Reputation Management & Keyword Match Domain Names

• May
• 14

A keyword match domain name comes with many built in advantages: type in traffic, links are easier to acquire, authority given to it by Google, etc.

One advantage that often gets overlooked is that owning the exact match domain will make it very difficult for negative listings to appear in the SERPS for your name. The more competitive the keyword phrase the harder it will be for negative listings to creep up.

As the market matures and more competitors enter, they will likely use the keyword + some modifier in their domain name to compete and try to grab some of that traffic off the generic keyword search. This simultaneously makes it more difficult for negative listings to appear for your primary keyword/brand. Even if users type in ‘keyword.com’ into the search engines, the results that will be returned are your site at #1 (hopefully with sitelinks) and #2, and then 3-10 will likely be competitors who are using the keyword in their domain name.

I’ve been examining a bunch exact match domain queries lately and very rarely do negative listings appear.
Obviously many of the quality, traffic driving keyword domain names are taken, but they are up for auction every so often and this is another reason why they are worth the premium that they’ll cost.

Britney Spears is Selling Viagra?

• April
• 27

Update: As with many flash-in-the-pan ‘buy viagra’ listings, Britney.com is gone and no longer ranks #3.

That’s what the Google search results will have you believe.

You can check out the actual search results here. I doubt they’ll last very long.

The link goes to this page on her site that was created over the weekend.

Who had any idea that Britney was such a savvy affiliate marketer?

RIP Yahoo Mindset

• April
• 20

What was once a great tool for finding resource sites to get links from is now dead. I noticed this about a week ago and thought that perhaps it was down for maintenance, but it has yet to come back. It had become so irrelevant, that I couldn’t find any information regarding it’s passing in the blogosphere. So I’m declaring it dead until further notice.

What’s up with Dewey?

• April
• 7

There has been plenty of chatter recently regarding the recent changes in the SERPS, which have since been coined ‘Dewey’. I’ve read much about what people speculate this update is about and many have said that they believe Google, whether intentionally or not, is giving more weight to spammy links. I saw a comment on WMW that sums it up pretty well.

“Seems to be a lot of consensus that the shuffling is about links and link value. I am in a highly competitive industry and I definitely concur. I’ve spent the past three days doing in-depth backlink analysis on the competitor sites that jumped ahead of our site (pushing us to #11 from #6) and they exhibit obvious link building practices that Google supposedly frowns upon…mainly link purchases. I’m coming across a lot of run of sites. We have been steadily cleaning up our paid links, which seems to have been a mistake.”

Although I personally haven’t seen any dramatic changes in the SEPRS that I track, I have seen evidence that lower quality links that Google supposedly frowns upon have been effective in incrementally improving rankings. Regardless of the effectiveness of these easily obtained low quality links, I feel that this is not the direction Google intends to go with how they give credit towards links, and to start acquiring low quality inbound links as your primary linking strategy due to changes brought about by Dewey could come back to haunt you shortly.

I believe what is being seen in the SERPS is more of the byproduct of an algorithmic flaw brought about by recent changes (similar to the position 6 issues a few months back) than the direction Google intends to go with their rankings. I can’t conceptualize why Google would voluntarily start placing more weight on links that require less effort to obtain and therefore more likely to be low quality/spam. If it is the case that these recent changes were a mistake, we are in for a huge shakeup in the not-too-distant future when Google gets it together and all these links that are proving so effective will be nullified and rankings will shift accordingly. Over the next few days/weeks I think it’s best to maintain a wait and see attitude. If nothing changes, it looks like it could be a plentiful season for link farms.

Read more about the Dewey update:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/016754.html
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3615693-6-30.htm

Great Moments in Link Building History

• March
• 26

November 6, 2007

Stubhub announces a deal with ESPN and gets highly targeted links from team specific pages throughout the ESPN.com site.

“The agreement integrates StubHub branding, links and promotions across ESPN.com, and creates a convenient destination for fans to search for tickets to sporting events nationwide. StubHub is now dynamically integrated into ESPN.com Team Pages, Scoreboards, Game Previews, Clubhouses, Schedule pages and Travel Indexes. A custom StubHub “TicketCenter” also appears on every major sport index page where users can buy tickets for any team.”

This is a hyper relevant link on one of the most authoritative sports sites around with targeted anchor text. Shockingly StubHub doesn’t dominate this market. Razorgator, Tickets Now, and a few other players put up formidable competition and fare quite well in many of the SERPs I have looked at.

How to Use Backlink Data

• March
• 12

As a link builder, one of the many things you can use to assess the level of competition in an industry is to check the backlinks of a few of the top competitors. Unfortunately we don’t get too much help from the search engines here, as they all report wildly different numbers and it’s impossible to tell which links count in the eyes of Google. I believe that the 80/20% rule applies to link building, where 80% of the link pop for a page or site is obtained from 20% of the links. I actually think it’s closer to 90/10, but as with most things in SEO, it’s unprovable and not information you’ll find in a backlink analysis.

Using Search Engine Land as an example, you can see the inconsistency between reporting:

Yahoo Site Explorer: 573,000
linkdomain command: 325,000
Google link command: 6,800
MSN link command: 0 (they blocked it again)
Alexa: 143

Two things to note here:

1) It’s common knowledge that Google’s backlinks are only a sliver of what is really being counted.
2) Alexa reports unique domains that they have data for linking to a site, not total links

What to do with the data

Regardless of the numbers reported by the engines, it’s not worth it to go over these with a fine tooth comb. I would recommend using Joost De Valk’s SEO link analysis firefox extension and trying to get a good idea of the different types of links that your competitors are getting. The extension will list the PageRank, anchor text, and whether or not it’s nofollowed. What I generally look for are types of links the competitors are getting. In order to do this I think the “linkdomain:site.com -site.com” works best as it provides you the most flexibility to filter the data.

For example, using retail giant Walmart as an example, to find how many directories a site may be listed in, I use a search in Yahoo like linkdomain:walmart.com intitle:directory. This shows all the pages that have the word ‘directory’ in the title that link to walmart.com. There is margin for error as some directories don’t have the word ‘directory’ in the title and some of the pages that do have it may not be directories, but I’ve found it to be reliable enough to give a quality snapshot.

You can also do the same thing to see how many links they have from blogs by doing a query like “linkdomain:walmart.com blog.” This shows you how many links they have from pages with the word “blog” in it. You could filter it a step further and search for only .edu blogs using a the query like “linkdomain:walmart.com blog site:.edu.”Again, the same margin for error exists for the reasons mentioned in the above paragraph, but for sites that don’t have blogs in Technorati (authority score in Technorati = links in the past 6 months) this is another reliable snapshot.

You can slice it and dice it any way you want which is why I really like utilizing Yahoo explorer more than any other tool. Depending on what you’re looking for, there are an infinite number of ways you can use this to help you in your quest to build links.

Don’t Write Off Reciprocal Links

• February
• 28

A common question these days is the issue of the effectiveness of reciprocal links. People have often made compelling arguments for both sides. Here’s my take.

Recips Work

I think reciprocal links never really stopped working, it’s just that Google got better at detecting relevancy. Before it seemed like Google used to count all recips regardless of whether or not the two sites were relevant, but now far fewer are passing juice. Recips from pages that have a high probability of being unrelated, and who reciprocate with plenty of other unrelated sites more than likely had their links discounted. But there were still some recips that counted between pages that were on the same topic. I think Google is too advanced to discount or give credit for all recips, and still give the same amount of credit for links between two sites in similar categories, regardless of whether or not they’re reciprocated.

This is often why you look at some competitors sites and conclude that all they really have going for them is links on other sites links pages, and they’re still ranking real well in the search engines. Although lots of those links may not count since they’re from old school unrelated sites like mentioned above, there are still likely more than a few that are from sites that only linked out to sites within the niche and who are passing the majority of the overall link juice.

How to Find the Juicy Sites

In order to make it easier to figure out which of the reciprocal links might be the few that are passing juice, you can run some queries in Yahoo utilizing the linkdomain command. The first query I would do is something like: linkdomain:competitorssite.com intitle:”key phrase”. If a site has the keyword phrase you’re targeting in the page title, it is a decent relevancy signal and the page is worth examining. If there are links only to related sites on that page, then it is a link worth getting, and you should have no qualms about linking out to that page from your own site.

Manufacturing Authoritative Links

• February
• 27

What is an authoritative link source?

In my opinion, a good answer to this question can be found by reviewing what a Google engineer has written on this topic. Krishna Bharat (Google Engineer) and George A. Mihaila wrote a paper called “Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents” in which they

“..propose a novel ranking scheme for broad queries that places the most authoritative pages on the query topic at the top of the ranking. Our algorithm operates on a special index of “expert documents.” These are a subset of the pages on the WWW identified as directories of links to non-affiliated sources on specific topics.”

The gist of the Hilltop paper is that a site that has many links from category specific hub pages that match the user query will be more relevant. This is really not much different than what consider as hub and authority pages today. However one thing that often gets overlooked is the part about how the hub pages (‘expert documents’ as they’re referenced in the paper) are scored. The only parts of the hub pages that get indexed, and consequently are used to compute relevancy, are the page titles, the headings, and the anchor text:

“..we only index text contained within “key phrases” of the expert. A key phrase is a piece of text that qualifies one or more URLs in the page. Every key phrase has a scope within the document text. URLs located within the scope of a phrase are said to be “qualified” by it. For example, the title, headings (e.g., text within a pair of H1 & /H1 tags and anchor text within the expert page are considered key phrases. The title has a scope that qualifies all URLs in the document. A heading’s scope qualifies all URLs until the next heading of the same or greater importance. An anchor’s scope only extends over the URL it is associated with.”

I believe this is one of the primary ways that Google determines the relevancy of a link. The amount of relevance given to a link can be based on how the URL is ‘qualified’. If the page title, headings, and anchor text are all relevant (but make sure they’re not identical to avoid tripping over optimization filters) to the user query, there is a very high percentage chance that the linked URL is also relevant, more so than if some of those relevance signals were not there.

How Can I Use This?

This is something that can be utilized when building links. Obviously, this further validates (if you believe Google has implemented elements of the Hilltop algorithm, which I think they have) the enormous impact that a presell page can have on rankings. Other ways to use this information are if you are syndicating content that has links to some of your other pages, try to use variations of your keywords in “key phrases” throughout the page as often as possible without sounding unnatural. If you are buying links, shame on you! But while you’re at it, see if you can pay extra to have the page title changed, or see if you can provide the text surrounding the link instead of having them write it for you, and see if you can include an h2 tag or something above your link with some keywords.

Think Like a Search Engine

As a link builder, I think it’s important to have a general idea of what the search engines are trying to achieve. The more you learn will allow you to get more benefit out of your links. By having a general idea of what the engines are trying to accomplish plus what data they have access to (just about everything) and may use to compute relevancy, you can make educated guesses as to what may work well and what will not, and how to utilize keywords throughout the page.

The most direct way to cultivate this train of thought in my opinion is to read research papers and patent applications. I admittedly suck at math but I am still able to understand the general idea of most research papers and patent applications. Some of the other papers are more complex, but I don’t think I’ve come across one where I couldn’t grasp the overall concept. And if I can do it, anybody can. Bill Slawski’s blog is a great resource for this type of info and should be read by anyone who is interested in learning more of what the search engines are trying to accomplish.

Your Competitors CAN Hurt You … Here’s How.

• February
• 25

It’s often said that there’s nothing that your competitors can do to your site that would get it penalized or in trouble with the search engines. While this may be true for a mature site, it doesn’t hold for new sites.

First Impressions Are Crucial

New sites have little history in the search engines and your early link profile says a lot about what type of site you have and what neighborhood your site belongs to. As in real life, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, so those first few links go a very long way towards letting the engines know how your site fits into the overall web graph. This is why links from large authoritative general directories (Yahoo, Best of the Web, DMOZ) and quality niche, topical directories are quality links for new sites as they allow the engines to classify your site.

Now imagine a site which is brand spankin new that also has no history with the engines. They know nothing about it besides what they can infer from on-page data (which isn’t enough to rank your site in the majority of markets), but beyond that don’t really know what the site is about. This webmaster, instead of paying to get reviewed and admitted into the quality general directories listed above, decided to go the quick and dirty route of getting 1000 directory submissions for $0.99, or whatever the hot, spammy directory deal of the day may be. In the eyes of the search engines, this new site now has 1000 links all coming from places that have a very high probability of being spam. This is not good. It will make it harder to rank for your core terms and you will need even more quality links to offset the Spamage (spam + damage = Spamage) that has already been done.

Spammy Links and Spammy People

Why does this happen? It’s really no different than the real world. Think about a situation where you just met somebody for the first time. First impressions are huge. Because you have had no interaction with this person before, your first impression of the person will be entirely based on that one interaction. If that interaction sucks (search engine spider lingo: is spammy), you are not going to like that person, whether or not it is an accurate representation of who the person really is (ie the quality of their content).

This could be how search engines also view your site. If your first links are from sites that have been marked by the engines as likely to be low quality spam, the search engines are not going to want to rank you, regardless of the quality of your on page content. Ideally if the content is good, you will attract links from the right places over time and you will rank, but that’s a different story for a different post.

Another Benefit of Aged Sites

The reason this doesn’t pertain to an aged mature site is that the engines have plenty of signals regarding what the site is about and where it lies in the grand scheme of things. Aged sites have had a longer period to acquire links and for those links to age. Adding 1000 low quality directory links to a 6 year old site with 30,000 backlinks and 800 .edus is a lot less risky than adding them to a brand new sites with no link profile.

Using the above information, I’m sure you can figure out how a competitor can get a newb site started on the wrong foot and make it hard for it to rank. I do believe that karma will come back to bite you in the ass if you did go out of your way to do this to a competitor, but it’s something to be aware of so that people understand just how important those foundational links can be to the overall well being of your site.

Long Term Costs of Poor Content

• February
• 20

Being about three weeks deep into my role as Chief Link Maestro at Elixir Systems, I have quickly learned why content is considered king. I’d dabbled in link building previously but had never really taken the reins and planned a link building campaign from scratch. Previously it had always been as a compliment to the SEO that was already in place. I’d see which terms needed a boost and figure out how to get some links. It’s not that I didn’t already know that content was king, I just wasn’t 100% on board with the slogan.

Lack of Quality Content is Expensive

Lacking linkable content is expensive and will make it increasingly difficult to compete. The site that is churning out great content and is continually getting links from all different parts of the web will be top of mind and top of search results. In order to stay competitive those that fail to do so will be forced to buy and/or rent links until they can figure out how to naturally attract links. Making an initial investment in quality unique content that people naturally want to link at will save you money on rented links and time in the future. Good content attracts links over time. A small investment (of time and/or capital) can yield many links today and will always be able to attract links in the future.

Secondary Cost of Buying/Renting Links

Bought or rented links rarely yield additional links as they are purchased mostly for ranking purposes, not traffic generation. Once the contract is up, the links are gone and possibly the rankings go with it. The most costly factor is the advantage that your competitors are growing by producing and syndicating quality content that attracts visitors and links. They’re building brand awareness and gaining traffic, two things that are very difficult to accomplish by purchasing and/or renting links.