your large site, and expose that content to a huge audience. Used this way, it can help with drawing links to the deep pages on your site.

Even while you are doing all these great things to get lots of links, you also need to focus direct attention on getting very high value links. These are the sites that are potentially treated by the search engines as authority sites, and you need links from them to win. This is also a business development type effort, where you build a relationship with a major influencer, and get them to link to you.

Ultimately, if you have unique, great content, the search engines will be a help as well. As you start getting basic rankings in search engines people will begin to find you there. Then the content can do the selling for you, and help you get great deep links too.

The key is to find a balance of the types of strategies outlined above that will net you the high volume links, the influencer links, and the authoritative links. Once you have this process humming, you should be in good shape.

Posted by at 10:13 AM | Permalink

October 18, 2007

SEW Experts: Top Rankings, Secrets, and Lies - Part 2

When linkbuilding, as with any task, your time is worth money, and that time needs to be focused on effective strategies. In today's Link Love column, "Top Rankings, Secrets, and Lies - Part 2," Justilien Gaspard shares some link building tactics that will maximize results by focusing on the links that will deliver the most value.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 11, 2007

SEW Experts: Solving the Link Building Puzzle: Do or Die.

Link building is a puzzle all search marketers are trying to solve. In today's Link Love column, "Solving the Link Building Puzzle: Do or Die.," Sage Lewis helps you learn where all the pieces of that puzzle fit, so you can move from page 4 to page 1 in organic rankings.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 4, 2007

SEW Experts: Link Value: Top Rankings, Secrets and Lies - Part 1

What's a Link Worth? Priceless? In today's Link Love column, "Link Value: Top Rankings, Secrets and Lies - Part 1," Justilien Gaspard encourages you to consider some simple techniques and strategies to help determine the value of a link.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 3, 2007

.EDU domains and links

Links from .edu domains are commonly thought to be higher quality links than links from other top level domains. There is truth to the notion, but not because the domain has the magic letters (.edu) in the domain. The reason why these types of domains tend to offer better quality links is that they often receive better quality links, and in significant volume.

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped provides an example of this with his recent post .Edu and Spam, where he provides the example of America.edu, a site filled with Google Ads. In spite of 941 third party back links (according to Yahoo), the site has a Page Rank of 0.

A quick look at the site reveals the problem. In addition to the Google ads, the rest of the content is in the form of news feeds. The site is not going to draw a whole slew of high quality links. They actually do have a couple of decent links in the batch, which appear to have been obtained by writing and syndicating articles.

Ultimately, there is no magic fairy dust here, or with .edu domains in general. However, there are a couple of reasons why looking to colleges and universities is still a really good idea:

1. Real colleges and universities do get a lot of trusted links, and therefore and provide a more trusted link
2. These schools also do like to point their students to helpful resources

These factors make this a useful direction for link building efforts. However, be sure that you do have something very, very useful. These types of entities tend to shine a harsh white light on all such requests to make sure that they truly have merit, and are useful for their students.

Posted by at 10:05 AM | Permalink

September 27, 2007

SEW Experts: Knock It Out of the Linkin' Park!

Is the job of an SEO to drum up valueless links, or to be the driver of creative content and content distribution for clients' Web sites? In today's Link Love column, "Knock It Out of the Linkin' Park!," Sage Lewis says it's time for SEOs to move past getting links just to try to game the search engine system. It's two dimensional thinking; and it's the wrong paradigm.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

September 20, 2007

SEW Experts: Link Building for Local Search

In today's Link Love column, "Link Building for Local Search," Justilien Gaspard imagines a search engine-free world. Would you still build "links" to increase local traffic? He shares some radical link building strategies for local search.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

September 6, 2007

SEW Experts: The Power of Link Building and Public Relations

In today's Link Love column, "The Power of Link Building and Public Relations," Justilien Gaspard offers advice for gaining links in local search while creating positive public relations opportunities.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 30, 2007

SEW Experts: The Great Link Buying Debate

In today's Link Love column, "The Great Link Buying Debate," Sage Lewis reviews the arguments for and against buying links, which was a hot topic at SES San Jose last week. Like all topics, buying credibility or exposure in any realm is never as black and white as we would all like to believe.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 23, 2007

SEW Experts: Training Link Developers to Become Marketing Gurus

In today's Link Love column, "Training Link Developers to Become Marketing Gurus," Justilien Gaspard continues his link training theme with a focus on training link developers to use marketing tactics.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 17, 2007

SEW Experts: Link Building for Large Corporate Sites

In today's Outsourced column, "Link Building for Large Corporate Sites," Chris Boggs gives you a quick course in advanced link building for enterprise-level SEO projects.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 16, 2007

SEW Experts: Integration: Key Element of Link Building

In today's Link Love column, "Integration: Key Element of Link Building ," Sage Lewis discusses a key element of link building: integration, the process of incorporating something special into your Web site to attract linking partners.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 9, 2007

SEW Experts: Reverse Engineering Linking Patterns to Create Link Equity

In today's Link Love column, "Reverse Engineering Linking Patterns to Create Link Equity," Justilien Gaspard tells you how to get quality links from trusted sites in a round about manner, creating trusted linking neighborhoods.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 2, 2007

SEW Experts: Understanding the Definition of Link Building

In today's Link Love column, "Understanding the Definition of Link Building," Sage Lewis gives you his definition of link building, and by understanding that definition, you can create a link-building campaign that is truly effective.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

July 26, 2007

SEW Experts: 7 Tips for Training Link Developers

In today's Link Love column, "7 Tips for Training Link Developers," Justilien Gaspard offers 7 tips for training link developers that range from promoting creativity to teaching negotiation tactics.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

July 25, 2007

How To Determine What A Link Passes

Aaron Wall over at SEOBook wrote a great overview article the other day about how to see if a link passes "Reputation / Authority / Equity / Juice / etc..."

It really is a good read and very informative. It provides some "white hat" and some "black hat" methods.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:33 PM | Permalink

July 20, 2007

Link Building is a Permanent Investment

I occasionally end up speaking with webmasters who thing of link building as an activity that you do for a while, and then you stop, or slow down. It's a mistake, and it's not one that you want to make. It's important to view link building as a permanent investment in your web based business. There are many reasons for this, but the most basic of them is that your competition is most likely continuing to add links.

Publishing a web site is a promotional activity. Once you decide to publish a site, you then need to promote it. The most basic way to do that is by telling people about it, showing them your great content, tools, or whatever, and over time, getting them to link to it. One of the challenges with viewing link building as a permanent investment is that you eventually run out of fresh ideas of who to contact and what to tell them about.

The key then is to keep generating new content or new tools that you can promote. No link campaign is going to be successful without having great content, tools, or both on your site. But if your content stays static, even if it's great stuff, your efforts will begin to return fewer results. This means you need to branch out. Branching out doesn't mean you need to change the topic of your site.

For example, if you are in the widgets business, and you have already been written up in the blogs and magazines that are about widgets, look for other magazines that might take an article about widgets. You need some creativity here. For example, if there is an article you could write about how your widgets can be used to reduce home heating costs, you might be able to get blogs or magazines about home improvement to take it.

This is just one idea, and there are many others. One thing you can do to get ideas is see what your competition is doing. By checking out their promotional strategies you just might get a bunch of new ideas for promoting your own site.

Posted by at 11:37 AM | Permalink

July 19, 2007

SEW Experts: Creating Link Love With Informational Videos

In today's Link Love column, "Creating Link Love With Informational Videos," Sage Lewis gives some advice for creating B2B videos that can create a lot of link love.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

July 12, 2007

SEW Experts: Exploiting Your Current Backlinks and Link Referrals

In today's Link Love column, "Exploiting Your Current Backlinks and Link Referrals," Justilien Gaspard tells you how to take full advantage of your current backlinks, while getting referrals to other Web sites that can help promote your business.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

July 5, 2007

SEW Experts: How Many Links Could a Link Lover Love?

In today's Link Love column, "How Many Links Could a Link Lover Love?," Sage Lewis describes the many different ways to count and track your links. What good is link love if you don't know how many links love you?

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:09 AM | Permalink

June 28, 2007

9 Tips for Getting Started with Link Building

Putting together a strategy for get links to a site is one of the hardest parts of SEO. Too many people jump right in to trying to get people to link to their site, when they should be taking the time to lay the proper groundwork in place to have a link worthy site. Here are 9 quick tips on how to approach the task:

1. Understand the anatomy of getting a link - Since we shy away from buying links, or pursing link swaps, you are left with the task of getting someone to provide you with a one way link. I.e. getting something from them, and providing nothing in return. Or is that true? Not really. What you end up giving out, is your expertise and knowledge. This can be embedded in articles, tools, or special promotions. People who care about their visitors will link to good content, and this ends up being a fair trade. It also gets you links that are unassailable in the eyes of the search engines, and it's the best way to get links from authoritative web sites.
2. Understand your target audience - Who are your prospective customers? What type of content would they like to see on a site like yours? Since relevant links count most, answering this question is a big key to success.
3. Develop a map of the places where you are going to get links - Blogs, magazines, trade organizations, industry associations, distributors, resellers, colleges and universities, government sites, ...? Be creative in coming up with ideas. A potential target for linking to you is ANY site which is related to your site's content, or that can reasonably publish an article related to your business. For example, if you run a sailing web site for the Massachusetts area, Boston.com is a great target. They could certainly run an article about sailing in the Boston area, and if they cover your site as a resource, you get a great link.
4. Develop a content plan for your site - Now that you know your audience, and where you are going to get links from, come up with a plan for the great content that you are going to put on your site. To succeed, you need to put things of value out there. People will not link to you to help you make money. But they will link to you if your content, or tools, or promotions provide a truly unique value to the visitors to their site.
5. Develop a content syndication plan - Here you can broaden your thinking even further. The concept here is to write high quality articles and give them to other web sites for placement on those sites. You only do this type of work to get very high quality links. But you can get some awesome links this way.
6. Consider social media sites - While these are great sources of huge spikes in traffic, the traffic is not always of the best quality (although this varies from site to site). The big win is in the links you get out of it. A really well structured campaign can bring you lots of links, and in some cases, high quality links, including links from traditional media sites. To do this well, you need to really understand the audience on the social media site you are targeting. You will need to develop content that targets that audience, while keeping it related to the theme of your site.
7. Implement a PR campaign - This is much, much more than simply sending out press releases. You need to have a plan to reach out to traditional media and bloggers as a follow up to your press releases. Unless you have lots of contacts and a great reputation with the media in your space, our recommendation is that you do this with the help of a PR agency, and leverage their contacts.
8. Understand the investment cost - All of this takes resources. In particular, developing content on an ongoing basis, building relationships with related sites, syndicating content, pursuing social media sites, PR campaigns, ... It's a lot of work. Make sure you build into your plan the resources to execute your plan.
9. Be in it for the long haul - Link building is not a start up activity, it's a permanent one. It is an ongoing cost to your business that never goes away.

Posted by at 10:55 AM | Permalink

June 21, 2007

SEW Experts: Does Your Site Deserve Link Love?

In today's Link Love column, "Does Your Site Deserve Link Love?," Sage Lewis offers some examples of clever ways to go about getting links and making your ideas go viral.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:12 AM | Permalink

June 7, 2007

SEW Experts: Let's Go Viral

In today's Link Love column, "Let's Go Viral," Sage Lewis discusses viral marketing, which is related to linkbuilding as two peas in a pod. He explains that while viral Web marketing can be risky, the rewards are great. Here's how to get started with a Web 2.0 strategy that won't break the bank.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:11 AM | Permalink

May 31, 2007

SEW Experts: Avoiding Low-Quality Links and Link Networks

In today's Link Love column, "Avoiding Low-Quality Links and Link Networks," Justilien Gaspard tells you how to build links while spotting low-value links or links that might be devalued.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:28 AM | Permalink

May 29, 2007

Using Log Files To Improve Page Rank Distribution

Following a discussion on "Link & Ranking Strategies for Enterprise Sites" at SEOMoz, Hamlet Batista wrote an interesting article on ways top pass the link love around a web site using a dynamic solution.

Basically the conversation started about Enterprise sites - ones with tens of thousands to millions of pages. Many of the pages have little if any Page Rank and Rand started the discussion with suggestions of how the link love can be shared inside a website.

Batista contributed to the comments and then wrote his own piece with details of how this could be programmed to be done dynamically.

Both articles are worth a read.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:47 PM | Permalink

May 24, 2007

SEW Experts: Building the Love

In today's Link Love column, "Building the Love," Sage Lewis gives tips for brainstorming ideas for building links. It takes more than business basics on a Web site to create link bait, and even a site offering the most mundane products can create compelling content.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:26 AM | Permalink

May 14, 2007

Starting a New Link Campaign

So you are starting up a new link campaign, and you want to know where to begin. I always fall back on the same approach. There are two basic questions you need to be able to answer:

1. What unique content do you have on your site that someone might want to link to?
2. Who are the people that might link to you?

It turns out that the two questions interact. Based on the people in your space, or related space, you might change the content you develop. That said, here are the five things I think about when I first start a new link building campaign:

1. I always start by identifying who the major media people are in the space of our clients. I do this without yet worrying about their potential to link to us. This would be a complete list of traditional media, bloggers, government, school, and hobbyist sites that are related to our client.
2. The next step is to prioritize the list ranging from top tier players to lower tier players. I will take links from any of them, but getting a link from a top tier player is worth more effort.
3. Now I re-examine the current and potential content of our client's site to see how it matches up with the needs and interests of the top tier targets.
4. If it's necessary (and it usually is), I put in place a content development plan to implement the right types of content to match up with the best targets. Several new articles may need to be written. There is no need to go off the deep end here. If there are 5 or 6 really great high value targets, develop new content for the 2 or 3 easiest ones to approach.
5. Once this is in place, you can begin the process of contacting your targets, and getting them interested in the unique cool content that you have.

Good link building always starts in the same place. Identify the targets.

Posted by at 8:27 AM | Permalink

May 7, 2007

Press Releases Can Be Good, But When They're Bad They're Ridiculous

I was checking my various sources of news this afternoon and came across a couple of PR articles at eMediaWire that seemed of interest - but turned out to be self-promoting garbage.

First there was a release about the recent SEO World Championships (I am not giving them links). Now okay I may have been too busy to hear anything about this ... so I click and read about it. Apparently the competition involved a Google bomb campaign for Global warming awareness 2007.

When the top 5 are people you have never heard of and only the winner was a US (and Phillipines) entrant it makes you wonder. But hey you can call it anything you want and limit entries to the event to your small group of friends - though it should really be called something like SEO World (of Peter's friends) Championship.

Unsuspecting customers will see this through a search or a link from one of the top finishers to the article and get a very slanted view of who they should hire. This is better than a bait and switch - it is just a bait.

The second article was topseos.com's list of the top 30 rankings for seo, sem, and many other categories. The lists include some very prominent names but are interspersed with companies I have never heard of (not saying they are not good), while many of the well-know and respected companies are not mentioned at all.

I checked out the site and basically it is an aggregator site for links and banner ads. If you are an advertiser you make their rankings.

I think I am going to start the 2007 Pinocchio Awards. Email me any sites or awards or press releases etc. that you think are stretching the truth. Points will be given for outrageousness of the lie, best twisting of reality and blatant cronyism.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:12 PM | Permalink

May 2, 2007

Eric Ward Podcast

Eric Ward and I recently did a podcast about link building. In particular, we focused on personalization and Google's new spam reporting form moves.

Eric had some interesting points about the personalization movement at Google. At the moment, even with the new iGoogle announcement, there is no reason to believe that link building will fade into the distant past. In fact, it remains as important as ever. One example of this, is that Google does need to decide what to show someone that they are not currently familiar with (or who is not currently logged into a Google account).

Eric also believes that the degree of personalization will be modest. Most likely, we are not talking about a completely different set of results, but rather some tweaking based on what Google knows about the user.

This is consistent with the iGoogle announcement of earlier this week. In the press briefing on the topic, Sepandar Kamvar of Google indicated that they are looking to calculate PageRank for every person. The idea would be to use information that is known about the person (for example, their default Google Maps location, and their recent search history) as an additional filter on the search results.

Posted by at 2:01 PM | Permalink

April 29, 2007

NoFollow, or MightFollow?

Loren Baker has asked Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com to explain just what nofollow really means in a comprehensive post at Search Engine Journal, "How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute."

Google is the only one to actually not follow the links, while Ask ignores the attribute, and Yahoo will follow the link but not give attribution to the source. So basically, the anchor text and "link juice" will not pass through a nofollow link in Yahoo, but the linked page will be crawled and indexed.

Microsoft has not yet replied to Baker's request for clarification, but had said when nofollow was introduced 2 years ago, "Any link with this tag will indicate to a crawler it is not necessarily approved by this page and shouldn't be followed nor contribute weight for ranking."

The attribute, which was originally intended to curb blog comment spam, is now a central part of the paid links debate sparked by Google's Matt Cutts.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:55 PM | Permalink

April 26, 2007

Meet the Newest Link Love Columnist, Sage Lewis

We welcome aboard a new SEW Expert, Sage Lewis, in today's Link Love column, where he will be sharing commentary and expertise on link building from the social aspect. Sage will be splitting time in Link Love with columnist Justilien Gaspard.

In his first contribution, Prevention is the Best Medicine: Don't Let Viral Campaigns Get Sick and Die, Lewis diagnoses problems with the most feverish trend in link building - viral marketing campaigns.

Sage Lewis is President of the consulting firm, SageRock.com and will be speaking on measuring the impact of social media and viral marketing at our next SEW Live in Columbus, Ohio - taking place on May 9th.

Posted by at 12:56 PM | Permalink

April 19, 2007

Blogging to Gain Back Links

In Link Love columnist Justilien Gaspard's latest article, he points out the difficulties of beginning a blog as a way to attract links and new traffic is hard work, but your site can reap huge rewards from the effort.

Posted by at 2:15 AM | Permalink

April 5, 2007

9 Step Process for Getting Authoritative Links

There are many types of authoritative links, and different sites require different approaches for getting the link. This post will talk about the process for getting a link from site by using a relationship building process. Certainly there are other sites you may be able to reach without using a process as labor intensive as the one shown below.

But the approach below works, and if your objective is to build your site into a stable authoritative domain, it's a great approach to use to help you get there. Without further ado, here is a 9 step process to getting authoritative links through relationship building:

1. Build a list of authoritative sites that you would really like to get a link from
2. Review the content and tools you currently have, or can easily develop. Find the places where you have a good match between your content/tools and authoritative domains. Now you know how to prioritize your campaigns.
3. Take your highest priority targets and do some research. Really understand what the site is about. If there is one key individual behind the domain, see if you can find out what their personal passions related to their site are. The best of all world is if they have stated a need or desire for something.
4. Make your first contact totally focused on helping them somehow, such as solving that stated need from the prior point. Or point out a broken link on their site. Or point them at someone else's site on the web that has great resources related to their site. But at the end of it all, simply help them, and ask for nothing in return.
5. Do it again, or perhaps even several more times.
6. Along the way make sure that they are aware that you have a related site (perhaps the site name is in your signature, for example).
7. After you have established a dialog with them, and they are really responding to you, send them an email that introduces your site, and the killer content and/or tools you think they may be interested in. Don't ask for a link, ask for an opinion, and ask for suggestions.
8. Respond to their suggestions. It's absolute gold if you can get them to suggest some tweaks that are easy to make. After you have made the changes they begin to feel some ownership in what you have.
9. The stage is now set, and the exact timing of the link request (if they have not linked to your site already) is a judgement call. But now you are in a good position to make the request.

Posted by at 10:45 AM | Permalink

March 28, 2007

Reciprocal Linking Should Still be a Component of Your Web Marketing Strategy

Is reciprocal linking dead? Of course not. What should be history, is the practice of requesting reciprocal links for the purposes of improving search engine rankings (if you are still sending out those link swap request emails, please stop, you are wasting your own time and effort). However, reciprocal linking should still be a part of your web marketing strategy.

As you build your web site you should be looking at building lots of relationships with other site owners, related magazine editors, and other people of interest to your business. Linking out to relevant quality content on other people's sites needs to be part of the mix. It's a tool that can be a part of building a relationship. Done correctly, it can also make your site a better experience for the visitors it receives.

With regard to reciprocal linking, don't ever trade a link with a site that you would not simply link to on it's own, even if they didn't link back to you. If it's good enough for you to link to, then there is no reason why you shouldn't try to get a link back from them. You just need to view the process as part of a larger relationship.

And that's the key. Linking between partners is a common practice. Or, if you link to someone, feel free to let them know that you did. I usually do this without asking anything in return, because we do view it as building a relationship. People often respond when you do this, and when they do, you can get a chance to tell more of your story.

Personally, I believe that this type of cross linking may well help your search rankings (because of the high relevance of the links), but more importantly, it exposes you to the audience of the other site. Some of the other site's visitors may not see what they want there, and come over to your site. And who knows? If they like what they see, they may link to you.

Posted by at 12:29 PM | Permalink

March 19, 2007

Can you Automate Link Development?

Using automation in link development is an attractive concept. The idea of getting bunches of links with minimal effort is compelling, but it's not real. However, there are parts of the process that you can automate, or partially automate to make your task easier.

But you can't lose sight of the process of identifying the best links. Ultimately, achieving high rankings in competitive markets will com from getting really high quality links. Consider, for example, the impact on your site of getting covered by the Wall Street Journal. The value of this link far exceeds its immediate SEO impact.

Such a link will give you tons of direct traffic, and you will get lots of other sites that give you links because they see the link in the WSJ. There are many links of this quality (as I said I used the WSJ as an example).

Too lofty for your business to contemplate? There are many easier to reach targets that will meet your needs. The specifics of who they are depends on your business. You will recognize them as the leaders in markets closely related to yours. I am not talking about direct competitors, but sites that are topically relevant to yours without being your competitors.

Identifying these sites is not something that you can ever automate. This can only be done by hand, by someone who understands the business. For this reason, you can never plan to automate your entire link development strategy. But there are pieces of the process that you can automate.

The most interesting of these is the process of identifying web sites that represent possible sources of links. For example, there are tools out that that will help you identify back links for various web sites. You can run these tools on your competitor's web sites, or authoritative sites in your space (perhaps a government site, or a major magazine site, for examples).

This is a great way to automate a part of the process. Unfortunately, it is hard to automate much more than this. You need to evaluate the target sites one by one after your tool gives you a list to look at, and you need to personalize your contacts with them.

But take heart, if you have great content, and fill an important role in your market space, get some of these higher quality links to your site, and other people will start linking to you without your even asking. Now that's an automation scheme I really like.

Posted by at 7:56 AM | Permalink

March 7, 2007

The Future of Link Building

Gord Hotchkiss did an interesting interview of Matt Cutts a while back, which I posted about here on Search Engine Watch. One of the major points in this interview was that increased personalization of search will make life much more difficult for black hat SEOs and link spamming schemes.

With that in mind, webmasters everywhere need to think about who they should target for link marketing campaigns and web marketing campaigns. This type of marketing is still going to be a critical component of a web marketing strategy, and it's important to focus your efforts in the best manner possible.

The key point to keep in mind is that sites that bring you relevant traffic are going to be the best sites to get links from. Relevance will mean more than ever. In addition to using algorithmic means to figure out what your site is about, search engines may also begin to measue user interactions with your site. These interactions will be driven by a few factors:

1. Relevance of your site to what they are looking for
2. How easy it is for them to determine that your site is relevant
3. How quickly they can get comfortable that you are legitimate
4. How easy it is for them to find what they want

Master these 4 things and the coming moves toward personalization will most likely not be a threat to you. That said, as you focus your web marketing strategy, you need to start to think about your web marketing itself.

Getting authoritative links has long been a critical component of a link building strategy. Now, they are more important than ever. Here are 3 reasons why:

1. Authoritative links offer value in terms of branding (speaks to point 3 above)
2. Traffic that comes to your site from a relevant authoritative site will be far more likely to convert
3. Search engine algorithms will still consider links as part of a ranking algorithm

Authoritative sites will be even easier for search engines to identify too. They will have user interactions that reflect the quality of their content. Their links may gain even more weight. So where can you find authoritative sites? It clearly depends on the nature of your business you are in. But here are the places to start your search:

1. Major media sites relevant to your area
2. Government sites that cover the topic of your area
3. School sites that have pages related to your topic
4. Whomever ranks highly in the engines for terms related to your topic
5. Lastly, blogs. Blogs with a high number of users who interact regularly with the site may be considered authoritative

Fitting into one of the 5 categories above does not mean the site is authoritative. It means it MAY be authoritative. There also maybe other ways of identifying such sites. But these are the folks you should be seeking promotional partnerships with.

Posted by at 3:40 PM | Permalink

February 23, 2007

11 Guidelines for Getting Authoritative Links

This post will offer 11 guidelines for getting authoritative links. Authoritative links bring value to your web promotion strategy that far exceeds their value on the surface. There is plenty of evidence that search engines will place more value on out bound links from sites that they consider authoritative.

However, these links are much harder to get. I am talking about getting links from very high value sites, such as government sites, education sites, news sites, and other comparable sites. Note that authority does not come solely from having .gov or .edu in your domain, it comes with the nature of the sites linking to the site.

However, .gov and .edu sites tend to have more authoritative content, so more sites are likely to link to them, and this does eventually establish them as more authoritative. But, sites can be authoritative without having a .gov or .edu domain.

One great objective for many webmasters, is to make their sites authoritative. You can't do that without getting other authoritative sites to link to you. Of course, you can't get authoritative sites to link to you unless you have great content.

But this post is not about content, it's about getting authoritative links to your site. Here are the 11 guidelines:

1. Focus on links from authoritative sites that are relevant.
2. Be prepared for the fact that success in a campaign to get a link from an authoritative site might take many months.
3. Be prepared for your strategies to fail more often than they succeed. If you do a really good job, perhaps 1 in 4 of your campaigns will work.
4. Be prepared to invest in building a relationship. Your first communications with the authoritative site may not include a request for a link.
5. It's a campaign. You need a strategy, and it may have multiple steps. Be prepared to invest in the strategy to make it work
6. Know that they won't link to you because they want to help you make money
7. Know that they will link to your site because your content is valuable to their users (and because they actually care about their users).
8. Meet their needs.
9. Study their needs. Figure out what they need, and then figure out which of their needs you can meet. One way to do this is to review things written in the past by key contacts at the site. They may have expressed a need, such as "I wish I knew how to ...", "The web needs a resource that ...", etc.
10. Be opportunistic. Your target site may identify a need that you can address. Jump on it as quickly as you can, and then fill the need completely.
11. Invest more in your first 2 or 3 killer links than you will in the ones that follow it. Your first authoritative link will simplify obtaining the ones that will come later, as that endorsement makes all the difference in the world.

This set of guidelines is not meant to be comprehensive, but is intended to help you think about the investment you make when you pursue an authoritative link. The more you view it like a business development process, the better off you are. Sometimes the process can go quite quickly, and that's great. And, sometimes it will be far more effort. But if you are in it for the long haul, the payoff you get in return for your effort is large.

Posted by at 10:00 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2007

What is the Value of a Link?

WebmasterWorld has a nice thread going about the value of different types of links. The thread starts with the question "what's a link worth to you in $?". It's an excellent question, and the answers are varied.

Although it appeared to be originally focused on the price you would pay to buy a link, a surprising number of people came back and pushed back on the notion, saying that it was better to focus on developing natural links. Pageoneresults has the following comment:

I look at it from the opposite direction. How much am I willing to pay for something that my visitors are going to appreciate, utilize and possibly link to? For me, natural links are the ones I'm after. The paid links are a moving target, here today, gone tomorrow. Usually short lived and high maintenance.

Clearly he is focused on the longer term development of his web properties. This is an important distinction to make in your web promotion strategy. If you are in a competitive space, the high value authoritative links are the ones you want and need. Chances are that you can't purchase these with advertising dollars, and even if you can, they will be too high profile to carry any value for long.

But pursuing natural links still costs money. The time and money you spend developing high quality content, and developing relationships with the sites that you are targeting for in bound links is also an expense. Would you spend 10 hours of your time over a period of 4 months to get a PR6 link from a PR8 site?

It's a great question to ponder as you think about where your link strategy is going to be focused.

Posted by at 9:11 AM | Permalink

February 20, 2007

What If Links Were Not Part of Search Algorithm.....

David Berkowitz over at MediaPost wrote an entertaining piece today about what would happen if inbound links were not part of a search engine's algorithm.

Great insight into the influence of the remaining factors and could be used to understand those other factors even with the links in place. Well worth a read.

Posted by Frank Watson at 2:47 PM | Permalink

February 16, 2007

Using Google Webmaster Tools to increase your link juice

Google Webmaster Tools provides a lot of great data. One of the things it will show you is 404 errors on your site. If you look at this data carefully, it can help you increase your valid in-bound links.

Of course, if you see 404 errors listed for pages that you are linking to from within your own site, you need to fix that right away. This will already help your site's overall page rank.

But the more interesting thing is when you see a 404 error for a page that someone else linked to. Most likely this occurs when someone links to your site, and then mis-spells the link (and also doesn't check it). When this happens you have people who gave you links for which you are getting no credit. Such a waste.

However, the fix is simple: Put in place a 301 redirect from the page that the person erroneously linked to, to the page they intended to link to. This is a great simple way to pick up link credit for those broken in bound links.

Posted by at 2:03 PM | Permalink

February 15, 2007

Loren Baker on the Warpath Against NoFollow

Loren Baker gets on the warpath today with this rant against the NoFollow tag. Loren lists 13 reasons why he is against it. He also backed up his rant by installing the DoFollow Plugin, a plugin that causes all comments out of your blog to have the NoFollow tag removed.

NoFollow was supposed to help clean up link spamming in the blogosphere. Well blog spamming is worse than ever. That said, it probably has met the search engine goals in the blogosphere. Blog spamming may be worse than ever for those of us who blog, but the search engines no longer need to worry about the links garnered by blog spamming having an impact on their ranking algorithms.

It's also true that the search engines have expanded the original mission of the NoFollow tag. They want people to use it whenever they sell text links to other sites. In Google's case, at least, if you are found to be selling text links and are not using NoFollow, they may simply discredit your site's ability to pass any link juice.

This latter usage of the tag is a complete bust. People object to the idea and don't want to do it, whether they be buyers, or sellers of links. It's clear that this latter application is a bust.

Posted by at 2:46 PM | Permalink

February 12, 2007

Google Webmaster Tools Loophole closed

Not to long ago, Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped reported that Google's new link count tools would show the link counts for other sites tool. In other words, you could get (more) accurate link counts from Google for sites you don't own.

The way it worked is that you would get the link from for your site, which would produce a line similar to the following:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/links?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stonetemple.com%2F&hl=en

You would then take the line and edit it to change the site listed. For example:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/links?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&hl=en

But it now looks like this loophole has been closed. So clearly, Google does not want users making use of their new tool for competitive intelligence purposes. You can get the link counts for sites you verify as yours, and that's it.

Still all in all, a very powerful tool. While it's reported link counts are still less than Yahoo's totals, they are much closer than they used to be, and the ability to download your links into a spreadsheet file is really, really nice.

Posted by at 1:34 PM | Permalink

February 8, 2007

Don't take the (link) bait

Actually, I don't have a strong objection to link bait. I do have a strong objection to the term, and its unfortunate connotations. The whole notion of baiting someone is not positive. And if you buy into the term, it becomes tempting to buy into bad ideas.

At its core, marketing your web site is about building trust, building a good reputation, and effective marketing techniques. The term "bait" makes the whole thing sound like a game, when marketing your web site needs to be serious business.

The term link baiting reminds me of that old phrase (that I also hated) "link popularity". Ugh. These terms make you think that the game is to get large numbers of links, and it's simply not true. Some of the strategies for getting large numbers of links are not all they are cracked up to be. It's great to get thousands of links from your day in the sunshine on Digg, but you still need to answer the question about whether or not they are relevant links that help your rankings.

It reminds me of a post I saw long ago on Greg Boser's blog about Amish Go Karts and Mini-Bike Furniture. In this post, Greg explains that the domain amishfurnitureandcrafts.com was resolving to the same IP address as gokartsusa.com (note that this is no longer the case).

Greg went on to provide some demonstrations of the wierd search terms that Go Karts USA was ranking for, terms such as Amish Go Karts, and Mini-Bike Furniture (note that this also is no longer the case).

But the point of the story is that links need to be relevant to really help you compete on search terms that you want to rank for. You need to focus on getting solid, high quality links to your site. This doesn't mean that Digg (or Reddit, or ...) can't help you. Just make sure that your link baiting scheme will bring you good relevant links.

And don't think of it as baiting someone, or setting a trap, or whatever. Think of it as building a serious business by offering something of value that tons of people are going to want to link to.

Posted by at 2:05 PM | Permalink

February 7, 2007

Rand Fishkin, the SUPER Man

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz comes clean with a super secret... he was "that guy" who wanted to propose to his girlfriend during a SuperBowl commercial. Yes folks, the blogger behind MySuperProposal.com was in fact Rand Fishkin, and with a lot of help from Joseph Morin, CEO & Founder of Storybids.com, they almost pulled off the best play of Superbowl XLI. And it probably would have had the most talked/blogged about Superbowl commercial of 2007.

When the inital plans to raise money for a commerical slot or find an advertiser to sponsor the proposal fell through, CBS almost stepped up to the plate to air the 15 second proposal for FREE, based on the viral buzz the MySuperProposal blog had created. By the halftime show, (hello, who would have preferred to see this over Prince?) Rand knew it wasn't going to happen during the big game. So Plan B followed: air this simple spot locally during his long time girlfriend's favorite TV show, Veronica Mars, and drop the clip on iFilm.com, followed by a torturous wait for Geraldine's response.

Watch Rand's Video Proposal Now:

So that's not the end of the story, of course - here's the video of Geraldine's exciting reaction, which was also posted on iFilm.com, two hours after the proposal clip:

Danny Sullivan & I also discussed the impending proposal, earlier in the day on the Daily Searchcast, where you may catch me *nearly* letting some of the secret slip!

In addition to the details on MySuperProposal, SeattlePI.comhas much of the local scoop and backstory on how the project evolved, and I'm sure the SEO blogosphere is going to buzzing about this, but let me (and the team at SEW) be the first to say: Congratulations, Geraldine & Rand!

Posted by at 1:49 AM | Permalink

February 6, 2007

Linkbait Rules As Linkbait -- Masterful

Oh what a recursive world we live in. Andy Hagans has successfully baited links from several search marketing blogs with his Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing. (doh! now he's got me doing it too!)

He's a tricky one, that fella. He lures us in with some self-deprecating anti-linkbait talk, like "Is anyone else sick of link baiting yet? I sure am." Then he proceeds to write more than 3,000 words on the topic. The man is a master-baiter.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:38 AM | Permalink

January 22, 2007

Wikipedia External Links Now "Nofollow"

Per a directive from Jimbo Wales reported in Wikipedia Talk, all external links in Wikipedia are now "nofollow." This is intended to reduce the volume of spam created by SEOs. The decision was triggered by an SEO contest discussed on the Wikipedia Administrators Noticeboard. As observed and commented on by Andy Beard, the "nofollow" is not universally observed by search engines.

The "nofollow" was developed to counteract blog comment spam where links were not trustworthy. For Wikipedia to render all external links as "nofollow," while an efficient way to cut down deliberate spam, in essence calls into question all of the links in this resource. Are any to be trusted? What about the value of the Wikipedia as a source? This begs for a better solution.

Postscript (Kevin Newcomb): Most of the Wikipedia editors are coming out in favor of the move, and some are even wishing violence against spammers. Once again, SEOs and others that try to get legitimate backlinks from Wikipedia for relevant sites are being lumped together with spammers who are trying to manipulate Wikipedia results with irrelevant links.

At least one link-building SEO, Rand Fishkin, is in favor of the decision. And at least one Wikipedia editor, BozMos, is predicting the decision will not achieve the intended result of reducing spam, and could even backfire.

A lively discussion is ongoing at the Cre8asite Forums.

Postscript 2 (Kevin, 1/23): Matt Cutts got back from vacation, and after plowing through his pile o' feeds, had this tidbit to say about the Wikipedia "nofollow" decision: "I don't expect this change to affect Google's rankings very much, but it's good to see the Wikipedia folks paying close attention to link spam (and open to refining their trust for external links)."

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 12:30 PM | Permalink

January 18, 2007

Linkbait in 2007

Over at Search Engine Land, guest blogger Nick Wilson offers up a 2007 Guide To Linkbaiting. He outlines the risk/reward potential of three types of linkbait: textual, site-based and software; and widgets.

"The linkbait way of link building is a mindset. To do it well, you need to put thoughts of manipulating the system to one side and focus entirely on providing value to your clients users and making that value easy to link to," Wilson writes.

Wilson, who resigned from Performancing earlier this month shortly after a deal with Performancing fell through, has just announced his plans to launch a new social media marketing agency, ClickInfluence.

"There's a huge opportunity in the gap that exists between companies and the conversations people are having about them. And as a way to build traffic, social media marketing is what SEO should have been from the start," he writes.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:55 PM | Permalink

January 16, 2007

What's Worth More, the Review or the Links?

One of the most refreshing things about the blogosphere (in its infancy) was that it had the potential of being an authentic forum. Whether readers loved or hated a blog, they could say with some assurance that the blogger wrote what they believed, and often with considerable passion. This apparent authenticity, coupled with a growing disaffection with mainstream media, helped build an audience.

And where there's an audience, there's money, which as Tony Hung at The Blog Herald tells us, really puts blog ethics in jeopardy. In his article SponsoredReviews.com Jumps Into the Pay-Per-Post Fray, Introduces New Ethics Quandry, Tony expresses the concern that given the amount of money a blogger can demand for a review (based on the SponsoredReview.com model), “how can anyone possibly be expected to write an unbiased review?”

The potential for advertisers is clearly stated on the SponsoredReview.com site. They boldly promise a positive impact on search engine rankings due to increased link popularity. Getting links from relevant, popular blogs is a major benefit of paid reviews, regardless of their content.

While other pay per post services like payperpost.com and ReviewMe.com have been in business for some time, their payoffs to bloggers appear to be considerably more modest. Will SponsoredReviews.com change the game? And will blogger-driven pricing drive blog spam to new levels? It will be interesting to see how this new business model is received, both by bloggers and by advertisers.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 8:20 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2006

The Link Building Conundrum - Eric Ward's View

Over the past year, there has been much talk about link building, in most cases specifically related to buying links. As Barry discussed and I commented on last week, the most recent hotly discussed topic has been around the subject of reciprocal linking. According to some interpretations of the Google Blog post from last week, reciprocal linking is now an "official no-no" when it comes to Google's ranking algorithm.

Last night, Webmasterrardio.fm's show "The Pulse" included a guest speaker who is very well acquainted with linking: Eric Ward. Eric gave some great insight into his opinions on the subject of reciprocal linking and link building best practices.

Eric was welcomed to the show by Co-Hosts Barry Schwartz, Ben Pfeiffer, and me. He introduced himself and his history (find out more about his link building history), and discussed his approach to building links which he feels is a bit different from the “norm” these days. He understands the fear of reciprocal linking that is being raised by some of Google's recent statements. Yet he feels that is there is concern, then maybe the worried party should question why they built the reciprocal links to begin with.

The trouble, Eric feels, is when people enter into a reciprocal link engagement with the initial intent to fool or game the Google algorithm in order to improve the rank of the site. He feels that this was never the original intent of reciprocal linking, when the practice started before Google even existed. The key point, however, is that it is difficult for the search engines to determine intent in a reciprocal relationship without looking further.

Eric surmises that the algorithms need more than just the presence of a few reciprocal (A>B>A) links in order to determine intent. He gave some examples of ways that search engines may be able to look for what he calls “signals of intent,” such as looking for further links and finding the presence of link farms or other sites that have been flagged in the past. If they do, then they should possibly return to look more closely at other relationships.

Eric also briefly introduced what he calls the “Matt Cutts rule,” asking webmasters to consider if they would try to get a particular link with Matt Cutts sitting on their shoulder. When asked if there is a difference between penalization and devaluation (remembered that word today), Eric felt that it would be “foolish and reckless” of Google to penalize a site without some “pretty heavy analysis.” He notes that he has seen sites drop in rankings due to what he believes is a temporary devaluation of some links that had helped the site in the past, while Google investigates those sites further.

The last question asked was how he would pick a high quality link. He brought up an example of getting links from .edu top level domains. He suggested putting oneself in the search engine's position: can they trust the link even if from an .edu site? If the page has links to YouTube, MySpace, and Napster, for example, it is pretty likely that it is a student page, which may be cause for concern if a commercial link appears along side. However, if the page is obviously a part of a Veterinarian School, for example, the “algorithmic footprint” left by the page's other outbound links may indicate that it is more trustworthy. Great stuff.

Eric summarized by saying that people should understand that any tactic used for link building could lead to potential repercussions. There are places that sites should have links anyway, he recommends, regardless if the engine will give credit for them or not.

Added: I just noticed Rand's excellent post on this subject, which also led to Danny's equally detailed opinion.

Posted by Chris Boggs at 10:26 AM | Permalink

December 18, 2006

Google Officially Says "No" to Reciprocal Linking?

Barry again had the scoop on a hot story over the weekend which has spawned a discussion in the WebmasterWorld Forums. On Friday, there was a post from Stephanie from the Dublin Google Search Quality team at the Google Blog (en Francais aussi - si chouette!) regarding "Building link based popularity." As mentioned, the topic has started a heated discussion at WMW, but the post really isn't stating anything completely new, in the opinion of some.

The Google Blog post provides essentially the same rhetoric that has been being fed through Matt Cutts' blog and the Google blog, as well as at conferences, to SEOs and webmasters alike over the past year by Google: don't buy links or participate in link schemes. It seems as if Google is hinting that they are now officially incorporating within their algorithm something which seeks out reciprocal links as well as link networks. Again, this isn't really new news, and savvy SEO's are either incorporating this possibility into their strategy or ignoring it – assuming that this is possibly a Google smoke screen used to try and minimize the SPAM found in their results from people that are experts at clandestinely leveraging links for rankings.

The focus on this post seems to be on the subject of reciprocal links, however. In the WMW thread, many posters bring up the idea that reciprocal links have been around far longer than Google itself, and that it is impossible for Google to judge the intent of every reciprocal relationship. If Google wants webmasters to link to relevant sites, there are many cases, especially in the SEO industry for example, where reciprocal links may occur purely for the purpose of giving the user more relevant content. Site owners should probably not be penalized for willing to exchange links in this relevant and helpful manner.

Google will likely respond that is that is the case, people should use the “no follow” attribute to ensure that the search engine doesn't assume that the link was obtained for the purpose of trying to improve PageRank and potentially actual results pages rankings. This is however not a realistic expectation. SEO's, as with any other industry, would probably prefer that any link may have the dual purpose of both helping with traffic as well as with rankings. Would Google be willing to give as much credence in their algorithm for on topic links that are attributed by “nofollow?” If not, then asking webmasters to employ them unilaterally is probably unfair.

Again, this is just an opinion, but for Google to not be clear about exactly what types of link exchanges and schemes they consider to be against the rules isn't really helping SEOs and webmasters. They have had an excellent year in helping marketers, especially with the improvement of the Sitemaps system and release of the Webmaster Tools portal, but these constant smoke screens about linking seem to indicate more of a problem in dealing with identifying valuable links than they may care to admit.

Posted by Chris Boggs at 2:26 PM | Permalink

November 22, 2006

Google Finance's Untrusted Links & Spotting Nofollow

For several months, I've been using the Search Status plug-in for Firefox to highlight links that are flagged with the nofollow attribute, a way for site owners to say they don't vouch for or necessarily trust a link. You see the web in a entirely new light after discovering how often and where people are saying "I don't trust this." And today, I finally noticed it happening over on Google Finance.

The image above show how Google Finance looks when links with nofollow are highlighted in red, for the page on Google stock price. All the news stories -- which come from Google News -- are flagged as effectively untrustworthy. But if they are untrustworthy, why are they in Google News to begin with?

Down below (see the whole page here), Google Blog Search results are also flagged that way also. Google Blog Search is effectively open to anyone, so I can understand the use of nofollow there more. But it still feels kind of odd, for this entire swath of the page to be considered untrustworthy in some way -- even if that way is invisible to virtually all visitors to Google Finance.

FYI, this isn't a new change. I did a search and found others talking about it earlier this year when Google Finance launched.

Go get Search Status and select the "Highlight Nofollow Links" option. Believe me, it's an eye-opening experience.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:51 PM | Permalink

Link Exchanges Are Spam Links According To Microsoft

The other day I reported that Microsoft Banning Sites from Live.com For Link Exchanges, where I uncovered an email sent to a Webmaster. The email stated that a particular site was removed from the Live.com Search index because the site was "acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content." The email also added that these types of links are "spam links," and is the reason the site was delisted from the index.

It struck me that this is why Google and Yahoo remain very vague when telling Webmasters why their sites are deindexed or penalized. Simply, people may look at this email and figure that exchanges links with your friends is a bad thing. If you have a personal blog about your life and you wanted to link to your dad's dental practice web site, there is nothing wrong with that. But if you do run huge link exchanges, then you need to be worried. The email sent to this Webmaster might not be clear enough to explain the difference, and get other Webmasters worried.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:28 AM | Permalink

November 7, 2006

Text Link Ads Aquired By MediaWhiz

Text Link Ads has been acquired by MediaWhiz as of yesterday. Text Link Ads (TLA) sells text advertisements on web sites and RSS feeds, they also have a publisher network where small publishers can earn money selling TLA ads on their own site. The dollar figures were not disclosed as part of the release. The Link Building Blog says notes that "the people you will be dealing with tomorrow at TLA will be the same people you have always dealt with since our doors opened in 2003." They will be moving from Cincinnati to New York in a few months to run TLA from within MediaWhiz. Patrick Gavin, co-owner of Text Link Ads, said, "We are excited to join MediaWhiz's team and their suite of products. It is a great opportunity to leverage our publisher base by offering more ways for publishers to make money. This deal will also allow us to offer our advertisers new ways to send traffic and sales to their websites." There are related articles at The Cincinnati Business Courier and the official press release here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:12 PM | Permalink

October 27, 2006

Competitive Intelligence & Link Searches

Rand over at SEOMoz has a great write up on Long List of Link Searches where he goes through a sample client and how he would approach the competitive intelligence aspect of the SEO research. This is a must read for any SEO because he goes through "the obvious," some "advanced operators," "alternative search sources," "directory search terms," "blog & forum searches," and "submit type searches." The best part is that this is a practical example that gives you actionable items to run through in your own SEO practices. Gotta love Rand for doing this, most would not.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:03 AM | Permalink

October 19, 2006

United Press International Selling PageRank

Threadwatch reports that the United Press International is selling links based on PageRank values. If you visit the advertising section, specifically for text links you will clearly see UPI marketing those text links to manipulate rankings and not for direct traffic building purposes like this:

The benefits they list include "increasing Page Rank" and "improving search engine results." Plus UPI listed out pages, with their current PageRank values and backlink counts for marketing reasons.

I have posted a screen capture at Flickr to document the full page it before Google removes all value from the links on this site. :-)

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:19 AM | Permalink

October 12, 2006

New Tool Measures Your Blog Juice

Text Link Ads has released a new fun tool named Blog Juice Calculator. You basically enter in your site/blog URL, and it tells you have juicy your site is. Search Engine Watch is a whooping 8.8, the SEW Blog is an 8.6, my search blog is a 8.3. Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads told me, "Blog Juice calculates its score from Bloglines RSS subscriber data, Alexa rank, Technorati rank, and Technorati inlinks. It is not a perfectly accurate data tool but is fun to compare your blog to others in your vertical."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:53 AM | Permalink

September 27, 2006

John Battelle Talks With Matt Cutts & Nofollow Attribute The Same As Meta Robots Nofollow?

John Battelle has a short interview with Google spam fighter Matt Cutts. The most interesting part I found was news that the W3C has added a meta nofollow tag to their page with paid links, which Matt seems to say is the same as the completely different nofollow attribute and thus something acceptable for to do by those selling links who fear the wrath of Google.

Let's back up. You can put a meta robots tag on your pages with the value of "nofollow," as described here. This tag, about 10 years old now, long predates any concerns about link selling skewing search results or the nofollow attribute. It is supposed to tell a search engine not to follow any links on a page, for purposes of indexing those links.

In other words, you've got a page with 20 links leading to other pages in your web site. Put nofollow into a meta robots tag, and you're telling the search engine not to follow the links on that page to those other pages.

An important note. Just using nofollow doesn't protect those other pages from being indexed. If there's any other links pointing at them from anywhere on the web, search engines will follow through to them that way. So if you don't want them indexed, you need to make use of a meta noindex tag or robots.txt text to specifically block them.

Now on to the nofollow attribute. Created in January 2005, it was a way to flag particular links to search engines as those a site owner doesn't explicitly approve of. It was never defined as a means to telling search engines not to actually "follow" the link. It was more a way to say that you don't endorse the link. In fact, to my knowledge, Yahoo and perhaps others will still "click on" or follow links even if they make use of the nofollow attribute.

Now to the W3C. W3C Selling PageRank Or Thanking Supporters? covers how some have felt they've effectively been selling links without using the nofollow attribute that Matt Cutts in particular has urged those selling links to do, lest they potentially be penalized by Google.

In Matt's interview, we read that using nofollow in the meta robots tag might be seen as the same thing as a nofollow attribute, at least in Google's eyes. That's a completely new thing to me. I've commented on Matt's blog post about the interview, to see if he'll clarify more.

Aside from nofollow, the interview also gets into some interesting discussion of whether Google should do more to use humans in refining results.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:42 AM | Permalink

September 14, 2006

Checking Back Links From Wikipedia Articles

Steve Rubel spotted a new page at Wikipedia that allows you to quickly locate all the links pointing to a specific site from within the Wikipedia. This page allows you to enter in a domain, and it will bring back all the pages that have links pointing to that domain from within the Wikipedia. For example, Search Engine Watch has 107 citations from the Wikipedia, just search using the syntax *.searchenginewatch.com to find out. It is a great way to see what types of Wiki links you have and also to see how people are using your content in a positive or negative way towards your brand.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:46 AM | Permalink

September 12, 2006

The Ten Linking Commandments By LinkMoses

Eric Ward posted a fun but true list of what he calls LinkMoses Linking Commandments. But honestly, number five makes me wonder about practicing what you preach. :) Come on LinkMoses, "Thou shall not refereth to content as link bait, any more than you shall refereth to your users as carp." Nice list!

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:14 AM | Permalink

August 22, 2006

How Much Is Link Baiting Services Or Projects Worth?

Honestly, the purpose of this post is selfish, I want someone to come up with the value of a link baiting effort. I am looking for someone to tell me how much time, money and effort should be put towards a link baiting project. What is the minimum you need as an outcome of that link baiting effort to make the link baiting tactic a success? These are questions running through my head over the past couple days.

Over at my personal, Cartoon Barry Blog, I wrote an entry named How Much is Link Bait Worth?. In that post, I do my best to compare two link baiting efforts (not sure if either of those developers would classify their efforts for the purpose link bating). I then asked Andy Hagans his opinion on the topic and he wrote an entry named What is link bait worth?

Link baiting has been a recent buzz term in the SEM industry. Andy still classifies it as "the least popular method of link building" but he does imply that link baiting is growing. I personally feel that link baiting has been around since day one. Yes, viral marketing. But with the term link baiting out there, you have more and more efforts out there to create bait for links. We have seen tons of recent top ten lists, we have seen several recent games launched, we have seen tons of controversial posts thrown up - all in an effort to capture links from authoritative sites.

But at what point does the time and effort and money cost more than the links you acquire? You see, I am giving someone an excuse to create some funky AJAX tool that enables you to enter a number of hours or dollars spent. The tool should then spit out a figure in links by PageRank score or something, detailing the number and quality of links required in return for that link bait investment. If you come up with that tool, I'll link to it. The question is, is the development of that tool worth the link?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:57 AM | Permalink

How XSS HTML Injection Might Let Others Put Links On Your Sites

SEOMoz has some excellent examples of government sites that are susceptible to cross site (XSS) html injection, something that can also happen to any site. Let me first do my best to explain what this means in layman terms (hope I get it right).

In the examples shown at SEOMoz, they were able to add the link that looks like "<h1><a href="http://www.example.com">Look, I made a link</a></h1>" in the HTML to a new page hosted on a .gov site. Now, the page is a brand new, dynamically generated page, because the HTML itself is injected via the URL, which may look something like;

textQuery=%3Ch1%3E%3Ca+href%3D%22 http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%22%3E Look%2C+I+made+a+link %3C%2Fa%3E%3C/h1%3E

The examples are still live, here is one of twenty, epa.gov link.

Now, if the search engines index this page - and they will, if there are enough links pointing to this new page, the search engines may assign higher weight to the links on this page, since it is a .gov link and thus benefit the injected links.

This exploit was first made public in mid-June. This is something that can happen to almost any site or any server. Google itself is not immune to this exploit, they suffered from it in early July. And I also had an exploit on one of the tools at rustybrick.com that people began exploiting.

I personally commend SEOMoz for posting the details on the 20 governmental sites with this exploit. They should ensure that their sites do not have this vulnerability and someone pointing this out, will help (encourage) them do something about it.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:21 AM | Permalink

August 18, 2006

Washington Post Selling Text Links?

Steve Rubel reported that the Washington Post launched a sponsored blogroll product that allows people to pay to be listed in the blogroll. You can see it live on the right hand bottom portion of the WashingtonPost.com web site. I dug into the source code to discover the blogroll is not using the search engine suggested nofollow attribute, which Google in particular pushes to be used for paid links. However, it is using some sort of JavaScript tracking code, that may or may not limit the PageRank and link popularity to flow to those sites advertised.

The code for a link that I pulled out looks like this:

<p style="padding:0px; margin:0px 0px 2px 0px"><a href="http://www.VivaLasVegasBlog.com" target="_blank" onclick="sa_onclick( 'http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/tracking/textlink/blogroll/' );" style="color:#0C4790; font-size:11px">Las Vegas Travel</a></p>

I started a thread on this at our forums named Do Washington Post Blogroll Links Pass Link Pop?

I personally think that this link may in fact pass PR but I am not 100 percent sure. I am hoping Matt Cutts or someone else at Google chimes in on this.

It is also important to note that these links also rotate, which also can impact those hoping to get a search engine gain.

Postscript From Danny: And would someone please, please tell the Washingon Post that the stupid "Zap The Mosquito" ad that won't shut up unless you hover over it is incredibly annoying.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:31 AM | Permalink

August 16, 2006

101 Ways To Build Links & Popularity

Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall have compiled a list of 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006. I will not attempt to summarize all 101 tactics here, check out the list at SEO Book.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:00 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2006

Site Geolocation Tool Sorts Backlinks By Top Level Domain

SEO Scoop reports on a new tool named Domain Localization. This tool uses the Yahoo link command to bring back a sorted list of your backlinks by linking TLD (top level domain). There are several factors that tell a search engine if you are a country specific web site; your TLD, meta geo tags, language on site, contact us page, the links pointing to your pages and a few other factors. This tool enables you to easily see the percentage of links pointing to you by TLD.

While Search Engine Watch is now hosted in the United Kingdom, the majority of its links are from .com TLDs (72%), 9% from .orgs, 6.6% from .nets, 5.8% from .edu and then 1.5% from .uks. My blog, the Search Engine Roundtable is hosted in the United States, and has 81% of their links from .coms, 5.65% from .orgs, 4.6% from .nets, and only 1.4% from .UK.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:00 AM | Permalink

July 13, 2006

Counting Links At The Search Engines

Rand has an excellent post on how to get your hands dirty by manually checking your links at the various search engines. He reviews Google's link command and how bad it is. He also reviews MSN's link command and explains how you can add modifiers to the link or linkdomain commands (i.e. exclude site A from the command). Rand then reviews the Yahoo link command, and explains that although Yahoo has Site Explorer, the "most accurate" result set still comes from search.yahoo.com. He recommends you use search.yahoo.com and then append &b=999 to the end of the URL manually. Like MSN, you can add modifiers to the Yahoo link commands. This is a great post for those who want a refresher on the link commands available to you, plus learn a few new tips on them.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:52 AM | Permalink

July 7, 2006

W3C Selling PageRank Or Thanking Supporters?

Nathan Weinberg linked to a post by Emad Fanous who notes that the W3C is selling PageRank 9 and PR7 links. You can buy a link on this page also and earn yourself a PR9 link from the w3.org site. How much is it? $1,000 per year and if you do that, you will also get yourself a free PR7 link on this page. How about that for a good deal? :) I'll stop being sarcastic now...

Things to note: (1) The links do not carry the nofollow attribute (2) It seems like anyone can buy the links. See the links listed, "Website Templates Company," "KVM Switches Online," "Cheap Web Hosting Provider," oh and a familiar face, "SEO Book," to name a few.

Is there a difference between having links to "supporters" and selling links to anyone? This is not for me to decide.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:14 AM | Permalink

Business.com Adds Nofollow To Many Links

Threadwatch reports that Business.com has added the nofollow attribute, a method of telling search engines not to count particular links as a "vote," to many of its outbound links. Aaron Wall discusses how the use of the nofollow in this sense "muddies their credibility" by saying they have links in their directory that they don't trust. But it appears that only those that pay Business.com for a directory listing get a link without the nofollow added to it. Everyone else who is accepted into the directory, is tagged as untrusted. That's the exact opposite of how Google's Matt Cutts has said he thinks nofollow should work.

Postscript: Business.com - Use of "No Follow" Tags Explained has Business.com explaining why it uses nofollow in some cases and not in others. Postscript 2: Business.com's "No Follow" Policy Revision has Business.com changing how it uses nofollow.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:41 AM | Permalink

June 23, 2006

Technorati Betting: New Link Bait Idea

Omar emailed me that he has posted a Technorati Blog Betting competition. Basically, you bet as much as you like, on the chances that a particular blog will be at the number one spot. As Threadwatch notes, Matt Cutts has 6 to 1 odds in this competition. They currently have Matt Cutts, Robert Scoble, Engadget, and some others in the competition. This site, nor is my site in the running. Currently, the Technorati top 100 shows me at #35, Philipp at #29, ShoeMoney at #52, John Battelle at #63 and Danny (SEW) at #69.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:00 AM | Permalink

June 14, 2006

New Public Link Spam Exploits

Peter Da Vanzo has posted information on XSS Redirects & SEO. Peter linked to two documented methods of exploiting comments and links at blogs and other sites. The two links include; XSS and Redirection Attacks, which makes for a nice and interested educational read and Moveable Type Backlink Exploit that makes me a little depressed (running MovableType and all). Point being? The nofollow attribute, created to slow down link spam, has not worked, IMO, I actually had to pull comments and trackbacks completely from my blog after 3 years of them being enabled. Sad.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:53 AM | Permalink

Looking At Links After Looking At Patents

I know, I know. Everyone everywhere is running SEO interviews with everyone. But Bill Slawski Interview over at SEO Buzz Box is well worth a read. Aaron Pratt's got a great set of questions that he puts to Bill, who in turn has very clear, good responses that show how the original Google notion of links as votes has become complicated for both Google and search marketers.

I have a slide in my long-standing Intro To Search Marketing session I do at our SES conferences that bullet points a number of ways search engines might or might not count links these days, to help illustrate why you can't just depend on that old PageRank meter.

Bill's responses go beyond the bullet points, for those who want to dig deeper into some of the many patents and research papers that have been released. Bill, of course, covers patents for us on the blog. But if you're looking for a nice, concise catch-up piece with his thinkings out of patents from the past, give this article a read.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:03 AM | Permalink

June 8, 2006

New Link Building Guide

Andy Hagans linked to a new link building guide by Jim Westergren. The guide goes over how to build links in 2006. For example it describes the "natural simulation" of link development and methods of building links naturally and quickly. Just be warned on some of the tactics, there are 43 comments appended to the guide, probably worth a full read before deploying all the ideas.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:42 AM | Permalink

June 6, 2006

Googlebowling A Reality?

Googlebowling is a term used to describe the method of knocking out a page from the Google search results. Googlebowling is conducted by linking to a particular site from sites within bad neighborhoods. Rand over at SEOMoz.org posted recent information he learned about Googlebowling while at SES London a week ago.

To successfully deploy Googlebowling, Rand writes that you need to "use patterns that would show that the site has 'participated' in [a spammy linking] program."

Specifically, this means you would point spammy links at the places the site you are targeting links to. If this is implemented properly and the site you are targeting is not a super authority, the site may be penalized for a long time. Note that the advice here is given not to encourage Googlebowling but to help people understand how it might be possible to impact their own sites.

Rand continues to explain that if a site is Googlebowled, you most likely will want to start fresh and drop the site that was penalized completely. I have discussed Googlebowling a few times at the Search Engine Roundtable. Two entries I would like to point out are:

+ Google Bowling For Dollars by Chris Boggs + Google Bowling Supporters Thread by myself

So can other people hurt your rankings? Can other links hurt you? Some think they can, but some such at Google itself say they cannot.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:15 AM | Permalink

June 2, 2006

NoFollow Changes Linking Behavior

Jeremy Zawodny posts his commentary on the NoFollow tag after finding an interesting blog entry on how the NoFollow attribute has changed linking behavior. NoFollow was introduced by Google over a year ago to combat prevalent comment spam as blogs became extremely popular. Ever since, NoFollow has had mixed responses from Webmasters, and Jeremy nicely puts it all in perspective.

NoFollow has done very little to actually thwart comment spam, and its other effect is to dissuade some from entering legitimate comments. Without a reciprocal link, what motivates readers from commenting on someone else's website? Jeremy notes the "psychology of linking" has changed, and people now ration their linking. It should really be up to the search engines to sort out linking and its prominence in the algorithm for ranking sites.

Jeremy's advice is try not to over-think the issue; link and be linked to! Life's too short.

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 8:25 AM | Permalink

May 30, 2006

Google Sitemaps: Links To You Can't Hurt You

The Google Sitemaps team posted to their blog in response to a question at SearchEngineWatch Seattle. Interestingly, they note that links from bad neighborhoods do not harm a site's rankings, only links to bad neighborhoods. It has long been theorized that links from bad neighborhoods do cause ranking problems and this goes against conventional thinking.

Link networks often populate quality content sites with paid text links as part of their program. If at all possible, Google obviously wouldn't want to remove quality content from their search engine. One solution is to make outbound links from quality sites that sell links worth nothing towards building rankings for destination sites.

We've heard this from Matt Cutts before: "Link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)." If a link from such a site loses it's ability to transfer PageRank, it can make sense that it doesn't harm a site's PageRank either. But that is not a foregone conclusion. The information comes from the Sitemaps team, and not Matt Cutts' anti-spam force.

In the above entry by Matt, he recommends the use of the "nofollow" link attribute to safely purchase links purely for traffic purposes. This infers links from bad neighborhoods indeed can harm a site's rankings in Google. Perhaps Matt implies this to deter link buying, but the advice is good insofar as links from bad neighborhoods also raises the profile of sites that eventually would come under scrutiny by Google. It can also be assumed that text links from bad neighborhoods can harm a site's rankings in other major search engines than Google.

Posted by Detlev Johnson at 8:22 AM | Permalink

May 22, 2006

Tool Estimates How Much Selling Your Links Is Worth

The folks at Text Link Ads announced via the Link Building Blog a tool that calculated the value of links on your page. This nifty and stylish AJAX powered tool asks you to type in the URL of the site, the site's theme, the number of links you want to sell on the page, if the links will be site wide or single page link only and then to specify the location of the links on the page. According to the tool, a single link on this site, if placed on the left hand navigation bottom bar, is worth $5,200 per month! The Web based tool is available at http://www.text-link-ads.com/link_calculator.php.

If you place seroundtable.com into the tool, for some reason, cartoon Barry pops up. Also, if you try msn.com, you get a funny picture, as you do with seomoz.org and even try google.com. I suspect there are more examples of these funny responses. Classic. :) Anyway, the tool is very cool, IMO.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 12:54 PM | Permalink

April 11, 2006

Webmaster Eyes Paints Google PR On Your Home Page

I reported this morning on a tool at Webmaster Eyes that overlays Google's PageRank bars on top of your pages. The tool works somewhat like how Google Analytics, ClickTracks and other Web analytics pages overlays click through data on your most popular links.

For example, plug in searchenginewatch.com and take a look at the overlay chart. I tend to like to plug in a URL of a sitemap page, so you can get an overview of your complete site PR distribution page by page. I attached an image of my sidebar navigation with the PR plots overlaid for your quick review. Try it yourself at http://www.webmastereyes.com/, notice there may be issues with PR bar placement for some sites.

Again, as I noted in my previous post, Google PageRank is not the final say in ranking well in Google. Google claims it is used for determining crawl frequency and other ranking aspects. But many SEO professionals have uninstalled the Google Toolbar, to make a statement about PageRank's worth.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:07 AM | Permalink

April 3, 2006

Nofollow Not Meant For Every External Link

NoFollow Nastiness - a Big Boo for Google! is a nice look at Threadwatch on how some people are making use of the nofollow attribute as a way to prevent link love from going to resources that many might say deserve it. For example, documentation from Apple on the Canvas HTML element gets a nofollow from the Mozilla Developer Center referencing it. It's an ironic twist. Nofollow, now just over a year old, was introduced in part to help search engines prop up the value of link analysis. But if it starts getting used as an attribute applied to any external link, that will just make link analysis even more devalued.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:37 AM | Permalink

March 17, 2006

MSN Search Link Operators Explored

Rand Fishkin explores the MSN Search link operator. With this advanced search command, you can find out who links to Matt Cutts, SEO Book, SEO Consultants, but not SEOmoz.org; (linkdomain:mattcutts.com linkdomain:seobook.com linkdomain:seoconsultants.com) (-linkdomain:seomoz.org). This is pretty powerful stuff, check out SEOMoz.org for more information on this.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:47 AM | Permalink

March 9, 2006

Music's Payola Compared with Web's Link Buying

Techdirt compares buying links to payola, "the illegal practice of record companies paying money for the broadcast of records on music radio." Joe at Techdirt explains that both payola and link buying are ultimately where "the seller pays for this by auctioning of its credibility, or whatever it is that made it popular."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:45 AM | Permalink

March 6, 2006

Hosted Doorway Pages & Paid Links Back At Stanford University

Bouncing ball time. Last April, I wrote about how the Stanford Daily newspaper was selling links for those seeking to rank better on Google, ironic given that Google was born out of Stanford University and is very anti-link selling. Then last May, the newspaper decided to abandon paid links along with doorway pages it hosted for third parties. Today, SEW Forums moderator AussieWebmaster notices that paid links and hosted web pages have come back, such as you'll see at the bottom of the paper's home page here and a hosted page here.

Nope, I don't see the use of nofollow as Google's Matt Cutts recommends, nor is the page banned by robots.txt from being indexed. Far from it, it's ranking well.

AussieWebmaster -- Frank Watson -- oversees a site for currency trading terms, which is why the Stanford-hosted page came to his attention. It currently ranks fifth out of about 40 million pages that Google has indexed for the term forex.

Well heck, at least the page carries Google's own AdSense ads on it :)

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums thread, Paid Links, Hosted Doorway Pages Back At Stanford Daily.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:34 PM | Permalink

March 2, 2006

Daily SearchCast, March 1, 2006: Special SES NY Edition, Linking Strategies Panel

Today's search podcast is the third of special editions out of the Search Engine Strategies New York conference this week. Originally, we'd planned to podcast the Who's Watching Whom privacy panel, but we had a technical glitch with that. So instead, please enjoy highlights from the Linking Strategies panel, which you'll find it in this MP3 file. About the panel:

Linking Strategies How far is too far in optimizing your internal link structure? If you operate a network of sites, can natural interlinking be perceived as link spam? How should you handle affiliate links? Advanced linking issues like these and more will be explored during this session. This session is designed for experienced marketers. Beginners should only attend if they've gone through the Link Building Basics session earlier in the conference.

Moderator: Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies

Speakers: Chris Boggs, Director of Online Marketing, G3 Group Greg Boser, President, WebGuerrilla LLC Mike Grehan, CEO, Smart Interactive Debra Mastaler, Owner, Alliance-Link.com Eric Ward, CEO, EricWard.com

Want more SES NY 2006 news? Technorati has blog reports here: sesny2006. See shared photos on Flickr here: sesny2006. See bookmarked pages on del.icio.us here: sesny2006. See saved pages on Yahoo My Web 2.0 here: sesny2006. Find live coverage and discussion at the Search Engine Watch Forums here: SEM Events.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:33 AM | Permalink

February 13, 2006

Lee Odden Interviews Eric Ward

Eric Ward is a long time speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and is considered by many the granddaddy of link building. Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog has posted an Interview with Eric Ward. Outside of the ordinary search chat, it seems that Eric is an Elvis fan.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:04 AM | Permalink

February 6, 2006

Google Sitemaps Stats On Most Common Words In Your Anchor Text & Site Content

Along with the cool new robots.txt checker, Google Sitemaps has also released stats showing the most common words used on pages within your web site and the most common words anchor text pointing at your site.

The common words in site content stats will be good fodder for those who believe Google somehow tries to figure out a word "theme" for your entire site. Google's never claimed to do this before -- and seeing sites like Amazon or Wikipedia rank for anything when they are about nothing in particular should demonstrate that you don't need to target all your pages around a particular term or theme.

Still, if Google's generating stats like this for a site, it'll probably tip some people back to worry more about this. I wouldn't - but do as you deem best.

The anchor text analysis is far more intriguing. Again, Google has generally said that each page is measured by the links pointing at that particular page. So if someone points at a deep page in your site, that helps that particular deep page, not the site as a whole. And if someone points at your home page, that helps the home page, not the entire site (Yahoo, in contrast, has said it does some sitewide link crediting).

Now Google's reporting anchor text terms for an entire site -- which suggests that any link to any page in your site might have an impact on other pages. Or not!

Questions, questions. I'll drop a word over to Google blogmeister Matt Cutts to see about getting some answers. I'll postscript here, but I'd also say to watch his blog as well.

Finally, while these stats are promised, I don't see them live for all of my sites my sitemaps yet. If you don't as well, there's probably a delay in getting them rolled out and live.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:24 PM | Permalink

January 9, 2006

New Google Patent Application Defines Link Churn

It's patent application time! Search Engine Roundtable points to a just published patent application (not an awarded patent) from Google (congrats to Matt Cutts who is listed as a co-inventor) that's titled: Information retrieval based on historical data.

From the abstract: A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data.

Barry (aka RustyBrick) also points out that the app includes a brief discussion and definition of "link churn."

Link churn is "computed as a function of an extent to which one or more links provided by the document changes over time."

The patent application also notes that Google MAT penalize the web page owner for link churn above a certain threshold. Note the exact wording in claims 60-63.

Of course, this is just patent app that was filed in December 2003 and does not guarantee that Google is using, will use, or has used any of these techniques. Nevertheless, good discussion material.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:41 AM | Permalink

December 13, 2005

Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny Caught In Link Selling Debate

Google Fights Paid Links & Yahoo Defends Paid Links from Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable does a great job of recapping the ironic situation of Yahoo blogvangelist Jeremy Zawodny selling links on his personal blog without using nofollow attributes while the most direct counterpart he has at Google, Matt Cutts, has been urging for months that nofollow should be used on paid links.

While Barry's done the recap, I still wanted to revisit things myself. First, there's the nofollow attribute, which was introduced earlier this year primarily as a way for blog owners to help combat trackback and comment spam. Slap a nofollow on links in these areas, and they don't pass credit for the search engines that support nofollow.

Todd Friesen dubbed nofollow to be a "link condom" (see Link Condom: The Nofollow Parody), a way to interact through links with other sites safely but not actually touching them, at least as Google, Yahoo and MSN will view it. But far from a joke, I later wrote a follow up on how the link condom parody site was a good jumping off point on how nofollow had many other uses, including as a means for those selling links to tell search engines that they meant no harm.

This was a point I made in my original write up on nofollow, Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links. Nevertheless, the issue of using nofollow in relation to paid links really exploded when O'Reilly was found to be selling links in August.

O'Reilly In Debate Over Link Selling covers that situation as well as the issue of selling links and influencing search engines by buying them in much greater depth. Nofollow was a solution, I explained, for any publisher not wanting to be accused of doing something wrong.

Soon after, in Text links And PageRank, Google's Matt Cutts urged the use of nofollow as a safe way for people to buy links, along with a warning that sites selling links without doing this might not pass along PageRank.

Not everyone agrees with Matt, as you can see in the comments below his post or in this discussion over at our Search Engine Watch Forums: Google's Matt Cutts On Link Selling: Sites Might Not Pass Reputation; Buyers Might Get Targeted More.

Now skip forward to last week. Zawodny Says No to Link Condoms from Greg Boser covers how he received an email telling him that he could now buy links on Jeremy's site (Dave Naylor got a similar email) and the irony that those links don't make use of link condom in the way that Google would prefer, as would likely Jeremy's employer Yahoo, as well. Or maybe not Yahoo, given that as some of the articles above detail, it has come under accusations that its $300 per year Yahoo Directory is nothing more than a giant link selling network.

I was actually going to drop a note to Jeremy and Matt to get both of their views on all of this before posting, but Sponsored Links from Jeremy over at his blog saves part of that work. In it, he explains his viewpoint on not using nofollow. To stress his main points:

• I didn't hide the links. (Remember the WordPress fiasco?)  
• They're clearly labeled as sponsored links.  
• They're far less annoying than distracting graphical ads.  
• I've made it possible for anyone to comment on them. In public. Who else does that?  
• They don't show up in my RSS feed(s).  
• I rejected the on-line casino, drug sales, cheap hotels, and really offensive stuff--basically, anything the reminded me of blog comment spam I've bit hit with or that sends me to a sleazy feeling site. No need to encourage 'em.  
• The links aren't permanent. They go away after a month (see below).

Those are all fine points, but none of them except the last are likely to make Matt over at Google happy. I'll try to channel him as well as comments on paid link in relation to the impact on search relevancy:

• The WordPress fiasco wasn't over hiding paid links. It was about having tons of doorways that were found through a hidden link. Different issue completely. WordPress Caught Spamming After Enlisting To Fight Spam covers it in more depth.  
• Sponsored links have been labeled at other places. That doesn't rob them of link juice. Someone's bought a link on Jeremy's blog with the link text "Local Coupons." That's going to contribute in some way to help it rank for those terms on search engines. The Sponsored Links label doesn't prevent that. Nofollow does.  
• Whether the links are distracting or not compared to graphical ones isn't why this has come up. The issue is whether the links are contributing to search results being degraded.  
• Commenting on them is nice, but it still doesn't pull away from the relevancy issue.  
• Doing some rejecting is fine, but I don't recall Yahoo or other search engines saying anything like, "Don't buy links, unless your company isn't in a sleazy, blog spamming industry."  
• Links going away is a positive, I suppose, at least to those who might feel Jeremy is messing with search results by selling links.

Further down, Jeremy talks about no one up in arms about the Google AdSense links he carries. Yep, and O'Reilly In Debate Over Link Selling has me covering exactly this same point, when it came up at one of our conferences. AdSense are sponsored links -- they're just "safe" sponsored links in terms of search relevancy that Google doesn't mind.

Need more from Matt directly? SES Chicago 2005 I think has some fresh comments from him below the post on link selling, as does ?Tell me about your backlinks?.

What's going to happen to Jeremy? As Greg notes, he's not going to be yanked from Google. His site is far too important for that. But Google might prevent it from passing along link juice to others. Apparently, I'm told by others (not Google itself) that Google's done the same to Search Engine Watch because of our SEW Marketplace ads that we sell.

If so, Google's just stupid. If it can't figure out that we carry the same sponsored links in the same area and filter out that part, really -- they're dumb. They're even dumber if they have to wipe out the ability of an entire site to help influence its results in a good way. We link to many excellent things -- including things Google wants people to know about. Our links don't carry weight because Google's not smart enough? And Jeremy's site might not carry weight as well? Please.

If you're interested, that O'Reilly In Debate Over Link Selling covers the former paid link program we had here and how ultimately, the SEW Marketplace ads might move to using nofollow down the line. But since none of these were ever sold as ways to help people rank, it's kind of a pain to have to retroactively make that type of move.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread, Yahoo's Zawodny In Paid Links & Nofollow Debate.

Postscript: Matt adds his thoughts on the situation over in Text link follow-up which in summary says yes, he still thinks nofollow is the way to go, but Jeremy's free to do as he likes on his site, just as search engines will be free to decide what sites they want to trust based on linkage patterns. But it's more fun to read his actual post, especially because he plays a game of Six Degrees, getting from a paid link to a sex positions web site in two mouse clicks.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:31 AM | Permalink

November 23, 2005

Getting Search Engine Love From Affiliate Links

A long time issue with those who ponder using affiliates is whether paying for affiliate links will rob them of link juice with the search engines. If the affiliate links make use of tracking codes or redirection, will search engines count these as much as "real" links?

SEO Friendly Affiliate Systems from Greg Boser is a great tutorial on how affiliate links work in various flavors and how to get the ones that will help you with search engines (short answer, use 301 redirection), assuming your affiliates buy into the idea. As Greg explains, giving you the link juice means they might be less likely to show up themselves.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forum thread, Affiliate URLs - 301s vs 302s.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:08 AM | Permalink

November 22, 2005

Boser On Reciprocal Links & Whether Inbound Links Can Harm

Greg Boser in The Truth About Reciprocal Link Networks on his new blog looks at how a former client built up 7,000 links in a month and a half, skyrocketing activity that may have blown up for the person in the latest Oct. 2005 Google Jagger update. He also digs into the GotLinks link network that the person was involved with and comes away unimpressed. He also raises the worrisome issue that that links out of your control could potentially harm you.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:21 AM | Permalink

November 11, 2005

Moving To Trusted Links & Change The Link Election Model

Thank you, Aaron. That's for taking the research paper (PDF file) about detecting link spam that Gary wrote about earlier and breaking it down in non technical language (and Jim Boykin summarizes Aaron further here). Aaron finds things like the paper says having .edu and .gov links are a good thing, don't worry about having a few spammy links and the more trusted links you have, the better.

I was thinking last night about the way to describe some of the changes or generational evolution we've seeing with counting links, and I thought it might be helpful to break it down this way:

Counting Links / Referendum: Before Google, other search engines made use of links to determine which sites might be important. But this was mainly a counting exercise. The more links the better, regardless of the quality of those links.

• In simple terms, each link counted the same.  
• In election terms, it was like a referendum. Every voter had an equal say.

Weighted Links / Electing A Congress: Google's PageRank system helped usher in a change to weighting links, that not all are as important as others. The system worked to figure out what were the most important links and give sites getting those links more credit -- the authority pages, to use a popular term for this.

• In simple terms, not all links are credited equal. Some links are worth more than others.  
• In election terms, it was as if Google looked at all the links across the web, determined who seemed to get the most, then let those authorities serve in a "congress" of sort in making the big decisions about what's good on the web through the link votes they cast.

Trusted Links / Qualifying Representatives

This is what we've been moving to. When PageRank knew a link was "important," that wasn't the same as trustworthy despite the authority misnomer. It only meant knowing that some particular link should count for more because the page the link was on had a lot of people "voting" for it. You can scam that type of voting.

• In simple terms, some links are worth more than others after using some checks-and-balances to eliminate the scamming.  
• In election terms, it's as if after a congress is elected, you go back and check the campaign contributions. If you find something iffy, then some particular congressperson's vote might not count for as much as others. Or perhaps you watch their voting record, to see if they know what they're talking about. Being popular as everyone knows doesn't necessarily mean you're an authority!

That's a rough idea, and I'm playing at refining it more, but I thought I'd share it now. Remember, it's also not just about how much a link counts for but the text that's in and surrounding the link, along with a lot of other factors. Also see Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge on how search engines hope to tap into trust in ways beyond link analysis to improve results.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:25 AM | Permalink

November 10, 2005

A Bad Reciprocal Link -- And Reciprocal Link Request

We've been having quite a discussion about reciprocal links over at the Search Engine Watch Forums in our Reciprocal Linking – Dead or Alive? thread. I chimed in to stress that whether a reciprocal link is bad or good can also depend on what exactly you mean by "reciprocal link." From one page to another and back? From one site to another but between different pages? And what about the underlying reason for the link? For search ranking purposes or for your visitors? Today, a gift (ahem) from the email deity arrived in my inbox. An example of a bad reciprocal link plus a bad link request. Yum, double badness to blog. Let's look.

Here's the email. URLs have been broken so as not to benefit the guilty, but you can always cut-and-paste and piece together, if you're really curious.

Dear Webmaster,

We would like to add http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/ to our online directory, by placing a link to it in our site http:// www. bradandjennifer. com/  In return; we would like you to link back to http:// www. myweddingfavors. com our site.

This exchange will create one way links to both our sites, which is beneficial from SEO point of view. This link will remain active as long as the requested link back is active on your site.

Please mail us your link Title, URL & Description & we will immediately place a link to http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/ on http:// www. bradandjennifer. com/ your link shall appear at: http:// www. bradandjennifer.com/ links.htm

Please place a link back to http:// www. myweddingfavors. com using the information below: -------------------------------------------- Link Text: Wedding Favors Description: Elegant wedding favors and unique wedding favor ideas from My Wedding Favors. URL: http:// www. myweddingfavors. com ---------------------------------------------

Thank you for helping both our sites achieve higher rankings, and for becoming part of the http://www. bradandjennifer. com/ family!

Regards, Satyajit  

Want to get 10,000 unique visitors per day from organic search engine traffic, like our Yahoo Store? 

"DISCLAIMER: If you prefer I not send you future emails, please reply with the word 'REMOVE' in the subject line."

Oh, where to begin? Let's go with the biggest reason why I think this is a bad reciprocal link. That's because there's no benefit to my visitors in adding it. Do they care about this Brad & Jennifer site (and no, it's not that Brad & Jennifer). They do not! They care about search stuff. If I link to this site and they link to me, sure, we've scratched each others' backs. But that's to benefit each other, to reciprocate, not to help our visitors.

Hey -- what's the deal with those blogrolls you see in a lot of places, even on our blog. Isn't that reciprocation? Sure is! Move along, you joker. You're messing up my presentation.

Seriously -- yes, it's reciprocation, but reciprocation that also helps your visitors. There's some good reason beyond "I wanna top search ranking" for doing those links.

Now what if we go with this old school reciprocal link request, defying all better judgment. Is that enough to get us banned? Yes. Yes, you will be banned for life. Using mental telepathy, I just beamed that question to all my search engine contacts and received back that unified answer, despite the tinfoil on my head.

Nah. What's one link among many? Honestly, even if I end up doing a fair number of these, I'm still not likely to get banned. But neither are they likely to be doing much good for me.

This is because the links coming at me are likely on pages with a lot of other links -- and links that clearly aren't related to each other -- and thus making it easier to identify that page as one that perhaps shouldn't be able to transmit much importance to other sites. (Want the science bit? Go read the paper about detecting link spam that Gary posted about yesterday. That's full of just one method of knowing good links from bad. Jim summarizes it here, from Aaron's longer summary. Both are better reads for most people).

Specifically to this example, while they want me to link to their home page, they're going to place my link on their links page, not their home page. If you look at that links page, you'll see it's just a jumble of links. A link to a Bahama vacations site next to one for a satellite TV site which is near a Utah homes for sale site.

The Google Toolbar PageRank meter gives the page a big ole whopping 0. That's zero, with a capital Zed. (That's Zed, in what my kids think Z is called. It's because of their mom/mum, who's British. And I ask you, if Z is Zed, then why don't Brits call a zebra a zedbra? But I digress badly, madly). Think you're going to benefit much being linked from that page? Then you'd better go claim that $400 Google's giving away (They're not! It's a scam!).

By the way, notice how the email is a bit confused, even more confused than my critique of it. It starts out about the Brad & Jen site (remember, not THAT Brad & Jen and not even an incredible simulation), but then it starts talking about a wedding favors site. Just a guess, but me thinks someone didn't do the cut and paste right before sending out this bulk email. Another sign of a quality request.

What have we learned from all this?

• Exchange links your visitors care about, and you'll probably be doing the "good" reciprocal linking and needn't fear people like Google's Matt Cutts, who can fell your site with one swoop of his mighty sword: Matt Cutts (right) with mighty sword (left). Photo Copyright 2005 Matt Cutts, all rights reserved. No swords were harmed in the taking of this photo.  
• Avoid links request that bury you in Siberia in exchange for some nice beachfront real estate on your home page.  
• Brad & Jen look better than that, in their better days when they were still a couple.  
• Send me bad link requests at your peril.

You might also take a look at my post from last year, Thanks For Your Horrible Link Request. In that, I examine not the technical quality of the link request but the style and substance of the request itself -- or lack thereof.

Want to commiserate? Visit our forum thread, Reciprocal Linking ? Dead or Alive?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:26 PM | Permalink

November 8, 2005

A New Report on Estimating Link Spam

Here's a new 21 page (pdf) technical research paper from the Stanford InfoLab that takes a look at link spam. It might be of interest to some of you.

Title: Link Spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation Authors: Zoltan Gyongyi (Stanford), Pavel Berkhin (Yahoo), Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford), Jan Pedersen (Yahoo)

Abstract: Link spamming intends to mislead search engines and trigger an artificially high link-based ranking of specific target web pages. This paper introduces the concept of spam mass, a measure of the impact of link spamming on a page's ranking. We discuss how to estimate spam mass and how the estimates can help identifying pages that benefit significantly from link spamming. In our experiments on the host-level Yahoo! web graph we use spam mass estimates to successfully identify tens of thousands of instances of heavy-weight link spamming.

Want to discuss? Check out this thread in the SEW Forums.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:48 PM | Permalink

October 21, 2005

The MSN PageRank 2 Controversy & Search Engines Needing To Offer Domain Management Tools

As part of the current Google update underway, it's been noticed that MSN now has a PageRank score of 2. What's the deal, Google -- decide to pull a little love away from MSN? Not so, says Google's Matt Cutts -- they're actually a PR8. Then why do you see a PR2 score when you go to MSN? Let's break it down, as well as revisit the oft-desired need for search engines to allow site owners to tell them directly which domains should be treated as the same.

• Visit MSN at http://www.msn.com with the Google Toolbar installed, and you'll see a PR2 score reported.  
• MSN.com down to pagerank 2! at WebmasterWorld has some of the discussion this sparked, where the anonymous GoogleGuy from Google puts the blame on redirection that MSN is doing. Look at http://msn.com, and you'll see a PR8 score is reported, we're told.  
• OK, but if you try that, you get redirected to http://www.msn.com, where it's still PR2.  
• Answer? You need to get the Google PageRank score for msn.com in another way than trying to reach that page, since the redirection will send you to what's technically a different page, the home page of www.msn.com  
• How? Google's Matt Cutts, posting over Threadwatch and sounding pretty in sync with GoogleGuy, explains that msn.com is a PR8 site and points to the Future PageRank checker at SEO Tools as a way to see this. (At this point, you're asking "Isn't Matt Cutts GoogleGuy?" For the record, Matt's never publicly laid claim to being GoogleGuy. But since Matt's more active on commenting with things these days, I think it's well time that GoogleGuy step forward with a real name, so that if they are one and the same, there's isn't confusion that two different people are talking. Honestly, at some point we'll have someone citing GoogleGuy, then someone citing Matt against GoogleGuy, which is absurd if they are the same. I and many others do know the real identity of GoogleGuy. I think it's well time everyone knows and hope GoogleGuy will step forward).  
• Run a test for msn.com using the checker, and you'll get a list of the PageRank scores reported by various Google datacenters, including the server that feeds the toolbar display. All of them are PR8.  
• Again, you can't see these scores showing up in your browser when trying to go to msn.com, because you get redirected to www.msn.com, which has a different PR score.

All this brings us back to the issue of redirection. MSN is doing a 302 temporary redirect from msn.com to www.msn.com, which can confuse search engines into knowing if they should be treated at the same site. A 301 permanent redirect would be preferred.

But more preferred than that, life would be a lot easier if site owners could simply register all the various domains that may resolve to their "main" domain with Google and other search engines, rather than them having to guess.

People have been wanting this for ages. C'mon Google and Yahoo! You've both made moves to let us submit sitemaps and URLs to be crawled. Let's get with it so we can register domains with you and how they should be treated through some type of program. It so long overdue. That's especially so given that after the last indexing summit, as I've written, the search engines were unable to unify on any common treatment of dealing with redirects.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:21 AM | Permalink

October 14, 2005

Fake PageRank Detection Tool

Using redirection and cloaking, a site can lay claim to the PageRank score of another site, with Dark SEO Team giving you a classic example here. Is it really a PR10 site, or is it Memorex? Actually, it's Google. Compare the backlinks, and you'll see link:www.pr10.darkseoteam.com = link:google.com! That's a way to detect fake PageRank. Or you can do it more easily with this handy tool from SEOlogs. Enter the domain you suspect of being a faker, push submit, and if the domain you were checking on remains the same, all systems go. If not, they're faking you out.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:24 AM | Permalink

October 10, 2005

WordPress Selling Links -- But Using AdBrite Solves Search Engine Concerns

Average CPC & Selling Ad Space from Aaron Wall over at SEO Book looks at how WordPress is now selling text links on its home page for $10,000 per day via AdBrite. What! Isn't selling links bad, and didn't WordPress get busted for doing something like this before? Short answer -- this isn't going to cause any Google or search engine problems like WordPress had before.

AdBrite seems a safe way for WordPress (or anyone) to make some money and not get back in hot water. Let's not have any pitchforks grabbed and thrust WordPress's way as somehow screwing with search results.

The long answer covering issues of link selling and breaking link love with redirection or nofollow attributes is spelled out for Search Engine Watch members, in this version of the post.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:35 PM | Permalink

September 27, 2005

Linking Neighborhoods, Illustrated

Threadwatch points over to the Picture of Link Neighborhoods post at Jim Boykin's new SEO blog, where he posts a nice illustration (PDF) of how search engines use links to determine what sites are important -- and not.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:50 AM | Permalink

September 23, 2005

Begging For Free Links

When Money Can't Buy You Link Love from Rand over at SEOmoz is a nice rundown on ideas for gaining links when cold hard cash isn't an option. Write a letter, give a call, do a giveaway. Whatever you do, ask appropriately. Increase Your Link Request Conversion - Don't Do This! in our SEW Forums is a current discussion starting out with a list of great tips on what NOT to do from member Stuntdubl, Todd Malicoat. You can also see my Thanks For Your Horrible Link Request post from last year.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:46 AM | Permalink

September 21, 2005

Paid Links Shouldn't Count? What Exactly Is Paid?

We've had a debate on our SEW Forums recently (see Matt Cutts Comments On Reputable Sites & Link Selling) over whether publishers should tag paid links so search engines won't count them. Part of that covered the issue of links where payment isn't so readily visible. Help Us Build a Link Farm, Get an iPod Nano? from Traffick is a case in point. Want to win an iPod Nano from them? Just post some links to them. It's an example of how what may seem to be a clear-cut, black-and-white issue isn't. Those who forthrightly pay for links potentially might not get those links counted, but do a savvy rub-our-back giveaway and that might fly under the radar?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:26 AM | Permalink

September 19, 2005

Can We Declare Automated Comment & Link Posting To Be Bad?

This week, search engines and blog software vendors are meeting again for a second "summit" on fighting blog spam. That's tipped me over the edge for tossing out a related proposal to search marketers and marketers in general. Can We Agree Automated Comment & Link Posting Is A Bad Thing? has the full details in our Search Engine Watch Forums.

In short, I explain that unlike some other debates over what's spam or what should be acceptable in search marketing, inserting content and links into other pages through automation just doesn't seem a defendable practice by anyone. Indeed, even "black hats" get annoyed by it.

So as an industry, or a community, could search marketers unite to say "No!" on this practice? Lots more explanation and thoughts are covered in the forum thread, plus the ability to vote and chime in with opinions. Please stop by.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:59 AM | Permalink

September 2, 2005

Google's Matt Cutts On Link Selling: Sites Might Not Pass Reputation; Buyers Might Get Targeted More

In last week's O'Reilly In Debate Over Link Selling, I looked in particular at Google guidelines and how they said not to buy links to boost rankings. Google spam fighter Matt Cutts now expands on that in his Text links And PageRank post. Selling links might not get a site banned, but it might prevent it from passing along reputation. Meanwhile, Google might crack down on those buying them -- which has one search marketer wondering if link purchaser Yahoo needs to lookout, while Gary Hat Search Engine News jokes that an Intent-O-Meter may be on the way.

For Search Engine Watch members, the longer version of this story takes an expanded look at the points Cutts makes and the Yahoo link buying.

Want to disagree, applaud or comment in some way? Visit our existing O'Reilly In Off-Topic Link Selling Debate in our Search Engine Watch Forums or start a new thread in our Link Building section.

Postscript: See the new Matt Cutts Comments On Reputable Sites & Link Selling thread for much more discussion of the issue, and also check out the comments below Matt's original post.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:11 AM | Permalink

August 24, 2005

O'Reilly In Debate Over Link Selling

I wrote back in April about how the sale of off-topic links to advertisers looking for search ranking boosts had become well seated within university newspapers, with the Stanford Daily paper as a classic example. My longer piece for Search Engine Watch members went further in depth, examining how links like these even showed up at places like the Washington Post.

Now respected publisher O'Reilly has come under fire for selling off topic links. It's not something new that they've been doing. Nevertheless, the attention and belated realization that they might be helping people to "game" search engines is causing O'Reilly chief Tim O'Reilly to do some hard thinking. It also raises the broader question of when is it "fair" or "ethical" to sell links.

Let's first talk about what this was not. This was not a cause of O'Reilly carrying hidden links, as happened with the Financial Times in June. These links were perfectly visible to anyone and present on various O'Reilly sites for at least two years.

Blogger Phil Ringnalda seems to have just discovered them this week, resulting in his O'Reilly Joins The Search Engine Spam Parade post. In it, he talks about the type of links you can see on the O'Reilly OnLamp.com site or XML.com. The screenshot below shows an example from XML.com:

Look on the left-hand side. See the two boxes? The links have little to do with XML. Why would someone buy them on this site? One leading reason is that they may be hoping the anchor text will help them rank well for the terms they've bought -- especially in that they are getting links from a fairly "trusted" site like XML.com.

Perhaps this is helping. A search for canada hotels on Google brings up the canadianhotelguide.com home page, which is exactly what the "Canada Hotels" link on the O'Reilly site leads to. Moreover, a backlink look up clearly shows that links from XML.com are being credited to the Canadian hotel site from Google.

Tim O'Reilly himself admits all this, after having been alerted to the situation now and examined it to some degree. In his Search Engine Spam? post, he writes:

That being said, it's become clear to me on investigation that these folks are indeed paying us for our Google rank, and not just for clickthroughs. We just aren't targeted enough for their ads to be justified on a click-through basis. What's more, using Google's link: keyword to check for top links to these particular advertisers shows that the O'Reilly sites they advertise on are among their chief link sources. They aren't getting independent links from users. In short, these advertisers are using O'Reilly and other highly ranked sites who accept their advertising to improve their chances of being discovered via search engines, rather than in quest of direct click throughs (although those may also provide some value for their ad buy.)

His problem now is what to do. Many in the comments to his post, including Google's spam fighting chief Matt Cutts, have suggested that he add nofollow attributes to these ads if they are going to continue to run, as a way to prove he's not inadvertently messing with the relevancy of search results.

From a public relations standpoint, it's an easy fix. Slap a nofollow on those links, and no one can accuse you of doing anything wrong. From an "ethical" standpoint, it's not so clear cut. Who's to say that you were doing anything wrong in the first place?

People have bought and sold links before search engines made much use of them for ranking purposes. Just having a link on a page can send traffic, even if it's an "off-topic" link. Heck, just imagine the number of "off-topic" ads you've seen on or offline in various situations.

Links also generate revenue. The search engines helped create an economy that revolves around links. If a site realizes it has valuable real estate, is it unethical to stay in business by selling some of that value, the reputation it can pass to another site? Does it make a difference whether the link you sell is "on topic" or to another "reputable" site.

Google Recommendation: Buy Yahoo Links

To further muddy the waters, let me take an example of what was asked at our recent Search Engine Strategies conference, in a session on buying and selling links. If buying links is supposedly so bad, then why does Google have no problem telling people to buy them from Yahoo?

What? Google says buy links? Sure, indirectly right on its webmaster guidelines page:

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

The Yahoo Directory charges for listings, if you want to be in a commercial category. It's $300 per year to be included. Not just evaluated, included. If you don't pay year after year, you don't stay in. And despite using redirection, last time I looked, these links still get counted by Google for link credit.

So it's OK for Yahoo to sell links but not O'Reilly? Therein lies part of the debate. Perhaps it's OK at Yahoo since it's well regarded as classifying web sites by category. By no means are O'Reilly's links mean to be any type of directory-style system.

Then again, just being a directory might not be a safe harbor. There's been an explosion in the number of directories springing up. As webmasters have gone on a quest to gain links, new directories have emerged to satisfy that need. But the Did Google Just Target Directories? thread in our forums looks at whether Google in particular has worked to remove the value of some of these places.

What's A Link Scheme?

Let's go back to those Google guidelines to see what at least one search engine has to say on buying links:

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

It's not actually saying specifically not to buy links, as you can see. It is a warning not to be involved with "schemes" that are designed -- in my view -- solely to boost rankings. If O'Reilly feels there's no value other than link boosting to its program, then I suppose that might be a scheme.

In contrast, let me turn the magnifying glass back to Search Engine Watch. Since we've had our forums, the occasional person has had great fun with the notion of not selling links, pointing at the "internet.commerce" links we used to carry.

Used to carry? Yep. I got them removed about a week ago. As many of you know, Search Engine Watch has a new owner. This ad program wasn't one we had to continue to carry, so I asked to have those links removed from our site. If you still see them around on pages here or there, that's just something we haven't caught. They'll also come out of the SearchDay newsletter when that's redesigned in about three or four weeks. But they looked similar to this:

That's off the Internet.com home page. As you can see, the links have little to do with internet issues. Spam city!

Retroactively, You're Bad!

Well, not exactly. As I said, the issue had been raised on our forums. Back in December 2004, I explained a bit more about this particular program. In particular, it predated Google, running since around 1998, I believe. It also isn't sold as a rank boosting system.

Now I don't handle the ads on the site. Nevertheless, I still get stuck being as a spokesperson for things that aren't in my control from time to time. Shortly before nofollow came along, I talked about these ads and how I wished I had an "ignore" tag that could go around them, to ease the PR headache side of things.

My wish was granted. Nofollow arrived. In addition, soon after nofollow came out, someone who had participated in the internet.commerce program had a ranking drop. Her concern was that somehow, because she suddenly gained a ton of links through it, Google had given her a penalty.

As it turned out, that wasn't the case. She'd also done a number of other things to her site that were responsible. But I put both issues on the table to Jupiter. Surround those links with nofollow! They remove the PR headache, and more important, they protect you from having some other site owner think you've some how created a link "scheme" that Google or another search engine wants to penalize.

To me, I got a dragging their feet response. I was told there were some issues with implementing this in the ad system. I also got some resentment that the company was supposed to be changing a program it had always operated just because years later, Google in particular thought selling links was a bad thing.

And naturally, no one would buy those links with nofollow on them, right -- so the ad department wouldn't want nofollow to go? Check out our The New Nofollow Link Attribute on the SEW Forums, and you can see someone speculating how the links wouldn't sell, if that were the case.

Value Beyond Ranking

My response was if so, too bad. For one thing, I said my assumption was that any decent search engine was already smart enough to see the same link with the same text on every page and not give more credit than deserved. They weren't sold as a rank boosting thing and should have value beyond that. I also said that the links should have value beyond just a ranking boost. And you know what? Apparently they do.

That link selling session I mentioned at our show two weeks ago? The issue of the internet.commerce links came up. A number of people had bought them who were in attendance. Going out on a limb, I asked if they'd been pitched by sales people as having rank boosting purposes. Nope, they hadn't, a hands-up type of response verified. Phew! In addition, a number of people found that even though they were supposedly "off-topic" links, the still generated quality traffic independent of search engines. You can read the account of the session over here at Search Engine Roundtable.

That session also burst into applause when I pointed out that the issue of buying links isn't raised if you're talking about Google AdSense. Don't buy links? Please. That's all AdSense is, a program where people can buy and sell links from across the web -- nor are they always on topic to the page, despite the contextual targeting.

The issue, of course, is buying links purely for search ranking gains. The reality is that some publishers are going to have to resort to using nofollow or some type of redirection as a means of "proving" they mean no harm to the search engines. It might also be wise to ensure that some advertiser who takes part in the program doesn't come back with an accusation that they unknowingly were taking part in some bad link "scheme."

Other publishers pressed for money might decide to push back. They might deem selling links and part of their reputation as fair game, especially in an ad downturn. Google and gang don't like it? Let them sort it out.

As for me, I'm glad to be rid of the internet.commerce box. We still have our SEW Marketplace ads, of course. Those are certainly on target for our site, with ads from search engines and search marketers. But I suppose the next issue for us is, for those ads that don't have redirection, should we be adding nofollow to their links? Probably, because again it solves a potential PR problem.

Postscript: See also Google's Matt Cutts On Link Selling: Sites Might Not Pass Reputation; Buyers Might Get Targeted More

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:58 PM | Permalink

August 10, 2005

New Yahoo Site Explorer To Provide Linkage Data, Bulk Submit

During the Search Engine Q&A on Links session here at SES today, Tim Mayer from Yahoo said his company is launching (not live yet) Yahoo Site Explorer that provides webmasters and other interested parties with linkage data.

From a SES Session Summary: Yahoo Site Explorer is a place to see which pages Yahoo has indexed. After clicking "Explore URL" you'll find the number of pages found in the Yahoo Index and also the number of inlinks. You can sort pages by "depth," submit URLs, and quickly export the results to CSV format. Site Explorer is also supported via an API.

Postscript From Danny: The new tool will also allow bulk submitting of URLs. Expect further details when it goes live.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:32 PM | Permalink

July 12, 2005

Revisiting PageRank Lunacy

Over at ClickZ, Mike Grehan's What Price PageRank? column looks at how people continue to be obsessed by PageRank and how the idea that PR scores mean nothing may freak out some in the PageRank economy that revolves around the Google Toolbar's PR meter.

Just how obsessed was underscored at the end of May, when despite it being a holiday weekend in the US and UK, forums were hit with many posts about the PR meter going down temporarily.

Yeah, people obsess over that stupid meter. I try to wean newbies away from this when I do my Intro To Search Engine Marketing talk at our SES shows.

I have a section on link building where I discuss the Google Toolbar and PageRank. I start out by saying that the PageRank score is basically unimportant and then run through a number of reasons why...

• Are all the links on the page getting the same share?
• Are some links discounted?
• What's the context of the link, the words in the anchor text?
• Did you check for nofollow tags on the links?
• Are the links in the navigational elements or elsewhere?
• Are they run of site links?

I speed up faster and faster listing various things to consider and end with a reiteration that because you don't know the exact answers to many of these questions, judging a page purely on its PageRank score is a waste of time.

In fact, I was stunned when I first started hearing of people deciding whether they wanted to get a link based on Google PageRank values back around 2002, as opposed to just getting good links period. I covered this obsession in my Google Sued Over PageRank Decrease article from back then.

That article included The Golden Rules Of Link Building, which I've since broken out into their own page. I think they are still useful for the new person pondering what to do when it comes to links, buying links and freaking out over the PR meter.

See also Google PageRank, Meet Yahoo Web Rank! that looks more at why PageRank doesn't win out over all. And if all the talk about wanting "authority" links and worries over "bad neighborhoods" freak you out, forget those as well.

What's a link you want? The search engines will tell you. As I've written virtually unchanged from around 1997:

By building links, you can help improve how well your pages do in link analysis systems. The key is understanding that link analysis is not about "popularity." In other words, it's not an issue of getting lots of links from anywhere. Instead, you want links from good web pages that are related to the topics you want to be found for.

Here's the simple means to find those good links. Go to the major search engines. Search for your target keywords. Look at the pages that appear in the top results. Now visit those pages and ask the site owners if they will link to you. Not everyone will, especially sites that are extremely competitive with you. However, there will be non-competitive sites that will link to you -- especially if you offer to link back.

Why is this system good? By searching for your target keywords, you'll find the pages that the search engines themselves are telling you are good, as evidenced by the fact that they rank well. Hence, links from these pages are more important -- and important for the terms you are interested in -- than links from other pages. In addition, if these pages are top ranked, then they are likely to be receiving many visitors. Thus, if you can gain links from them, you might receive some visitors who initially go to those pages.

Need more take-me-by-the-hand advice? Link Analysis And Link Building for Search Engine Watch members provides that.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:51 AM | Permalink

June 24, 2005

WebmasterWorld Search & Marketing Conference Recap: Day 3

The third and last day of the WebmasterWorld Search & Marketing Conference 2005 in New Orleans happened yesterday. Below is the roundup of live coverage from Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable and Aaron Wall from SEO Book relating to search:

• Morning Coffee with Yahoo's Tim Mayer: Covers mainly Q&A with Tim, who's well known to many search marketers for having dealt with webmaster issues in his time with Yahoo...and FAST...and Inktomi. Some tips on getting reincluded and other related topics. 45 Minutes with Yahoo's Tim Mayer is coverage from SEO Book.  
• Linking on a Dime: Tips on how to value the quality of a link and gaining links in general. Linking on a Dime is the SEO Book recap.  
• Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters: Q&A with search engines on indexing and ranking issues. WMW Search Engines and Webmasters is SEO Book's take on the session.  
• Link Building Campaigns WMW Conference: From SEO Book, covers briefly basic tips on link building.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:03 AM | Permalink

June 17, 2005

PageRank Decoder Offers Flash-Based Guestimates On Linking Impact

Want to understand how PageRank will build between pages you link? Only Google actually knows how that works. There's been so much tinkering and tampering with what they do since the original PageRank formula was published years ago that using that equation to understand what happens today is like teaching sciences with a textbook that's hundreds of years old.

Nevertheless, that's all PageRank Decoder has to work with -- the old formula. Spotted via Search Engine Roundtable, this Flash-based application lets you link between actual pages to guestimate (strong on the guess) how things might change. Further comments on the tool from Search Engine Roundtable and

For a nice, healthy and recent debate on how much we can really know about PageRank calculations, I recommend reading our Revisiting whether PR is lost when adding pages to a site thread on the Search Engine Watch Forums. For a reminder that it's anchor text rather than PageRank to worry about, see the How Important Is Page Rank? thread. Other factors come into play, as well, as What Factors Other Than PR Determine Google Rank? covers.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:57 AM | Permalink

June 16, 2005

ALT Attribute For Descriptive Image Linking

Having to use long, descriptive copy in your internal linking got you down for some reason? How Image Links Can Help Build a Better User and Search Experience from Scottie Claiborne at Search Engine Guide looks at how using the ALT attribute for image that also link may help.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:00 AM | Permalink

June 13, 2005

Financial Times Carried Hidden Paid Links

Spotted via SEO Book, Hidden Links on The Financial Times Website from Linking Matters spots how the Financial Times was carrying hidden paid links on its pages.

Screenshots show how a link to moneysupermarket.com was placed under visible links in the "Partner Sites" section of pages at the FT. Hidden links like this are something search engines such as Google warn against doing, lest they be considered search spam.

An update to the story provides some comments from the FT, saying it had a relationship with moneysupermarket.com and that the links had been made visible (I didn't see any links when I looked today, visible or hidden).

Interestingly, the FT had no comment about why the links were hidden originally. That reminds me of WordPress, where hidden links that service was found to have earlier this year lead to search spam. While admitting they were wrong, why they were hidden in the first place was never answered.

Newspapers selling links isn't new. Stanford Daily Removes Paid Links from our blog last month looks at how the student paper at Stanford University recently removed paid listings after coming under fire again that they were being sold in a way that worked against search relevancy.

Stanford University's Student Paper & Selling Links for Search Engine Watch members in April looked at the issue in depth, and how other student papers not to mention major media outlets like the Washington Post and CBS News also sell links. Our forum thread Stanford Daily Selling Links also has discussion on the issue.

In none of these cases, however, were the links hidden from view. People can and sell links for any reasons they want and in fact have been doing so since before search engines depended on them heavily to rank pages.

A search engine might view off-topic links at at attempt to spam them and perhaps even penalize the site and those involved, as happened with SearchKing. Then again, it might not. Was the main reason the link was sold to try and influence search rankings? If so, then they'd be more likely to consider that an attempt to spam them. A hidden paid link pretty much has only one reason to be hidden -- to influence search engines.

Postscript: The New York Times has a short brief on the story with a quote from the FT on not wanting to clog its page "real estate" with an "overt link."

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:17 PM | Permalink

June 6, 2005

LinkCounts & LinkStats From PubSub's Only Rough Picture, So Far

There seems to be no end to blog search tools wanting you to have cool looking charts to prove your popularity. To prove the point, here's another one. LinkCounts from PubSub gives you an overview of top sites getting links and giving links. Want to check yourself or another site? Use the LinkStats page. But keep this big caveat in mind that the page itself tells you:

PLEASE NOTE: LinkCounts are based on the content of a site's feed(s). Some feeds only publish summaries (or even just headlines) that do not contain links. We are constantly working to improve the resolution and accuracy of our published statistics. At times we may feel that our changes are significant enough to warrant reprocessing of some or all of our historical "raw" data. These changes will most likely result in the removal and regeneration of our published historical data.

In other words, rather than counting links in actual posts, this is all apparently based only on what goes out in a feed. That's a bad, misleading thing. For example, here's the SEW Blog stats for the past 30 days. According to this, we're pretty stingy with the links, giving out only one -- ONLY ONE -- over the past month.

That's absurd. We link and link and link to all sorts of things. But since we send out 100 word summaries, only links appearing in those summaries are counted. Even then, they have to be parsed out correctly -- and PubSub's not doing that. I know that, because it's very common that a post will start out with a link -- so the link is in the summary. That happened many more times than once in the past 30 days. Heck, the summary of this post will have two links in it.

So, if you want some very rough idea of who links to you in the blogging world, this new tool gives you an idea, but it's far from a complete, accurate picture. In addition, while you see overall sites linking, you aren't show individual backlinks. In other words, you have to hunt around in a site to find the actual link.

Postscript: PubSub got in touch to note that we don't send links in our summaries at all -- so there's nothing there to count! But I haven't heard back about why they mysteriously have found some to count anyway in the odd case. And the underlying point remains. Only links parsed out of a feed are counted, which will skew the stats.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:25 PM | Permalink

Spam Spotted on Yahoo Developer Network Wiki

One of the great things about wikis is that anyone can easily contribute. At the same time, the ability for anyone to contribute can also cause problems. While reviewing a page on the Yahoo Developer Network wiki this morning, I noticed that sometime over the weekend some "wiki spam" with links to purchase drugs (like Viagra) appeared on the page. Of course, it just might be that some YDN member is working on a way to search Yahoo and take care of "other problems" at the same time. (-: (-: (-:

Update: The spam has been removed. Here's a screen cap of what I saw earlier.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:11 AM | Permalink

May 30, 2005

Stanford Daily Removes Paid Links

In April, I wrote about how Stanford University's student newspaper and many other student papers were selling offtopic links to advertisers almost certainly trying to increase their search rankings. Blake Ross came across the situation this week and noted it on his blog. In a new twist, he seems to have also found WordPress-like doorway page spam, as well. The Stanford Daily and search spam from Silicon Beat has fresh comments from the Stanford Daily, with them saying they'd review the situation. That review seems to have happened, as Ross's blog notes the ads appear to have been removed. My previous summary of the situation is here: Stanford University's Student Paper & Selling Links. If you're a Search Engine Watch member, the longer version of that article goes into depth about the situation, with screenshots and a summary of what has been happening at other universities. Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread, Stanford Daily Selling Links

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:33 AM | Permalink

May 27, 2005

GoLexa, Link Harvester & Recap Of Other New SEM Tools

The past few weeks have been pretty busy in terms of new search marketing tools appearing. I've now posted a recap of these for Search Engine Watch members, ranging from AdWords keyword generation tools to link analysis tools to Firefox add-ons for marketers. I especially wanted to mention these to everyone:

• GoLexa: This is a very cool tool for site owners. It brings back Google results and provides a ton of extra information about the pages listed.  
• Yahoo Link Harvester: Uses the Yahoo API to let you find links pointing at a particular domain or individual page. You can get back up to 1,000 listings. You can then easily get WHOIS info, Alexa info, Google full cache or text-only cache copy of the domain that the link is hosted on.

If you're an SEW member (thank you), be sure to see the longer version of this article with more tools and info.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:10 PM | Permalink

Types Of Links To Lead Search Engines To Your Site

Threads of the Web - Linking for Success from Scottie Claiborne at Search Engine Guide is a nice overview to the types of links you might want to obtain to help search engines and human visitors down these "roads" to your site. She also offers some short tips about each type.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:34 AM | Permalink

May 19, 2005

StatCounter & Alt Text For SEO

ClickTracks said it wasn't the only tracking service to make use of tracking codes for SEO purposes. Frank Watson's Some Tracking Companies Stealing Links looks today at how StatCounter apparently does the same.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:49 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2005

Questions Raised On ClickTracks Use Of Alt Text

Over on Threadwatch, Clicktracks Inserting Hidden Links in Customers Pages? has discussion of how ClickTracks tracking code made use of an ALT text attribute in a way that may have helped the company rank well for "web analytics" on major search engines.

Here's the situation. Below is the standard code that those using ClickTracks to monitor their web site activity would put on their site:

<script type="text/javascript"> document. write ('<'+'script type="text/javascript"  src="'+document.location.protocol+' // stats1.clicktracks.com/cgi-bin/ ctasp-server.cgi?i=datasetID"> < /'+'script>'); </script> <noscript> <a href="http://www.clicktracks.com/"> <img src="https://stats1.clicktracks.com/ cgi-bin/ctasp-server.cgi?i=datsetID&g=1"  alt="Web Analytics" border=0> </a> </noscript>

The first section is acted upon by those using browsers that can process JavaScript. It lets ClickTracks know that the page has been viewed. FYI, ClickTracks says 96 percent of pages it processes are viewed by JavaScript capable browsers.

The second part is acted upon by those with JavaScript switched off. In their case, an image is loaded, an alternative way to know that the page is viewed.

Search engine spiders show also only see the second part, as they generally do not process JavaScript. But since they don't see the image, the visit isn't recorded.

The controversy in the thread comes over the ALT text that's associated with the image. That's because the image itself is a link to ClickTracks.com, with the ALT text saying "Web Analytics." That means the link will be associated with those words, similar to how it might have been an ordinary link with those words.

For example, look at the bottom of this cached page in Google. I'm showing the text-only cache. At the bottom, you'll see the last two words are a link, "Web Analytics," that leads to ClickTracks.

So, something ClickTrack did to help with rankings? Yes, said John Marshall, CEO of ClickTracks, when I emailed him about it:

There is alt text in there because we felt it was OK to get some slight keyword ranking from it (it's widely done by competitors also).

Marshall also added that it's fine that the ALT text be altered or removed, if anyone is concerned about giving ClickTracks some type of benefit. In addition, ClickTrack is going to offer customers two versions of the script in the future. Anyone concerned can select an option that doesn't provide a link benefit.

Did it work? ClickTrack is definitely in the top listings for "web analytics" at Google and Yahoo, as the thread shows. It certainly has gained links because of the technique. But as also discussed in the thread, it may very well have ranked well for those terms even without using the ALT text.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:45 AM | Permalink

April 20, 2005

Google Ransom Notes To Block Automated Queries, Submissions

Aaron Wall reports in Google Taking Action Against Automated SEO Software that new "ransom note" style codes are being used by Google to block the OptiLink link building software -- causing OptiLink to suspend its Google functionality for the time being. Note that ransom notes were also added recently to a number of other Google services that might get hit by automation, such as its Add URL page.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:28 AM | Permalink

April 19, 2005

Stanford University's Student Paper & Selling Links

The Stanford Daily Selling Links thread at our Search Engine Watch Forums (and see also this from Feb) looks at the ironic situation of the student newspaper at Stanford University -- the birthplace of Google, Yahoo and owner of the PageRank patent -- selling off-topic links to advertisers who almost certainly are trying to get better rankings on search engines.

For Search Engine Watch members, the extended version of this post goes into more depth of how why these links have raised eyebrows, given that some would view them as hurting search relevancy. It also looks at why university newspapers have become a popular source for those wanting to buy links to influence search engines, including a short tour of how papers beyond Stanford are selling.

The extended post also covers how link selling has become commonplace and why publishers wary of a public relations problem might wish to sell only redirected or nofollow links.

The story concludes with comments from the Stanford Daily itself. The paper said it unaware that there might be any search spam issues involved with selling links and emailed:

Distorting search results is not and has never been our intention. Our intention has been to make up needed income from classified, subscription and display ad sales lost to the internet through a new, legitimate method of advertising.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:29 AM | Permalink

April 5, 2005

Google Ranking Itself Tops For Britney Spears & The Need For Better Categorization

Spotted via InsideGoogle, Stephan Spencer argues in Does Google deserve a top 10 spot for “britney spears”? that Google is borderline spamming to come up in the top results for britney spears on its own site. I disagree. The content is relevant, nor are the changes suggested necessarily a solution to this "problem." C'mon along for a journey into the issues at hand.

One solution Spencer suggests is that Google should tweak its algorithm to favor pages with more "topical relevance" about Britney? Sounds reasonable, but in practice, not so clear cut.

What's Relevant For Britney

The fact that so many people don't know how to spell Britney's name IS relevant to the topic of her. In fact, it's long been a talking point that MSN Search used to use to highlight its relevancy.

By the same argument, the Britney Spears Guide To Semiconductor Physics should be dropped from the top results. Believe me, having watched this query over the years, that site is a long time rank holder on Google and elsewhere that has nothing to do with Britney other to use her as part of an educational parody for explaining semiconductors.

When the physics site first started ranking well, I felt the same way as Spencer. What's the deal with this non-Britney page being there? But it is sort of related, in that her fame has extended into people using her for parodies.

Similarly, I don't see that Spencer's installed any type of meta robots tag or robots.txt file to prevent his article about the Google-Britney situation from itself ranking well on Google. So when he says:

In the meantime, I think it would be in good form for Google to add a rel="nofollow" href attribute to the Britney Spears link on their Job Opportunities page and let some other, more relevant Britney fan site have that #7 slot.

Then the same should apply to his article. Shouldn't he be blocking his content from being indexed, to ensure some more relevant Britney fan site isn't bumped out if you somehow start ranking well?

How About Showing Some Topics, Not Pages

The reality is every search on any search engine will have some irrelevant results. Ideally, what you'd want for a popular and broad query on Britney is to get a better classification of types of results you can see: official sites, fan sites, sites about her film career, Britney as a part of popular society and so on. Since everything has some relevancy, such groupings help ensure you get into a particular area related to Britney that you're interested in.

For example, consider if you searched on Yahoo Directory, where you could see all directory categories like this:

Rock and Pop > Britney Spears

Rock and Pop > Anti-Britney Spears

Britney Spears Concert Tickets

Britney Spears > Lyrics

See how the "topical relevancy" of all things Britney is divided into four major areas? How about the 208 topics that Clusty finds, which include:

• Britney Spears pictures (36)
• Fan (19)
• Nude (25)
• Album (18)
• Artists, Art (19)
• Galleries (10)
• Married (7)
• Britney Spears lyrics (7)
• Launch (5)
• DVD, Amazon (6)
• MTV (4)
• Britney Spears Online (5)
• Britney Spears Posters (5)
• Britney Spears Tickets (5)
• Totally Britney (5)
• Baby One More Time (7)
• Stage (5)
• N Sync (5)
• Semiconductor Physics (2)

Sadly, the demise of human-powered directories on major search engines has all but killed such categorization from really being show to searchers. But what about Ask! It clusters! It groups. Yeah, but sometimes not very well. Here's what we get for Britney:

• Christina Aguilera
• Janet Jackson
• Paris Hilton
• Jennifer Lopez
• Orlando Bloom
• Hilary Duff
• Eminem
• Jessica Simpson
• Britney Spears Bikini
• Carmen Electra

Sure, everything may be related to Britney in some way, but that's a far cry from actually grouping and refining topics that are specifically about her.

Did Google Really Make This Happen

How about Spencer's claim that "the sheer weight" of Google's own link from its job page to its page about Britney misspellings gave that page a top ranking. Hard to say.

Google lists over 100 pages that are linking to that page, such as The Guardian mentioning the page about Britney or this site commenting on the page back in 2003. Google, of course, doesn't show all the links it knows about. So heading over to Yahoo, we see there are nearly 2,000 pages linking to that page, such as this one from Wired back in 2002. Google has certainly indexed some of those links that Yahoo has also found, even if it doesn't show them.

I have no doubt Google's own link helped. But it also links on that same page to its Google AdWords page with the words "advertising products." But when I search for that on Google, I don't get the AdWords page. Why not? Because the sheer weight of that link on that page doesn't appear to be weighty enough.

As for the page being a "dead-end" for users, I agree with Spencer here, in as much that given that the page is obviously getting visitors, it could be made more useful to those interested in Britney but who don't want to work at Google. And sure, maybe Google should add a nofollow link for the PR value in saying it's trying to minimize its own impact on search rankings. However, I think that's a difficult path to follow.

Overall, I'm going to end up hoping that if a page is deemed so irrelevant by Google searchers, they'll tell Google directly via the "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" link at the bottom of every search result page.

Disagree and perhaps think Google is indeed spamming itself? Well heck, they've banned themselves from cloaking before: Google Admits To Cloaking; Bans Itself. You can use the Report a Spam Result page at Google to report the page.

Of course, the page might easily return at any point, if Google feels whatever was in error has been fixed. Google released WordPress's home page from its penalty after less than a day. But from what I can tell, Google's own page that was banned remains so nearly a month after it was penalized.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:21 AM | Permalink

March 29, 2005

Seeking Links in the Nooks and Crannies of the Web

We've been writing forever about vertical search, and we're happy to see the topic start to get some mainstream attention. What isn't getting much attention, however, is the fact that vertical sites can provide some of the highest quality traffic for your web site—if you can get links from them.

In today's SearchDay article, Looking for Links In All The Wrong Places?, well-known linking authority Eric Ward discusses the opportunities and options for capturing traffic from niche web sites.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:16 AM | Permalink

February 21, 2005

Getting Quality Links

Looking for ways to get quality links? Jennifer Laycock has a nice rundown on ideas to try, such as providing articles to other sites, gaining links through RSS feeds, product reviews and other ideas. See her article at Search Engine Guide: Incoming Links Aren't Hard to Come By With the Right Content

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:50 PM | Permalink

January 31, 2005

Scoble On Anti-NoFollow & Blogs As Not Search Kryptonite

Robert Scoble takes a stab at what he calls a "anti-nofollow religion" that has sprung up in The "no nofollow" religion. To be fair, there's also a "pro-nofollow religion" as well.

As with most debates, the truth is at neither extreme. Nofollow isn't a perfect solution to blogging comment spam, but neither is it a waste of time. It's nice that web authors (not just bloggers, everyone!) have more choices over what will get indexed.

Interestingly, the NoNoFollow site that Scoble is reacting to was apparently started by some well known German bloggers in part worried that nofollow tags might work against bloggers, such as by robbing them of links they see as helpful with search engines.

As I've written before, such arguments bring the bloggers making them much closer to the comment spammers they despise. So this comment from Robert's post echoes with me:

Discriminates against legitimate users as spammers? Huh? Since when did writing a comment mean that you deserve the full search engine juice of getting linked to by someone else?

Robert also touches on the whole "blogs are superpowerful with search engines" topic that I disagree with:

Could be used to further discriminate weblogs. Um, weblogs are actually showing up too high for their real-world relevance. Here, why am I the #3 "Robert? [on Google]"

Why? Not because you're a blogger, Robert. It's because you're a person that lots of people link to with the word "Robert" in your name. Look at the other things coming up tops for "Robert." Most of them are not bloggers.

Heck, here's a new page just up with tips for those using the Blogger system that continues this type of myth of blogs as some type of search kryptonite, able to bring the mighty search engines to their knees:

Blogs rank well in the search engines by their very nature. They are regularly updated with keyword rich content. Most blog writers stick to a main theme for their blogs making relevance easy. Because of the blog?s versatility, the blogger can add more themes to the blog and tie them together, enabling a blog to maintain several strong themes.

Actually, many blog writers are all over the place in what they write about in publishing on their home pages. That dilutes what the home page is about and can cause what its relevancy is for to a search engine to constantly change.

As for "themes," the search engines have consistently said that keyword relevance is done on a page-by-page basis. So have all the pages on a particular topics you want -- that doesn't somehow make the entire site more relevant for a particular term. If having a site be all about a particular topic were crucial, then Amazon would never rank well for anything. Instead, you constantly stumble upon it for a variety of keywords in search results.

Blogs can certainly quickly attract links that search engines depend on, and that can help them more than other sites that don't have the ability to easily generate new links. As more and more content is published through blogs, it's also natural we'll see more of them in search results. But content just being on a blog is not a guaranteed rocket to success.

A search on Google for "cars" doesn't give me any blogs about cars in the top results, despite the fact we've got car blogs out there. A search for "movies?" The same thing.

For more on blogs and search engines, see my older article, Loving Each Other More: Search Engines & Blogs. For more on the nofollow debate and how nofollow goes beyond blogs, see my recent post More On Link Condom & Blogger Worries Over Nofollow.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:22 AM | Permalink

January 25, 2005

New Nofollow Support & Looking At Vote Links

Over at the Google Blog, the announcement about the nofollow link attribute has been updated at the bottom to note some additional blogging tools and others lending support.

It also notes that Technorati has a draft specification up for the attribute. It's not clear to me if this is something Technorati is drafting for itself or instead for proposal to the W3C.

That nofollow spec also links over to another, earlier Vote Links spec. Vote Links suggests a way that people can indicate -- at least to Technorati -- whether they actually approve of a link or dislike it. Technorati rolled out support of that in November 2004.

The idea of being able to have positive and negative links that point at others has been discussed for ages. Just a tiny, tiny sampling:

• On the responsibility of linkage, Tom Coates, 2002
• Vote Links, Kevin Marks, 2003
• Vote Links, Many-to-Many, 2004

Now that nofollow has made it into the major search engines, will something like Vote Links follow? We effectively have two out of the three:

• Regular link: A positive vote
• Nofollow link: An abstention

What's missing is some way to overtly negative link to people. I wouldn't lobby for such a thing to come to the major search engines, for the moment. It would easily be abused.

Want to discuss or comment on the nofollow attribute? Visit our forum thread, The New Nofollow Link Attribute.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:49 AM | Permalink

January 21, 2005

More On Link Condom & Blogger Worries Over Nofollow

Earlier, I posted about the Link Condom site that went up, which pokes some fun at the new nofollow attribute. Six Apart's Anil Dash didn't find it funny, as he deconstructs in Anti-Nofollow FUD. Instead, he interpreted as a blog spammers attempt to discredit the attribute.

News flash for anyone who doesn't yet realize it. Nofollow will NOT stop blog spam. Want to understand more about why? See my previous article on it, Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links.

The site is more about the fact that there's a host of other non-blogging issues that the tag raises that people will want to be aware of. So it's not anti-nofollow. If anything, it deserves a little praise for helping people easily understand a concept of what nofollow does -- prevents links from actually touching another site for search ranking purposes. Link condom? Great name -- because that's what nofollow is.

I posted a long response to Anil's worries on his site, but I'll reproduce those comments below for my readers. In addition, I'd encourage everyone to look at some of the discussion within our The New Nofollow Link Attribute forum thread especially for a non-blogger view of the attribute.

Also look at Anil's The Social Impacts of Software Choices, which looks at how bloggers are now wondering if the impact of nofollow will hurt how they link between themselves for search purposes. I have a long response I posted to that, as well. The main bit that struck me was the comment that some bloggers worry nofollow will hurt their chances of ranking well when they comment on other blogs:

There's also some resistance from real bloggers, who are fretting now that their comments won't confer PageRank on their blogs.

 To which I responded:

This sounds very much like bloggers with an SEO complex. I need links for ranking? How about you write good stuff, and people will comment on it within their own posts that will help -- not that you need to be able to comment behind a post and get respect that isn't necessarily earned.

Again, see that post for Anil's full look, my comments and responses for others. And below, my full comments on the non-blogging issues about nofollow that Link Condom highlights:

Anil, the site's a light-hearted joke. Believe me, Todd Friesen who threw the site up isn't trying to spread FUD about nofollow through that site. It's more an inside things for those who know search engines and are talking about the issues of nofollow OUTSIDE blogging. Want a taste of that? Then check out this thread at our forums that goes into the non-blogging issues more.

No time for that? Then let's go back and look at the main points highlighted on that page about "uses" of nofollow:

• Hoard your PageRank
• Hide your outgoing links
• Screw your reciprocal link partners
• Add code bloat to your page
• Find out today if people are buying links for the right reasons
• Yet more to obsess about
• Freely link to bad neighbourhoods
• Far easier to use than JavaScript, perl, php, robots.txt etc

Where's the mention of comment spam in those? The word "blog" isn't on the page once and "comment spam" is down in small text as a joking aside. If this were a rant against nofollow being useless at combating comment spam, why bury it like that?

Answer? Because it's not a rant on nofollow as it relates to blogs. It's a joke having fun at the issues of nofollow that those OUTSIDE of blogging are contemplating in the wake of the tag. I'll take up some of the bigger points and explain them:

Hoarding: Some people want to get tricky and not let anything outside their own web site get link credit. It's not a blog thing -- it's a link thing. Personally, I think it's a waste of time. But for those who do worry about it, nofollow gives them a nice, new approved tool to hoard link credit.

Hiding: Some people want to link out so search engines feel they have a "natural" site but don't really want to show those links. Nofollow may -- or may not -- allow that. It's a new thing they'll try.

Screwing: Well, some people swap links for reasons good and bad, and for reasons before we had blogs and even before the search engines did much with links. And that link swapping -- again, completely outside of blogs in many cases, may now be impacted. Because if someone links to you, they might not really link in a way that gives you search credit. If that's what you wanted, you'd better know they've put a "condom" in the form of nofollow around that link.

Buying Links: People buy and sell links outside of blogs, often times for reasons of getting better rankings in search engines. Nofollow means that you can now sell links but say to the world, "Hey, I'm not doing this to mess with search rankings." That's nice if you're a big site that might want ensure you aren't going to be tainted as some type of search evil-doer. Then again, if you are someone buying links and doing it for just search reasons, you'd better make sure you don't buy them with nofollow on.

Bad Neighborhoods: Google and gang will tell you not to link to bad neighborhoods. Do you know what those are? I don't -- they didn't publish a list along with that advice. Maybe it's a porn site. Maybe it's a link farm. Maybe a porn site like Playboy is OK though. And maybe you are some newbie web author freaked out that anything you link to might get you into trouble.

I know those people because I have to deal with their questions and worries after the search engines have unleashed the fear factor. So the point is -- are you freaked out? Hey, use this new link condom and you can link safely. And by the way, it's another non-blog specific issue. It has an impact on all web authors. It's actually a great tool for anyone to use.

Easier to use: Yeah, it is easier to use. You and Todd seem to agree on this. Having easy options is good.

Now, I know you've got generally a bad view SEO, that it seems populated with scumbags like the supposed scumbag behind this site -- and being on the sharp end of blog spam, its understandable. But let's get personal a moment about the scumbag in question for this site.

Who published it? Someone who definitely does black hat SEO, yep. Someone who does white hat SEO, as well. And someone who knows a heck of a lot more about how search engines work -- and how this tag will and will not have an impact -- than the vast majority of people out there.

Scumbag? Then Yahoo -- who joined you and the other major search engines  on nofollow -- is hanging out with scumbags, because Todd and I and several others all had a nice dinner recently with key people from Yahoo's search team last month.

Oh, and Todd's good friend Greg? One of MSN's search champs that got invited up with a few months ago along with key bloggers that MSN itself talked about in its post on adding nofollow. Why invited? Because despite being black hat at times, he also knows search intimately.

Let's not leave out Google. Todd and Greg have better contacts with Google's search engineering teams than the vast majority of people. Why? Because those scumbags know search so well they're respected for it. That's why I myself have them talk on search issues. There's a lot to learn from them regardless of what hat you wear.

Now for some of your points:

Nofollow Gives Choices: Yep!. I love it for that. Bring on more choice with what search engines do and don't index, so people like Brad Choate don't have to cloak and violate search engine guidelines. Brad, cloaking. Yeah, my How About An Indexing Summit! explains why he ended up doing this without realizing it. And by the way, that also puts Brad on the same exact page as people like Greg and Todd, who feel like they should be able to control their content as fed to search engines as much as Brad wants to.

Rankings From Blog Posts Won't Be Impacted: Oh yes they will. Hey, Jeremy says he's just put nofollow on the link to Todd's site in his post about it. Hey, that's a ranking impact. If someone links to you (on a blog, in blog comments, in a blog post, on your personal home page whatever) and now uses nofollow, you aren't getting the credit for that link. That's their choice, and I'm glad they have it. And they've had it before, but not as easily as nofollow makes it now. But you'd better believe it will have an impact. Whether it's good, bad or very little remains to be seen. For most people with quality content, probably very little.

PageRank Is Not A Contest: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Geez, I beg and plead for you, someone with such high standing in the blogging community, to stop making such bad mistakes and spreading misinformation about search. Perhaps you should be forgiven, given that the PR-meisters themselves at Google often make the same mistake. But to clarify:

PageRank is how Google calculates the popularity of a page, based on looking at all the links across the web. But you don't want PageRank alone. Go on, search for "cars." Did you see Amazon come up? No -- because despite having incredibly high PageRank, it's not got anchor text with the word "cars" pointing at it. So PageRank does not equal how Google ranks pages in search results. It is one key component, with the other two being the link text itself and the words on a page itself.

PageRank is also a Google-specific thing. Nofollow has an impact with ALL three major search engines participating, so talking about PageRank just reinforces the notion that it's all-Google or nothing world, when it is not. In fact, Ask Jeeves is specifically not supporting nofollow at the moment because they use a radically different ranking system that they feel might not be impacted by blog spam, link spam, link bombing and so on.

What you're really saying is that search rankings are not supposed to be a contest but instead be an objective decision of a mix of factors that the search algorithm uses to determine what's relevant. And it's a nice goal, but it's not true.

Even if we had no blogs -- no SEO -- no spammers, search algorithms wouldn't get it perfectly right. That's because people still make unintentional mistakes, create non-search engine friendly sites, rely on graphics rather than text, Flash rather than text and a host of other issues that ensure there's no such thing as a "level playing field" on the web. That's also, by the way, where plenty of SEO firms that you'd like come into play. They can help clear up many mistakes that the search engines themselves suggest fixing.

As for being a contest, search rankings are indeed one. And PageRank specifically itself is definitely a contest. Remember, when Google talks about counting links as a key component of what it does, it talks about relying on the web's "uniquely democratic nature." Democracy -- that's a popularity contest. In fact, to quote Google:

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Not a contest? If it's not a contest, then what are all those votes being counted? Maybe nofollow will help ensure that we don't have a lot of chads polluting the election, but then again, maybe not.

What is clear is that nofollow will NOT stop blog comment spam. Not at all. Don't believe it? Then right now, all bloggers can stop making use of blacklists, registration schemes and other tactics used before nofollow emerged. Sit back and see if the spam goes away. It won't. Nofollow is a nice new tool that we can use, one that as I've said many times before is welcomed for giving us choice and more options, but it's not a magic bullet. Well, it's a magic bullet for one thing. It now lets the search engines say to bloggers, we gave you want you wanted, stop blaming us for the problem!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:22 PM | Permalink

Link Condom: The Nofollow Parody

While debate over the usefulness of the new nofollow link attributes continues, a parody site called Link Condom has just gone up to stress some of the issues beyond blogging that the attribute raises.

Will people use it to link freely to "bad neighborhoods?" Will it be used to promise a reciprocal link but not really provide one with search engine credit? Will people use it to "hoard" PageRank?

Different issues -- but with all of them, nofollow becomes a way to link to others without actually touching them from a search engine perspective. In other words, nofollow works as a link condom -- the name of the new site from Todd "Oilman" Freisen.

For more on the nofollow attribute, including some of the non-blogging issues it raises, see my Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links article and our forum discussion The New Nofollow Link Attribute.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:02 AM | Permalink

January 18, 2005

Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links

In the first cooperative move for nearly ten years, the major search engines have unveiled a new indexing command for web authors that they all recognize, one that they hope will help reduce the link and comment spam that plagues many web sites, especially those run by bloggers.

The new "nofollow" attribute that can be associated with links was originated as an idea by Google several weeks ago and pitched past MSN and Yahoo, as well as major blogging vendors, gaining support.

The Nofollow Attribute

The new attribute is called "nofollow" with rel="nofollow" being the format inserted within an anchor tag. When added to any link, it will serve as a flag that the link has not been explicitly approved by the site owner.

For example, this is how the HTML markup for an ordinary link might look:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html">Visit My Page</a>

This is how the link would look after the nofollow attribute has been added, with the attribute portion shown in bold

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

This would also be acceptable, as order of elements within the anchor tag makes no difference:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.site.com/page.html" >Visit My Page</a>

Once added, the search engines supporting the attribute will understand that the link has not been vetted in some way by the site owner. Think of it as a way to flag to them, "I didn't post this link -- someone else did."

By the way, should you be one of the few using other types of rel attributes within your links (a way to show the relationship between your page and the page you're linking to), Google advises that you should separate them with spaces.

For example, Google cited this page, which provides one example of multiple rel attributes in action, like this:

<a href="http://jane-blog.example.org/" rel="sweetheart date met">Jane</a>

If you wanted to add nofollow to the existing one, you'd just put a space between it and the other attributes of sweetheart, date and met, like this:

<a href="http://jane-blog.example.org/" rel="sweetheart date met nofollow">Jane</a>

Google also said upper or lower case is usage of the attribute is fine and that the creation of this new attribute is believed to meet W3C standards on markup, as they allow for anyone to create new attributes.

Causes Of Link Spam

Why would you want to use the attribute? Blog publishers, forum operators, sites with guest books and others who allow anyone to contribute in some way to their web sites have suffered when people have used these systems to spam them with links.

For search engine purposes, getting a link to your site from someone else's site can serve as a "vote" that your site is seen as good. In Googlespeak, getting a link increases the PageRank value of your page -- sometimes a tiny bit, sometimes much more.

In addition, getting a link may help better ensure that your page is indexed by the major search engines. Finally, getting a link with words you want to be found for embedded in the anchor text can help you not just be seen as popular but also help you rank better for particular words.

Here's an example of comment spam in action. I did a Google search for texas holdem comment to find some candidates and focused on this page as an illustration. From PoliPundit.com, it's a blog post from Nov. 2002 about a political development.

Below the post is the comment area. The area has been link spammed heavily -- 30 entries containing links to web sites promoting casinos, poker, dating and other topics, like this (I've removed the links):

http://www.-texas-holdem-poker.us holdem poker texas holdem poker Comment by texas holdem poker | Email | Homepage | 12/26/2004 - 12:31 pm

Your blogg is smashing! Payday Loans http://www.payday-express.com Comment by Payday Loans | Email | Homepage | 1/15/2005 - 4:04 am

Your blogg is full o information. HGH http://www.hgh-express.com Comment by HGH | Email | Homepage | 1/15/2005 - 12:40 pm

Great article and great website. I wish you could update if more frequently. You?re also welcome to visit my websites: Checks, Cigarette, Dating, Honda, Insurance, Las Vegas, Lawyers, Lexus, Online Poker, PDA, Toyota.

It's not just a Google problem. Do a Yahoo search, an Ask Jeeves search, or a search at MSN Search. All bring up examples of pages that contain link spam, which have been indexed by these search engines. As a result, they also might find their ranking systems impacted by the activity.

Google, nevertheless, often gets the blame -- which is why it was under the most pressure for coming up with something for the problem. The hope is that by allowing web authors to flag links in this manner, it will make blogs, forums, guest books and other places accepting contributions less attractive to spamming.

What Nofollow Means

Below I'll cover what Google says it does, if it sees a link with the nofollow attributed associated with it. Yahoo and MSN are likely to react in a similar fashion, though I haven't yet spoken with them to get exact details since news of their support only just emerged.

If Google sees nofollow as part of a link, it will:

1. NOT follow through to that page.
2. NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
3. NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for.

That's the situation at the moment. Google is going to evaluate how the attribute works, and it could decide to make other changes down the line, it says.

Now let's look at the impact of each action:

1) Not following the link to the page it points at means that potentially, Google might not index the page at all. As said, the more links that point at a particular page, the more likely it is that Google (and generally the other major search engines) will include that page within its index.

The nofollow attribute DOES NOT mean that someone will prevent a page they do not actually control from being indexed, however. If Google finds even one ordinary link pointing at a page, it may then index that page.

In addition, people can submit their pages directly to Google (and most major search engines). So it's crucial to understand that just because someone might place nofollow in a link pointing at your site, this WILL NOT prevent your page from getting indexed.

2) As for PageRank calculations, it's important to remember that PageRank is a pure popularity score (other search engines have similar scoring mechanisms, just not catchy names other than Yahoo's Web Rank). The nofollow attribute means that a link will not be counted as a "vote" in this popularity contest. That can have an impact on ranking, in cases where the impact of other factors beyond pure popularity come into play.

Huh? Say there are two pages, one with a PR score of 6, the other a PR of 7. Even though the PR7 page is more popular from a link counting point of view, it could still get outranked by the PR6 page if other factors such as the words on the page, or the anchor text pointing at the PR6 page, make it more relevant for a particular search.

It's also important to note that nofollow DOES NOT mean you are flagging a link as being bad in some way. Google isn't going to say, "Aha -- nofollow is on this link -- that's a bad link." Or as Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer who helped develop the attribute, said:

"It doesn't mean that it is a bad link, or that you that you hate it, just that this link doesn't belong to me."

Instead, nofollow effectively will cause Google to ignore the link, to pretend it doesn't exist. This also means you shouldn't worry that people will link to you and use nofollow as a way to hurt you -- Google says that won't happen.

3) This leads to anchor text. Generally much more important in ranking well for a particular term is to get the words you want to rank well for put into a link that points at you. With nofollow added to a link, Google won't associate the anchor text in the link with the page the link is pointed at. This, more than anything else, will sour things for link spammers.

Stop Spam? No. A Start, Yes!

The new attribute won't stop link spamming. Many people may still spam simply because they hope human beings will see the links, click through and perhaps convert. As with email spam, maybe only an incredibly tiny number will do so. But since there's no heavy cost to the spamming, that might still be enough.

In particular, much blog spamming is done through automation. So even with the new system in place, some of that automation will keep rolling along. It will no doubt even evolve to spot blogs and other areas that aren't making use of the nofollow attributes, just as smart spammers currently focus on blogs that have been abandoned, rather than irritating active bloggers.

This means other types of systems of blocking spam will likely still have to be used, such as forcing people to input characters from graphics (captchas), registration and so on (The Solution To Blog Spamming at ThreadWatch has a nice rundown on these, and also see Six Apart's Guide to Comment Spam).

While link or comment spamming isn't going away, it's still heartening that it will be less attractive. Site owners have been given an important new tool that lets them control indexing -- something they've not had offered for years. Perfect or not, I'm glad it's emerged.

Vendor Support

Google started developing the idea of a nofollow attribute several weeks ago and quietly shared it with a number of the major blogging vendors. Many of them have now signed on, pledging to support and implement the tag in the future, if they've not already done so now.

As a result, those using systems provided by one of the major vendors such as Blogger or Movable Type (see here for support news) should find that implementing the tags to be associated in links in comments is a matter of flipping a switch. OK, maybe clicking a radio button or drop-down box! Google provides a list of those supporting it here.

Google said it will soon begin talking with other companies, such as those that making forum software. But makers of these packages or any packages could implement support when they are ready.

Uses For The Attribute

The tag can be used by anyone anywhere, of course. It's not just for use with blog comment areas or forum posts. For example, Cutts said people might use it if they publish dynamically generated referrer stats and visitor information.

"Wherever it means that another person placed a link on your site, that would be appropriate," Cutts said.

Because of this, some page authoring tools will likely add support in the future, if it is widely adopted as will likely be the case. Some tools may allow adding it right now -- and those who know HTML code can do an easy insertion.

That might be handy if you need to link to a site but are worried that a search engine might consider it a "bad neighborhood," as they've often described them. In reality, the chances are very small that the typical person might link to a site that would actually hurt them with a search engine. But if in double, nofollow could offer peace of mind.

Of course, those who are swapping links with other sites now have a whole new thing to look out for. If someone offers to link to you, you'll want to make sure they don't make use of the nofollow tag -- at least if you were hoping for some search engine gain. Otherwise, the link's not going to count.

Don't forget -- there are other good reasons to still get links even beyond search engines, of course. My Golden Rules Of Link Building article covers this more.

You definitely DO NOT want to use the attribute on links to your own pages. Do that, and you'll deprive your own pages from the chance of influencing how your other pages rank.

Having said this, I've no doubt some people will try playing with the new tag as a means to "hoard" PageRank that's passed on to only a few pages in your site. For example, your home page might link to 25 of your internal pages. Using the new attribute, you could exclude all but five of these pages. Do that, and you might possibly cause Google to give those five pages more credit (see the Link Building & Link Analysis article for Search Engine Watch members for more about this).

Maybe. Perhaps. And perhaps the search engines may make other changes down the line. Rather than get tricky with this tag, I'd recommend using it as intended for now -- as a means to flag that there are certain links on your web site that you didn't place there.

Support From Other Search Engines

How about the other search engines? MSN and Yahoo are onboard. In fact, Yahoo beat Google out of the gate in blogging its support of the new tag first. A Defense Against Comment Spam offers a few details, an example and news that the change will be implemented in the coming weeks.

As for MSN, Working Together Against Blog Spam explains how the company made a snap decision today to support the tag, though the idea was something it had considered during its Search Champs meetings with bloggers and search marketers several months ago. It promises that its crawler will begin respecting the attribute in the coming weeks.

Google, of course, has been onboard from the start. It provides more details on its blog in Preventing comment spam.

So how about Ask Jeeves, the remaining major crawler? They're still looking at the new option and weighing it up.

"We'll consider it for the future, but because we use local [link] popularity and not global popularity, we are not going to rush into anything today. It has more impact for Google and Yahoo because of their similar methodologies. The upside for us is much more modest," Lanzone said.

By local popularity, Ask Jeeves is referring to how its Teoma search engine will calculate the popularity of pages and do ranking only after culling a subset of pages deemed relevant, rather than looking at all links from across the entire web. My Make Room For Teoma article explains this more.

More Info

Google To Add "Nofollow" Tagging Of Links To Fight Spam? is where I explain more about how the news of the new attribute emerged, plus provides some background on the difference between it and the nofollow attribute of the meta robots tag.

Comment Spam? How About An Ignore Tag? How About An Indexing Summit! is my post wishing for an "ignore" tag similar to what's emerged here and how others have been wishing for this even longer.

It also looks at how it has been literally years since we've had an advancement in the type of indexing control given to site owners. This new attribute -- whether you love the idea or hate it -- is welcome move for at least giving site owners themselves some choice in the matter.

The New Nofollow Link Attribute is a thread in our forums where you can discuss the new attribute.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:47 PM | Permalink

Yahoo, MSN Join Google In Supporting Nofollow

While we wait for Google to post official notice of its support for the new nofollow attribute, Yahoo's already chimed in on its blog that it will do so as well. And apparently, the Google announcement may come here, as Yahoo is already linking to it. MSN tells me directly it also will support the tag, and plans to post on its blog as well. As with Google, Yahoo's linking to where that will likely show up. Ask Jeeves tells me it is still considering the tag. More to come in a long story I'm about to post!

Postscript: Support has now been officially announced by everyone. See the Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links for further details.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:03 PM | Permalink

Confirmed: New Google Nofollow Link Attribute Is Coming

Robert Scoble has posted confirmation that Google will introduce a new link attribute. OK, then I'll confirm it as well -- I've been told the same by my contacts at Google. Since official confirmation has now been leaked out, I see no need to hold back.

As Robert notes, the information is supposed to come out later today on the Google Blog. What will be the new attribute? Well, I could say "wait and see," but Dave Winer already leaked that part out. He didn't say it came from Google (it did), but he provided enough clues and follow up confirmations for people to know this is the nofollow attribute that will be introduced.

Exactly how Google will interact with the nofollow attribute remains to be seen. I'll be posting a follow up with those details. For background on it, see my Google To Add "Nofollow" Tagging Of Links To Fight Spam? post.

Postscript: Support has now been officially announced. See the Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links post for more.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:06 PM | Permalink

January 17, 2005

Google To Add "Nofollow" Tagging Of Links To Fight Spam?

NOTE:Support has now been officially announced. See the Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links post for more.

Dave Winer posted a cryptic Watch This Space post yesterday, pointing at a page that many have interpreted to mean that Google will be providing support for a "nofollow" attribute that can be added to links.

For example, the HTML code for an ordinary link might look like this:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html">Visit My Page</a>

HTML specs (3.2, 4.0, XHTML 2.0) allow for links to have additional information associated with them. The rel attribute is designed to allow authors to express particular relationships about the current document to the page it is linking to.

In Winer's post, he makes use of a nofollow rel attribute in links that appear in the comments of his post, such as like this:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

The speculation of those who spotted this (see Robert Sayre with a supportive comment from Dave, Simon Willison, others) is that Google will be providing support of the nofollow attribute in some way to help combat comment spam on blogs (and by extension, anywhere people may find publicly-contributed links to cause problems).

Why Google? In the past, Dave has suggested that comment spam is a Google problem -- and earlier this week, he also posted a note saying he'd heard from a the "only" that could solve a "big" problem on the internet.

What might the nofollow attribute do? The closest thing we have to it at the moment is the nofollow attribute for the meta robots tag. That attribute is a way to tell search engines not to follow links from a page they may have found.

It's important to note that the attribute was intended for site owners who wanted to prevent search engines from indexing other pages they link to from within their own sites, not as a mechanism for preventing the indexing of pages of sites outside their control. No does it allow this. If there was another way to find a page (on the site owner's site or not) -- and if the page itself is not blocked somehow from being indexed -- then it would still get listed.

So a nofollow attribute associated with a link itself isn't likely to prevent the page the link points at from being indexed. After all, search engines will likely find those pages in other ways, and those pages probably won't have spider blocks placed on them.

Instead, a nofollow attribute is likely to be treated as an "ignore" or "don't count" flag. It's the way for a web author to say, "I don't care about these links -- nor should you."

How might Google react to it? That remains to be seen. It might decide not to index the link at all -- so it wouldn't record the text of the link, nor the fact that the link points at another page -- depriving that page of a possible PageRank rise. Or, it could decide to index the information but not weight it as heavily.

Whatever the case, it won't stop blog comment spam -- nor other types of link spamming across the web. But it's a start, and more important, it gives authors more control over their pages. I'm all for that.

My main disappointment, should the mechanism emerge, is that it would have come unilaterally from Google. Despite what Dave thinks, comment spam is not a Google problem. It's a search problem in general, and it would be nice to see the search engines work together to solve the wide range of issues that web authors (not just bloggers) have.

More on this in my past Comment Spam? How About An Ignore Tag? How About An Indexing Summit! post, where I talk about the idea of an "ignore" tag or more important, an indexing summit to discuss publisher needs and controls. We're doing that at our SES New York show, by the way. I hope to get some search engine reps to come hear and discuss what publishers of all types are looking for.

Also see Nick's Rumour - Google About To Kill Comment Spam post and comments at Threadwatch. I've chimed in along with others about what might happen, how it might fit in with things and what may or may not work. Also some nice thoughts also from Peter Van Dijck and a summary from Steve Rubel.

Postscript: We've also got a thread going on the topic now in our forums, where you can comment or discuss: Discussion on 'Google To Add "Nofollow" Tagging' blog

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:51 PM | Permalink

December 7, 2004

Wishing For Better Anchor Text Searching

I've written before that on my wishlist would be for Google and its competitors to offer the ability to search for links across the web that point at a particular page with certain terms in the links.

In other words, many are familiar with the famous miserable failure results that bring up the official George W. Bush biography on several of the major search engines. But none of them make it possible to see exactly what pages are linking to the biography with those words in them.

Sure, I can do a backlink lookup on Google for pages linking to the bio like this. But that shows me all pages that Google wishes to reveal that link to the page -- not the pages that link and use the words "miserable failure" in the links.

At MSN's beta, this search lets me find pages that link to the bio and use the words "miserable failure" on the page, something you can't do at Google or Yahoo. But that's still not what I want. Some of those pages might link to the bio but NOT with those words in the link itself. This search still doesn't help if I or other enquiring searchers want to know who exactly is influencing a link bomb.

OK, so enquiring search marketers may also want to know -- and fear of giving them too much information may be why we don't have this ability. AltaVista once gave it, but that support ended earlier this year. I think the fear is overblown, and I stand ready to give big kudos to the first search engine that resurrects this past feature.

Google does offer some ability to find matches showing words in anchor text, as well as in title tags and in URLs. Do the results that come up in response to these special search commands relate to how Google ranks web pages? That's being discussed by marketers in our forums: What Do Google's Allinanchor, Allintitle & Allinurl Results Tell Us?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:25 AM | Permalink

November 22, 2004

Tips On Link Building in Link Building 101

Search Engine Watch Forums moderator Nacho Hernandez has pulled together useful resources from articles, books, forum threads and blogs all over the web on the topic of link building. Check it out, if you're looking for some starting places or wish to contribute more: Link Building 101.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:44 AM | Permalink

November 19, 2004

GoogleGuy On Google Link Counts

Many experienced with search engine optimization know that Google's backlink feature, the link: command, has long not returned all the links Google actually knows about for a particular page. Nevertheless, the issue continues to come up again and again, as new people stumble onto the problem.

Google recently expanded the number of links it shows, but it still doesn't show all of them. That's not going to change, but at least Google may finally update its web site to change the current wording about the feature, to make it clear not all links are shown.

More about the issue, with a long post by GoogleGuy, can be found in our forum thread Google Say Not Reporting All Backlinks.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:15 AM | Permalink

November 18, 2004

Looking For Directories?

There's been a number of posts on our forums and elsewhere where people are listing new and existing directories, all part of the general quest by site owners to find more quality links. Nick W decided to pull everything into one place in a new thread on our forums: Directory Submissions 101. So if you need a starting place on the directory hunt, check it out.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:25 AM | Permalink

November 9, 2004

Tips On Link Development

Shari Thurow offers up basic tips and background on developing links over at ClickZ: Link Development: The Key to Successful SEO.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 17, 2004

New Deep Link Ratio Tool

Nice catch spotted via Tara Calishain's blog, a Deep Link Ratio tool that will calculate your "deep link ratio." What's that? It tells you of all the links pointing at a domain what percentage of them point at the home page. Why do you care? You probably don't need to, but it's interesting to see, nonetheless.

Some people want all their links to point at their home page, either feeling that this forces people through the "front door" or that it makes their home page much more important for search engine purposes. Personally, I think you should be happy getting a link from anyone who has quality traffic and who wants to route to the most appropriate page in your site.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Search Engine Watch Forum's 101 Threads

Last week, one of our most energetic forum moderators Nacho Hernandez started a thread called Search Engine Marketing 101. In it, he leads off with a variety of resources useful for those getting started with search engine marketing. Comments and further contributions follow.

Nacho also kicked off a theme. Orion, one of our newest moderators, followed up with Block Analysis 101. That looks at the concept of search engines breaking up a page into "blocks," to better understand which particular content or links within that content should be given greater or less weight.

Member Nick W's now dived in to look at the often controversial issue of cloaking: Cloaking 101 - Questions and Answers. Some previous good threads and debate on this topic include The Great Doorway Debate, How Do I Spot Cloaked Sites?. You might also look over an article I did last year, Ending The Debate Over Cloaking.

Returning back to Nacho, he's compiled a great list of Google Sandbox 101-style resources in Sandbox - IN or OUT? The sandbox concept relates to the idea that new pages, new links or new sites might not be allowed to do well in Google until a certain period of time has passed. The Filthy Linking Rich thread touches on this, as well.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 7, 2004

Thanks For Your Horrible Link Request

As part of my Intro To Search Engine Marketing session at our Search Engine Strategies conferences, I always have a segment on link building and the appropriate way to do it. Key tip? Understand the site you are making the request from. What's it about? What's the best place for a link? How can you make this easy?

Then I usually drag out one of the many generic link requests I get that violate all the rules. I just got another one of these classics:

We have recently visited your site, http://www.searchenginewatch.com, and found it to be not only professional and interesting, but very informative too. We would like to propose entering into a link exchange that will be beneficial to both your site and our clients' site.

As you're probably aware, search engines (such as Google) prefer sites that are linked from other related sites. For some time now, reciprocal linking (sites trading links to each other) has been used to improve link popularity and rankings in many of the major search engines.

I have something like this I use already in my talk. It's makes for a good laugh. What? Links are important? Wow, thanks for letting me know! I mean, I run a site all about search engines. It's a good thing you've come along. This is a great tip. I'd better let my readers know.

Please, thanks for showing me how much thought and effort you put into this request. But it gets better:

However, these same search engines are now gradually discounting the benefits of direct reciprocal links. Many search engine discussion forums have already identified the trend among the major engines to give more preference to sites that have "one-way" links. This means that any two sites directly linking to each other will no longer be improving their search engine visibility as much as sites that have "incoming-only" links from other topic-related sites.

What we are proposing is a link exchange that will benefit your site and our clients' site, without having an ineffective direct reciprocal link exchange. Our proposed link exchange creates, in effect, an "incoming-only" link for each site. This is a more desirable (and more difficult to achieve) link which will help both sites improve their search engine visibility, while at the same time it completely avoids the detested spamming dangers of "link farms" and similar ill-advised approaches.

Not quite right. Folks can (and do) debate, but my view is that links between two entire SITES are not likely to be discounted. After all, what's a site? A domain name? Well, you've got plenty of domain names shared by multiple web sites within them. Going to discount all those links? That's going to make a mess of your link analysis system. Too many innocents will be caught.

More important, you want to offer me a link on some unknown page that might not have any visitors at all? That's what I care about -- a page that has visitors I'm interested in, not one that may (or may not) have any impact on search rankings.

Thanks -- I can't be bothered with your off-topic request that shows complete ignorance of what my web site is about. I'll stick with my

Thanks -- I can't be bothered with your off-topic request that shows complete ignorance of what my web site is about. I'll stick with my Three Golden Rules Of Link Building, instead.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 17, 2004

SearchStatus Puts SEM Info Into Firefox Toolbar

I just downloaded the Firefox browser yesterday, and now I've got a cool new tool to plug into it. SearchStatus lets you see both Google PageRank info and the Alexa popularity ranking of a page. In addition, you can easily look up backlinks for a page on Google, Yahoo or MSN (which ought to be similar to Yahoo, as Yahoo still powers it -- but you may still find some differences).

As always, you should never obsess with any page rating. The quality of page to your audience, rather than PageRank scores, is what's important. More on this, in what I call my Three Golden Rules Of Link Building. Those looking for some advanced tips might check out this SearchDay article: The Art of Advanced Link Building.

Want to comment on this post or discuss SearchStatus? Drop by this thread in our forum: Google/Alexa Toolbar for Firefox Users.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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