Hi SEOmoz fans. I’m Paddy, I work at Distilled. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’re going to go through eight link building tips in eight minutes. I’ve just presented at MozCon, and we did 35 ways to get links in 35 minutes. This is a lot shorter, but hopefully you’ll get some good tips out of it.
So, number one, this is a little technique you can use to mine through your competitors backlinks and pull out the links which are good for you. So the process, you go to Open Site Explorer, put in your competitor’s URL, you can download an Excel file, put that Excel file into a Google custom search engine, then you can search for whatever you want. So you can search for guest posts, you can search for competition, you can search for sponsored links, you can find all of these really cool places your competitors have got links and average those guys as well and just piggyback off the back of their link building.
Number two: Go to Meetup.com and search for the word “blogger” and refine the results by your area, and you’ll find local bloggers meeting up in the same place. So you may find music bloggers, design bloggers, fashion bloggers. Instead of emailing all of those people, just go to the event. Go and meet them, say hello, buy them a drink, go and have dinner. It’s a much better way of building a relationship than just firing a bunch of emails out, and this is going to build a good long-term relationship with those guys.
Number three: Build good infographics quickly. Infogr.am is a really, really cool tool for uploading your own data. You can put headlines. You can create really pretty graphs. So without the need of a designer, you
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Category Archives: Link Building
17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid
by SEOMoz
If the last few months of ranking changes have shown me anything, it’s that poorly executed link building strategy that many of us call white hat can be more dangerous than black-hat strategies like buying links. As a result of well intentioned but short-sighted link building, many sites have seen significant drops in rankings and traffic. Whether you employ link building tactics that are black, white, or any shade of grey, you can do yourself a favor by avoiding the appearance of link spam.
It’s become very obvious that recent updates hit sites that had overly aggressive link profiles. The types of sites that were almost exclusively within what I called the “danger zone” in a post about one month before Penguin hit. Highly unnatural anchor text and low-quality links are highly correlated, but anchor text appears to have been the focus.
I was only partially correct, as the majority of cases appear to be devalued links rather than penalties. Going forward, the wise SEO would want to take note of the types of link spam to make sure that what they’re doing doesn’t look like a type of link spam. Google’s response to and attitude towards each type of link spam varies, but every link building method becomes more and more risky as you begin moving towards the danger zone.
1. Cleansing Domains
While not technically a form of link building, 301 “cleansing” domains are a dynamic of link manipulation that every SEO should understand. When you play the black hat game, you know the chance of getting burned is very real. Building links to a domain that redirects to a main domain is one traditionally safe way to quickly recover from Google actions like Penguin. While everyone else toils away attempting to remove scores of exact-match anchor text, the spammers
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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Tv6PixteaqQ/17-types-of-link-spam-to-avoid
7 Ways Links Cause Search Rank Changes
Based on the happenings over the past few weeks, and especially given that Google is sending warning messages about unnatural links to webmasters, it seems almost inevitable that the next great link building business scam will be promising to clean up linking messes for websites, so those sites will have a chance to get back in Google’s good graces.
Not all such businesses will be scams. It is possible to go through a process to “cleanse” a site of enough of the spammy links that the site can return to Google. Whether or not that site’s ranking returns is a whole different question.
My Site’s Ranking Tanked. What Happened?
Before making the decision to pursue the time consuming process of cleaning up “bad” links, it pays to understand the variety of potential reasons your site might have dropped in the rankings in the first place. Not all rankings drops have to do with your site’s links, and not all Google warning messages result in a ranking penalty or removal.
Google’s known about these unnatural links for years. All that’s new here is Google has decided to tell you about them, and good for them.
Google won’t tell you the exact URLs they think are unnatural, for reasons that you can kind of understand. They don’t want the link networks to know they’ve been caught until they have found as many different pages in the network as possible.
Here’s a summary of seven different occurrences that could explain a drop in your site’s rank.
1. Other Sites Gained Additional Legitimate High Trust Links to Help Their Content Outrank Yours
This is the most painful explanation to accept. Nobody cheated. You just don’t have the content quality that a competitor (or some other site) does.
To get
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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2170399/7-Ways-Links-Cause-Search-Rank-Changes
Building a Good Link Profile: Measure Twice, Cut Once
A prospect calls up and asks you to “do this search engine optimization thing” for their website. After checking their website against identified keywords and the competition, you check their link profile, only to find no links (or very few of them).
For whatever reason – whether it’s due to the website being brand new or having never been marketed – these guys are starting from scratch. But they want rankings now and SEO is the hot topic for the CEO/owner/whoever.
Sound familiar?
The best advice you can give these people is to slow down and be prudent.
What is a Link Profile?
It’s important to understand that search engines are trying to rank the best results that they can for their users. In this process, Google – especially – has put quite a bit of emphasis on trying to rank “big brand” websites. There’s a lot of debate on how this is determined, exactly, but one major factor is a website’s link profile.
A link profile is made up of:
The types of links to your website (sources such as directories, forums, news articles, press releases, social, etc.).
How these links were acquired (all at once, or slowly/steadily over time).
The anchor text (words used) in those links (perhaps the most important piece).
Building a Link Foundation: Getting Started
For any website just beginning to build its link profile – sites with no/few backlinks – it’s important to establish a sound foundation of links.
To start, reach out to partners/vendors, trade associations, local Chambers of Commerce, Better Business Bureau, business.com, and other “good” directories. Another way to get things off the ground is to send press releases with links to their website and use their company name in the anchor text of these links.
Above all, especially for a new website, it’s important to create great content that is link worthy,
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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2169465/Building-a-Good-Link-Profile-Measure-Twice-Cut-Once
The Noob Guide to Link Building
The Noob Guide to Online Marketing is arguably the greatest single post of all time. If you don’t agree, well, it’s at least my favorite. Oli Gardner (of Unbounce) displayed a playful writing style mixed with pixel perfect graphic design, and a GPS of a roadmap to take your site from mile marker zero to one hundred in six months. It’s nothing short of amazing.
While savvy content marketers realize that many of Oli’s tactics will naturally attract links, fledgling link builders got to the 63rd page and were still wondering what to do. With this companion piece, it is my goal to grab the baton from Oli and outline a six-month link building action plan for your brand or client’s new web property. Even if the website isn’t brand spanking new, that’s fine, what I really mean is that this is the link building plan for the less savvy looking to do dive into off page optimization. Marketers with long existing sites and more link building experience will be better served downloading the Complete Six-month Off Page SEO Gameplan from iAcquire.
Following this guide in concert with Oli’s you will identify your audience, build a list of prospects, plan and execute four successful pieces of content and convince influencers to create content for your site.
Since we last spoke I left Publicis Modem to become the Director of Inbound Marketing at iAcquire which is a technology-focused off page seo agency. I encourage you to read the “Quantifying Outreach” study that I released at LinkLove London wherein I examined nearly 300k outreach emails from both our own iRank platform and Buzzstream’s CRM software. The study will help you optimize
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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/FRXnvFwvi0M/the-noob-guide-to-link-building
Google Webmaster Tools Notice of Detected Unnatural Links
For years I have heard people say “buy links for your competitor and report them”, if it was really that easy and I’m guessing not illegal then we would all be doing it, wouldn’t we ?
Sometimes I sit at home at night and pretend I’m the Head of Google’s Spam Team, only I drink wine and not Sprite , and what would I do with competitor bowling and buying links in general, so here is what I think I would do.
a) Assemble a crack team of Googlers ( I guessing the real head of spam did this ), and create a list of guidelines to send out to 50,000 work at home raters and look for patterns. Things like bad content, over affiliated sites or sites just hitting out of their league, (say a 3 page site ranking top 10 for insurance or loans), sites that shouldn’t be in the top 10. The metrics are truly endless when you start looking into this, you only have to find a few positive signals, is this site is buying links and a quick hand review from any expert spam team or seo and they can tell.
So now I have a small section of sites that are seen to be are Selling links and all I need to do is collect all the sites that have out going SEO links and I have my maybe list of link buyers. Then all I need to do is find any correlation appearing on other sites (now my sellers list) and pretty soon I will find the networks.
Not all sites that sell links realise what they are actually doing. I have found many link placements for SEO value in sponsoring clubs and user groups or in paid offline advertising that’s going to get republished. I guess my job
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Article source: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/detected-unnatural-links.html
Internal Linking, the Other Linking
In a search marketing environment where linking is all the rage, we tend to forget that just as important are the links we maintain internally on our sites. What is the point of garnering a great inbound link profile if your site can hardly be traversed by a search engine or human visitor?
The problem with the world of linking is that we place too much time thinking externally. I, like many, ponder nofollow, follow, paid, non-paid, or who Google is threatening to penalize. But at the end of the day did we provide pathways (links) throughout our site for our content to be viewed from the masses we attained through a great inbound link profile? Probably not.
Internal linking is one of the easiest elements in SEO. Why? Because typically SEO has to pick a ratio of appeasing a user but also a search engine.
With internal linking, the better you do, you equally benefit the human element but also the crawling bot. So, let’s start making everyone happy.
For those of you well-versed in SEO, this is just a refresher as to what you probably have lost track of while worrying about inbound links, who the next JCPenney will be, or when you will reach your desired Domain Authority/Page Authority/PageRank and so on.
Making Search Engines Happy
- Have sitemaps: One of the oldest rules of SEO is to have a sitemap containing at least all top level pages linked from each page of your site. Follow this up with probably the second oldest rule of SEO: you should have an XML sitemap containing all URLs on the site. The may not seem like internal linking, but this actually is, in its rawest form.
- How do you link site-wide in navigation? You
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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2165167/Internal-Linking-the-Other-Linking
SEO: Avoid Link Building Shortcuts
There are no safe link building shortcuts. Instead I want to warn marketers about deceptive search marketers and the dangers of using “easy” link building tactics. In the latest instance, the search engine optimization community is abuzz with news that Home Depot’s SEO team has attempted to increase its link portfolio by potentially shady means. Last year, J.C. Penney and even Google’s own Chrome browser marketing site were reportedly penalized by Google Search for violating linking guidelines.
The temptation to manipulate rankings by acquiring links through unethical means is easy to understand: Links are the lifeblood of the Internet and a major factor in every major search engine’s ranking algorithms. In theory, more links means better rankings. In reality, the engines compile data across hundreds of factors algorithmically to determine rankings, and links are just one part. We’ll look at some link building tactics as examples of what not to do.
Know the Linking Guidelines
The first and easiest way to run afoul of linking guidelines is ignorance. Google in particular publishes its webmaster guidelines as a way to communicate what it considers ethical and unethical in its search algorithms. Google’s guidelines for links are very clear:
“Examples of link schemes can include:
- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (‘Link to me and I’ll link to you.’)
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank”
The guidelines are fairly broad. In practice, I use this check: If a linking opportunity seems too easy it’s probably in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. For example, many companies will offer to sell you 100 links for the low price of $50. Yes, these companies will sell you the links and they may even produce the links. However, the tactics they use will involve activities like
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Article source: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/3489-SEO-Avoid-Link-Building-Shortcuts
5 Must-Have SEO Skills
What kind of skills do search engine optimizers need to succeed in today’s marketplace? Should SEOs be siloed into doing just SEO and close themselves out from other marketing skills? Or should the new kind of SEO should be jack of all trades and also the master of all trades?
The modern day SEO should be an integrated SEO digital marketer – one who knows about on-page SEO and other integrated tactics.
Whether you’re considering working in the SEO industry, or you’re looking to hire an SEO, there are five must-have SEO skills. Let’s run through these five skills one by one and discuss why they are important.
Technical SEO
If you think SEO is all about keyword research and then wordsmithing (think stuffing) them on a page, then you’re in for a surprise. That’s not what it’s all about.
SEO is about making websites better at both the page and server level in a structured way to enhance their chances of being found on search engines, with the eventual goal of generating traffic and conversion.
Yes, knowing on-page optimization (e.g., title tags, alt tags, H1, copy optimization) is helpful but it’s more critical to understand the technical side of SEO, such as code. You can win your IT battles easily if you’re well-versed with technical SEO.
Go ahead and learn everything related to technical SEO, including server-side settings, sitemaps, server response codes, rewrites, and more.
Understanding both page-level optimization and server-level optimization is what makes a rounded SEO practitioner.
Social Media Marketing
Does a day go by when you don’t hear about social media? Not in this wired world.
Social media skills shouldn’t be limited to maintaining accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but actually driving traffic from social sites. Traffic generating exercises that can help you develop into a well-rounded SEO include
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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2145255/5-Must-Have-SEO-Skills
Building a Technical SEO Process
One of the biggest challenges many of my clients face is building the right SEO processes in place, so that any problems are quickly accounted for before they lead to bigger issues. Below are three things you should consider when trying to create a more streamlined process for making sure the technical foundation of the site is solid. Though none are considered “quick” or necessarily easy wins and can initially take a significant amount of time, ultimately in the long-run, they will help make monitoring the SEO on your site more efficient. This means less time spent identifying and fixing site issues and more time focusing on other aspects of SEO, like linkbuilding, developing a content strategy, etc… Overtime, the impact this will have on your site can result in high rewards.
1) Technical Annotations in Google Analytics
Currently, many of my clients with Google Analytics accounts either don’t include any annotations in Google Analytics, annotate only their email, PPC, social campaigns or use it to keep track of search engine algorithm changes (like Panda updates). However, the value of annotating any technical changes made to the site in Google Analytics creates a more efficient internal process.
Scenario 1: Let’s say that you have set up Google Alerts to alert you of any spikes and drops in traffic. Then, having technical changes annotated in Google Analytics makes it quicker and easier for you to specifically determine the cause of this spike or drop, instead of investing hours later on trying to determine the cause of these changes in traffic. In addition, any major technical issue runs the risk of being implemented improperly (in terms of SEO considerations), simply because there are so many issues to take into account.
Here is more information on how to setup a Google ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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