Archive for December, 2006

There’s a highly interesting thread going on at SEOmoz about what Google should officially say about the issue of buying text links.

Rand starts the thread out with comments about the nofollow tag and ends with what he feels Google should use as a written statement about buying text links. Rand thinks Google should say:

Honestly, if a relevant, high-quality link requires financial compensation to acquire, we have no problem with that. We may have an algorithmic preference for links that point to content without a monetary incentive, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find good links that need to be bought. However, we’re pretty darn good at evaluating who’s selling "PageRank" and who’s trying to manipulate us with their link schemes. When we see that, we’re going to do our best to discount it and oftentimes, that means removing a site’s ability to pass link juice. If you’re selling links, you should think about whether you’re giving those links a good, solid editorial review and adding value for your visitors, because that’s what we’re thinking about, too.

Later Danny comes in and give some good information, including:

In short, if you’re buying a link, nofollow is your way to tell Google you mean no harm. If you’re confident that the link is (1) not really a paid link they’d be worried about or (2) a paid link they won’t detect, go nuts. Don’t do nofollow. I can appreciate that there is a ton of gray area in terms of what’s a "paid" link out there, and I’ve written extensively on that topic and how I think Google is trying to put a genie back in the bottle. It was, of course, one of the exact issues I raised with Eric Schmidt earlier this year. But if you are buying links, specifically buying them, and you’re worried about Google, nofollow is in fact a far more elegant solution for the *purchaser* to demand than hoping Google will get the crap shoot of an algorithmic guess correct.

I do agree it would be better if they could just evaluate links, paid or not, and decide if the link seems good. And let’s not be foolish — they are doing some of this. Nofollow isn’t the perfect solution, and I do see much of what Google wants to shape as trying to conrol the link genie. But nofollow remains excellent advice for that nervous webmaster that wants to buy a link and not been seen as doing harm. I’m glad they have that condom to slip on.

Jims Thoughts:
If your site is selling a bunch of spammy links, and you are spotted (through a forumula, or by hand), you’ll surely loose your ability to pass link juice from your site.

If you’re buying links…buy them under the radar. If you are buying a lot of links from sites that are "over the radar", then put a no follow on them, and figure your value is the traffic you get for the price you pay…. your value might not be from any google juice.

Later Matt comes in and gives the ole official Google statement:

I think I’ve been straightforward on Google’s behalf: paid links should have a nofollow attribute. Other choices run the risk of losing trust with Google in various ways.

If you look like a link spammy SEO you might pay the price of poor rankings, lost rankings, or worse yet, the fate of Matt’s axe (reminds me to remove, or slap a no-follow, on a big link I bought for some site last month that got sandwitched between some other shady buyers….(sending email now)).

Rand quickly follows Matts comments with:

I would say that you’ve been consistent and direct, which are both admirable. I’m merely disagreeing with the logic behind your position. My point is simply that, to my mind, it seems illogical to ask webmasters to attach nofollow to links when the benefits of not doing so are high and the liklihood of being caught (if you’re intelligent about it) are relatively low.

I’m just hoping for a shift towards something like the fake quote I made for you above.

Later Robertk then poses the question of the year that I’d love Google to respond to:

If I paid money to Yahoo to review my site for listing in their directory, would that be considered a "paid link"? Money did change hands and without it, my site would not have been added to the directory. However, there is no guarantee the site will be listed.

So.. is it a bought link, one that Google would like me to ask Yahoo to add a "nofollow" to it, or am I okay to leave things as they are?

Gotta love grey areas.

There’s a lot of great information, questions, and debates there - check out Rands post about his Link Buying Practices.

Let me ask YOU - If you found a great page….let’s say it was relevant to your site, and that page had lots of backlinks to it, and you could get a paragraph of text added, with your link imbedded, and you knew that even if an engineer saw it they’d say "Hum….is that an ad?….is it relevant? Is it a quality trusted site that giving the link (non-bastardized, real backlinks)?…is the link going out to a site that can be trusted?….is this spam?….and you think you’d pass the test…but you had to pay someone $….would you nofollow it?

So I’m sure most of you have seen lots of bloggers doing the "5 things you didn’t know about me post" that’s also a "tag" game.  I believe this game was started by Jeff Pulver and it’s been working its way around to so many SEO bloggers that I just can’t name them all….Luckily, Michael Jensen started a tag tree showing the progress of this tag game.

I’ve been tagged by Graywolf, Stuntdubl, SEO4Fun, and SEO Igloo (btw, nice article on What to expect with Custom Web Design).

So here goes my 5 Things you didn’t know about Jim Boykin

1. Ever since Back to the Future came out, I’ve wanted a Delorean Car.  I keep watching ebay motors for Delorean’s (range from $14k - $45k)…but so far, all I’ve got is 3 Back to the Future car models….one day. And FYI, I’ve never owned a new car in my life.

2. I keep several bird feeders around the house, and I love watching the birds and squirrels with my 2 year old son Sam….kinda funny since as a kid we used to shoot squirrels behind my house (and eat squirrels too). I later turned into a hippy and don’t believe in shooting animals.

3. Between 93 and 98 I did 4 round trips around the country working mostly in national parks. I’ve been in every state except Hawaii. It was great fun, but I can also think of at least three times when I thought I was going to die during those travels, but luck was somehow there each time and as you can see, I’m still kicking.

4. I collect Famous People’s hair. Check this out. These are displayed in our Board Room at work. During our meetings I feel like we’re surrounded by some of the world greats.

5. I still work at least 80 hours each week….not that I have to, it’s just an addiction. I work at least an hour on the computer before I go to work, I work 8 hours at work, and I work most nights between 10pm and 2am. I sleep between 4 and 6 hours most night. I also work Sat and Sun about 10 hours each day.

I’m going to pull a Rand, and not nominate others…since I’m not sure who’s been tagged and who hasn’t.

I’m sure most of you heard about SEOmoz making changes in how they link out and the use of the nofollow. As Rand stated:

…It’s also an excellent time to talk about how bad outbound links can affect your website.

At SEOmoz, we’ve got 10K+ members with profiles, and a visible amount of those were linking to some naughty places (at least, enough to have it mentioned to me in person). Not just spam, but places that none of us who contribute here (or work here) would want to be associated with. The grapevine source basically said - unless you want all links at SEOmoz to lose their value (including those in the blog, on the recommended list, in articles, etc.), you should take care with who you link out to.

The new system will allow folks who contribute to still have those outbound links that pass value ..We’ll manually approve the folks who get moved into the "contributed a bunch of good stuff" pile so as to prevent linking out to nasty neighborhoods ..

Interesting, as this is the exact advice Matt gave back when he was talking about the no follow tag:

In an ideal world, nofollow would only be for untrusted links. Let’s take the example of a forum that wants to avoid linking to spam, but the same advice applies to wikis or any other web software. If an off-domain link is made by an anonymous or unauthenticated user, I’d use nofollow on that link. Once a user has done a certain number of posts/edits, or has been around for long enough to build up trust, then those nofollows could be removed and the links could be trusted. Anytime you have a user that you’d trust, there’s no need to use nofollow links.

I might have blown this off more back back when Matt first said this, but now I’m thinking he might have actually been giving some good advice (even if I do hate the nofollow tag) when thinking about the trust value of who you link to.

I know it’s been talked about in the past, but so often SEO’s get so focused on who they get backlinks from, that they overlook who they link out to.

Stuntdubl said it very well once in his post called "You’re Only as Smart, Sexy, Funny, and Trusted as the People You Link To"

Link to people that are more intelligent than yourself, and eventually people might actually believe that you’re smart too….

Don’t try to hoard your links, and don’t try to pimp your site out to people. Surround yourself with good people and learn from people smarter, sexier, funnier, and more trusted than yourself. Create resources, but give them some personality….

Martinibuster started a nice thread on webmasterworld back in August called "Could Your Link Neighborhood be a Nightmare on Elm Street?" where he states:

One of the most explicit rules handed down by search engines is the prohibition on linking to bad neighborhoods. Not bad neighbors, but the entire neighborhood. This implies that when you link to a website, you are linking to everyone else they are linking to.

and then asks:

Perhaps one of the troubling issues about defining a bad link neighbor is that a relevant site can be a bad neighbor, and some say that an irrelevant site can be a better neighbor. Oh my! What rules do we use to define the bad neighbors?

Tedster (who I was hanging out with just last night in NYC) then adds:

Another comment: how about looking at the percentage of reciprocal inbound links as an indicator — especially for well established domains. If a site approaches 100% reciprocals for IBLs, then I think it is a very questionable link partner.

Neuron also adds:

When I review a site to determine if it is worthy of me linking to it, the prime determinate of whether I should link to it, is who they are linking to.

If I see that the site links to 100 different Bali hotels or 100 casino sites, and when checking those sites that they too link willy-nilly to anyone and everyone, then that is a bad neighbor. ‘

yahoo.com has little relevancy to most of my sites but I’m very willing to link to yahoo because yahoo exercises discretion in who they link to, so does Google.

TrustRank is very much a backwards iteration of PageRank, it’s not who links to you that matters but who you link to. Can your links be trusted? Do you link to sites that link willy-nilly to all sorts of other sites without regard to who they link to?

In desperation for links people often swap links with sites that are also just as deperate for links. Another word for this is spam. If you do no exercise discretion in who you link to, then you (and your links) cannot be trusted. This incorporates you into a bad neighborhood.

Good neighbors are those that can be trusted. A bad neighborhood is where no one is trusted. If you’ll link to any site then you can’t be trusted, you are from a bad neighborhood.

Very wise words indeed.

Back in Dec of 2004 Bob Mutch was asking in the SEW forum questions about why one site he had just picked up had dipped in rankings, and GoogleGuy came in and offered some advice…ending with:

….Who you link to can affect your ranking. This site seemed to have a lot of links to a lot of very aggressive sites for a non-profit. I’d recommend that he remove all links to these aggressive sites, and then send an email to us requesting reinclusion.

So now let’s look at a couple of types of sites as far as styles of linking out:

1. The Dead End Site. This type of site doesn’t link out to anyone. I don’t want to say that there’s something wrong with this types of site….but I would say that I’m pretty sure that on average 9 out of the top 10 sites link out to other good related resources.

Some Dead End sites are SEO relics from ideas of a few years ago where there was a fear about "Leaking Pagerank"….but that was when Pagerank was a hugh ranking factor, and so lots of people wanted to horde thier pagerank….but wake up…it’s almost 2007 and fears of leaking pagerank need to be replaced with fears of trust levels and co citation.

2. The site who has a Link Trading section of their website (call it what you want, directory, resources, etc). Here is a site who links out to 300 websites on their "links pages" (and fyi, these links pages don’t have any outside links to them….near worthless). Now these 300 sites all link back to this guy from their crappy links pages (that don’t have any outside links to these pages that link to you…near worthless). So this site links out to 300 sites, and all 300 link back….doah! Do you think this looks natural in the eyes of the search engines, or does it have a big ole "kick me, I’m an SEO" flag on it?

Sure, you can be clever with this….there’s those who say "yea, but I only trade with other related sites"….well, that’s better than trading with unrelated sites….but there’s still some problems.

It’s worth also noting that google probably dates when they find someone linking to you as well….so if you link out to someone one day, and the next day they link back, how natural is that (hum…maybe I shouldn’t allow pingbacks in my comments). (tin foil theory?)

3. The Natural Site. This type of site has links out to trusted related sites. Some of those trusted sites also link back to this site on real pages (not from links pages, but on real content pages).

If you’re a regular reader of my blog you know I’m always saying how much I hate "links pages"….but mind you, I don’t feel that all reciprocal links are bad.  Think of it this way….who links to you is part of your neighborhood, who you link to is part of your neighborhood….who you trade links with is your closest neighborhood (you’re linking to each other…..so if you’re going to trade, ideally you’ll want to trade with those sites that are extremely relevant, and only with those site who link out to trusted sites as well (and have trusted backlinks).

Having a few reciprocal links is great…but having 100 links to other sites, where all 100 sites link back is not a good thing.

Solutions:
Ok…. so if Rand is worried about who he links to because he’s worried about his rankings, do you think you should be worried as well about who you link to too? Yea, you should! Let’s look at some simple solutions to finding and analyzing who you link to.

Use MSN’s linkfromdomain command to see who you’re linking to, or who a prospective link deal site is linking out to….this methods is OK.

Better yet, use the new/improved We Build Pages tool - The Forward Links Tool. Once you start this tool, just minimize the screen…let it run it course. After is loads the pages, and the title tags, and checks if it’s a recip link, (takes ~15 minutes to finish), it will then show you some nice summaries.

I ran www.jimboykin.com through this tool. It took 22 minutes to complete….but when it did it said

Summary:  426 forward links, 77 (18.1%) of which are reciprocated (if more than 50% of your links are reciprocal I’d start to worry…that’s not natural)

It then showed everywhere I was linking to (and thier title tags of those page) and if it was a reciprocal link or not, then gives nice list of all your reciprocal links and also a list of any error causing urls.

In browsing through the title tags of those I link out to, I can at least see an SEO theme in who I link to…but….there are many "off topic" sites I’m linking to as well….yea, and the way I have my blog set up with comments, that’s bound to happen…but if I ran webuildpages.com through, that’d be a different story….I’d be very fussy there on who I link to…and unless you run a blog too, you should be too.

If I were to browse through the title tags of the pages I linked out to, and I couldn’t guess what jimboykin.com was about, I’d be worried too (there should be a theme in the page you link to…the more focused, the better).

If I were linking out to bunch of error pages, it’d be a great time to clean that up.

If I wanted to know what specific page of mine was linking to any specific page of another site I could got to yahoo and type in link:http://www.that-site.com/the-page.htm site:jimboykin.com and I can find exactly what one of the pages on jimboykin.com was linking to that page in question.

Often the errors are false errors (many savvy bloggers stop auto checking of thier sites), but it’s worth it to click on them to double check.

Moral: The SEO of 2007 includes looking more closely at who you link to.

Think of who you link to……not only for your rankings….but for the trust your site might pass…and if you’re getting links from other sites, you might want to look at who else that site links to, and what co citation you’re putting your site in.

The Perfect Link is a Unicorn - By Jen  (Link Ninja in Training)

Finally, my stealth Ninja abilities have allowed me to infiltrate Jim Boykin’s blog. I have come here because there is something I feel you should know. I think it is best that you hear this from someone who has spent 40 hours a week for the past few months seeking the perfect link.

It does not exist.

That’s right, I am certain I hear SEO tempers flaring around the globe,. But as I have pursued that one perfect link that would earn me a coveted laser pointer from my Sensei’s prize closet, I have come to understand, that no link is perfect.

We had some fun at our Ninja Master’s expense recently looking at his golden links and offering up criticisms that many of us have gotten all too frequently in trainings, meetings, or early morning e-mails from him.

“Well, the backlinks are great but if you had used this anchor text instead…”
“The placement is good but if you added co-citation …”

To be fair the boss took it like a champ. But in this it occurred to me if we could find fault with my master’s links, the wisest of all Ninjas, then perhaps my quest for the perfect link is in vain, and that laser pointer will remain forever out of my grasp. No matter what link we get, if the backlinks are amazing, the title tags could use tweaking. If the relevance is perfect the Page Rank could be a little better. I said to him, “Even if by some miracle one of us did somehow find the “perfect link” I guarantee, you would show up in the morning with a new revelation that makes it flawed.”  Thus, is the nature of SEO.

However, perhaps it is that inherent nature of Internet Marketing that keeps me here. The unending quest to conquer what is essentially invincible. The ever changing world of Google and the Internet is the essence of what makes any of this thrilling. If the perfect link were in fact obtainable, there would be nothing more to learn, or master. If SEO was simple we wouldn’t be link Ninjas, we’d be link Monkeys and that’s no fun at all.
- Jen (Link Ninja in Training)

I was in my office today when I heard my sales manager (and Ninja) today on the phone (his office is next to mine, and he’s got a lould voice) at one point he raises his voice even more in exhaustion, saying something to the effect of:

"It’s not the number of links that matter, it’s all about the quality and neighborhood that effects your search engine rankings…if you’re looking for hundreds of links each month, I’ll send you over some links to sites where you can buy hundreds of crappy links on links pages….problem is, most of these will have no value at all when it comes to increasing your search engine rankings…"

So I’m in my office thinking "Good Job Chuck - You tell him!"…and I’m thinking also about the strongest subpage tool we’re using now as well, and how the links we’ve been getting now with this tool are from pages with lots of backlinks to the exact pages were our links are. (sorry the public tool has often exceeded use…it’s getting hammered this week).

Though I don’t spend much time actually writing emails requesting ads anymore (I’ve got 16 Ninjas who do that for us every day), I did send another few requests out on Sunday, and one one site I bought ads on 2 of his pages.

The first page was relevant to one of our clients, and that page had 69 links to that exact page, of those 4 were from .edu’s.

The second page I got from this site was relevant to another client and had over 3000 backlinks to that page, and of those 185 were .edu’s linking to that exact page.

My links were placed in the body copy, inside of the text, in the middle of sentences. They will also generate click through traffic.

I’d say that this one link would be worth more than 10,000 links from some crappy link package deal done by a company that specializes in selling "bulk" links.

If someone is so concerned with volume of links, go to google and search for things like "bulk links" or "link trade" or "link trading"…look at the paid ads over on the right side and find those promising hundreds or thousands of instant links, yea, here’s one - only $24.95 per month:

Instant Links from 10,500 Websites
Improve your search engine ranking

….maybe I should change the "Improve your search engine ranking" to "Flag your site as someone trying to artifically inflate your links…and get tons of spam to boot"

Like I’ve been saying recently - get links from pages that have backlinks to them. This guy’s 10,500 links I’m sure all come from pages that have no trust value (no outside backlinks to them), these pages I’m sure are clear links pages that don’t pass any real value. I’m also sure that the co-citation you’re putting yourself in will put your site in a neighborhood you don’t want to be in and will flag you as being an untrusted website. 

Think like a google engineer would - those PHD’s are pretty damn smart and simple link tricks are only a joke on you if think they have any value. Pressing buttons and getting 1000’s of links at once where any have any value is not going to happen. It’s not a numbers game, it really is a quality game.

> Dear webmaster,
> we are very interested in a linkxchange with your website.
>
> We could offer you a PR 6 page for your reciprocal link -
> http://www.online- texas- holdem- poker.net/glossary.html - we will place
> your link under the left menu on this page. Do you agree? If yes, then
> send us please the exact location where you could place our link.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jeremy CXXXXX (edited last name)

—————–

My Response:

Jeremy,
Sure, I can place you link on any of these pages:
www.jimboykin.com/what-a-links-page-should-not-look-like/
www.jimboykin.com/manual-vs-software-link-building-and-management/
www.jimboykin.com/links-within-content-linking-to-content-a-rant/
choose 1 and let me know.
Jim

Sometimes I just can’t help it.

Last week we released a handful of new SEO Tools, and updated some older SEO tools. One of these tools has quickly turned into my new favorite tools….the Strongest Subpages tool. (we’ve also got a private version that shows the top 100 subpages, and shows the title tags for those pages).

So why do I love this tool you ask?

Because you can find the best pages to get links from using this tool!

I spent some time today sending some ad request emails, and used this tool in the process.

If I found what appeared to be a great site, and one that I thought might give me some advertising space, I’d run the site through this tool to find the most powerful subpages and try to get ads on those pages.

Why? Well, for one, these are the pages that have been referenced the most, so the content on these pages must be of quality. Also, since these pages are often referenced, they probably get the most traffic, and thus click throughs as well.

Think about this….if you were google, and you wanted to not count crappy links pages, or pages with no value, then an easy filter would be "Don’t count any link that comes from any page that doesn’t have outside links to it".

If you’re getting a link from a page that no other site links to (beyond that site), what is the true trust of that page?

However, if you get a link from a subpage, that has lots of links to it, and your link is on that page, there’s outside trust flowing to that page.

If you’re getting links from pages that only has internal links to it, I doubt there’s much value in it.

I sealed a deal already from one of the sites I contacted today.

The first page I got an ad from had more backlinks than the sites homepage had (the homepage had ~300 outside backlinks to it, the most powerful subpage had over 2000 outside backlinks to it). This page was relevant to one of my clients, so I got an ad there.

They had another subpage that had close to 200 backlinks to it, and I had another client related to that topic, so I got another ad there.

I’d bet that these pages count a lot more than if I had gotten ads on pages that had no outside links to it. I bet they’ll also get some nice click throughs.