Rand Fishkin

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we want to talk about link diversity. So we’ve talked a lot about external links, the importance of them. I think everyone in the SEO world is familiar with that. But there’s an interesting phenomenon where the raw link count, the number of links coming to your site or a page, may not be particularly indicative of things. These can be for obvious reasons like some of those links are followed or nofollowed, or some of them are from pages or sites that aren’t passing link juice. But there’s another important thing to realize here as well, and it has to do with the diversity of different domains that point to a page or a given site. So let me show you what I am talking about.

Up here we’ve got a diverse link profile. And so this diverse link profile for your page or your domain has many different links, in this case four links, but they’re coming from four different domains. Here’s XYZ.com, and a page on there points to it, and abc.com, and these two others. This, in Google’s mind, is going to be tremendously better than the situation over here where we have this very homogeneous link profile. And you can see that your page or your domain has four links also, and it could be from four links that maybe are from higher page rank pages or with pages with better anchor text, or they are more contextually relevant, or all of these other signals that SEOs sort of think about as important. But if they are all coming from one domain, you’re really losing out on some of the value here. And Google and the other engines take this diversity of links to mean, broadly, a representation that’s much more about trust, popularity, and authority than this homogeneous link profile.

There is something very interesting that we have been observing lately and that I think is worth diving in to, and that brings us over here. This concept of, “I have a site with many pages on it. How am I going to earn a diversity of links to a good number of those?” And we’ve been surprised to see, actually, that while you might think that having, let’s say, the same three domains link to many of the pages on the site, wouldn’t be that valuable. It’s actually incredibly valuable. That link diversity on a per page basis seems to provide quite a bit of value both for clients we have been working with and folks in Q&A, and all of that kind of stuff. And we think that this has to do with the fact that multiple different sites are telling the engines that these pages have some independent authority and value. Even if many of those links are shared between the different domains or many of the different domains that send those links happen to be the same ones over and over, it seems to be quite a value ad. So you can imagine a scenario like this where, let’s say, you’re a news website like ReadWriteWeb, which is in the technology field and they do lots of reporting on technology issues. They have lots of different blog posts and, handedly enough, people like Wired.com, who syndicated their stuff, will republish portions of their article and link back to them. So will the New York Times. NYTimes.com will link back to many of those same articles. Other bloggers who pick them up will. And it turns out that maybe the field here is pretty broad because it is technology, but in smaller niches there might only be 10 or 20 big websites. And if a few of these are voting for each of your pages, that’s a very strong signal to the engines that they should keep them in the index—we talked about indexation a bunch on the blog this week—that they should rank those higher, and that they should give them some authority both on the page level and on the domain level as an important site. I hope that you will consider theses when you are thinking about your linking campaigns, particularly as it relates to the subject we discussed last week, content licensing, on Whiteboard Friday. I hope you have a good December.

We will see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Danny Dover

Hi, mozers. My name is Danny Dover. I work at SEOmoz doing SEO. I actually have possibly the most meta job ever created. I do SEO for an SEO company. So it keeps me on my feet because if I screw up, everyone in the company knows about it and so do all of you. I want to talk about something that is not talked about very often in the SEO industries. There’s this problem we run into that the people who get to a position via blog, interview, video, or via anything else where they have the opportunity to talk to most people, also run into a problem where they no longer fight the same problems the beginners did.

So let me give you an example: link building. The way I do link building is probably very different than the way a beginner link builder does or the way when I was a beginner, when I was doing link building. So at SEO we’re very fortunate in that when we post a blog post, we automatically get links just by virtue of the scrapers who repost our content with our links in it. So their low-value links, but they help us nonetheless. This disconnection becomes a big issue when the people who are talking about SEO start teaching SEO. If they don’t run into the same problems, it will be hard for them to empathize with what’s going on. So in that mindset, I’ve come up with the top five ways for gaining links from bloggers for SEO beginners, so kind of a long title there. I’m still working on the keyword research. I’ll get back to you on that one.

#1: Make lists of niche linkers. A linker is anyone who can create a link, so a blog. So an example might be creating a blog of top Seattle bloggers who host Whiteboard Fridays, who have facial hair, who work at SEOmoz. I could probably get on that list. Now that’s going to be really helpful because—don’t tell Rand this and don’t tell anyone else working above me, but I have other priorities in life also in addition to SEOmoz. So I work, and that’s fantastic. But it’s in order to fund the other things I do in my life. Part of this is building my resume and building my work that I can show to people. So if I’m included on lists of niche bloggers, I can then put that and it’s bragging for myself, and it helps me. So I’m very likely to link back to you. I’ve actually used this tactic as I was first getting into SEO, and it worked really, really well.

#2: Do interviews.—This is a little scribble I did of Walter Cronkite. He’s actually a lot older than me. I didn’t really watch him. I’m just totally a wannabe Walter Cronkite fan.—Interviews. So they’re great. If you don’t have anything to write about and you’re new in the space, any space really, you can reach out to other people and interview them. This is helpful for two reasons. One, it gives you interested things to write about, like what other people have to think and say about a given topic. And two, the people you’re interviewing are very likely to link back to you. I’ve seen this work very well on Twitter where I’ll get lots of tweets, and that’s good, but the links are low nofollow, so that doesn’t really help me. Also, I’ve seen that when I’ve done interviews of other people, they are more likely to link back to my stuff. So when I’m like, “Hey, Mr. Can I ask you some questions?” And they’re like, “Yes, little Danny Dover, that’s a great idea.” Those people with the deep voices are much more likely to link back to me, and it’s really, really helpful.

#3: Be virtually social. Being social in real life turns about to be really tricky. There are real people involved who are like five feet away from you and they make real eye contact. This is a problem that I had for a long time in this industry. Being virtually social, there are three main avenues that I use for doing this. The first one is Facebook. This is a picture of Mark Zuckerburg. He’s a stick figure surrounded with money, that’s just how Mark Zuckerburg exists in my head. Facebook. So this is a good way to get into being social online. So you can communicate with your real life friends, which is what I use Facebook for. And then with the new features they’re starting to introduce, they just recently replaced the fan button with the like button. It’s lowering the boundaries and the hurdles to promoting yourself and your work online, specifically via Facebook. So while you’re talking to your friends, you can also like something and get the network effect of Facebook and promote whatever it is you’re doing. Be it yourself, be it your blog, be it your work, anything like that.
Number two – that’s a picture of a whale. The fail whale. Twitter. So I use Twitter not to talk to my real life friends, because they don’t understand what it is. I’ve literally had the conversation of “What is Twitter?” I’ve had that hundreds of times. And I really don’t think that I’m explaining it very well, or the people I’m talking to are going to get it. So it’s just kind of an infinite loop that I’ll forever be in. Twitter though – I use it to promote my work and to post pictures of wall cats out of the other pictures with like a walrus and a bucket. It’s probably the funniest picture online I’ll put it in the post below. But this is a great avenue for driving people to your blog and getting links, ultimately. So if you talk to people on Twitter and become friends with them that way just by posting funny pictures, they’re more likely to link back to you because they know who you are. They’ve communicated that. They break down these hurdles to get in the link that you’re ultimately looking for. It’s a lot like social engineering. I’ll go ahead and say that. But hopefully you’re being genuine about it, that’s always the hope.
Number three – This is not a picture of a rug or a pool, this is actually a picture of a blog post. A very good way of getting links is to comment on other people’s blog. So when someone who is in position to link from a powerful blog writes something and puts a lot of thought into something, if you comment on it, they are much more likely to embrace you and talk to you. The way that I used this when I was first getting into the industry is if I found something that would back up their argument, I would post it on the blog comment. And they would then use that and then site me as a person who provided it, which got me a link. I found that to work really, really well.

#4: Make in person connections. So at SEOmoz, we try to do this a lot. SEO, I think, is inherently very social, so we try to do a lot of in person things. Be it a conference, be or some kind of a party, or just meeting up with some other SEOs who are like-minded at a par, which is halfway between a pub and a bar. This is a new thing I’m starting. I hope people go with it, so meeting people there. Much more likely when I’m writing on a blog post, and I’m trying to think of an example for something to back up my point, to think of the people who I actually know face to face, and use their work as an example. Just naturally, I’m going to want to help out my friends when I’m writing out blog posts. I think that other people do the same.

#5: This one is kind of long winded. I couldn’t figure out a better way to do it. I’m still working on the keyword research like I said. It’s kind of my ongoing thing. Send linkers demos which include their own stuff. So we’ve been getting this a lot at SEOmoz lately. People will send in demos that include screen shots of SEOmoz in the product demo, or little games, or they’ll include the SEOmoz logo as one of the toys or something. So when people do this, we’re much, much more likely to link to it because it’s also promoting ourselves when we promote them. Whenever you can do a win-win like that, it’s obviously a good idea. So if you have a product or something that works particularly well for a specific niche, it might be a very good idea to include the influencers in your product demo so they’re more likely to link back to you.

So that’s all I have right now. I’m sure all of you have lots and lots of other ideas, so I look forward to your comments below. And thank you very much. I’ll see you later. Bye.

Rand Fishkin

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about some specific kinds of links that can cause some trouble in the SEO world. These types of links tend to get a bad rap, and I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. So, specifically, sitewides, reciprocals, and directory links. All of these you’ve likely heard things like, “Oh, no, sitewides are really bad,” or “Oh, sitewides. You should try and get those because it’ll send lots of page rank,” or “Oh, reciprocal links, those can be bad,” or “No, reciprocal links are fine and they’re perfectly natural,” or “Directory links, oh, that can be bad and those can be penalized,” or “No, directory links, that’s a great way to link build.” The truth lies somewhere in the middle. I want to address the finer points of these, and make sure there isn’t confusion about what the difference is = because there are good ways to do all of these and there are bad ways to do all of these. And I don’t want SEOs out there being worried that because, “oh, well, technically this site links to me or I link to it” that it’s a problem, but I also don’t want you to go getting yourself in trouble by engaging in manipulative link practices that might either penalize your site, or not be counted and be a waste of your time, or just be potentially hurting you in the future or devalued you in the future, even if they might be helping today.

So let’s start with sitewide links. Pretty obvious concept. Here’s domainx.com. There’s your page over there. And, for some reason, they have a sitewide link to you, which means that every page or 90% of the pages on their site, link back to your site. This isn’t necessarily bad. What’s bad is that in the, let’s say, early to mid-2000s. So 2001 to about 2006, there was a ton of abuse of precisely this kind of linking. Because people were manipulating page rank so much, they thought to themselves, “Wow, if page rank is really the formula, I should try to get a link from every page I possibly can.” And so they’d go out and say, “Hey, can I buy a link in your footer? And I’ll always be in your footer. I’ll be linked to across your entire site.” And this caused problems with footer links. It caused problems with sitewide links, and essentially became connected with manipulative activity. Google started devaluing these and trying to look for them and recognize them. But, you know what? There are a lot of sites that link to a lot of other sites. For example, Disney.com has disney.go.com, and the cruises site often links back to the Disney World site, and the Disney World site is often linking to Pixar stuff, and this is totally fine. There as a site lulu.com that linked to SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards for a long time on every page. Not a big deal, right? It’s not like it was hurting us. It’s not like Google saw that and thought, “Oh, that’s manipulative.” They said, “Oh, we’re a winner of the Web 2.0 Awards,” and so they linked off and they just had that as a little badge on their page. Tons of people do this with Twitter, with LinkedIn, with Facebook. They’ll link back to their profiles and their pages. It’s natural. It’s fine. Where it gets manipulative is when you’re trying to inject it into the footer, or sidebar, or those kinds of things, and you’re doing already manipulative types of link building, non-natural, non-editorial stuff. That’s when sitewide can get you in trouble.

What about reciprocal linking? So we’ve got some reciprocal links here. This domainx.com, he’s got a page up here, and it’s linking over to yoursite.com. And we have a page over here that’s linking back there. Oh, man, these sites are trading links. They have a reciprocal link structure. It must be a bad thing. No, not at all. If this guy wrote something and he referenced something over here, and we wrote something and we referenced something over there. Not a problem at all. You see this kind of activity all the time, particularly in niches on the web that are around a specific topic. Virtually every large site is linking to every other large site in that world. In the SEO world, for example, SEO Book and Search Engine Land and Search Marketing Expo, and Search Engine Strategies, and SEOmoz, they’re all linking back and forth to each other all the time. Not a big deal. Not a problem. Don’t worry about it.

Where it gets problematic is when you do very specific kinds of things. So, reciprocal linking in a very negative sense has classically meant this. It means I go over to domainx and I say, “Oh, I’d really like a link,” and he says, “Sure, I’ll link to you, but you have to link to my directory first.” And so this page will now link to this page, but now I have to link that page to this page. Or even I have to link this page to some other page on his site. And we have to use manipulative, gamey, anchor text, and it turns out that every single person that he links to also links back to him, which is pretty rare, usually there’s some one way links going around. And all of those links happen to be with particularly excellent anchor text that seems to be targeted and optimized towards high volume, high competitiveness keyword phrases. It just looks super weird. That kind of manipulative activity is where you start to get in trouble. Normally, just linking to someone who happens to be linking to you? Don’t worry about it. It’s very natural web activity.
Last, we’ve got directories, which is a tough subject to cover. We could probably do several Whiteboard Fridays just on this topic. But, broadly, I just want to say there are lots of kinds of directories. We talked about this today in the PRO webinar series. If you haven’t downloaded it and checked it out or you haven’t gotten a chance to listen, definitely download and check it out, Scott will link over to it. But, essentially, you’ve got good to bad. Good kinds of directories would include things like a local directory. So this is Seattle Glassblowers Directory. Yeah, that’s probably a great site. It probably links to lots of good glassblowers in the Seattle region, and it probably doesn’t even call itself a directory. It’s not like you have to pay to submit. It’s just a regional listing of local glassblowers in the Seattle area. Awesome.—Hopefully Dale Chihuly is on there. I don’t know. Maybe he’s not in this area anymore. He’s too fancy to be important.—

But, you can get topical niche runs. So this would be lots of universities maintain web pages on math resources. Lots of them maintain resources on specific scientific communities. There are plenty of web pages out there that will talk about travel destinations and tips for tourists, and they’ll link off to different travel websites. And those are all fine and well too. It’s generally when you get into generic, when you get into pay for listing, and when you get into low editorial controls. Those three things really predict. Generic, you pay for the listing. There’s low editorial controls. This is really someone who’s trying to maximize the number of submissions that they’re getting, the number of people who are paying them to review, and listing a lot of sites that probably are not listing-worthy. So they’re not doing a good job of maintaining a specific resource that says, “Oh, this is great for Seattle tourism,” “this is great for local glassblowers,” or “these are terrific sites if you’re interested in oceanography.” They’re just saying, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to create a topic category for everything, and we’ll build up lots of links by submitting to our friends. And we’ll generally have, oftentimes, a very low link structure ourselves, but we’ll rely on things like Google’s Toolbar PageRank to be high on our homepage to hopefully suggest to other webmasters that we’re a quality resource.”

Let me tell you what I would do in this type of situation. If you have questions about whether these are providing value, I would go and use some methodologies around testing. So what I’d do is submit a web page—or if you’re not even ready to make a payment to these guys, you can look at some of the other web pages that are listed, ones that have very few other links in their link profiles, and check. Are they really ranking for the stuff that the anchor text is sending over there? Are they performing well? Does that link seem to be helping them? Look at a few different ones. Is it consistently helping? Does it appear to be high quality, or does it look like the kind of thing where, boy, if someone reported this to Google, or someone at Google web spam actually spent some time on this, they’d likely devalue it. One of the concerns I have is, “Oh yeah, it looks like it’s passing value right now, but you’re not thinking long term.” So investing $50, or $100, $200 in a link for a year is probably money better spent in lots of other places. Directory’s potentially a great way to get links. There are lots of good listings out there. Just watch out for the bad stuff. And that applies to all of this kind of things, sitewides, reciprocals. You’ve got to be thinking. You’ve got to be using your head and using logic before you determine, “Is this a good way to link, or a bad way to link?”

Alright everyone, I hope you’ve enjoyed this Whiteboard Friday, we will see you again next time. Take care. (9:20 music)

Rand Fishkin

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another addition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about some link building strategies, and specifically link building strategies that leverage some of the human psychologies that we’ve come to be aware of in the last few years and few decades. Some of you may remember a blog post that Will Critchlow wrote a while back about a book called Nudge and how you could use the psychologies described in that book for SEO and business types of purposes. Today, I want to focus on just a couple of those purposes that are really interesting for link building. I have seen this applied. I was helping out a non-profit recently, and we talked about a few of these and how effective they can be and have been for folks in the past.

So, let me give you an example here. In this scenario, what the non-profit has done is they decided that their message is super compelling. They’ve got a really interesting cause that they’re funding, and they think they can get lots of donations. But it’s hard to get the word out just by saying, “Hey we do this good stuff.” The Internet is a fantastic way, specifically the social media and sharing portals of the Web, to draw in traffic. And search traffic follows from that if you can do it effectively. So what they’ve done is built an ancillary portal, sort of a blog if you will, about interesting topics that relate to the subject matter that they’re talking about. In this case it was academics and poverty. And they’ve got this interesting share-worthy content. It’s quite good. They have a lot of interesting statistical data and they describe things quite well. They do some good stuff with video and images, and it’s quite compelling to read. It’s sort of like the stuff you find on Smashing Magazine about design or you might find on Malcolm Gladwell’s blog, those types of things. And they have got a call to action. The call to action wants you to subscribe to their email newsletter, from which they get donations. So it’s very interesting, we were looking at some examples of some other folks who do this really well, and we came to one that we just thought was tremendous. It didn’t have to do with non-profit. It was specifically about something else, but it’s this concept. And it leverages two of the ideas that are presented very well in Nudge. I think you’re going to be pretty excited when you see this.

There are two options in the call to action. Number one is “make a donation.” And that donation then sends people who feel interested about this topic or want to learn more right into the portal to make that donation. Then there’s a second call to action that says, “If you can’t afford to make a donation today—maybe you were hit by the recession, you were hit by the economy, you simply don’t have the money to do it, or you’re not yet ready to make a monetary financial commitment—here’s the code to link to us” And that’s sort of just as good. That’s a digital currency way of contributing to this campaign. So if you have a blog or a website of any kind and you want to support our mission, then you can link to us. And by linking to us, you’re going to help us attract more people who will then help attract more donations. So you’re essentially spreading the word instead of making the donation yourself.

This leverage is what the authors of Nudge call choice architecture. It’s essentially setting out a system by which you, as the architect of the design or as the architect of the website, determine what the user can and can’t do. We do this all the time whenever we select navigation components or whenever we put links on a page, those kinds of things. But, in this case, it’s even more important. And I think it’s critical to apply this same methodology not just to this one scenario, not just to the call to the action at the bottom of a blog getting people to link to you or donate to your website or buy something from you or what have you, but really to think about choice architecture as it relates to any sort of conversion event. If you make it an either/or play rather than a “Do this. This is what you can do from here,” you are setting up people to have success. The book talks about how this is done really interestingly with school lunches. They’ll talk about a tray of school lunches at the cafeteria. If you put the desserts on the high tray where it’s harder for the kids to reach and you put the vegetables down in the bottom, the kids will generally eat healthier throughout their lives. Completely shocking. It’s totally disturbing to think that the lunch preferences that you set up as a cafeteria employee at an elementary school could have this impact throughout a person’s life. It might actually change the course of whether they get heart disease or what their health risks are. The power is just as applicable in the web marketing space for a non-profit or a for-profit organization. Anytime you are putting together this kind of conversion path and you say to yourself, “Boy, I would like people to perform these actions.” I think that adding in this architecture of “you can choose what you want to do here,” and “here are the choices,” and “this is people do,” is a really powerful one.

The second one that’s powerful here is this idea of anchoring. A lot of non-profit sites do this very well where they will put info like “x-thousand people have contributed $14 million.” And those numbers, by saying that some percentage of the visitors who come here or people like you contribute this amount, have a very interesting impact as well. We all sort of want to be like the group. So if people tell us that other people like us that other people like us who visited the site, other people who are interested in these topics, other people who have maybe kids who have these issues, have contributed in the past, we are more likely to do those things. We have sort of a natural social, human, instinct desire to fit in. I think it’s really power to use things like FeedBurner, for example. FeedBurner does something really unique by saying at the side of a blog, “Hey, here’s 62,000 people who subscribed to this blog.” “Aww, geez, 62,000, that’s a ton of people. I should clearly be subscribing.” I don’t think this is nearly the best methodology for how you frame what that could be. If you said 62,000 people who read and study SEO on a regular basis and do it professionally subscribe to SEOmoz, that may be an even more powerful message. Again, it’s leveraging these concepts of choice architecture and anchoring.