Link Building Best Practices - Q and A with Eric Ward

Admitting You Have a Social Network Linking Addiction

2009-06-26T00:34:00.007-04:00

The below article from Stepcase Lifehack really resonated with me from a link building/publicity perspective.

Managing Your Social Network Addiction

In my earlier years, I often felt the need to sign up and create accounts every time a new social network or related venue/tool appeared. It's easy to get caught up in it all. Then, as time went by and those same hot brand new venues became ghost towns and/or vanished, I realized they weren't quite as crucial to my client link building efforts as I initially thought. Go back even further, and the same addiction applied to search engines. I think I submitted a few thousand URLs to Excite once upon a time...The lesson for me has been that there will always be something new, bigger, brighter, cooler, and none of them matter. What matters is meritorious content, influencer identification, and topical merit based link seeking based on one to one interactions.

To bring this around to something tangible, if you have truly outstanding and useful content, you don't have to have a perfect understanding of how to get links from every single communication tool or social network. Learn a bit about a few of them, like Twitter, delicious, digg, reddit, and stumbleupon, and then...at most all you'll need is a content publicist (aka link developer/builder) to show you how to get the link waves started.

Riding The Twitter Link Waves

2009-06-18T11:33:00.020-04:00

A few weeks ago I wrote an article for SearchEngineLand titled Twitter: Incredibly Valuable Or Utterly Useless As A Link Building Tool? .

In the article I wrote:

"Where I see the real value in Twitter as a link building tool is in recognizing that many people who use Twitter have influence in very specific subject areas. If I'm announcing a niche health related web site, I can do a bit of research and quickly find which Twitter users are regularly tweeting similar health related URLs, and reach out to them...Twitter's surface allure is about fame and followers, everything shiny and bright. Twitter's deeper value, for those of us laboring away to constantly improve our search marketing campaigns, is about resource discovery and new links via a handful of experts behind the scenes, in the corners of the web most people ignore, but engines don't."

Let's follow up with a live case study, using this week's article from SearchEngineLand titled

Understanding Federated Link Building: A Primer With Examples.

The above article was posted at 10:25am on June 16, 2009. Fourteen minutes after it posted, a Twitter user named @seomasterlist tweeted a link to it. Here it is (image below).

Waves and Echoes
Since seomasterlist has 1300+ followers, that means at least 1300 people had a chance to see and click that link to the article I wrote.

But that's just wave #1. In addition to @seomasterlist's tweet, 40+ other Twitter users have tweeted or re-tweeted that link. I like the analogy of tweets and re-tweets as waves and echoes, with waves being high follower influencials and echoes being less followed but still extremely important. See this Twitter search result list as of this writing. Notice the variety of links, all ending up at that same article. Some are links tweeted via a URL shortener, like this from @tweetingseo

Search Engine News - Understanding Federated Link Building:
http://bit.ly/pX9Oh

Some are to the SEL RSS feed, like this from Twitter user @mcmaktoby

Understanding Federated Link Building: A Primer With Examples http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/OY9dSZDG69o/understanding-federated-link-building-a-primer-with-examples-21056

And some are direct links, like this tweet from @craig_burgess

Understanding Federated Link Building: A Primer With Examples http://searchengineland.com/understanding-federated-link-building-a-primer-with-examples-21056

Each of these links will deliver a clicker to my article. Think pass-along readership from the print world. But...remember not every tweet is seen by every one of your Twitter followers every time. When you are offline you don't see my tweets, and when I'm offline I don't see yours. By the time you log back in to Twitter, my tweet is likely off your list of current tweets, and may never be seen at all. You can't click what you don't see.

Still, here's some Twitter math to illustrate the power of Twitter Link Waves.

41 Total Twitter users who have tweeted a link to the article
53,282 Total number of followers those 41 Twitter users have
52,270 Total number of Twitter users shown a link to my article (I removed my own followers keep this honest)

As for how many of those 52,270 people saw, clicked on, and read my article at SearchEngineLand, only the folks at SearchEngineLand can know for sure. What's truly amazing is the speed with which links ride waves/skip through Twitter-space. It's only been two days since I posted that article, and all because of Twitter, over 52,000 people had a chance to see it.

Follower Overlap and Co-followers
Remember this is just the Twitter users, and only those Twitter users who used the article title in their tweet text, meaning I can find them by searching. Not everyone tweets an article title. Some just write "good article" and include a short-cut link, meaning I wont find those with a keyword search. We also have to remember that within any vertical, follower overlap is higher. In other words, since my articles have a tendancy to get shared the most within the SEO/SEM industry, and since many folks in the SEO/SEM industry follow each other, I must assume that the 52,000 followers include a significant overlap.

For example, I follow 20 of the 41 people who tweeted my article link, so I would see that same link tweet 20 times. For the sake of argument let's assume a 50% follower overlap. Even then over 25,000 people received that link.

Interesting side notes

- Speaking of Twitter follower overlap, check out Venn'd which offers a nifty twitter follower overlap analysis, or twtrfrnd, which will show you the common followers for any two twitter usernames. And Who follows whom let's you do cofollower analysis for up to five usernames.

- You can search Google for tweets, by restricting your search to the twitter domain like this

"Understanding Federated Link Building" site:twitter.com

But the Google results only show 23, wheras Twitter's search engine shows 40+. So how long before Google makes their move?

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NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to eric [at] ericward [dot] [com]

Up Close Look at Eric Ward's Link Building Desktop

2009-05-05T09:37:00.038-04:00

I was reading Matt Cutts post the other day titled My 8.7M Pixel Display, and it hit me.

There is no site devoted to showing the various desktop rigs for those of us who earn our livings in the SE/SEO-SEM/Link Building/Online Publicity field (seorigs.com is available, btw). I've found a couple other people like Matt and Danny Sullivan who've posted pictures and descriptions of their desktop setups, monitor's etc., and having been asked many times over the years how I manage my daily workflow, I decided to explain it in pictures.

How I Work - Full View
This first shot shows the full command center (click it to enlarge). Bookend laptops, an HP on the left and a Dell Mini 9 on the right. Under the desk is a Dell Studio XPS. Four monitors (15 inch on the left lap, then to the right a 24 inch, a 22 inch, and a 9 inch). Note there are no wireless keyboards or mice. They were always more trouble than they were worth, plus having wired mice and keyboards makes it easier to hurl them greater distances when I have one of my moments (tip: If you use the cord like a lasso and the wind is blowing, you can sail a keyboard over 50 yards.

The Mini Me
That tiny laptop in the above picture (larger picture to the right) is a Dell Mini 9, and that's the one thing I take with me when I leave the office. Very handy. Mini Me's sole mission during the day is to run TweetDeck, which is what you see in the smaller photo. When I take it in the house after work, I use it like a Kindle. My first cell phone was about the same size. Seriously, I had that phone. In fact, note to Dell: please make the Mini a phone for us old school types.

ADD Cental
Just above the Mini is a 22 inch monitor, pictured closer at right, and this is what I call "Feed Central" aka ADD Central. It's blurry becasue that's what it looks like to me most of the time. Feed Central is my iGoogle homepage, and it currently has 57 feeds from folks I keep up with. I use this to scan all the news my brain can tolerate during the day, the amount of which varies depending on my Mtn. Dew blood level. On the positive side, this overload approach will help me know before anyone when my brain is turning to mush, because one day I'll look up at that monitor and ask who this Matt Cutts guy is?

Side Note: I use Firefox's find feature for the feed Central page to highlight the word "link" so that any time link appears in any post's title, I see a visual cue. That way I can scan and spot any post from any of the 57 sources that might be more pertinent to my work.

You can't see it very well, but the first three feeds across the top are Matt's, SEL, and WebProNews. I set all 57 sources to show the maximum 9 posts, so that's 513 posts live on that monitor at any given moment. Thank goodness for OCD, ADD, and Red Bull, or someday I'll be giving interviews like this nice chap to the right, mumbling "linking quid pro quo is spam, Clarice..."

The Main Workhorses
The HP Laptop and the 24 inch Dell monitor on the left are where the real link building takes place. I run Firefox, IE, Thunderbird, assorted tabs and tools, plus a remote session to my link analysis script box located at...Ha! Like I'd give that secret out. If I'm in a phone consult, I'll have skype, a web cam, glance screen sharing, and often trillian running at the same time. I usually have about ten windows open via tabs when I'm in heavy duty link dev mode. My Firefox is tricked out with about 25 add-ons. If you look closer, you can see that I keep a sidebar open on the left, and my tab bar open on the right. I do a lot of dragging and dropping, and even though there are countless link building tools, apps, and thingamabobs, it's often the simplest approach that works best. It's sad that I would call what I just described in this post simple, isn't it?

Multitasking Without Distraction
It's worth noting that when I go deep into link building mode for a client, I go invisible to outside communiques except as they relate to that specific project. I also turn off the Feed Central monitor and TweetDeck. Too distracting. There are some days where all I do all day long is I.D. targets and send email or make phone calls. Pure link seeking. I try not to do this too many days in a row, because it can get tedious, but...it's been proven to me through the years that you can't work at link building for just an hour or two a day. It takes long stretches of intense focus. I devote at least 4 consecutive hours or more of each day to client link building work. Back in the day, when I was starting out and the web was exploding, my wife and I worked side by side, often for 12 hours straight. This was before we had kids and mortgages.

The rest of my day is spent publishing URLwire, doing outreach and rep mgt., research and running link analysis scripts. Over the weekend I usually have 5-10 link audit scripts running, so on Monday there's always a pile of linking data for me to distill into reports.

That about covers it.

Why?
Part of the reason I've posted this is that many folks in the industry refer to me as "old school", and while I take it as a compliment, others regard that term with disdain, thinking my approach to link building is something like this. Hardly. As you can see above, my control center is not for the faint of heart or for those who can't multitask with abandon. Total the info points across my desktop, be they tweets or IMs, add in six email inboxes, and I figure I'm handling and scanning through roughly 3,000 items every day.

If that's old school, so be it.

What has remained old school is my ethos and outreach communication style and technique. And guess what? They work even better today than they did then.

Desktop Rig Links
If you have a page where you've shown and/or described your desktop setup, send me your link, and I'll post it here, hopefully creating an ever growing log of how we all actually do our thing all day.

Eric Ward (your on it)

Matt Cutts
Danny Sullivan
Craig Burgess of Digital Tsunami

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To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below,
or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post.

Best Practices for Feeling Sorry for Yourself

2009-04-20T10:14:00.013-04:00

Over at Outspoken, the place where I secretly wish I worked (if I was 15 years younger and had any youthful hotness remaining), there was a firestorm over Lisa Barone's post It's Not the Recession, You Just Suck

Some loved it, some didn't, some seemed offended. I read it with detached bemusement, which is professionally my favorite emotional state. Being an elder statesman has it's perks and detached bemusement is one of them.

Another perk of being a gray-beard in this biz is watching the younger crowd earn their stripes as the years go by. Even though I really don't know these folks, I watch them from a distance, follow them, comment on their blogs from time to time, and oddly take great pride when one of them becomes as successful as I thought they would back when I first met them, when they might not have known if they were going to make it big or not.

Rae Hoffman is a perfect example. I had been speaking at conferences for many years and then she happened to be on a panel with me. I don't remember the specific conference, as I've done over 100, and I don't remember who else was on that panel. What I remember was Rae knew her shit cold. Smart as hell, fearless, willing to speak up. I remember her saying she was glad to be on that panel with me and then thinking to myself I should be thanking her. I also remember thinking to myself that she was going to be a force in the industry, and soon. I so much love being right.

On Lisa's post above, Rae commented...

...a few of them might do what I did ten years ago and say "you know what? I want more. And I CAN get it..."

Yes, indeed you can. Long before Mike Grehan and Greg Boser and Debra Mastaler decided my new SEO handle was LinkMoses, which was circa 2002, a full decade earlier in 1991, I lost my job when my division was sold to Time Inc., and my boss informed me I was not a part of the "new organization". The economy was in a recession (you thought this one was the first one?), and I spent three months in a funk before I realized nobody was going to rescue my sorry ass. I did what Rae said. I decided "I want more" and got up and did something. You all know the rest of the story.

So take everything Lisa and Rae said, put it in ALL CAPS and multiply it by 10. Then it will be perfect.

Nobody, and I mean n-o-b-o-d-y gives a shit about your future enough to put your faith in them. We are all free agents, and like it or not, you cannot hide your weak-ass game for long in this industry. After 14 years at this, I could easily just phone it in. Sit on the porch with a blunt listening to the best band nobody's heard of (on 8-track). Hell, I've earned it. Fuck that Twitter shit and why the hell do I need a blog? I'm freaking Link-Moses.

Right?

Wrong.

I know what I know because I refuse to stop. I refuse to let my skills rust. And more important, I know what I do not know, and it's a lot. So I go learn it.

The special thing about our particular industry is how it's still in its infancy, and nobody is such an expert at any aspect of it that they can stop learning. At the same time, it's all right there for the taking, if you want it, and are willing to learn it, and then earn it.

-Eric

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NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to LBBPQ@ericward.com

How Twitter Can Impact Link Building

2009-03-31T12:29:00.017-04:00

Live now over at SearchEngineLand is this week's Link Week column:

Twitter: Incredibly Valuable Or Utterly Useless As A Link Building Tool?

Before you start your attack, yes, I know people are saying Twitter has already jumped the shark and become nothing more than a popularity contest. In some instances I agree it is, but from a merit based link building perspective, forget the Twitter masses.

Twitter is not just about Shaq and his 490,000 followers, clicking like sheep whatever URL the big guy tweets.

Twitter is also about small groups of subject specific influencers, and what they do with the links they learn about.

Read more

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to lbbp@ericward.com

Best Practices for Flickr Link Building

2009-03-24T10:30:00.010-04:00

Every once in a while I read an article or blog post related to link building, and it's so good I nearly wet my pants. Of course, I'm in my forties so it could be incontinence, but that's a story for another post.

There is a right way and a wrong way to go about link seeking and link building, and then there are ways that rise above everything else. A technique so sublime that as you read about it you are both mad (that you didn't think of it), but smiling at the sheer brilliance of it.

I'll get to the specific example in a moment, but first it's important to explain that when I say there is a right way and a wrong way to build links, what I should say is there are a hundred right ways and a thousand wrong ways. The approach and strategy you employ will ALWAYS depend on the venue you are pursuing links from, the content you are pursuing links for, your creativty, and your own internal ethical compass. The strategy I'm about to point you to will not work for everyone, nor should it. But the lesson to take from it is priceless.

I'm fond of throwing around the phrase "holistic link building". It makes me sound smarter than I am. The two core strategies behind holistic link building are that 1). your site is more than it's homepage, with multiple opportunities for content specific deep links, and 2). the web is filled with passionate experts who create a variety of content that you can leverage.

OK, enough introduction. This article from Lisa Barone and Rae Hoffman titled "Getting Links AND Content From Flickr" shows just how creative and clever link building can be. It does so not just by theorizing, it does so by sharing a real life case study and examples. But besides that, and perhaps most importantly (here's where I get all misty), this article shows how link building can (and should) be a very human process, not a task to be dreaded, or a chore to be completed. Please read it and see if it inspires you like it has me.

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to LBBPQ@ericward.com

LinkWeek - Rules Of Linking Engagement As The Web Turns Twenty

2009-03-17T11:17:00.005-04:00

Live now at SearchEngineLand
LinkWeek
Rules Of Linking Engagement As The Web Turns Twenty
Excerpt:
Link building is a strange profession. Link building is not something you can get lazy about. Yes, it's true I know more about link building today than I did in 1994. But...in some ways I know less about it now than I did then. If linking campaigns from 1996 were a food they'd have been a Hostess Twinkie. Today a link building campaign is a seven course meal. There are so many different ways to seek, chase, inspire, engender and obtain links that it's mind blowing. Yes, it's harder now, but...it's still easy if you remember this is all just...click to read the full article

Clarification of my role in the Disa Johnson / Shoemoney Situation

2009-03-11T17:37:00.011-04:00

On ShoeMoney's Blog today was written...

Disa says she has enlisted Link master Eric Ward to start building her links to her new site and improve her rep management. I am still stunned that Disa doesnt understand truly how rankings work… but bringing in the Link Moses cant hurt.

I felt I needed to respond, because this statement is not true.

While Disa is a long time colleague and friend, I am not working on any sort of link building or rep mgmt on her behalf or for any of her sites. I'd fail at such a thing because rep management and attempting to push pages down the rankings is not my specific area of expertise AT ALL. Disa gave me a testimonial, which I posted it on my site, with link attribute, and that single link from my site somehow bumped Disa's site up above ShoeMoney's original post. Thus it appeared I'm some sort of reputation management link building guru.

I'm nothing of the sort. Not even close. I also have no illusions that this rank will be permanent, nor should it be. Jeremy knows far more about this type of thing than I do.

I know how link works and why, but only in my very specific niche, which is for content rich niche sites, so I'll be staying on the sidelines on this ongoing saga.

I think it's time to drop this. Live and let live. Life is short. Please.

Eric, the link builder formerly known as LinkMoses :)

Link Building Project Manager - SQuiD

2009-03-05T08:55:00.012-05:00

I've been working quietly behind the scenes advising Disa Johnson on a link building project management tool. It's called SQuiD, and is still in its earliest stages, but functional. You can check it out at http://squid.searchreturn.com

I hope to see many additional features added to SQuiD, as SQuiD has already helped me with several link building projects, and as it evolves, it will solve one of the most challenging aspects of link building. Keeping track of the link building process over time.

As always, remember that any tool is only as good as your content will let it be. SQuiD wont help crap become non crappy:)

SQuiD will help those of you who are producing truly meaningful content.

Jake Scruggs, who helped Disa create SQuiD has posted a couple SQuiD tutorials on his blog, which I encourage you to check out.

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NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to LBBPQ@ericward.com

Opinion on Why Link Building Must Go In-House

2009-03-03T17:02:00.002-05:00

My Link Week column for this week at SearchEngineLand is live now here. Titled Why Link Building Must Go In-House, my feelings about this subject have been known, but never written in a way that I was happy with. Please have a look.

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NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the "comments" link below, or the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to LBBPQ@ericward.com

Helping Clients See The Bigger Linking Picture

2009-01-22T09:47:00.010-05:00

Good read written by Mike Moran over at SearchEngineGuide titled How do I get links to my Web site?

The site in question was an ecommerce site. Skis and snowboards.

Sites that are primarily ecommerce oriented present special linking challenges. Several times each month I get questions like Mike did. Ecommerce sites want links. How do they do it? Will I do it? What will it cost? How long before they see improvement in rank?

Owners of those sites are sometimes willing to listen to what I tell them, accept what they are up against, and decide what to do about it. But some want no part of an actual linking strategy. They want a quick fix. They may be resistant to the "let's add great content" approach, or if they try it, they short-cut the process because they are doing it only because they feel they have to. And even if they have a passion for the subject, they aren't writers, they are store owners.

One of the more eye-opening ways to show the client the link attraction power of passionate content is to find sites in their niche that have already attracted high value links as a result of specific content. Show them the links, show them the content linked to. Then show them a search result like this one for snowboard linkbait, so they see first hand how advanced some folks are already getting, as well as how silly. How many "snowboard selector tools" does the web need? Apparently 163,000. Seeing that I'd be tempted to go old school and create another snowboard glossary (shudder). Heck, why not just aggregate the already existing snowboard video tips onto one central page, living on your site? Nobody's done it yet.

After this exercise, show them subject specific sites they may have never thought of, but which illustrate the potential for high trust inbounds in certain niches. I use cocitation analysis, show them a specific example, and then hope the light comes on for them. For the ski equipment site, show them these pages

http://staff.niacc.edu/skiclub/
http://www.crescentskicouncil.org/clubs.html
http://www.scwdc.org/
and
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/student/club/ski/Index.htm

They may not see the multiple and larger strategic linking implications and opportunities such sites present. Do you?

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the Comments link below, or the Post a Comment link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to LBBPQ@ericward.com

Social Media Links - Spam 2.0

2009-01-16T08:55:00.008-05:00

I read a great post this morning at InventorSpot titled

As the Algo Turns- 7 Predictions for Search Engine Marketing in 2009

Prediction #6 was this.

Social Media will become a major brand and link-building device.

While I agree, I also felt compelled to leave the below comment.

But...those of us who are in the link building business need to recognize and respect the distinct culture of social media networks. Social media is not there to be exploited for SEO. Don't ask "what can social media do for my links". That's just spam2.0. Instead, ask, "what can I do to contribute to the conversation aside from link drops". If you have nothing to add but company and/or client links, frankly, your wasting your time, and ours. If you worked for the engines, would you really trust anything about social links enough to incorporate it into a ranking adjustment? Maybe In certain cases, and for cetain topics, but if you spend some time looking through the social apps, you'll see they are polluted already by the usual suspects.

Some perspective. A couple years ago I wrote an article for SearchEngineLand titled Social Link Manipulation, where I tried to explain my position that SEO or marketing driven social linking is a pointless and ugly link building tactic. For goodness sake just become an advertiser. Don't pollute the river.

I'll flesh this out in a longer Social Media Linking Best Practices post soon, but you tell me, am I just spitting in the wind?

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the Comments link below, or the Post a Comment link at the bottom of any individual post. You can also email your question to LBBPQ@ericward.com

Where Trust Lives - An Example

2008-12-18T09:15:00.006-05:00

Sometimes when I'm giving a link building presentation, I'll show the audience a site like this: Directory of open access journals, and tell them it's an example of where trust lives. People look confused. Eyes glaze over. So what do I really mean? And what value would a site like this have from a link building perpsective? I'd love to hear your thoughts, and I will reply right here on this post again in a few days with my explanation of the many ways a site like this is incredibly important for certain link builders.

Revenge of the Librarians - Don't Hate me for Being Right

2008-11-13T09:04:00.021-05:00

.
Revenge of the Linking Librarians

Today I saw the below announcement.

I-Schools Announce Reference Extract Web Search Project

If you're so inclined, I suggest you have a look at the RefEx site, and read the above article, because it will help you understand what I have been preaching about links for over a decade.

Some perspective is in order. I spent a couple years in Library School back in the early nineties under some amazing professors, José-Marie Griffiths and Carol Tenopir among them. I watched as the web seemingly came out of nowhere and in some ways snuck up more than a few library school's curricula. José and Carol were among those who did see the web of the future, and helped me tremendously (and boy did the web kill Gopher).

I left a few courses shy of my MLS to start my content linking and publicity company (dubbed NetPOST back then), and have predicted to whoever would listen ever since that underpaid and hard working librarians would one day arrive en-masse and help make sense of the mess that is the web. They've already been doing this on a library by library basis for years.

I've called it Revenge of the Librarians, and it's why for many many years I have been methodically reaching out to and building contacts and rapport with thousands of librarians all over the globe. I bet over half the links I have sought for clients over the years have been from librarians. True, this is easy when the content you are seeking links for is from PBS.org, or NationalGeographic.com, or Discovery.com, but that's the point. Meritorious content earns trusted links. You can't fool a librarian.

Back when I wrote columns under the pen name Link Moses, I preached for years about meritorious content and earned citation trust, and most of you looked at me like I was an alien. I talked about etiology and trust flow, and you laughed. Called me old school or worse. When I told you your sites weren't good enough to earn the types of merit-based links that would then result in long term earned search rank, you hung up on me and hired a black hatter. For those of you who have heard me speak at conferences, you know that at the end of my sessions I am famous for taking a moment to predict where search is headed, and the potential implications for link building. I'd whisper just one word: Librarians. I think Shari Thurow was the only one in the room who smiled.

I hinted at this in an article a couple years back titled Where Is The Mother of All Links?

Back to RefEx. I don't know what the adoption rate of this new engine/tool will be. Ultimately it will depend on the value the search results offer to the searcher. Certainly there will be value to the academic side of the search world. Consumers may need a bit of help to find it, as the inertia of search habits tends to lead us all to Google. After all, if someone with the brand, clout, and pocketbook as deep as Disney couldn't make Infoseek work, can anyone really hope to gain a foothold in today's search world? I think yes, but people wont find RefEx on their own. We can help.

In my perfect future search world, RefEx results will become a standard toggle selection option for Google, Live, and Ask, giving all searchers exposure to RefEx results, without them having to visit the RefEx site and conduct searches there. The impact of such an integration would be astounding.

-Eric

Paid Links from .edu's - Good, Bad or Ugly?

2008-11-06T10:44:00.016-05:00

A reader asked...

“What about paid links from the school newspapers. Can those hurt your rankings?”

[Quick backgrounder - printed college newspapers sell advertising just like most newspapers do. The online version of those college newspapers also sell advertising, and since the online version of most school newspapers lives on a .edu TLD, a couple years ago this created a frenzy among Pagegank driven link chasers who (thought they) found a loophole that allowed them to buy high Pagerank links from trusted sources]

I always go back to intent. Why are you wanting to buy a link from a college newspaper in the first place? There could be many legitimate reasons why you would do so. A local bar with a web site that offers nightly specials to college kids would be a natural for such a link buy. Or a local store or salon or car repair shop. Nationally, it's logical that a beer company or even Nike or Doritos would want to advertise to a college audience and maybe even try to drive a bit of traffic to a web site by buying an online link in the school newspaper web site.

The motivations and intent in the above examples are fairly evident. Doritos isn't chasing search rankings via that link buy. Nobody is searching for "seasoned triangular shaped snack chips" as you can see here. No, the motivation for the links buys from Nike or Doritos or the local bar are all simple demographically driven advertising in hopes of click traffic.

Other web sites have different intent when they choose to buy an .edu based link from a school newspaper. Take a look at the bottom of the main page for the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon. Here's a link to it, and below is a screen capture of the ugliness. Remember, all these paid links are located on a University newspaper's web site in Knoxville TN.

Now you tell me the intent of these advertisers. When was the last time a college kid in Knoxville needed to rent a limo in Orlando? Buy an artificial Christmas Tree? Use a Restaurant Supply firm? Subscribe to US News and World Reports (which they can read free already)? How about never? I went to undergrad and graduate school at the above school, and I can pretty much remember most of those days. I never bought one single kitchen sink in all my years in college.

Shocking.

So why did these companies buy these links? Bad intent. Intent to game search rank via buying links on (potentially) trustworthy content. But remember, it took my average brain all of 60 seconds to find these same advertisers and links on plenty of other school newspaper web sites. How fast does the world's most powerful brain (aka algorithm) notice them? Pretty Damn Fast.

But the question was will your site be penalized for engaging in this approach? Probably not, but the larger point is the approach itself wont work, and by participating in it you send plenty of other signals to the bots that you might be very unhappy about. Why cheat in such an obvious and silly way? Why cheat when the bots are seconds away from finding it? Why cheat at all?

As I wrote in .edu Inbound Link Fallacies, any TLD has crap, and any TLD has gold. Paid links on a school newspaper in Tennessee about limousines in Orlando. That friend, is pure crap.

Backlink Research Best Practice - Linkscape

2008-10-17T22:08:00.006-04:00

My silence regarding Linkscape has been mistaken by several people as meaning I don't like it. Quite the contrary. I do like it, and I'll post here what I've posted on a few other blogs, almost verbatim.

Over the years I have lost count of the 3rd party link building and link analysis tools and software I've tried out, many of which are long gone. What is most telling to me is that I abandon them when it comes time for heavy lifting deep vertical link target ID and evaluation. I wont go so far as to say “All you need is Google and your brain”, but it’s darn close to true, at least for the type of client content I work with. Linkscape is outstanding and useful for a very specific set of metrics and measures, and for a certain type of link builder will be quite helpful. I commend Rand for it and I will use it to augment my own personal approach to the link building research process.

On the other hand, I'm old school and have never been a big user of any tools other than my own privately created (and really simple) scripts. As much as I want and look forward to every new tool, I keep thinking about Rocky IV, where Ivan Drago was using every cutting edge tool and training method available, while Rocky ran around in the snow with a log on his back. The savviest link builders will use tools and logs.

Lost in all this tool talk is that it don't matter how awesome your link intel is if you don't have the content that will earn you the types of links that really matter in the first place. I have my own methodology to ID the exact set of targets that will allow just about any site in any vert to rank extremely high. But this is useless information unless it is used by a truly meritorious site that also knows how to seek and get those links. No tool can finish this journey for you, and like a marathon, the first part is easy. It's the last few miles that are hard, and that's where the battle is won.

Joe The Plumber and Link Building Best Practices

2008-10-16T08:48:00.007-04:00

Right now, tens of thousands of Americans are searching for Joe The Plumber. You can thank John McCain for this, though I'm not sure Joe will in the long run. SEL is live with a post about the search impact. See Joe The Plumber, The Presidential Debates & Search.

The sudden spike in searches for JTP (That's my shorthand for ole Joe), can help illustrate the Search Flow Link Building model. Yesterday, nobody had heard of Joe. Today, everyone knows Joe. While this will bring out the worst in the SEM world, it can also bring out the best. So what's the best? What's a 100% white hat method of taking advantage of Joe's good fortune?

The obvious beneficiaries are Joe himself, or this site http://joetheplumber.com (ironic isn't it that the Joe mentioned during the debate is not the Joe who owns JoeThePlumber.com). But, other sites specifically devoted to plumbing, like this one Plumbing Supply.com have much to gain, if they know what to do and how, when, where, and why. And I don't mean the thousands of soon-to-be-issued press releases that will have the "Joe The Plumber" phrase all over them in deep anchored glory. Not at all. And I don't mean the thousands of blog posts, just like this one, that will use the phrase "Joe The Plumber" in their titles. That's just pandering to the search flow, rather than utilizing it strategically.

One way a plumbing supply site could take advantage of the Joe frenzy is this. Set up a Google news alert for the phrase "Joe The Plumber". Toggle to by sort by date. If you are confused, here you go http://snipurl.com/4ewqi.

Now, as those alerts arrive, visit the sites found and look for a contribution opportunity. If the site is the New York times and the article allows for comments, you go in with this one or something more to your own opinion.

“ Listnening to the candidates say Joe The Plumber over and over in many ways demeaned Joe and for that matter the plumbing industry. I know I felt sorry for Joe after the 18th time McCain said it. Our industry is not a bunch of idiots. We know when we are begin used like a volleyball for someone elses purposes. Exactly like what I'm doing here. Regards, the staff at PlumbingToolsAreUs.com

Before you jump me about nofollow and linkjuice, I know this type of link is not going to help your rank. I'm not after rank. I'm after the traffic flow. Publicity driven link building. If I wanted links that would help rank, I'd use a different tactic, and I know what it would be. Do you? I'll follow up with it here soon. Eric

Outlinking Best Practices - Rule 1

2008-10-15T13:03:00.004-04:00

Some people hesitate to link back to a site that is of really high quality, out of worry that by adding a link they create a recip loop, which they think devalues that high value link in the process. I look at it another way. There are many reasons why you might link out to another site that's linking to you. For example, what if my site at EricWard.com was mentioned in The New York Times, and they linked to me as well. I'd be insane if I did not include a blurb about this on my site, with a link back to it where readers on my site could go see it. When I do this, it is no different than any other reciprocal link loop, except that the two sites doing the linking are of highest quality in their respective niches. There is no reason to let any engine dictate high level linking like this.

Rule of Outlink #1 is...

Link freely and often, but first apply a degree of scrutiny similar to that used when selecting a new suit, engagement ring, or proctologist.

FYI - The Great Link Race Has Begun, But To Where?

2008-10-15T10:05:00.001-04:00

I'm getting some amazing private feedback about my column from yesterday at SearchEngineLand

The Great Link Race Has Begun, But To Where?
http://searchengineland.com/the-great-link-race-has-begun-but-to-where-15003.php

Link Building Podcast and Transcript with Eric Ward

2008-10-13T12:38:00.004-04:00

Thank you to Jerry M. for alerting me to this podcast transcript. It's a couple years old but still 100% on target.

On April 5, 2007 Eric Enge and Eric Ward, aka Link Moses, spoke about some of the latest events affecting the world of link building. Here is the transcript of that podcast.

http://www.ericward.com/link-building-podcast.html
Here is the original audio
http://www.stonetemple.com/podcasts/Eric-Ward-Podcast-040507-Transcript.shtml

Answer to: After The Basics - Now What?

2008-09-26T15:18:00.003-04:00

TravelingNinja asked...

I've taken a new site from 1 backlinks to 350 in five months of hard work. I've done the basics: submitted to niche and free mainstream directories, posted in forums, exchanged some links, and requested some links. What can I do next?

Link building for a new site with no links is my perfect scenario. You don't have to worry about previous mistakes or link spam, and you have a clean slate on which to work. But, as TN notes, after the basics what do you do? Two word answer: vertical publicity.

What's the subject of the site? You mentioned you submitted to niche directories, but depending on the niches these are just as notorious for junk and swaps as the wannabeeyahoos. I suggest you compile a list of the top sites that appear in a both the regular and blog search results for your most important phrases. Look for common citations A site that is showing up in both results, even on page two or three, is doing something right. On the blog results, bookmark every site that has mentioned the site that is also ranking well in regular search. Also compile a list of every niche content site and blog that is not a competitor. This is the start of a publicty and public relation driven link building campaign. You aren't after niche directories here. You are seeking editorial mentions or blogroll inclusions from the key influencers in your niche.

This is just a scratch at the surface, but a good scratch.

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the Comments link below, or the link at the bottom of any individual posts

New Link Building Boot Camp

2008-09-26T13:52:00.002-04:00

I just finished teaching a one month link building boot camp, which was a custom training project I created for a specific client in a tight vertical. During the course of the month, it became obvious the boot camp was working very well, the client was learning, becoming self sufficient at link building, and most of all getting results. They told me I should offer the boot camp to other clients...

Hmmm. Now why didn't I think of that?

After reverse organizing the previous boot camp into a service description, I'm happy to announce ...

30 Day Private Link Building Boot Camp with Eric Ward

UPDATED: .edu Inbound Link Fallacies

2008-09-23T16:03:00.008-04:00

One of the bigger link building hot topics is the impact that IBL (inbound links) originating from .edu locations can have on your link popularity and search rankings. Lost in the discussion is that the quality of IBL's from within the .edu domain varies significantly.

Rather than making this concept more complex than it needs to be, let's boil it down by example. A link from a student homepage or school paper web site isn't as valuable as a link from a professor's page, or better yet, the University library site. Why? because it's easy for those who are into black hat stuff to buy links from students, wheras a librarian isn't likely to be bought. Thus the content EARNED the link, and the source and citation can be trusted. Engines know this and will tweak algos until they get it right. I hope, anyway. Give me 10 library links instead of 100 student page links any day.

Likewise with .gov and others. Any TLD has crap, and any TLD has gold.

Another linking topic that gets folks excited is geographic IBL variety. This is another way of saying you need links from a bunch of countries. Not true. Links from around the world may not matter one IOTA for your particular site.

More fallacy regarding directory inclusion. I can say with complete certainty that the older the site the more useless those directory IBLs are. I rank 1st for all key terms and I'm in only two directories. Why do I rank? Simple. Because a). I never went after rank, and B). I stayed true to my content and expertise. That said, since I do rank high I can reverse analyze my links and learn why, but just because I can tell you doesn't mean you can get those links. You have to earn them via meritorious content.

For a newer site, the game changes. The new site's IBL profile or "link transcript" or "link signature" needs to slowly percolate towards becoming something that looks natural and trustworthy. I see evidence every day that the links that help me rank 1st will not help every site site rank 1st.

So what works for one site WILL NOT work for every site, which is why it's such a challenge to create software/tools that can analyze links with any degree of confidence. In the end, a human still has to make some very tricky decisions about whether or not ANY link is worth pursuing. The answer will be different for every site, and thus the potential link target sites need to be different as well.

----------------------------------------------

Eric's Note: I included the updated version of the above article as it appears people are as in love with .edu based link targets today as they were many years ago. I base this on several inquiries I received, the last one of which I have included below.

Dear Mr. Ward,
We are a manufacturer and seller of high end playgound equipment designed for municipalities. Our site is http://xxxxxxxx. We would be very interested in a quote from you for the following...
- obtaining 100 .edu based inbound links
/snip

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the Comments link below, or the Post a Comment link at the bottom of any individual post.

LBBP - The Weekly Delete - Avis Edition

2008-09-15T09:35:00.011-04:00

You would think the fine folks at AVIS would know better. Once upon a time Avis used the tagline "We Try Harder" in their TV ads. I wish that ethos carried over to their online marketing efforts. The below link request from AVIS's SEM firm is truly insulting. It's a great example of the Lying Link Building Liar approach (Apologies to Al Franken). Why? First, within the first 25 words they lie. After a dehumanizing greeting, the parade of lies starts with I have visited your website. No, No you haven't. Nobody could visit my site, see my picture, see my name appearing 10 times before the scroll, see that my site has nothing to do with Israel, or rental cars, or travel, and then think they could reach me via an email address with the word webmaster in it. That is, unless they never looked at my site in the first place.

You are a liar. Lie lie lie, you good-intentioned but nonetheless lying liar.

The kicker is after all that, they then write Competitive compensation is offered. Nice. So here's what this email tells us about Avis: They are willing to buy a link on a site that they have not even seen, have no idea what the subject matter of that site it is about, and are so eager and willing to do so they will offer top dollar to whoever runs the site, which again, they have no idea who is.

All this, and we haven't even touched on the comically-long-and-strategically-kiss-of-death URL they are seeking links for in the first place.

Below is the full email, and I close with DELETE.
__________________________________
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Placing our link in your website
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:38:44 +0300
From:
Reply-To: lxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxractive.com
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Dear Webmaster,

My name is Xxxxx and I am a member of online marketing team who handles Avis Israel. I have visited your website and would like you to consider placing our link in your website. We are open for other options as well.If you would like to take a look at our website please do so and let us know what you think.

http://avis.co.il/avis/site/local/avis/english/Israexxxxxxxxxxxx.jsp?

Competitive compensation is offered. An answer would be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Best Regards,

Lxxxx

Avis online marketing team

Lxxxx@xxxxxxxxxractive.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the Comments link below, or the Post a Comment link at the bottom of any individual post.

Reply to Link Building Best Practices Question: How do I determine good link targets?

2008-09-05T09:08:00.005-04:00

Asked by Steve...

"What signs do you look for to determine what a good link is?"

First my generic answer then I'll be more specific. Generic answer: A good link target will be different for every site you are seeking links for. Specific answer: For example, let's say the site you are seeking links for is devoted to everything about the history of Jazz music, like this one http://www.apassion4jazz.net, then an example of an absolute highest quality and trusted target site would be
http://www.wku.edu/Library/dlps/rsrchguides/dept/html/music.html

Why? Many reasons. First, always look for the INTENT of the target site. In my example above the intent of this library based music web guide is pretty evident. That site isn't there to sell links, barter links, swap links, trade links, triangulate links, or any other silly link scheme. The intent has nothing to do with any search engine. That site exists as a resource to help people. And whether or not this target site EVER sends even one visitor to apassion4jazz.net, really isn't important from a link building standpoint. What's important is that a link from that site and others like it send incredibley powerful signals of trust to the search engines.

The beauty of this is it doesn't take many such signals/links to get to a point where the engines will then, by extension and association, trust apassion4jazz.net as well.

And as this search result shows, they obviously do.

Eric Ward
Link Building Best Practices

NOTE: To ask a link building related question, click the Comments link below, or the Post a Comment link at the bottom of any individual post.