Candlesandsuch.com is a website run quite frugally by its two main proprietors. For a site that hasn’t had a lot of professional help with regard to search engine optimization, it possesses some positive SEO attributes. That’s not to say there aren’t issues, but some of the main facets of good SEO are observed and incorporated.

In this SEO report card originally featured on Practical eCommerce, Netconcepts’ Search Analyst Jeff Muendel takes an in-depth look at how inbound links and sculpting PageRank can help improve the overall site.

Jeff writes how the ScanAlert Hacker Safe logo “bleeds PageRank away from every page, so add NoFollow tags to these links.” Here, the placement of the logo is also an issue since it’s “among the first pieces of code a search engine spider sees on each page. Moving the logo further down the page would be better.” Another valuable find that Jeff discovered was the fact that this site’s error pages were not delivering the proper 404 code, so outdated pages are not dropped from the search engines’ indexes.

In conclusion, Jeff recommends that:

A good link building campaign is what this site needs most! Read Stephan’s article called “Weaving A Web Of Links” for great suggestions on getting started. With that and a few technical changes, Candles And Such will have a website that is optimized at an above-average level. Once inbound links begin to build, they should reap the benefits of their SEO.

You might wonder if elements of your ecommerce site could become worthy link bait. I hate to break this to you — but probably not. Link bait is the sort of thing that tends to spread virally through email and the blogosphere. When was the last time you saw swarms of people forwarding emails about an ecommerce site? Not recently, I’d imagine.

It’s more realistic and fruitful to think of link bait as content that stands alongside your ecommerce site — either as a separate page, a blog post or a microsite. If you post the link bait to your ecommerce site, you should do so with the expectation that it probably won’t get as much traction with bloggers as it would have gotten if you’d posted it on your blog. Bloggers are cliquish; they tend to link to each other more than they link to outsiders (non-bloggers).

If link bait is really successful, it can migrate to the front page of a social media site such as Digg.com, Reddit.com, Netscape.com or the del.icio.us popular page. The trick to infiltrate any highly-trafficked social media site is to have friends “on the inside” who are top influencers within that site’s social network.

It really helps to be humorous in your link bait. But more importantly, “be remarkable,” as author Seth Godin says. Remarkable doesn’t mean you have to be the best at something or have the best post about something. It just means that your work has to be worthy of notice. A purple cow grazing in a pasture would be remarkable only because passersby would remark about it. Once passersby see enough purple cows along the roadside, they will no longer remark about them, because such cows have become commonplace.

One way to stand out is to expose a fraud or to take a position that’s contrary to popular opinion. For instance, you could challenge an A-list blogger on one of his/her blog posts. This can be risky, however, so take great care if you choose to employ this tactic.

Another way to be remarkable is to be the first to cover a particular story. You could post a scoop — an exclusive. You could publish original research. Or you could offer photos of an event that you attended. You could even Creative Commons License those photos to allow people to re-use them at no charge.

Speaking of no charge, people love “free!” so if you could make available for free any tools, software, plugins, blog themes and so on, it will go a long way towards turning your resource into link bait.

Another thing you might have seen on the web is “memes” that spread across the Internet through email, YouTube, the blogosphere, etc. A meme is an idea, value or pattern of behavior that propagates itself through imitation. Memes take many forms — clothes, fashions, habits, skills, songs, stories and catchphrases. As memeticist Dr. Susan Blackmore describes it, a meme is basically a “copy me” instruction backed up by threats and promises. An example of a meme in the offline world is the toilet paper folded into a triangle at the end (does that somehow make the bathroom more hygienic?).

If you can start a meme that will spread and eventually link back to you, you will get a lot of nice link juice (e.g., PageRank) out of it. Of course, if it’s in the form of a YouTube video (like the most famous of Internet memes “Numa Numa”), YouTube will hoard all the juice, as YouTube doesn’t include links to your site.

A very recent successful example of an Internet meme is “The Five Things You Don’t Know About Me” meme that spread through the blogosphere late last year. Part of the meme was the directive to “tag” five other bloggers and ask them to share five unknown bits of information about themselves. The originator of this meme (purportedly Jeff Pulver) is now PageRank-rich indeed.

Other forms of link bait include a niche-specific blogroll, a how-to, or a compilation of news stories.

Here are some of my favorite examples of link bait:
* Counterfeit Mini, an effort to “protect” unsuspecting consumers from buying a counterfeit Mini Cooper. Ha! Actually, Mini is behind this brilliant campaign.
* Will it Blend? videos showing the founder of Blendtec blending rake handles, light bulbs, marbles, iPods, etc.
* 19 Things You Don’t Know About Death, a clever and surprising campaign that made it to the front page of Digg. Who would have thought that a life insurance company could churn out link bait?
* Subservient Chicken, a brilliant viral campaign from Burger King in which viewers issue commands to a chicken wearing lingerie.
* Institute for Backup Trauma gives us John Cleese starring in an uproariously funny instructional video about the dangers of not making adequate backups.
* Up Your Budget by Budget Rent-a-Car uses a blog to launch its nationwide scavenger hunt with clues planted in various cities across the U.S.

One successful viral link bait campaign can be worth many, many thousands of dollars of link buying and thousands of emails of link-building requests. Social media optimization expert Neil Patel estimates that just getting your link bait featured on Digg.com will yield tens of thousands of visitors in a very short period of time and potentially more than a thousand links within a few weeks.

Ready to generate some link bait? Then get your creative juices flowing, because out-of-the-box thinking is the key ingredient to a successful campaign. Calling in a favor with friends who are influencers in the social networking sites can’t hurt either.

Cutts has addressed the topic of link-buying on a number of occasions on his blog (Mattcutts.com/blog) and in blog comments elsewhere. He’s admonished webmasters who buy links for PageRank and encouraged webmasters instead to buy only links that have been “nofollowed” — in other words, where the rel=nofollow attribute has been added to the link so that the search engines do not count that link as a vote. He has stated in no uncertain terms that Google considers “buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside our quality guidelines.”

Cutts outed the Berkeley college newspaper (Dailycal.org) on his blog as a link seller. Cutts then warned that sites such as Dailycal.org that sell links may “lose their ability to give reputation.”

In other words, Google may revoke the site’s voting power — its ability to pass PageRank.

That is of course disastrous for the link seller, but it is also bad news for the link buyer, who is unwittingly wasting money every month for that link.

In a comment on the O’Reilly Radar blog, Cutts revealed that “parts of Perl.com, Xml.com, etc., have not been trusted in terms of linkage for months and months.” His comments were significant: Google admitted it decreased the voting power of such excellent and useful sites as Perl.com and XML.com and downgraded the reputation value of some of the sites’ outbound links.

The implication for the rest of us is clear: if you don’t want your site to suffer the same fate, you’d better tag your link ads as rel=nofollow so your advertisers won’t gain any PageRank.

How do you detect if a site has lost its ability to pass PageRank? Unfortunately, it’s not easy.

Cutts cautioned: “Remember that just because a site shows up for a link: command on Google, [that] does not mean it passes PageRank, reputation or anchortext.” There is, in fact, no way to know for sure — unless you work for Google on its Webspam team.

A link buyer can surmise the loss of the link seller’s voting power by a drop in his/her rankings commensurate with a drop in the rest of the link buyers’ rankings. Consider the case of link-selling California newspaper The Fresno Bee (Fresnobee.com). At some point in time between 2004 and 2005, its reputation was rescinded by Google, as indicated by the hurried exit of nearly all the link-buying advertisers (which you can verify through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine at Waybackmachine.org).

When diagnosing whether a link seller still has his/her voting power, one tool I find helpful is the SEO-Links extension for Firefox. Simply hovering over the paid links allows me to quickly obtain rankings for the keywords targeted in the anchor text. The inference is that a site stacked with successful link advertisers is probably contributing to the rankings. If it weren’t, all those SEO-savvy advertisers probably wouldn’t be there.

Not surprisingly, search engine optimizers have a different view from Google on the issue of link-buying.

Christine Churchill, president of SEO consultancy KeyRelevance, describes the situation thus: “Search engines like to take the hard line and categorize things as either black or white. In some cases, they are actually grey. Taken to the extreme, your link from the local Chamber of Commerce could be considered link-buying.”

Indeed, a $300 annual directory submission to Yahoo! is, in effect, a paid link. But Google allows that one since there’s an editorial review process involved.

Personally, I think link-buying can be done legitimately, just like in the case of a Yahoo! directory submission. I don’t see the difference between a banner ad and a text-link ad — as long as you’re not intentionally trying to game the search engines and you expect to get traffic and brand visibility from the ads you place on websites.

To me, it seems unreasonable for Google to expect website owners to ensure that no PageRank is transferred in all the online advertising it facilitates. It is however, up to you, the advertiser, to ensure that all ads are placed on relevant websites and are not misleading, whether text-link ad or banner ad. It is then the publisher’s responsibility to screen all advertisers for relevance and ethical SEO behavior.

A site with paid links that span the spectrum of relevance — from casinos to mortgage brokers to pharmacies to jewelers to electronics merchants and all places in between — is certainly an obvious red flag to the search engines. Reputation should be passed only when the publisher can confidently vouch for the link ads and the sites to which they point (and to the sites to which they, in turn, point).

This is where a reputable and highly selective text-link broker, such as LinkExperts, can be invaluable, as you vet both the publishers and the advertisers.

PageRank Search

PageRank Search provides Google results alongside with PageRank scores. Bear in mind that Google link results (e.g. “link:www.practicalecommerce.com”) are not comprehensive. Select the options of 100 results per page and order by PageRank. (www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/)

PageRank Lookup

PageRank Lookup lets you check PageRanks of multiple URLs simultaneously. The tool comes in especially handy when a home page does an immediate redirect and you can’t get a PageRank reading for the “true” home page (i.e. the URL with nothing after the first slash). (www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/)

Neat-o

Neat-o lets you review whether the keywords you are targeting are present within the anchor text of your inbound links. Contact high PageRank endowed linking sites with whom you have a relationship or influence and ask them to revise their anchor text. As you may recall from my previous articles, anchor text is critical for SEO because all the major engines take the anchor text that you have used and associate the words in the anchor text with the page that you are linking to. (www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/)

SEO-Links Firefox extension

SEO-Links Firefox extension provides link counts and rankings for the anchor text by simply hovering your cursor over a link. It’s great for evaluating how successful a text link advertiser is. (webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/firefox-extensions/seo-links/)

Thumbshots Ranking

Thumbshots Ranking presents visually the common results between two sets of search results. Use the tool to find commonalities in inbound links between you and your competitor

(e.g. “link:http://www.yourcompany.com -site:yourcompany.com” and “link:http://www.yourcompetitor.com -site:yourcompetitor.com”)

on Yahoo!, MSN Search or Google. (ranking.thumbshots.com)

Some Words of Caution…

Take PageRank scores with a grain of salt; they are merely indicative. Scores displayed in the PageRank meter are months old and hugely imprecise. Furthermore, it’s not the same PageRank as what is used in Google’s ranking algorithm.

Many types of links are likely to get discounted, including reciprocal links, links from affiliated sites (on the same IP range or hostname), footer links, site-wide links, links with the exact same anchor text, and links contained on a page called links.htm / links.asp or similar. Remember that the more links on the linking page, the less PageRank you’ll get.

The best kinds of links are ones that appear to be earned rather than bought or bartered, from relevant “authority” sites on noncommercial domains (e.g. .edu, .gov, and .mil), with anchor text containing relevant and popular keywords. Authorities and hubs are important concepts in SEO. An authority site is one with lots of inbound links from topically relevant sites. A hub site is one with lots of outbound link to topically relevant authorities. A site can be one, both, or neither. An authority or hub will often times get preferential treatment by search engines, in addition to the links from such sites being more valuable.

Try to keep the URLs of your site as simple as possible (see my previous article on optimizing your URLs, online at practicalecommerce.com), as it will encourage people to link to pages deep within your site — a good thing!

If you don’t have valuable, fresh, “link-worthy” content, then nobody will link to you no matter how much effort you expend in requesting links (unless money’s involved, of course!).

Don’t link to “bad neighborhoods,” hide links, or create unnatural link structures (that look too “perfect” to be a naturally occurring neighborhood). Of course, don’t receive such links either; and if you already have, you’ll need to contact those dodgy sites and ask (demand) that they remove the links.

Link building isn’t about simply increasing your “link popularity.” And it’s definitely not about trading links with your business partners. Countless hours are wasted by naïve website owners forging reciprocal link deals because, in the end, they offer little to no benefit.

It’s true that search engines use link popularity as an indicator of a site’s worthiness, but it’s a weighted form of link popularity that I’ll refer to here as “link gain.” Not all links are created equal. Links from some sites are given much more weight by the search engines than those from other sites. Thus, “votes” (links) from some sites – CNN.com for instance – count more than lower profile sites like someone’s personal homepage.

Google uses a proprietary algorithm called PageRank&tm; to weight links from pages that it considers important. Every web page, not site, is assigned a PageRank score. You can check your PageRank scores with the Google Toolbar, a free plug-in for your web browser available from http://toolbar.google.com.

PageRank scores run from 0 to 10 on a logarithmic scale, meaning that the gaps between the integers increase logarithmically the closer you get to 10. So, for example, the gap between the 3 and a 4 is quite small, whereas the gap between 7 and 8 is huge in comparison. As such, boosting your PageRank from a 3 to 4 would be quite easy, and going from a 7 to 8 would be quite hard. Another logarithmic scale you might be familiar with is the Richter scale. As you probably know, a 5.0 on the Richter scale isn’t such a huge deal, whereas a 7.0 is a very big deal indeed.

Improving the link gain of your home page and of key internal pages is critical to getting well ranked and thus getting traffic. In other words, don’t just try to improve the amount and quality of links coming in to your home page; also make the most of the link gain that you already have by passing more of it on to your key product/category/content pages than to inconsequential pages like your ‘Welcome Letter from the President’ page.

A simple way to start boosting your site’s link gain is to submit to major directories such as Yahoo!, Open Directory (dmoz.org), GoGuides, Gigablast, JoeAnt, Gimpsy, BlueFind and Zeal. But don’t overly rely on directory listings. Just like with investing, with link building it’s important to diversify.

Additional link opportunities might include business partners (e.g. suppliers, customers, distributors) or related noncompetitive sites like industry guides and vertical portals. Also consider sponsoring organizations and getting acknowledgement through a link from their site.
You probably get bonus points for a link from a topically relevant or authoritative site, so especially target topically relevant sites.

Sites that link to your competitors are often good targets. You can find many of these sites quickly using Netconcepts’ free link checker tool at www.netconcepts.com/linkcheck/. Resist the temptation to boost your link popularity by submitting to “free for all” links pages. These are simply disorganized pages full of links — you submit your web address and are automatically added. Search engines hate these. Likewise, stay away from automated submission bots that promise submissions to thousands of search engines and directories. You will be paying for submissions to totally irrelevant or defunct websites. Worse yet, you may get penalized.

We’ve only scratched the surface, so stay tuned and next month I’ll dig deeper into some of my favorite link building tools and tips.

The engines place a weighting factor on each link. That is, a link from an important site like CNN.com would count for a lot more than Jimmy Bob’s personal homepage.

Google calls its importance-scoring system “PageRank,” and it’s been a fundamental building block of Google’s ranking algorithm since day one. Tactically improving the PageRank — or, more generically, your “link gain” across all the major engines — of your homepage and of key internal pages of your site is critical to being well-ranked and thus getting traffic.

Links are the currency of the Web, so it is important to have a plan in place to improve the number and quality of the links to your site from the outside. That is the idea behind link building.

Link building can be approached a number of ways. You can, for example:

• Garner links from vendors, clients, business partners
• Garner links from other related sites
• Garner links through general directory entries, like Yahoo
• Garner links through specific directory entries, like a marketing services directory if you are a marketing consultancy
• Sponsor organizations and get acknowledgement through a link from their Web sites
• Create content and syndicate through RSS so that other sites will post the content contained within your RSS feed on their sites with a link back to your site.

It is not just about the importance of the page, or the PageRank score. You probably get bonus points for a link from a topically relevant or authoritative site, so target topically relevant sites in particular when link building.

By the way, the worst kind of link building is sending unsolicited email to Web masters asking for a reciprocal link. Web masters get inundated with such spam daily.

Each page within a Web site is assigned its own PageRank score by Google. PageRank scores run from 0 to 10 on a logarithmic scale, meaning that the gaps between the integers increase logarithmically the closer you get to 10. So, for example, the gap between the 3 and a 4 is quite small, whereas the gap between 7 and 8 is huge in comparison. As such, boosting your PageRank from a 3 to 4 would be quite easy, and going from a 7 to 8 would be quite hard. Another logarithmic scale you might be familiar with is the Richter scale. As you probably know, a 5.0 on the Richter scale isn’t such a huge deal, whereas a 7.0 is a very big deal indeed.

You can check your PageRank score several ways. One is using the Google Toolbar, available for download from toolbar.google.com. It works with Internet Explorer (for Windows) and with Firefox, users of which also have access to an alternative toolbar with a PageRank meter available at www.prgooglebar.org.

You can also check your homepage’s PageRank score using the Google Directory at directory.google.com — assuming, of course, that you are listed in the Google Directory! If you aren’t listed, you can submit through the “Add Site” link at the bottom of the appropriate category page where you wish to be listed.

Listings on Google Directory category pages are ranked in order of PageRank score. This means it is possible for you to see your site make small PageRank shifts relative to other sites in your category, particularly if there are a number of sites listed on your category page. (If you are curious where your site sat in comparison to others listed on that category page in the past, you can get historical PageRank scores using the Wayback Machine available from Alexa at www.archive.org.)

A word of caution: don’t be overly focused on what that little green PageRank meter says. PageRank values shown in the Google Toolbar are imprecise, months old and not the same as the PageRank that is used in Google’s ranking algorithm. Google realizes that it’s really only search engine optimizers who care about the PageRank scores, and they don’t want to be too helpful to SEOs. So PageRank scores should be treated as merely indicative, and so you have to take them with a grain of salt.

PageRank as an algorithm is alive and well, and will adapt with the times. One way we can probably expect to see it evolve is with the incorporation of “TrustRank”, a concept where a small number of reputable seed pages are used to help differentiate good pages from spam.

There is a tactic called “Google bombing” whereby linking to a site with particular words in the link text can get a site highly ranked for those keywords in the search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of the most famous Google bombs has been George W. Bush’s biography page on whitehouse.gov being ranked number one for the phrase “miserable failure” –even though neither the word “miserable” nor the word “failure” appear anywhere on Dubbya’s page. It was the sheer power of the inbound links with the link text that did it.

Not all links from a high PageRank-endowed page are equally as good. For instance, if there are a great deal many other links on that page that link to you, you will end up with only a small share of the link gain that has been passed down, as you are sharing it with the multitude of other sites linked on that page. The fewer the number of links, the better.

Reciprocal links are likely to get discounted. Search engines have a fantastically comprehensive link map of the Web, so they can spot reciprocal links easily. As you can imagine, getting your golf buddy to link to you and you, in turn, linking back isn’t as useful to the search engine users than an industry resource site linking to your site, because it is relevant and useful for that link to be only one way.

Links from affiliated sites (those on the same IP range or host name) will likely be discounted as well, as will footer links located at the bottom of all the pages site-wide.

Some types of links are just bad news. Google warns not to link to what it calls “bad neighborhoods.” These would include link farms and search engine spam sites, in fact don’t participate in “link farms” or FFA, also known as free for all sites, at all. (If you’re wondering how to identify a link farm from a directory, link farms tend to be less organized and have more links per page.) When you get emails inviting you to get a link submitted to many thousands of search engines and directories, do not respond. At best, these sites are irrelevant. At worst, which is most likely the case, they consist of link farms and bad neighborhoods. The results of participation can be devastating and include ranking penalties or even the banning of your site.

One of the keys to garnering links is to offer link-worthy content and to keep that content fresh. You can proactively solicit links. If you do, you need to do it carefully. I recommend the following process:

Step 1: Identify suitable link targets

Review links of competitive sites and sites in your keyword market. SEO Chat’s PageRank search tool is very handy in identifying link targets with high PageRank scores. With it, you can conduct Google queries and have the tool return the results in order of PageRank score rather than relevance.

I use the tool several ways:

• Checking backlinks of competitors’ sites
• Checking keywords relevant to the client’s industry
• Using the site: query operator to restrict results to specific TLDs (top level domains) and countries

One downside of this tool (and of Google’s backlink checking in general) is that the backlink searches are not comprehensive. It is only a sampling of the total number of backlinks, and those backlinks are only to the page specified, such as the homepage, and not to the entire site.

On the other hand, Yahoo offers a query operator linkdomain: that allows you to see all backlinks coming in to any page on the site. Furthermore, Yahoo allows you to further restrict a linkdomain: or link: search by subtracting particular sites from the search result. For example, you could do a linkdomain: query on Yahoo and subtract your own site from the search results, seeing only inbound links from other sites into your own, rather than seeing pages of your own site linking to yourself.

Step 2: Contact them and try and persuade them to link to you

You can beg, borrow or buy a link. (But I doubt you could steal one, although the blog comment spammers and guestbook spammers have managed to steal links to some degree of effectiveness — a very bad thing.)

How could you “buy” one? You might be able to obtain a link by “sponsoring” their organization with cash or “in kind” services or by buying text link advertising on their site through a broker such as Text-Link-Ads.com.

You could suggest a link as a site visitor, or you could contact them representing yourself from your site. If you represent a site visitor, you should probably give them some additional constructive feedback besides inclusion of your link. For instance, in the same email let them know of any broken links on their site that you have spotted or of any other suggested links besides your own.

Remember, offering a reciprocal link in exchange is not a viable approach, because their link to you will not be worth as much once the search engines pick up the fact that you link back to them.

If this approach sounds oversimplified, it is. Link building is arguably the most challenging aspect to search engine optimization. It’s anything but straightforward; the process is fraught with landmines; and the outcome is largely outside of your control — since you can’t dictate who links to you and who doesn’t.