SEO Link Building Case Studies

I attended the “Search Algorithms: The Patent Files” session first thing this morning. The panelists were Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, Ani Kortikar, Founder and CEO, Netramind, Dr. E. Garcia of Mi Islita.com, and Jon Glick, Senior Director of Product Search, Become.com. My favorite presentation was from Jon. He was not overly technical (Dr. Garcia lost me at the advanced mathematics talking about calculating dot products of vectors) yet he gave solid advice. Here’s what he had to say, in summary:

Take these patents with a grain of salt, because…
- patent applicants don’t need to use all the stuff they include in a patent application.
- patent applicants don’t have to disclose all of its features in a patent application.
- and they recognize that SEOs and their competitors are pouring over their patent apps.

With that said, there are some valuable learnings from the 2003 Google patent. Search engines may take into account: CTR on your page in SERPs, rapid changes in content, rapid growth of in-links, and length of time users spend on your site.

So which of these actually impact your rankings? Some are red herrings, such as:
- Clickthrough rate (CTR): it’s too easy to distort (e.g. through clickbotting, which is evil and likely to get you penalized). Probably CTR is used for demotion only. In other words, high CTR won’t help your organic rankings, but low CTR may lower your rankings.
- Time spent on a site: when users hit the back button almost immediately, it can signify an irrelevant page or 404 error. However, if this was used then this would in effect reward black hat tactics like mousetrapping and endless pop-ups — tactics that trap users within a site.
- Rate of change in content: Most recent crawl date, last time the content changed, registration date, and first crawl date mostly impacts crawl frequency, not ranking. Duplicate detection technologies are used to find meaningful changes in site content. Meaningful changes in site content do not include putting today’s date or today’s weather on the page — it doesn’t help rankings. When a site changes its IP address, it is often re-evaluated because it is possibly under new ownership.

According to Jon, what’s not a red herring is:
- Rate of change in links: Most Search Engines limit how quickly a site can gain connectivity (sandboxing, link aging). A sudden jump in in-links (e.g. from link farming and interlinking and triangle linking lots of domains) can draw scrutiny. There are exceptions for ?ĺspike?Ĺ sites (editorial review, lots of accompanying news/blog posts, lots of web searches).

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Hello from sunny San Jose. I’m at the Search Engine Strategies conference - THE place to be if you care about search. I’m going to be blogging the sessions, so stay tuned over the next 4 days.

Here’s my first installment: a recap on the session I attended before lunch today on “Earning from Search & Contextual Ads”. Panelists were: Jason Calacanis, Co-Founder, Weblogs, Inc., Will Johnson, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Scott Meyer, President & CEO, About, Inc., Gokul Rajaram, Group Product Manager of Google AdSense, Google Inc. and Jen Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com.

Jen from JenSense.com started the panel off:
Jen started off by comparing and contrasting AdSense w/ Yahoo’s new YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network). Similarities include…
- very large pool of advertisers
- real time stats
- neither will tell you the revenue split
- can’t show both YPN and AdSense ads on the same page

Differences include…
with AdSense:
- 4 ads in smaller font
- international publishers ok
- offers additional tools & services
- more competition for higest paying
- multiple ad units per page
- “smart pricing” (CTR taken into account in pricing)

with YPN:
- 3 ads in a much larger font
- beta for US publishers
- only traditional ad units
- fewer publishers means less competition
- same ads on multiple units
- no smart pricing
- in future will be able to transfer your earnings to your advertising account

Many alternatives to AdSense and YPN:
- Kanoodle brightads: avg $0.35 earnings per click (EPC). 30,000 advertisers in network.
- Adsonar: thousands of advertisers
- Clicksor: avg $0.20 EPC. 4,000 advertisers running 20,000 campaigns. Will pull ads from other ad networks if insufficient clicks.
- Chitika: avg EPC $0.50
- Mirago: avg EPC .21p (approx $0.31 USD). you must invoice them. 12,000 advertisers
- ContextWeb: over 40,000 advertisers
bidclix: avg EPC 0.30. 11,000 advertisers
- Others include Miva Adrevenue xpress, Quigo, etc.
Rhetorical question from Jen: “When will MSN jump in?”

Optimizing tips:
- Placement: Bottom of page is bad. Good practice is to make link color the same as other links on the site. Anther good tactic is to place the ads on the left column where the nav usually is.
- Proximity:
- Ad unit selection: Try a variety of sizes and test.
- Ad unit colors & borders: Don’t use the standard ad unit colors / layout. Mix things up to prevent banner blindness. Try both complimentary and contrasting colors. Most sites find hidden borders yield highest CTR. like 2 or 3 times
- URL filters: Don’t do it as a way to get higher paying ads to appear. Only block your direct competitors or your own websites.

Testing:
- Use AdSense or YPN channels to track highest CTR & earnings pages. AdSense or YPN may perform better. Try both.
- Test on non-holiday weeks
- Try switching ad placement, ad unit sizes and colors
- Keep track of what works and what doesn’t
- Never assume that what works on one site will work on another.

(more…)

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Any search engine optimization consultant will tell you that links are the currency of the Web. They’re also the currency of the blogosphere. Without any inbound links, you’re just blogging to yourself. In Mike Grehan’s seminal piece “Filthy Linking Rich“, he explains how those rich with links just keep getting richer.

So how can new business bloggers get a jump start in the search engines? Simple: just whip out your wallet. The business of text link ad buying has matured, and it’s on the up-and-up. We’re not talking about “buying PageRank”… what we’re talking about is a totally legitimate business practice of buying text ads where you choose your hyperlinked words carefully based on keyword research and your advertisement appears on a reputable, relevant website. And of course, it links directly to your website, sans click tracking, so the ’search engine juice’ flows unhindered. If the practice weren’t legit, would you see such well-respected link-building pundits as Eric Ward on the board of the link broker Text-Link-Ads.com?

Buying links is not quite as simple as I make it out. Yes, you can use a broker and they’ll happily take your money. Caveat emptor! In order to make an informed purchase, you’ll need to evaluate the quality of the links using a number of criteria. Here’s such a list of criteria, courtesy of the ABAKUS SEO Blog:

1. Inbound site traffic and page traffic.
2. Inbound dot gov and dot edu links.
3. Click though traffic you get from the page.
4. Site in DMOZ and Yahoo directory.
5. Age of domain and time of domain being used (longer the better).
6. Inbound links shown to that page on Yahoo (link:http:www.domain.ext/page/).
7. Ranking of page for the keywords it is optimized for.
8. Relevance of theme of site and page to your site and page.
9. Alexa ranking (lower is better).
10. Deep link compared to home page links.
11. Location of link.
12. Length of allowed description text.
13. PR of page (still matters a bit).

Personally, I’d also add to the list:

1. Appearance of any link advertisers on the page that would attract the attention (negatively) of the search engines (e.g.: casinos, Texas Hold’em, Viagra, pharmaceuticals, insurance, Rolex, etc.)
2. Quality of the landing pages of the existing link advertisers (if you find any are spammy-looking, turn and run!)
3. Placement of the link. (i.e.: being relegated to the bottom of the page as footer links is not ideal)

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The major search engines - Google, in particular - seem to love blogs, which are the personal or professional diaries that number in the millions online. Search engines favor blogs because …

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4 dedicated stations will help you optimize every element of your website, from Search, to Analytics to CRM and Visualization, there is a cure for every pain point! Make sure you sign up for your 30-minute session today.

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Recreational Equipment Inc., a multichannel retailer of outdoors gear and clothing with more than 70 retail stores and revenue of nearly $1 billion a year, recognized the importance of search engine optimization early on.

Executives understood that they could gain significant traffic to the site at www.rei.com and sales from natural search if product pages were more visible and ranked better in search engines.

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I was recently interviewed by a journalist on business blogging and its benefits. He wanted to know specifically what it’s done for me to have a blog. Here’s what I told him:

• I’ve gotten inquiries from prospects who found Netconcepts through my blog.
• My blog helps me get speaking gigs and PR. In fact, I recently got one of my blog entries taken verbatim by a well-respected US magazine — DM News — and published as an article.
• It builds credibility and establishes me as a thought leader in the eyes of prospects and clients. For example, one of our recent clients choose us over a competitor for online marketing services partly because of my blog.
• It’s helped upsell existing clients on additional services, as many of them are regularly reading my blog. For example, some of our clients are going to start a blog and use us for blog design, blog consulting, etc.
• I’ve gotten links from popular bloggers, like Robert Scoble of Microsoft. It’s much more difficult to get a mention from Scoble (or other prominent bloggers) if you’re not a blogger. Scoble’s blog, called Scobleizer, is one of the most well-linked blogs on the Internet. Some bloggers have even included me on their blogroll, like Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing Blog (Thanks, Toby!)
• It’s helped me with recruiting panelists for Thoughts Leaders Summits that I organized and moderated for MarketingProfs. For example, the lineup of panelists for one of the recent summits included Internet marketing gurus: Seth Godin, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, and Debbie Weil. My blog played a role in establishing my credibility with them and getting them to respond to my “cold call” email message.
• Blogs are also great for SEO (search engine optimization). Links are important to the search engines, and the blogosphere is richly interlinked with bloggers linking so much to each other. Blogs are also rich in content, which search engines also like. If I blog about RSS and SEO (which I have), for example, next thing I know I’m #1 in Google for [rss and seo].
• I’ve also built some great business relationships with other respected bloggers. They have referred business to me, shared speaking opportunities with me, etc.

I had yet another experience with that last item, just today in fact. I’m speaking at the Frost & Sullivan Sales and Marketing East conference in Boston, and a fellow blogger from a competing SEO firm who was sitting at the table I was facilitating earlier today on blogging very kindly publicly commended my blog to the rest of the group for its content and thought leadership. (Thanks Stephen!) There’s a guy who understands the benefits of coopetition (rather than competition)!

The journalist also wanted to know how my blog’s traffic had grown over time. Here are the charts I shared with him showing the growth trends in pageviews and visitors:

Pageviews:

Visitors:

A pretty respectable trend, I’d say. If you’re curious what the actual numbers are, I will give you a hint and say that the both charts measure into the tens of thousands of visitors per month. Hopefully the trend will continue.

One thing I really need to do to keep the numbers heading northward is to blog more frequently. I’m sure traffic growth will accelerate once I do. I just need to buckle down! I guess I’ll just sleep less… (sigh). You other bloggers out there know what I’m saying here, don’t you! More often than we’d like, it’s the wee hours when we’re blogging.

How might a blog pay off for you? For some general ideas, read this article of mine, on blogging, published in last month’s issue of Multichannel Merchant magazine.

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Google’s new Google Sitemaps service, a free inclusion service, is a step in the right direction, but there are two quite major problems with Google’s approach.

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Last Friday it seemed like the whole blogosphere was abuzz with the news that Google unveiled its new Google Sitemaps service, a free inclusion service where you publish an XML file of your site pages to Google so its spider can get a better sense of what to crawl of your site. This is good news, especially for dynamic sites that aren’t getting fully indexed. I appreciate Google once again showing its thought leadership. Not only is Google giving webmasters a new way to relay information about their site structure information to its spiders, but it’s sharing this new technology with the other search engines by releasing the protocol and code as open source.

This all sounds wonderful, but there are 2 quite major problems with Google’s approach.

• First, it doesn’t solve the duplicate pages problem that a great many dynamic sites have. Even the Google Store suffers from this (which I blogged about previously but here’s a more recent example of a Google Store product page being duplicated times in Google’s index). The Google Sitemaps protocol does not provide a way for webmasters to convey which pages are duplicates of other pages. A site that gets crawled incorrectly by Googlebot, due to superfluous or non-essential parameters/flags being included in the URLs of links on the pages, will continue to get crawled incorrectly. An “Official Google Sitemaps Team Member” states that the sitemap XML file will merely augment their crawl, it won’t replace existing pages in the index:
  

  This program is a complement to, not a replacement of, the regular crawl. The benefit of Sitemaps is two fold:
  – For links we already know about thro our regular spidering, we plan to use the metadata you supply (e.g., lastmod date, changefreq, etc.) to improve how we crawl your site.
  – For the links we dont know about, we plan to use the additional links you supply, to increase our crawl coverage.

  The high-level Google engineer who goes by GoogleGuy in the online forums explains Google Sitemaps in this way:

  Imagine if you have pages A, B, and C on your site. We find pages A and B through our normal web crawl of your links. Then you build a sitemap and list the pages B and C. Now there’s a chance (but not a promise) that we’ll crawl page C. We won’t drop page A just because you didn’t list it in your sitemap. And just because you listed a page that we didn’t know about doesn’t guarantee that we’ll crawl it. But if for some reason we didn’t see any links to C, or maybe we knew about page C but the url was rejected for having too many parameters or some other reason, now there’s a chance that we’ll crawl that page C.

  So, the way I read GoogleGuy’s explanation, if pages A and C are essentially duplicates of each other, with A containing an additional superfluous parameter in its URL (like sortby=default or lang=english), then BOTH could end up in Google’s index. Thus, Google Sitemaps won’t reduce the amount of duplication in Google’s index; in fact, I believe it will increase it.

  Duplicate pages, on its own, may not sound like a problem for webmasters as much as it is for Google itself, which has to dedicate additional resources to maintain all this redundant content in its index. However, it does have serious implications for webmasters, because it results in PageRank dilution ?Į where multiple versions of a page split up the “votes” (links) and PageRank score that a single version of the page would aggregate.

• This brings me to the second, related problem with Google Sitemaps: it doesn’t do anything to alleviate the phenomenon of PageRank dilution. PageRank dilution results in lower PageRank, which in turn results in lower rankings. For example, consider that the above-mentioned Google Store’s product page (the “Black is Back T-Shirt”) is in Google’s index 5 times instead of just once. So each of those 5 variations earns only a fraction of the total potential PageRank score that it could have earned if all the links pointed to a single “Black is Back T-Shirt” page.Google Sitemaps needs to provide a way to convey, or to sync up with, the site’s hierarchical internal linking structure, so that it’s clear which pages should get how much of a share of the PageRank flowing into the site’s home page. Since the primary holder of PageRank score is the home page (that is, after all, the page that most everyone links to), it’s up to the site’s internal hierarchical linking structure to pass the PageRank of the home page to the rest of the site. As such, a page that is 2 clicks away from the home page will get a much larger share of PageRank score passed on to it from the home page, versus a page that is 5 clicks away from the home page.

Here’s how I suggest both of the above issues be rectified: by extending robots.txt with some additional directives that specify:

• which parameter in a dynamic URL is the “key field”
• which parameter is the product ID and which is the category ID (specifically for online catalogs)
• which parameters are superfluous or that don’t signficantly vary the content displayed

Armed with this information, Googlebot will be able to not only eliminate duplicate pages but also intelligently choose the most appropriate version to save in its index and then associate with that page the PageRank of ALL versions of the page. The days of session IDs killing a site’s Google visibility would be over! Google admits in its Sitemaps FAQ that session IDs are still a problem even with the advent of Google Sitemaps:

Q: URLs on my site have session IDs in them. Do I need to remove them?

Yes. Including session IDs in URLs may result in incomplete and redundant crawling of your site.

Remember, getting indexed only gets you to the party, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be popular at the party. Google Sitemaps may help you get more pages indexed, but if those pages all have a PageRank score of 0, then what was the point? It’ll be like sitting along the wall the whole time with no one asking you to dance!

GravityStream, our SEO proxy technology (the concept of SEO proxies is explained in my article in Catalog Age last October) deals with PageRank dilution by distilling URLs in links into their lowest common denominator and replacing them on the proxy. We’ve found that, even as Googlebot gets more aggressive at spidering dynamic sites with complex URLs and starts indexing one of our clients’ sites more fully, our proxy still has a major leg-up on the native site that it’s proxying. For example, our GravityStream proxy of PETsMART.com is #1 in Google for “best pet toys”, and yet the corresponding page on the PETsMART.com native site is nowhere in the first 10 pages of results even though it is indexed. Until Google extends Google Sitemaps to deal with PageRank dilution, I’d expect that a GravityStream proxy will still trump a native site, even if it’s using Google Sitemaps. That means that currently, despite Google Sitemaps, GravityStream still plays an important role for online retailers. Nonetheless, it’s my sincere hope that Google takes my feedback on board and reworks their protocol!

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