Archive for the ‘Link Building’ Category

You know the saying about links, that it’s about quality, not quantity? I believe that. But sometimes, quality be damned, you just need to go out and get a bunch of new links!

A quick client history

I’m not a fan of garbage SEO which includes link building and everything else, but a few months back we were needing a little extra push for a client site. The site had sunk from #3 to #6 for two of its core terms and had been there for over a year. With the busy season approaching the client asked us to do everything we can to push them back up to the top three.

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As the debate over paid links continues to wage a lot of innocent business owners get caught in the crossfire. They often hear bits and pieces of information and then have to make decisions based on that information. Rarely is the average business owner as fully informed as the average SEO. Heck, even the average SEO is in the dark much of the time trying to parse statements and warnings made by the search engine representatives.

One of the areas of confusion that many have regarding paid links is knowing when a paid link is really a paid link, and when is a paid link penalized. I think a fair argument can be that a payment doesn’t necessarily always have to be monetary. Any quid pro quo on a link can legitimately be considered a “paid” link.

But not to worry, Google and the other engines don’t work that way. In fact, in their attempt to eliminate all forms of paid links from affecting their natural algorithmic search results Google has left one giant loophole in the paid link witch hunt: paid directory links.

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• Thematic Link Building – Link Building Strategies & Tactics
• Organizing Your Link Lists for Effective Link Building
• A Great Link Building Tool

During my webinar last month I received a lot of questions both before and during my presentation on website architecture. I’m trying to answer a handful of questions each week until I get through the whole bunch of them. If you have any questions of your own I’d be happy to answer them. You can either post a comment for me to respond to or email me and I’ll add them to the list here.

Today I have answered questions regarding books for beginners, SEO techniques and how they have changed, pro’s and cons of CSS, different types of architecture and favicons.

On with the answers…

There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor. Typically, session IDs are used for tracking a single visitor’s navigation path through the site, including the adding or removing products from the shopping cart. They are great for tracking purposes, but really, really bad for search engines and inbound linking.

Ok, first of all, that’s a bad URL shown above, but aside from that, tacked on at the end there is the session ID. Both URLs pull the same page pulled open via a different browsing session. The bad stuff happens if the session IDs also get attached when the search engines come for a visit.

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I’m just now getting around to checking my stats after posting Link Building Secrets Revealed on our site early last month. I thought I’d share a few stats:

The main page linked above was viewed just over 7,500 times. That’s not bad traffic. But who’s secret was most popular?

Here’s the breakdown on page views for each contributor’s page:

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What happens when you ask some of the world’s foremost link building experts to dish out one of their most guarded secrets to the world in a single collaborative effort? They respond!

I found 11 of the world’s top link building experts and got them to give away a single never-before-revealed link building tip, trick or strategy. The result The result is 24-pages of linky goodness! Click the link below to find out more.

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Wiep Knol put together a fantastic document on internal and external linking values. Developed in the same format as Rand’s Search Engine Ranking Factors, Wiep’s Link Values Factors puts together some of the greatest minds in link building, presents them with a series of factors and asks them to rate each according to how much weight it carries.

As is usually the case, not everyone agrees, which is what makes this document fun. It’s very eye opening in that some of the top minds disagree so completely on what is or isn’t a valuable link. It only goes to show that there is still much to be proven in the science of link building. But you have to admire anybody who can definitely answer any of these questions at all. A lot of time and testing has to go into knowing many of these answers, and you know that even if in disagreement, these guys are well educated in the realm of links.

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Ok, I realize that most if not all SEO’s know about the below mentioned tool but I wanted to let everyone know about it. This is a neat tool to prove that Google and Yahoo have completely different ranking tools. This was first brought to my attention by Debra Mastaler during a phone conference and I found it very interesting and useful in many ways.

If you go to Google vs Yahoo it pops up with a preset keyword search. Enter in any keyword(s) that you want to compare, click compare them. It’s as easy as that. You can see the top sites that pop up for your keyword(s) by putting your mouse over the dots. The graph shows you how different Google and Yahoo are for your entered keyword(s).

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Last February, when Stoney told me of his diabolical plan to become a household name in the SEO community, I scoffed. Here was a guy who has been in SEO for almost ten years and remained a relative unknown. Sure, he made a few friends here and there and has been slowly building his reputation, but who would of thought 12 months ago that Stoney would be able to snag an interview with one of the biggest names in the SEO. And that’s not Stoney interviewing the big name, mind you… that’s the big name interviewing Stoney.

Here we are, nearly twelve months later and I can hardly believe that yes, ladies and gentlemen, Stoney has become a “name”. Ok, so maybe he’s not Rand Fishkin. Or Jennifer Laycock. Or Jill Whalen. Or Aaron Wall. Or Andy Beal. Or Brian Clark. Or… OK, you get the point. Stoney has not become that much of a household name, but still I bet many of you hadn’t heard of him 12 months ago!

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