Between Stations » link building

Jumbo Shrimp

Julie — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:45:31 +0000

If all your title tags and meta-descriptions include how you’re ‘SEO friendly!’ and all that fluff, and your main means of promotion seems to be spammy footer tags in WordPress themes released under Creative Commons (meaning that someone’s not supposed to remove them), you probably pass about as much link value as my cat does (The PageRank over Fluff Protocol is not yet implemented).

But then, I am a known crankypants.

Political Search

Julie — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:40:26 +0000

Rolling into the three-decade long primary race, we have studies evaluating the search effectiveness of various US presidential candidates already.

One limiter of the study is that it seems to focus purely on PPC spend. I find some of what various candidates are doing from an organic perspective to be far more interesting. They’re all on all the social networks, YouTube, and Flickr, for instance, and then each candidate seems to have their own spins:

Mitt Romney has a blog, ostensibly by his brothers, on a subdomain. He’s also been using his domain since 2002, and hasn’t done anything limiting like add office or year to the domain — smart.
John Edwards has a freaking SPLASH PAGE. Ugh! But he uses wacky code to avoid having it indexed. Again, he’s using his ‘name’ domain, no wacky offices or years. Again, a blog. And nice rollover menu code.
Barack Obama is more of the same, only he’s added a UGC section over at my.barackobama.com. Nice.
Hillary Clinton, like John Edwards, has a dumb splash page with wacky code. Once in, it looks like she has a UGC section… but wait! DEAD LINK!!!! I’m also underwhelmed by her meta-description on a SERP.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on a dumb domain (JoinRudy2008.com, registered 2006, and not reusable if he doesn’t get it this round, or if he DOES and needs to be re-elected later). He’s got some nice ‘add these widgets to your blog!’ for quick link-building.
Sam Brownback officially makes me ask: WHAT IS WITH SPLASH PAGES THIS SEASON. Especially for a guy without a metric ton of name recognition. Interestingly, once you make it in, he’s got one of the cleaner designs and a text-driven home page — which most of the others just don’t.

Looking at bad political sites makes my head ache. I may go research nice places to go during the Republican Convention in 2008, happening right here in my home town of Minneapolis-St. Paul. I am SO going to be out of town, after having lived through the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I’ve had a full lifetime worth of Secret Service Agents preventing me from getting a coffee, thankyouverymuch.

Directories & The Sniff Test

Julie — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 18:04:33 +0000

I think any reasonably competent SEO has the good sense on how to tell if a directory is ‘good’ or ‘eh.’

Unfortunately, many of our clients, let alone non-clients who think they can’t afford SEO advice, don’t have the well-honed sense of smell. Nor should they be expected to — one of the advantages for a business owner in working with a full-time search engine marketer is that the SEO spends their professional life being a search geek. Most ‘normal’ business owners need to spend their time knowing the ins and outs of their business.

Here are a few warning signs about if that ‘directory’ is crap:

Are they indexed? I had someone ask me about submitting to a ‘directory’ that I was quickly able to determine wasn’t even indexed in Yahoo or Google. This is not the sign of hot traffic referral waiting to happen! The site: command is a good one for people wanting to get involved with their web site to learn.
Age of domain. Now, I know that a lot of normal people don’t know how to use whois, but it’s really quite simple. If the domain is fairly new and the directory isn’t associated with someone you’ve heard of, caveat emptor.
Request for reciprocal link. I recommend all suspicion of any reciprocal link request, but if this directory is prominent enough to drive traffic to you, why do they need you to link to them? In general, they’re going to have hundreds of outbound links, you probably have fewer. This means your link to them is likely more valuable than their link to you. So why bother?
Have you heard of them? If you haven’t heard of them, will your clients have heard of them? It won’t be a good source of traffic if no one uses them.

Out at SMX

Julie — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:09:41 +0000

I’m at SMX in Seattle this week, experiencing the magic of the Seattle weather and the oddities of my laptop’s battery. A few things I will expound on during my free time later:

why this conference’s food is currently winning the ‘conference prize’ for the recent past, excepting that of the MIMA Summit
Supplemental index
Duplicate content
Kneeling down to speak to Vanessa Fox
The complete weirdness of spending my weekend in a rustic northwoods cabin in Minnesota, followed by a stay in a faux-rustic Seattle hotel with ‘modern cabin’ themed furniture.

I am told that, at home, my little kitten is sad and lonely and is sleeping on my robe, as I now haven’t spent a night at home since Thursday.

SEO 12 Step Program: Rank-Checkers Anonymous

Julie — Wed, 02 May 2007 19:35:12 +0000

1. We admitted we were powerless over search engine rankings–that our obsession with Googling ourselves had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to high rankings.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as we understood Them.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our web sites.
5. Admitted to Google’s reinclusion request form, to ourselves and to our SEO the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have our SEO remove all these defects of web development.
7. Humbly asked Google to forgive our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all web pages we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such web pages wherever possible.
10. Continued to take link inventory and when we reciprocally linked with link farms admitted it and removed said links.
11. Sought through link-baiting and white hat methods to improve our conscious contact with Google, as we understood It, praying only for knowledge of Its will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to all web site owners, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

(with apologies to all AA members)

Paid Link Crackdown

Julie — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:01:07 +0000

It’s all over the place: Google is looking at ways to get bitchy about paid links and hidden links.

I hate hidden links, simply because playing games with CSS to hide links from users is a clear sign of some form of dumbassery occurring.

But paid links are a really messy area. There’s a billion comments in a billion forums right now pro-killing paid links, con killing paid links, etc. An argument is being made that when you buy directory links, such as Yahoo! Directory, you’re not paying for the link, but for having the link reviewed.

That strikes me as complete poo. You mean to tell me that it really costs Yahoo! $299 to ‘review’ my submission? Man, their reviewers must be pulling amazing hourly rate. I want to be a reviewer. I could sit at home with the cats and wear sweatpants all the time. I could bike all day and review all night while drinking beer and watching the Fox Reality Channel on cable.

The only way the $299 makes sense is if Yahoo! is in fact charging on the basis of the value of the link. Which, as we’re all aware, is the truth of the matter, or else none of us would ever pay the going rate.

Other types of paid links are similarly sticky. Text link brokerage is sort of sleazy — it’s rare that I see an example where brokered text links don’t look spammy on a site. But what of a paid review? Sure, most reviewers won’t give quality reviews just for the freebie or the cash, but everyone lies if they claim the gift or the $$ doesn’t make an impact. It’s a truism of public relations that schmoozing works.

I just feel like, of all the dodgy techniques to go after, paid links are both hard to justify the various nuances, and likely difficult to build into an algorithm. How about devaluing Squidoo and MySpace linking? That would be super-easy, and probably have more immediate merit.

Edit: One of the my favorite summaries to date: The Real Reason Google Doesn’t Like Paid Links. It suits my sense of tinfoil-hattery.

Can Local Search Replace Directories?

Julie — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 21:59:42 +0000

Understand: I think most major directories, at this point, suck.

Consider:

DMOZ: Mostly broken, and they’ve reached the volunteer organizational size where bizarrities and politics get in the way of either people who want to volunteer, or any of the volunteers being effective.
Yahoo!: Listings are by those who are paying for it. Editorial review is mostly ‘is this site really in this category?’ and ‘is this really a site?’
Business.com: Finicky that you not only be a business, but that you offer B2B services.
Everyone else: either still for-pay, or so minor as to be useless anyway.

These days, people paying to be in are doing it because they know it’s got SEO value, or they’re hoping it does. I’m suspicious of traffic stats to anyone but Yahoo!, given the semi-integration to Yahoo! Search that remains (although less as of late).

Local Search placement seems to be a place where there’s some gooshy Web 2.0 flavor that can be added that can do what directories used to claim to do, but even then didn’t necessarily. Ease of adding a business, even one that doesn’t do Yellow Pages, is easy. Editorial review, to date, is fairly limited.

For a lot of verticals, this could be something major. And the way real estate allocates, it could bump some of the dreadful AdSense farms found for some searches, way down.

My only concern is that should this evolution take place, monetization will go the way of Yahoo! Directory submission, and again pound the little providers.

Spring Break: Comment Spam Gone Wild!

Julie — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:15:03 +0000

In honor of Spring Break, we remind you why spam filters and comment moderation are blogger tools to cherish:

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I believe you will have a lot of exciting times ahead in your future with the web!
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tramadol http://tramadol3akak3.blogspot.com
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I believe you will have a lot of exciting times ahead in your future with the web!
carinsuranceonline http://car-insurance-online07.blogspot.com
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phentermine http://phentermine45akl7.blogspot.com
cialis http://cialis-3ak7d.blogspot.com
health insurance http://health1insurance1online1.blogspot.com
All the best!

All the best indeed. What baffles me about this approach is that as someone who has done e-mail marketing, if you’re at all smart you figure out what triggers spam filters. Given that there are some pretty predictable comment-spam standards for the big blogging softwares — and that comment moderation tends to be default to on rather than off for neophyte users — you’d think some of these clowns would actually, you know, try to link-spam one at a time. (Most of the set-defaults tend to trigger at two. I’d feel bad for pointing this out, but it is that obvious if you look in either WordPress or Blogger settings.)

This is why the Big Three created the nofollow standard to start with. I tend not to believe that even on some of the bigger sites (read: popular and ranking) that even slipping in one or two links at a time, though methodically, does all that much for overall performance of the site.

It’s far better to piss people off and create link-bait, in my mind. It’s also more fun!

Nostalgia: Web 2.0 is the Old Web

Julie — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:46:44 +0000

Every so often, I get nostalgic for Days Of Olde(tm) and the early days of the Web. Those magical days when the Web was all Webrings (invariably of people’s D-n-D characters), lists of CDs, and pictures of people’s cats. On GeoCities.

Then I consider several things:

In 1996, I wanted to move from Chicago to Minneapolis. I spent Mondays at the Borders on North Michigan reading the Sunday Star-Tribune for job ads. These days, it’s easy to be totally online with hunting.
Webrings DID invariably include people’s gaming characters.
The blink tag. Holy moly. I had to clean up instances of it even in 2000 when I was working on a major corporate portal. Blink was NEVER a good idea.
MySpace and LiveJournal are fundamentally GeoCities 2.0. You can find lots of “I’m listening to…” things (lists of CDs!) and pictures of people’s cats

Sometimes the whole notion of Web 2.0 cracks me up because in some ways, all Web 2.0 represents is a throwback to people making bizarrely-colored pages on GeoCities. This time, though, it comes with the phat broadband connection to allow for massive, poorly sized images of people’s cats. The inbound link algorithim really dates from something like a topical Webring, which explains why it’s so poorly suited to e-commerce. Web 2.0 is fundamentally about democratization of content — taking back control of the Web from corporations and the corporate shills (like myself) who co-opted it for commerce.

It will be interesting to see where business attempts to ‘use’ Web 2.0 go, and what some of this action means for the traditional link model. It certainly changes the process of SEO to be more about building trust. And possibly about providing more pictures of one’s cats: