SEO Link Building Case Studies

Netconcepts President Stephan Spencer has some key advice for Technorati to counteract the challenge from its new blog search engine rival: Google.

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DiscountFlies.com has really missed the boat (yes, the pun was intended) when it comes to search engine traffic. They do not show up in the first 100 results in Google or Yahoo! when searching for the popular search term fly-fishing or for the more targeted term fishing flies. But all is not lost. With some concerted effort, DiscountFlies.com should be able to turn things around.

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Not only are overly complex URLs unfriendly to users who might copy the URL and paste it in an email to a friend, or add a link on their own website to that particular page deep within your site, they are also unfriendly to the search engine spiders because they are a tip-off that the page is dynamically generated and could lead to what is called a spider trap.

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BalancedLifeProducts.com is a small ecommerce site, based in Madison, Wisconsin, that sells meditation and massage products such as yoga mats, meditation cushions, and reiki timers. The site doesn’t fare well in the search engines in the natural (unpaid) search results, so they have been relying on Google AdWords to fill in the gaps. It wasn’t hard to see why their rankings in natural search traffic were so low. After a quick health check-up of their level of search engine optimization, I made the following diagnosis…

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This screencast, presented by Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer, explains how to install and use the free Firefox extension SEO-Links to gauge the succesfulness of text link advertisers.

First Stephan installs the extension. Then he jumps to the Seacoastonline.com home page, which is selling links over in the right column half-way down the page. By simply hovering the cursor over each of the text link ads, he obtains backlink counts for each advertiser and their rankings across Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search for the phrase in the anchor text. This provides an indication as to how effective that advertiser is at SEO. The assumption is that an SEO-savvy and successful text link advertiser will make better advertising decisions than an unsuccessful one. If a bunch of successful ones flock to a particular site selling text link ads, then that’s an indication that the site is a good one to advertise on (assuming other things check out like the advertisers aren’t using spam tactics).

Turns out the site is not a good site for link advertisers. Find out why by downloading the 4 minute video as either a 2 megabyte WMV file or a 5 megabyte MPEG-4 file (iPod video compatible)

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Content is king on the web. A site without content is doomed to lousy search engine rankings. Search engine spammers can’t be bothered writing good content. Especially when they can easily steal it from other web sites. How do they do it? They use “scrapers” — spiders that trawl web pages and/or RSS feeds and siphon off the content. They then stick your content on their own site and slap their own ads and affiliate links onto it.

The spammers especially want you to use relative links across your web site. That way they can lift your entire website and they don’t even have to go to the trouble of rejigging your internal links to make them point back to the scraped site. Granted, as far as bandwidth conservation, relative links are better than absolute links (also known as “hard links”). But let’s not make the spammer’s job any easier.

So use absolute links throughout your site.

As a side benefit, if your site responds to multiple domains and you use absolute links, you’ll also be helping the search engines reduce the potential for duplicate content by definitively identifying the full, canonical URL.

Also, to check if your site has been scraped, use Copyscape.

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Tag clouds, a Web 2.0 sort of user interface for navigating tagged content a.k.a. folksonomies, gives certain hyperlinked keywords a larger font size treatment than others. These links lead to various category pages, tag pages, or search results pages.

One of my favorite implementations of a tag cloud on a blog is on O’Reilly Radar (on the right).

Another is the one on Eurekster’s blog (on the left).

The latter uses a new approach of “auto-tagging”. Eurekster calls this tag cloud of theirs a “BuzzCloud”. Webmasters can get one for free by signing up for their new Swicki service, which is a personalized Web search engine that is targeted and relevant to your site’s audience. You can seed your buzzcloud with search terms of your choosing, then Eurekster adds additional terms based on which searches are popular with your visitors. Visitors who click on the links are taken to a Eurekster search results page for that term. The results popular with you & your audience are promoted to the top of the search results and marked with an icon — in essence, tagging the results as well as the term.

Tagging that requires manual intervention such as del.icio.us and Technorati definitely have their use, but I think they are primarily for more web-intensive users; the combination of manual control and auto-tagging offered by Eurekster with swickis can potentially lead to mass uptake amongst web content editors. I’ve put a Eurekster swicki & buzzcloud here on my blog (on the right-hand column, near the bottom). Try it out and let me know what you think. Get your own free swicki for your blog or website here.

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Most affiliate programs do not benefit search engine rankings because the link from the affiliate to the merchant doesn’t count as a “vote.” Thus, the merchant will not see a benefit in their Google PageRank and consequently in their search engine rankings. For example, any merchant using LinkShare or Commission Junction will not see such a benefit. That’s because they all use temporary redirects, also known as 302 redirects. That type of redirect, which is the one programmers and site administrators tend to use by default, doesn’t pass the link gain (e.g. Google PageRank) on to the target (final destination) URL. Only a very few affiliate management services allow the merchant to capitalize on the link gain of the affiliate. MyAffiliateProgram.com is one such affiliate solution. So I checked them out, and it turns out that it kinda works. Yes, kinda.

Here’s the problem. The affiliate solution needs to use permanent redirects (a.k.a. 301 redirects) rather than temporary (302) ones. MyAffiliateProgram.com uses what they call “direct links.” Here are a couple examples of affiliate-tracked direct links that they provided me to look at: http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/?kbid=1001 or http://www.kitchen-universe.com?kbid=1001. But when you visit either of these 2 URLs, there is no redirect at all. Consequently, this creates lots of duplicate pages in Google when Googlebot finds these affiliate-tracked direct links and follows them. Taking the first URL as an example, if you search Google for site::www.myaffiliateprogram.com inurl:kbid you’ll see 6,980 duplicate pages in Google. In other words, these are pages that were already in Google with URLs that don’t have kbid= appended at the end.

Think about it this way: Yes, with MyAffiliateProgram.com a merchant will get PageRank flowing to all the links contained on the countless duplicates of the merchant’s home page that are getting indexed. But because there is no 301 redirect present, MyAffiliateProgram has failed to collapse the link gain to one definitive version of the merchant’s home page. Then search engine spiders come along and index all these versions of the merchant’s home page which compete with the merchant’s true home page (the one without any kbid=). Furthermore, searchers who click on listings in the search results that contain kbid= in the URL will get counted as referrals from the affiliate and the merchant will pay for that. Ouch!

So, buyer beware when shopping for an affiliate management service that passes PageRank to your site. The devil’s in the details.

Any readers want to recommend affiliate solutions that do effectively pass link gain?

UPDATE: Just found this great blog post from Greg Boser that discusses this issue in more detail.

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This session explores how search engines are dealing with blog and feed (RSS/Atom) content and why providing such syndicated content can drive new search-related traffic.

Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com

Speakers:
Dick Costolo, CEO, FeedBurner
Nan Dawkins, Partner, RedBoots Consulting
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

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