Yes, yes. Do a top 10 list. Got it. Attract links with rewards. Heard that. What else you got when it comes to link building? In this session, link builders share real life stories of how they obtained hard-to-get links. Is it the relationships, stupid? Focusing on what matters?

Tips and strategies, for the professionals, at SMX Advanced Seattle 2010 featuring Debra Masteler, Roger Monti, Gil Reich, Chris Bennet, Arnie Kuenn.

Building links for B2B sites – Roger Monti – Martinibuster

1) Target searching – use allintitle: “relevant keyword” resources site:.org
2) Backlink trolling – troll for sponsor or advertising opportunities and cherry pick the best. Don’t poach the backlinks (same links) of competitors. Cultivate your own set of backlinks: linkdomain:relatedsite.com -site:relatedsite.com “sponsors” / “advertisers”
3) Association memberships – some associations link to their members. Do searches for member lists, restrict your searcg to .org and add in relevant keyword phrases to filter for your related groups. Don’t be afraid to expand your search to cover closely but not directly related groups
4) Paid links – carries risk, evaluate the risk tolerance before attempting to negotiate paid links
5) Broken link campaign – Flame-outs from the past are fertile hunting grounds, particularly for B2B sites. Once you have identified a dead internet page do a linkdomain:example.com
6) Sponsorship campaign – “sponsors” “your keywords” site:.edu
7) Free links – free links from web pages about your products / services often have phrases like “resources” and “where to buy” associated with them

Examples of targeted link requests – Arnie Kuenn – Vertical Measures

Pirate costume link – used Open Site Explorer to find relevant links and email and said “Ahoy Webwench, I like yer site…” – acquire a link by using the same language or style that the website’s tone is written in
9) Do some research before you contact a website. Try to find out if you can contact someone personally. Researched a site owner who claimed he could predict the next Miss America pageant winner. Started a conversation around hiring the webmaster to make predictions on another website
10) Look for broken links on a site, contact the webmaster, tell them about the broken links suggesting a fix with an updated URL
11) SayCampuslife.com – connected and asked if they could contribute some content to their site and use the clients huge Twitter following to tweet the link as soon as the article was published – use your resources to drive traffic to a guest article on a target site
12) April Fools Day Prank – “Google opening SEO agency” – 27 days later Newswire editor turns the news into real news on their website – over 800 links coming into this post

Infographics – Chris Bennet – 97th Floor

What makes for a good infographic? Lots of data, information, presented and made “interesting” and visually appealing, aesthetically pleasing. Turn complex ideas into concepts that are easily consumed. Infographics are a 100% legitimate and natural way to build links and can set you apart from your competitors.

Chris’s infographic examples

13) STD’s across America – http://stdtesting.md/blog/stds-across-america-32
14) Who owns the most servers – http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-got-the-most-web-servers/
15) Where does the money go? – http://www.joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/where_does_the_money_go1.jpg
16) What is a petabyte – Mozy.com – http://gizmodo.com/5309889/how-large-is-a-petabyte (Seeded via Gizmodo.com)
17) Commercial domains have a hard time playing in the social space – hence visualeconomics.com, a link bait project created for a loans credit site that has attracted over 50,000 backlinks in 9 months
18) Use guest virals, host your amazing infographic content on a partner publisher site to get initial exposure – this will skip the buries on Digg and take you straight to the traffic, just make sure when your viral is embedded on a guest site, it links back to your domain
19) Contact people who linked to you and thank them – notify them the next time you create good content and create virals on their behalf

How to get people to link to you by telling them how great they are – Gil Reich – Answers.com

20) You rock! badges – confirming people’s expertise and get them to host a badge to your site
21) The SMX Advanced “I’m speaking” badge is a great example of this
22) Testimonials
23) Get awards – even give yourself awards

Write on sites that want good content and can deliver an audience

24) Keyman collect-ables – each time this guy gave a good answer linking back to his own site (??)
25) Ask a question on answers.com that leads to an answer that is in fact, your website
26) Leverage Youmoz’s power!
27) Enlightened self interest is ok – serve your community and that makes it perfectly acceptable for you to link to yourself
28) Disagree with a statement and ask for balance in an article
29) “Chase the community” – give, link out, be nice, try to be trusted and liked within a community
30) Common enemies – if a few folks mutually disagree with someone, the community who disagrees with that person together are more likley to cite you when they’re publicly disagreeing, too
31) Help people – charity widgets work well showing donation totals
32) Make it easy to link to you – eg the answers plugin for WordPress

Pump up your links – Debra Masteler – Alliance-Link

33) Use Dapper.net – http://dapper.net/open/ – content is what’s driving links – create RSS feeds for all of the content that you’re producing on 3rd party sites with a link back to your site. Use RSS directories to then link back to you. RSSmix.com into RSS directories. Sweet!
34) Use Yoast’s RSS Footer plugin
35) Use RSS for media leads – set an alert service from a publishers RSS list (Watchthatpage / Trackengine) Monitor for contact details on RSS feeds for major publisher sites (look out for email addresses etc)
36) White papers, Living stories, podcasts, News Streams, – Syndication is the word
37) Create podcasts (very hot for links apparently) – release your new stuff to the media (not the press!)
38) iTunes is awesome to get Podcasts out
39) Guest blogging is still the way – use SoloSEO to generate queries for great link building: http://www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html?keyword=seo

40) Widget bait – “baby ticker countdown”, “Mortgage calculator” – you can build those on Widgetbox.com and they “kind of ok” – great widgets syndicate news / items / links to relevant articles. Widget directories, widget galleries. Widgets are east to get built on elance.com
41) Use chatroulette – “link to us and we’ll give you a free xxx”
42) Microsites – buy blogs / old sites, rebrand them and use them as microsites
43) Use Linkinfluencer, SEObooks link hub tool, SEOmoz’s link intersect tool, social media for Firefox

Real Life Link Building Examples [SMX Advanced 2010] is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.

Image credit: Leo

If you’re embedding a 3rd party chart, video, or document, you might have noticed a complete lack of a feature that (I think) pretty much every SEO would go crazy for.

What’s missing from this awesome presentation?

Running Competitions for Links

And here?

And here?

The answer

We’d love to see the ability to select an option to include a link back to the originating source, not just the 3rd party embeddable content provider. The principle feels simple enough, where during a file upload, you cite the originating source of the data. The embeddable object then contains a link back to both the 3rd party host and the originating content source, just like this:

View more presentations from Richard Baxter (via: SEOgadget.co.uk)

If you’re a 3rd party embeddable content provider, you should definitely think about building this feature – SEO people would swarm to you in droves!

A Killer Feature for Embeddable Video, Documents & Charts is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.

Enquisite Linker combines the proven logic behind an online dating service with the concepts of social networking to streamline your link-building campaigns. Webmasters, marketers, and search marketers interested in improving their web sites’ visibility across the Internet continually express frustration to us of the difficulty around linking strategies. It’s been incredibly hard to find all the relevant web sites and web pages to link to for outbound links; and, it’s incredibly frustrating for business operators to manage the process that is time and labor intensive to acquire inbound links. Enquisite Linker solves these problems in a simple and elegant manner.

Though the system won’t be arranging my perfect link date until March 16th, you can register your site (if you recieved that email) as of today. So, what’s the point? I think this screenshot summs it up really nicely:

Note how you have control over the success parameters in which you’d consider linking out to, and getting a link from a website. That means you’re only likely to be matched with better sources of trustworthy links, provided that, of course, those sites want to meet you. SEOmoz MozRank and Google PageRank play a role in the selection process as does the region your site targets. Neat.

The system takes you to a summary page that reports on the number of new matches found for you and introductions made:

The most important point Enquisite makes with the new tool is this:

All your data is private and unless you elect to share your website name and address all information remains anonymous. Add your site today, and on March 16th you’ll start reaping the benefits…

A degree of confidentiality makes a lot of sense to me, until at least you’re happy to make contact and arrange a first date. I’ll be watching the results on March 16th with great interest!

New Linkbuilding Tool: Linker from Enquisite is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.

Here’s a quick and handy (and headsmacking) link building tool tip you should try the next time you’re link building for a client by using competitor back links data as a starting point.

We know that the “Competitive Link Finder” tool (or, “Link Intersect Tool”) offered by SEOmoz Labs offers insightful comparison on your competitors most powerful back links, with a useful notification if any of those back links are missing from your link graph. My tip involves using two tools offered by Labs to get the most out of your link building strategy.

Here’s a search for the top 4 ranking sites for the term “Pears” with a comparision to a lesser ranking site:

Which reveals a report something like this:

Often a report like this can immediately expose valuable opportunities in contextually relevant, high value links. By expanding on the “# Linking Pages”, you get a quick summary of the urls on the linked from domain:

At this point, my advice is: don’t stop there! So often, an SEO would take this report and contact the owner of the site shown above to request to be included on any of the pages in the list. But, your job is to beat the competition, right?

Run that valuable new link opportunity through the Top Pages on Domain Tool

It’s no secret I’m the world’s biggest advocate of the SEOmoz Top Pages tool, and for good reason. It’s very, very useful. Copy your new target domain into the tool and run the top pages report:

Now you have a list of the most linked to pages on the domain target in question. To beat your competitor, if you’re going to be linked to from the same domain, get a more authoritative back link from them. Using these tools individually is powerful, but learning to use them together is awesome.

Linkbuilding Tool Tip – SEOmoz Link Intersect + Top Pages on Domain is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.

Some of my UK SEO friends have been known to argue that irrelevant links have long been detected and discounted by search engines, making related links an important part of your link building strategy. Do you really need  large numbers of “relevant” links to get a site to rank for your top keyword?

No. As long you’ve built links on reasonably trusted, authoritative domains, and you’ve thrown in some (sometimes over) optimised anchor text for good measure, you can still rank. That’s not to say relevance plays an important role, but not as much as one as I had been hoping for.

I’ve been checking out some high search volume, relevant key phrases to get optimising my new company website for. One of the most consistent things I’ve found by checking out the back link profile data is that link authority and inbound anchor text optimisation completely outweighs relevance of the links themselves. Though I can’t tell you the keyphrase, or expose the competition’s link building strategy, there are some very cool take aways below.

The data sources

I gathered data from Yahoo Site Explorer and Linkscape. All the usual metrics were there (see below) with an additional  series of percentage calculations and counts of inbound link relevancy by profiling link URL’s, titles and domains.

Data captured

- URL
-Google Position
-Pagerank
-# Yahoo Inlinks
-# Relevant links in first 100 Yahoo Inlinks
-Yahoo Inbound link Relevancy %
-mozRank and other Linkscape metrics from the advanced report CSV
-Inbound link URL relevancy (count in Linkscape export)
-Inbound link relevance %
-Most valuable inbound link mR
-Count of relevant anchors
-Relevant anchor % of total inbound links
-Average URL mR of all relevant inbound anchors
-Highest mR of all inbound (relevant anchors)

The takeaways

1) The first 100 links reported by Yahoo showed high, medium or low relevancy counts. There was no strong correlation between Yahoo Site Explorer inbound link relevancy in the first (arguably most authoritative) 100 links and Google ranking for the term monitored. The top ranking site had 1 relevant inbound link, on a non keyword rich domain name.

The second and third results contained much larger numbers of relevant inlinks, though the vast majority of them were nofollowed, comment links from blogs.

2) mozRank of the URLs offers a stronger correlation in some cases, with a significant anomaly in position 6. This ranking happened to be a very strong domain, with an article on the subject in question holding the ranking position with a non canonical form URL.

3) Juice-wise, most of the domains sat in a comparitively similar range (domain juice is the sum of mozRanks for all URLs in a domain. It is shown on the same 10 point logarithmic scale that mozRank uses), so not much joy there.

4) Inbound link URL relevancy *(count) was calculated by looking at the URLs, domains and titles of the most authoritative inbound links in the Linkscape data.

* I would like a way to make this calculation stronger by also including mentions of the key phrase in the body content on the linked-from page, so consider this a rough guide. To make the calculation even stronger, an array of related key phrases could be generated and each one used to count towards relevancy. This would likely increase the relevancy count in some cases!

5) The overall inbound link relevancy expressed as a percentage to make the comparision a touch more meaningful. Again, the highest ranking sites inbound link profiles often produced the lowest (or very low) levels of relevant inbound links.

6) I found the percentage of “optimised” inbound links for our top 10 ranking URLs quite interesting. Could there be a tolerance range in which a search engine finds certain anchor text distribution percentages acceptable? The first 5 results, with a gentle downward slope followed by a increasing percentage for the lower positions looked really interesting and I’m definitely looking forward to doing more tests with other search terms.

7) My favourite measure – a plot of the average URL mozRank of all inbound links that carry relevant anchor text, originally discussed in a post about the Vince update, appears once again. Although the difference (slope) is gradual, and there are a few anomalies, there’s definitely a trend to be found here.

What’s the conclusion?

My conclusion? Sites are ranking regardless of how “relevant” this test percieves their inbound link profiles to be. The top ranking sites in the test had consistently low relevant link counts. Instead, authority factors such as value (mR) passed via relevant anchors and anchor text term distribution percentages seem to play a strong influencing role in final ranking position.

For next time, I’d really like to spend more time analysing and defining “relevancy”, as I mentioned in point 4. That said, I don’t think we would see much of a change in the patterns, with high ranking sites continuing to obtain rankings using heavily optimised inbound link anchors from trusted domains.

Get High Rankings by Building Authoritative, Irrelevant links? is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.

Today, I’d like to share an observation I made after analysing new back links acquired from guest blogging on Search Engine Journal and getting promoted to the main blog at SEOmoz. It’s really interesting how the more popular, high authority domains get copied (scraped) so frequently by other sites that have pagerank or are sometimes even functioning companies in their own right.

Could these scraper sites pass any value through their outbound links and as a consequence, can the process of guest blogging on well scraped sites be levered to work positively for your SEO?

Blogs get scraped

Ever since the introduction of WordPress plugins such as Wp-O-Matic scrapers have become a fact of life. Blogs get scraped, particularly, the larger, more successful and regularly updated sites. Take this popular post on Search Engine Journal for example – there are 78 instances of the <title> and first line of the opening paragraph according to Google’s index. If you take a look at any blog in the Adage Power 150 or Technorati’s Most Popular you’ll be sure to find their posts duplicated hundreds if not thousands of times elsewhere.

Scraping is with us and it’s here to stay, but can that fact be used to add short to medium term value to our SEO campaign? Back in April 2008, I wrote a Youmoz post about my good friend Dan Faircloth. Dan’s an engineer at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and specialising in particle accelerators, not SEO, he hadn’t attracted many links to his (rather new) domain at the time. After the post got published, the links back to his site increased quite significantly. They were all links from sites scraping the original Youmoz article. The best part was all of the scraped links were using  our targeted anchor text. Soon after, Dan was ranking in 1st place for his own name, which was exactly what we had intended.

Do links in duplicated content pages still pass value?

In my opinion, yes they do. There doesn’t even seem to be a limit to the number of times you can duplicate a page across unique domains to pass link value. You’d expect (or hope) that pages triggering the duplicate content filter at Google would have the value of their outbound links nullified, but I don’t see this happening in many cases. It’s not up to me to out specific examples of this, we’ve all seen it happening. If you haven’t, I’d suggest finding a high competition market and analyse the backlinks to a few domains. If you start seeing links from sites like articleblast.com, goarticles.com and articlesbase.com just do an exact match query in Google for some of the text you find and you’ll find your duplicate articles and inbound links.

Case study: Scraped post at SEOmoz

I decided to take a look at my post (titled “SEOmoz Tools – Top Pages on Domain Kick Ass”) published on SEOmoz a few weeks back. At the base of the article, there is a link back to my site using the anchor “SEO Consultant in London“. It’s not a particularly competitive phrase (nor is there much traffic) but, nonetheless, it’s a valid term and one for which SEOgadget ranked third for until a week or so ago. The article was scraped by at least 21 other domains, the data on which I gathered by using an “intitle” query on exact match for the post title and a randomly chosen sentence from the content, also on exact match.

How do you find scraped content?

My favourite way is just to use a search engine. In this example, I have used an “intitle” operator and a section of text that could only have appeared in the article in question.

You could use Copyscape to do the same thing, though I have found the results to be less useful and not as fresh as the main search engines. You’ll end up going to Google in the long run. Whether you’re familiar with anti plagiarism tools online or not, it’s worth checking your own site. You might be (unpleasantly) suprised.

Data captured

To answer my question: “Could scraper sites pass any value?” I needed to collect some data. For each of the scraped articles, I collected the following information:

- URL and Domain Pagerank
- SEOmoz Domain MozRank and Domain MozTrust
- Comments on the article (How the original has been scraped and played back to the user on the new page)
- The search  engine used to find the article (Yahoo or Google)

You can download my raw data from this URL. (Office 2007 Excel).

Common forms of scraping

The most typical form of scraping was to directly copy the original post HTML and present the content back to the audience of the scraper site. In many cases, the original links to SEOmoz.org had been removed and replaced with the host domain. One site had taken a copy of the page and nofollowed all of the external article links. Frequently, the scrapers were citing a Google feed proxy URL as the “original” source of the content. The remaining pages were displaying only the first paragraph of the page content and linking back to the original with either a do followed or no followed link.

Though all forms of scraping are quite annoying if you’re a site owner, the worst instances (IMO) are when the original links in the article are replaced with internal links elsewhere on the scraped site. No value whatsoever is passed back to the original author, nor the sources the original author cited as valuable. I did find that specific domains were being removed rather than all external links – i.e “seomoz.org” was replaced where “seogadget.co.uk” was not.

Google Pagerank

Though none of the urls had yet been awarded pagerank, out of the 21 scraping sites found, 17 of the domains had a Google pagerank between PR6 and PR1:

SEOmoz Domain MozRank and Domain MozTrust

16 of the 21 sites found had MozRank and MozTrust – the most trusted and ranked sites being quite high (6.03 DmR and 6.24 DmT). These values are higher than SEOgadget, which has a DmR of 4.39 and a DmT of 5.28. None of the scraped page URLs were in the Linkscape index and didn’t have their own metrics available.

Conclusion

Most of the site domains included in the sample data have Pagerank, MozRank and MozTrust. Some of them are in fact perfectly “authoritative” sites in the eyes of search engines such as Google and backlink value analysers such as Linkscape, which would imply they are capable of passing link value. I’m not saying scraping is good, but I am making a comment on their ability to pass value. There are a number of different methods of scraping and problems can be introduced during the scrape process such as bad HTML parsing, linking to RSS feeds and linking out to 404 error pages. That said, for the most part, links back to sources referenced in the posts tend to be left untouched, which (during this test) included the footer text left in the base of my articles. Authoritative domains pass value as search engines index new pages on those domains. Taking that fact into account, it is fair to assume that the scraped sites identified in this test will pass value via the outbound links in the scraped content. I’m still watching a few pages which have links from recently published, scraped posts to test this conclusion further.

Recommendations

My recommendation to anyone thinking of posting on a 3rd party blog is, given the likelihood of the target site being heavily scraped, think very carefully about your content’s outbound links, especially in the footer of the article. Use a sign off, referencing your site and the most important pages on your own blog. In my case, I use a footer link like this:

Richard Baxter is an SEO Consultant in the UK and chief blogger at SEOgadget.co.uk. Come check out our latest SEO Jobs or, if you’re recruiting, post a job free.

Finally, if you’re thinking of targeting a blog with an offer of a guest post, be sure to read Josh Klien’s “How to Guest Post to Promote Your Blog” and Darren Rowse’s advice on “How to be a Good Guest Blogger” to get yourself positioned in the right way when you’re authoring your content.

Guest Blogging for Links? Choose a Heavily Scraped Site! is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.

As you can see these two Tweets are displaying content links to my site, so anyone linking in to me is automatically featured on my Twitter profile with a Tinyurl link back to the post with the featured link. Potentially, there’s some coolness in this idea. Anyone who sends you a link will get some traffic back to their own site as soon as Google picks it up. If someone in the blogosphere knew there was an additional exposure and traffic benefit to linking out to you, they’d be a bit more likely to do it, right? Here’s how it’s done.

Set up an inbound link Twitter alert and post it to your Twitter profile

Start by setting up a Google Alerts RSS feed for inbound links to your site:

If you select “Comprehensive”, you’ll get a snapshot of everything be it News, Blogs or general web. According to Google Alert’s help section: “A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.”.

Right on, but you might want just to go for the Blogs alert for more relevant Tweets. You can always make changes to the feed from the “Manage your alerts” console, like this:

Next you’re going to need to be able to feed your RSS into your Twitter profile. We’re going to do that with Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed can post directly to twitter, identi.ca, custom laconica installations, and via HelloTxt or Ping.fm. Could be used for spammin’, could be used for useful stuff. You decide.

First, you’ve got to register with Twitterfeed. It’s a touch laborious, in that you have to register via authentification services such as Vidoop or OpenID. Once all that’s done, you’ll get to your account panel. Select “Add new feed” to see this screen:

As you can see there’s a huge range of options including the ability to filter for specific keywords, add some text to the beginning of the Tweet (eg: “Linking to SEOgadget:”) and how often the Tweets are published.

There are lots of ways Twitterfeed can be used (and abused) – but I think that this is a pretty reasonable way to add to the conversation with your followers on Twitter. If they don’t like it, I guess you’ll find out pretty quickly

Twitter your inbound links via RSS and Twitterfeed is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.