SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)
Part IV. After You’ve Submitted Your Site
Chapter 17. Finding Sites to Link to Yours
In This Chapter
Getting other sites to link to you
Finding who links to your competition
Looking at reciprocal link campaigns and much, much more
Buying links — the ins and outs
In Chapter 16, I explain the value of linking — why your site needs to have backlinks (links from other sites pointing to it). Now you have the problem of finding those sites.
Chapter 16 gives you some basic criteria. You need links from pages that are already indexed by the search engines. Pages with high PageRanks are more valuable than those with low PageRanks. Links from related sites may be more valuable and so on. However, when searching for links, you probably don’t want to be too fussy to start with. A link is a link. Contrary to popular opinion, links bring value — even links from unrelated sites.
It’s common in the SEO business to say that only links from “relevant” sites have value, but I don’t believe that’s true. How do search engines know which sites are relevant and which aren’t? They don’t. Sure, they can guess to some degree. But they can’t be quite sure. Therefore, my philosophy is that every link from a page that’s indexed by search engines has some kind of value. Some will have a higher value than others, but don’t get too hung up on relevance. And don’t worry too much about PageRank. Sure, if you can go after sites with high PageRanks first, do it, but often it makes sense to simply go get links — links with keywords in the text — and not worry too much about the rank of the linking page.
Use this chapter to get links, and things will start happening. Your site will get more traffic, the search engines will pick it up, and you should find your pages rising in the search engine ranks.
Controlling Your Links
Before you run off to look for links, think about what you want those links to say. In Chapter 16, I talk about how keywords in links are tremendously important. The position of a page in the search engines depends not only on the text within that page, but also on text on other pages that refer to that page — that is, the text in the links. In fact, even a link from a low PageRank page can bring real value, if it has good keywords in it.
Converting good links to bad
For instance, suppose your rodent-racing company is called Robertson Ellington. (These were the names of your first two racing rats, and they still have a special place in your heart. And you’ve always felt that the name has a distinguished ring to it.) You could ask people to give you links like this:
Robertson Ellington
Everything you ever wanted to know about rodent racing — rodent-racing schedules, directions to rodent-racing tracks, rodent-racing clubs, and anything else you can imagine related to rodent racing.
You got a few useful keywords into the description, but the text in the link itself (known as the anchor text) — Robertson Ellington — is the problem. The link text contains no keywords that count. Are people searching for Robertson Ellington, or are they searching for rodent racing?
A better strategy is to change the link to include keywords. Keep the blurb below the link, but change the link to something like this:
Rodent Racing — rats, stoats, mice, and all sorts of other rodent racing
The perfect link text
Here are some strategies for creating link (or anchor) text:
· Start the link with the primary keyword or keyword phrase.
· Add a few other keywords if you want.
· Perhaps repeat the primary keyword or keyword phrase once in the link.
You need to control the links as much as possible. You can do this a number of ways, but you won’t always be successful:
· Some sites provide Link to Us pages in their Web sites. If this makes sense for your site (it’s a site that lots of people are going to want to link to; see later in this chapter for the discussion of link bait) provide suggested links to your site — include the entire HTML tag so people can grab the information and drop it into their sites.
Remember that although links on logos and image buttons may be pretty, they don’t help you in the search engines as much as text links do. You can add ALT text to the image, but ALT text is probably not as valuable as link text. Some site owners now distribute HTML code that creates not only image links but also small text links right below the images.
· When you contact people and ask them for links, provide them with the actual link you’d like to use.
· As soon as someone tells you she has placed a link, check it to see whether the link says what you want. Immediately contact that person if it doesn’t. She is more likely to change the link at that point than weeks or months later.
· Use a link-checking tool occasionally to find out who is linking to you and to see how the link appears. If necessary, contact the other party and ask whether the link can be changed.
Whenever possible, you should define what a link pointing to your site looks like, rather than leave it up to the person who owns the other site. Of course, you can’t force someone to create links the way you want, but sometimes if you ask nicely … .
Always use the www. portion of your URL when creating links to your site: http://www.yourdomain.com and not just http://yourdomain.com. Search engines regard the two addresses as different, even though in most cases they are actually pointing to the same page. So if you use both URLs, you are, in effect, splitting the vote for your Web site. Search engines will see a lower link popularity. (See Chapter 16 for a discussion of how links are votes.)
Many sites use a 301 Redirect to point domain.com to the www.domain.com form. For instance, type google.com into your browser’s Location bar and press Enter. Where do you go? You go to www.google.com because Google’s server admins have “301’d” google.com towww.google.com. If you want to do this on your site, search for the term 301 redirect for instructions. Also, the Google Webmaster console (see Chapter 13) provides a way for you to tell Google to use www.yourdomain.com as the primary address for your site; select Site Settings on the Settings menu and you see the following option buttons:
· Don’t set a preferred domain
· Display urls as www.yourdomain.com
· Display urls as yourdomain.com
You want the middle option, of course. The Google Help text says that “If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead.”
Google does provide information about links to Web sites in another way; the associated Google Webmaster account (see Chapter 13). However, this is only information for the sites over which you have control. You can’t get information about competing sites, which is often very useful; you can find out how your competitors are beating you, and perhaps beat them at their own game.
Doing a Link Analysis
One of the first things you may want to do is find out who is already linking to your site. Or perhaps you’d like to know who is linking to your competitors’ sites. The following sections look at how you can find this information.
In theory, Google shows you links pointing to a particular URL. I explain this only because many people know about it, and thus someone at some point will probably tell you to use it. It’s pretty worthless, for two reasons:
· It shows links to a particular page, not to the entire site.
· It shows some of the links to the page, not all.
You have two ways to use this Google search syntax. The Google Toolbar has a Backward Links command; open the home page of the site you want to analyze, click the PageRank button on the toolbar (see Chapter 16), and then choose Backward Links from the drop-down list.
The other way is to simply search for link:domainname.com in Google or in the search box in the Google Toolbar. For instance, search for link:dummies.com, and, at the time of writing, Google returns 148 results.
These Google methods are not worth the energy you expend to type the command or select from the toolbar. I rarely use them because the information is pretty much useless.
Link popularity software
Numerous sophisticated link popularity software tools are available to run on your computer or as a Web service. However, most have a significant problem; for their data, they rely on information that is initially pulled from the major search engines.
Several take a different approach. Moz Open Site Explorer (www.opensiteexplorer.org), ahrefs Site Explorer (https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer), and MajesticSEO (www.majesticseo.com) have actually created their own indexes of Web pages, so that rather than asking the major search engines for data, they use their own indexes to find links pointing to your, or your competitor’s, site. Moz currently has an index of around 187 billion pages, while MajesticSEO and ahrefs have trillions.
Let’s look at http://dummies.com again. I found 148 links in pointing to dummies.com using the link:dummies.com syntax at Google, as noted earlier. How does that number compare with these three other systems?
· Google: 291
· Moz Open Site Explorer: 511
· ahrefs Site Explorer: 379,733
· MajesticSEO: 1,055,293 current; 2,682,427 including old, deleted links
So if you’re looking for the most data, Majestic is definitely the way to go; many people use Moz or ahrefs because they like specific features of those systems, or they find them easier to use, while still reporting a large number of links. If you want to try Majestic SEO, go towww.majesticseo.com and enter a domain name into the Site Explorer search box at the top of the page. Notice the Use Fresh Index and Use Historic Index option buttons. You’ll probably want to use the Fresh Index, which is the default. If you select the Historic Index, you’ll find many old links that no longer exist included in your report. (You are allowed to use it a few times per day before being forced to create an account.)
In Figure 17-1, you can see the first results page. Notice the menu bar immediately above the Trust Flow circle; these options help you find the different categories of information (more than most people need!). Here are some of the things you’ll find:
· Referring Domains: The number of domains that have Web pages linking to the analyzed domain, with a breakdown of how many are educational (.edu) domains and how many are governmental (.gov).
· External Backlinks: The number of links from other sites pointing to the domain you specified, with a breakdown of how many are images, how many are nofollow links, how many are educational and governmental, and so on.
· Top Backlinks: The links that MajesticSEO thinks are the most valuable.
· Top Referring Domains: A list of the domains with the most links pointing to the site.
· Top Pages: The most-linked-to pages on the site.
· Map: Shows where, geographically, links are coming from.
Figure 17-1: The first results page from MajesticSEO.
And that’s just the beginning. Create a full report to find details, and lots of them, including a full list of all the links pointing to the specified site, including where the links is placed, the link text, and the specific page that the link points to.
If you “verify” that you own your Web site (Majestic gives you a file to place in the root of your site), you get free reports about your own site. To check links to other sites, you have to pay. It may be worth signing up for a month to do a good link analysis of competitors.
In fact, one problem with this system, for inexperienced SEO people, is that it has so much data that you don’t know where to start. So, what is important? Here’s what you should care about:
· Where do links come from? What sites are linking to yours, or your competitors? You can get ideas for where to ask for links to your site.
· What is the anchor text — the text in the links? Links with keywords are powerful. When analyzing competitors, for instance, you can often get an idea of how hard you have to work by seeing how well the links are keyworded; the more links with good keywords, the harder you have to work.
· How valuable are the linking pages? What PageRank do they have, for instance? (Majestic doesn’t use PageRank but has something similar called Citation Flow; it also has a TrustRank-type metric, Trust Flow.)
Generating Links, Step by Step
Here is a quick summary of various ways to get links; I explain them, and their advantages and disadvantages, in detail in the following sections:
· Register with search directories. The Open Directory Project and the specialty directories aren’t only important in their own right but often also provide links that other search engines read.
· Ask friends and family. Get everyone you know to add a link.
· Ask employees. Ask employees to mention you.
· Contact association sites. Contact any professional or business association of which you’re a member and ask for a link.
· Contact manufacturers’ Web sites. Ask the manufacturers of any products you sell to place a link on their sites.
· Contact companies you do business with. Get on their client lists.
· Ask to be a featured client. I’ve seen sites get high PageRank by being linked to from sites that feature them.
· Submit to announcement sites and newsletters. This includes sites such as URLwire (www.urlwire.com).
· Promote something on your site. If you have something really useful, let people know about it!
· Find sites linking to your competition. If other sites link to your competition, they may link to you, too.
· Ask other sites for links. During your online travels, you may stumble across sites that really should mention your site, as a benefit to their visitors.
· Search for keyword add url. You can find sites with links pages this way.
· Contact e-mail newsletters. Find appropriate e-mail newsletters and send them information about your site.
· Mention your site in discussion groups. Leave messages about your site in appropriate forums, with links to the site.
· Promote to blogs. Blog sites are often well indexed by search engines.
· Pursue offline PR. Getting mentioned in print often translates into being mentioned on the Web.
· Give away content. If you have lots of content, syndicate it.
· Apply for online awards. Sign up for site awards.
· Advertise. Sometimes ads provide useful links.
· Use a service or buy links. Many companies sell links; Google doesn’t like this, but at the same time has encouraged it for many years.
· Just wait. Eventually links will appear, but you must prime the pump first.
I’m going to mention a few more things, although these methods are in decline or simply don’t work anymore.
· Send press releases. Sending press releases, even if distributed through the free systems, used to work incredibly well.
· Make reciprocal link requests. Asking other site owners to link to you, in exchange for a link to them, was popular for years.
· Respond to reciprocal link requests. Eventually, other people will start asking you to link swap, perhaps.
· Use link-building software and services. Try using a link-exchange program or service to speed up the process.
These link-building strategies are ranked by priority in a very general way. One of the first things you should do is to ask friends and family for links and one of the last is to wait. However, in between these strategies, the priority varies from business to business, or person to person. You may feel that a strategy lower on this list is important to do right away.
The next sections look at each of these link-generation methods. But before I start … how quickly should you create these links? Some in the SEO business believe that links shouldn’t be created too fast because a sudden huge increase in links to your site looks unnatural. Imagine a situation in which your site gets a link or two a month and then suddenly starts getting several thousand a month — that might suggest something odd going on, eh?
I can’t give you a number; I can’t say “never create more than x links a month,” or “y links a week are far too many.” It all depends. It depends on what your site has been doing in the past and how many links it already has. If Wikipedia got a thousand links one day, this might not be at all out of the ordinary. If you got 1,000 links one day, it might be unreasonable. (Wikipedia has literally billions of links pointing to it, so actually 1,000 a day is probably nothing.) Just keep in mind that too fast may look suspicious to the search engines.
Register with search directories
In Chapter 14, I discuss getting links from directories, the Open Directory Project and specialty directories. Links from directories are important not only because people can find you when searching at the various directories but also because search engines often spider these directories.
Google, for instance, still includes hundreds of thousands of Open Directory Project pages, and thousands of different specialty directories. These links are highly relevant because they’re categorized within the directories; as you find out in Chapter 16, the search engines like relevant links. Therefore, if you haven’t registered with the directories, consider that the first step in your link campaign.
Ask friends and family
Ask everyone you know to give you a link. Many people now have their own Web sites or blogs, Facebook pages, and LinkedIn accounts. Ask everyone you can think of to mention your site. Send all of them a short e-mail detailing what you’d like them to say. You may want to create a little bit of HTML that they can paste straight into their pages. If you do this, you get to control the link text to ensure that it has keywords in it: The best darn rodent racing site on the Web, for instance, rather than Click here to visit my friend’s site.
Ask employees
Employees often provide, by accident, a significant number of links back to their employer’s Web site. In particular, employees often mention their employer in discussion groups that get picked up by the search engines. So why not send an e-mail to all your employees, asking them to link to the company’s site from their sites, blogs, and various social-networking sites, and to mention you in discussion groups? Again, you might give them a piece of HTML that includes an embedded logo.
Also, ask them to always use a signature with the link when posting to Web-based discussion groups.
Of course, some employers don’t want their employees talking about them in discussion groups because they’re scared about what the employees will say. If that’s your situation, I can’t do much to help you, except suggest that you read Figuring Out Why Your Employees Hate You For Dummies, by I. M. N. Ogre.
Contact association sites
Association sites are a much-overlooked source of free and useful links. Contact any professional or business association of which you’re a member and ask for a link. Are you in the local Better Business Bureau, the Lions Club, or Rotary Club? How about the Rodent Lovers Association of America, or the Association for Professional Rodent Competitions? Many such sites have member directories and may even have special links pages for their members’ Web sites.
Contact manufacturers’ Web sites
Another overlooked source of links is manufacturers’ Web sites. If you sell products, ask manufacturers to place link from their sites to yours. I know one business that sold several million dollars’ worth of a particular toy that it got from a single retailer. For several years, the company was the primary seller of the product referenced by the retailer, which at the time didn’t sell directly to consumers; the link brought the retailer most of its business at the time. The manufacturer is a well-known national company that gets plenty of traffic, and the manufacturer’s Web site had a PageRank of 6 on its main page. (See Chapter 16 to see why that’s impressive.) The link to the retailer was on the manufacturer’s home page, so not only did the link bring plenty of business, but it also got plenty of attention from the search engines.
Contact companies you do business with
Many companies maintain client lists. Check with all the firms you do business with and make sure that you’re on their lists.
Ask to be a featured client
While looking at a competitor’s Web site for a client, I noticed that the competing site had a surprisingly high PageRank even though it was a small site that appeared to be linked to from only one place, www.inman.com, which is a site that syndicates content to real estate sites. It turned out that the competitor was linked to directly from one of Inman’s highest PageRanked pages. Inman was using the client as an example of one of its customers.
If you’re using someone’s services — for Web hosting, e-mail services, syndication services, or whatever — you may want to contact the site and ask whether you can be the featured client. Hey, someone’s going to be, so it may as well be you.
Submit to announcement sites and newsletters
There used to be scores of “announcement” services, Web sites and newsletters that published information about new Web sites. Most have gone.
The only one I’m aware of now is URLwire (www.urlwire.com). This service, which has been around since the beginning of the Web, claims to have more than 125,000 readers, of whom 6,500 are journalists and site reviewers who get the e-mail newsletter. It costs $495 (and has foryears), but the impact can be significant, if you can get accepted. (It doesn’t take just anyone; you have to have a good story.) Not only do you get a link from a page with a PageRank of 5, but you probably also get picked up by many other sites and newsletters. (URLWire uses nofollow links for keyworded links, but follow links for the URL link to your site.)
Create a little linkbait
One of the most powerful link-building techniques is to place something very useful on your site and then make sure that everyone knows about it. I’ve included a little story in the “How links build links” sidebar at the end of this chapter. It shows how links can accumulate — how, in the right conditions, one link leads to another, which leads to another, and so on. In this true story, the site had something that many people really liked — a directory of glossaries and technical dictionaries. The site eventually garnered around 200,000, all because the site owner provided something people really wanted and appreciated.
This is something known these days as linkbait — something so valuable to others that they link to it. It can be something fun, something useful, something weird, something exciting, something cool, or something important. Just something that provides so much value to other people that they link to it from their blogs and Web sites, from social-media accounts and within discussion forums; something they want to tell others about. Matt Cutts, well-known SEO blogger and Google employee (see Chapter 23), defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”
Find sites linking to your competition
If a site links to your competition, it may be willing to link to you, too. Find out who links to competing sites and then ask them if they can link to yours. In some cases, the links are link-exchange links (which I look at in the later section, “Make reciprocal link requests”), but in many cases, they’re just sites that provide useful information to their readers. If your site is useful in some way, you’ve got a good chance of being listed.
On the other hand, when you do a link analysis on your competitors, you’ll often find that many of the links are purchased links, which I talk about later in this chapter, in the “Use a service or buy links” section.
Asking for the link
When you find sites linking to your competitors, you discover that some of them may be appropriate for a link to yours; directories of products or sites, for instance, may want to include you. So how do you ask for the link? Nicely. Send an informal, chatty message. Don’t make it sound like some kind of form letter that half a billion other people have received. This should be a personal contact between a real person (you) and another real person (the other site’s owner or manager). Give this person a reason to link to your site. Explain what your site does and why it would be of use to the other site’s visitors. Yes, this can be time consuming. Nobody I’ve ever met said that link building is easy.
Ask other sites for links
During your travels online, you’ll run across sites that provide lists of links for visitors — maybe your site should be listed, too. For instance, while working for a client that had a site related to a particular disease, I found sites that had short lists of links to sites about that disease. Obviously, my client should also have been in those lists.
Approach these sites the same way you approach the sites linking to your competitors: Send an informal note asking for a link.
Don’t forget the blogs, by the way. Blogs exist on virtually any subject, and most bloggers provide links to sites they like, often in the “blog roll” or “favorite sites” box on one side of every page on the blog.
Search for keyword “add url”
Go to Google and search for something like this:
"rodent racing" + "add url"
Google searches for all the pages with the term rodent racing and the term add url. You find sites that are related to your subject and have pages on which you can add links, as shown in Figure 17-2. (For some inexplicable reason, you don’t find much with “rodent racing” +“add url”but you find plenty with, for instance, “boating” +“add url” or “psychology” +“add url”.)
Figure 17-2: Searching for a keyword or keyword phrase along with +"add url" uncovers sites that are just waiting for you to add a link to your site.
You can also try these searches:
"rodent racing" + "add a url"
"rodent racing" + "add link"
"rodent racing" + "add a link"
"rodent racing" + "add site"
"rodent racing" + "add a site"
"rodent racing" + "suggest url"
"rodent racing" + "suggest a url"
"rodent racing" + "suggest link"
"rodent racing" + "suggest a link"
"rodent racing" + "suggest site"
"rodent racing" + "suggest a site"
However, these aren’t always high-quality links. Generally, the search engines don’t really like this sort of linking, and the word on the street is that links from such pages probably don’t have the same value that you get from links that are personally placed. On the other hand, they may be easy to get; it’s a tradeoff. Often the pages that appear are directory pages; some may be valuable, some not.
Mention your site in discussion groups
Search engines index many Web-based discussion groups. Whenever you leave a message in the discussion group, make sure that you use a message signature that has a link to your site and also include the link in the message itself.
Sometimes URLs in messages and signatures are read as links, and sometimes they aren’t. If you type http://www.yourdomain.com in a message, the software processing the message can handle the URL in one of two ways:
· It can enter the URL into the page as simple text.
· It can convert the URL to a true HTML link (<A HREF=" http://www.yourdomain.com"> http://www.yourdomain.com/ </A>).
If the URL is not converted to a true link, it won’t be regarded as a link by the search engines.
Another strategy is often employed with discussion groups. Seek out questions that you can answer, answer them, and put keyworded links in your message. For instance, say you have a rodent-racing site; you dig around in the rodent-racing forums, answering questions when possible. Someone asks about where to find scores from recent races, and you respond by saying something like, “Well, I may be biased, but I think my site is the best place to find rodent-racing scores!” (putting a link on rodent-racing scores, of course. Have I mentioned how important keywords in links are?). Don’t be pushy and don’t just post ads. Provide value in your answers, and (usually) nobody will mind.
Now, a couple of things to consider. First, many discussion groups create nofollow links (see Chapter 16) in posts; on the other hand, many don’t. So you’ll get search engine value from many of the links, perhaps even most, but not all.
However, you may get indirect search engine value from the nofollow links, too. Many of these discussion groups will turn up when people search, so even if someone searches and doesn’t find your site, he may find the discussion group and then click the link to your site.
Working with blogs
The Internet holds literally billions of blog pages, and some of them have to be related to the subject served by your Web site. Many blogs allow visitors to respond, and in fact you may find services offering to post responses into blogs for you as a way to create links back to your site.
Don’t bother. Apart from the fact that most of these services pollute the blogs with meaningless, worthless messages, most blog software uses nofollow links, so you won’t get any value from them.
The best way to work with blogs is to find something the bloggers may be interested in, some kind of PR-story hook, and get them to write about your site.
Pursue offline PR
Getting mentioned in print often translates into being mentioned on the Web. If you can get publications to write about and review your site, not only do many people see the link in print — and perhaps visit your site — but often your link ends up online in a Web version of the article.
Give away content
Many companies have vast quantities of content on their Web sites. It’s just sitting there, available to anyone who visits. So why not take the content to the visitors before they reach your site? Placing the content on other Web sites is a powerful way not only to build links back to your site but also to get your name out there — to “brand” yourself or your company. I look at this topic in more detail in Chapter 18.
Apply for online awards
This used to be a very popular technique, and there were many award sites. It’s much less common these days, but I still do see people touting awards they’ve received now and then; if you get a reward, there’s a good chance that the site giving the reward has linked to you.
Advertise
You may want to consider advertising in order to get links to your site. However, you need to consider a couple of issues first:
· Advertising is often grossly overpriced. It may be much too expensive to justify just for a link.
· Advertising links often don’t count as links to your site. Rather, they’re links to the advertising company, which runs a program that forwards the visitor’s browser to your site. Search engines won’t see the link as a link to your site, or will give the link no value if they recognize it as an advertising link. (See Chapter 16 for more information.)
In some cases, buying ads on a site to get a link does make sense. For instance, if many of your clients visit a particular Web site and you can get a low-cost ad on that site, buying an ad to both brand your company and to get a link that the search engines can read may be worthwhile. And remember that it’s a very relevant link because it comes from a site that’s important to your business.
Use a service or buy links
I can’t stress enough that link campaigns can be very laborious, tedious, and time consuming. That’s why many people decide they are better off paying someone to perform the work. Some of these services simply run a link-acquisition campaign for you. Others already have an inventory of ad space on thousands of sites and charge you to place a link on a set number.
One company I’ve seen is selling almost 800 links for $30 per month. Another company I’ve seen claims that it can put links on 250 sites for $99. Some companies sell links from pages of a particular PageRank, too. One company, for instance, claims to be able to sell you a link on a PageRank 8 site for $799. (A PageRank 4 page is just $29.)
The vote from a page is shared among all the pages it links to, so the more ads that are sold, the less the value of each ad. You should know exactly what page the link will be placed on, and you should be able to view the page. Consider buying links as a form of advertising that should be evaluated as such. How much of an impact will the ad have on bringing more visitors to your site?
Many, many companies are doing this sort of work. You can find them by searching online (search for buy links, text links, purchase links, link popularity, and link building at a major search engine) or in the freelancer sites, such as Guru.com, eLance.com, and oDesk.com.
Make sure that you understand what you’re getting into. As you’ve seen, you can use many methods to get links to a site, but they don’t all provide the same value. Are you working with a company that can find good links from popular sites that are relevant to yours or a company that uses an automated link-exchange tool to gather links from anywhere it can? There’s a real difference! Also, are the links on pages that are actually indexed? In recent years, Google has targeted link “networks” to knock them out of business; such companies are effectively banned from Google, and thus links they places are never seen by that search engine.
Caution! Google doesn’t like purchased links!
It’s important to understand that Google doesn’t like purchased links. In fact, none of the major search engines would be pleased to know that you were buying links pointing to your site. Google even encourages people to report paid links (seewww.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks).
On the other hand, the major search engines have actually (albeit indirectly) encouraged link buying for years. How? Many high-ranking sites succeeded thanks to the purchase of links!
In the past, it was very common, when analyzing clients’ competitors, for me to find that the competitors were ranking well thanks to a few hundred, or maybe thousand, purchased links.
That’s why people bought links in the past: Because it worked! Furthermore, it’s hard for search engines to deal with this problem for a couple of reasons. First, how do search engines know the link is purchased? Yes, there are highly automated systems that place purchased links, and the search engines may be able to find a signature — some kind of characteristic that identifies the link as purchased; over the past few years, Google in particular has become really good at identifying sites selling links. However, how will a search engine know whether you ask Fred over at ReallyFastRodents.com, “Fred, if I give you $20 a month, will you link to my site?”
Additionally, if the search engines penalize site owners for purchasing links pointing to their sites — well, how much is it worth to you to push your competitor out of the search engines? Sure, you may be too ethical to play this game, but plenty of people aren’t. So, say you’re tired of seeing ReallyRapidRodents.com ranking above your rodent-racing site month after month. Perhaps you could buy a bunch of links pointing to his site, report him to Google, and see Google drop him from the search engine. Therefore, search engines have to be very careful about penalizing sites for buying links. The more likely scenario is that when search engines identify the links as purchased, they downgrade or ignore them, not penalize the referenced site.
Just wait
I’m not really recommending that you sit and wait as a way to build links, but if you’re doing lots of other things asking everyone you know for links, getting mentioned in papers and magazines, contacting e-mail newsletters to do product giveaways, and so on — you’ll gather links anyway. You’ve got to prime the pump first; then, things seem to just take off.
Fuggetaboutit
Don’t bother getting links in guest books, Free for All pages, and link farms, for the following reasons:
· Many Web sites contain guest book pages, and one early link-building technique was to add a link to your Web site in every guest book you could find. The search engines know all about this technique, so although many guest books are indexed, links from them probably have very little value in most search engines.
· Free for All (FFA) pages are automated directories that you can add a link to. They bring virtually no traffic to your site, are a great way to generate a lot of spam (when you register, you have to provide an e-mail address), and don’t help you in the search engines.
· Link farms are highly automated link-exchange systems designed to generate thousands of links very quickly. Don’t get involved with link farms. Not only can they not help you, but also, if you link to one or host one on your site, you may be penalized in the search engines.
Search engines don’t like these kinds of things, so save your time, energy, and money. There are a few more things that worked incredibly well in the past, but not so much today.
Send press releases
Press releases were once a very popular way to create links, and they worked incredibly well. They’ve fallen out of favor, though, because Matt Cutts of Google (see Chapter 23) has stated that you shouldn’t expect to get ranking help in the search engines from releases. There’s also a persistent (but apparently unfounded) rumor that doing press releases can get your site penalized. I’ve seen this mentioned in various blogs, but the authors either don’t say why they believe this, or link to other pages that also don’t provide evidence that it’s true.
I can’t think of a good reason why the search engines would penalize anyone for doing press releases, but I can think of good reasons why they would devalue any links that appear in the releases. Thus, it’s possible that if Google, for instance, finds a follow link in press release on a press-release site, it’s not going to give that link any value; if Google can recognize a press release on a non-release site, the links in the release also won’t have any value.
Make reciprocal link requests
A reciprocal link is one that you obtain in exchange for another. (It’s often also referred to as a link exchange.) You ask site owners and managers to link to your site, and you in turn promise to link to theirs.
In theory, reciprocal linking helps you in several ways:
· The search engines see nice, keyworded links coming into your site from appropriate, relevant sites.
· You link to appropriate, relevant sites, too. (In Chapter 16, I discuss the concept of hubs or value networks.)
· You may get some traffic through the links themselves (though I doubt you’ll get much).
Reciprocal linking is different from asking to be added to a list, although plenty of overlap exists. With the latter, you don’t need to offer a link in exchange because the link list is a service to the other site’s visitors. However, sometimes site owners respond with, “Sure, but will you link to us, too?” In this case, you’ve just found yourself in a reciprocal linking position.
Before I go further, though, I need to address a couple issues. First, you may hear that reciprocal linking can get your site penalized — is that true?
If reciprocal linking caused Google to penalize sites, half the Web would disappear. If it’s true, why does Google index so many reciprocally linked pages? Why do sites that use reciprocal linking often rank so high? In addition, why would search engines penalize people for using a technique that they have in effect encouraged over the years — a technique so common that, for good or bad, it’s part of the landscape of the Web?
Which brings me to the next major question: Does reciprocal linking actually work? My answer is, it certainly used to work, and work well … but these days, it has very little value, if any. Reciprocal linking was truly powerful a few years ago; I’ve seen sites rank first on Google in very competitive markets, based almost entirely on reciprocal linking (and, by the way, at a time when many in the SEO business were saying that reciprocal linking didn’t work!).
I wouldn’t bother with reciprocal linking today. The only reason I’m mentioning it is that you may still run into reciprocal linking requests.
Also, one of the bad things about traditional reciprocal linking is the link page, pages stacked with link after link. Some reciprocal linkers use a more reasoned approach; although they still do link exchanges, they spread the links around the site rather than just dump them onto link pages.
You’ve undoubtedly seen links pages all over the place — pages with titles such as “Useful Links,” “Useful Resources,” “Visit Our Friends,” and so on. These pages never generated much traffic to the referenced Web sites, even in the height of the reciprocal-linking days.
Links pages have the following problems:
· Search engines downgrade links from such pages. A link from an ordinary page is likely to be more valuable than a link from a links page.
· Links pages often have dozens or even hundreds of links on them. Remember that the more links on a page, the lower the vote for each outgoing link.
If you want to do a little reciprocal linking — perhaps with friends who own sites — the ideal situation would be to
· Scatter links to other sites around your site in locations that make sense.
· Encourage site owners linking back to you to do the same. Start educating the other sites you work with! (In fact, tell them to run out and buy this book; better still, tell them to buy ten copies of this book for colleagues, friends, and family.)
· Avoid having large numbers of links on one page.
Three-way and four-way linking
You may also run into a more complicated form of reciprocal linking. The idea is that instead of linking from site A to site B and back from site B to site A, you create a three- or four-way link, as shown in Figure 17-3. (You may actually see this described as a one-way link exchange, but it’s the same concept; the site you link to doesn’t link back.)
Figure 17-3: Traditional reciprocal linking (top left). Three- and four-way linking is probably more beneficial.
It’s easy for the search engines to recognize reciprocal linking. If a search engine sees a link from one site to another and then sees a link coming back, there’s a good chance it’s a reciprocal link. (I’m sure it’s more complicated than this, but the basic principle remains. For instance, does the site have lots of outgoing links, to sites that link back, on the same page?) So it’s pretty easy for search engines to recognize reciprocal linking, and because they’re aware that such linking is used as an artificial way to boost ranking, they can lower the value of these links.
Say, however, you have a large collection of sites that want to trade links. Rather than have every site link to every other, you might try a more complicated structure where site A links to B, B links to C, and C links back to A, as shown in Figure 17-3. Instead of getting two incoming links, each site only gets one, but it’s probably of more value because it’s not so obviously a reciprocal link. Or maybe you link site A to B, B to C, C to D, and D to A. In this case, each site gets one link instead of three, but again, the links are likely to be more valuable than simple A-to-B-to-A reciprocal links. Some companies that perform SEO work for large numbers of clients use this technique; for example, some companies with a large number of hosting and Web development clients link between client sites, but not reciprocally. There are also some services that provide three-way linking, but not many, thanks partly to the software complexities involved in managing a three-way process.
Be Careful Whom You Link To!
In general, links to your site can’t hurt you. The link may have no value, but it’s unlikely to lead to some kind of penalty. It’s with outgoing links — links from your site to other sites — that people sometimes get themselves into trouble. There are essentially two ways people cause problems:
· In attempts to get incoming links, they sign up with some kind of Free for All program or link farm. To be part of one of these programs, they have to link to other sites in the program, thus showing the search engines that they are in fact taking part in such link games. As Google puts it, you shouldn’t link to “bad neighborhoods.”
· They sign up with a program to sell links to other Web sites on their Web pages. The search engines are getting much better at recognizing this kind of thing, and may penalize the owner of the site selling the links.
How links build links
I want to share a story that provides a wonderful illustration of how a link campaign can work. It shows how you can build links, PageRank, and traffic, all at the same time, the old-fashioned way, using link bait. I found this story in one of WebmasterWorld’s discussion groups a few years ago. As the author of the post put it, you should remember how the “Internet started and what it was supposed to be all about: sharing information.” The search engines want you to remember this, too.
The story is about an Aussie called Woz. Once upon a time, Woz had a site called Glossarist (it’s gone now — this was a long time ago), a directory of glossaries and topical dictionaries. This was a hobby for Woz, and he had done little to promote the site. However, one sunny day — July 26, 2003 — he noticed a 4,000 percent increase in traffic. (For the math challenged among you, traffic on that day was 40 times greater than the day before!) The site had been mentioned in the ResearchBuzz e-mail newsletter and Web site (www.researchbuzz.com, which still is around), by the fairy godmother, Tara Calishain. Not surprisingly, ResearchBuzz is a resource for people interested in research. It’s the sort of site that would be interested in a directory of glossaries and topical dictionaries.
The very next day, a wonderfully bright and sunny day, Glossarist was picked up by The Scout Report (http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/ScoutReport/2001/scout-010727.html), which, perhaps a little more surprisingly, is a “weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators.”
Then on August 9, a really sunny day, the site was mentioned in USAToday.com’s Hot Sites (www.usatoday.com/tech/2001-08-09-hotsites.htm). I’ve had one of my sites mentioned in USA Today, and believe me, your traffic really spikes when that happens!
By the middle of August, Woz wuz able to identify links from over 200 sites — “libraries and student-resource pages from schools and universities, translation sites, business reference sites, writers sites, information architecture sites, and so on.” He also got a lot of traffic from newsletters that had been forwarded from subscribers to friends and colleagues. (Both ResearchBuzz and The Scout Report are very popular e-mail newsletters.) Not only did site owners find out about him through these e-mails, but many visitors also came to his site through the e-mail links.
All this publicity was great, providing his site with a lot of traffic through those links and making it more likely that his site would be found and indexed by search engines. It also boosted his site’s PageRank. By mid-August, the Glossarist PageRank had reached 3; by the end of August, it was 8, which is an excellent PageRank for a hobby site created by a single person without a marketing budget!
By the end of August, Woz had around 300 links. And, as Woz claims, he didn’t request a single one of these links. Today? Well, today, many years later, I checked using MajesticSEO and found that throughout the site’s history it had around 200,000 links, including more than 3,000 links from .edu and .gov Web sites.
Don’t underestimate the power of this kind of grass-roots promotion. It can be tremendously powerful. One link can set off a chain reaction, in the way that a single link in ResearchBuzz did.