Category: Link Building
Chat through link building best practices and outreach techniques.
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How to Handle Press Releases for Multi National Sites
I think most of the major media markets would have distribution in both, so there's a good possibility that the UK PRs would indeed "bleed."
| BrianCrouch0 -
Hi I wanted to clarify whether what I am describing is a link wheel and is this black hat ?
I agree Mat, but it's difficult to tell who is who. Client worked with a big name in the world of digital marketing. They checked references, put in place a carefully worded contract (phew!) and (thankfully) I had the knowledge to identify a well-hidden blog network, and secure link takedown. The SEO industry needs an aggressively policed quality standard, in my opinion.
| McTaggart0 -
Do you know what adf.ly is?
Although the service itself is legit it is possible for people to abuse their system to spam other sites. I filed a complaint and was able to add our site to their blocklist. Thanks for you help!
| theLotter0 -
What's a really good example of a linkbait-y Category / Subcategory hierarchy?
Link Building-Focused Examples: Stephanie Chang has a good SEOMoz article on Creative link building for ecommerce sites that discusses good pages. Design Examples: Another article on Smashing Magazine details some beautiful/creative ecommerce designs. While the post is slightly more focused on the design, there are some good examples on there of unique content, too. Both are important in earning links on otherwise boring pages, and will greatly increase user trust and conversions if done well. Here are some other similar articles from Smashing Magazine: Design Showcase Of Creative Online-Shops, 35 Beautiful E-Commerce Websites. **Seat Geek: ** This is an OK example that comes to mind of content - but they could do better. If you look at a page like http://seatgeek.com/paul-mccartney-tickets/#about, you'll see on the left sidebar that there are tabs for "About Paul McCartney Tickets" which contains some statistics about concert ticket prices, among other things. They could do a better job by improving the design of the page and making it more visually appealing, and by featuring this content above the tickets themselves, rather than hiding it on the about tab like they're currently doing. Service Sites: For a Service site... nothing changes. Instead of assisting a user in the decision process between products, you're doing it for services. Make the design look sharp, keep all of those pages 1 click from the homepage unless there's tons of them, and make the pages useful to the user. Regarding the "Marketing Solutions" concept, I'd say give users two options: browse by service itself, or browse by solution. This satisfies them whether they know what they're looking for or not, and it adds context to the existing service pages.
| KaneJamison2 -
New website, small business, niche market --- what's my best link building strategy?
Hi Dana, Thanks a lot for your great advice! I will follow all your 3 advices and start to create some really useful content for natural link building, our competitors are not strong, I believe we have a good chance of catching up them in half year or 1 year. Thanks again for the help! Tian Jie
| DSG_clan0 -
Setting up Web 2.0 sites in your own name or business name?
Looking at your original question about registering web 2.0's in your name or your company's - doesn't matter for ranking but it's a question of your goal: are you branding? Are you just trying to manipulate rankings? If the latter, it doesn't matter who you register under. If the former, probably your company's name. But it's not as if you can't build the web 2.0's - they're links to get all the same. As for what to do instead of link wheels - I'd start with finding your top competitors across tough terms, as well as consistent competitors across your long-tail KW's. Mainly you want to find the sites that are ranking for the tougher terms, and follow their best and strongest links if you can. Since you're posting in the SEOMoz forum you can start with the SERP analysis functions of the keyword research tool. I also use other tools to find competitors across niche related keywords (A1 Keyword Tool from Microsys is one): but you want to find quality competitors and not just copy anyone online: you could be copying a link profile of a poisonous website and repeat their mistakes. That's why I'd start looking for those sites that rank for the tougher terms. Find their best links, try to copy them. Link acquisition is more than copy-cat SEO, though - you can read plenty more about it in the forum or YouMoz blog, or one of Rand's many posts on the matter of link building - but I'd suggest looking at making your site(s) capable of attracting links, finding raving fans of your brand and give them incentives to share your content (i.e. build links - like running a contest for instance), creating awards for other websites that are somehow correlated to your site and getting a link via the award (an older but effective method)... I'd run from the "flavor of the month" methods like link wheels because it's not going to net you quality and sticky links. Those links will have a high amount of link rot and are designed to provide the link wheel company/software provider with a recurring income, meanwhile in today's environment you'll simply be out-running and inviting Google's manual review (especially if a competitor decides it's best to rat you out in Google Webmaster Tools: link wheels are easy to find). When your site drops rankings, the answer is always going to be, "build more links," or "use another tool," or "you did it wrong, but keep building more links to replace the links you've lost." Meanwhile it's time and money down the drain. Solution: build a defensible link profile. Go for the links that are harder to come by because your competitors are too lazy to try: they're all busy with link wheels. Think of it this way: the PageRank/link juice of a link is calculated on a logarithmic scale. It's much harder to get a PR 6 link than 100's of PR 1 links. The site that gets the former is going to out-rank the site floating on the latter, and it's just a matter of time before the temporary rankings generated from the cheaper methods get penalized or otherwise demoted by the algo. But experiment: all this is just my experience. After Penguin I've had to rethink everything, but I was one of the loudest mouths supporting link wheels and everything else "that worked..." That short-sighted pragmatism wound up biting me in the end. You might find something in your experimentation that I totally missed, but I don't want the responsibility of giving out more bad advice, so I'm more cautious in what I share these days.
| TheAverageGenius0 -
Client Content Strategy (or lack of)
If he answers those questions once on his website via an FAQ, then he doesn't have to go back and answer them time and time again in email and phone!
| KeriMorgret0 -
Looking to outsource some of our link building...
Please let me know what you find because I am looking for the same thing!
| ClickIt0 -
Safe percentage of sitewide links?
It has been a long time strategy of ours to remove ANY site that is linking to us sitewide. Email the webmaster and ask him to make your link a homepage only link. Sitewides are discounted at best and penalized at worst so I would recommend removing all of them when you come across them. They usually come in form of a blogroll link which has been a bad method of link building for many years, and your sitewide link is lumped in with other sites in the blogroll who all have sitewides as well, so their chances of getting penalized are greater too. Then you will be listed sitewide with a penalized domain which is linked sitewide. So now you share a more similar link profile having thousands of links on the same page with a penalizes site or sites. AND you have thousands of links with the same anchor text. It just bad all around.
| irvingw0 -
Strategy When Building Links
If you are commenting on a blog for links, you're commenting on a blog for the wrong reason. If it's not held in moderation by software, usually a good admin will spot it and remove it -- and if it's not removed, it's likely that the link isn't very worthwhile in the first place (such as an abandoned blog on an .edu domain that has 8000 comments with link drops). If you are commenting on a blog to be part of the conversation, you would want to either subscribe to comments by email or bookmark the comment so you can come back and be part of the community.
| KeriMorgret0 -
How Is It Possible That I Rank O Above Large Competitors?
acutally what I was using is the SEO moz plug in to show a non pers. search. Although I am not #1 I found it odd that I was ranking above a HUGE website. Thanks for all the help!!
| TP_Marketing0 -
Blogs For SEO
It is actually good content, Im not sure if they own the blog or not? There links are in the side bar, so its carried through the entire blog, could they me paid? Will owners of a successful blog put a link on their blog in exchange for money?
| TP_Marketing0 -
Usin Strong Inner Pages To Pass Link Juice?
Well, technically you could. But to me it would be more important to optimize these pages to rank, rather then use the strength to link to other pages. So it's your choice ;). I would rather milk the cow here.... Keep in mind that these pages are probably already linking to your other pages as well via the common header, footer and other navigation links.
| NakulGoyal0 -
Continue Building LInks After You Reach Position
From my personal experience, link building is never done. That said, if you reached #1 / #2 then you can probably ease back shifting focus to other aspects, but never stop. My thinking is it is very easy to follow the leader. Take a few extra steps now you're in front. If you stop.. catching up to you is that much easier.
| donford0