Archive for February, 2007

Links as Pennies and Old Ben Franklin’s

I was just listening to Chuck (Sales and Mgt at WBP) on the phone with a prospective client. At one point he was explaining how it’s not all about the number of links that makes the difference, it’s the quality of those numbers that matters.

He used an analagy of something like this:

Links are like currency and coins. Not all coins are equal. 25 pennies (0.01 each) do not equal and old Ben Franklin ($100.00).

I about fell out of my seat laughing - it’s so true and that’s a great way to think about links!

I might add though….

"And a link that might be a penny to you, could be a $100.00 to someone else site, and vice versa."

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On my way home from work last night I was listening to Jim Croce’s "You Don’t mess around with Jim" and I started playing with the words, so this morning I spent a few minutes writing my rewording of this song.

Now I know Matt’s over in London at SES right now, so here’s a bit of advice for everyone there.

You Don’t Show Your Sites to Matt.

The blackhats got DaveN
The Whitehats they got Doug
And the Google Search Engine has Mr Matt Cutts
He’s a spam fightin’ son of a gun.
Yea he’s the public affairs saviour
a conference panelist and a blogger
And when Page and Brin get together at the plex
you know they all call Matt GoogleGuy, they confess.

And they say you don’t buy that link for juice
You don’t wear a hat that’s black
You don’t buy links without the ‘ole no follow
And you don’t show your sites to Matt

Well out to a SEO conference comes a newbie boy
He said he’s looking for man named Matt
He says he’s a PR buying boy, his name is Johnny McCoy
But at his company they call him Pagerank Zak
Yea he’s looking for this person known a GoogleGuy
He drinks sprite and touts a goatee that’s black
and last week he took all my rankings, and it may sound funny
But I’ve come to get my rankings back
And everybody say Zak, ohh, don’t you know

That you shouldn’t buy that link for juice
You don’t wear a hat that’s black
You don’t buy links without the ‘ole no follow
And you don’t show your sites to Matt

Well a hush fell over the conference room
When Johnny raised his hand and stood up on his seat
And when Matt’s analyzing was done
There wasn’t a site of Johnny’s that wasn’t banned
And Johnny knew he’d be tossed onto the street, woah.
Yea he was banned in several places
And he was supplimental’d in a couple more
And you better believe it turned into a horror story
When Pagerank Zak sunk to the floor, aw

Now they say you shouldn’t buy that link for juice
You don’t wear a hat that’s black
You don’t buy links without the ‘ole no follow
And you don’t show your sites to Matt

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oh, and stay tuned for the new Link Ninja Song coming out soon!

A majority of the leads we get at from webuildpages.com are from "new" websites which are seeking higher rankings in Google.  I don’t believe that for most new sites that they’ll see their ROI with our services for several years (but if you’ve got an old site you’ll see results from our type of SEO work "fast").

This is based on my belief that a huge majority of sites will not get into the top 30 of Google for competitive phrases without having been online for at least 2 years.

Because of this I’ll almost always pass on taking on clients who have "new" websites and are seeking SEO services and expect top 10 rankings for competitive phrases within a year.  

So I’ve created this post as a link that I can send to people who contact us seeking our SEO Services for thier new website.

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Reasons I won’t work with most new sites:

In my first month of blogging I once said that I like ‘em old, and added:

..in 98% of the cases, you’re not going to see any "competitive" rankings for what I believe to be 6 months to a year and a half.  Keep in mind that if your website is less than a year old, chances are you’ll see almost no traffic from Google, no matter what you do.

I also gave some reasons including:

Natural Link Growth.
Older sites have the advantage of gaining links within a community over the course of years.  New sites, unless they are spectacular and "of news" will not be able to even start to look into "fitting into the community" for a year or more (part sandbox - part Mike’s Filthy Linking Rich ideas). Google tends to like old established sites and trusts them more often over new sites.

The key is (gaining) links over time.

The older the site the more "natural" the more probable that it has experienced some type of "natural link growth" and that it’s potential is far more than any sites started after the site in question.

I later did a post where I spoke about telling a prospective client that I don’t want to work with their new website. When someone asks me about doing SEO link building services for them I first ask:

"How old is your website", and then I cross it with this wbp backlink tool, or I’ll use the Cool SEO Tool. (to check their site againt the top 10 for phrases they’re targeting).

In October I also posted about Google Ranking Filters: Trust and Age Factors, where I stated:

If I were handed 2 sites, and I had to vote for which one has the best changes for highest ranking:

Choice 1 - site registered in Aug 2005 with 10K of great backlinks.

Choice 2 - site registed in August 1997 with 1k of great backlinks

I’d easily bet on Choice #2 beating the 2005 website - even if they both had great backlinks.

Find out why by reading that post.

I also spoke more on this in my post about historical importance of backlinks, which talks a bit about Google’s patent on this topic as well.

WeBuildPages (that’s me) also has a tool that shows the top 100 search results the the age of the domain (at time of writing the tool is broke, but should be working by monday).

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Do you agree or disagree?
Would you work with a new site if the client was expecting top 10 rankings for specific highly competitive phrase?
If so, what would your methods be, and do you really think you can crack the top 10 for a highly competitive phrase (and highly searched) in less than 1 year or even 2 years?

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