Strategies to Spend Money & Earn ROI from Link Campaigns (without buying links)

Posted by randfish

Last week at Pubcon Las Vegas, I presented on How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Effort with fellow panelists Roger Montti (Martinibuster), Aaron Wall (SEOBook) and Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl). I was a bit of an odd choice for this discussion, as I’d only recently announced SEOmoz’s Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads, but Pubcon’s organizers decided it would be interesting to have a divergent point-of-view.

Below is my presentation, which covers the perspective I come from and why I’m so risk-averse as well as strategies I recommend to capture value from investing in link acquisition campaigns:

Pubcon 2009 Paid Links

Not surprisingly I had a lot of people talk to me (and email me) after the presentation and express some really valuable opinions and questions. The presentations started late due to a misfunctioning projector, meaning there was no time for formal Q+A. I thought I’d take the opportunity in this post to address some of those missed questions.

Do you ever recommend link buying for any site? What about hyper-competitive industries?

Because of my distaste for risk of any kind when it comes to Google’s webspam team, my answer is consistent – no. I don’t ever suggest that businesses buy links from brokers or in the form of link ads that carry the primary intent of boosting a site’s ranking. To be fair, many of my colleagues who practice SEO in competitive industries (dating, gaming, pharmaceutical, real estate, e-commerce, etc.) don’t agree and do engage in buying links to boost their rank. I even know folks at Fortune 500s who use link brokers successfully for specific pages and targeted keywords (this group is probably in the lowest risk category).

Despite these examples and my respect for my colleagues, whenever I’m asked, I’m going to give the same reply – it’s my belief that in the long run, your money will be better spent on link acquisition that runs no risk of being flagged as manipulative by Google. The penalties and problems of link buying simply outweigh the benefits in my mind, so while I have no problem with paid links from a moral, ethical or legal standpoint (nofollow is most definitely not a way to disclose advertising to consumers as per the FTC’s guidelines), the pragmatist in me says link buying isn’t the way to success at Google.

What about directories that require a payment?

The short answer is – it depends. I’d wager a lot of money that some directories which do require payments pass great link equity. These include sites like:

• The Yahoo! Directory
• The Better Business Bureau Directory
• SEMPO’s Member Directory
• Apple’s Web Apps Directory

Then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum of directories that exist primarily for the purpose of selling PageRank. Google took action against many of these a couple years back and I suspect they continue to identify and discount their links as new ones crop up. In 2007, I wrote a lengthy post on What Makes a Good Directory and I’d still stand by nearly all of that today.

The message here is that just because a site requires payment to get a link doesn’t make it a “paid link” that Google will penalize or discount. As with many things in life, SEO and the web, there are shades of gray and nuances that require paying attention. If stuff like this were simple, SEO would be, too, and we know that’s not the case.

If I see my competitors engaging in link buying, how can I compete if I don’t do it, too?

I think a big misnomer with link analysis comes up when people scroll through a list of their competition’s links via something like Yahoo! Site Explorer. There’s no metrics indicating whether the link is passing juice, no metric for trustworthiness or quality, just a notation that a link exists on the page. Even if you’re using something more advanced like Linkscape, there’s nothing to say which links Google counts and which they don’t. You can easily get pulled into the idea that paid links are what’s propping up the competition’s rankings, when in fact, it’s a few great natural links that are doing all the heavy lifting.

I remember a site clinic several years back featuring a Google’s webspam chief, Matt Cutts. He was reviewing a site’s link profile on stage using an internal tool and commented that while Google saw several hundred links to the site, only three (yes 3 out of hundreds!) were passing link equity. Cearly, the search giant does a tremendous amount of filtering on the web’s link graph, so don’t presume to be sure which links are passing value.

Even if you feel very confident that paid links are winning the battle for your archnemesis, I recommend taking the low-risk road. In the long run, they’re likely to get penalized/devalued and you’re likely to overtake them with a link profile that’s clean and continually increasing in value.

Where do you draw the line between money that’s spent to acquire a link indirectly (as with event sponsorship, ads that turn into links, etc.)

This gets at the crux of the issue, but I think I’ve got a reasonably good methodology for determining which links requiring funds fit with Google’s guidelines and which violate them. I like these three questions:

1. Does the organization offering the link tout SEO, PageRank, customizable anchor text or Google rankings as either a portion or the whole of the benefit you’ll receive by paying this money?
2. Does the money go towards little else besides the link itself?
3. Does the organization/website provide links via this acquisition methodology (whether that’s an event sponsorship, a charitable donation, an advertising relationship, etc.) to the more aggressive side of the SEO/web marketing field (niches like porn, pills, casino, legal, real estate, etc.) often with anchor text heavy links?

If the answer to any of these is a definite “yes,” the source is likely to fit into Google’s “suspicious” pile and possibly will lose the ability to pass link equity in the future (or already has).

How can you be sure that linkbait and viral content won’t be treated the same as paid links by Google in the future?

Just a couple months back, I wrote about Why Linkbait is a Tactic the Search Engines Will Always Value, so it’s probably not worth re-hashing here. Certainly, there are ways to be manipulative about virtually anything in the link acquisition world, and Google may well take action against some forms of these, but I believe natural links acquired through great content are going to stand the test of time (and are likely to benefit from future ranking signals, whatever they may be).

This is just Google FUD – we shouldn’t let them dictate how to do our jobs!

But we already do! The only reason we try to build these links, research the right keywords, create and submit XML sitemaps, etc. is because Google is dictating the way their crawling, processing and ranking systems work. In their ecosystem – the one that drives 85%+ of all search traffic on the web – there are guidelines, best practices, rules and regulations. If you want to play on their court, you’ve got to abide by those rules or be ready to face the consequences. I’m not ready for those consequences and thus, have low risk tolerance and the attitude you’re reading about.

None of this is to say that a more risk-heavy appetite and more gray-black hat methodologies for link acquisition aren’t worth trying; just make sure you do it on sites you’re willing to get tossed out of the playground.

As always, I’m looking forward to the conversation in the comments.

Google Link: Command – Busting the Myths

Posted by randfish

I’m a big Google fan – my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I’ve even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I’m shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO, webdev and technology industries who haven’t realized this.

Here’s what Google themselves have to say on the matter:

You can perform a Google search using the link: operator to find a sampling of links to any site. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list web pages that have links pointing to the Google home page. Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page URL.

To see a much larger sampling of links to any verified site in Webmaster Tools:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Your site on the web, click Links to your site.

Note: Not all links to your site may be listed. This is normal.

Here’s what Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) had to say in a video on the subject:

The short answer is that historically, we only had room for a very small percentage of backlinks because web search was the main part and we didn’t have a ton of servers for link colon queries and so, we have doubled or increased the amount of backlinks that we show over time for link colon, but it is still a sub-sample. It’s a relatively small percentage. And I think that that’s a pretty good balance, because if you just automatically show a ton of backlinks for any website then spammers or competitors can use that to try to reverse engineer someone’s rankings.

Google themselves is telling us not to pay too much attention to the link command, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping folks. Let the myth busting commence.

Myth #1 – The Google Link Command Returns Accurate Numbers

Nope. Not even close. Google themselves say the numbers aren’t accurate and that they’re showing a small sub-sample. The numbers show this as well. Check your link counts with the Google link command vs. the number inside Google’s Webmaster Tools (when you verify your account, you’ll see them shown). Here’s the stats for SEOmoz, for example:

Google’s link command claims 1,590 links. Let’s see what Webmaster Tools says:

Hmm… 381,403 seems slightly larger than 1,590. In fact, the link command is showing me 0.4% of what Webmaster Tools says exists. Running this analysis on another few domains that we have access to in Webmaster Tools, I saw numbers ranging from 0.1% to 4.4% (meaning there’s not even any consistency between in the percentage of links from the two counts). 

Myth #2 – The Google Link Command Returns Important Links

Tragically, a long time ago (pre-2004), Google did show only important links via the link: command, which created the myth that exists to this day. In fact, the links shown in the link: command have no particular importance or relevance. They are truly a random sample, including links that are nofollowed, links from pages that have had PageRank penalties applied to them as well as links that do pass link juice and value.

Myth #3 – The Google Link Command Returns Links in Some Kind of Order

No one in SEO has been able to show any ordering of any kind in the Google link: command’s results. Important, well-known websites may be listed on page 2 or page 20 of the results, and it is likewise with spam, scrapers and low quality sites that Google’s likely not counting. In Site Explorer and the web results, Yahoo! appears to do some type of ordering, tending to show more important links, pages and sites before less important ones (though not with great consistency). Unfortunately, many SEOs suspect that, should Microsoft’s deal to power Yahoo! with Bing results go through, Yahoo! is unlikely to maintain their own web index (and thus, link, linkdomain and site explorer will be gone).

As exemplified above, Google appears to be very random indeed when showing link: results.

Myth #4 – The Google Link Command Returns a Numerically Representative Count of Links

This is possibly the myth that’s most disturbing of all, primarily because so many operators in the SEO field belive it and track the link: command count as a reliable, useful metric. Nothing could be further from the truth – and here’s some data to help back it up:

Root Domain	Google Link: # (external + internal?)	Yahoo! Linkdomain # (external only)	Linkscape Count (external only)
Yahoo.com	3,650	331,000,000	201,681,667
Recovery.gov	7,550	328,000	155,780
Facebook.com	165,000	567,000,000	116,748,934
Real.com	11,400	4,600,000	5,596,165
Adobe.com	51,200	124,000,000	78,550,468
Reddit.com	18,300	128,000,000	29,071,291
Twitter.com	224,000	515,000,000	132,528,763
Salon.com	12,300	3,420,000	1,535,342
SEOmoz.org	1,590	957,000	486,405
NYTimes.com	7,990	21,200,000	12,884,758
TurkeyDayRun.com	3	68	22
Ninme.com	539	42,000	3,149
Burgerking.com	942	106,000	23,761
Alaskaair.com	1,010	44,000	38,358
Smashingmagazine.com	8,730	1,130,000	592,054
Smithsonian.org	4,860	25,700	14,545

I collected the data above spur of the moment, so I won’t try to claim great statistical integrity. However, looking at Google’s link: command results, the best I can say is that Google has some relationship to the others within 1-2 orders of magnitude, though they may be directionally inaccurate much of the time as well. Just look at the NYTimes.com for example – Google claims they have 2/3rds the links that Salon.com has, yet Yahoo! and Linkscape agree that, in fact, NYTimes.com has 6X+ Salon.com’s link total.

These are not numbers you want to hang your hat (or any crucial business decisions) on.

Myth #5 – The Google Link Command Tracks Accurately Over Time

Unfortunately, I don’t have data points I can show, but our observations over time indicate that Google’s link count in Webmaster Tools might rise, along with the Yahoo! and Linkscape link counts, yet the Google link: command will show lower numbers. The reverse is sometimes also the case. Without directional consistency, even when compared against their own counts, it’s very hard to take the Google link: count seriously.

Myth #6 – The Google Link Command is Up to Date

Most SEOs & webmasters have noticed that the Google link: counts update infrequently, inconsistently and most often in correlation with toolbar PageRank updates (another data point I’ll need to takcle in a future post). These updates from Google occur every 2-10 months with little warning about when they’re coming or have happened. If you watch sites like closely, they’ll report many of these as they occur.

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The next time someone tells you their Google link: command numbers as a metric for SEO, competitive analysis or anything else, make sure they read this post. Google’s not nearly as up-front with the information as they should be (honestly, removing the link command would save so much time and effort for poor site owners who get needlessly confused), but hopefully as a community, we can help build more awareness around this issue.

New & Interesting Insights Into Google Rankings & Spam from Pubcon

Posted by randfish

Tonight’s post comes via the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas and is likely of interest to many in the webmaster and search communities. Today, during the Interactive Site Review Session, Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, along with Vanessa Fox of NinebyBlue and Derrick Wheeler of Microsoft took thorough dives into a number of sites. The session was well coverd on Twitter, and in live form by Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable.

Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox on the Site Review Panel (photo credit: davecolorado.com)

A few points in particular stood out and are worthy of coverage:

• Blocking Internet Archive may be a Negative Signal
  Matt Cutts noted that spammers very frequently block archive.org from crawling/storing their pages and few reputable sites engage in this. Thus, it’s a potential spam signal to search engines. SEO Theory has a good writeup on when and why there may be legitimate reasons to do this, but webmasters seeking to avoid scrutiny may want to take heed.
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• Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings
  Maile Ohye actually mentioned this at SMX East in New York, but Matt Cutts repeated it again today. In a nutshell – while slow page load times won’t negatively impact your rankings, fast load times may have a positive effect. This comes on a day when the Google Chrome blog introduced their new SPDY research project. I’m particularly happy about this news, because it’s also true that load times have a positive second-order effect on SEO. Pingomatic recently published some excellent research on load times from Akamai noting the expectations of users for faster web browsing have doubled in the past 2 years. In addition, fast loading pages are, in my opinion, considerably more likely to earn links, retweets and other forms of sharing than their slow-loading peers. This tool from Pingdom is a great place to start testing your own site.
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• It May be Easier to Walk Away from Banned Domains
  Sites that Google’s webspam team has severely penalized or banned entirely from the index can be very difficult to re-include, and thus, Matt suggested that “walking away” and “starting over” may be a more prudent strategy. In my opinion, this is largely due to link profile issues – if your site has a “spammy” link profile, it’s tough to ask an engineer to sort out the wheat from the chaffe manually (or algorithmically) and stop counting only the bad links. Thus, re-consideration requests may not be as effective a use of time as registering a new site and trying to re-build a more trusted presence.
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• Repetition of Keywords in Internal Anchor Text (particularly in footers) is Troubling
  During a specific site’s review, Matt noted that keyword usage in the anchor text of many internal links, particularly in the footer of a website, is seen as potentially manipulative. Yahoo!’s search engineers have noted this in the past and we at SEOmoz have seen specific cases where removal of keyword-stuffed internal links from a footer had immediate impacts on Google rankings (removing what appeared to be large negative ranking penalties sitewide).
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• Having Multiple Sites Targeting Subsections of the Same Niche can be Indicative of Spam
  Matt Cutts today mentioned that “having multiple sites for different areas of the same industry can be a red flag to Google.” Though Googlers have mentioned this before, today’s site review panel brought renewed attention to both Google’s ability and proclivity for carefully considering not only an individual site, but all the other sites owned by that registrant/entity/person. Given Google’s tremendous amount of data on web usage behavior, many SEOs suspect that they track beyond simply domain registration records.

I also presented at Pubcon today – on a panel called Linkfluence: How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk (live SERoundtable coverage here) - as the counterpoint speaker (on why not to buy links). I’ll try to have that presentation in written format early next week on the blog.

p.s. I was asked by a large number of attendees at the conference about our venture capital fundraising experience. I expect to be able to write about that very soon and certainly appreciate all the support.

p.p.s. For those who are interested, my brother, Evan Fishkin (who works at Portent Interactive) had his head shaved by Google’s webspam chief. On a personal note, I must say I was particularly impressed with Matt’s ability to shave a head without nicks or cuts, and his foresight in bringing proper equipment. Unfortunately, I’m not fully briefed on why this occurred, but I do know that my little brother was in terrible need of a trim (photo of my shocked observance of the event here & more photos/video here).

The Search it is a Changin

The Search it is a Changin
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Currently, it seems like there is a lot going on in the world of search that is pretty exciting for the typical user. Today I would like to point out a few changes I’ve noticed and what they might mean for your SEM and SEO efforts.

Visual Search – images seem to be getting more and more important in the search world. I don’t know if it’s a function of the fact that no one likes to read of if images are being used digitally (say as phone wallpaper) much as they were in print fashion years ago. It’s always been a good idea to optimize your images online, say with a file name and alt attribute that describe the content, but with Google’s changes to their image search engine it’s probably more useful than ever. Also, check out how Bing is displaying images with it’s Visual Search feature – this is a Bing search for Pulitzer winning fiction

A Feisty Competitor – And speaking of Bing, depending upon the research you choose Bing and proposed combination of Bing results for Yahoo search could start to put a dent in the once thought impossible Google search share. Bing users are finding the comparison shopping and travel, including airfare prediction feature very attractive. It’s certainly time to plug in and make sure your sitemap and other functions are playing well with Bing

Would you like a biscotti with that? – Lastly, Google is poised to release an update to its search algorithm so substantial they are making the rounds promoting it and allowing developers to play with it to experiment with results. The update is dubbed caffeine. The big promise is better results, faster results and real time results. The search engine optimization community always get very nervous during these updates but many signs point to the fact that if you produce lots of high quality content you’ll be fine. Although, take note (and I’ve been suggesting this for some time), social media content seems to becoming even more important for ranking purposes. I do also think that page load will get more emphasis so I would run your pages through the YSlow tool to get suggestions on speeding up page loads. You can play with search results in caffeine right now and see how your site will fare in a split screen mode of Google vs Google Caffeine Rank Tool. Google’s search voice Matt Cutts also shares views on Caffeine

Linkscape’s Best Link Building Tool Yet

Posted by randfish

Linkscape has always been a project with a lot of promise. Building a crawl of the WWW that can expose link data in interesting ways, calculating metrics in the ways search engines do and surfacing potential SEO opportunities are all a part of that, but it’s a lot of work and time to get all the potential functionalities into real-life tools. Last week, Linkscape took a giant leap forward in usefulness with Nick’s new Competitive Link Finder.

Here’s how it works:

1. Takes a pair of inputs – your website and the websites of 2-5 competing sites (or sites in the same sector)
2. Uses a link graph of 443 Billion Links to find link intersects between those pages (URLs that have links to 2+ of the sites you’ve entered but may not have links to your site)
3. Exposes a list of domains, with each linking page underneath along with metrics about those pages and sites.

Getting started is really simple. Just enter your own site, plus up to 5 competitors and the tool will find pages on the web that point to two or more of those pages, then list those in descending order of importance. The tool currently lives inside our SEOmoz Labs (which houses a ton of our best stuff) at http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect. We don’t have fancy graphics or great UI in Labs, but the functionality takes center stage:

The results look like this:

For each domain that’s mentioned, you can see a breakout list of the pages that point to those URLs, a checkmark next to the domains you’ve already earned a link from and data on the importance of the domains and pages (Domain mozRank and mozRank, respectively) listed. When you click the number of links from any given site, the tool surfaces a list of those exact pages, making it easy to see where and how they’ve earned those links. The features are just killer:

• The tool ignores nofollow links, so you’re only seeing pages that have actual, live links to at least two of your competitors
• As our metrics (DmR, mR, DmT, etc.) have improved over time, the results really do feel like they’re ranked in order of importance/potential value
• The data is extremely comprehensive – since Linkscape crawls a dramatic portion of the “important” web, the probability of finding great links is very high
• When SEOs talk about “hubs” from the Hubs & Authorities link model of the web, that’s exactly what this tool is finding. Thus, you may see even more benefit from attaining these links than the raw metrics might indicate
• The tool includes pagination, so you can see hundreds, sometimes thousands of potential link sources and every new competitor or site you add is a new opportunity to discover more link resources
• Don’t just limit yourself to narrow competitors – plug in any site in your field that’s roughly related and you can find the intersection of potential links; the possibilities for finding links with this tool are limited only by your ability to plug in new sites and pages

The Competitive Link Finder is currently available only to PRO members (who have unlimited access for now). However, tonight, we’re opening the link finder to all SEOmoz members; just log in to your account and for the next 24 hours (until 11:55pm Pacific, Thursday September 2nd) you can try out the tool yourself.

QUICK WARNING: We haven’t exposed this much Linkscape data to so many people in the past, so things may slow down a bit. If you’re finding the tool takes a few minutes to run, don’t panic – the web is really, really big, so it’s a bit complex to run data calculations like this

I’m a fairly tough critic, but I have to say that every time I’ve used this tool myself or shown it off in the last few weeks, people have been incredibly impressed. Nick, Sarah and I spent the latter half of last week on Sand Hill Road pitching VCs, and I can honestly say that even they were really, really amazed by how high quality and useful the results are. Link building is, according to most SEOs, the hardest task we collectively engage in. I think the work here from Nick (built on the backbone of Linkscape that he and Ben developed) is finally making that process an order of magnitude more do-able.

p.s. I’d like to call out some of the other tools on the web which also leverage the concepts of link intersection. While I’m a personal fan of this one, there are some other good resources for those seeking link co-occurrence. The first tool of this variety used link data from a number of search engines back in the 1990′s (I believe it was operated under WebsiteGarage which shut down in 2002). Jim Boykin’s WeBuildPages also featured a free tool that used Yahoo! link data (now available under their Ninjas program), as did the software package WebCEO (though it appears to no longer be included). SEOBook (of which I’m a big fan) also released a Hub Finder tool in 2005, which was almost certainly the best iteration to date (note: I’m a paying member at SEOBook). Like Newton, we’ve been very lucky to see far by standing on the shoulders of giants, and I remain indebted to the terrific community around the SEO world.

p.p.s. Sadly, we’ve had to turn off access, but more than 30,000 reports have been run just today! If you’d like to try the tool, PRO is the way to go.

This Week in Search for 9/3/09

Posted by Sam Niccolls

Henry Ford said that if he had asked his customers what they wanted before he built the Model T, they would have said they wanted a faster horse. The reality is few people are industry leaders. Most try to make faster horses. But had the need in 1907 been for web analytics and not transportation, Avinash Kaushik would have been a likely candidate to put America on wheels. So prompted by something Avinash said in a blog post earlier this week, here are some analytics quotes that’ll get the ole pistons firing.

Avinash Kaushik Quotes that Belong on Hallmark Cards:

• Tips for eCommerce websites: From site architecture to product interlinking, Everett Sizemore’s post is a shopping cart of tips and tricks that eCommerce marketers shouldn’t abandon.

• How search engines might look at link structure: Building off Microsoft research Bill Slawski articulates his hypothesis on how he thinks the engines use link block analysis.

• Bryan Eisenberg: social media is not a message: Marketers may be focusing on social media, but tweets and status updates are not substitutes for conversion funnels and clear calls to action.

• Seth Godin: comparing your business to the status quo: The best airport restaurants are those that compare themselves to other restaurants, not other airports. The lesson here is simple yet poignant: if your customers crave better food, don’t be afraid to go gourmet, even if your competition is happy serving McLeftovers.

• Robots exclusion protocol tutorial: For those looking to learn more about robots files, Bing’s post on robots exclusion protocols is informative, as well as digestible for non-technical folks.

• Rand talks about the history & future of SEOmoz: In a 30 minute video interview with Gabriel Weinberg, Rand shares a personal and introspective look at both the history of SEOmoz, as well as next steps for the company.

• Good sales people have expensive hobbies: According to Quota Crush you can also find out how good a salesperson is by looking at how expensive their hobbies are.

• Microsoft hired gun takes on Google: Qi Lu never played for the Washington Generals, but he knows about being runner up. For over a decade Lu has tried to beat Google, a mission the former Head of Yahoo Search now continues at Microsoft.

• Submitting a Sitemap on Bing: In June Bing rolled out Sitemap.xml support, but if you’re looking to create, submit, or validate a Sitemap with Bing, the post on their webmaster blog is a great tutorial.

• Buy happiness through memories, not objects: Why do expensive things not make people happy? Hint: it’s the same reason you can’t feel your underwear.

• Does Google know you own your website?: Michael Gray’s take is that both the social graph and XFN links are likely each ways that Google is making ownership associations across domains.

• Google gear (and not the browser extension): Who knew how big the Google store was? From t-shirts and hats to lava lamps and yoga balls there are many ways for you (and your toddler) to get Googley.

From actionable seminar re-caps to ethical SEO debates, there were many fantastic YOUmoz posts this week. Apparently dummerboy9000 was not the only mozzer who read Jen’s post about creating great UGC blog posts and noticed that YOUmoz links are followed.

1. SEOmoz Training Seminar Takeaways by Whitespark
   
2. How I got 200 Backlinks for Free by Trafikant
3. Extreme Local Optimization Put to the Test by Rstellers
4. Standing Out in the Crowd by Sly-grr
5. The Ethics of Search Engine Marketing by Thomas M. Schmitz
   
6. My Twitter Experiment at SEOmoz Training by KitsapKing
7. Immersion at the SEOmoz Day Spa by erikellsworth

Competitive Link Research with the Linkscape Index

Posted by Nick Gerner

Just before the SEOmoz PRO Seminar, over the weekend, we updated the Linkscape index.  This is great timing because we’re also unveiling (to PRO members only, sorry free members) the prototype for a new tool!  We’re calling it our competitive link finder, powered by Linkscape.  But Tom Schmitz was good enough to explain things in a blog post some weeks back.

But before I dive into the new tool, as is traditional, some numbers:

• URLs: 39 billion
• Root Domains: 55 million
• Subdomains: 208 million
• Links: 443 billion

The sharp members of our audience will recognize that this index is, in fact, smaller than our last.  Our index size is varying from update to update as we tune quality vs coverage.  And this creates some issues around historical tracking.  Believe me, we are working on the issue, stay tuned for more information around this scenario.

More interesting is an Index Quality Study we finished just before this update.  From that study two things are immediately interesting to me.

First, we estimate that between 60 and 70% of what Y!SE might give you (including no follows, duplicate links) are in our index today (the small one, remember?).  Moreover, we estimate that nearly 50% of what Y!SE will give you, we could too, but we filter out as duplicates, nofollows, or otherwise less important than other data we’ve got in our top 3000 links.

Next we’ve gotten a lot of feedback about how mozRank matches intuitive understanding.  Sure it’s a 10 point scale, similar to Google Toolbar PageRank, but often people are finding it’s off from what they’re expecting.  This is because of the data we’ve been optimizing our index for:

In the past we’ve been concentrating on a more or less random sample of pages users might care about (the red bars).  As it turns out, you guys care a lot more about important pages and want mozRank to be focused at describing the authority of these pages (the blue bars).  So we’ve dramatically shifted the focus of mozRank toward these pages.  Hopefully you should get a better experience out of mozRank and mozTrust for these high authority pages and sites.

We have more data for partners and power users.  PM me if you’re interested.

Finally, here’s the new competitive link tool. (I know you guys already took a peek at it!)  The idea is to identify authoritative sites and communities you could get links from, but don’t already.

What we do is take your site, and up to five related sites (maybe competitors).  From those we find all the links the related sites have, and find the common ones.  From that we create a check-list.  These are the big important sites your industry is engaging with, but you aren’t.

Of course, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to get some of these endorsements too.  I mean, you’ve got great content, products, tools, and services.  Users want that stuff.  Google, et al. want to deliver those search results.

So go check out your latest updated data, our new tool, and stay tuned for a Linkscape FAQ adapted from my PRO training slides.  That’s a little something for those of you who couldn’t make it to the seminar

The New Marketer’s Toolbox

The New Marketer’s Toolbox

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

More than once those that follow what I do have asked me how I seem to get so much done in a day. I have to admit that I get a lot of help from the man behind the curtain and from you my readers and subscribers. That’s the part that many don’t see, but the rich set of, often free, tools out there now make it much easier to run your business and increase your productivity.

I use a power set of tools throughout the day to write, collaborate, bookmark, filter, find and conduct commerce. Here is my current list of favorites, although like so much on the Internet, some of these could change in the blink of an eye.

Google Alerts – Free service from Google allows you to conduct customer searches for your brand, competitors, industry mentions, and journalists and have any mention of these terms online sent to your email inbox on a daily or as it happens basis. Key tool for monitoring your reputation in real time but it can also serve as a great client relationship building tool as well.

Central Desktop – I use this tool to collaborate with providers and clients alike. The set of features and flexibility from this tool is incredible. I was a hard core Basecamp fan, and still am, but Central Desktop just does so much more. You can manage projects, teams and schedules, but my favorite use is the built in WYSIWYG wiki editor. I use this to build web based operations manuals and document processes for my team.

Google Reader – I subscribe to and scan and read about 100 blogs and think you should too. I get some great ideas, hear about the next new thing, and find tools like I ‘ve listed here by adhering to this practice. Google Reader puts them all in one place and is very mobile browser friendly so I can jump on the site and read a few blogs any time I’m standing in line.

TweetDeck - This desktop application makes it very easy to keep up with what I want to follow on twitter. I create searches for key terms and form groups of people I want to follow closely. The tool also allows you to RT, tweet, DM, follow and unfollow directly from the interface. A mobile app is available as well.

Firefox – Firefox is, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, simply a browser, but it’s so much more due to the fact that you can extend its functionality through plug-ins and add-ons. I use it subscribe, blog, bookmark, filter and aggregate much of what I find online all day. I use it to help with web design, SEO and competitive analysis.

Flickr -In addition to optimizing and sharing images online I use the Creative Commons Licensing of images on Flickr to grab great photos for my daily blog posts. (I wrote about how to use Flickr for blog images here)

Snapz Pro X – This $29 software sits in the background and allows me to do screen grabs and video screencasts with the push of a few keys. There are free programs that can do some of this but the added editing and file format options of this program make it worth the money. I’m always adding screenshots in my blog posts and PowerPoint presentations.

Adium – I’m a pretty big fan of IM for internal office use as well as to use with my key collaborators. Adium is nice as it allows me to communicate with people using IM no matter if they are on Yahoo, AOL, Skype, or GTalk.

ScreenFlow Pro – Another paid program but this is simply the easiest, yet feature rich, video screen capture program I have ever used. I use it to turn many of my web and offline presentations into short movies to share on YouTube.

su.pr - This is a my tool of choice for much of my tweeting. When I use su.pr to post a tweet with a link it shortens the link bu also sets up a rich set of tracking so that I can view how many view, retweets and mentions the tweet received. In addition, because the tool is part of the StumbleUpon network it gives me the opportunity to receive or send traffic from this network to the pages I link to.

Email Center Pro – This tool allows me to create mailboxes for departments of information, such as sales, service, media requests, etc. and then, if I choose, assign emails to those addresses to various internal and external resources to address. I can create responses to many common questions and allow anyone to interact from that department. In addition, I can see the entire archive of any of the discussion threads that might occur in any conversation from a dashboard. Great customer service tool.

Jott – This tool allows me to use my phone to “jott” a message that is transcribed and sent to my email. I use this all of the time when I am driving along and am hit with a thought for a blog post. Additionally, you can set-up groups and contacts on Jott so you can send anyone you set-up emails via your voice messages. You can post appointments to Google Calendar and, if you speak very slowly and use simple words, post tweets.

SimpleNote – Every morning I make a to-do list based on what I want to get done that day. I’ve been doing this for years and it keeps me productive. I started using note pads but now I use SimpleNote on my laptop because it is simple (duh) and it syncs to an online page and my phone so I can have access to my daily list no matter where and how I choose to access it.

WordPress – There are many ways to create web sites and blogs but I just love WordPress. In addition to being one of the simplest ways to create and manage all your web pages and content, the developer community that creates add-ons, themes and tutorials is hard to beat. I encourage most businesses to use it for their entire site, it’s that good.

Google Analytics – Tracking traffic, trends, searches and conversions is a necessary and basic marketing tactic if you want to grow your business. Google’s free analytics package is a no brainer and can give you so much feedback you’ll wonder how you lived without it. Take the time to read and understand everything it can do and you will get even more. Combine it with Site Optimizer and you can begin to do the slightly more sophisticated A/B split testing and find out how to really fine tune your web site.

InfusionSoft – I use Infusionsoft to run the CRM, ecommerce, email marketing and affiliate tracking aspects of my business. There are individual tools that do each of these functions quite well (In fact I also use ACT!, SwiftPage and Vertical Response), but Infusionsoft is the one tool that brings all of the functions under one roof. It’s not for everyone, but it is a nice tool that keeps getting better.

10 Reasons to Submit to YOUmoz

Posted by jennita

Have you been thinking about submitting to YOUmoz lately, but you’re not sure what the benefits are? Or perhaps you have a killer post in your head but are afraid to take the next step. Whatever the reason is that you’ve been holding back, I have 10 reasons why you should get yourself in gear and get that post written and submitted!

1. Reach tens of thousands of SEOs
   Our subscribers for both the main blog and YOUmoz continue to climb. Every month the numbers grow, just think about how many people will see your work. This is a great way to make yourself known in the industry.
   
   
2. Get great feedback
   People will leave comments and help/suggestions about your issue, or even ideas you hadn’t considered before.
3. Good posts get page views
   If you write a successful post, it can generate lots of traffic. For example, the great post that Aaron Hunter wrote comparing Joomla and WordPress is still getting over 1,000 page views a month and he wrote the post over a year ago.
   • 6,959 page views from January through July.
   • 11,468 page views since date of post (January 2008)
     
4. Get smart SEOs visiting your links
   SEOmoz visitors clickthrough rate is tremendously high compared to other blogs and sites in the field. When we link, people click, so if you want eyeballs, make something compelling. Check out how many members we have on our site, that’s a lot of people looking at your work!
   
5. Badge of Honor
   Our bar is set high – just to make it to YOUmoz is tough; getting on the main blog is a real challenge. Our readers’ expectations are high and we reject 10 submissions for every 1 we accept. It’s a badge of honor and, in many cases, resume-worthy, particularly in the search world.

   As an example, check out chenry‘s post on CAPTCHAs’ Effect on Conversion Rates. It was so popular, it was moved to the main blog, and ended up with 58 thumbs up, 0 thumbs down (a feat I never manage myself!) and 73 total comments.

   His entry isn’t super long, but it is to the point, he shows graphics and pulls the reader into the post quickly.

6. Get a job!
   Yes, people come to SEOmoz looking for SEOs to hire (see the marketplace, for example). If you can show your knowledge through written word, you are likely to get some calls/emails.
7. mozPoints
   When you reach 100 mozPoints, the nofollow is removed from your profile and if you reach 150+ within one month you could get a free SEOmoz PRO membership for a month!

   YOUmoz is the best way to earn those points because content gets more thumbs than comments (most of the time). Plus every time your YOUmoz entry gets posted on the site, you get 10 mozPoints, plus whatever thumbs up that post receives. AND if your post gets promoted to the main blog, you’ll get an additional 15 mozPoints.

8. Beat Rand!
   Many of the best YOUmoz writers have authored posts with more thumbs than Rand’s posts – just think how you can flaunt it in his sad, bearded face!
   
9. Rank!
   If you want to get top rankings in the engines with a piece of your content, but don’t have the appropriate domain for it, SEOmoz has a lot of juice and ability to compete. While we don’t allow parasite hosting, we do have YOUmoz
   
10. Umm… you get a frickin’ live link!
    We have some serious sweet link juice floating around these pages, why not take advantage. All submissions are subject to our editorial approval of course (more on this below).

What we’re looking for when reviewing YOUmoz entries

The fact is, if you submit a post that is clear, concise, well written and thought out, your entry will more than likely be approved. We are happy to post beginner articles along with more seasoned posts. Often times if a post is good, but needs some extra help to make it great, we’ll work with you to get the post just right.

Use images!
Photos and images break up the content and help make it more readable. They give your post more “oomph” and  can help you make your point more clear. Plus, great posts with graphics do really well.

For example, just look what feedthebot did back in 2007: How to put Google custom site search into your current website design. He wrote a post about integrating Google custom site search with your current web design and included some great visuals, which made the post engaging. As a result, since the post was published in May 2007, he has gotten over 38,486 page views.

Come up with some sort of unique and relevant image that goes with your post. If the post is short, then one image will do, but if it’s a big longer,  break it up with multiple images. Some examples:

• Screenshots with areas highlighted
• Charts or graphs
• Illustrations
• Photos

Here are a couple recent examples of good use of images/graphics in a post:

Unique Content
We search for duplicate content and if we see the same post on another site, your entry will be automatically rejected.  So it’s more beneficial for you to only submit unique content.

Spell check and Grammar check
We read through every entry and will make changes as needed. However if the post is filled with misspellings and grammar changes that would take us a long time to fix, then your post probably won’t get approved. Depending on how good it is we may send it back to you and ask you to redo it, but only if it’s “knock your socks off” good.

When it comes down to it, have fun with your post and don’t hold back. It’s great to have posts that cover a mix of subjects, just keep them relevant. They don’t have to be specifically about SEO, but the general topic of search marketing usually hits the mark! If you have questions feel free to email or send me a private message. I’m happy to help get your entry posted! And don’t forget…

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Early Detection: How Social Media May Save The World

Posted by Danny Dover

It is a typical Tuesday afternoon in suburbia California. Jenny, a sixteen year old girl is taking a sick day from school. With a runny nose, she sits idly on her bed surfing Facebook. At the same time, 2,000 miles away in Seattle, a twenty-two year old ambitious college drop-out named Kevin is on Twitter complaining about his sore throat. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a 40 year old single mother in London searches Google on her phone for the location of the nearest Boots drug store so she can buy cold medicine.

If a human from 200 years ago were to look at our planet today, it would appear completely alien. Culture shifts and technology improvements have drastically changed our perceived landscape. One tiny part of this is the use of social media and search engines. More than ever, teenagers are complaining about their parents joining Facebook and parents are complaining about their children interfering with their online social lives. Together they are sharing small events like sore throats, runny noses and big events like floods and hurricanes. Communicating online has become intertwined with our lives and has now become deeply integrated with our work, education and entertainment.

But how did this happen? While I don’t know for sure, I do recognize the patterns. For companies like Twitter, Google, Digg and Facebook, it started with a small group of entrepreneurs in California whose great ideas eventually went viral and spread around the globe. This word ‘viral’ describes a pattern and has become a buzzword. It is usually used to describe the virus like spread of ideas and technologies. The amazing idea behind a virus like spread is it expands exponentially. Once it starts, it multiples and multiples until nothing can stop it.

It is the great irony I see in this buzzward that prompted this post. I believe the viral nature of social media and popular technology companies is what will paradoxically allow us to prevent the viral spread of real viruses and pandemics. This is not a new idea. Many vaccines are in essence inert viruses fighting would-be viruses.

In 2006, a man by the name of Dr. Larry Brilliant won the TED prize for calling for a new global system that could identify pandemics before they spread. Dr. Brilliant (you can’t make this stuff up) is world renowned for his efforts in successfully eradicating smallpox from the planet. Before winning the TED prize, he had been inspired by the potential of a Canadian system called GPHIN. GPHIN is a system of web crawlers and analyzers that scour web based content looking for trends in keywords like ‘fever’, ‘cough’, ‘tired’, ‘sick’ and ‘flu’. Using this methodology, GPHIN was able to detect a would-be SARS outbreak six weeks before any other system (including the systems used by the World Health Organization). Quick responding officials were able to isolate the outbreak and prevent a global pandemic. Dr. Brilliant later said that this possible for two reasons.

1. Early Detection
2. Rapid Response

Shortly after his major call for action, Dr. Brilliant was hired as Executive Director of the then newly formed Google.org. This new philanthropic arm of Google was funded by 1% of all Google profits. Dr. Brilliant eventually used these resources to build an early detection system that is used today to help predict flu trends. He built the system he called for and the world has been better off because of it.

Unfortunately, this is not where the story ends. Larry Brilliant has since left Google for other endeavors. GPHIN and Google Flu Trends continue to save lives but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Google is now falling behind new competitors that dominate the ever growing real-time web. Status updates from Twitter and Facebook are being produced and becoming obsolete so quickly that Google’s index can’t keep up. We saw this with Michael Jackson’s death and we will see it again in the future.

Social media has the potential to become the greatest early detection system that the world has ever seen. It is faster, nimbler and has more access to user data than any traditional search engine. Not only does Facebook have the data necessary to see who is suffering from an illness, it has the data necessary to predict who these ill people will most likely come in contact with. Twitter has the data to make similar predictions (although less accurately because people don’t physically spend time with Twitter friends like they do with Facebook friends) but enjoys the added benefit of being accessed and updated from any place with mobile phone or WIFI service. (90% of Twitter requests are made to it’s API, whereas only 12% of Facebook users access Facebook through it’s mobile apps).

These two social media platforms by themselves have the ability to enable ordinary people to report their symptoms in real-time. Specialists like epidemiologists and statisticians could then identify threats (early detection) and use these same communication channels to direct aid workers (rapid response) on how best to isolate viruses before they become pandemics. If the features of other social media platforms and modern search engines were added to this theoretical system, specialists could for the first time ever educate the global community in real time. (Think about how many people read stories on Digg or about the much larger amount of people who read Google Adsense ads every day.)

Theory and predictions are helpful but just like verbal contracts, they are only worth the paper they are written on. Luckily for us, this theoretical system is already becoming reality today. People are already reporting their symptoms on Twitter and on Facebook. Likewise, disease experts and aid workers are already using social media to organize relief efforts. Although a unified, non-government controlled system for monitoring these platforms doesn’t currently exist, all of the pieces are in place. Dr. Brilliant said that there are two steps necessary for preventing pandemics. Social media is completing the first step (early detection) to a degree that even he couldn’t imagine. Better still, this is not costing the public a dime.

The world is changing in parallel with the internet. Next time you hear someone complain about “pointless” status updates, take the time to explain it to them. Social media is powered by all of us individually. Because of this, you have the ability to make a positive difference.

UPDATE: There has been some very healthy discussion in the comments that I would like to address here. Thank you 0lly and Bludge for bringing this up.

What about false alarms? Clearly, social media will have a lot of noise mixed in with legitimate concerns. Just like good ideas, bad ideas can spread virally as well. Paranoia and misinformation run rampant in the media and online.

So how do medical professionals use a system that will likely have a lot of misinformation and noise? The key is acknowledging that limitation and designing the system to account for it. The reason that GPHIN was so successful, was not that it sent an e-mail directly to health authorities every time someone mentioned “cough”, instead it was so powerful because it used aggregate information to identify real trends. Real people, including doctors, look over the information and decide if it is worth pursuing or not. It is natural to assume the front end of a system like this might look something Twitter search with has every relevant Tweet visible. This is not how it works. Instead I think a more accurate representation would be that of Google Flu Trends (aggregate information) with trends that can be broken down by location and with the help of social media, broken down into social groups.

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I am not and do not claim to be a medical or disease expert. If you are, I invite you to help me make this post better. As always, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below. If you would rather not do that, feel free to e-mail me. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!

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Other Similar Discussions:

Twitter: Growing Virally But Can It Stop Viruses? – Chris Thorman writes a very compelling post that adds the use of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) to the discussion. From the article “The combination of social media and EMRs, in some form or another, will undoubtedly be part of the future of tracking disease outbreaks. The how and when of that process remains complicated, dependent on health agencies, governments and the doctors themselves to implement the appropriate systems.”

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