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SEO Guide Wrapup: Link Building, Search Engine Relevancy and Local Search

This past week or so has been an excellent one in terms of SEO Guides to hit the Net. First, we have Jim Westergren’s informative Link Building Guide. Next, we have Aaron Wall of SEO Book with his Defining Search Engine Relevancy in 2006 guide. And finally, we have Small Business SEM’s Local Search Marketing Guide. If you haven’t already, be sure to check them all out. If you keep up with SEO and SEM news on a day-to-day basis, there’s not much you’ll glean from these guides. But they do serve as a nice refresher course on their respective topics.

Google: Poor Incoming Links Don’t Hurt

As far as the search engines are concerned, it has long been speculated and claimed that receiving links from “bad neighborhoods” could hurt a website; you know, those pill-n-casino sites. It makes perfect sense - if you run around with spammers, getting link benefit from them, the value and integrity of your site should be questioned, as well.

Not so, says Vanessa Fox of the Google Sitemaps team:

In general, linking to web spammers and “bad neighborhoods” can harm your site’s indexing and ranking. And while links from these sites won’t harm your site, they won’t help your indexing or ranking. Only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site.

This also makes sense. How can you be responsible for the linking practices of a third party?

In any case, this seems to be a deviation from the inherently ambiguous language of their Webmaster Guidelines:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Then again, it is from the horse’s mouth. Take it with a grain of salt, if you will.

Text Link Brokers’ Link Building Wiki

Link building got you down? Check out Text Link Brokers’ new Link Building Wiki. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but it does serve as a nice central repository for all those link building forum threads and blog posts you’ve seen referenced again and again. There’s nothing mindblowing here, but it is shaping up to be a nice resource. I like the link building tools section.

Rand on Matt Cutts on the Google Sandbox

Rand of SEOmoz has a nice analysis of Matt Cutts in an interview with Mike Grehan on the topic of the Google Sandbox:

1. The sandbox as we perceive it is not a myth, but a real phenomenon (we’ve had this confirmed in the past, but always in person rather than in a recording that could be transcribed)
2. Matt (and Google) recognize that certain content is not being made “available” to searchers and the reasons deal with “how much do you trust certain pages”
3. In order to get out of the sandbox (or dodge it entirely), you must “capture the mind of the blogosphere” which is “the best way to let search engines find out about you too.”

I would also emphasize that your SEO focus (industry) also plays a role in avoiding the Sandbox. A “light” industry typically sidesteps the Sandbox nicely.

That said, it seems that “linkbait” is the key to avoiding the Box entirely (as well as the key to serious link building). Before you even start developing your website, determine what makes you stand out. Will anyone care about your site/product/offering? If you can answer that question effectively, you’ll get your links. A couple well-placed emails to some industry bloggers can easily get the ball rolling here.

Google’s Big Daddy Choke

Barry Schwartz over at the Search Engine Watch blog points to a piece in the Register about Google’s Big Daddy update and their subsequent storage problems.

The Register reports that Google is “choking on web spam” ever since the roll out of The Big Daddy Infrastructure. The article highlights a mention from Google CEO Eric Schmidt from last month talking about Google having a storage “crisis.”

Backlink Strategies - No More Home Page Links

What pages should you get your links from? That’s the question posed in an excellent post by Jim Boykin on his personal blog. His suggestions:

Go for the most relevant page.

I’d go to google and search [site:theirsite.com keyword phrase] to find the most relevant page. Relevance is a big factor. If I sell Green Widgets, and they’ve got a specific page on Green widgets, that would be a great page to get a link from.

And go for the most powerful internal page.

I’d go to Yahoo and search [site:theirsite.com]

The nice thing about Yahoo is that they tend to list pages in order of importance. Same goes for a “linkdomain” search in Yahoo (the best backlinks tend to be towards the top of results). This hold true for a “Site:” search with Yahoo. The best “internal pages” tend to be listed first.

Good advice.

The Power of Internal Linking

An oft-overlooked aspect of SEO, Dan Thies, in an interview with Lee Odden of Search Engine Guide, expounds on the importance of internal linking techniques:

In SEO terms, the power of the web site is also largely ignored. Very few web sites that I look at leverage the power of their own internal links to improve rankings and broaden their search engine profile. I’ve got pages ranked for some very competitive search terms, purely from internal links. Not just for my site, but students as well, but you have to understand why it’s important and take action.

I agree. Link text and tight interlinking can do wonders for a website’s SEO campaign. Know how effective external links are? Well, the same thing applies to passing your internal link power around.

Google’s Weekend Update

Rand of SEOmoz is one of the few industry bloggers willing to share real SEO tips and information in his posts, rather than simply regurgitating the daily SEO gossip - which explains why many of his posts end up syndicated across many blogs, this one included. Needless to say, he’s got another bit of useful information up about Google’s apparent weekend update:

1. Global popularity/authority of a domain was slightly devalued when calculating rankings of deep, internal pages (and/or)
2. Deep links from external sites to deep content pages is now slightly more valuable

So it looks as if Google is reducing, at least somewhat, the benefit of having a very large, content-laden site as it pertains to any one particular page and its rankings on said site.

Links and SEO - A Timeframe

There’s a nice bit of information from Rand of SEOmoz about the lag between acquiring new links and those links helping out your SEO effort. According to him,

we found that it was not until 10 weeks after our efforts had begun that the rankings showed progress. Moreover, rather than being a steady climb, the site, which ranked primarily in positions 8-12 for most keywords, rose to #1 for nearly every term (almost like a mini sandbox-escape, though the site is quite old and has no other “box-like” features). This startling jump at Google is a new experience for me, as most of our projects have shown relatively steady climbs as the number and quality of links slowly increases.

Google, Paid Links, and a Smackdown

From Rand at SEOmoz:

So Matt’s comments yesterday (he didn’t pay me for a link, so I’m afraid I can’t give one out) set off a treasure trove of commentary about the use of paid links.

[...]

Google should not have any influence on how markup is controlled. They are completley out of their jurisdiction in making this request.

“Nofollow” was created to say “I don’t have editorial control over this link or I can’t vouch for its quality.” It was not created to say “money may have partially influenced my decision to provide this link.” If that were the case, most of the link structure of the commercial web would be invalid

Google has no ability to track paid vs. unpaid links effectively. For every example folks are giving in the forums of how they might do it (banner ad sizes, common text link formats, etc.), there are 5 ways to have paid links they could never track down.

Promoting fear in your public relations to help keep your results of higher quality is a naive, short term solution. Google’s forte in quality has always been about engineering solutions algorithmically and not via public relations.

The inherent arrogance in telling web developers to modify their content to suite your whims can not have good long term results. Google is valued as highly as they are because of their brand’s goodwill. You can ask yourself whether this will help or hurt that goodwill.

In order to be ranking competitively in Google in many, many spaces, you need to buy links. Anyone who’s done large scale link research in any niche will immediately identify dozens if not hundreds of directories, sites, membership-signups, etc. that provide high quality links (that are editorially given), but the require some type of fee. The Internet is not a commercial free, capitalists-shunned part of the world, and if you want publicity and recognition online, just as offline, you have to be prepared to spend.

Ouch. Cutts will be reeling from that one for a while. In any case, I agree more on the nofollow side of things. If Google could really determine a paid link from a non-solicited link, the nofollow attribute would never have been introduced. Google’s already waived the white flag with nofollow, now they’re telling everyone to be careful. Sorry. I don’t buy it.