IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 |
Hello and welcome to Link Building In Depth.
| | 00:07 |
I'm Peter Kent and I'll be helping you understand the
importance of links for search engine optimization.
| | 00:13 |
While it's sometimes possible to get a site ranked
high in the search engines without worrying too
| | 00:18 |
much about links, that's rarely the case.
| | 00:21 |
If you have plenty of competition for your
keywords, lots of other websites trying to
| | 00:26 |
rank well for the same terms as you, then
a strong linking strategy is essential.
| | 00:32 |
I'm going to stop by
providing a little background.
| | 00:34 |
I'll explain just a little about the evolution
of search engines to set the stage and then
| | 00:39 |
I'll explain why links are important to them.
| | 00:42 |
With the introductory stuff out of the way,
we'll jump in and learn about what links are
| | 00:46 |
and what they can do for your website.
| | 00:48 |
I'll discuss Google PageRank and also the role of
keywords, and why you want to Google bomb your site.
| | 00:54 |
Of course, I'll also explain what
things to avoid when creating links.
| | 00:59 |
Once you understand the basics, we'll get
into how to actually create links, how to
| | 01:03 |
get other websites to link to yours.
| | 01:05 |
I'm going to explain the link game and then
talk about low hanging fruit, the links you
| | 01:10 |
can get quickly and easily.
| | 01:13 |
In addition, you're going to learn about the
link business, the things that the search
| | 01:16 |
engines hate, such as buying links, plus a
bit of link jargon and some information about
| | 01:20 |
working with firms that can
help you create the links.
| | 01:24 |
In some ways linking is the worst part of SEO.
| | 01:28 |
With onpage issues, page optimization and
site structure, you have total control.
| | 01:34 |
It's your site after all.
| | 01:35 |
But with linking, it's different.
| | 01:37 |
You're trying to convince other
people to link to your site.
| | 01:41 |
There are lots of ways to do that, some good
and some not so good, but getting really useful
| | 01:46 |
links can often be difficult.
| | 01:48 |
So let's get started with
Link Building In Depth.
| | 01:53 |
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| How the search engine killed the web directory| 00:00 |
In order to understand why links are so
important, it may help to understand the problem that
| | 00:06 |
search engines use links to solve.
| | 00:09 |
It's hard now for many of us to imagine the
world without a World Wide Web, but by the
| | 00:13 |
end of 1993 there were only around 600 websites
and most of those 600 sites were pretty thin;
| | 00:20 |
a handful of pages each.
| | 00:23 |
In August of that year, when there were just
a couple of hundred websites, a well-known
| | 00:26 |
computer book publisher O'Reilly and Associates
launched what was probably the first commercial
| | 00:31 |
directory of the Internet, GNN,
the Global Network Navigator.
| | 00:36 |
Much of the directory was based
on the whole Internet catalog.
| | 00:39 |
In effect, it was like a paper
directory of websites posted on the web.
| | 00:44 |
In September, another directory
appeared on the scene, W3 Catalog.
| | 00:48 |
And in January of 1994, when there were around
600 websites, David and Jerry's Guide to the
| | 00:54 |
World Wide Web launched.
| | 00:56 |
You'll know that directory better by its later
name Yahoo! Yahoo! eventually became the world's
| | 01:01 |
top search directory and the
world's most popular site.
| | 01:05 |
These were all web directories.
| | 01:06 |
In other words, they were list of websites
with a little information explaining what
| | 01:11 |
each list of site contained.
| | 01:13 |
That was fine in the early days when the
web simply didn't contain much information.
| | 01:18 |
But as the web grew, they became unwieldy.
| | 01:21 |
If you're trying to find a particular
Shakespeare sonnet, a directory will tell you which sites
| | 01:25 |
might contain the information, but they
don't let you see what's in each site.
| | 01:29 |
They simply tell you what each site is about
and it's up to you to go to the site to see
| | 01:34 |
if it contains what you're looking for.
| | 01:37 |
So the next step was the search engine, a system
that created an index of pages within sites.
| | 01:43 |
There were various simple search engines
early on, but perhaps the first true web search
| | 01:48 |
engine, a system that would allow use of the
search through the text contained in web pages
| | 01:53 |
within index websites, was
WebCrawler launched in April 1994.
| | 02:00 |
A directory provides minimal
information about a site.
| | 02:03 |
A search engine, though, lets user search
pages within sites, a far more useful service.
| | 02:09 |
During 1995 and over the next few years, all
sorts of other search engines appeared on
| | 02:14 |
the scene; Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, HotBot,
Northern Light, and of course AltaVista which
| | 02:21 |
became hugely popular when
it launched late in 1995.
| | 02:25 |
Finally, in 1998, Google
appeared on the scene.
| | 02:31 |
By the end of the decade, the writing was on
the wall, search engines were the future and
| | 02:35 |
over time search engines would more
or less kill off the directories.
| | 02:39 |
Even Yahoo! had to switch.
| | 02:41 |
In the year 2000, Yahoo! began using
Google's index to provide search results to Yahoo!
| | 02:47 |
searches, then gradually pushed the directory
further down the page until they removed it
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from their homepage entirely.
| | 02:53 |
Yahoo! Directory still exists today of
course, though most users have no idea where.
| | 03:00 |
But the search engines
have problems of their own.
| | 03:03 |
As the web grew to around two to three million
websites and hundreds of millions of web pages
| | 03:07 |
by the time Google appeared on the scene,
the problem of sorting through the starry
| | 03:11 |
amount of data was becoming overwhelming.
| | 03:15 |
Google was based on a revolutionary idea that
you could figure out what a web page was about
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and whether it was a good match for someone's
search query, not just by looking at the page
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itself but also by looking at
links pointing to that page.
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Those links could be inside the website within
which the page was found, but could even be
| | 03:36 |
pointing to the page from other websites;
sites that the owner of the reference web
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page might not even know existed.
| | 03:43 |
And that's what we'll
look at in the next video.
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| How link analysis revolutionized web search| 00:00 |
As I discussed in the last video, the search
engines in the late 1990s were faced with
| | 00:06 |
enormous amounts of data to sift through.
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The idea of simply looking at a page to figure
out what was in it, and whether it was a good
| | 00:13 |
match for a searcher's query,
simply wasn't enough anymore.
| | 00:17 |
New methods had to be developed for ranking web
pages and link seemed to be the way to go.
| | 00:22 |
In 1996 a search engine called RankDex owned
by a subsidiary of Dow Jones was experimenting
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with using links to assess the value
of the pages that links pointed to.
| | 00:33 |
The site would rank search results based
on how many links pointed to each page.
| | 00:39 |
RankDex is long gone, but the designer went on
to build Baidu, China's equivalent of Google,
| | 00:45 |
and the world's fifth most popular website.
| | 00:49 |
Then came Google with this PageRank system
and this revolutionized the role of search.
| | 00:54 |
The basic concept is simple: use links pointing
to websites to give you an idea of how important
| | 01:00 |
to link two pages really are.
| | 01:03 |
If one page has lots of links and another
very few, then the web is just voted for the
| | 01:08 |
highly linked page and
against the page with few links.
| | 01:12 |
But not all links are equal.
| | 01:14 |
If a link comes from a very popular site,
one with many links pointing to it, then the
| | 01:20 |
outgoing link from that popular site is more
valuable than a link from an unpopular site.
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In effect, the popular
site's links carry more votes.
| | 01:30 |
This was a huge change in the world of
search and the very basis of Google.
| | 01:35 |
Google can be traced to early 1996 when Larry
Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford Computer
| | 01:40 |
Science students.
| | 01:42 |
When they first launched their search engine
they called it BackRub, you could see the
| | 01:46 |
original logo here.
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The hand reportedly belongs to Larry Page.
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Why BackRub? The name referred to backlinks.
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Page and Brin were examining backlinks,
links pointing back to a web page.
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To paraphrase Page and Brin's paper, "The
Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web
| | 02:06 |
Search Engine," they were using backlinks to
figure out a page's importance or quality.
| | 02:11 |
Analyzing links then was at the core of
Google's methodology when it finally launched in 1998
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and it remains essential to both of the
world's top search engines, Google and Bing.
| | 02:23 |
Today, links provide crucial information about
a reference web page's importance and quality
| | 02:29 |
and no concerted SEO campaign is
complete without considering them.
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In the next chapter, we'll
look at what a link actually is.
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|
|
1. Link BasicsExploring the anatomy of a link| 00:01 |
In the previous videos I've explained how the
search engines killed off the directories,
| | 00:06 |
the problem that arose and the
solution to the problem: links.
| | 00:11 |
So now it's time to get down to work, to learn
what links can do for us and how to get them.
| | 00:16 |
So let's start right at the beginning.
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Let's look at what a link actually is.
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The word "link" is really
short for the term hyperlink.
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A hyperlink is a connection in a hypertext
system between two documents or two areas
| | 00:29 |
within a document.
| | 00:32 |
Selecting a link, loads the other document
or moves the document you are viewing down
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to the area the link connects to.
| | 00:38 |
Of course, these days selecting a link means
pointing to it with a mouse pointer and clicking.
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During the early days of the web, each link
had a number associated with it. The number
| | 00:47 |
was displayed at the end of the link and you
selected it by typing the number and pressing Enter.
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Now in HTML, the system used to create web
pages, a link is created using what is known
| | 00:59 |
as the anchor tag, the "a" tag.
| | 01:02 |
Now they're not known as link
tags that would be too easy.
| | 01:05 |
In fact, just to really confuse the issue, there
is a link tag, but that's not what is used
| | 01:10 |
to create hyperlinks.
| | 01:12 |
It's most commonly used to tell browsers to
retrieve a style sheet associated with a web
| | 01:16 |
page, as you can see here.
| | 01:18 |
Now it's the anchor tags were
interested in, the "a" tag.
| | 01:23 |
Anchor tags can be used in two ways: to create a
hyperlink that is clicked upon to load another
| | 01:28 |
web page or another part of the existing page,
or to create a bookmark, an area in the page
| | 01:35 |
that can be linked to from another anchor tag.
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Here's the basic format of an
anchor tag when creating a link.
| | 01:42 |
This creates a link with the person viewing
the page will see as the words click here.
| | 01:47 |
When the user clicks the link, a
page named document.html will be loaded.
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It's the href attribute that points to the
reference document, and in this case, document.html
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must be in the same
directory as the current web page.
| | 02:02 |
And here's the way you use the anchor tag to
create a bookmark using the name attribute.
| | 02:07 |
In this case, we've created a bookmark
called "here1" on a piece of text Step 2.
| | 02:14 |
You can then create a link elsewhere in the
document that will link to this bookmark,
| | 02:18 |
but we're not really interested in the
bookmark for the purposes of this course.
| | 02:22 |
You can certainly use internal linking to
bookmarks to optimize pages adding keyworded
| | 02:27 |
internal links. That would be a good thing.
| | 02:30 |
But from the perspective of this course on
linking, we don't care about the bookmark,
| | 02:34 |
so this is the last we'll see it.
| | 02:36 |
Let's go back to using anchor text to
create hyperlinks between documents.
| | 02:41 |
So here, again is a simple link pointing
to a web page called "new-document.html".
| | 02:49 |
This is structured so that the reference
points to a document within the same directory as
| | 02:53 |
the page containing a link.
| | 02:56 |
This is what's known as a relative reference
to the web page we're linking to, because
| | 03:00 |
it defines how to get to the page from the current
page location not using the full page address.
| | 03:07 |
But we can also use an
absolute reference like this.
| | 03:11 |
Now we've included the full URL
of the page we're linking to.
| | 03:15 |
This links to the new-document.html web page
which is found in a directory called 123 in
| | 03:21 |
a website at the domain, anotherdomain.com.
| | 03:26 |
Now let's look at the anchor text.
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The anchor text, also known as the link
text, appears between the anchor tags.
| | 03:34 |
It's the text that will actually appear in
the web page itself. The text that the user will
| | 03:39 |
read and click on.
| | 03:41 |
For the purposes of SEO, it's always good
if the anchor text contains keywords that
| | 03:45 |
we want to rank well for
in the search engines.
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The search engines read the anchor text and use it
to tell them what the reference page is about.
| | 03:55 |
It's even better if the page we are pointing
to also contains matching keywords of course.
| | 04:01 |
What else can be put into a link? Well, there's
the target attribute though from an SEO standpoint
| | 04:06 |
is not important.
| | 04:08 |
The target attribute simply tells a browser
what to do when loading the reference page.
| | 04:13 |
In this case, for instance, the new
page will load in a new tab or window.
| | 04:18 |
One attribute that's often used by people for
SEO purposes, if they're trying to promote
| | 04:23 |
the targeted page, is the title attribute which
is intended to provide additional information
| | 04:29 |
about the link to browsers and
other programs downloading web pages.
| | 04:34 |
For instance, browsers may use this text as
pop-up text when people point at the link.
| | 04:39 |
Does it help from an SEO perspective? I think
it probably doesn't help, at least with Google.
| | 04:44 |
It's a matter of debate in the business.
| | 04:46 |
But it wouldn't hurt; perhaps it does
help at least with some search engines.
| | 04:52 |
One attribute that is important to
know about is the "rel" attribute.
| | 04:56 |
This attribute was originally intended to
allow authors to specify the relationship
| | 05:01 |
between the linking document
and the links to document.
| | 05:05 |
"Alternate" means the reference
document is an alternative version.
| | 05:09 |
"Next" means it's the next
document in the sequence.
| | 05:12 |
"Glossary" means that the reference document
contains a glossary of terms in the linking
| | 05:17 |
document, and so on.
| | 05:20 |
From an SEO standpoint though, it's the rel
="nofollow" attribute that's important.
| | 05:26 |
This provides the author with a way to tell
the search engines not to follow the link.
| | 05:31 |
You need follow links, links that do not
contain the rel="nofollow" attribute.
| | 05:37 |
You should assume that no-follow
links provide no value to your site.
| | 05:41 |
Just assume that the
search engines ignore them.
| | 05:46 |
There are various other attributes that can
be placed into anchor tags, but we don't need
| | 05:49 |
to concern ourselves with them.
| | 05:52 |
From an SEO perspective it's "href," "rel,"
and perhaps "title" that we care about.
| | 05:58 |
Of course, links aren't
always place on to text.
| | 06:01 |
They can also be placed on images.
| | 06:03 |
From an SEO perspective, putting the
links on text is generally better.
| | 06:07 |
The text, as we'll discuss in a later video,
tells the search engines what the reference
| | 06:12 |
page is about, so the text can improve
the page's rank in the search results.
| | 06:16 |
Still, now and then you'll want to put
links on the images as you can see here.
| | 06:22 |
You can improve a link like
this in a couple of ways.
| | 06:24 |
First, it's always good to use
image names with keywords in them.
| | 06:28 |
You can also use an "alt"
attribute in the image tag.
| | 06:32 |
The "alt" is intended to contain words that
describe the image in browsers that are not
| | 06:36 |
displaying images.
| | 06:37 |
Hover over the image with the
mouse and the "alt" words pop up.
| | 06:42 |
You might also want to use the title
attribute in the anchor tag just in case.
| | 06:47 |
Links can also be placed on to images by
combining the image tag with the map and area tags.
| | 06:53 |
When doing so, remember to use the "alt"
attributes throughout, for the image tag itself and in
| | 06:58 |
all the links created by
the individual area tags.
| | 07:02 |
So that's the anchor tag.
| | 07:05 |
Perhaps the most important thing to remember
about the anchor tag is to use keywords wherever
| | 07:09 |
you can in order to be as
descriptive as possible.
| | 07:14 |
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| Not just PageRank: Understanding what links do for your site| 00:01 |
In an earlier video I mentioned PageRank,
Google's method for assigning a value to web pages.
| | 00:07 |
It was an incredibly important development in
search engine technology and we'll be looking
| | 00:11 |
at it in more detail in the next video.
| | 00:14 |
But I think it's important to
understand that SEO is not all about PageRank.
| | 00:18 |
There's a lot of talk in the SEO business
about PageRank and you may hear a couple of
| | 00:22 |
conflicting opinions, that PageRank is
everything or the PageRank is irrelevant.
| | 00:27 |
The truth is somewhere in-between.
| | 00:30 |
So in this video, I want to quickly discuss
the different ways in which links pointing
| | 00:33 |
to a website can help you.
| | 00:36 |
Links do a number of things for you.
| | 00:38 |
First, they help the
search engines find your site.
| | 00:41 |
The more links you have pointing to the site, the
more often they will stumble across the site.
| | 00:46 |
They use the links to figure out site
popularity, that's where PageRank comes in.
| | 00:51 |
They help search engines to index most of
your site too, if you have links from outside
| | 00:55 |
the site pointing into your site.
| | 00:58 |
The keywords in the links help the search
engines figure out what the site is about.
| | 01:03 |
And forget about the search engines for a
moment, links can also bring visitors to your
| | 01:06 |
site directly, regardless of their
effect on search engine ranking.
| | 01:11 |
As I explained in my previous course,
Analyzing Your Website to Improve SEO, the way to get
| | 01:16 |
your site indexed is to point links to it.
| | 01:19 |
The search engines will follow these links,
find your site and probably crawl and index it.
| | 01:25 |
A site with no links pointing to it is in
trouble. It will probably never be indexed.
| | 01:30 |
After all, if nobody cares enough about the
site to link to it, the search engines might
| | 01:35 |
wonder why they should care about it either.
| | 01:37 |
Of course, the more links the better.
| | 01:40 |
More links do several things.
| | 01:42 |
The search engines will consider the site
to be more important, they will index the
| | 01:46 |
site more often and they're
likely to index more pages.
| | 01:50 |
A single link might eventually make the
major search engines aware of your site.
| | 01:55 |
A hundred links could make them aware sooner and
will give them more reason to index your site.
| | 01:59 |
Of course, this is closely related to Google
PageRank and similar systems in other search engines.
| | 02:06 |
PageRank is a way for Google to assign a value
to a page based on the page's link popularity.
| | 02:11 |
The more links pointing to the site, the higher
the value, and this value can be used as a sort
| | 02:16 |
of tie breaker when comparing pages that all
seem to be a good fit for a search query.
| | 02:22 |
But PageRank also looks at the
value of the pages providing links.
| | 02:26 |
Popular pages, pages with high PageRanks, provide more
value through their links than the less popular pages.
| | 02:34 |
Links can also help you get
more of your site indexed.
| | 02:38 |
By pointing links not just to the homepage,
but to pages inside the site, you're telling
| | 02:43 |
the search engine that these internal pages
are important to other people, so they might
| | 02:47 |
be worth indexing.
| | 02:50 |
Now here's a critical function of
links that are often overlooked.
| | 02:53 |
A link is good, but a link
with keywords is far better.
| | 02:58 |
Keywords in the link's anchor text tell the
search engines what the reference page is about.
| | 03:03 |
This is a critical concept that
we'll cover in a video later on.
| | 03:06 |
In some ways, it's more
important than the link popularity.
| | 03:09 |
You could have thousands of badly key worded
links, and do nothing, whereas a few dozen
| | 03:15 |
nicely key worded links might push your
site to the top in the search results.
| | 03:19 |
In fact, because keywords are so important,
this means that internal links, links within
| | 03:25 |
your website are also very important.
| | 03:28 |
Most of this course is about getting links
from other sites pointing to your site.
| | 03:32 |
But remember that internal links from page
to page within your own site can also help
| | 03:37 |
you in the search results, if they're nicely
keyworded, because the keywords help the
| | 03:41 |
search engines figure out what
the reference pages are about.
| | 03:46 |
Finally, let's not forget the
original purpose of links.
| | 03:50 |
To help visitors, actual people, not
search engines find your website.
| | 03:56 |
That's not what this course is about, but
it's worth remembering that links are useful
| | 04:00 |
from a totally non-SEO standpoint.
| | 04:03 |
The right link in the right
place can bring people to your site.
| | 04:09 |
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| Explaining Google PageRank| 00:01 |
Back in the mid-1990s the idea of using links
to help rank web pages had already occurred
| | 00:06 |
to various people.
| | 00:07 |
In 1996, Robin Li designed the system called RankDex,
in which links were used to help rank pages.
| | 00:14 |
The same year, Sergey Brin and Larry Page
began working on BackRub, the system that
| | 00:19 |
two years later would be
released commercially as Google.
| | 00:23 |
There was also Jon Kleinberg's hyperlink
induced topic search at IBM and various others.
| | 00:30 |
Much of this early work was based on the
concept of citation count or citation analysis which
| | 00:36 |
actually dates back to the 1950s.
| | 00:37 |
The idea was that you could figure out how
important academic papers are by analyzing
| | 00:43 |
the number and type of citations of
those papers and other academic papers.
| | 00:48 |
In fact, today, Google Scholar uses
citation analysis to rank search results.
| | 00:55 |
But it's specifically PageRank that is
remembered and PageRank that occupies so much time and
| | 00:59 |
energy in the SEO field.
| | 01:01 |
Why? Because it's Google's link analysis
algorithm and Google is of course, the giant in the
| | 01:07 |
search engine world.
| | 01:09 |
So what is PageRank? Well, it's a patented
algorithm named after Larry Page that Google
| | 01:16 |
uses to assign a numerical value
to every web page it indexes.
| | 01:21 |
There are two things to understand.
| | 01:23 |
First, that it's complicated and we really
don't need to understand exactly how it works.
| | 01:28 |
And secondly, that it is not exactly what
Google uses, more than 14 years after the
| | 01:33 |
patent was issued.
| | 01:35 |
And they're not saying
exactly what they do use now.
| | 01:38 |
They say they use PageRank, but it's
undoubtedly changed over the years.
| | 01:44 |
So what do we need to know about PageRank?
That Google looks at links pointing to a web
| | 01:48 |
page and uses those links to
calculate a numerical value.
| | 01:53 |
It considers various factors beginning
with how many links point to a page.
| | 01:58 |
The more links, the more popular
the reference page is going to be.
| | 02:02 |
But it also considers the PageRank
of the page on which the link sits.
| | 02:06 |
A link on a high PageRank page is worth
more than a link on a low PageRank page.
| | 02:12 |
So you can consider each link is acting
like a vote or a collection of votes.
| | 02:17 |
The more links, the more votes.
| | 02:19 |
But some links, those from higher
PageRank pages, carry more votes than others.
| | 02:25 |
It's rather like when shareholders vote.
| | 02:28 |
Some shareholders have more votes than
others, because they hold more shares.
| | 02:33 |
Google considers other factors too.
| | 02:35 |
It looks at how many
links appear on each page.
| | 02:38 |
A page's votes are shared
among links on the page.
| | 02:42 |
A link from the page with only one or two
other links would be worth more votes than
| | 02:46 |
a link from a page with a same
PageRank, but 50 or a 100 links.
| | 02:51 |
In effect, all the links on the page share
the votes, so more links means that each link
| | 02:56 |
has a smaller share.
| | 02:58 |
Now remember, PageRank is passed from
page to page, not merely site to site.
| | 03:04 |
Every page in a website has a PageRank, and
that rank can vary widely throughout the site.
| | 03:10 |
Pages within your own site pass PageRank from
one to the other, just as they pass rank to
| | 03:15 |
pages on other sites, when you link out.
| | 03:19 |
We should also consider the idea of TrustRank,
a concept from Stanford and Yahoo! but one
| | 03:25 |
that's almost certainly used by
Google in combination with PageRank.
| | 03:29 |
The idea is that links from trusted websites are
more valuable than links from sites with no trust.
| | 03:35 |
Links from major newspaper sites and
government research sites for instance, are likely to
| | 03:39 |
be more valuable than links from Joe's Blog.
| | 03:43 |
As the links flow away from the trusted sites,
from site to site, the trusted rank pass gets
| | 03:49 |
weaker and weaker.
| | 03:52 |
PageRank is generally expressed as a number from
0 to 10, because that's how Google publically
| | 03:57 |
presents the number.
| | 03:59 |
Behind the scenes though, the number is
not, cannot be, a number from 0 to 10.
| | 04:05 |
PageRank is almost certainly a logarithmic
scale with numbers reaching into the millions.
| | 04:11 |
The PageRank numbers provided by Google are ranges
within the logarithmic scale. We don't know for sure,
| | 04:18 |
but if it's a logarithmic scale with the base
of say, 6, then a page with a PageRank shown
| | 04:23 |
0 could have a true PageRank between 0 and 6.
| | 04:28 |
If the PageRank is shown as 1, then the
real PageRank would be between 6 and 36.
| | 04:34 |
For 2, it would be
between 36 and 216, and so on.
| | 04:39 |
Of course, this also means that a PageRank
of say 4 is not twice that of 2. It could
| | 04:45 |
hundreds of times more.
| | 04:48 |
Which also means it's much harder to
increase PageRank as you move up the scale.
| | 04:53 |
What then does Google do with PageRank? What
do the other major search engines do with
| | 04:58 |
their equivalent systems
which they certainly must have?
| | 05:01 |
There's a lot of confusion here.
| | 05:03 |
Many people tend to think that the page with
a higher PageRank always ranks higher in the
| | 05:07 |
search results, but that simply wouldn't work.
| | 05:10 |
Google and the other search engines are
looking at a lot of different variables in order to
| | 05:14 |
rank pages, not just PageRank.
| | 05:17 |
I think of PageRank as a tie breaker.
| | 05:20 |
If you have two pages that Google thinks
match a search query equally well, the one with
| | 05:25 |
the higher PageRank ranks highest.
| | 05:27 |
But it's not going to rank one page higher
than another based on PageRank if the page
| | 05:32 |
isn't as good of a match
with the search query.
| | 05:35 |
This is all a little
complicated, but we can simplify it.
| | 05:38 |
What does all this tell us from an SEO standpoint? It
tells us that we need links, and the more the better.
| | 05:44 |
Ideally, we need links from high PageRank
pages, better still, high PageRank pages with
| | 05:50 |
very few other links on them.
| | 05:52 |
Ideally, we also need links from trusted
sites too or at least from sites that are close
| | 05:57 |
to trusted sites in a web of links.
| | 06:00 |
It also tells us that links
within your site are important.
| | 06:04 |
If your site has few internal links, then
you may end up with a decent PageRank on the
| | 06:08 |
homepage, but really poor rank on internal pages,
making them less competitive in the search results.
| | 06:15 |
I'd recommend that you ensure you have plenty
of internal links throughout your site, so
| | 06:18 |
PageRank is passed through.
| | 06:21 |
Some people undertake what is known as PageRank
sculpting, using the anchor tags rel = nofollow
| | 06:27 |
attribute for instance to stop PageRank from
flowing to one area of your site, so instead
| | 06:32 |
it boosts others.
| | 06:35 |
Google recommends against this and even
changed the algorithm to make it harder to do.
| | 06:40 |
When you know Follow Links, you're no longer
giving the votes those links would've had,
| | 06:45 |
had they not been nofollowed to
the other links on the page.
| | 06:49 |
It's also important to understand
what PageRank doesn't tell us.
| | 06:53 |
Unfortunately, many people in the
business have not got this message.
| | 06:56 |
It doesn't tell us that only links
from high PageRank sites have value.
| | 07:01 |
Links from low PageRank sites still carry
some value in particular, if they're properly
| | 07:06 |
keyworded as we'll discuss in a later video.
| | 07:10 |
It also doesn't tell us that your site must
have a high PageRank in order to rank well.
| | 07:14 |
That's an it depends situation.
| | 07:17 |
It depends on how competitive the
keywords you are targeting are.
| | 07:21 |
In many cases, well optimized sites with lots
of nicely keyworded links pointing to them
| | 07:27 |
can rank well even with mediocre PageRank.
| | 07:30 |
Sure, in an ideal world, all your links will
be well keyworded, coming from high PageRank
| | 07:36 |
pages with no other links on them.
| | 07:38 |
In the real world, you take what you can get.
| | 07:43 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Looking at PageRank in practice| 00:01 |
Let's quickly look at how you can find
out the PageRank of a particular page.
| | 00:05 |
Probably the easiest way is to install a
toolbar into your browser that retrieves the page's
| | 00:10 |
PageRank from Google when you load the page.
| | 00:13 |
This one of course is the Google Toolbar
which is only available for Internet Explorer.
| | 00:19 |
You can see that the PageRank button shows a green
bar to visually indicate the page's PageRank.
| | 00:25 |
Point at the button and this pop up
appears providing the PageRank number.
| | 00:29 |
Remember, as explained in the previous video,
this is the public PageRank number which is
| | 00:34 |
not that true secret number.
| | 00:37 |
When you first install the
toolbar, you won't see this button.
| | 00:40 |
Go into the Options, select the Privacy tab
and you'll find the PageRank button here.
| | 00:48 |
What if you don't use Internet Explorer? You
can still find various add-ons and extensions
| | 00:53 |
that will you show PageRank.
| | 00:54 |
In fact, there are non-Google PageRank tools for
Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.
| | 01:02 |
This one is a product called
WebRank running in Firefox.
| | 01:06 |
You can see the page's PageRank here along
with lots of other data related to the page
| | 01:11 |
such as the Alexa Rank, the number of pages on the
site indexed in Google, Bing and Yahoo!, and so on.
| | 01:19 |
To find these tools, simply go to your
browser's Add-ons or Extensions Library and search for
| | 01:24 |
the word PageRank.
| | 01:27 |
You don't have to install anything though,
you can find sites that let you enter a page's
| | 01:31 |
URL and they retrieve the PageRank for you.
| | 01:34 |
Just Google the term view
pagerank and you'll find them.
| | 01:39 |
What about PageRank for other search engines?
PageRank is a Google term of course, but other
| | 01:45 |
major search engines must use a similar method, a
way to use incoming links to help rank web pages.
| | 01:51 |
Yahoo! had a system called WebRank, it even
provided a toolbar with a WebRank display,
| | 01:57 |
but it may not have been quite the same.
| | 01:59 |
Yahoo! claimed it was based
on what sites people visited.
| | 02:03 |
Of course, Yahoo! no longer maintains a
search index. It gets search results from Bing.
| | 02:08 |
As for Bing, that search engine had something
it calls Page Score, but it's a very different
| | 02:13 |
thing, it really isn't clear what it is in fact,
and Bing seems to have pretty much dropped it.
| | 02:18 |
So for the moment, all
we're left with is PageRank.
| | 02:21 |
Bing isn't providing any
equivalent information.
| | 02:24 |
But it really doesn't matter that much.
| | 02:26 |
In fact, PageRank isn't something
you should be obsessing over anyway.
| | 02:30 |
What really counts is how your pages are ranking in the
search results for the searches you're interested in.
| | 02:36 |
While PageRank is one factor, you can
often rank above sites with higher PageRank.
| | 02:42 |
If you're not ranking well and your site is
well optimized, then you need to create links
| | 02:47 |
with good keywords in them from lots of
different sites pointing to your web pages.
| | 02:52 |
That will help you rank and it will build
PageRank at the same time, but it's the ranking
| | 02:58 |
that counts.
| | 03:01 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring keywords and Google bombs| 00:01 |
In this video, we're going to look at another
critical concept, one that I feel is really
| | 00:05 |
more important than PageRank for all the fuss
that is made over the PageRank algorithm.
| | 00:09 |
We're going to discuss the importance of
putting keywords into your link's anchor texts.
| | 00:14 |
The fact is you can have high PageRank pages,
but if they're not well optimized, they still
| | 00:18 |
won't rank well, and keyworded links are
part of the optimization process in a sense.
| | 00:24 |
PageRank merely tells the search engines that
your site is popular but keywords in the links
| | 00:28 |
tell the search engines why. They tell the
search engines what your site is about.
| | 00:33 |
PageRank can't do that.
| | 00:35 |
Take a look at this search
for olive oil face cream.
| | 00:38 |
We'll open the pages listed from the organic
search results one by one, skipping the shopping
| | 00:43 |
and video results.
| | 00:46 |
And look at the PageRank.
| | 00:50 |
You can see, starting at the top, we have a
variety of PageRanks and you'll notice that
| | 00:54 |
they're not in sequential order. There's no
direct correlation between Rank and PageRank.
| | 01:00 |
Clearly, something else is going on.
| | 01:02 |
As I explained earlier,
PageRank is used as a tiebreaker.
| | 01:06 |
The page has to be a good match for a search
query before PageRank ever comes into play.
| | 01:11 |
I explained in my earlier course, Analyzing
Your Website to Improve SEO, the sorts of
| | 01:16 |
on-page things you can do to make
your pages match particular keywords.
| | 01:20 |
So now we're going to look at an off-page
technique to do the same; a very powerful,
| | 01:25 |
yet very simple way to use links to
make your pages match search queries.
| | 01:30 |
Quite simply, you put the keywords you want
to rank well for into the anchor text that
| | 01:34 |
the link is pointing at your site.
| | 01:37 |
The search engines look at the anchor text to get
an idea of what the reference page is all about.
| | 01:42 |
If Google, for instance, finds the words
olive oil in a link, you can be pretty sure that
| | 01:46 |
the reference page isn't
about oral surgery or soccer.
| | 01:50 |
It makes perfect sense that the reference page
should have something to do with olive oil.
| | 01:55 |
You know this from your own experience; the
text in links is usually closely associated
| | 01:59 |
with the subject matter of the reference page.
| | 02:02 |
It's such a simple thing, but when you
think about it, it makes perfect sense.
| | 02:06 |
Words in the links can be
generally speaking one of four things.
| | 02:10 |
They can be calls to actions such as click
here or click this link or something similar.
| | 02:16 |
They can be the name of the website
or the company that owns the website.
| | 02:20 |
The link text can be a URL, that's common in
many directories or listings of websites.
| | 02:25 |
Or they can be words that are somehow
related to what the reference page is about.
| | 02:30 |
So it makes perfect sense that Google and
all other major search engines should examine
| | 02:34 |
links for clues about the subject matter of
the reference page, because they can often
| | 02:39 |
find really strong clues.
| | 02:41 |
If a search engine sees a company name in the
link, it's fair to assume that the reference
| | 02:45 |
page has something to do with that company.
| | 02:49 |
If the link contains the words training videos,
it's reasonable for it to believe the page
| | 02:54 |
has something to do with training videos.
| | 02:56 |
And if it sees dozens or hundreds of links
with the words training videos pointing to
| | 03:01 |
that page, it's convinced and it figures
that the page is one that many people think
| | 03:06 |
is a good match for the
phrase training videos.
| | 03:09 |
The search engine has in effect recruited website
owners to help it find a good match for the phrase.
| | 03:17 |
Even if the search engine sees a call to action, it's
going to associate the page with that call to action.
| | 03:23 |
Here's a perfect example.
| | 03:25 |
What happens if you search Google for the
phrase click here? At or near the top, you'll
| | 03:30 |
find the Adobe Reader download page.
| | 03:34 |
Open that page and search the
source code for the phrase click here.
| | 03:43 |
You won't find it.
| | 03:44 |
This page is a truly terrible match for the
phrase, except for the hundreds of thousands
| | 03:50 |
of pages around the web saying something like, If
you need to download Adobe Reader, click here.
| | 03:56 |
This is a great example of what
has become known as a Google bomb.
| | 03:59 |
A Google bomb is created by linking to a
specific web page using a particular keyword phrase
| | 04:04 |
often for political or humorous purposes.
| | 04:07 |
Sometimes it's used to associate an unpleasant
or insulting phrase with a particular person,
| | 04:12 |
or perhaps to cause a site to attacking
someone to rise high in the search results.
| | 04:18 |
The most famous example was the "miserable
failure" of Google bomb of 2003 when a few
| | 04:23 |
score links and blogs managed to associate
the phrase "miserable failure" with George
| | 04:28 |
Bush's resume on the whitehouse.gov website.
| | 04:31 |
Again, the page was a terrible match as
neither word appeared anywhere in the text.
| | 04:37 |
Google somehow fixed it four years later,
so that "miserable failure" no longer puts
| | 04:42 |
George Bush in the number one spot.
| | 04:45 |
But this Google bomb still
works on Yahoo! and Bing.
| | 04:48 |
You see, Google bombs are a function of the
way all major search engines read links, so
| | 04:53 |
they don't function only on Google.
| | 04:55 |
We don't know for sure how Google
stopped the "miserable failure" Google bomb.
| | 04:59 |
They claimed it wasn't a manual fix, but that
they changed the algorithm to stop it happening.
| | 05:04 |
Regardless, Google bombs are alive and well
and if you stop thinking of them as a mere
| | 05:09 |
trick, you'll realize they're a technique.
| | 05:12 |
Your task is to Google bomb your own site with
the keywords for which you want to rank well.
| | 05:18 |
One of the most common questions I get from
new consulting client is why is my competitor
| | 05:22 |
ranking higher than me? Often I'll see that
my client's website is much better optimized,
| | 05:27 |
yet here is this other poorly
optimized often ugly site ranking higher.
| | 05:32 |
So I'll do a link analysis.
| | 05:34 |
We'll look at that in a later video and take
a look at the links pointing to the site.
| | 05:39 |
You can see the example here for a site
ranking well for the phrase olive oil.
| | 05:43 |
Each line is a separate link and in this column
you can see the anchor texts for those links.
| | 05:48 |
What do we see? Olive oil in various
combinations over and over again. Call it what you want;
| | 05:56 |
keyworded links or Google
bombing, the fact is it works.
| | 05:59 |
It's an extremely powerful mechanism for
convincing search engines that your site is related to
| | 06:04 |
a particular keyword phrase
that is the best match in fact.
| | 06:08 |
What it means is you want to make sure that
many of the links pointing to your site have
| | 06:12 |
useful anchor texts, not just your company
name and unless that's what you're trying
| | 06:16 |
to act for, not merely your URL, not a call
to actions such as "click here," but keywords
| | 06:22 |
you want to do well for.
| | 06:24 |
Incidentally, this works not only for links
pointing to your site from elsewhere, but
| | 06:29 |
also for links within your own site.
| | 06:32 |
Even within your site, the search engines look at the
keyword text to figure out what a page is about.
| | 06:37 |
Of course, you have much more control over
your own links and external links, so don't
| | 06:42 |
forget to use plenty of
keyworded links in your own pages.
| | 06:47 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The perfect link| 00:01 |
In this video, we're going
to look at the perfect link.
| | 00:04 |
What kind of links do you really want
pointing to your site? You can't always get exactly
| | 00:08 |
what you want of course, but in this video
we'll be looking at what you're aiming for.
| | 00:13 |
First, you should try to get text
links rather than image links.
| | 00:18 |
I'll take an image link over no link of course,
because even if I can't get keywords into
| | 00:22 |
my links, the links still provide some
value, such as passing through PageRank.
| | 00:28 |
But the ideal is a text link, so that you
can use anchor text keywords, as you learned
| | 00:33 |
in the last video, to tell the search
engines what the reference page is about.
| | 00:37 |
And if we have enough keyworded links, we are in
effect, Google bombing the site we're linking to.
| | 00:44 |
Of course, the text needs to contain useful
keywords not "click here" or not your company
| | 00:48 |
name or URL, but rather the
keywords for which you want to rank well.
| | 00:54 |
You can add a title attribute to the tag if
you wish, though as I mentioned in an earlier video,
| | 00:58 |
it may not make any difference.
| | 01:01 |
Where should this link be placed? Well,
first of all, it needs to be on a web page that
| | 01:04 |
is indexed by the search engines.
| | 01:06 |
If it's not indexed, then of
course that link has no value.
| | 01:10 |
That's not to say that you necessarily turn
down links on pages that are not indexed.
| | 01:15 |
If the page is very new for
instance, it maybe indexed soon.
| | 01:18 |
In fact, one technique that used to be
popular was to figure out which links to your site
| | 01:23 |
are on non-indexed pages, then get those pages indexed
by linking to them from other already indexed pages.
| | 01:30 |
Anyway, as far as the ideal link goes,
it needs to be on an indexed page.
| | 01:37 |
What kind of site do you want your link
placed on? There's a lot of talk about relevance
| | 01:41 |
in the SEO business, and while I'm sure it has
some importance, I believe it's often overrated.
| | 01:47 |
The idea here is that a link from a related site is
more valuable than a link from a non-related site.
| | 01:52 |
A link to your olive oil website is more valuable
when it comes from the cooking site, for instance,
| | 01:57 |
or some kind of food site, rather than
from a blog about American history.
| | 02:03 |
This may be true to some degree, however
it's completely untrue that a link from a
| | 02:07 |
non-related site holds no
value as some people claim.
| | 02:11 |
I'll take a well keyworded
link from anywhere I can get it.
| | 02:15 |
Relevant is the ideal, but not 100% essential.
| | 02:18 |
Let's not forget trust either.
| | 02:20 |
As we're building the ideal link, the very
best link we can, we might as well put it
| | 02:25 |
on a well-trusted site, perhaps a major newspaper website
or the website owned by a highly respected university;
| | 02:32 |
.edu domains are thought to carry extra
weight in the search engines, as are .gov domain
| | 02:37 |
names, government websites.
| | 02:40 |
Our ideal link will also be
on a high PageRank web page.
| | 02:44 |
As you learned in an earlier video, PageRank
is a measure of value, so as we're dreaming
| | 02:48 |
about the perfect link right now, we might as well
get that link from the highest PageRank page we can.
| | 02:55 |
It also needs to be on a
readable portion of the page.
| | 02:58 |
For example, if a page is pulling content
from another source using JavaScript and your
| | 03:02 |
link is in that content, it may not be read.
| | 03:05 |
Actually, Google can read JavaScript and
sometimes does, but quite likely not all the time.
| | 03:12 |
It does, for instance, read the content in
Facebook pages that is being pulled in using
| | 03:16 |
JavaScript, all the dynamically updating
content that appears as you scroll down the page.
| | 03:22 |
That doesn't mean it reads all such content
on all sites though, so I believe the ideal
| | 03:27 |
link is one in static text that has been loaded into
a web page by the web server, not the web browser.
| | 03:35 |
Where within a page is ideal? Preferably
within content, rather than in a list of links.
| | 03:40 |
Again, I'll take a link anywhere on the page,
rather than no link, but links embedded into
| | 03:45 |
paragraphs are likely to be more
valuable than links in a big list of links.
| | 03:49 |
The theory is that links in paragraphs tend
to be surrounded by other related words.
| | 03:55 |
The search engines may see these related keywords as
associated with the link giving the link more value.
| | 04:01 |
On the other hand, it's not at all a bad thing
to get a link in say a blog's blogroll, its
| | 04:06 |
list of favorite sites, as then you end up
getting a link from every page in the blog.
| | 04:11 |
I think it's fair to say that it's better to
have a hundred links from a hundred different
| | 04:15 |
sites, rather than a hundred
links from one single site.
| | 04:18 |
However, it's also better to have a hundred links
from one site, than just one link from that site.
| | 04:24 |
A hundred links from a single site is not a
hundred times the value of a single link
| | 04:28 |
from that site, but I'm sure it's
worth more than just one link.
| | 04:33 |
As far as where to put a link on the page goes,
perhaps there really is no ideal, rather
| | 04:38 |
it's good to get a variety; links embedded
into paragraphs, links in blogrolls that appear
| | 04:43 |
hundreds of times, links in page
footers that appear on every page, and so on.
| | 04:48 |
To summarize then, what's the ideal link?
It's a text link with good keywords in the
| | 04:53 |
anchor text and a title attribute if you think
that may be important, or want to cover all bases.
| | 04:59 |
It will be on an index page on a relevant
site, a trusted site in fact, perhaps a .edu
| | 05:04 |
or .gov domain with a high PageRank.
| | 05:08 |
The link should be in static text, not
text created browser site dynamically.
| | 05:13 |
Getting the link into paragraph text is a
good thing though I like to see a variety
| | 05:16 |
of link types really.
| | 05:18 |
So that's the ideal.
| | 05:19 |
But as I mentioned before, you
can't always get what you want.
| | 05:22 |
You have total control over the
links in your own site of course.
| | 05:26 |
And as you've learned in earlier videos,
even internal links are important.
| | 05:30 |
As far as links from other sites are
concerned though, it's harder to get the ideal.
| | 05:34 |
Sometimes other site owners will link using
your URL or your company name, rather than
| | 05:38 |
the keywords you want for instance.
| | 05:40 |
Still, do what you can to get as
close to the ideal as possible.
| | 05:46 |
But even non-ideal links have value.
| | 05:48 |
If I can't get a text link,
I'll have an image link.
| | 05:51 |
If a text link has to use my
URL or company name, so be it.
| | 05:55 |
And most links I get won't
be from high PageRank pages.
| | 05:58 |
In fact, if there's one thing that I think is
most important, more important than PageRank
| | 06:02 |
or site relevance or placement
on the page, it's keywords.
| | 06:06 |
The single most important thing is to get
plenty of keyworded links pointing to your site.
| | 06:13 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Dealing with problem links| 00:01 |
In the previous video, we looked at the ideal
link; what you really want to get when you're
| | 00:06 |
outbuilding links for SEO purposes.
| | 00:09 |
In this video, I want to quickly cover a few
things to watch for, things that you need to avoid.
| | 00:14 |
The first issue is something we saw when we looked at
the anatomy of a link, the rel="nofollow" attribute.
| | 00:21 |
This was originally designed to discourage
link spam in blog comments, people promoting
| | 00:26 |
websites dropping meaningless and irrelevant
comments into blogs in order to create links
| | 00:31 |
back to their sites.
| | 00:33 |
It tells the search engines to ignore the
links, not to follow them, not to use them
| | 00:38 |
for PageRank or equivalent
and to ignore the anchor text.
| | 00:41 |
In some cases search engines may actually
follow these links, but they won't use them
| | 00:46 |
for PageRank and they do
ignore the anchor text.
| | 00:49 |
Google has publicly stated that they
treat them this way, for instance.
| | 00:55 |
Many different sites now automatically
place the nofollow attribute into links.
| | 00:59 |
Links in Facebook posts, for
instance, are nofollow links.
| | 01:03 |
The pink links on this
page are nofollow links.
| | 01:06 |
I'm using a Firefox add-on called
DoNoFollow that automatically colors them.
| | 01:11 |
I can also look at the underlined code.
| | 01:13 |
I'm using Firebug here, and we can
see the rel="nofollow" attribute.
| | 01:18 |
I sometimes wonder whether the search engines
actually do ignore all the outgoing Facebook
| | 01:23 |
links, as they could be
extremely valuable information.
| | 01:26 |
Still, Google certainly claims it does ignore them,
so you should assume these links provide no value.
| | 01:34 |
Many different systems now use nofollows.
| | 01:36 |
Most blog comments are nofollowed, but the links
created by the blog owner are generally follow links.
| | 01:42 |
A lot of forum software now automatically
converts links in posts to nofollows, though
| | 01:48 |
it's not as common as for blogs.
| | 01:51 |
And many sites with public posting such as
Craigslist and Wikipedia also convert links to nofollow.
| | 01:58 |
Another type of link that generally provides
no values are Redirect links, such as a link
| | 02:02 |
that goes through an advertising
or affiliate marketing service.
| | 02:06 |
For instance, take a look at this link.
| | 02:08 |
If we click the link,
we're taken to this site.
| | 02:13 |
But let's go back and look at the link.
| | 02:15 |
As we can see in the code,
the link is really a redirect.
| | 02:18 |
The link goes through some kind of tracking script,
which then forwards this to the final page.
| | 02:24 |
Now the search engines can still follow links
like this, and they often will, but they usually
| | 02:29 |
won't give credit for the link to the destination
site, no PageRank boost, no anchor text association
| | 02:35 |
with the destination page.
| | 02:37 |
Why? Because, and Google has stated this
publicly, such links are generally placed
| | 02:43 |
on the site for commercial reasons.
| | 02:45 |
Someone paid for this link to be there, so
the search engines don't want to use the link
| | 02:50 |
for ranking purposes.
| | 02:52 |
Which brings us to another type of link that may not
bring you any value; what are known as paid links.
| | 02:58 |
Not the more typical ads as we just saw, but
links that look like ordinary text links,
| | 03:03 |
but that somebody paid to have placed.
| | 03:05 |
If the search engines decide that a link is a paid
link, they will not pass any value for that link.
| | 03:12 |
That's not to say that
buying links isn't big business.
| | 03:14 |
It really is, as you'll
learn in a later video.
| | 03:19 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Analyzing links| 00:01 |
We've learned a lot about
links in the last few videos.
| | 00:04 |
We've looked at what they
are and how they can help us.
| | 00:07 |
By now you should know the structure of the
links we need and a few things to watch for,
| | 00:12 |
things that can devalue our links or
even make them completely worthless.
| | 00:17 |
Pretty soon we need to get started actually
building links, but there's one more thing
| | 00:20 |
that's worth doing.
| | 00:21 |
We need to learn about link analysis.
| | 00:23 |
What I'm talking about here is analyzing the
links that point to a particular website.
| | 00:28 |
You'll want to analyze the links pointing
to the site you're optimizing of course.
| | 00:32 |
You need to know where you stand and it's a
good thing to have some kind of baseline
| | 00:36 |
from which you can measure improvement.
| | 00:38 |
But you may also want to analyze the links
pointing to your competitors, for a couple
| | 00:43 |
of reasons: you'll
discover what you're up against.
| | 00:45 |
It can be disheartening when you discover
that your competitor has a hundred thousand
| | 00:49 |
links pointing to the site, but on the other
hand you may discover that the competitor
| | 00:53 |
actually has very few links and
your job is going to be easy.
| | 00:57 |
But you may also find some
great places to get links from.
| | 01:00 |
If you have a competitor sitting at position
number one in Google for the keyword phrases
| | 01:05 |
you want to rank well for, what could be better
than knowing how they did it? And as important
| | 01:10 |
as page optimization is, very often it's mainly
the incoming links that make a site rank well.
| | 01:17 |
How then do we find out about links pointing
to a site? Well, first I'm going to tell you
| | 01:22 |
about Google's link syntax, not because it's a
good way to find out about links, it's not,
| | 01:27 |
it's terrible, but because it's there and
you might as well know it doesn't work.
| | 01:31 |
Go to Google and type link:
domain name and press Enter.
| | 01:36 |
And in theory, Google will return a list
of pages that contain links to that page.
| | 01:41 |
However, it will only be
a small subset of links.
| | 01:45 |
In general, no where near all
the links pointing to that site.
| | 01:49 |
Here's what Google shows when we search for
the number of links pointing to lynda.com.
| | 01:52 |
Of course, if you try this yourself right now,
you'll probably see a different number.
| | 01:57 |
You'll see later that in fact lynda.com has
a much larger number of incoming links than
| | 02:01 |
Google is showing us.
| | 02:03 |
So now you're seeing the link colon
syntax, you can forget about it.
| | 02:07 |
There are much better ways to find
incoming links though they may cost you.
| | 02:11 |
Yahoo! used to have a pretty decent link tool,
but unfortunately that disappeared when Yahoo!
| | 02:16 |
began using Bing results.
| | 02:19 |
So all we're left with are the commercial
tools, such as SEOmoz, Wordtracker, SEO Elite,
| | 02:24 |
Majestic SEO and others.
| | 02:26 |
There are basically two
methods used by these tools.
| | 02:30 |
The first method is for the tool to
query the search engines for information.
| | 02:33 |
You tell it the domain name and the tool
goes to the search engines asking for data.
| | 02:39 |
The other method is to actually create an
index just like the search engines do.
| | 02:43 |
SEOmoz and Majestic SEO do this.
| | 02:46 |
They have their own searchbots retrieving and indexing
pages and examining all the links in those pages.
| | 02:53 |
Majestic SEO, for example, taps into a vast
community builds index of a trillion URLs
| | 02:58 |
and over 360 billion pages.
| | 03:01 |
Let's take a look at Majestic SEO
and see what it can do for us.
| | 03:04 |
This is my current favorite as it has the
largest available link database, but you can
| | 03:09 |
still get useful data from
other tools if you prefer them.
| | 03:13 |
You can begin using Majestic for free, and
in fact, as long as you're only looking for
| | 03:16 |
information on links pointing to
your own site, you never have to pay.
| | 03:21 |
Majestic will provide you with a verification
text files that are placed into your own website,
| | 03:25 |
so it knows you own or manage the site.
| | 03:29 |
Begin by going to majesticseo.com
and registering for a free account.
| | 03:34 |
Once registered, I suggest you go to the Site
Explorer page, then enter your domain name.
| | 03:40 |
I generally use the Fresh Index
to get more recent information.
| | 03:43 |
If you use the Historic Index, you'll get
information on a lot of links that are no longer present.
| | 03:50 |
Click Explore and within a second or two,
you'll get basic information about the links
| | 03:54 |
pointing to your site. L ook at this.
| | 03:57 |
There are around 700,000
links pointing to lynda.com.
| | 04:00 |
Remember the Google link colon syntax? Google
return information on a little over a thousand links.
| | 04:06 |
Now you can see why Google's link
information is not worth bothering with.
| | 04:11 |
You have lots of data on this page.
| | 04:12 |
In fact, Majestic SEO can be a little
complicated because it throws so much information at you,
| | 04:17 |
but it's worth spending the
time to figure it all out.
| | 04:20 |
As you can see on this page, Majestic is
telling us that there are more than 18,000 domains
| | 04:25 |
pointing to lynda.com.
| | 04:27 |
It even breaks it out, telling us that around 5,000
links are coming from about 600 different
| | 04:31 |
EDU domains, a really good thing.
| | 04:35 |
It even gives us a breakdown showing us around
a quarter of a million links are image links,
| | 04:40 |
unfortunately, and more or
less 170,000 are nofollow links.
| | 04:45 |
The tabs at the top lead us to more
information on the top backlinks, the domains linking
| | 04:50 |
back, and the pages within
the site they mostly link to.
| | 04:55 |
We haven't yet created a full report
though, so click the Create Report button.
| | 04:59 |
If you own the site you are currently analyzing,
use one of these links to find out how to
| | 05:04 |
verify your site and get free information.
| | 05:07 |
In this case, we'll assume you're looking
for information on a competitor, in which
| | 05:11 |
case you need a page
subscription currently around $50 a month.
| | 05:15 |
I'm going to create the full
report to get the most information.
| | 05:18 |
We then go to the reports page and
click on the report we created.
| | 05:26 |
Now here's where we get to the
really important information.
| | 05:29 |
We're going to create a download file by
clicking here and then on the Prepare Download button.
| | 05:37 |
Then we'll go over to the Downloads page and
click the report name to download the file.
| | 05:41 |
It will be downloaded as an archive file, so
you need a program such as WinRAR to open
| | 05:46 |
it or StuffIt if you use a Mac.
| | 05:52 |
Inside the archive file, we'll find a .csv
file, which can be opened in a spreadsheet
| | 05:57 |
program, such as Microsoft Excel.
| | 06:00 |
So what do we have? Each line is a link.
| | 06:03 |
The first column shows the page
that the link is pointing to.
| | 06:06 |
The second column shows
the ACRank of the page.
| | 06:10 |
ACRank is something Majestic calculates, a page value
based on linking similar in concept to PageRank.
| | 06:17 |
Next we see the URL of the
page on which the link is found.
| | 06:21 |
In the fourth column, we again see an
ACRank, this time for the source page.
| | 06:26 |
Finally, in the fifth column, we see some of
the most important information, the anchor
| | 06:30 |
text of the link.
| | 06:32 |
As we scroll down this list, we
can see some good links, some bad.
| | 06:37 |
In this case, anchor text that say
lynda.com actually are not ideal.
| | 06:40 |
Search for lynda and lynda.com comes up number
one anyway, and would do so without too many
| | 06:45 |
links pointing at it.
| | 06:47 |
Links such as these, however, are much more
useful containing keywords that could help
| | 06:51 |
lynda.com rank well for various phrases, such
as computer-based training, computer learning,
| | 06:58 |
computer online software training, and so on.
| | 07:01 |
You'll also want to look at the Source URL
column carefully too, especially when looking
| | 07:06 |
at competitors link reports.
| | 07:08 |
Spend some time digging around and you'll
probably find lots of ideas for links that
| | 07:12 |
you can build to your own site.
| | 07:14 |
You may find out your competitor is getting
links from directories in which you should
| | 07:18 |
be included too, or maybe links from blogs
that could provide good targets for some kind
| | 07:22 |
of online PR for your site.
| | 07:25 |
One thing you'll often find, if you dig deep
enough, is that your competitor is also buying
| | 07:29 |
links, something we'll
discuss in a later video.
| | 07:34 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Building LinksExploring the two types of links| 00:01 |
I like to think of linking as two separate
games, creating two different types of links.
| | 00:07 |
These two groups maybe thought of as the real links on
one hand and fake or contrived links on the other.
| | 00:14 |
What do I mean by real links?
| | 00:16 |
The real thing, a real link, is a type of link
that the major search engines really want to see.
| | 00:22 |
It's a link pointing to a website from another
site but it exists because the owner of that
| | 00:27 |
other website really wants to create a link.
| | 00:30 |
The owner has found a reference page to be
in some way useful, or amusing, or interesting,
| | 00:36 |
or engaging in some manner.
| | 00:38 |
These are the sort of links that search engines
are most interested in because they are genuine
| | 00:42 |
votes for your site.
| | 00:45 |
On the other hand is the fake link. Not fake
in the sense that the link is somehow not
| | 00:50 |
real in the technical or structural sense.
| | 00:52 |
They are real HTML links.
| | 00:55 |
But fake in a sense that the
purpose for the link is fake.
| | 00:58 |
The link isn't there because the person owning the site
linking to yours particularly cares for your site.
| | 01:04 |
The link is there because you want it there
and have somehow managed to convince the site
| | 01:09 |
owner to place a link on his site pointing
to yours. Or to put it another way, because
| | 01:15 |
the site linking to your site has some
kind of incentive to place the link there.
| | 01:19 |
Here's an example of what I
think of as a real link.
| | 01:24 |
Let's say you created glossary of terms
related to your business, something genuinely useful
| | 01:28 |
to other people in your industry.
| | 01:31 |
A few bloggers discover the glossary, think
it's worth talking about so they mention it
| | 01:36 |
in their blogs and the link to it.
| | 01:38 |
Those are real links.
| | 01:40 |
This kind of strategy, building something on
your site in order to encourage people to
| | 01:44 |
link to it is often known
by the term "link bait".
| | 01:48 |
On the other hand, let's say you buy links.
| | 01:51 |
You pay other site
owners to link to your site.
| | 01:54 |
Those are the fake kind of links.
| | 01:56 |
The site owners don't
really care about your site.
| | 01:58 |
They don't care what the link is pointing to.
| | 02:01 |
They're simply placing the
link in exchange for money.
| | 02:04 |
We'll be discussing both "link bait" and
buying links in more detail in later videos.
| | 02:09 |
Of course it's often difficult for the search
engines to determine the difference between
| | 02:13 |
a real link and a fake link.
| | 02:15 |
Which is why fake links are
from work well though not always.
| | 02:19 |
And why the whole fake link business is so big.
Here's an example, let's say you pay a blogger
| | 02:25 |
to write about your site and link to it.
| | 02:27 |
How can Google for instance, tell the
difference between a real link to a really useful link
| | 02:32 |
bait and a fake link to your not so useful site
that was placed in return for cash? Often it can't.
| | 02:39 |
Which represents a huge dilemma for the search
engine companies because on the one hand they
| | 02:44 |
try to discourage fake links, in particular
purchase links, yet at the same time they
| | 02:50 |
reward the strategy.
| | 02:52 |
Millions of sites are done very well using a
variety of strategies for building fake links.
| | 02:57 |
In fact most link campaigns
are really fake link campaigns.
| | 03:02 |
It's actually often the case that a fake
link is more valuable than a real link because
| | 03:07 |
of the problems the search engines
have in distinguishing between the two.
| | 03:11 |
A real link from a low page rank blog for
instance will likely be less valuable than
| | 03:17 |
a paid link from a high page rank blog.
| | 03:20 |
However, in general, a real link strategy is
more valuable than a fake link strategy for
| | 03:26 |
a variety of reasons.
| | 03:28 |
First, the search engines are continually
getting better figuring out the difference.
| | 03:33 |
As an example, when Google discovers a site
containing paid links, it often devalues those
| | 03:38 |
links perhaps totally ignoring the links
and could even remove the page from the index.
| | 03:44 |
Another example is reciprocal linking.
| | 03:46 |
While many proponents of reciprocal linking
would put such links firmly in the real link
| | 03:51 |
category claiming they
provide value to site visitors.
| | 03:54 |
In fact most reciprocal linking is clearly
done for SEO reasons and the search engines
| | 03:59 |
know it, which is why reciprocal links
generally have little value these days.
| | 04:04 |
We'll be looking at these kinds
of links in the later video.
| | 04:09 |
It's also likely that many fake link strategies
create links that even if the search engines
| | 04:13 |
aren't certainly fake, are likely
to be valued less than real links.
| | 04:18 |
For instance, links embedded into an article
on really popular blogs are likely to be more
| | 04:23 |
valuable than links placed in to websites
that were created for the purpose of holding
| | 04:27 |
paid links or than links in web directories.
| | 04:32 |
There's also a no fine line
between real and fake links.
| | 04:35 |
So on the one end there's links to genuinely
useful link bait, on the other, purchase links.
| | 04:40 |
But in between there are all sorts of other
things such as press releases, an article
| | 04:45 |
syndication, friends and family
links, links from partners, and so on.
| | 04:50 |
With links getting more valuable as you move along
the continuum from paid links to link bait links.
| | 04:56 |
Still, in a general sense it's worth being
aware of these two basic link strategies.
| | 05:01 |
Real and fake links and understanding that
search engines are more interested in real
| | 05:05 |
than fake and continually getting
better at assessing the difference.
| | 05:11 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Grabbing low-hanging fruit| 00:01 |
So it's time to build some links.
| | 00:03 |
The first thing you should do is to grab the
low hanging fruit, that is, place links in
| | 00:08 |
the easy, obvious locations.
| | 00:11 |
The obvious place is of course, a web
page is already under your control.
| | 00:14 |
If you have a blog for instance perhaps you
can write a short article about the site you're
| | 00:18 |
promoting and link to it from the article.
| | 00:21 |
Remember use keywords.
| | 00:23 |
Don't just link to your site using the URL
or site name but use the keywords for which
| | 00:27 |
you want to rank.
| | 00:29 |
For instance, let's say you're pointing to a
website about travelling in Central America
| | 00:33 |
and you're using the domain SeeCA.ni.
| | 00:35 |
Sure, you can still link to the site using
that domain name as the keyword, but you should
| | 00:41 |
also link using keywords like this.
| | 00:44 |
You could even link to
different pages with each link.
| | 00:47 |
As you learned before, linking into the site instead
of only to the home page is always a good thing.
| | 00:53 |
Where else can you link from? What about social
networking accounts? You probably have a Facebook
| | 00:58 |
account don't you? How about a Google+
account? Facebook, LinkedIn and various other
| | 01:03 |
social networking sites use no follow links.
| | 01:06 |
But don't let that put you off.
| | 01:08 |
You may get visitors through the links after
all and as I discussed in an earlier video,
| | 01:13 |
I'm not totally convinced that the major search
engines ignore all social networking no follow links.
| | 01:19 |
Google+ currently
provides follow links by the way.
| | 01:23 |
Do you have control over or access to any
other sites? Perhaps you have regular websites.
| | 01:29 |
You could at least put links in the page footers
or find various other places to slip links in.
| | 01:34 |
This is a time honored mechanism for creating
links and most companies that own multiple
| | 01:38 |
sites do it, so why not you?
| | 01:41 |
Remember use keywords.
| | 01:43 |
Many companies just link to
their other sites by name.
| | 01:46 |
But there's no reason you can't do a more promotional
link such as Travel Central America with SeeCA.ni.
| | 01:53 |
It's rare these days for people to have
absolutely no web pages under their control in some way.
| | 01:58 |
So think carefully about all the
possible places you can place links.
| | 02:02 |
How about profile pages in forums and bulletin
boards you're a member of? Perhaps you can even
| | 02:07 |
announce your site in forum messages.
| | 02:09 |
How about listings in the directories of
professional associations which you remember? Spend a little
| | 02:15 |
while thinking this through and you'll
probably find a few good placements.
| | 02:19 |
What next? Friends and family of course.
| | 02:22 |
Who do you know who might be willing to give
you a link or two? Who might be willing to
| | 02:26 |
mention you in their blog for instance or
in groups of which they are members or in
| | 02:30 |
their personal or business websites?
| | 02:33 |
Use a broad definition of friends and family.
| | 02:36 |
How about your employees for instance? Your
company's or employer's partners. If your
| | 02:41 |
company buys product for resale, will
its suppliers provide you with a link?
| | 02:45 |
If you sell products to other companies, can
you get them to link back to you? How about
| | 02:50 |
professional associations? Can you get them
to the link to the corporate site? Does your
| | 02:54 |
company donate money to non profits? If so,
can you get links from the donor pages? I
| | 03:01 |
can't tell you exactly where you're
going to get your low hanging fruit links.
| | 03:04 |
But I can tell you that if you sit down and
think for a while, you'll almost certainly
| | 03:09 |
come up with a bunch of
places to get you started.
| | 03:13 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Fostering a "think links" mentality| 00:01 |
I see many link opportunities go to waste,
simply because people involved in an organization
| | 00:07 |
don't realize the value of links.
| | 00:09 |
And even when they have a vague idea that
links can help a website, they still don't
| | 00:13 |
understand just how powerful
putting keywords into a link can be.
| | 00:18 |
If it all possible, try to engender a "think
links" mentality into organization, so that
| | 00:23 |
all staff members understand that links to
your website would be a key factor in the
| | 00:28 |
success of your site.
| | 00:30 |
Specifically, they need
to understand two things.
| | 00:33 |
First, that whenever they see the
opportunity for a link, they should take it.
| | 00:38 |
Secondly, that wherever possible the link
should contain keywords as explained earlier
| | 00:42 |
in this video course.
| | 00:45 |
There are some company departments that
really should understand these concepts.
| | 00:48 |
A classic example for instance of lost link
opportunities due to a lack of understanding
| | 00:54 |
are company's public relations departments.
| | 00:57 |
Most PR departments do not understand linking.
| | 01:00 |
So even though they're out there doing things
that can really help such as issuing press
| | 01:04 |
releases, all too often they don't take the
extra few moments to think about links and
| | 01:10 |
so the opportunity is lost.
| | 01:12 |
We'll be discussing press
releases in the later video.
| | 01:15 |
Your PR department should understand that
keyworded links can often be placed into press
| | 01:20 |
releases pointing back to
specific areas on your site.
| | 01:24 |
Ideally, whoever is responsible for promoting
the website should ensure that the PR department
| | 01:29 |
knows what keywords to use and
which pages they should link to.
| | 01:34 |
When working with new clients looking for
possible link locations I often hear about
| | 01:38 |
various business partners, suppliers, major
clients, industry associations and the like,
| | 01:44 |
companies that have websites of course and who
might be willing to link back to the client's site.
| | 01:49 |
Typically, most of these
opportunities go unclaimed.
| | 01:53 |
So the people in your organization who set up
such relationships really need to understand
| | 01:58 |
the value of getting this other
organizations to link to your site.
| | 02:02 |
It's not just your PR
department who can help though.
| | 02:05 |
Any member of your organization can provide
links from their Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+
| | 02:10 |
pages and the footers of forum
messages, from their own blogs, and so on.
| | 02:15 |
So try to educate your staff or organization
members with some basic linking concepts and
| | 02:20 |
with a little luck and the occasional
reminder you should see your links grow.
| | 02:26 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with "local" pages and directory links| 00:01 |
If the website you're promoting is related to a
local business, an attorney, medical professional,
| | 00:06 |
retail store, plumber or whatever you really
need to work on links from local directories.
| | 00:12 |
In fact, for a number of reasons one thing
you should do early in a link campaign is
| | 00:15 |
to make sure you're registered in as
many local directories as possible.
| | 00:20 |
This is actually a good
thing on a couple of levels.
| | 00:22 |
Yes, you'll get good links back to your site.
| | 00:24 |
But you're also creating pages about your
business linking back to your site in lots
| | 00:29 |
of different directories and those
directories are tickets in the SEO lottery.
| | 00:35 |
When somebody searches for your business type
in your area, hopefully your business website
| | 00:40 |
comes up in the search results.
| | 00:42 |
But with luck some of these
other web pages will pop up too.
| | 00:45 |
So you get not just one link on the
first search results page but several.
| | 00:51 |
There are several really important local
directories you should manage manually.
| | 00:56 |
First and foremost is Google Places.
| | 00:58 |
The directory of businesses
associated with Google Maps.
| | 01:00 |
And that is use to provide local
results to the Google search results.
| | 01:05 |
You should also manage your Yahoo!
Local and Bing Local results manually.
| | 01:09 |
You also need to submit to a directory
service such as UBL.org which takes your data and
| | 01:16 |
sends it to hundreds of
different directory services.
| | 01:19 |
I won't go into detail here though, because
I've already done a video in this subject
| | 01:23 |
in my SEO course.
| | 01:25 |
I explained how to submit to
those services in that video.
| | 01:28 |
But, there's more that you can do.
| | 01:30 |
You should also look for specialty directories
and an easy way to do that is to search for
| | 01:35 |
your business type along
with the word directory.
| | 01:38 |
You can also search for your business type
along with the name of your city and see what
| | 01:42 |
directories pop up.
| | 01:44 |
For instance let's say
you're a cosmetic surgeon.
| | 01:46 |
Search for cosmetic surgery directory,
plastic surgery directory, and so on.
| | 01:52 |
You can also try cosmetic surgery along with
your city name and even cosmetic surgery directory
| | 01:57 |
along with your city and
see what directories appear.
| | 02:01 |
You'll find various directories.
| | 02:03 |
Your job then is to find out how to
get listed in those directories.
| | 02:07 |
In some cases, you'll find
the only way in is to pay.
| | 02:10 |
But often you can get a
basic listing for free.
| | 02:13 |
For instance, one dental directory I saw
recently included free listings and those listings
| | 02:18 |
include real follow links
back to the dentist websites.
| | 02:23 |
You only have to pay if you add
a photo and more information.
| | 02:27 |
It's not worth paying for a
listing in most of these directories.
| | 02:31 |
But that's not to say some are not worthwhile, of
course that's the subject outside this course.
| | 02:36 |
So let me just say that if you do pay for
listings you should consider carefully whether
| | 02:40 |
it's worthwhile and track the traffic to your
website and calls that you get so that you'll
| | 02:45 |
be able to see if it's working.
| | 02:48 |
Another form of directory that is well worth
getting listing in is what I call a local
| | 02:52 |
local directory, the
specialized city directories.
| | 02:55 |
I'm not talking now about the big systems like
Citysearch and Yelp, though those are important too.
| | 03:01 |
I'm talking about the small directories
that focus on a particular town or city.
| | 03:06 |
There are mixed bag.
| | 03:07 |
Some are associated with the local newspaper or
perhaps even with small towns, the local city government.
| | 03:13 |
Some are small independent sites.
| | 03:16 |
They're very professional and attractive.
| | 03:18 |
Others are somewhat more
funky or downright ugly.
| | 03:21 |
Some are actually sub domains of very large
national directories, still, they're all worth
| | 03:26 |
getting links from.
| | 03:27 |
In some cases, you may find your business already
listed as many of these directories are getting
| | 03:32 |
their data from sources such as UBL.org.
| | 03:35 |
Still, check to see if the data is correct
and whether it contains a link to your site.
| | 03:40 |
These directories are easy to find.
| | 03:42 |
Search for your town or city name
along with the word directory.
| | 03:46 |
You may be surprised to what pop ups.
| | 03:49 |
Better still go to Yahoo! Directory or dmoz.org
and dig around in the regional search results.
| | 03:55 |
And you'll often find local directories.
| | 03:58 |
Dmoz even has a guides and directories
sub category which is often quite useful.
| | 04:03 |
You might be surprised that how many local
and industry directories you can find if you
| | 04:07 |
invest a little time.
| | 04:08 |
Spend a while digging around and you'll discover
lots of great link opportunities that provide
| | 04:12 |
really useful, relevant links.
| | 04:17 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Reciprocal linking: Is it worth the trouble?| 00:01 |
We need to quickly discuss reciprocal linking.
| | 00:04 |
Mainly because it's be such an important link
technique in the past and many people still
| | 00:08 |
use it and seem to think it's
what linking is all about.
| | 00:12 |
So what is reciprocal linking? As the name
suggests, it's linking with reciprocation.
| | 00:18 |
You link to my site and I'll link to yours.
| | 00:21 |
It's often also known by
the term Link Exchange.
| | 00:24 |
You've seen link pages, I'm sure.
| | 00:26 |
Many are still around.
| | 00:28 |
You still sometimes see links that simply
say links, or maybe useful links, or resources,
| | 00:34 |
or perhaps our friends or link partners.
| | 00:38 |
Click those links and you'll see pages
and pages of links to other websites.
| | 00:44 |
For a surprisingly long time, reciprocal
linking was a very powerful way to rank a website.
| | 00:49 |
It really did work and it worked very well.
| | 00:52 |
There used to be hundreds of companies
providing reciprocal linking services such as software
| | 00:58 |
that helped automate the process of finding
link partners and placing and managing the
| | 01:02 |
links, and people who would search the
web for possible partners and email them.
| | 01:08 |
Even now, I still get a few
reciprocal link requests by email every week.
| | 01:13 |
But over the years the search engines have
devalued reciprocal linking to the degree
| | 01:17 |
that in most cases it doesn't work.
| | 01:19 |
I'll explain in a moment how
it can still work sometimes.
| | 01:24 |
The problem with basic reciprocal linking
from a search engine standpoint is that the
| | 01:28 |
links have no real value.
| | 01:30 |
The only reason they're there is to convince
the search engines that the reference sites
| | 01:35 |
should rank well.
| | 01:36 |
Despite the fact that the reciprocal link
companies always used to claim that reciprocal
| | 01:41 |
linking was about providing useful links to
site visitors not manipulating search results.
| | 01:48 |
That was nonsense of course, and over the
years as the search engines reduce the value
| | 01:52 |
of such links, this companies have mostly
disappeared or moved into more general link
| | 01:57 |
building services.
| | 02:00 |
You may also hear however that reciprocal
linking is actually dangerous, that doing it
| | 02:04 |
can get you penalized.
| | 02:06 |
In most cases that simply isn't true.
| | 02:08 |
In fact, the story that reciprocal linking
was dangerous first started circulating while
| | 02:14 |
I was still seeing sites ranking
well using reciprocal linking.
| | 02:18 |
Now using link farms, the automated creation of
huge numbers of what are in effect reciprocal
| | 02:24 |
links, is dangerous.
| | 02:26 |
But most reciprocal linking won't do
any harm. It just won't do any good.
| | 02:32 |
So when can reciprocal linking work? When
it's not obviously reciprocal linking.
| | 02:37 |
What are the two characteristics
of typical reciprocal linking?
| | 02:41 |
Well, first of all, site A links to
site B, and site B links back to site A.
| | 02:48 |
And the links typically appear in
pages containing long list of links.
| | 02:53 |
But what if site A links to B
then B links to C and C links to A.
| | 02:59 |
Or maybe site A links to B, B
to C, C to D and D back to A.
| | 03:06 |
And what if those links were scattered around
a site rather than in a big list of links?
| | 03:12 |
This form of reciprocal linking sometimes
known as three way linking or even one way
| | 03:17 |
linking, because your links go one way without a
second link back, can work and many people use it.
| | 03:24 |
But although there are some companies
providing three way linking services, most of this form
| | 03:29 |
of reciprocal linking is more informal with
owners of multiple sites linking between their
| | 03:34 |
own sites with other
people who own multiple sites.
| | 03:39 |
In general, you'll probably want to avoid
reciprocal linking. It's simply a waste of time.
| | 03:43 |
But if you run into some kind of multi-site
link exchange in which you don't do A to B
| | 03:49 |
to A linking and in which you don't create
big list of links, then go ahead. It could
| | 03:54 |
be helpful.
| | 03:57 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating press releases| 00:01 |
I mentioned in an earlier video that company
PR departments often miss the real opportunity
| | 00:06 |
in the form of press releases.
| | 00:08 |
They are out there creating press releases
for all the usual reasons companies do so,
| | 00:13 |
but they are either not including keyworded
links in the press releases or not including
| | 00:17 |
any kind of link, even a basic URL
link back to the company site.
| | 00:23 |
If you're distributing press
releases, it's a no brainer.
| | 00:25 |
Why not do it right and make the
most of the work you're already doing?
| | 00:29 |
But even if you don't already do press
releases, you may want to experiment with them.
| | 00:34 |
I've seen releases used very effectively to
generate traffic to sites and they often rank
| | 00:39 |
well in new search results.
| | 00:41 |
So how should press releases be distributed
most effectively? There are three steps.
| | 00:46 |
One, write the press release.
| | 00:48 |
Two, decide where to distribute the release.
| | 00:52 |
Three, make sure the release
contains links when you distribute it.
| | 00:56 |
I'm not going into great detail
about writing press releases.
| | 00:59 |
As you can find plenty of information
about formatting and style online.
| | 01:03 |
Ideally, it should contain some kind of
interesting information, something worth reading and it
| | 01:09 |
should generally be around
four, five hundred words long.
| | 01:13 |
Include your relevant keywords
scattered through the release.
| | 01:16 |
And in particular include a few keyword
phrases on which you plan to place links pointing
| | 01:20 |
back to your site.
| | 01:23 |
Depending on the service you use, you may be able to
include three to five keyworded links in the release.
| | 01:29 |
What are you going to do with the press release?
There are lots of places to distribute them
| | 01:33 |
and you may even want to distribute
through several different outlets.
| | 01:37 |
Perhaps one major paid
service such as prweb.com.
| | 01:39 |
One or two lower cost services
and a few of the free ones too.
| | 01:45 |
PRWeb is one of the best known distribution
services, probably because it was one of the
| | 01:50 |
earlier web based press release companies.
| | 01:52 |
But there are many press release
companies now with the wide range of services.
| | 01:57 |
You may want to check out companies such as
PRBuzz, eReleases, eMailWire, PRLeap and Vocus.
| | 02:06 |
Pricing varies but there are two basic models.
| | 02:08 |
You pay per press release or you pay a
monthly or perhaps annual subscription, typically
| | 02:13 |
somewhere between $200-1,000 a year which allows
you to submit an unlimited number of releases.
| | 02:21 |
Make sure you understand what you're getting
though, most importantly, make sure you're
| | 02:25 |
buying a service that allows you to
include keyworded links in your releases.
| | 02:30 |
For example, PRWeb's pricing
starts at $89 for a single release.
| | 02:35 |
But if you check their feature list carefully, you'll
find that you won't get keyworded links with that price.
| | 02:41 |
There's not until there are $199 level
that you start getting keyworded links.
| | 02:46 |
So whatever service you sign up for, check to
see that at least this feature is included.
| | 02:51 |
As I mentioned before, you may also want
to distribute through free release sites.
| | 02:56 |
If you're going through the trouble of
creating a release, you might want to distribute it
| | 03:00 |
as widely as possible after all, or perhaps you
simply don't have a budget for press releases.
| | 03:05 |
The free services may still work for you.
| | 03:09 |
Each service works a little differently in
regards to how links are placed into the releases.
| | 03:13 |
So read the instructions carefully.
| | 03:16 |
Put as many links into the release as you can.
| | 03:19 |
If the service allows say four links you can
use four different phrases and link to different
| | 03:24 |
pages within your site.
| | 03:27 |
I know some of you have the term duplicate
content bouncing around in your heads right now.
| | 03:32 |
After all, if you submit a press release it could
end up on many different sites, hundreds perhaps.
| | 03:37 |
Yes, that's true but don't believe
the hype about duplicate content.
| | 03:42 |
It's not going to get you penalized.
| | 03:44 |
After all, the fact is that these press
releases do end up on many different sites and yet
| | 03:49 |
do end up indexed within Google.
| | 03:52 |
They often end up in the search results unless
can be found by searchers who may read them
| | 03:57 |
and end up on your site by clicking on a link.
| | 04:00 |
So don't worry about duplicate content.
| | 04:02 |
Google does index press releases and those
press releases can be found in the results
| | 04:07 |
and can also be a great
source of links to your site.
| | 04:11 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with article syndication| 00:00 |
Article syndication is very
similar to press releases.
| | 00:04 |
Essentially, you're writing a different type of
article, not an article praising your company
| | 00:08 |
or announcing something but some kind of
informative article, then distributing it through article
| | 00:15 |
syndication libraries.
| | 00:16 |
The purpose of an article syndication library
is in theory at least to provide repository
| | 00:22 |
of articles that website owners can
pick from to help bulk-up their sites.
| | 00:27 |
You provide your article with permission for
site and blog owners to use the article, and
| | 00:32 |
in return, they agree to run the articles author
information along with the article including
| | 00:37 |
a link back to your site.
| | 00:39 |
That doesn't always happen of course, sometimes
site owners simply run article without attribution.
| | 00:45 |
But it does most of the time.
| | 00:47 |
Thus, by distributing your article through
the syndication libraries you potentially
| | 00:51 |
end up with links back to a
website from two types of locations.
| | 00:56 |
From any websites on which the article ends
up after being pulled from the syndication
| | 01:01 |
library and of course from the library itself.
| | 01:05 |
Article syndication used to be a very effective way to
get links back to your site spread around the web.
| | 01:11 |
Today, these sorts of links are not as good as
they once were, but probably still help a little.
| | 01:16 |
And at the end of this article, I'll explain a
special form of syndication that can bring more value.
| | 01:22 |
There are hundred of syndication libraries.
| | 01:24 |
And of course, you can
submit to them directly.
| | 01:27 |
Sites such as GO Articles, Ezine Articles,
Article Space, articlecity, ArticleTrader
| | 01:33 |
contain many thousands of articles each.
| | 01:36 |
And they're all indexed by Google.
| | 01:38 |
However, there's a lot of work to distribute
widely by working with each site individually.
| | 01:43 |
So instead, you may want to use a
service that does the work for you.
| | 01:48 |
As an example, submityourarticle.com provides
a web based console in which you enter your
| | 01:53 |
article and the service then sends it out
to hundreds of different article libraries,
| | 01:57 |
while at the same time posting
the articles on blogs for you.
| | 02:01 |
There are a number of these article
syndication services out there such as Unique Article
| | 02:06 |
Wizard and distributeyourarticle.com
and software such as Article Submitter.
| | 02:10 |
Search a little and you'll also find
plenty of manual submission services too.
| | 02:16 |
You can even find services that will
write articles for you and then submit them.
| | 02:21 |
Article syndication doesn't
have to be hugely complicated.
| | 02:25 |
Most of the article libraries do not allow keyworded
links in the articles themselves, though some do.
| | 02:31 |
Typically, links are placed in the informational bio-box
at the bottom of the article about the author box.
| | 02:38 |
In this box you get to say who wrote the
article and provide a line or two about the author
| | 02:43 |
including a link or maybe a couple of
links back to the author's website.
| | 02:48 |
Remember, rather than a name or URL linked
back to your site you want a keyworded link.
| | 02:55 |
Most article libraries
have very low standards.
| | 02:58 |
Essentially, anyone can submit an article and
also often the articles are poorly written.
| | 03:03 |
Some of the libraries try to keep the standards
up though and in any case, you want well written
| | 03:07 |
articles because the better written and more
interesting the article, the more likely it
| | 03:12 |
is to be picked up and used
by site owners and bloggers.
| | 03:16 |
But there's another type of article site
that is proliferated over the last few years.
| | 03:21 |
Content sites that are very concerned that
the articles they carry are well written.
| | 03:25 |
And these sites don't let just anyone
throw any kind of garbage onto the site.
| | 03:30 |
Rather they have a submission process.
| | 03:32 |
You have to prove you can write.
| | 03:34 |
Some of these sites actually share revenues
with writers paying them a portion of the
| | 03:38 |
advertising revenues earned from their pages.
| | 03:41 |
Most writers probably earn very little.
| | 03:43 |
But I do know one successful writer for
a top site making a six figure income.
| | 03:49 |
In any case, from an SEO perspective,
some of these sites can be very useful.
| | 03:53 |
Of course you want a site that allows you
to place links in your articles and create
| | 03:57 |
follow links, not no follow links.
| | 04:00 |
I'm not going to suggest which site is the
best as these things change over time but
| | 04:04 |
you may want to research sites such as examiner.com, suite101.com,
helium.com, hubpages.com, ideamarkerters.com and the like.
| | 04:13 |
These are high quality content sites,
often regarded as citizen journalism sites.
| | 04:18 |
Dig around and you may find an opportunity
to create keyworded links pointing back to
| | 04:23 |
your site from high value,
high page rank websites.
| | 04:27 |
Finally, another article syndication
strategy that is rarely discussed.
| | 04:32 |
Write articles and provide them
directly to bloggers to run on their sites.
| | 04:36 |
Find the blogs that are related to your area
of business and approach them to see if they
| | 04:40 |
might want to run guest articles.
| | 04:43 |
Many blogs will, if the articles
are interesting and well-written.
| | 04:47 |
There are even sites that connect blogs
with bloggers for this very purpose.
| | 04:51 |
We'll look more blogs in the next video.
| | 04:54 |
A quick comment about duplicate content.
| | 04:56 |
Yes, it would be better if your articles were
all different and in fact some services such
| | 05:00 |
as submit your article.com even provide
tools that help you mix up your articles.
| | 05:05 |
You provide several headers, several opening
paragraphs, several closing paragraphs and
| | 05:09 |
so on, and the software then picks randomly
so that each submitted article is different.
| | 05:16 |
If you're posting the blogs, you may want to
manually modify your article so each blog
| | 05:20 |
to which you send an
article gets a unique one.
| | 05:24 |
Article syndication is being used very
successfully in many linking campaigns.
| | 05:28 |
And although there are plenty of low value
syndication libraries, there are still high
| | 05:33 |
value syndication mechanisms
available to you if you look carefully.
| | 05:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with bloggers| 00:01 |
In the previous video, I discussed article
syndication, and left you with the idea that
| | 00:05 |
you could contact bloggers and
offer guest articles for them to run.
| | 00:09 |
There's an important difference between
articles posted into syndication libraries and those
| | 00:13 |
posted directly to blogs.
| | 00:15 |
The links in blogs are likely to be far more
valuable than regular syndication articles.
| | 00:20 |
The search engines know the article libraries
when they see them and thus don't give links
| | 00:24 |
in their pages particularly high value.
| | 00:27 |
And even if someone picks up an article from
a library and posts it on their site, the
| | 00:31 |
search engines may recognize the articles
elsewhere and thus give the links relatively low value.
| | 00:37 |
However, unique content on blogs can
provide very valuable links back to your site.
| | 00:43 |
There are several ways to
get links placed on blogs.
| | 00:46 |
First, there's the idea of posting
links in article comment areas.
| | 00:49 |
It's a strategy that's essentially worthless
but you'll still find companies selling blog
| | 00:53 |
comment services.
| | 00:55 |
This is what's known as blog spam, and apart
from being obnoxious, essentially polluting
| | 01:00 |
people's blogs, it really doesn't work because links
and comments are virtually always no follow links.
| | 01:06 |
In fact, that's why the rel=nofollow tag was
created in the first place to discourage blog spam.
| | 01:13 |
Okay, next is the idea of
submitting guest articles to blogs.
| | 01:17 |
As I suggested in the last video, if you do
this the articles will be posted into the
| | 01:21 |
blogs article area and links
there are generally follow links.
| | 01:26 |
These are good links especially
when they come from popular blogs.
| | 01:30 |
You can also try to convince bloggers to list your
site in their blogroll or their list of links.
| | 01:35 |
You'll need to have a site that is worth linking
to of course, if for example you're promoting
| | 01:39 |
a site that sells a discount snow shoeing
gear, you maybe able to get people who blog
| | 01:44 |
about snow shoeing to list you as a resource.
| | 01:47 |
Finally, you can also get links from blogs by
convincing bloggers to write about your site.
| | 01:53 |
Of course, you'll need something to write
about a hook that you can hang a story on.
| | 01:57 |
Again, links and articles posted on blogs
whether written by you or the blogger are
| | 02:02 |
generally follow links.
| | 02:05 |
A good blog campaign can be very valuable
because you get links distributed widely across
| | 02:09 |
the Internet and they're the type of links that
Google typically likes to see, the real thing.
| | 02:15 |
But to make such a campaign work you
really do have to have a good story.
| | 02:18 |
There has to be a reason for
bloggers to link to your site.
| | 02:21 |
I think of a blog link campaign as blog PR.
| | 02:25 |
And there's a core concept in public
relations that goes back many years.
| | 02:29 |
If you want people to write about or talk
about you, you have got to have a hook to
| | 02:34 |
hang the story on.
| | 02:36 |
What I ask my clients is your USP,
your Unique Selling Proposition.
| | 02:41 |
What makes your site so special?
| | 02:43 |
If you can't answer that question, there's
probably no reason for bloggers to write about you.
| | 02:48 |
If you are just one site in a crowded arena of
similar sites, bloggers won't want to write about you.
| | 02:54 |
And in any case you have a bigger problem.
| | 02:56 |
How do you hope to compete in any way?
| | 03:00 |
Let's assume thought that you can answer that
question and that you really do have a good answer.
| | 03:06 |
You have the best prices, or the best selection, or
the best content, or something that sets you apart.
| | 03:11 |
So the first thing to do is find the
bloggers who have good prospects for your pitch.
| | 03:16 |
You may already know the number of bloggers
but you can find more by searching using Google
| | 03:20 |
Blog Search for instance.
| | 03:22 |
There are various other blog directories too.
| | 03:25 |
And don't forget to follow links in blogrolls or
the useful link list within the blogs themselves.
| | 03:30 |
You'll soon find a large number of
blogs in virtually any subject area.
| | 03:35 |
When you find useful blogs, you will want
to record some basic information, perhaps
| | 03:38 |
in a spreadsheet.
| | 03:40 |
The blog name, the URL, the name of the person
who owns the blog, a link to the author page.
| | 03:45 |
Perhaps the author's email
address or other contact method.
| | 03:49 |
If one of your goals is to get blogroll links, you
will want to record information about that too.
| | 03:54 |
One of my clients has a site selling a
particular type of handicraft supplies.
| | 03:58 |
And we notice that many blogs
contain list of links to useful stores.
| | 04:02 |
So he had his staff record whether a blog
had such a list, and if so, whether his store
| | 04:07 |
was already in the list.
| | 04:09 |
Once you've got this sort of
information, the hard work begins.
| | 04:13 |
Essentially you're going to contact the
blogs and offer or suggest various things.
| | 04:17 |
You'll want informal chatty context.
| | 04:20 |
Don't use some kind of spam looking boiler
plate, and don't overwhelm the blogger.
| | 04:24 |
I suggest you propose one thing at a time.
| | 04:27 |
Very quickly tell them why their
readers might be interested in your site.
| | 04:31 |
And remember, just as with PR, it's all about
providing something that the readers might
| | 04:35 |
be interested in.
| | 04:37 |
Then suggest that they add a link to the already
existing list of stores or list of useful resources.
| | 04:43 |
Perhaps you suggest that they write about your site
or maybe you offer to write an article for them.
| | 04:47 |
There are other things you can do too, perhaps you
hold a contest giving away something of value.
| | 04:53 |
If your site is promoting an eBook for instance,
you hold a drawing to give away 20 copies
| | 04:57 |
and use the blogs to announce the drawing.
| | 05:00 |
If you find really popular blogs, you might
even offer the blogger's own drawings, exclusive
| | 05:04 |
to just his readers and no one else.
| | 05:07 |
This is a very effective
technique that many sites have used.
| | 05:10 |
I know of a musical instrument company that
gives away strings every month and has gone
| | 05:15 |
to thousands of links by
announcing the drawings in blogs.
| | 05:18 |
Also, make friends with the bloggers.
| | 05:20 |
Include coupons when you contact them.
| | 05:23 |
Offer to provide review copies or whatever
you can do to stand out and make them want
| | 05:27 |
to write about you.
| | 05:29 |
Blog linking campaigns are often
overlooked but can be incredibly powerful.
| | 05:33 |
If you have a good story to tell, get
out there and tell it to the bloggers.
| | 05:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating link bait| 00:01 |
Link bait is a simple concept.
| | 00:03 |
You place something on your
site that acts as bait for links.
| | 00:07 |
It attracts links.
| | 00:09 |
People link to your site not because you
want them to, but because they really want to.
| | 00:13 |
They want to tell people about whatever
bait you place there. You place the bait,
| | 00:18 |
then let people know about it and
wait for the links to roll in.
| | 00:22 |
These are the very best
type of links you can have.
| | 00:24 |
In fact, when Matt Cutts, Google's liaison
with the SEO world, fields questions about
| | 00:30 |
linking, link bait is one of
the first things he mentions.
| | 00:34 |
So what is link bait? It's simply something
so interesting, or useful, or entertaining, or
| | 00:40 |
funny, or sexy, or intriguing, or perhaps even
disgusting or evil that people will link to
| | 00:46 |
it because they just feel the need to
tell their friends and colleagues about it.
| | 00:51 |
A classic example is, of course, YouTube, which
at the end of the day is all about link bait.
| | 00:56 |
YouTube contains millions of videos and while
it's true that many of them are most certainly
| | 01:01 |
not link bait, many are.
| | 01:03 |
And consequently, YouTube has more
than a billion and a half incoming links.
| | 01:08 |
Another example is Wikipedia, a site that
contains around 18 million pages, each one
| | 01:13 |
of which could be regarded
as link bait to someone.
| | 01:16 |
You may not be interested in the Beard Liberation
Front, but apparently, hundreds of people are.
| | 01:22 |
Of course, we can't all be YouTube or Wikipedia,
but that doesn't mean you can't create your
| | 01:26 |
own link bait on a more modest scale.
| | 01:29 |
So what can you do? Well, an obvious idea
is hosting a blog on a subject related to
| | 01:33 |
the area you work in.
| | 01:35 |
Blogs are very easy to create,
good blogs are much harder.
| | 01:39 |
So don't jump into blogging until
you are sure you can make it work.
| | 01:42 |
You need someone who can write, who wants
to write, and who can write articles that
| | 01:46 |
people want to read.
| | 01:48 |
If you got what it takes, if you can create a really
top-notch blog, a blog may provide great link bait.
| | 01:55 |
But what is a blog? It's really
just a content management system.
| | 01:59 |
So whether you create content within a blog
or using more traditional web development
| | 02:03 |
methods, it's all content
at the end of the day.
| | 02:07 |
Perhaps you can provide
useful tools of some sort.
| | 02:10 |
Many mortgage websites provide
mortgage calculators, for instance.
| | 02:13 |
Of course, if you have a mortgage company,
adding a mortgage calculator today may be
| | 02:18 |
a little late in the game.
| | 02:19 |
Essentially, you're going
to have to brainstorm this.
| | 02:23 |
Every business is different, of course, and
the resources you have available will vary.
| | 02:28 |
Perhaps it's a glossary of some kind or a directory
or a series of videos about using your products.
| | 02:33 |
Some outdoor stores now host videos on how
to use the various types of equipment they
| | 02:37 |
sell, for instance.
| | 02:40 |
Whatever your link bait is, the next
step of course is to tell people about it.
| | 02:44 |
Obviously, you'll want to use SEO to make
sure your link bait is easy to find, but you'll
| | 02:49 |
also want to get out there and let bloggers, for
example, know about whatever it is you've posted.
| | 02:54 |
You'll want to do a basic PR campaign contacting
bloggers, relevant newspapers, magazines sites,
| | 03:00 |
get listed in any directories
that may be appropriate, and so on.
| | 03:04 |
Of course, you'll also want to place
link invitations next to your bait.
| | 03:07 |
A little social networking icons and
share buttons that you see so often.
| | 03:12 |
A quick tip, think back to the first two
examples I gave in this video, YouTube and Wikipedia.
| | 03:18 |
Apart from the fact that they contain huge
amounts of link bait, what else do they have
| | 03:22 |
in common? The crowd created the link bait.
| | 03:25 |
The organizations that run YouTube and
Wikipedia don't create any content.
| | 03:30 |
They simply created the infrastructure that
allowed other people, the crowd, to create
| | 03:34 |
the link bait for them.
| | 03:36 |
In fact, many of the
world's top websites do this.
| | 03:40 |
Think of sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor,
Pinterest, Craigslist, and many more.
| | 03:46 |
Sites that let other people create
their content, they're link bait.
| | 03:50 |
If it's at all possible for you to
do that, it's a powerful thing.
| | 03:54 |
An example would be a retail company that
also managed to set up and run popular forums
| | 03:59 |
related to its products.
| | 04:00 |
Adobe, for instance, hosts
community learning areas.
| | 04:05 |
Forums and music groups, for instance, in
which content provided by Adobe customers
| | 04:10 |
act as link bait for many thousands of links.
| | 04:13 |
That's perhaps not why Adobe did it,
but nonetheless, link bait it is.
| | 04:19 |
Creating link bait is actually quite difficult
for many companies, which is why so many people
| | 04:23 |
turn to other methods; methods
that create less valuable links.
| | 04:27 |
Spend a little while thinking about this, though,
and you may find a way to create something
| | 04:32 |
that people really want to link to.
| | 04:36 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Examining social networking links| 00:01 |
Before we begin looking at social network
links, I just want to say that for all the
| | 00:05 |
hype, it's quite possible in many cases to
create an effective linking campaign without
| | 00:10 |
social networking.
| | 00:11 |
I've seen many sites rank well using linking
strategies that don't include social networking.
| | 00:17 |
In fact, there's also the problem that in many cases,
social networking links are no follow links.
| | 00:23 |
Take Facebook, for instance, the
single most important social network.
| | 00:27 |
Links from Facebook to external pages
on nofollow links as you can see here.
| | 00:32 |
I've got the Firefox's DoNofollow plug-in
turned on, so you can see the pink links.
| | 00:37 |
On the other hand, some other
social networks use follow links.
| | 00:41 |
Take a look, for instance, at Google+.
| | 00:44 |
Yes, there are some nofollow links between
Google+ accounts, for instance, but the
| | 00:49 |
external links, at least
for now, are follow links.
| | 00:53 |
Myspace provides nofollow links while
LinkedIn provides follow links, but in both cases,
| | 00:59 |
they're not direct links
to the reference sites.
| | 01:02 |
They are redirects and not 301
redirects, so they don't carry value.
| | 01:09 |
Yet another example, Delicious, they recently
changed to make all external links nofollows
| | 01:14 |
and they're redirects too.
| | 01:16 |
Some social networking sites evidently tried to decide
which links should be followed and which shouldn't.
| | 01:21 |
Digg, for instance, says that they provide
follow links in cases that the story has reached
| | 01:26 |
a certain popularity.
| | 01:28 |
How about Twitter? Twitter used to use nofollow links, but
more recently seems to have switched to follow links.
| | 01:34 |
Some Twitter feed mechanisms
convert them to nofollow links, though.
| | 01:39 |
By the way, here's a quick tip on how to
figure out if a link is a 301 redirect link.
| | 01:44 |
You can see a redirect link here.
| | 01:47 |
Point at the link and you'll see that it's
a redirect through a linkedin.com server.
| | 01:52 |
So let's copy the link and
search for server header service.
| | 02:04 |
We'll paste the URL into the
service and see what comes back.
| | 02:08 |
You can see in the case of this
LinkedIn link, we can get 200 responses.
| | 02:12 |
In fact in this case, it's actually a double
redirect as it's redirecting to another LinkedIn
| | 02:18 |
page which then redirects
to the final destination.
| | 02:22 |
Some links will return a 302, which is a redirect, but
for the link to have value it needs to return 301.
| | 02:30 |
How about the link shortening services such
as bitly, Google URL Shortener, and Tiny URL?
| | 02:36 |
Twitter users often employ these services to
create short links for use in the limited
| | 02:40 |
space of a tweet.
| | 02:42 |
Well, these services
typically use 301 redirects.
| | 02:46 |
These three certainly do and you can check
your favorite service for yourself using the
| | 02:51 |
method I just described.
| | 02:53 |
So some social networking links do carry value
to follow links, but what about the nofollow
| | 02:59 |
links? Is there SEO value to social networking
nofollow links? That is, will the search engines
| | 03:05 |
consider the links for ranking purposes? Will
social network links help push your site up
| | 03:11 |
in the search results?
| | 03:13 |
Well, as explained in an
earlier video, in theory, no.
| | 03:18 |
In theory, at least, the major search engines,
and that essentially means Google and Bing,
| | 03:22 |
ignore nofollow links for ranking purposes.
| | 03:26 |
They may actually follow the links in some
cases, but both search engines claim they
| | 03:31 |
do not use nofollow
links for ranking purposes.
| | 03:34 |
My only problem with this is it seems like
there must be an awful lot of useful information
| | 03:38 |
embedded in social networking links.
| | 03:40 |
Yes, Google has stated quite clearly and quite
recently that nofollow links don't count in ranking.
| | 03:47 |
In fact, Google has suggested that social
networking sites should try to identify trusted
| | 03:53 |
posters and make their links follow links.
That is, as far as Google is concerned,
| | 04:00 |
it's up to the social
networks, not Google, to decide.
| | 04:04 |
So you'll have to make your
own mind up on this one.
| | 04:06 |
Either Google is being honest and such links
have no value, or perhaps you have a situation
| | 04:11 |
in which Google is claiming they have no
value and yet at the same time, deciding that in
| | 04:16 |
certain situations they
will look at nofollow links.
| | 04:19 |
I just don't know the answer to this, but
as I mentioned, there must be a lot of good
| | 04:23 |
information in these billions of nofollow
links coming off social networking sites.
| | 04:28 |
So I keep coming back to the idea that maybe they
do look at some social networking nofollow links.
| | 04:34 |
So is social networking useful or not for SEO?
In some cases, definitely useful as you'll
| | 04:41 |
get follow links.
| | 04:42 |
In others, when you're only
getting nofollow links, perhaps not.
| | 04:46 |
The official position of the search engines is,
of course, you should go ahead and promote
| | 04:50 |
your site in the social networks because links
bring traffic regardless of search results ranking.
| | 04:57 |
And that's perfectly true.
| | 04:58 |
A well-executed social networking campaign can
help a website get traffic directly bypassing
| | 05:04 |
the search engines.
| | 05:07 |
Don't get pulled in by the hype, though.
| | 05:09 |
Social networking is no silver bullet.
| | 05:11 |
And in fact, doesn't work very
well for many types of businesses.
| | 05:15 |
It's not a one-size-fits-all type of thing.
| | 05:18 |
In any case, in this video course, we're
interested in SEO in optimizing for the search engines.
| | 05:24 |
So I'm not going to get into a
general social networking discussion.
| | 05:29 |
I'll just leave you with this, if you think
you can make social networking work for you
| | 05:34 |
regardless of search engine results,
then of course, go ahead and do it.
| | 05:38 |
If there is any search engine lift, then that's
great, but if you're not sure the non-search
| | 05:43 |
engine results from social networking campaign
are worth the cost to you, and social networking
| | 05:48 |
is very hard to succeed at for many types of
businesses, you might simply do the basics;
| | 05:55 |
set up the obvious social network accounts,
just don't spend a lot of time on it.
| | 05:58 |
You will want Facebook and Google+
accounts, perhaps Twitter and Linkedin.
| | 06:04 |
You'll also want to use the usual social networking
share buttons, of course, and try to encourage
| | 06:08 |
people to link to you from
their social networking accounts.
| | 06:13 |
Social networking has become popular in SEO
circles and in fact, there are many companies
| | 06:17 |
that will go out and create
social networking links for you.
| | 06:21 |
We'll be discussing the whole idea of
buying links like this in the later video.
| | 06:25 |
Do these link campaigns work? Perhaps,
depending on what you believe about the nofollow issue
| | 06:31 |
and what proportion of follow links
are created during such a campaign.
| | 06:35 |
But again, as the search engines are
continually pointing out, linking is not all about SEO,
| | 06:41 |
sometimes a link is just a link.
| | 06:46 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Getting more links| 00:01 |
In the last few videos, we've looked at a
variety of ways to get links to your site
| | 00:05 |
from directories to link baits,
reciprocal linking, to working with bloggers.
| | 00:09 |
Some of these methods are better than others,
of course, but there are some of the more
| | 00:13 |
common methods for creating links.
| | 00:15 |
However, you'll find that there's an almost limitless
number of ways that people go about creating links.
| | 00:20 |
So in this video, I'm going to
quickly run through a few more methods.
| | 00:24 |
You may find these directly useful or perhaps
they'll simply spark ideas related to other
| | 00:28 |
things you can do to gather links.
| | 00:31 |
Let's start with classified-ad sites.
| | 00:33 |
And in the U.S., that mainly means Craigslist
followed by eBayClassifieds, backpage.com,
| | 00:38 |
and various smaller sites.
| | 00:40 |
In the U.K., the big
classified site is gumtree.com.
| | 00:44 |
Most people have never even
heard of Craigslist over there.
| | 00:47 |
There was a time when a concerted linking
campaign based on Craigslist ads could really
| | 00:51 |
boost the site and the search engines, but
Craigslist has provided nofollow links for
| | 00:56 |
a number of years now.
| | 00:57 |
And most other classified ad sites provide
either nofollow links or redirect links, so
| | 01:02 |
they don't help much these
days from an SEO perspective.
| | 01:06 |
On the other hand, classified ads, in particular
Craigslist ads, can generate a lot of traffic to a website.
| | 01:12 |
And there are now thousands of businesses,
even businesses without their own websites
| | 01:16 |
whose entire existence depend on Craigslist.
| | 01:20 |
Forum linking can be very effective and
I'm not talking about spamming forums.
| | 01:25 |
In fact, you might term this community marketing,
though there can definitely be an SEO benefit.
| | 01:29 |
Here is the basic strategy.
| | 01:31 |
Let's say you have a website
selling Star Trek memorabilia.
| | 01:36 |
You begin by finding all the web-based
Star Trek discussion groups you can.
| | 01:40 |
I'm sure there are few.
| | 01:41 |
You then keep an eye on the discussions
and answer messages whenever you can.
| | 01:47 |
If someone is trying to find a place to buy
a product you have, mention that you have
| | 01:50 |
it and link to your site.
| | 01:52 |
If someone asks a trivia question and you
know the answer, then answer and include a
| | 01:57 |
signature line that holds a link to your site.
| | 02:00 |
You have to be careful not to be obnoxious
about this process, but if you can spread
| | 02:04 |
these links around a variety of
forums, it can be quite effective.
| | 02:07 |
Note that nofollow links are not as
common in forums as in blog comments.
| | 02:12 |
Perhaps half the time, your links will be follow
links and half the time, they'll be nofollow links.
| | 02:16 |
Either way, there's value.
| | 02:19 |
People will read your posts and if they're
helpful, the links will get clicked on now
| | 02:23 |
and then, even when they don't
help boost search engine rank.
| | 02:27 |
A similar strategy to forum
linking is Q&A site linking.
| | 02:31 |
You've probably seen these sites where people
ask questions and others answer; Yahoo Answers,
| | 02:36 |
Wiki Answers, Askville, which is owned
by Amazon, and a couple of dozen others.
| | 02:41 |
Many of these provide nofollow links.
| | 02:43 |
There are some still giving follow links,
but even the nofollow links can help your
| | 02:48 |
site if you're answering the right questions.
| | 02:50 |
If someone is asking where to buy a niche
product that you sell, it's a good thing to
| | 02:55 |
have the answer include a link to
your site, follow or nofollow.
| | 03:00 |
If there's any way you can get links to your
website in newspaper and news sites. There
| | 03:05 |
are essentially two ways.
| | 03:06 |
The first is to get the papers to write about
you, so you need an old-world PR campaign.
| | 03:11 |
It can be a lot of work, contacting journalists
for the right pitch to get them to pay attention,
| | 03:16 |
but the payoff can be huge both in terms of
SEO, links from newspaper sites are often
| | 03:21 |
regarded as very valuable by the search engines, and
in direct traffic from people reading the articles.
| | 03:28 |
Unfortunately, many news sites don't provide
links to the websites they're talking about.
| | 03:33 |
Still, the coverage is a
good thing either way.
| | 03:36 |
Another way to get into
newspapers is to buy your way in.
| | 03:40 |
In the old days, companies often
purchased what were known as advertorials.
| | 03:44 |
Back in the late-'90s when I was running a
publishing company, I would write articles
| | 03:48 |
about the books that I was publishing then
have them distributed to newspapers by an
| | 03:52 |
advertorial company.
| | 03:54 |
I would sometimes find these articles in newspapers
with my name taken off and some lazy journalist's
| | 03:59 |
name put in its place.
| | 04:01 |
Of course, these companies migrated online
and these days, they send advertorials to
| | 04:05 |
all the nation's newspapers.
| | 04:07 |
You might be surprised at how much supposed
editorial content is really advertising, especially
| | 04:12 |
so-called lifestyle stories.
| | 04:15 |
Many of these stories end up not only in
newspaper sites, but also on blogs, general websites,
| | 04:19 |
and even pay-for-papers,
if you remember those.
| | 04:23 |
Of course, the term advertorial, which means
essentially an ad masquerading as editorial,
| | 04:29 |
is a bit of a dirty word in the business.
| | 04:31 |
The more respectable terms are
feature releases, or matte releases.
| | 04:36 |
And they're not cheap.
| | 04:38 |
They start in the thousands of dollars.
| | 04:40 |
However, one service I'm aware of allows three
key worded links in each article and guarantees
| | 04:46 |
a total of 800 links
pointing back to your website.
| | 04:50 |
Sometimes these articles are identified as sponsored
articles by the sites carrying them, but often not.
| | 04:56 |
There are only a handful
of companies doing this.
| | 04:58 |
You can see a few here or dig around
a little to see what you can find.
| | 05:03 |
One strategy that used to be popular was the
creation of widgets of some kind that people
| | 05:07 |
could put on their sites.
| | 05:09 |
The widget, of course, would include
links back to the owner's website.
| | 05:13 |
Many of those silly hit counters you used
to see everywhere were in fact created for
| | 05:17 |
linking purposes.
| | 05:18 |
In fact, many were provided by
companies that sold linking services.
| | 05:23 |
They would switch out the link that was attached
to the counter depending on which client they
| | 05:27 |
were promoting at that moment.
| | 05:29 |
Of course, a widget can be almost anything.
| | 05:32 |
Some kind of calculator, a
news or weather feed, and so on.
| | 05:36 |
If you use a widget strategy, you'll want
to make sure that the link you include is
| | 05:40 |
basic HTML not hidden inside JavaScript.
| | 05:44 |
There are hundreds of
different ways to create links.
| | 05:46 |
A little imagination really helps and we
haven't even touched on the rather sensitive subject
| | 05:51 |
of buying links which we'll
be doing in the next section.
| | 05:54 |
However, before we get there, I want to
discuss a couple of more subjects; linking software
| | 06:00 |
and Google's new Penguin algorithm update.
| | 06:04 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with linking software| 00:01 |
If you're serious about link building, you may
want to get some help in the form of specialized
| | 00:05 |
link building software.
| | 00:07 |
I'm not talking about
reciprocal link building software.
| | 00:11 |
As I discussed in an early video, reciprocal
linking is not terribly valuable anymore.
| | 00:16 |
So be careful when you go looking for link
building software that you don't end up with
| | 00:20 |
that kind of program.
| | 00:21 |
Typically, those programs help you manage
the process of contacting other site owners
| | 00:26 |
to ask for reciprocal links.
| | 00:28 |
Some of these old reciprocal linking programs
have evolved away from reciprocal linking though.
| | 00:33 |
Also, watch out for software that employs
linking tricks; things like Linked networks
| | 00:38 |
and XRumer linking software, the sort of things
we'll discuss in the last section of this course.
| | 00:44 |
Today, there are a number of programs
available that are designed to simplify the process
| | 00:50 |
of finding places to get links
through a variety of different methods.
| | 00:54 |
The essential concept is that the software
searches the web for possible candidates based
| | 00:59 |
on your keywords, and perhaps also based on
links to your competitors, then it provides
| | 01:05 |
a report that groups the prospects into categories,
such as blogs, social media, job sites, business
| | 01:11 |
sites, trusted sites, and so on.
| | 01:14 |
If you're interested in these programs, spend a
little time comparing as they provide a range of tools.
| | 01:19 |
Ontolo for instance, works in the background
constantly checking for new link prospects
| | 01:24 |
and emailing you when it finds a hot lead.
| | 01:27 |
Wordtracker provides a learning area; the
Wordtracker Academy, where they provide ideas
| | 01:31 |
on how to approach the different types
of link prospects to ask for a link.
| | 01:36 |
Ontolo will also gather contact information
whenever it finds it, such as email addresses
| | 01:41 |
and links to Twitter and Facebook accounts.
| | 01:44 |
In addition, Ontolo provides sophisticated
search functions allowing you to search for
| | 01:49 |
prospects in many different ways, focusing
on particular domain types, .edu domains for
| | 01:55 |
instance, and searching
for page topics and types.
| | 01:59 |
And Raven provides tools to help you manage
communications with prospects and to keep
| | 02:04 |
an eye on links, even telling you if something
changes with a particular link, if the site
| | 02:09 |
owner adds a note full of attributes for
instance, or if the page value goes up or down.
| | 02:14 |
This type of software can be a little pricey,
70 to a hundred bucks a month but if you're
| | 02:18 |
serious about link building, especially if
you're doing it for multiple sites, it might
| | 02:23 |
be worth it to you at least for a while.
| | 02:28 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring Penguin: The new link approach from Google| 00:01 |
Early in 2012, Google released a
new algorithm update called Penguin.
| | 00:06 |
This update was related to both on page and
off page factors, both on page optimization
| | 00:13 |
and linking to the site.
| | 00:15 |
We're only going to discuss
linking in this video course.
| | 00:17 |
In fact, as far as the linking goes, Penguin is
really a continuation of a variety of changes
| | 00:23 |
Google have been making recently.
| | 00:25 |
And in fact, whether we give these changes
fancy names or not, they're all part of a
| | 00:29 |
process that's been going on for years.
| | 00:32 |
Google is simply trying to do a better job
of figuring out which links are important
| | 00:36 |
and which are not.
| | 00:37 |
In an earlier video, I discussed my idea of
the two basic types of links, real links and
| | 00:44 |
fake links and these algorithm changes are
all part of Google trying to do a better job
| | 00:48 |
at figuring out the difference.
| | 00:51 |
So what are these recent changes? Well, as far
as the Penguin update itself, those changes
| | 00:56 |
were very specifically related to
Google's web master guidelines.
| | 01:00 |
Google stated that the update was intended to
decrease rankings for sites that it believed
| | 01:06 |
were violating Google's quality guidelines.
| | 01:08 |
And what do those quality guidelines say about links?
The guidelines are mostly related to on page issues.
| | 01:16 |
But as far as linking goes, they say this, "Don't
participate in link schemes designed
| | 01:21 |
to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.
| | 01:24 |
In particular, avoid links to web spammers
or 'bad neighborhoods' on the web, as your
| | 01:30 |
own ranking may be affected
adversely by those links."
| | 01:35 |
By link schemes, Google
specifically refers to these types of things.
| | 01:40 |
Links intended to manipulate PageRank, which is
not a particularly helpful statement really.
| | 01:46 |
Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods
on the web and excessive reciprocal links
| | 01:50 |
and link exchanging; something we
discussed in an earlier video.
| | 01:55 |
Also, buying or selling
links that pass PageRank.
| | 01:58 |
In other words, they don't care if you buy
or sell nofollow links, but they object to
| | 02:02 |
the purchase or sale of follow links.
| | 02:05 |
That's something we're going to look at
in the next section of this video course.
| | 02:10 |
Another recent development is that Google
has been sending messages through the Google
| | 02:14 |
Webmaster account warning people that their
incoming links appear to be artificial or unnatural.
| | 02:21 |
A Google spokesperson has also recently stated
that while in the past they would simply quietly
| | 02:26 |
distrust such links, that is, downgrade the
value of the links or ignore the links entirely,
| | 02:32 |
they are now informing people that these are
bad links, presumably to discourage people
| | 02:37 |
from using such links and to push
the link networks out of business.
| | 02:42 |
Now Google has stated that Penguin itself
only affects around 3% of web searches, so
| | 02:48 |
most sites are really not affected, and often
when a site is hurt, it's due to really egregious
| | 02:53 |
on page problems, such as keyword stuffing and
garbage text with outgoing links, unrelated
| | 02:59 |
to incoming links.
| | 03:02 |
From a linking perspective, there's been a
lot of conjecture in the SEO business about
| | 03:06 |
how Penguin may deal with links, and unfortunately, I
think much of the conjecture is wrong or exaggerated.
| | 03:12 |
Some pundits have looked at the things that
penalize sites have been doing and assume
| | 03:16 |
that everything they do must be
bad which is itself bad logic.
| | 03:20 |
Like saying that lung cancer may be due to
smoking, but you should also give up watching
| | 03:24 |
TV just to be safe.
| | 03:27 |
Google has stated that they make it very hard
for people to hurt other sites, but apparently
| | 03:31 |
it can happen now and then.
| | 03:33 |
I'm sure the guys at Google are not stupid
though and realize that penalizing sites based
| | 03:38 |
on incoming links is simply an invitation
for more spam, as the less ethical among us
| | 03:44 |
start attacking their competitors with spam
links, by signing them up with link programs
| | 03:48 |
that create thousands of spammy
links very quickly, for instance.
| | 03:53 |
On the other hand, Google wants people to
be scared of the consequences of bad links,
| | 03:57 |
to discourage people from using them.
| | 04:00 |
Is Google actually penalizing sites for having
bad links pointing to them? I would suspect
| | 04:05 |
that in most cases the answer is no.
| | 04:07 |
Though some in the SEO community seem to
have taken Google's rather mild statements
| | 04:12 |
and turned them into something quite different,
and in consequence, we have seen a couple
| | 04:16 |
of things happen.
| | 04:17 |
First, some site owners are beginning to
threaten other people with legal action if they don't
| | 04:23 |
remove links pointing to their sites.
| | 04:25 |
Some are even using Digital Millennium
Copyright Act Take Down notices quite improperly
| | 04:31 |
though the average hosting company doesn't
realize it's not illegal use of such a notice.
| | 04:36 |
And some owners of garbage spammy sites are
extorting money from site owners refusing
| | 04:42 |
to remove links unless they get paid.
| | 04:46 |
Based on Google's actual statements, I think
all these maybe somewhat of an overreaction.
| | 04:51 |
I still don't think Google will be penalizing
sites based on linking, except in really extreme
| | 04:55 |
cases, and in particular, when on page
factors in combination with linking issues seem to
| | 05:01 |
indicate that a site owner is playing games.
| | 05:05 |
Still, what is going on with Google's linking
algorithms and how can you stay out of trouble?
| | 05:11 |
Well the first thing is the obvious stuff.
| | 05:13 |
As Google states in its guidelines, it doesn't like
to see links from your site to bad neighborhoods
| | 05:18 |
and web spammers.
| | 05:20 |
By this, they essentially mean links to various
kinds of link networks, systems that promise
| | 05:25 |
you hundreds, if not many thousands of
links to your site very quickly and easily.
| | 05:30 |
They specifically warn about links from your
site to the networks, because if they see
| | 05:35 |
those, they know you're
involved in bad linking.
| | 05:38 |
But of course, you'd be wise to avoid
getting links from such networks too.
| | 05:42 |
So avoid any kind of program in which you have
to provide links to the network in exchange
| | 05:49 |
for links from the network or schemes in
which you pay for links from such a network and
| | 05:54 |
also avoid programs that create tens of
thousands of links or any kind of program that shows
| | 06:00 |
you're involved in link manipulation.
| | 06:03 |
Extensive reciprocal-linking programs should
be avoided too, and don't sell links pointing
| | 06:08 |
from your site to others, unless there are no
follow links, as you could get your site penalized.
| | 06:14 |
As for buying links, we'll be
discussing that in the next video.
| | 06:19 |
You may also want to consider
your overall link profile.
| | 06:22 |
If you get tens of thousands of
links in a few days, that's a problem.
| | 06:26 |
If all your links are highly
keyworded, that could be a problem.
| | 06:29 |
Yes, I know we've talked a lot about keywords
and how important they are in links, but if
| | 06:34 |
almost all your links are highly keyworded
links, in particular, if they only use one
| | 06:39 |
or two different phrases, that's a problem,
because it looks unnatural to the search engines.
| | 06:45 |
Natural linking is likely to include various
different phrases with a bunch of domain links
| | 06:49 |
and even "click here" links thrown in.
| | 06:52 |
You need a wide variety of different types
of links too: directories, blogs, websites,
| | 06:57 |
forums, social networking, and so on.
| | 07:00 |
If your links are predominantly coming from
one type of origin; that looks unnatural, and
| | 07:06 |
if you get an unnatural linking message from
Google, do your best to get the unnatural
| | 07:10 |
links removed, and if you can't, reply to
the message, telling Google that the linking
| | 07:15 |
site won't remove them.
| | 07:18 |
Overall then, use some commonsense.
| | 07:20 |
Thinks about the things that Google is likely
to be looking for, the type of linking that
| | 07:24 |
is likely to be considered part of a game
and avoid it, and expect more updates from
| | 07:29 |
Google, including ways for Webmasters to tell
Google which incoming links they're willing
| | 07:33 |
to take responsibility for, and
which may be placed by competitors.
| | 07:39 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. The Link GameBuying links: Pros and cons| 00:01 |
In this section of the course, we're
going to look at the idea of buying links.
| | 00:04 |
I want to state though that I'm not
recommending that you buy links, but I do think you need
| | 00:09 |
to understand what's going on here, why people
buy links and why Google both punishes and
| | 00:15 |
rewards the purchase of links,
because it really is a big part of SEO.
| | 00:20 |
As we saw in an earlier video, Google
devised a great way to rank web pages.
| | 00:24 |
The real Google revolution back in 1997 was
to use links to figure out both what websites
| | 00:30 |
were about and how
important they were likely to be.
| | 00:34 |
That's great, until people realize what you're
doing, and then realized that they can game
| | 00:38 |
the system by creating links that are
intended to send you the right signals.
| | 00:45 |
Of course from there, it's not a huge jump
to the idea of paying somebody to create the
| | 00:50 |
links you need, and as purchasing links is
now a huge business, that's a problem for
| | 00:55 |
Google and the other search engines, because
when you pay somebody to link to your site,
| | 00:59 |
you may end up with great
links pointing to a lousy site.
| | 01:04 |
You're gaming the system and naturally
the search engines don't like that.
| | 01:09 |
So what can they do? Well, they can
discourage the purchasing of links even implementing
| | 01:14 |
penalties with this kind of cheating, but of
course that means the search engines do two things.
| | 01:19 |
They both reward and punish
the use of purchase links.
| | 01:23 |
After all, nobody buys
links for the fun of it.
| | 01:25 |
They buy links because it works at least some
of the time, quite frankly, a lot of the time
| | 01:31 |
in the past, and even today if you're careful.
| | 01:34 |
So if you sell widgets from your website and
you're new to the SEO game, you may discover
| | 01:40 |
that your competitors are ranking higher
than you in the search engines because they've
| | 01:44 |
been buying links.
| | 01:46 |
For all Google may talk about link bait, it's actually
quite hard for many businesses to create any
| | 01:50 |
kind of link bait that will have an effect.
| | 01:53 |
Who really wants to read about your widgets
after all? It's far easier to pay $50 a month
| | 01:59 |
perhaps or maybe a hundred bucks a month to
somebody who will create the links for you.
| | 02:04 |
And so that's where we find ourselves in the
SEO world, in a situation in which for years
| | 02:10 |
the major search engines have
rewarded websites for buying links.
| | 02:14 |
If they didn't, people wouldn't buy them,
while at the same time trying to figure out
| | 02:19 |
who is buying links so they can punish
them or at least stop them from doing so.
| | 02:24 |
There are actually two huge
problems for the search engines.
| | 02:28 |
Firstly, it can often be very difficult for
the search engines to figure out whether a
| | 02:32 |
link is a paid link or not.
| | 02:34 |
After all there's no dollar attribute in an
anchor tag showing whether you paid for the
| | 02:38 |
link, and if so, how much.
| | 02:40 |
A really well placed paid link may
look no different from a free link.
| | 02:45 |
After all, how can Google tell if a blogger is
linking to another site, because the blogger
| | 02:49 |
likes the other site or because the other
site just PayPaled the blogger fifty bucks?
| | 02:55 |
The other problem is to know even if they figure
out that a link has been paid for, who to punish.
| | 03:01 |
After all the search engine doesn't know if a
paid link was paid for by the owner of the
| | 03:06 |
site to which the link is pointing or by a
competitor hoping to harm the site, a strategy
| | 03:11 |
sometimes known as Negative SEO.
| | 03:13 |
So the search engines
have a few possibilities.
| | 03:16 |
First, if they think a link has been paid
for, they could simply ignore the link or
| | 03:21 |
perhaps ignore all the links on
that page or even that site.
| | 03:25 |
That is, do not pass any value in
effect regarded as a nofollow link.
| | 03:30 |
The harm being caused to the person buying
the link of course is that the fee is wasted,
| | 03:35 |
as it isn't helping the site rank.
| | 03:37 |
Unless of course you're buying the link purely
for traffic, in which case Google recommends
| | 03:41 |
that the link be a nofollow link anyway.
| | 03:45 |
Google has definitely done this.
| | 03:46 |
In fact, a few years ago, many newspaper sites
were selling text links; even today many are.
| | 03:52 |
And for a while, Google had to simply ignore
the links in the page, which of course means
| | 03:56 |
a lot of good links get ignored.
| | 03:58 |
But Google sometimes take things further.
| | 04:00 |
Google may penalize the sites selling the
links, dropping its PageRank for instance
| | 04:05 |
or it may even drop the site from the index.
| | 04:08 |
Quite frankly this is more likely to happen
to a low quality site selling links than to
| | 04:12 |
a genuine newspaper site selling links.
| | 04:16 |
An otherwise reputable site might be dinged a little
as Google recognizes that it still has some value.
| | 04:21 |
Finally, the search engine could punish the
site to which the paid link points, but that
| | 04:26 |
usually won't happen, because if the search
engines had a policy of doing that, then companies
| | 04:31 |
would point paid links to
their competitors to harm them.
| | 04:35 |
This can happen now and then, but generally
in really egregious situations, such as when
| | 04:40 |
a low quality site has thousands of
garbage links pointing to it, or as with J.C.
| | 04:45 |
Penney, when it got into trouble with Google early in
2001, when it's quite clear the company is involved.
| | 04:52 |
So as we've heard, the search
engines don't want you buying links.
| | 04:55 |
But what does that mean? When is paying for
a link the same as buying a link? We'll be
| | 05:01 |
looking at that in the next video.
| | 05:05 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| When is paying for links buying links?| 00:00 |
In the previous video, we discussed the issue
of buying links, about how the search engines
| | 00:05 |
don't like it, about how they sometimes punish
it and how at the same time they reward it.
| | 00:11 |
But what is a purchase link? After all, there
are lots of services out there that will help
| | 00:16 |
you get links and some of what those
services do is actually legitimate.
| | 00:20 |
If you pay somebody to help you create links,
are you buying links? The classic example
| | 00:26 |
is Yahoo! Directory which
charges $299 a year for a listing.
| | 00:30 |
Google doesn't penalize Yahoo! Why not? Well,
Google's position is that Yahoo! and some
| | 00:37 |
other directories, Best of the Web for
instance, provide value-ad editorial services.
| | 00:43 |
They don't just take anyone who pays, they
review the site and reject many, and that's
| | 00:48 |
this human review process is much more than
simply selling a link, and in fact, provide
| | 00:53 |
some value to the search engines by
pointing out decent human reviewed sites.
| | 00:58 |
Shabby directories that accept anyone who
pays that provide whatever anchor text you
| | 01:03 |
want and so on, are more likely to
be considered selling paid links.
| | 01:08 |
How about the advertorials, often known as
feature releases or mats that I talked about
| | 01:12 |
in an earlier video? Aren't these
paid links? Well, in a sense they are.
| | 01:16 |
I think the advertorial companies would
argue that they are more than that though, that
| | 01:21 |
they are links inside genuine content.
| | 01:24 |
On the other hand I suspect the advertorial
market is simply too far under the radar for
| | 01:28 |
the search engines to have noticed.
| | 01:30 |
If they have or eventually do though, it wouldn't
be hard for them to stop rewarding such links.
| | 01:36 |
All they need to do is to sign up to get the
editorial content then block it wherever it's found.
| | 01:43 |
So how can the search engines figure out if
links have been paid for? Often they can't
| | 01:48 |
of course, and those from the buyer's
perspective are the very best types of paid links, but
| | 01:52 |
sometimes they can.
| | 01:54 |
Look at this example provided by
Google of a page that contains the links.
| | 01:58 |
First, notice that this
is really badly written.
| | 02:01 |
In fact it's probably spun, an
article created by a piece of software.
| | 02:06 |
Next, notice that the links don't fit the text, "enable
it to pay day loan you stay healthy," for instance.
| | 02:13 |
It's not so hard for the
search engines to figure this out.
| | 02:17 |
Here's another example.
| | 02:19 |
Newspaper websites used
to frequently sell links.
| | 02:21 |
Well, the recent actions by Google have
probably stopped much of this business.
| | 02:26 |
This is a link block on a newspaper site,
and yes, these are all follow links.
| | 02:31 |
It's getting hard to find these links now,
as most of newspapers have been frightened
| | 02:35 |
off selling links.
| | 02:37 |
This blog post from Google's
Matt Cutts gives a clue as to why.
| | 02:44 |
Here's another way they can find
purchased links, direct research.
| | 02:48 |
After all if you can find link purchase opportunities and
I'll show you how in the next video, then so can they.
| | 02:54 |
In fact, the search engines do
go looking for link networks.
| | 02:58 |
They figure out identifying features in the
core sites involved in the network and then
| | 03:02 |
they knock them out of the game.
| | 03:04 |
The risk to you if you're a purchaser is that
you maybe paying for links that have no value.
| | 03:08 |
Though in some cases, the networks simply go
out of business and you stop getting charged.
| | 03:13 |
Still, the search engines are
merely scratching the surface.
| | 03:17 |
How do they stop you, for instance, emailing
a blogger and asking if they will add you
| | 03:22 |
to the blogroll, their list of
favorite links for 25 bucks a month.
| | 03:26 |
It's almost impossible to
police this kind of thing.
| | 03:29 |
What they can do though is hit the most
obvious problems and over time they'll get better
| | 03:34 |
and better at doing that.
| | 03:36 |
Still as a wise man once said, make something fool
proof and they will just build a better fool.
| | 03:43 |
Buying links is not going to go away.
| | 03:44 |
It's just going to get more sophisticated.
| | 03:47 |
So what's the answer to the question posed
by the title of this video? Should you buy
| | 03:52 |
links? Well, I'm not
going to provide an answer.
| | 03:54 |
I want you to understand the lay of the land
and understand that there may be dangers,
| | 03:59 |
but it's up to you to decide how
to build your linking strategy.
| | 04:03 |
There is however one important consideration.
| | 04:06 |
Be warned that many link building companies
you may run into are little more than a scam.
| | 04:11 |
I often get new clients who ask me what a
linking company did for them only to discover
| | 04:17 |
that the company did
little or nothing of value.
| | 04:21 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Finding link services| 00:01 |
As we've seen, sometimes paying for
links is not the same as buying links.
| | 00:06 |
And in fact, there are many, many companies
looking for your business, companies that
| | 00:10 |
want to help you get links.
| | 00:11 |
Some of those companies will help you get
links in a way that the search engines dislike,
| | 00:16 |
while others use more legitimate methods.
| | 00:19 |
Companies that provide services related to
real link buildings, not just selling links.
| | 00:24 |
And of course, many companies use
both approved and non-approved methods.
| | 00:28 |
So in this video, we're going to look at the
subject of finding companies to help you create
| | 00:32 |
links in various ways.
| | 00:34 |
In fact, you will run into companies that have a
whole menu of options in which you can choose.
| | 00:39 |
Let's start with one of the many
worse forms of link, blog comments.
| | 00:43 |
You can easily find services that will go out and
place comments in blogs pointing to your site.
| | 00:49 |
These are really obnoxious; the worst kind
of link spam and they probably won't help
| | 00:53 |
you any way, as it almost
always nofollow links.
| | 00:57 |
Any company selling a blog comment
service is hard to take seriously.
| | 01:02 |
You'll also find companies
selling forum comments.
| | 01:04 |
As I discussed in an earlier video, forum
commenting can both be a viable strategy and
| | 01:10 |
non-offensive if it's done right, but most
companies doing this won't do it right.
| | 01:14 |
They'll simply drop garbage posts into as
many forums as they can, relevant or not.
| | 01:19 |
Of course, you'll find companies that will
post your site into web directories, and I
| | 01:23 |
think this is fine, an ethical strategy, though these
days most of these directories hold little value.
| | 01:29 |
On the other hand, some companies will drop
your site into niche directories, directories
| | 01:34 |
related to your business,
which is more valuable.
| | 01:38 |
You'll also run into companies that do
reciprocal linking, contacting websites on your behalf
| | 01:42 |
and asking them for links.
| | 01:44 |
As you learned in an earlier video, this is
not likely to be very helpful as reciprocal
| | 01:49 |
linking is no longer particularly valuable.
| | 01:52 |
You'll actually find companies doing most
of the linking methods we've discussed in
| | 01:55 |
this course, such as posting articles and
press releases for you, or submitting your
| | 01:59 |
site to local directories.
| | 02:02 |
Now we're getting to the
out and out link selling.
| | 02:05 |
There are a number of services that will place
your links into blogs, not into the comments,
| | 02:10 |
but into the blog posts and
blogrolls, the list of favorite links.
| | 02:15 |
There are essentially two ways this is done.
| | 02:17 |
First, there are companies that act as
clearing houses connecting bloggers and site owners
| | 02:22 |
with bloggers stating how much
link cost in one of their articles.
| | 02:25 |
In theory, this can be done without upsetting the
search engines by making the links no-follow links.
| | 02:31 |
Of course, these are generally follow links, as no-
follow links will be defeating the whole purpose.
| | 02:37 |
By the way, selling links in blog post is
not only against Google's guidelines, but
| | 02:42 |
in many cases in the United States, it's actually
illegal, whether you use follow links or nofollow.
| | 02:48 |
Though almost nobody knows these FTC
regulations exist, but they do.
| | 02:54 |
Another problem; bloggers sometimes fake
their PageRank so buyers end up paying more for
| | 02:59 |
a link than it's really worth.
| | 03:02 |
And one final problem; these sites are not
hard to find, which means it's not hard for
| | 03:07 |
the search engines to find them either.
| | 03:10 |
The other way to buy blog links is from
companies that own dozens, maybe hundreds of blogs.
| | 03:16 |
There are many of these companies, perhaps
thousands, in particular operating in Asia.
| | 03:20 |
There's a little cottage industry of young
Indonesians, for instance, who build blogs,
| | 03:24 |
then sell links and article for a one-time fee, or in
the blog's blogrolls for a monthly or annual fee.
| | 03:31 |
Similar to this, and often run by the same
companies, a link is placed into websites
| | 03:36 |
that appear less bloggy and
more like regular sites.
| | 03:40 |
Of course, blogs are merely content management system,
so a blog is a website and a website might be a blog.
| | 03:46 |
But before blogging software became popular,
companies were building networks of regular
| | 03:50 |
websites in which they could place sold links.
| | 03:55 |
Another service you'll run into is the
placement of social networking links, often known as
| | 04:00 |
social bookmarking.
| | 04:02 |
These companies often create hundreds of social
networking accounts in which they can then place links.
| | 04:08 |
Or perhaps go out and create profiles on
sites that allow account creation and then place
| | 04:12 |
links from those profiles back to your site.
| | 04:16 |
You may, if you dig deep enough, run into
services that build links en masse, sometimes
| | 04:22 |
using software such as XRumer, which automatically post
into forums, even automatically entering capture codes.
| | 04:29 |
Systems such as this and the various link
networks you may run into are a little scary.
| | 04:34 |
They can create many thousands of links very quickly
and can create a very unnatural looking link profile.
| | 04:40 |
They are the prime target of the search
engines. There's nothing subtle here.
| | 04:45 |
Finally, there are out-on-out link selling,
companies that put buyers and sellers together.
| | 04:52 |
Like the blog services I mentioned, site owners
sign up and add their site to the inventory,
| | 04:57 |
then buyers come in and pick
where they want to place the links.
| | 05:01 |
The link sellers can be small sites owned by
individuals or even major sites owned by,
| | 05:06 |
for example, newspapers.
| | 05:08 |
So how do you find these services?
Well, that's the ironic thing.
| | 05:12 |
You search for them.
| | 05:14 |
Search for terms such as buying links, buy
text links, link building service, and so on,
| | 05:19 |
and you'll soon find plenty of services.
| | 05:22 |
You can also find people by searching in the outsourcing
websites, such as Odesk.com, Guru.com and Elams.com.
| | 05:30 |
Search for link building for instance.
| | 05:33 |
You might also want to search for the term "link
building reviews" to find websites that
| | 05:37 |
review link services.
| | 05:39 |
Here's a major problem with link building
services though, all too often it's impossible
| | 05:44 |
to figure out what they actually do.
| | 05:46 |
There tends to be a lot of
blinding with science going on.
| | 05:49 |
So in the next two videos I'm going to discuss
how to understand what they're talking about
| | 05:54 |
and what services they actually provide.
| | 05:58 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding linking jargon| 00:01 |
One challenge working with link building
companies is simply understanding what on earth they're
| | 00:05 |
talking about? I think
part of that is intentional.
| | 00:09 |
There are lots of link building companies
that are a little more than a scam and they
| | 00:13 |
don't really want you to
know what they're doing.
| | 00:15 |
They're blinding you with science hoping to
make the sale without going into detail about
| | 00:20 |
what you'll get in return.
| | 00:22 |
On the other hand, some services suffer from a
problem common in the geek world, an inability
| | 00:27 |
to explain things clearly and an assumption
that everyone is a geek and understands anyway.
| | 00:33 |
So in this video, I'm going to run through a
few bits of jargon you may hear while reading
| | 00:38 |
link building sites or
talking to link builders.
| | 00:41 |
In fact, even if you have no intention of
buying links, this video may help you understand
| | 00:46 |
general link building jargon.
| | 00:48 |
Some of the services you'll see offer, they're
obvious; forum comments, directory submissions,
| | 00:53 |
press release distribution, and so on.
| | 00:56 |
But let's consider some of the terms we
haven't discussed in this course, where we've only
| | 01:00 |
touched on quickly.
| | 01:01 |
Let's start with the few general link terms.
| | 01:04 |
First, the term one-way links.
| | 01:06 |
This simply means that you get a link pointing to your
site without placing a link back to another site.
| | 01:12 |
Typically, this term is used in some kind
of link network situation, so be careful.
| | 01:18 |
You may be asked to link to a different site,
site B we'll say, in return for the link from
| | 01:23 |
site A, you may be getting yourself into
some kind of link network, and by linking out,
| | 01:29 |
you're telling the search engines that you are a
willing participant and thus risk some kind of penalty.
| | 01:37 |
When people talk about deep linking, they
simply mean linking into your website rather
| | 01:41 |
than just to the site's homepage.
| | 01:43 |
This is a good thing to do,
spreading your linking around your site.
| | 01:48 |
The term above the fold means the space in
a website that could be seen when the page
| | 01:53 |
loads without scrolling down the page.
| | 01:57 |
It's quite likely that links near the top of the page
are more valuable than links lower down the page.
| | 02:04 |
Another link type that's likely to be more
valuable is a content or in-content link,
| | 02:09 |
a link that will be placed into content within a
web page rather than just in a block of links.
| | 02:16 |
You'll also hear the term landing page.
| | 02:18 |
That's simply the page that the link points to;
the page that the visitor lands on after
| | 02:23 |
clicking the link.
| | 02:25 |
You may also hear the term relevant, which
means the link will come from a page that
| | 02:29 |
contains content that is somehow
related to the subject area of your site.
| | 02:34 |
That's a good thing, but sometimes even
links are non-relevant pages, in particular, if
| | 02:39 |
they are keyworded can help.
| | 02:41 |
And a permanent link is what it sounds like.
| | 02:44 |
You pay once and the link should stay for
good; though realistically one day the site
| | 02:49 |
will probably disappear.
| | 02:51 |
Many links are in effect
rented, you pay by the month.
| | 02:56 |
Some services will state that your links
will be placed onto pages of a particular page
| | 03:00 |
rank, which of course, we have discussed in
an earlier video; the higher the PageRank
| | 03:05 |
the more valuable the link
and the more expensive.
| | 03:09 |
You may also see claims of
particular Alexa ranks.
| | 03:12 |
Alexa is a website analysis service owned by
Amazon and it maintains list of sites ranked
| | 03:19 |
by popularity; the lower the
number, the higher the rank.
| | 03:23 |
A low number means a more popular website.
| | 03:27 |
Site wide links are links
placed on every page in a website.
| | 03:31 |
This often refers to links in blogrolls, or in
traditional websites, links in the page footer.
| | 03:37 |
But it may also be links in some kind
of link block higher up on the page.
| | 03:42 |
A Drip Feed refers to creating links
gradually, a few a day or a week. The idea is to avoid
| | 03:49 |
a sudden huge increase in links pointing
to your site which may look suspicious.
| | 03:55 |
Spend enough time digging around link sites, and
you'll see a feature called unique class C IP numbers.
| | 04:03 |
This means that each link, or perhaps block of
links will come from a different IP number.
| | 04:09 |
But it won't be simply the last three digits
in the number that are different, it'll be
| | 04:14 |
a number in the C block
or above that will vary.
| | 04:18 |
So the links won't be coming from pages with
IP numbers close to each other, which could
| | 04:23 |
indicate to the search engines that
the pages are related to each other.
| | 04:28 |
When link companies talk about blog links,
they could be talking about several things.
| | 04:32 |
First is blog comment links, links
placed into blogs by commenting on a post.
| | 04:37 |
They're probably of no use to you, as comment-
links are generally nofollow, though some companies
| | 04:43 |
may be placing follow
links into their own blogs.
| | 04:47 |
Then there's blog-roll links, links that appear in
every page on a site in the list of usual links.
| | 04:52 |
These are typically rented out; you'll
paid by the month or perhaps by the year.
| | 04:57 |
Finally, links in actual articles.
| | 04:59 |
In some cases, you write an
article and give it to the company.
| | 05:03 |
Or they can write it for you,
though it may be in pigeon English.
| | 05:08 |
You'll typically get two or three key-worded
links in the article and pay a one-time fee
| | 05:12 |
for as long as the blog stays active.
| | 05:16 |
Some services also sell what they call sticky
posts, links in blog posts that will remain
| | 05:21 |
on the blog's homepage for a
specified period of time.
| | 05:26 |
You could also hear about blog reviews, which
are typically reviews of your website or product
| | 05:30 |
posted in a blog.
| | 05:32 |
Again, you're getting links in the
blog post not the comments or blogroll.
| | 05:37 |
Strictly speaking, of course, these are often
illegal under FTC regulations, unless it's
| | 05:42 |
stated in the review that it's been paid for.
| | 05:46 |
A lot of services also provide social bookmarking
services, which really can mean a number of things.
| | 05:52 |
There are a lot of social networks now, so
one big question is, what networks are the
| | 05:56 |
links being placed into? Sometimes these
services create hundreds of accounts on five or ten
| | 06:02 |
different networks, and then place
posts containing links to your site.
| | 06:06 |
They may also provide profile links which
are links directly from an account profile.
| | 06:12 |
These may be social networking accounts, but
could be accounts from just about any website
| | 06:17 |
open to public registration, such as forums.
| | 06:20 |
You sometimes see services
offering to create squidoo lenses.
| | 06:25 |
Squidoo.com is a site that allows members to
set up pages known as lenses, collections
| | 06:31 |
of information related
to a particular subject.
| | 06:34 |
So these services will create lenses about your
subject area and include links to your site.
| | 06:40 |
Whatever kind of social networking service
is being offered, it's worth bearing in mind
| | 06:45 |
that in most cases the links you're going
to get are probably not very valuable.
| | 06:51 |
One more unusual service that you
may run across is Link Wheels.
| | 06:55 |
A Link Wheel is a network of sites that all
or mostly linked to the target site, your
| | 07:02 |
site, but it's also linked to
each other in some kind of pattern.
| | 07:06 |
In the simplest incarnation, you might have,
say 20 sites linking A to B, B to C, C to
| | 07:13 |
D and so on, all the way up to R to S and
S to T, and the T site links back to A.
| | 07:22 |
Then all of the sites linked to your site
and to any other sites they're promoting of
| | 07:26 |
course. Link Wheel companies often use social
networking sites, setting up accounts to act
| | 07:31 |
as the spokes of the wheel, and so, perhaps a
combination of social networking sites and blogs.
| | 07:37 |
You may also see sites offering
search engine submission services.
| | 07:41 |
In general, this is a waste of time and money
unless the service also includes submitting
| | 07:46 |
your site to search directories,
not merely search engines.
| | 07:50 |
There are a lot of search engine submission
scams out there often claiming to submit you
| | 07:55 |
to a list of search engines that include
systems that no longer even exist, so beware.
| | 08:03 |
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| Questions to ask| 00:01 |
If you do decide to work with a link company
of some kind, you really need to understand
| | 00:06 |
what you're getting for your money.
| | 00:08 |
In the last video, I discussed some of the
jargon you'll hear, but often linking companies
| | 00:12 |
are also very vague about what they
will deliver, sometimes intentionally so.
| | 00:17 |
I frequently talk to clients who've worked
with linking companies, sometimes for many
| | 00:22 |
months, without ever fully understanding what
types of links they'll be getting and how many.
| | 00:28 |
Many website owners are of course not
terribly sophisticated in this area.
| | 00:32 |
They know they need links, but don't
understand the kinds of things we've covered in this
| | 00:36 |
course so link companies can
easily take advantage of them.
| | 00:40 |
So in this video, I want to quickly run
through a few things you need to ask and understand
| | 00:45 |
if you do decide to hire a linking firm.
| | 00:48 |
The first question is of course, what type
of links are they providing? Links firms are
| | 00:54 |
often vague about this.
| | 00:55 |
They're just going to get you links;
it doesn't seem to matter where.
| | 00:59 |
There's often a signal that you're going to
get garbage links, because why would they
| | 01:03 |
provide high quality links, when you
don't even know what you're getting?
| | 01:08 |
Are these links in blogs? If so, where?
On comments, blogrolls, posts or reviews?
| | 01:13 |
Are they social network links? If so, what
networks and what types of links? Of course,
| | 01:20 |
you'll also need to know if they're
getting you follow or no-follow links.
| | 01:24 |
Perhaps some will be no-follows, and that's
fine in some circumstances, but at least be
| | 01:28 |
aware of what you're getting.
| | 01:30 |
How many links are you paying for? It's
surprising how many people buy link packages without
| | 01:35 |
understanding the number of links that
will be created each month, for example.
| | 01:40 |
Then will you get reports showing where
these links are? If the service doesn't provide
| | 01:45 |
reports, you will never know if
you're really getting links or not.
| | 01:49 |
Are you paying for permanent links? In other
words, if you stop paying, will those links
| | 01:53 |
disappear? If so, you're
basically renting the link.
| | 01:57 |
Again, that can be okay as long
as the price is right of course.
| | 02:02 |
Are these pages indexed by the search engines,
in particular Google? If not, what's the point?
| | 02:08 |
And do the pages have any PageRank? That's
not to say the pages with no PageRank or low
| | 02:13 |
PageRank are of completely no value, but you
should at least know what you're getting.
| | 02:20 |
You also need to actually see some example
links, so you can get an idea of how valuable
| | 02:25 |
the links are going to be for you, and if the
person you're talking with is being honest.
| | 02:30 |
Are they in posts and high quality blogs for
instance? Or in really trashy, unintelligible
| | 02:35 |
blogs that look like they were written by
someone who can't speak the language, or by
| | 02:39 |
a computer program? Are the links in account
profiles that contain nothing more than a
| | 02:43 |
fake name in the link or are they in genuine well-
written content? You need to know what you're getting.
| | 02:51 |
Consider also how obvious these links are.
| | 02:54 |
How obvious is it that these links are not
real, but purely placed for SEO purposes?
| | 03:00 |
If it's really obvious to you, there's a good
chance that it's also obvious to the search
| | 03:03 |
engines, and thus the links
will likely have little value.
| | 03:08 |
When talking with these companies, don't be
afraid to push for answers you can understand.
| | 03:12 |
If the linking company can't or won't
explain what they're doing, then you shouldn't be
| | 03:16 |
working with them.
| | 03:18 |
And if you do work with the firm, check the
reports and sample of the links now and then
| | 03:23 |
to make sure you're
getting what you're paid for.
| | 03:26 |
Make sure you're getting follow links,
for instance, on pages indexed by Google.
| | 03:30 |
If the page is very young, Google
may not have gotten around to it yet.
| | 03:34 |
In which case you should at least check to
see if the site itself is indexed, and perhaps
| | 03:38 |
how many pages in the site are indexed.
| | 03:41 |
If only one or two pages from that site were
indexed, there's a good chance your link on
| | 03:45 |
that new page will never be picked up.
| | 03:49 |
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|
|
ConclusionNext steps for linking| 00:01 |
Linking is usually the worst part of SEO work.
| | 00:04 |
It's a real stumbling block for many people.
| | 00:07 |
Actually creating a website and making sure it's
optimized correctly is rather like paint by numbers.
| | 00:13 |
You just have to follow
the steps and get it done.
| | 00:16 |
But then you come to linking and in
many ways, it's far more complicated.
| | 00:20 |
It can be boring, tedious work and it's often
hard to find good people to do it properly.
| | 00:25 |
It's going to get harder too; this is
really a critical area for search engines.
| | 00:32 |
One sad result of the focus on links to help
with search ranking is that the web is now
| | 00:36 |
drowning in garbage pages created solely to
hold links pointing to other websites, to
| | 00:42 |
convince the search engines that
the reference sites are important.
| | 00:46 |
This is bad for the search
engines and bad for the web.
| | 00:50 |
So the search engines are going to continue to
work on cleaning up, to distinguish between
| | 00:55 |
good and bad links.
| | 00:57 |
As I discussed earlier in this course, there are two
types of links: the real thing and the fake thing.
| | 01:03 |
Links that exist for good reason and links
that exist solely for SEO reasons. They're
| | 01:08 |
all part of the link game.
| | 01:11 |
And as time goes on, the search engines will get
better and better at figuring out at the difference.
| | 01:16 |
In some ways that will be
making linking even harder.
| | 01:19 |
But if the search engines could distinguish
between two forms of link 100% perfectly,
| | 01:24 |
it might actually make linking easier.
| | 01:27 |
Right now, there's a link arm's race going on.
| | 01:31 |
It's all very well the search engines
discouraging the link game, the purchasing of links for
| | 01:35 |
instance, but as I've mentioned before, at
the same time they are encouraging the link
| | 01:40 |
game, quite simply because it works.
| | 01:43 |
If a site owner discovers that 10 competitors
are ranking ahead of his site, thanks to playing
| | 01:48 |
the link game, what is he supposed to do?
Take the completely ethical path and avoid
| | 01:53 |
the game or think to himself, if
you can't beat him, join him.
| | 01:58 |
The latter is what happens most of the time.
| | 02:01 |
But having said all that, overall it is true
that real links are more valuable than the
| | 02:07 |
game; the fake links.
| | 02:09 |
Yes, they are harder to
get, that's true as well.
| | 02:13 |
But if you can get them, that's the way to go.
| | 02:15 |
And that's why Google talks so much about link
bait and why you should think about it too.
| | 02:21 |
The most powerful linking technique is to
create something so useful, or entertaining,
| | 02:26 |
or interesting, or amusing, or cool, or whatever,
that people all over the web link to it.
| | 02:32 |
It's what the search engines want to see and
it's what they will reward you for, if you
| | 02:36 |
can figure out how to make it happen.
| | 02:39 |
This video course is by no means exhaustive.
| | 02:41 |
If you want to continue learning about linking
methods, there are lots of places to go with
| | 02:45 |
a wide variety of opinions.
| | 02:47 |
For the Google point of view, about all
things SEO, not just links, I'd suggest that you
| | 02:52 |
check in with Matt Cutts' blog now and then.
| | 02:56 |
You might also want to read Search
Engine Lands, Link Week Column.
| | 03:00 |
Search Engine Land is about SEO in general
of course, but has a regular column about
| | 03:04 |
linking strategies.
| | 03:06 |
The major link analysis companies, SEOmoz and
Majestic SEO, can also provide interesting information.
| | 03:13 |
Or simply Google for terms, such as link-building
strategies and link-building ideas, and you'll
| | 03:17 |
find plenty to keep you busy.
| | 03:20 |
So we've come to the end of this course.
| | 03:23 |
Thanks for watching and good
luck with your link building!
| | 03:27 |
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