Joe Whyte - Digital Marketer » Link Development

Deep linking, when to do it and is it illegal?

joe.whyte — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:35:45 +0000

Deep linking has been a topic of interest for the longest time. There have been many litigations and court cases challenging free speach and copyright infringment associated with linking to internal pages. Read my article about Deep Linking at search marketing standard.

Random Posts

10 Easy Steps for Evaluating Directory Submissions | How to choose the right directories

joe.whyte — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 08:06:24 +0000

While I was in the real estate industry doing SEO my manager gave me a list of directories that my clients site’s should be submitted to. The list contained a various number of real estate related directories and withouth knowing it I had submitted some of these clients sites into a deeper whole then they started in.

The problem was three tiered.

1.) I did not have enough experience in SEO to understand why the list I was given was wrong.
2.) I put trust into an SEO I did not know.
3.) We submitted our sites to way to many directories at one time.

Now the first rule when looking into “linking” is going to be relevancy. Although a directory submission is a link I would consider the relevancy of a directory not as important then other areas like trust rank or age of domain. The pitfall for some of this companies clients was that we where putting up a link to their site on a directory that falls into one or all of these catagories.

1) Low PageRank
2) Low TrustRank
3) Low Domain Name Age
4) Poor url structure
5) Poor Page Indexing
6) Poor Page Caching

Some but not all of the sites on my managers list contained sites that had just been created, had dynamic url’s for poor indexing, no deep linking to help internal pages get PageRank and be indexed etc. thus causing our clients to have their SEO budget depleted and see very low ROI.

The real estate company I worked for clearly did not understand what to look for in a PFI program. Once I did a little bit of research and some testing on my personal sites I noticed a huge difference in search ranking when I mixed up my directory submissions with some older more trust worthy directories along with some relevant well trusted directories.

When doing directory submissions it is important to look at the this checklist.

1) Evaluate TrustRank based on TrustRank Factors
2) Is the page you are submitting your site to cached
3) Is the page you are submitting your site to indexed
4) Check the backlinks to the directory to make sure you don’t see casino, porno or little to know backlinks
5) Check to see how many pages are indexed to make sure you see many pages indexed and NOT just the home page
6) Submit one site to 3-5 directories per month by hand
7) How old is the site you are submitting to Is there a catagory “relevant” to your sites keyword theme
9) How expensive is the cost of the link vs the quality of the link
10) Do they offer featured links and are they static

Now that you know what to look for you need to know what tools to use. You have Search Status firefox plugin which will allow you to highlight nofollow links, check pages indexed, check pages cached, check backlinks, PageRank and Alexa rating and more. Also you have the Way Back Machine, Aviva Strongest Directories List, Strongest Direcvtories List. If your niche is real estate try submitting to top real estate directories but also include sites like dmoz, botw.org and etc. Make sure you mix it up. Another must read is going to be a recent post over at search engine journal by Loren Baker. Loren did a post on link buying and did a quick overview on some popular directories that are worth submitting to. Really smart guy worth listening to and I read his blog all the time. Also Aaron Walls put out a good video on directory submissions.

Random Posts

Newsvine Algorithm and potential ranking factors for exposure.

joe.whyte — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 05:51:31 +0000

As I do more and more social media optimization I can see that there is a pattern to most of these sites. Just like there is a pattern to SEO and Marketing (a formula … if you will). The exciting thing about all of these types of jobs is that every keyword, every site and every social media is different and gives us the opportunity to stay on our toes.

I was recently working on newsvine.com looking into how to draw traffic and how to get articles onto the first page of a given catagory. While I was looking this site over I jotted a list together of potential ranking factors for newsvine.com.

Reputation of Profile

How many friends does a profile have

How many people have you on their watchlist

How long your profile has been around

How well your articles and or seeds have been received

Are a majority of users story or articles from ONE url

How many times a article or seed has become popular

Your vineacity rank

How many articles you have submitted and how well they have done

How many popular comments you have received

Reputation of friends profile

How reputable a friends profile is gives weight on votes on your own post

Comments

How many comments does a certain story get

How many positive votes do the comments get

Submit a like story related to what has been submitted by newsvine for your specific targeted catagory.

A majority of links that are submitted that are related to a newsvine story tend to appear under the top seeds section

What domain name a story is submitted from

A majority of “wires” come from newspaper sites and writers and do not have many comments or votes but are on the top page because of where they are submitted from.

Groups

How many groups you are a member of

How active you are in the groups

how long you have been in a group

Number of views

A high number of views with no votes could mean no one likes the story and subsequently your entry will never make it to a top page.

Length of views

Hand Jobs

Just like some of the major search engines and social media sites there is a good chance they do hand jobs thanks to people like me

Source of votes

Tracking IP addresses

Tracking browser id’s

Tracking login account ID’s could help newsvine keep track of vote groups who’s sole purpose is to vote, comment and help rank articles on the home page or sub page

Follow the Code of Honor!

The “Freshness Factor”

How new the article is. Older content will get pushed down eventually.

Something that I found pretty interesting is that newsvine actually gives you some sort of insight into there ranking algorithm by showing you a chart they call “vineacity”. I have posted the image below. Special thanks to Aine MacDermot for some extra insight into how newsvines ranking is determined.

Random Posts

15 types of links and how to get them

joe.whyte — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 07:39:17 +0000

I was currently thinking of how to setup an appropriate linking structure for a site I was working on. I had to sit down and really think of all the different ways and types of links I could go after and how effective they are and where to get them. So instead of just keeping this to myself I decided to post it on my blog and share it with everyone. It was a pretty quick post because it was kinda late and I’m tired but I hope this is enough.

Authority Links
How to get them: Google search, Google and Yahoo directory http://directory.google.com/ , Arelis,
what to look for: Sites that rank for top level keywords, Notability, alexa rank and age of domain name
Examples: motortrend.com, lunarpages.com,
Notes: Most likely you will be able to purchase links from these sites or you can utilize linkbait, or content bait to get them to link back to you. Authority links are an absolutly must have in order to build a websites trust rank!

Directory Links
How to get them: Aaron walls has a great list of powerful directories, Strongest directory links
what to look for: You should submit slowly to directories. About 3-5 a month per website. Keep it slow and natural. The best directories will be relevant/related content directories or niche directories.
Examples: www.real-estate-ims-directory.com or site-sift.com, dmoz.org, botw, yahoo directory etc.
Notes: Directory links are not as strong as some SEO’s might think. Keep these to a minimum and stick with relevant one way links.

Reciprocal Links
How to get them: Probably one of the easiest to get but not the most effective. You can try link metro, link market, webmaster forums and Arelis.
what to look for: Its always hard trying to negotiate a reciprocal link that will be in your favor but the majority of link exchanges will be pretty equal to what you are offering yourself. Make sure the page is cached, indexed and no black hat techniques are being used.
Examples: Link market, link metro.
Notes: Reciprocal links are out dated and old seo technology. They can serve a purpose though. Lets say you just need a few links to start getting your site crawled then reciprocals are great. Maybe you have a black hat campaign then reciprocal links could work well.

SiteWide Links
How to get them: Usually you can purchase these through sites like textlinkbrokers.com or text-link-ads.com. Asking around in forums like digital point and sitepoint are great ways to do this as well.
what to look for: You are going to want to find sites that have a large number of indexed pages with quality content, relevant and have PR.
Notes: Site wide links are not something you want or need a lot of. If a few sites out of hundreds do this for you then you are looking at a good inbound linking structure. To many sitewide links will raise a red flag with google and could penelize you in the serps. Usually having to many inbound links from one IP and domain can hurt you so make sure you do not go over board with these types of links but they absolutly have there place and google does like these in regards to PR.

One way links
How to get them: Contextual advertising, forums,
what to look for: Look for relevant sites that have a low amount of outbound links with decent rankings. Stay away from area’s that say “sponsored links, friends, advertisements”. The higher on the page you are placed the better.
Notes: One way links are going to be one of the more effective ways to gain rankings in the SERP’s. Many quality sites have MORE one way links then any other type of links because of link bait and quality content.
Examples: Blogrolls

3-way Links
How to get them: three-way-links.com, forums, arelis
what to look for: You will always want relevant links with quality content but 3-way links can be considered a little grey hat so be careful on how many you do. Depending on the type of site you have you may want more or less or none of these.
Examples: site 1 links to site b and site b links to site c
Notes: Considered more of a grey hat technique so use with caution.

4-way links (coined by joe whyte)
How to get them: forums, arelis
what to look for: a new way to fool the search engines but you need enough sites to do this. Its the same idea as a 3 way link but 2 out of the 4 sites are getting a one way and the other to are giving a link. Stay with relevant sites with quality content.
Examples: Site 1 links to site 2 and site 3 links to site 4
Notes: This is a good idea for people who are used to reciprocal linking. If a webmaster has more then one site then they can start building there one way links much more effectively instead of doing reciprocals.

.Edu and .Gov Links
How to get them: Use yahoo query inurl:.edu or .gov search query, Arelis.
what to look for: There are a ton of ways to get these. Look for resource .edu libraries, email students directly who have a webspace through there educational institution and offer them something in return for there webspace or a link on there webspace.
Notes: TLD’s like .edu’s and .gov’s are not neccesarily BETTER then a .com but usually have much more trust rank as they have been around a lot longer and they have quality content which is updated frequently. Basically the trust rank on these sites is very high and will help your sites tremendously.

Radio station, Television, Magazine or Newspaper links
How to get them: Usually contextual advertising.
what to look for: duh look for radio, television, magazine or newspaper links duh!
Examples: http://www.50states.com/news/, http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Radio/ etc
Notes: These are most likely not going to be relevant to your sites content but usually these site have good trust rank, are trafficked heavily and are good resource links for your site.

Press Release Links
How to get them: Search for press release submission services and or sites that allow press releases which are normally your newspaper sites.. HINT HINT.
what to look for: Look for industry leaders and stay away from the mom and pop press release sites.
Examples: PR.com and PRWeb.com are some great press release sites
Notes: Press releases are usually not a GREAT way to get inbound links but can be a good source of traffic and any little bit helps when building a white hat inbound link campaign.

Article Bio Links
How to get them: Creating an article and then syndicating it amoung hundreds of article submission sites.
what to look for: Look for any sites that are article syndication sites.
Examples: Ezine.com, articledashboard.com, etc.
Tools: If you can you might want to pick up a article syndication spammer. I use them and it works pretty well. This is a faster way to submit an article to many sites which is not black hat related unless you go to fast and to many.
Notes: Article syndication has not really improved a large sites rankings dramatically but works pretty well for lower competitive keywords. The more sites that have content pointing back to you or refrencing your site will overall increase how many pages are indexed for a given term. In my experience I have seen rankings for lower competitive terms when doing article syndication. Works great for SEV (search engine vanity).

RSS/Blog syndicated links
How to get them: This is so easy. Start a blog and put some quality content up and most importantly offer RSS, Atom or xml so your reader’s can syndicate your feed.
What to look for: Look for blog directories, blog syndication sites etc
Tools: http://www.sphere.com/, feedburner.com, technorati,
Notes: Highly debated in the industry but syndication can help in many ways in my opinion. From traffic to inbound links and branding. Syndication is syndication in my opinion and from my experience blog syndication works well.

Comments and Profile Links
How to get them: Find related popular blogs and comment on them and provide a link back to your site.
what to look for: popular blogs in your industry that allow tags
Notes: Since most blogs utilize a rel=nofollow tag these are not going to count towrads your seo efforts as mush as you would hope but they still show up in your backlinks and can help increase branding, traffic and could help in crawling, indexing and ranking.

Presell Page Links
How to get them: Presall pages are pretty hard to find. You can do google searches, arelis, forums and webmasters
what to look for: You want to find a reputable site that is a quality relevant site with high PR and traffic.
Notes:If you just contact webmasters and ask to purchase a full page on there site they will give you a price if you provide the content. Usually this is something that can be done with ease but you might have to do some digging. These type’s of links are great for seo as the whole page is going to be content you provide which will be relevant content and inbound links.

Social Media Links
How to get them: Submit to them, search for them, create accounts and pimp them OUUUUT
what to look for: any sites that have to do with people getting together for a common goal
Examples: myspace, tickme.com, digg, stumbleupon
Tools:This is a great opportunity to create spam programs unless you want to go white hat then you can optimize this with tact like me
Notes:Links on social media do help. Not only is digg submissions actually ranking for results much like wikipedia does not but it also draw’s a ton of traffic to your site. Leverage social media to your favore and you seo efforts will come full circle!

Random Posts

6 minute link partner evaluation

joe.whyte — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 07:41:36 +0000

Author: Joe Whyte

Text link ads, performencing, text link brokers and other contextual advertising venues are full of abuse. People are buying a pr6 link for over 1000 a month and getting no SEO benefit from it what so ever because the site is either whored out, black listed or using black hat techniques and many people are being taken advantage of. The reason people are being taken advantage of is because link buyers and link developers do not know the true value of a link and how to asses that value. I have been doing link development for quite sometime now and I have devised a 6 minute quick link partner evaluation that I think will help many people when considering a link partner.

Age of website
A good website will be years old. The older the site the more trust rank a webpage will have from search engines like google. The reason google penelizes new sites is because a lot of them do not make it past its first year. Linking to a site with a long history shows stability and a stable inbound linking structure is a stable ranking and PR for your site. Download search status ff plugin or check out Wayback Machine.

Alexa Rank
I have seen a ton of sites that have a high PR but their traffic looks like 1 person visits their site each month. Although the PR is high it is quite possible that they used a black hat inbound linking structure to get that PR and I would stay away from those sites. Plus contextual advertising is NOT just for seo but it is also for traffic so keep this in mind when deciding to place and purchase your text links.

Pages indexed
The more pages that are indexed gives weight to a sites search engine saturation and its overall weight. The more content the better the site. If you see that there are only a few pages showing up when checking pages indexed but you know there are thousands of pages on the site then this draws a red flag and you should look into this further to find out why this is. I use some of the seo tools over at webmaster my domain.

Link Partners inbound Linking Structure
Make sure you check randomaly the inbound links coming into your potential link partners site. Are they FFA, reciprocals or linking schemes? Are they links from sites like link metro and link market? If so stay away from these pages because you do not want to get caught in a bad linking neighborhood. Reciprocal linking is an older form of linking and is dated. FFA and sites like link metro and link market are considered spammy crap links in the industry and you will not find any reputable websites joining these schemes. note: all linking has its place but if you are working on a white hat site then stay away from them, if you are working on a black hat site then link spam away . I love Aaron walls seo for firefox plugin for this. I can see what compeitors linking scheme is pretty easily.

Does link partner rank for its keywords
Any decent website will rank for some or all of the terms within its title tag. Although if the market is very competitive you might not find them in the top 3 pages but make sure you look into this. It only takes a minute and can save you from making a big linking mistake. You do not want to associate yourself with sites that do not rank because its possible YOUR site might not rank.

Is Site relevant
Over ANYTHING relavance is the most important. If your site is about web hosting then you need to have web designers, seo, web hosting, blogging, web development sites linking back to you. There are exceptions to this and those are your tld .gov’s .edu’s, news websites and your social media.

How many outbond links
Expert sites are equal to enthusiast sites and will normally link to authority sites which are ground breaking news worthy sites people trust. Authority sites usually do NOT link out to other websites (unless quoting or doing contextual advertising). This is one way search engines can try to varify weather or not a site is leaning towards authority or expert.

Is page Cached
If someone is going to place a link on a page of their website MAKE SURE THE PAGE IS CACHED, plan and simple.

Are their any black hat techniques being used on this site
Check to see if any sneaky redirects are happining, is there hidden text? Are they cloaking? These are things you will want to check. If you associate yourself with someone who does these things then you are associated yourself with a bad apple and this WILL affect your rankings.

What is the pages PR
PageRank is not my number one of course because in my mind PageRank is a stupid green bar that makes people try to sell me contextual advertising for 600% markup. When considering a link partner I personally have had good luck with sites OVER PR5 but let me tell you a secret.

Co-citation
Co-citation has to do with the type of links on a site. A good example of what cotitation is over at directory revolution. News sites are notorious for selling contextual advertising to anybody so we have casino, hospital, tax attorny and so on listed on there sites. Now google’s algorythim is going to co-citation these links and basically assume they are all connected SOMEHOW so the last thing you want is to see your site assocaited with casino sites or adsense sites.

Current amount of text link ads
The amount of text link ads is important. A recent post over at matt cutts was discussing how google devalued outbound links on harvard.edu because it was selling text link ads. General rule of thumb is to keep it below 15, some say 10. In my opinion if you where the ONLY person advertising on that site and your link was NO WHERE near anything that said sponsors, advertisments, friends etc then that would be the very best situation.

I like cooking and all of these steps are equal to ingrediants which together all make a perfect pie. Now if one or two ingrediants are missing you can still make your pie but it might not taste as good ya see? By following this list and using these tools you will get a good assumption on how well this link partner might help you in the SERPS. Its important to remember that PR is being widely used these days to configure contextual advertising which is like bidding wars for compeititve terms in PPC. You don’t want to find yourself exploding your budget by purchasing expensive links on worthless sites.