It feels good to be back at Search Engine Strategies 2010 New York. I was white-knuckled on the flight in but the embarrassing sobs and childish screams were all worth it to come fraternize with you search folk in the city that never sleeps.

The first session of the day in the Search on the Edge Track was “How To Become A Link Magnet.” The session was brimming with insight from industry thought leaders, Jennifer Slegg, CEO, JenSense.com, Rand Fishkin CEO, SEOmoz.org, and Aaron Kahlow, Chairman & Founder, Online Marketing Summit with moderator Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR.

Jennifer Slegg is the first to approach the intermittently spaztastic microphone. She’ll be speaking about the building blocks of link magnetism and what needs to be in place in order to be a link magnet.

First of all, what is your motivation for being a link magnet? Is it to boost your organic prominence? Is it to place yourself in front of potential clients? Maybe its to be an online rockstar or to gain recognition. Identifying your motivation for becoming a link magnet influences how you go about presenting your brand and message.

Next, how do you want to project your brand? Are you going to brand your personal name, handle or will you go with the company name?

Personal Name
If your name is John Smith your going to need a hell of a lot more than killer content, good looks and a prayer to build a unique identity! Do the groundwork and make certain that you stand a chance. This was the exact reason I chose to brand myself as Manny Rivas rather than Manuel Rivas, well, that and everybody knows me as Manny.

Handles
If its a handle you’re going after, search it first. Is anyone else using it? Has it been used in the past and if so, what type of content did they publish? Make sure if you are marketing in multiple countries the handle you choose does not have a negative double meaning in one of your markets. Something that could be totally benign in the US could have a very different meaning in the UK.

Every audience has a different social media playground. Its important to make sure your desired handle will be available for the jungle gyms you’re going to be hanging out in. Lastly, make sure the handle doesn’t narrow your focus too much. If you go with @ppcthug, your persona will be cornered, making it difficult to extend your war out of the PPC turf.

Company Name
If the decision is to brand under the company name, realize that you and the company brand are forever merged. This may present company marketing conflicts if in the future you hire a community manager or decide to sell the company. The benefit of this method however is instant branding.

Setting the Groundwork
Whatever name you go with, be sure to register it everywhere. Jennifer is an advocate of this and advises the audience to stay abreast of new social communities that are emerging; pay special attention to communities that surround your industry. This process is easy if you know Knowem.

“Adding a blog when you’re doing personal branding is a no brainer. Everyone should be doing it.”

What Kind of Personality Do You Want to Project? Jennifer covers four main types of online personalities to brand to.

Helpful/Informative Expert: Cruise Linkedin, Yahoo!, Twitter and forums and answer questions surrounding your area of expertise. Tap into your physical community and pursue local speaking engagements.

Controversial
This is a tricky area. Take a popular industry topic that everybody is raving about and show (in a purely defensible way of course) HOW its not as great as its been chalked up to be. Tread carefully though, you don’t want to pigeon hole yourself as being anti-(topic here).

The Jerk
This personality type is very difficult to pull off. These personalities get noticed and can be extremely popular for their reputation. In some instances it can prevent you from being seen as an authority figure and some companies may perceive you to be a loose cannon.

Getting Others to Build Your Brand for You
Its best to be transparent here. If you are going to have others publishing tweets under your brand name, make sure they signify who’s on deck. Jennifer references the example of Guy Kawasaki and the backlash he received for having members of his staff ghost tweet under his handle.

Next to take the stage is Rand Fishkin. He begins by giving a break down of the past few generations of SEO and getting linking. First it was direct contact to webmasters, then it moved to blogging and forums (the first social media), then once people figured out how to mechanize blog spam, we arrived at social media. Now we’re on the verge of a new generation.

Link Bait VS. Link Magnets
This new era has ushered in a new paradigm surrounding linking. First off there is a distinct difference between link bait and link magnets. Link bait is really content that is built to attract links and not necessarily reward their creation. Link magnets on the other hand, emotionally or psychologically reward the person linking, creating a fundamental incentive.

The Web has Become Jaded

The way that people share links is different now. Not but a few years ago, if Rand published a stellar blog post, he’d stand to receive 50 possibly even 100 links. Now, the amount of links published is far less but he sees anywhere from 500-2000 Tweets and Facebook status updates. Baller! Gone are the days of trying your darnedest to get on top of Digg. People have become extremely sensitive and suspicious to link bait.

“Its like the fish have figured out there’s a hook attached to the worm.”

There needs to be an emotional and obvious hook. 
Instead of taking the worm and getting a nice rusty tetanus ridden hook, you take the hook and get what you bit for. So we have go beyond link bait. People are still ready and willing to link when it benefits them. Rand gives some examples of how savvy marketers are rewarding linkers in non-financial ways to garner links.

The Yelp Badge
Transferring the window cling idea online, Yelp decided to give restaurants with high reviews a badge to put on their site. Restaurants welcomed the badges as a citation to their exquisite dining experience. The “cha-ching” for Yelp came from the link back to the restaurants profile, the neighborhood their in, and the home page on beautiful anchor text.

Ingredients in Link Magnet Soup
Unfortunately great content does not earn links or inherently rank well. This isn’t the way content works on the web, its all about branding and marketing content properly. Get your bowls ready kids, Rand dishes out some of his Link Magnet Soup one ingredient at a time.

- 1 cup rewarding content - satisfaction
- 2 tbsp “something that makes em feel good”
- a dash of utility
- 1 can of efficiency and effectiveness
- A whole bunch of strategy

Last up, but certainly not least, Aaron Kahlow. He takes a different approach to his portion and shares his thoughts, in a bullet point sort of way, on being a link magnet and what that really means.

• Content – If you don’t have content that’s interesting, engaging, controversial or timely…forget-a-bout-it!
• Persona – Decide who you are what you want to be and get comfortable with it. Once you decide you need to commit, be consistent and be comfortable with who you are.
• Social – Every time you’re writing a headline, think about how it can be shared. Is it something your constituents would want to pass along?
• Think about your friends – Hang out with the link magnets. Keep good company in who you link to, and why you link to them.

Aaron’s Take-aways

• Decide who your target market is and then address them. If your audience is not geek you can’t geek out.
• Make sharing easy. Make the ability to share your content the easiest thing to do when they come to that page.
• Create a blog.
• Decide what kind of magnet you want to be.

photo credit: sinisterbluebox

<rant> I was strolling along the lake towards our lovely Canal Park Office this  morning, when my Blackberry (sonar sound) alerted me to an email. I was consumed noodling on possible blog topics for today and weighing ideas against our team’s imposing schedule. The sound of an email spammer trying to buy doFollow aimClear Blog content links that violate Google’s terms of service, jolted me a bit. Little did I know that some moron was about to make my day.

I read the email. It was some link-building dude trying to buy hidden doFollow links, to build links to his link-building business! My first thought was freakin’ LOL! The second thought was more efficient.  “Well that takes care of my blog post for today, Marty!”

Upon arrival at the shop, we took a staff vote, overridden by me…and decided to occasionally publish these types of emails in the future as an exercise of cleaning spam out of our email boxes. Before we share the spam letter I received, here’s the recommended takeaways from this post in advance:

• Tip #1: Don’t send stupid solicitations to SEOs, you never know when they might publish it.
• Don’t ask SEOs to violate any search engines TOS, at least not in writing.
• Tip #2: Don’t piss off SEOs
• Tip #3 Reread tips #1 &#2.

——Original Message——
From: Paul White
To: Marty WeintraubSubject: aimClearBlog Contact Form
Sent: Aug 26, 2009 8:03 AM

Paul White wrote:
Hi,
I would like to become an advertiser on your site. I am looking to place a
small text link ad. Do you allow those types of ads and if so would you be ok
with a do-follow link?

I usually ask for one line with just a few words. I prefer them at the top,
middle, or bottom of the main content area of the site. However, I am sure we
can work out placement.

The keywords the ad would be targeting would be “link building” related. If you
accept this type of advertising please let me know what you would charge me to
place a link ad on your site. Feel free to call me if you have any questions

Thanks

Paul White
Inventory Manager
inventory.pwhite@gmail.com
(661)754-6089
Website:
IP: 116.71.178.97

</rant>

photo credit  (just fragmented link-juice by 2 links to do the right thing): Mykl Roventine

The most important news to come out of  ‘Advanced 2009 is Google’s blurt-of-a-revelation that they removed the algorithmic benefit from internal page rank sculpting, “about a year ago.” The change also affects how Google handles noFollowed outbound links.

Boiled down, noFollow still prevents the passing of link juice (energy) to the internal or external destination page. However the value is no longer divided up amongst the remaining followed links on the page. Though this 180 degree about-face in what Google had been preaching (literally) to webmasters was poorly handled from a public relations perspective, presumably it was made because the tag was overused, abused and had the potential to skew Google’s rankings.

No worries. We actually think the change will bring some positive changes to the SEO process, though as always there are tradeoffs. Here’s what we’re telling our clients:

Internal Linking & noFollow

• Don’t panic! Google dialed in the change a year ago and nobody noticed. Even Matt Cutts noFollows hundreds of internal links on his blog including his subscription form and “comments” #anchor links.
• Link-count matters at least some of the time. The new PageRank sculpting is about not placing unnecessary links on a page to extraneous or duplicate content, as opposed to noFollowing links. Sadly, at times this sometimes may seem incongruous with usability. This usability-sacrifice may  hurt the Internet IMHO.

  Forgoing gratuitous internal linking to pointless or little used pages does not mitigate the critical need to create a keyword-rich, diverse and colorful internal link graph to compliment global navigation. Just don’t build tons of extraneous crap-content and associated navigational links,  which could dilute the power distributed by other links to important content.

• Don’t hide links. Google’s already told us that they read javascript and that the links can pass juice. iFrames in conjunction with robots.txt may work to mask links. We’re telling clients not to bother. Today’s effective cloaking is tomorrow’s red-flag penalty. Really the days of PR sculpting by hidden links are over.
• Arguably, it still makes sense to send Google sparse clues that some pages should not receive internal link energy. We think it’s still fine to noFollow privacy policies, registration forms and other obviously inconsequential pages that webmasters’ truly don’t want to waste site strength on.
• If you have already noFollowed internal links holistically on your site, Google says you won’t be penalized. It’s not necessary to remove existing noFollow attributes that are not gratuitous. Because Google was steadfast in their PageRank sculpting recommendations for the last year, we’ve made some conservative noFollow suggestions to clients.  It does not appear that any damage has been done. In fact, sites we’ve been working with are thriving. This is congruent with what other SEOs are reporting.
• Reciprocally, we don’t recommend adding many if any new noFollow internal links. It’s a good time to watch and wait, while focusing on re-tooling sites to “sculpt” link juice by better architecture using more meaningful links that lead to more to valuable content.
• Some or all sites may be ranked differently than by traditional theories. The algorithm is complicated and, outside of Googlers, most analysis regarding black box factors is speculation. There are credible theories to suggest that some sites may not be evaluated by the PR bean-counting approach.In fact there is reliable evidence (watch the whole video) to indicate that, at least for some sites, there is a pot of link power applied to the entire site and hoarding excess domain juice could be a negative.
• (Not a recommendation) If you’re feeling snarky, radical, and you’re not the Washington Post, consider making unnecessary navigational links copy and paste instead of hot. For instance, look at the date archives on this blog in the left hand sidebar.We don’t offer them as clickable (hot) links anymore  because we don’t want to dilute the link-count on the page.

  We hope any user motivated enough to view our date archives, won’t mind the the copy/paste. Sadly, welcome to the new copy and paste era of web navigation. Without noFollow, that’s just what you get.

External Linking & noFollow

• Don’t panic! This is not a very big deal.
• Outbound links are simple to think about. As a rule of thumb, only follow links you can vouch for from an editorial perspective. The obvious intent of eliminating noFollow benefits for outbound links is to impel webmasters to police their own links. This is good for SEO. It’s known that linking to quality sites provides an organic boost to the link-source site so linking out to other respected sites is a great thing to do. However, choose outbound links wisely and link out to high quality relevant and top trusted sites when appropriate.
  
• The new rules present somewhat of a conundrum in regards to user generated content that contains links. Link-count in user generated content could be a problem. There’s been much written about what the effect of long comment threads, with many noFollowed links, might be.

  Many believe that Google “knows” the footprint of popular blogging platforms like WordPress and will somehow compensate. There are those respected webmasters who believe that all approved user generated content links should be followed.

• Many webmasters don’t use WordPress or other common and recognizable content management systems to handle user generated content. Since we don’t trust Google to tell webmasters what they need to know straight up, maybe we should remove the links from our comment-threads as opposed to noFollowing UG links or eliminating comments.

  This is not a “recommendation.”Users would still see the anchor text along side the non-linked URL for easy copy and paste. This will reduce the link-count on the page to potentially mitigate any potential dilution factor, should Google not recognize WordPress and compensate. It would be great for Matt Cutts to provide some honest clarification to this point before fear of the new algorithm guts webmasters’ willingness to engage their readers.

• It might make sense to apply this principle to other outbound links on the page. Maybe Twitter links and other outbound links in widgets should no longer be hot. Thanks Google …welcome to the new copy and paste navigation paradigm.

Discover the Power of Linking: Link Building Basics session at SES NY covered a great deal of ground in representing both Search Engine and Search Marketer viewpoints on the subject of links.

The second half of the session comprised of search marketers Kristjan Mar Hauksson, Debra Mastaler, and Peter Van der Graaf, which greatly contrasted the presentations given by the search engine reps.

Overall, it was light on the idealist link concepts, but full of real world applied link building tactics. This post picks up exactly where we left off in the first part of this session’s coverage.

Kicking off things on the search marketer side was Kristjan Mar Hauksson, director of search and managing partner at Nordic eMarketing. Kristjan’s presentation was about the basics of link building in a multilingual environment.

He asks, Why should I care about link exchanges/link building?

-It increases your traffic

-It improves search engine visibility through more link popularity

-Gives an extra resource to your website

-Higher ROI

Kristjan explains that searching for “Click Here” in Google retrieves Adobe Acrobat Reader as the #1 result because of the many sites that have Adobe links on”Click Here” anchor text when making sure users have the right plugin to display their content.

Now search for “leave here”.  You may see that a Disney site ranks well; a joke within the porn site industry linking to Disney on anchor text like “If You are Younger Than 18, Leave Here”

Of course, you shouldn’t use “click here” as your anchor text. Don’t waste your linking efforts, instead Kristjan advocates creating your own “click here” strategy.

Your “Click Here” Strategy
What do you want your “click here” phrase to be – what do you want your optimal anchor text to be? Kristjan says you then use that  in your link request anchor tags and use that in your description text.

Where to start then? For link building in a multilingual environment, organization is key. Kristjan suggested an extremely useful spreadsheet for this process, some fields it should include are Site/Candidate, Target Country/Site Language, Link Request Language, Contact Type – Email, Form, Phone, Contact Information, Site Page Rank, basically information that can help further narrow down to your optimal links for pursual.

Do some analysis and preparation on the front end of your process; use the keyword tool to advise your anchor text. For your targeted language, use the locally appropriate tool ex. German Google Keyword Tool  etc. You can also use Freetranslation.com to get a feel for words. This can be sort of a dangerous suggestion, but it is often a good start for raw ideas.

The Concept of Region
Based on Christian’s own experience, there are 4 key elements in regards to local visibility

Language of your site is  35%

Language and type of links point to you 35%

Your ccTDL (country code top level domain) like .de for Germany 25%

Your hosting locations 5%

Kristjan then presented an example for attaining visibility in the UK:
Create a special UK landing page, then find sites with a co.uk ending that are relevant link candidates. You could use a search operator query like “add link” “guest house” site:co.uk.

Now here’s the hard part; Kristjan started with 4340 potential linking partners after running this tactic, but after weighing against his criteria, he only ended up with 56 potential sites. The best advice he can offer is to run this process again with different permutations, and take your time.

Kristjan says to not just throw out link requests, instead create a list where you have reviewed and weighted all candidates. Set your goals and research right from the beginning, and don’t shy away from doing a link request in a language you don’t know about. It’s all about being patient.

The next search marketer to take the stage was Debra Mastaler, president of Alliance Link and easily one of the most reputable authorities on linkbuilding.

Debra’s topic was very tactical, all about links from directories and how to attract links from the media.

Getting Links from the Media
Debra’s media fact: any time your site is mentioned in the media, it’s an implied endorsement and free advertising. The basic way to get this is to issue press release though they don’t generate many links by themselves. You can use either free services like PRLog.org or paid services like PRWeb.com and Businesswire.com.

One paid service that Debra likes is Marketwire because of their market penetration. Always watch out how much you pay for press release, make sure they’re only for a huge event or something special.

On the other hand, don’t overlook the “niche wire” services. Think about where your business is focused. There are communities for host of demographics & interests; chances are at least one will line up with your organization.

She stressed that you make sure you tell people in your press release you are willing to give interviews.

When you’re looking for journalists that would care about your company, there are a number of classic places you can find them. You need to start by performing a backlink analysis of your competitors;  look at who’s written about them in the past, make a excel sheet to keep track.

By the same token, set up automated alert services to find these opportunities; Debra likes Trackle and Yotify, while wearing a decidedly healthy “tinfoil hat” when it comes to Google Alerts monitoring.

You can also use Twitter to find key journalists, the good ones should be tweeting about your industry right now anyways.

There are also media lists that can be a one stop shop, she uses CyberJournalist.net and BlogCatalog.

Engaging Journalists
Don’t be afraid to call journalists, you need to start getting on their radar by genuinely engaging them. Go ahead and comment on their blog, just don’t be stupid, actually lead meaningful discussion. Be sure and link to their blog, reference them by name in a post, ping them however you can think of so that they know who you are.

Links From Directories
Debra says that these days, most directories are crap. However, directories that are editorially sorted (read by humans) end up still being worthwhile. Dmoz, Yahoo Directory, and Splash Directory are all considered to still have good value. With these directories, you get 1 link for 1 site and that’s how it works. Even if your site has lots of diverse and worthy content.

Take note that there are good specific directories for each one of your content areas, so use multiple directories for different sections of your site. Also take a look at niche directories, they usually do not cost much or anything at all, tend to rank well, and they tend to pass popularity since they’ve been around so long.

Make absolutely sure that your page is indexed before you submit to a directory, otherwise you won’t receive the same value from the outset. Debra remarks that “Adsense is the scourge of the internet”. Having Adsense on your page will deter you from receiving directory listings. Don’t waste your time and money on directories that host more Adsense than actual listings; you shouldn’t have to compete against Adsense ads.

Coming back to the topic of media links, Debra reiterates that after build your own database of journalists and media people, do what it takes to get on their radar. Send them a fruit basket if you need to, just don’t annoy them.

Closing out the session was Peter Van Der Graaf, advanced search specialist at NetSociety. Peter explains that link building isn’t as trial and error as you might think. You may currently be saying to yourself, “Ive Got Linkable Content, Now What?” For this, Peter lays out logical approaches for each stage of the linkbuilding process.

Link Building Stage 1: Research
Ask who are my possible link partners, how can i categorize them, how can i approach them? Do this first for your own website and look at your naturalness and fullness of your linking profile. Then do the same for your competitors in the top ten search results.

Link Building Stage 2: Linkbait Creation
You already have great content, but don’t be afraid to advise new linkbait content based on research and topical relations to desired links. You should also think about content contribution with you linking partners; things like guest blogging or co-blogging.

In addition, you need have some sort of visitor reward or linking reward. You could send free samples for review or you could offer access to exclusive “must-see” information.

Link Building Stage 3: Distribution
It’s often best to establish some level of personalized contact with your link partners. The really important link partners should always be contacted by you personally. Success increases dramatically with personalization, Dear Webmaster < Hello, John < Hey, I’m a fan too!

People are used to spammy and impersonal link requests, don’t get lost in this bunch. Do granular research on your link partners; who are they and what do they like? Peter gives a short example:

“Hi Mike, It seems we’re both Yankees fans and I agree Girardi should be replaced blah blah blah” then smoothly transition to your link request.

Grades of Personalization
Very Important Link Partners – require specific link bait and personal contact

Important Partners – require personal contact

For the Masses – require less personalization overall

What is viral link building?
Peter gave us an entertaining case study where he had  1 week to rank for “world cup soccer” before it was actually slated to begin. How is this possible to do, to get 1000 links quickly without tripping off the search engines?

It’s simple; sites related to newsworthy events have this happen all the time; getting picked up in CNN can send you 1000 links easily and in a completely natural way.

What Peter did was create a story about football haters being fed up with the World Cup, and staged a live local event of college students against the World Cup. The story eventually got picked up all around, even on CNN international and they links followed of course.

This concluded the session, and overall I found it to be an interesting grab bag of “perfect world” linking idealism appropriate for a young SEO’s bed time story and the “quick and dirty” techniques search marketers do in back alleys to survive.

I hope Search Engine Strategies has more of these perspective-mesh sessions in the future, maybe with some extra room for speaker to speaker discussion/fist fighting.

The undeniable significance of linking within the black box algorithm of the major Search Engines has been the subject of at least half the chatter and controversy in the search marketing world. Remarkable research efforts, branching theories, and “under the hood” tools have sprung from the pure need to demystify the role of links in the SERPs.

Discover the Power of Linking: Link Building Basics at SearchEngineStrategies New York 2009 represented the first major instance of both search marketers and search engine representatives (Live Search, Yahoo!, and Ask.com) converging in one session to give polar perspective on links. Because of this, it was essentially two sessions in one, and aimClear will be breaking coverage up into two parts.

Chris Boggs moderated this session, noting the historical importance of this meeting of the minds on links.

Presenting first was Sasi Parthasarathy program manager for Microsoft Live Search. It is Sasi’s intention to give us the search engine perspective, a view of how Live Search sees links and how they treat them.

Live Search’s stance is that they don’t care so much about your link building technique but about your linking intention. If you have good content and good links you’ll be fine.

Sasi see’s link building as a chance to build your reputation on the web, because your website is an asset, link building is an asset building exercise. Sasi says not to expect results overnight, build over time. He remarks that content is still king, high quality content, should of course attract users and good links naturally.

The Live Search engine looks for high quality links from authorities or experts in your field. He gave the example, if you are building a website about feline care, it would be desirable to get a link from catvets.com , the site for American Association of Feline Practitioners. Think about the sites that link to you; how do they relate to your content? Live Search places great deal of importance on content.

What does Live Search perceive as spam?

Anything done with the intent to rank higher by manipulating the search engine will be perceived as spam

Live Search simply wants to deliver the best content to the users, anything to disrupt this will be neutralized or punished. Some examples of disruptive or suspicious behavior included:

• If the number of links you receive jumps from 100-10000 in a week, not a natural attainment of links overtime

• If Live Search sees a lot of links from blog comments or irrelevant sites; flagged for closer review

• Hidden links are forbidden

Sasi advocates using the Live Search Webmaster Tools Link Analysis. Use this tool to  look at your in-links, and out-links for spam sites or malware infected sites. Their Webmaster Tools page score is ranks links from 1-5 to tell you 5 being a good link, and 1 being poor.

You can also use the Link Analysis tool to look at the reputation of sites that are linking to you. Sasi suggests keeping track of all news about your site, know specifically which authors write about you and now you know who to ping for future PR.

Up next was Sharad Verma, senior product manager at Yahoo! Search.

Sharad relays a story of talking to someone from AIG, who was wondering what SES NY was about. Sharad let him know it was about best practices for your website, site optimization, ways to receive to optimum links. The AIG employee seemed most highly interested in linkbuilding (maybe for a new career).

How Do Search Engines Use Links?

If you site has no links - search engines don’t know about you

Few links – search engines know you exist but they may not crawl you, a small site would then need to submit a sitemap

Some links – you might be crawled but not indexed

Some more links - search engines crawl and index you, but you may rank low

Enough Links – you may start getting ranked in the top 10

More than enough links – helps in anchor text variety and ranking for different keywords

Links on Steroids -  no effect, your wasting time and efforts

*Sharad noted in the Q & A session that “few links” and “enough links” are relative to a number of factors and not limited to a specific link count

How Do Search Engines Treat Links?

• Authority of a link source is important, they need to have authority

• Topical context is extremely important. For example, an auto parts store doesn’t get links from a lipstick site

• Where is the link placed? In the  header, footer, ads?

• External links or internal? Externals links have less bias

• Value to user – ultimately you want users to navigate to the link your placing on your site. If you take care of the user everything takes care of itself.

How Should You Think About Link Building?

• Look for sites with traffic – links should then follow

• Look for links that are authoritative and contextually relevant

• Use descriptive and diverse anchor text in your links

• Use RSS  for recurrent updated content on your site

• Be sure to watch your links as well
  • Watch for broken sources
  • Deep linking vs home page linking
  • “Nofollow links”
  • Link accessibility – ajax/javascript not crawlable

Sharad brought up the famous Link Building 101 chart to illustrate some of his points

• He says forums are good to get noticed, but know that many are nofollow

• He advocates legitimate link bait, useful content, avoid sensationalism

• Paid links and trade links are considered inherently bad, just watch the signal to noise ratio, he asks that you please be mindful of context

What is Link Spam?

Sharad gave a general example: If your site is a good site that gets links from other good sites, but your site changes hands and then your site starts to get links from a lot of malicious sites, you might get delisted. Say your site changes hands again and tries to do better, but you still go after bad links, your site ends up in a link limbo.

In regards to link spam/link exchange sometimes it works, but most times it’s just spam. Guestbooks are an easy place to get spam, watch for injected link spam in your comment system. He says Yahoo is good at ignoring links from User Generated Content portions of websites (interesting).

What Kind of Things Can You Do?

• Again, monitor a lot, use Yahoo Link Explorer, track your backlinks

• Don’t fall for link exchange spam and scams

• Don’t link to suspicious site

• Make sure you nofollow links that you have no control over

Sharad lets us know that if you’ve done all of these and still receive poor results, you can fill out a Yahoo webmaster report form and have Yahoo take a look at your site.

Chris Boggs found it interesting that Yahoo revealed that the number of inbound links helps them determine how often they crawl.

Speaking next was Ankur Choksi who is the director search technology for Ask.com.

Why Are Links Important?

• Links are the way that people traverse the web. Imagine no links between pages, typing each URL by yourself would be a painful experience.

• They are citations and referrals from one page to another, links are used as one of the important signals in ranking.

• People want to link to good quality content to enhance their user’s experience.

How Do Links Influence Rankings?

Ask.com looks at link quality, their Expert Rank algorithm looks at authoritative and topical content, and also at anchor text.

Ankur ponders, if you break your leg, you go  to health authority figure like a physical therapist or doctor, well Ask.com takes this approach to links. They ask who are the experts/or community for your site’s topics?

Quality of links are more important than quantity, a large quantity of links from low quality sites will not contribute to the page. Again, the best way to get high quality links is to create high quality page content. As always, make sure your outgoing links point to relevant resources. Don’t inadvertently hurt your site!

Ankur says that anchor text really represents the views of other people about your page. Irrelevant anchor text may devalue the link, and anchor text is also weighted based on link quality.

Things to Avoid With linking:

• Do not buy or sell links

• Excessive links between sites, it can look like a link farm, you can even be blacklisted

• Don’t have unrelated links on your page

• Don’t serve links on your page that are optimized for search engines, no cloaking

Ankur says that if you avoid these and focus on content, your site will do well.

This concluded the Search Engine Representative portion of the presentation, and it was now time for the Search Marketers to weigh in on this linking business. Would they agree with the engines that “content is king”? In their experience, has “just focusing on the user” made great rankings and pulled significant traffic? Part 2 of this post will cover linking perspectives and tactics from the search marketers

The “Fool’s Gold Link Exchange” play is a perfectly ethical tactic we employ surrounding client link-trading activities which results in holistic reciprocal promotion & traffic, happy trading partners, and massive one-way link juice building…for our clients.

When is a link a Link?
Bloggers and savvy marketing types understand that links have value on 2 important levels. Laypeople think of links solely as referral mechanisms to drive branding and traffic. SEOs are also after the “signal” each link sends to search engines regarding the value of the site we’re marketing.

The uninformed do not have this multi-layered level of awareness about links, even in light of highly visible SEM industry dialog-of-the-day regarding Google’s algorithm, which depends on evaluating linking patterns to determine the “value” of any site. (For those uninitiated, quality and quantity of inbound links to your site are crucial factors in Google’s ranking criteria.)

We find that local business link trading partners, when asked “why” they want reciprocal links, respond regarding their desire for increased site visitors, awareness, branding, etc…We’re happy to oblige and take the algorithmic equity for our client.

The Spoils go to the Informed
Though the general level of understanding is rising, nearly all local site owners we encounter think of links only as traffic building and referral devices. Link exchanges for these purposes make them happy as clams. We say GREAT. Unless website marketing amateurs study or hire an experienced search agency, they simply don’t know enough to negotiate all aspects of link exchanges. Too bad for them.

It’s sure not our job to teach the world, rather to take good care of our clients while facilitating reciprocal link local networking on our terms. We encourage our clients not to give swapped Dofollow links unless the exchange partner specifically requests it. That’s the essence of the tactic. It is highly effective and the links are often of very good quality. We see the results in organic SERPs.

Why Local Search?
First, naivety and unqualified negotiators are more pervasive phenomenas in local search. Therefore it’s much easier to find link-exchange partners who don’t understand Do/Nofollow theory. Second, local search is all about getting indexed for products and services in your specific geographic area. Local sites you exchange links with are likely to be considered relevant to your area by search engines. This tactic can help your client dominate mid-tail keyword local SERPs.

The Ethics
First, we place our DoFollow/NoFollow disclosure in the reciprocal links page privacy statement and encourage our clients’ trading partners to read it before the exchange. The language is plain as day for anyone who knows what they’re doing (and actually reads the policy) to see.

“Outbound links are for branding, traffic, site referral purposes. We are happy to share approved links and hope each link brings our exchange partners traffic. At our sole discretion links may be NoFollow, for algorithmic purposes, unless otherwise negotiated.”

When exchanging links, our client’s partners haven’t nary a clue as to the negotiable SEO currency on the table. If a trading partner knows enough to ask for link juice as part of the trade, we freely give it, drop the link, or renegotiate. If they don’t ask…tough, they should hire qualified help. It’s not like they’re assuming they’ll get the juice. They have no idea it even exists. We’ve helped clients build thousands of terrific local links by this method and never received a single complaint.

Get Links or Perish
With Universal Search pushing local listings further down vanishing organic SERPS, dancing the link building hootenanny is now more critical than ever. Our clients pay real cash for the edge our expertise brings to the table. We never assume that an inbound link procured will bring Dofollow benefits. That’s because we’re qualified to negotiate on our client’s behalf and take the time to read and understand the small print. It’s not our job to teach those we negotiate with the various value-levels of traded links.

As search marketers, it is incumbent upon us to capitalize on the market’s confusion on behalf of our clients. After all, that’s why they hire us. Maybe there is something in Google’s algorithm (or will be) to detect such patterns, but we have not seen it. In most reciprocal link deployments we dynamically rotate the Nofollow links within text throughout the site (never more than 5 at a time site-wide) so there is no overall reciprocal pattern and honestly natural. We would never advise clients to do anything which violates Google’s TOS.

It had finally registered that over half of the links we’d procured for clients would, not only cease to have value, but potentially cause penalties. Google was going door to door in a vicious pagerank-killing pogrom.

Gnashing teeth that night, it was clear that our many months of intensity, whilst delving deeper into the social media universe, would pay. I quietly thanked the stars for our team’s social media acumen, planning, and luck. With certainty the golden path was clear. The line between organic search engine optimization and social media is evaporating.

Everyone knows that the black box organic ranking machine, especially in this day of personalized search, is all about links, links, and better links. Now linking patterns need to be (or appear) honest and “natural.” Paid links screw up Google’s authority ranking system. Eeeek!

True Participation
While ad nauseam Dofollow bookmark-site Link building can be useful, the “new” SEO is to a significant extent about making friends and participating in niche’ communities like Metafilter, Mixx, Hugg, Sk*rt , and Stirr’dup. We’ve made long lists of social news sites and DoFollow blogs. Participation in comment threads about stainless cookware, music school, Chicago airport parking, bagged cereal, and Duluth hotels is mandatory. It’s hard to fake that level of participation. Bloggers, community members, and algorithms will cut you to shreds.

Client Pushback
Social media is often in the jurisdiction of the PR agency or in-house department, separate from SEM. This partitioning is sometimes a tough barrier to crack. Convincing the VP of marketing that online PR and reputation management has become a key component to being properly indexed in Google can be a difficult sell. That’s not how most companies are tooled. The thin yellow line is fear of rapid change.

Links Take Time
Link building is less and less a direct response medium. Now we engage readership over time, make loyal friends, and the links come in reward for relevancy. Think of a link for what it really is: A true recommendation from one site to another.

Link building has gone underground and techniques have to change. The majority of effective link building now must bring elements of actual value to web users.

“As the engines have improved detection of the junk, the better link builders continued to thrive while those who sold crappy services to crappy content ran for cover. At least three of the most dependable link building tactics started wobbling and in some cases failed completely in 2007: article marketing/syndication, directory submission, and paid links. It’s not that these tactics aren’t potentially still useful, but rather that the approach you will have to use for each will have to be modified, in some cases even abandoned.”
Eric Ward

Adapt or Fail
Everyone knows link building is vital for organic success. Now manufactured links are much harder to mask as they must be craftily embedded in relevant content. Personal relationships gained by authentic social media participation are one of the easiest paths to “honest” inbound linking profiles.

There is fear on the street as the yellow line between SEO and social media evaporates. Some SEO firms, not tuned to social media vibrations, may cease to exist.

Recent Notable Link Building Posts
Top 5 SEO and Link Building Challenges for 2008 Justilien Gaspard, Search Engine Watch

2008 Link Building Guide Earnersblog

No Recession For Link Building SearchEngineLand, Eric Ward

Worst Link Building Email I’ve Ever Received Loren Baker, Editor

Building Links For Fun And Profit Vanessa Fox Nude

Link Building Campaigns That Work Arnie Kuenn, ISEDB.com

Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview Sugarrae

15 Link Building Tips for New Websites Dos Dosh

What’s Your Link Building Marketing Mix? - Part 2 Eric Enge, Search Engine Watch

The Ultimate Guide to Building the Perfect Link Small Business SEM

The truth is that bloggers pioneered software and linking methods which socialized the interconnected grid of links and content. Blogging communication tools, laid over the Internet, have helped maximize the social promise of http protocol. Blog-style tools are ubiquitous in nearly all online social communities.

We build blog software hybrids to facilitate feed marketing, content management, hosting community dialog, interactions with social websites, and for blog powered online media rooms. It makes tons of sense. These pockets of functionality are easily available to mash up from open source software like WordPress and integrate easily with traditional website structures.

Most Corporate Types are Slow to Accept.
You would have thought that someone (like me) who was Creative Services Director for a Minnesota CBS affiliate, founded and directed the Interactive division of a venerable Duluth advertising agency, coded hybrid CRM and analytic software packages, placed millions of dollars of pay per click, designed hundreds of websites, and has been optimizing for 10 years MIGHT get blogs early. Nope….

Not me, I learned slowly. Like many of our clients, it took a while to understand the incredible power of managing content by posts, categories, authors, tags, blogrolls, pingbacks, trackbacks, and pages. It’s so simple. It’s so deep. It’s so relevant. Yet for the first few years of the blogging phenomena I simply did not understand the concept bloggers have been on to for years. I perceived blogs as a craze or some cyclical phase. Not true…

The Blogs Grid within the Web.
Bloggers are the ones who first figured out and taught us how to take the web “social.” Links are one of the main measures of authority on the Internet. Since a link is a recommendation search engines like Google assess the value of any given website in part by the count and quality of sites that link in. Links carry a lot of weight.

Blogs Make Giving and Receiving Links is Easy.
Whereas “hyperlinking” has always been a fundamental premise of the World Wide Web, with the advent of blogs it has never been so easy. At first in the early 90’s website management lived in the rarified domain of IT gods. Linking to another site involved CODE. The very technical skill of even creating a site was the stuff of mythical heroes. Getting a new link onto a corporate website involved memos, meetings, dreaded HTML, and took some time.

Then with the advent of WYSIWYG programs like Adobe PageMill, Front Page, Net Objects Fusion, UltraDev, GoLive, and the Dreamweaver, the “webmaster” was born. The new hybrid skill set of creative services and IT was the 1990′s model and high school students first started making websites in their bedrooms. Linking got easier.

Now Links Are Easy.
71 million people, who use blogging software that children easily handle, give out “link love” every second of every day. All social media sites and tools somehow mirror the physical world. Blogs paved the way by creating a system that morphed interlinked websites into an analogy for next-gen human interactions. if you know a site that has somthing cool to say you link to it.

Bloggers who know what to do speak to each other through pingbacks and trackbacks and hundreds of other subtle methods of leaving and finding breadcrumbs as they travel the net. Still your ability to garner and give links is a basic measure of your website’s authority. Blog software functionality is the millennial tool designed to easily do just that. Make sure that your website is plugged into the blog linking grid.

The panel was comprised of some of the finest social media minds in the world: Andrew Goodman, Principal, Page Zero Media, Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts, LLC, Rick Klau , Vice President of Publisher Services FeedBurner, and Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus Inc. [Read Full SES Coverage at SEO RoundTable]

Content is Still King
Before we start, creating compelling content (and lots of it) is what really matters. Everything having to do with blogs and feeds is about disseminating great optimized content. There are no magic bullets without content. Blogging publishes content in the most competent and organized SEO-friendly system possible. One major goal of blogs and feeds is to publish your content in a way that compels interest and entices websites to link to your site. These inbound links help your site rank higher in search engines.

SEM Clients Want Feeds and Blogs
That’s good because every website needs, at minimum, feeds. My team at aimClear has spent considerable time researching the blog solutions we help our clients deploy. This seminar featured hard-core techniques to optimize blogs and feeds. It was amazing to hear the panelists offer the same type of advice we give our clients every day. Andrew, Stephan, Sally, and Rick ROCKED the house with their hands-on structural advice regarding optimized blogs and feeds.

I sourced a lot of detailed content at this session to share with our readers in the coming days and weeks. For now, since so many of our clients ask about RSS feeds and blogs, here is a some background.

What is a Blog?
Blogs are SEO powerhouses and there is little question about it. Still, connotations associated with the word “blog tend to be diverse and colorful.” However, once demystified, it’s easy to see that the content management concept behind modern blogs like WordPress and Movable Type offer SEO-guided-missiles.

In the old days building links was a very tedious process. If you have not heard, links are the most valuable commodity on the Internet because search engines look to the quantity and quality of inbound links as a key part of evaluating whether your site will receive a top rank for a keyword. Lee Oden at Toprank has written extensivly on the benifits of blogging.

What is an RSS Feed?
RSS (really simple syndication) is a key part of blog content management. Programs like WordPress automatically “broadcast” your content’s RSS feed to those who subscribe. Other non-blog content management systems can be modified to broadcast RSS feeds. FYI: In actuality a “feed” is a little text file living on your host that that is updated every time you post content. aimClear helps our clients deploy RSS feeds from within their content management systems.

Subscribers to your feed can range from everyday people using feed readers like Google Reader or one of many others. When you see this little orange button on a website it means that the site has a feed that you can subscribe to. Your feed reader is place you can log into from any Internet enabled computer to “read” the content from whichever sites’ feeds you’ve “bookmarked” in your feed reader.

Feed Readers Save Tons of Time
If you consume a lot of content from numerous sites, this is a beautiful thing. No longer do you need to visit multiple websites to check for updates. Instead, all of your favorite sites’ content updates appear in once centralized place.

Making matters more interesting, feeds are crawled each day by feed indexing engines including Google and Yahoo. Increasingly feeds themselves are ranking in SERPs.
Importantly, using content management systems that generate optimized feeds is a great day way to generate links to a website site. Check out Bill Hartzer’s post on feeds.

I’ll be writing more about feeds and blogs in coming posts. For now I’m off to the Efficient Frontier party!

Link baiting can be a useful way to generate decent links in large numbers. Viral marketing is different and speaks to a longer term strategy which also generates links but is more prone to result in conversion to a website’s key performance indicators-like sales or information requests. In the continuum of traffic segments, viral marketing to interested communities often results in more engaged traffic which stays on the website longer because of a higher interest level.

First, it’s so good to be here. People who attend SES conferences are beautiful people. They have a seasoned and focused look about them. The marketing, advertising, and PR professionals who frequent search marketing conferences seemed measured and deep regardless of each person’s level of accomplishment. It’s so much fun to participate at SES. It’s clear from conferences like this that businesses are learning to adapt and survive the millennial transition of communities reflecting their physical world to online interactions.

People Share Information by Email.
Jennifer quoted a research project which concludes that 25% of people share business or personal financial information by email. 63% share content at least once a week and 25% share content daily. That’s right daily! 5% will not share branded content. Bummer…95% will.

The Session was Kicked off by Debra Mastaler who briefly commented on building links from relevant and authoritative sites to achieve link popularity. Writer of the Search Engine Land column Link and sensibilities, Debra focused on the importance of anchor text and the interconnectedness of SEO. She stressed remembering to do the basics to support your website by garnering links from traditional places like Chambers of Commerce and trade organizations. Don’t forget to get all of the obvious endorsements, do the basic things first. Always remember that links tell search engines that other people value your site. Links are the Internet roadmaps.

Protect yourself from Google.
Jennifer discussed diversifying to insure a website from the mythical Epic future Google Crash “If more than 25% of your site’s traffic is coming from Google you have to insure your business from Google crashing” she explained. “Links are that security. Diversify where your traffic is coming from so that you are not relying on the search engines.” It is clear that regardless of any future search and tag mechanisms, the people seeking information will not change.

Buzz Works
People don’t trust advertisements on the Internet. Yet somehow we’re willing to trust total strangers giving us information about products. By using creativity and choosing the channels carefully viral marketer plants viral seeds to grow and propagate. Unlike traditional paid media placement channels the cost of a viral marketing campaign is mostly in the creative. In fact the primary cost is in the development of the idea and determining where to plant the viral seeds.

Traffic generated by blogger-brand-evangelists and news-seekers is made up of site visitors who tend to be more engaged than segments of traffic generated from other channels like paid search. When I pointed out that “it’s all the same money” Jennifer responded by saying that even if you’re giving away free money (by couponing and such as part of a viral link baiting campaign) advertisers are finding they can get “a lot more bang for their buck then from traditional paid channels because the traffic is highly engaged and spends more time on the site than other segments.” Technorati offers an API call that queries a search string you specify. This can be used to keep you apprised anytime someone has just blogged about you about a topic which matters to you-including yourself or your client. 

i -poop
Jenifer quipped several times that “Steve Jobs could poop in a box and if he slapped an i in front of it (i-poop) people would buy the product in droves. However for the rest of us, not just any idea will do for viral marketing. The SES session on viral link baiting and viral marketing provided insight, tips, techniques, and perspective on creative link building.

Of particular interest are the differences in objectives between the two link-thinks. Link baiting is about the links themselves which are required to demonstrate authority to search engines like Google. Viral marketingis about a longer term approach to driving engaged folks who are candidates to become die-hard fans while your site attains links at the same time. If you ever get a chance to see Jennifer Laycock speak take advantage of it.