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with Eric Ward And If you don't think it's worth it, I'll pay you back. Twice. "Eric Ward is THE authority on links" -- Danny Sullivan, SearchEngineWatch.com |
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Articles and commentary on the art of building links by Eric Ward (aka The Link Mensch) Linking Strategy Session | Linking Services | RSS Feed Publicity | Contact |
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April 2005
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| Looking for Links In All
The Wrong Places?
by Eric Ward In their frenzy to build links to curry favor with the engines, web site owners miss a far more important audience using topical tools. Most people will tell you that links from Yahoo and DMOZ to your site are vital, and to a certain extent I agree. Who wouldn't want to be listed with two of the most widely used directories in the world? It's what marketers do after they get the Yahoo and DMOZ links that can make or break them. Pursuing links just for Pagerank and Link Popularity in the major search engines is not going to go away, as much as I wish it would. And by trying to impact Pagerank artificially, Pagerank as it is determined now is doomed. Whether that happens in 2005 or 2010 I don't know, but once thousands of sites are after links for reasons other than relevancy, no link can be trusted enough to reward it, right? Aside from the ethics of link building, pagerank, etc. let's discuss sites and search engines dedicated to niche topics. Niche and topical search engines and directories can bring your site highly targeted traffic. Maybe not a stampede of it, but a steady trickle of perfectly qualified users. And while some marketers are quick to claim nobody uses niche search engines because they've never heard of them, I can tell you from ten years of experience they're wrong. It probably wouldn't surprise you to find
out there were search engines devoted to popular topics like Financial
web sites or even Fish web
sites . But for proof that search engines are truly going vertical,
look no further than ElvisFind,
a search engine and directory that only indexes content about Elvis Presley.
At the time of this writing ElvisFind contained 320 Elvis related web sites
in 9 categories. Obviously, if your site doesn't have content about Elvis
Presley, you have no reason to request a link from them or submit your
site to their editors.
Some specialty search engines focus on more than just a specific topic. SearchEdu.com is a good example. This search engine indexes pages from educational sites hosted on .edu domains. I use this search engine to find links pages at educational sites, since for my kinds of clients educational links pages are extremely useful (and they are pretty good for improving Pagrank too). One nice aspect about specialty search engines is they typically don't charge for links (although a few have started charging), and better still I've noticed they add links and index sites far quicker than most of their bigger brethren. There isn't a sandbox at ElvisFind... While there are hundreds of specialty search engines available, it can be hard to find the best ones in any particular subject area. I'll included some of the tools I use below. Once you find a specialty search engine, the link request or site submission process is usually fairly straightforward. Look for the "add your site" link and follow their directions. Options may even be available for paid links or sponsored links. Here are some online tools you can use to find specialty search engines. Danny Sullivans' List of Directories and Search
Engine's by Topic
Until next time, I remain, Eric Ward,
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| About the author... |
Eric Ward founded the Web's first service for announcing and linking Web sites back in 1994, and he still offers those services today. His client list is a who's who of online brands. Ward is best known as the person behind the original linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, The Link Exchange, Microsoft, Rodney Dangerfield, Warner Bros, 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. Eric has also written columns for ClickZ and Ad Age magazine. |
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