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Link Building in the Modern Age of SEO

Todd from Stuntdubl has been a link building advice monster of late, and his advice is some of the best in the biz.

First, there’s his balancing the link equation. An important bit:

If you are still using the same three title and descriptions for your link acquisitions you are really spinning your wheels. STOP! You will reach a level of diminishing returns very quickly using the same anchor text these days. Use the thesaurus and ontology tools to find synonymous terms and keyword co-occurrence. It’s very easy to get overoptimized on anchor text. If you are much higher for allinanchor searches than you are for normal search results, it’s definitely worth doin’ some investigation on what type of anchor text ratios you currently have to your site.

Then there was his example of a good link request email.

And thirdly he has his 10 tips for training a link developer:

• Teach them the value of a link - TLA Guide to text link purchasing
• Explain the contradiction of PR mattering
• Show them “starting points” like the Google directory, keyword combination tool
• Teach them to mine competitor backlinks with yahoo, link harvester, or other methods.
• Train them to skim and search pages for “hot words” like advertising, sponsors, resources, advertisements, etc. to establish if a site is open to, or currently offering advertising - cntrl+f works nicely
• Show them how to check if a page is cached or in the supplemental index
• Encourage them to be creative and learn link development from the right people and places
• Train them on using ontology tools to write anchor text
• Show them how to negotiate a link trade or purchase
• Let them buy some links to understand the value
• Set them up a paypal account to buy links from other places - trial by fire

All good advice. And be sure to check out Mr. Ploppy’s link list for some great SEO tools.

Google: PageRank Drain is Real

This is hardly new news, just a new look at the Webmasters’ SEO section at Google. As any of you that follow PageRank literature know, there is a debate amongst SEOs as to whether outlinking “drains” PageRank. The basic idea is covered here.

One side argues that in Google’s white paper Google clearly sets the foundation for PageRank drain. The other side aruges that linking is part of the Web and to penalize for outlinking is absurd. (Note: PageRank drain is considered to be sitewide, not on a page by page basis.)

But in the second section at the bottom of the Google SEO page, Google states that “doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.”

Looks like an admission of some sort of PageRank drain to me. However, it is important to note that they use the phrase “link popularity.” Can outlinking really reduce your backlinks, pretty much the only measure of link pop? Doubtful, but it’s interesting, nonetheless.

But before you run off to encode all your links, note that GoogleGuy has gone on record stating that it is rather easy to spot a domain hoarding PageRank. I believe him. It would be rather easy to spot a site with a very low (none?) outlink count and a huge backlink count. It just doesn’t look natural.

The Google Sitemaps Mega Resource

Via Threadwatch comes an excellent Google Sitemaps article that covers just about everything you ever wanted to know about Google Sitemaps - useful reading if you’re considering launching Google Sitemaps on your site.

Building Link Popularity Without Buying Links

Andy Hagans of Text Link Ads has an excellent post about link building on Threadwatch about how easy it can sometimes be to build links.

• I submit to 27 Web directories
• I submit to 3 niche industry directories which I find on Google
• I write a short press release and submit to PRWeb and PRLeap
• I write a cheesy article, “4 Things You Don’t Know About Widget-man” and submit to EzineArticles and the like

It’s nice to see link building advice that isn’t, “Buy links from site A.” I like the press release method myself. And as always, the best link building advice is to offer something that people want to link to. Like:

• Useful content
• A neat tool
• News about X, Y or Z…

And there’s plenty more. Just think of the reasons why you link out - there’s your answer.

Another SEO Keyword Combination Tool

Though I like it, this keyword permutation thing has been done to death. See here and here for just a couple of examples. You can also download Good Keywords for a windows edition if you’re offline.

And in the end, Excel, used properly, does all this and much, much more. There’s not much that can’t be done using Regex in Excel. Dreamweaver’s find/replace with Regex also works quite nicely.

Pimp Your Firefox - SEO Extensions Edition

We all know Firefox provides a more useful browsing experience. More secure, complete with tabs and standards compliant, Firefox is just plain better.

But the best feature of Firefox has to be its extension capabilities, which allows third-party programmers the ability to customize Firefox with stuff left out by the developers. Nice!

For SEO, this means very, very good things. Here’s a list of extensions I can’t live without. And once you start using them, you won’t be able to, either.

• Google PageRank - Yea, yea, it’s dead. But you know you still need it. This one’s even better than the original because it provides a text number (no more mousing over to see if it’s an 8 or a 7).
• IE View - Adds a right click menu item that spawns an IE window with the current page you’re viewing. Very useful for CSS debugging.
• HTML Validator - Real time HTML error and warning reporting based on the W3C recommendations. If you care about clean and lean code, this one is a must. One of my favorites.
• ColorZilla - Gives you a color picker to find out the color of anything in your browser window. No more print screen / Photoshop pasting! Not really for SEO, but I love this one, nonetheless.
• SEOpen - Gives you right-click abilities to view cache, backlinks, etc., in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. You also get a link checker, headers, robots.txt, whois and much more. Very useful.
• Web Developer - If you create sites, this is the single most useful extension you will ever download. Live CSS editing(!), image dimensions, block sizes, outline elements, window resizing (no more switching display modes), validation and a handy view source button. And much more. Wow!
• Copy Plain Text - Have to copy something from a Web page and stick it in something else without the formatting? Well, open up notepad, paste it in, copy again, then paste again to strip it. No longer! Copy Plain Text does it for you, stripping all formatting like styles, fonts, etc.
• User Agent Switcher - Switch your user-agent and, umm, I don’t know, find cloaked pages, maybe? ;-)
• Customize Google - Uses Google Suggest in the default search box (useful for subconscious keyword mining even when you’re not actively doing SEO), adds competitor links, secures GMail, prevents Goog from tracking your userid, removes click tracking, links to archive history and more.
• Session Manager - Saves your Firefox session (open tabs) even when you close and reboot.
• miniT - Drag and move your open tabs around. Another useful utility.
• Copy URL + - copy URLs and more with this little handy plugin. The best part seems to be the customizing you can do to markup the content copied, making it very helpful for blogging.
• SEO Links - When enabled, hovering over any link in Firefox will show you Yahoo, MSN and Google link popularity and ranking data for the URL and anchor text pair.
• IE Tab - an extension from Taiwan, features embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox.
• MeasureIt - measure any area of your screen in pixels. No more opening Photoshop to paste screenprints!
• Flashblock - opt in to play flash movies. Very nice in preventing flash popups and hiding annoying banner ads.
• SEO for Firefox - Just. Plain. Excellent. Quite possibly the only tool you need for SEO market research. Provides information on the following: PR, age from archive.org, links from Yahoo!’s linkdomain, # of .edu domain links, # of .edu page links, # of .gov domain links, total # of page links, del.icio.us bookmarks, Technorati links, Alexa rank, # of pages cached in Google, DMOZ listing, Bloglines subscriptions, Yahoo! directory listing and WhoIs.
• DownThemAll! - allows you to download all the links on a page without clicking each one. Useful for logfiles, reports, or anything else you can think of.
• ShowIP - show the IP of the current site in the status bar.
• Greasemonkey - customize websites using JavaScript.
• Firebug - another Web developer extension. I really like the real-time editing capabilities of Firebug as opposed to the Web Developer toolbar.
• Header Spy - Shows HTTP headers in the status bar.
• FAYT - Bring back the missing “find as you type” “next” and “previous” buttons in FF2.

And while technically not an extension, be sure to run this hack to curb Firefox memory leaks (FF2 compatible).

If you have a useful addition you would like to see here, please contact me.

301 or 302 Redirects and the Google Sandbox

Are 301s or 302s better for the your new site on the search engines, specifically Google? Most of what I’ve seen suggests the latter.

From conversation marketing:

- Sites that have had multiple URLs pointed at them using 301, rather than 302, redirects are likely to end up in the Sandbox, too, when they relaunch. 301 redirects tell a web browser that lands on one web address to go to another. 302 redirects tell the web server to send all visitors that land on one address to another. Search engines generally respect 302 redirects, but dislike 301 redirects because they are a common spamming tactic.

From SEG:

By using a 302 “temporarily moved” response instead of a 301, the original URL will remain in Google’s index, and maintain its position as if the page were still there. However, visitors who click on the link will be brought to your new URL, exactly where you want them to be. It’s the best of both worlds — you retain your rankings during that interim aging period, but visitors are redirected to the updated and correct domain.

Personally, I like the 302 method. I’ve seen similar things as the above, and if you still manage to get sandboxed, you can rely on your old site rankings per the 302s. And, as always, remember to do the 301s once the site has been properly aged.

More Yahoo! Index Malfeasance

Still doom and gloom in the new Yahoo! index thread. This is interesting, though:

If you want your position back, sign up for “Yahoo search submit”, pay 30 cents per click and you’ll be restored immediatley. I know of a top site that was removed, was told they “may” have violated Yahoo’s guidelines, signed up for “search submit”, and was back to #1 that week. This is a shakedown. Yahoo wants those top ten positions to be paid for, but they should indicate that to the public, because these results are no longer natural algorithmic results.

Worth a try?

The dashes vs. underscore debate continues?

Dashes or underscores? This debate has long since been over. Do a quick allinurl search for a few words and you’ll find that dashes are much more successful - like this.

You see, the engines treat dashes as spaces while they treat underscores as special characters. Here’s Matt Cutts take on it:

Matt: Hmm, this search for [FTP_BINARY] didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I got a couple scuzzy looking urls, and the other documents just have the words “FTP” and “BINARY” but the term “FTP_BINARY” doesn’t actually appear. (Note: Matt was a bit of a nerd, as you can tell.)
Some Random Person That I Don’t Remember: Have you tried Google?
Matt: What’s that?
SROTIDR: It’s a search engine written by nerds for nerds! They index numbers! Sometimes they even index punctuation, like “C++”. Try your underscore search there.
Matt: Okay, here goes. Whoa! They actually return pages with the literal string “FTP_BINARY”! That’s wicked cool! (Did I mention Matt was a nerd? Big-time nerd.)
SROTIDR: Yeah. The wild thing is that they wrote a paper about how they crawl the web and rank pages.
Matt: Well, now that’s just silly. I wonder why they didn’t keep it a secret? I bet those papers will make great reading for my information retrieval class.

So there you go. A few searches in Goog and any SEO could have figured that out. And many did - long ago, by the way. ;-)

Watch out for foreign links?

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that links from foreign sites can hurt your SEO campaign, but a high proportion of foreign links will “theme” your site in a unique way, so to speak.