- Turned a loss making site into a profit center
- Now generates over $5000 per month in Google AdSense revenue
- Over 86,000 pages in Google
- Traffic levels in the hundreds of thousands of visitors per month
Case Study: WritersNet
Your link building strategy, PageRank, & pieces of the linking puzzle
Link building is not all about transferring PageRank. Don’t get caught in the trap of basing your decision on high PageRank score alone. There are other considerations to be taken into account.
For example, your backlinks need to represent a range of importance scores (PageRank) so that Google doesn’t construe your link network as unnatural. Building links exclusively or mostly from high PageRank endowed sites may flag your site for artificially trying to boost your PageRank. And do you really want to attract additional scrutiny?
For long term benefit and security, sites that are selected for inbound links should be from an on-topic neighborhood, have aged domains, and if possible, have .edu and .gov sites in there. The list of sites needs to be analyzed to ensure that there are no technical limitations that slow the flow of “link gain” (e.g. PageRank). For example, the directory Gimpsy.com has let pages with session IDs (“PHPSESSID”) in the URLs slip into the indices, which makes it less ideal as a backlink.
In general, all links help (unless from “bad neighborhoods”), regardless of their PageRank. Some of the links NEED to be topically-relevant or your site is going to appear unfocused and the links won’t appear to have been “earned,” but instead bought, borrowed, bartered or stolen.
Directory submissions should be a component of your link building strategy, but don’t put too much emphasis on them. As Stuntdubl says, you need to balance the link equation and not rely too heavily on directories, and you need to spread your submissions out over time.
Certain directories are considered to be “hubs” or “authorities” or both (unfortunately only the search engines know which ones, so try to cover your bases as best you can), in which case it may be used by a search engine as an indicator of the topically-relevant neighborhood that your site belongs in.
Bear in mind that toolbar PR scores are months old and can’t really be trusted. The REAL PageRank is outside of our grasp, locked up within the Googleplex.
Also bear in mind that PageRank is Google-specific. That’s not to say that you can’t use PageRank to make some inferences about the importance of a page in the eyes of Yahoo! and MSN Search. The concept of “link gain” or weighted link popularity is alive and well at Yahoo and Microsoft, they just have different ways of calculating it and names for it. At Yahoo it’s been referred to as “Web Rank” and “link flux” (a term from their days at Inktomi). I don’t know what MSN calls it. The higher the PageRank, the more useful it is as an indicator of a powerfully important site across all 3 engines. For example, I’d have little doubt that a PageRank 9 link would be an amazing link opportunity that would reap benefits across Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search.
Case Study: InnSite
- Went from loss-making venture into a profitable web project
- Google AdSense revenue regularly exceeds $10,000 per month
- SEO techniques turned Innsite into an ongoing revenue stream
- A free service for users, yet still profitable for us
SEO: Tools for Link Building
Last month I discussed links and their importance in search engine optimization. Now let’s get acquainted with some powerful tools to aide us in our link building efforts. Yahoo! Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) offers a quick way to review competitors’ and your own inbound links. PageRank Search is…
Continue reading »SEO: Weaving a Web of Links
Links are the currency of the web. Not only do their drive traffic in their own right, but they also are essential to high search engine rankings. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts won’t get off the ground.
Continue reading »Inside Secrets To Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and SEO
MarketingProfs virtual seminar series — online (webcast)
Everyone seems to be in a frenzy to get links to their sites. Usually for the wrong reasons and from the wrong sites. Terms like Link Popularity, PageRank, Hubs, Authorities, Hilltop, Sandbox, Anchor Text, etc. are being bandied about and discussed ad nauseam. Marketers obsess over concepts like link leakage, bleeding PageRank, nofollow tags, triangular links, link architecture, link equity. There are many companies selling linking services that are absolutely 100% worthless.
Get past all the misinformation and disinformation and join two of the top-most experts on link building, as they share their favorite tips, lessons learned, tools, and success stories.
This seminar will be rich with case study examples.
This seminar is for you if you:
- Know that you’re missing out on key linking opportunities, but you just don’t know which ones and how to find them
- Don’t have all the answers on what it takes to get coverage and links in the right places from the right people
- Don’t have a current linking strategy or have one with holes
Successful link builders take an active role in the process. They don’t just sit back and hope that links happen. They make them happen! Take the first step by registering for this virtual seminar today.
You will learn:
- To build a comprehensive linking strategy (including: portals, blogs, feeds, niche venues, vertical search, authority sites, e-newsletters, zines, awards, mailing lists)
- How to get the best anchor text that you can
- Holistic linking
- How to receive online publicity
- How to purchase links
- How maximize on-site and off-site link architecture
- How to mine and analyze competitor site links and industry-specific links
- The biggest link building mistakes and myths
- To generate buzz
- How to write and release effective press releases
- Link building in blogs and RSS feeds
- How to the right people with the right message
- How to optimize your link architecture to get the most out of your inbound links
The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.
ABOUT THE PROF EXPERTS
Eric Ward founded the Web’s first service for publicizing Web content back in 1994, and he still offers these services today. His client list is a who’s who of online brands. Eric is best known as the person behind the original linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, The Link Exchange, Microsoft.com, Rodney Dangerfield, WarnerBros, The Discovery Channel, the AMA, and The Weather Channel. His services won the 1995 Tenagra Award for Internet Marketing Excellence, and he was selected as one of the Web’s 100 most influential people by Websight magazine in 1997. Eric also wrote the Link Building column for ClickZ, the NetSense column for Ad Age magazine, and is a 4-star speaker at major industry conferences.
Stephan Spencer is founder and President at Netconcepts, a 9-year-old, multi-national interactive agency specializing in search engine optimization, web redesign, usability, e-commerce, website auditing and email marketing. Clients include Verizon, REI, Gorton’s, Cabela’s, InfoSpace, The Sharper Image, Wella, Northern Tool, Sara Lee Direct, Midwest Airlines, Guild.com, and MP3.com. He has contributed to magazines such as Catalog Age, Unlimited, Building Online Business, and NZ Marketing. Stephan is a frequent speaker on Internet marketing topics for organizations such as the DMA, the AMA, Internet World, and IIR.
Screencast on using the SEO-Links tool
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)
Google in the Real World: How Links Boost Your Ranking
MarketingProfs virtual seminar series — online (webcast)
Links are the currency of the search engines. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts will be in vain.
Link building is arguably the most difficult, most misunderstood, and most poorly executed aspect to SEO. Join SEO and link-building expert Stephan Spencer as he guides us through the quagmire and shows us the way to great search engine rankings.
You will learn:
- Google’s PageRank scores: red herring or useful metric?
- What makes a link valuable or not
- Creative strategies for building link-worthy content
- What works when approaching webmasters with link requests
- Pitfalls to avoid if buying or bartering links
- The phenomenon of Google bombing and making it work in your favor
- The role of authorities, hubs, and topical relevance
- How to leverage blogs and the blogosphere for link building
- To get your content successfully syndicated onto other web sites with RSS
- How to capture the link gain (PageRank) of your affiliates and your advertising
The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.
The Secrets of Building Links and Increasing PageRank
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.
Continue reading »Coverage of SES San Jose: Search Engine Q&A On Links
I’m a bit behind on my conference session blogging. Waaay too many parties going on; doesn’t leave much time for blogging. The Google Dance last night. Yahoo! party at Great America the night before. And tonight I’ve got another party to go to. Yesterday I spoke on RSS. I’ll post a recap on that session later.
I just attended “Search Engine Q&A On Links”, which was great. Lots of useful advice from Google and Yahoo! about linking (nobody seemed to want to ask poor Ask Jeeves any questions). It was funny how obviously diametrically opposed the engines were to the immediately prior session on “Buying and Selling Links”. It’s hard to reconcile the two different sets of advice. Matt in the hallway before this session was adamant: “Don’t buy links!”
Anyways, without any further ado, here’s the session recap:
Kaushal Kurapati from Ask Jeeves:
Be cautious of: reciprocal links and purchasing links
Avoid: link farms, cloaking pages, invisible or hidden links that trick the crawler
Become an authority on a subject
Focus on your busines and content. Rest will follow. [I say: "yeah, right..."]
Teoma uses subject specific popularity: garner respect in your industry, subject-specific text based links can be understood. (hubs and authorities model)
Tim Mayer from Yahoo!:
Here’s some important news!! Yahoo! has just launched a brand new service: Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search. Stop scraping the Yahoo site for backlink results and use Site Explorer instead. Access via an API is offered too. And you can export as a CSV file.
Yahoo has 19.2 billion web objects in its index. Over 20 billion objects, when you include the audio and video.
Plans to use community to improve search quality. Social search = within a trusted network, where someone within your network vouches for a site.
Create natural linking strategies. when things start to look unnatural, is when you’ll start getting into trouble. We look at intent (linking to plasma TVs, diamonds, and Viagra all on the same page) and extent (i.e. what looks normal. Having everything on the page as links or 200 links on the page is too much!)
Yahoo! offers a much more comprehensive sample of backlinks than Google, but not a complete set of backlinks. New system (Site Explorer) will be reasonably comprehensive, in his opinion the most comprehensive out there.
It’s unnatural to link to sitemap-1 sitemap-2 sitemap-3 sitemap-4 sitemap-5. If you are doing this, you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Matt Cutts from Google:
Good links are earned links, links that are based on editorial discretion.
Create services that really useful. e.g newsletters, an article a day, syndicate through RSS (attribute my article and give me a link). start a blog.
Matt launched his blog today: mattcutts.com
Think outside the box.
Only SEOs and librarians do backlink searches. Historically we decided to dedicate a subset of our servers to backlinks. Only a sampling of backlinks would be displayed but only for a threshold of PageRank 4 or higher pages. A suggestion was made to show backlinks for lower PageRank pages too. We liked that idea so we now show a random sampling of backlinks, including low PageRank scoring pages too. We show twice as many backlinks as shown before, but still it’s only a sampling of the backlinks.
In graph theory, a clique in every node in the graph is very unnatural. So don’t link to every single node in your network of sites; it’ll get flagged.
For dynamic sites, you’re very safe if you have fewer than 2 parameters; keep the values of those parameters to fewer than 5 digits, and don’t name a parameter “id”. Googlebot sometimes tries variations of URLs by dropping parameters, but we only do that deep level analysis on big, quality sites.
Another good approach that alltheweb came up with: spider would always go 1 dynamic page deep from a static page.
Search engines only grab 100k or 200k or 500k so be careful loading up a huge page with a lot of links.
PageRank isn’t as important as SOME people make it out to be. BUT it’s NOT like “PageRank? Oh yeah let’s shuffle that one under the rug! That was sooo 4 years ago!”
“BO” = backlink obsession
We export PageRank only once every 3 months or so.
Technorati tag: Search Engine Strategies