Jon Cooper writes about an interesting negative SEO tactic: fake link removal requests. I have particular interest since I think I got one of these, recently.

As I emailed Jon:

“I recently got an email from someone supposedly asking for me to take down links to their company site. The weird thing is that the address was actually a company one. I wonder if it’s not some former angry employee? When I wrote back asking why, I got no response.”

I’m having trouble finding it in Gmail but will update this post later (hopefully Sunday) with the email.

What’s the tactic?

Basically you’re adopting the MO of a phisher (bank impersonating website trying to steal financial info), but your goal is to persuade the people linking to competitors to drop the links. I can see this being used against very high value links, but not as a standard tactic because it’s just too time and work intensive, when you could spend the time on building your own links.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

[Edit: I try to post original stuff but I realize here that I'm adapting "second page poaching." It only occurred to me after writing my post, but when you're done reading this, check out Virante's posts on second page poaching, relevant data collection and an API. ]

While working on a huge site with 1000s of pages and keywords, I realized that I needed to prioritize what keywords to build links for.

The situation was different from a brand new site, because for a new site, all keywords are equally hard to rank for (except perhaps those in the domain), in that you’re not in the top 100 for anything. In such a case, you typically prioritize keywords by absolute search volume, then keyword difficulty.

Unlike a brand new site, this site already has pages in the top 100 – and especially the top 20 – for dozens of terms. I sawthis when setting up the rank tracking (for reporting purposes) in Raven Tools. (Normally I prefer Authority Labs for rank tracking for their great historical graphs. These let you see what links boosted you, assuming the links are published on sites crawled regularly.)

 Check page 2 rankings with equivalent keyword search volume for their relative keyword difficulty, using SEOmoz‘s keyword difficulty tool.

Accessible to SEOmoz Pro members only as of this writing.  

Anyways, Stephan Spencer and the boys at Virante shared a tip that you should look for pages ranking in positions 11-20, e.g. on the second page, since they’re easiest to rank.

The site already has loads of authority links from across the web, having been around since the 90s. So what’s needed at this point is deep links with a mix of anchor text. You’re only a few links away from page 1 and traffic in that case.

And as the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. A site doing 1 million visits/month didn’t get there from trying to rank for “insurance” straight away, but from getting 50 visits a month here and 230 visits a month there. It adds up and snowballs, because as more people get to know you and find you in search results, more people link to you.

(Mike Grehan described this phenomenon years ago as the [SEO] Rich Get Richer, in a piece called Filthy Linking Rich.)

What do you do when you have a few dozen pages on page 2? With similar keyword search volumes? Look at the keyword difficulty. 

So unless there’s a tool that gives me keyword difficulty scores in bulk, I’m going to go through the terms 5 at a time with SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty tool and see what ranks in positions 2-20 and is worth building links for to top up traffic.

Like this post? Get my latest posts by email or RSS!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

David McBee, one of the web’s savvier link builders, shared with me this parody, tongue-in-cheek infographic about infographics, via ComicalConcept.com:

I like it .

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve been going back to basics and doing lots – dozens of hours worth – of manual link outreach. It ain’t pretty, but it works. Here’s how I build my link request list, without tools.

(Come back next week for a tutorial on the rest of my process!)

As most of you know, there are queries you can search for that will return potential link prospects. Everything from queries that return comment forms, forums and guest books (the spammier low end) to general (aka SEO-friendly aka BURN-ME-PLEASE-GOOGLE) directories.

Most people overlook that you can also use link queries to find hubs, the most powerful links around.

1. The first thing is to find out who creates hub pages and why.

2. Once you know that, you can query for more hubs of the same type. I described that process and gave examples already years ago. (Kudos to Eric Ward and his link opportunity alert newsletter for some excellent answers to “who” and “why”).

“The Results Suck Though, Gab!”

It’s true! The annoying thing with searching Google/Bing for hubs is that a large percentage of the results – at times even the wide majority – are useless. Some reasons:

1. Site updates are impossible: broken forms, email addresses, absentee webmasters…
2. No one optimizes for these queries so many of the results are irrelevant

Are tools the solution? Various link research tool vendors like Citation Labs, Ontolo, etc offer to run the queries and scrape the results for you.

The problem is that if you’re auto-scraping together junk, you just end up with a bigger pile of junk, faster. And exponentially more work sorting, if a few queries were bad, because then you need to eliminate all those results from your link prospect export.

So the question is – how do you auto-filter the junk? Or, phrased differently, how do you maximize your percentage of high-quality opportunities?

Browse, don’t search. Go parallel.

I’ve used this technique for years and it’s always proven highly valuable. In essence, once you’ve found a good prospective hub, click on their links and aim to solicit those people.

Why does it work?

It works because someone else has already done the filtering for you. That is, problem #2 – irrelevant search results – has been taken care of by human curation. It’s ironic, but human curation is an important way to provide quality in the long tail.

(Demand Media, if they wrote decent articles, is another face to this coin).

Of course, this doesn’t solve problem #1 for you.

You still have to either click around the site looking for contact info (and/or use the WhoIs database), check copyright type info to see when the last update happened etc.

The contact info rummaging, fortunately, can be handled by a tool like BuzzStream, to save you some time.

Some things to prioritize when clicking links on a hub page:

- If the site description says that it links to other sites. (Yay, another hub!)
- If the linked site has a blog.
- Look at the blogroll because you can easily see whether the blogs linked are current thanks to blogs’ default reverse-chronological sequencing. This is a time-saver, plus most blogs also have some contact information accessible.

If you liked this post, why not link to it? Or get my latest posts sent to you…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Directory.Google.com is dead. All the links going to it and its associated URLs are broken.

Follow the process of broken link building and you could find yourself with some massively juicy links.

Step 1: Find links to relevant pages on directory.google.com in your favourite link research tool.
Step 2: Publish a directory page with links to relevant sites/pages, in replacement of Google’s equivalent page. Try archive.org to see if what was on Google’s directory is still around.
Step 3: Solicit the webmasters linking to the dead pages.

The catch? Most of the pages with links have under 10 links … so you could do a fair amount of work for little reward. This is especially true when you consider the low response rates for manual outreach.

Of course, experienced link builders know that link building tactics don’t die, they just get recycled with new twists/modifications. This is a whitehat variant on cloning dead sites, a grayhat tactic I spun off of a blackhat tactic, and shared a few years ago.

(I realize I’m a bit late finding out about the death of Google’s directory, but hey – when was the last time you visited a directory for purposes besides SEO?…)

How badly do you want quality links?

p.s. Google directory was a scrape of DMOZ… so you can also look at DMOZ”s links, and tell them how out-of-date, broken down etc the directory is and why not link to you instead?…

If you liked this post – I`d love a link to it ;D.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Does your competitor have some sweet old links you wish they didn’t have?

Well, here are two sneaky ways – one’s even sly and nasty – to get your competition’s links dropped.

1) Run their site through your favourite backlink research tools.
2) Use something like Xenu Link Sleuth or your favourite link checker to look for 404 pages on your competitor’s site that have links.
3) Contact the webmasters linking to said 404s and use broken link building to get the link for yourself instead.

If the link is on a hub page that links to many pages in the field, you don’t even need the competitor’s page to 404.
1) Run the hub page through a broken link checker.
2) Write an email to the hub page’s webmaster with a large list of the broken links – but don’t send yet.
3) Add your competitor’s link into the list near the end.

Q: Why would the webmaster remove your competitor’s link if it’s not broken?
A: Laziness and trust – if the first dozen links were all broken, the next dozen are probably broken, too. Why keep checking all of them?

While I think it’s fine for you to do the first to competitors, the second approach isn’t ethical. It’s an approach to be aware of though, so if you have a link management software like Buzzstream , follow up with the appropriate webmaster if a link dissappears. And of course, monitor your 404 errors in Webmaster Tools and server logs.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Ever needed to send a link request but lacked anything better than “webmaster@site.com” as a contact address? I’ve been back to basics with a client recently, and of course this classic situation has come up. Here are a few tools/tricks I’m using to get more information to personalize the email/phone call and increase the success rate:

1) Whois data: For those who don’t know, “whois” refers to the registrant information and associated contacts for domain names. Often a person is listed in the whois data even though the site itself doesn’t give any names of people to contact.

2) Sometimes, Whois only lists a company name. In such a case, I’ll look up the company on both Bing/Google and LinkedIn. Maybe the company behind my link-target-site has a brochure site about themselves with contact info. Better yet, maybe they’re on LinkedIn and I can contact them there!

3) At times, you’ll find a site for the holding company via Google but because of server or other issues, the site’s not accessible. And that’s where search engines’ cache and preview can be really handy! In particular, try a site:example.com inurl:contact search to find a contact page on your target domain, then use cache or preview to see if there’s an email or phone number publicly visible.

4) Another valuable resource I just discovered is searching for a company by name – often yellow pages type directories come up in the results with valuable data.

Liked this post on link building? Get my latest posts by RSS or email!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Need A Free Ebook Directory? Here’s the Ebook Directory list….

Hat tip to Eric Ward for telling me about ebook publishing as a link building technique. It obviously helps more if those ebooks are free. Check out Eric’s link opportunity alert newsletter for more…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

It’s no secret that editorial links are typically relationship driven, but who has time to build relationships? That’s why we talk at each other in ephemeral tweets that last 140 characters … if you had that kind of lasting power in your relations with your wife, a divorce would not be long in coming!

So I want to share two little time-saver tools to building relationships by making more meaningful investments of time.

The Problem: People share links over Twitter and Facebook a lot more than they do via their blogs, because we’re lazy. Facebook and Twitter make it easy to do, with embedded widgets that let you share from any page on the web – not just when you’re logged in on their sites. That’s a lot nicer than having to go to your site, login, click new post and then finally create the link.

Turns out at some point in the dozens of version updates, WordPress snuck in a feature called Press This. It’s a bookmarklet – aka a button you can drag to your bookmarks bar in your browser – and when clicked from any page on the web will automatically take you to your New Post editor in WP and auto-insert and link the page you were on. Woohoo!

On a similar note, what if you’re collecting lots of URLs for a link roundup? It’s annoying having to edit the html to make each a link. Not to worry, there’s a plugin for that:

Auto-hyperlink URLs

Link out, make friends, watch them reciprocate. Win-win.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This guest post is by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services. We met at SMX West a few years ago and he recently got back in touch to see about guest posting… I suspect this technique is how he found out about me taking guest posts !

ScrapeBox kicks butt for link building. It has dramatically sped up my link building process more than any other tool I’ve used. This post will show you exactly how I use ScrapeBox to find dozens of high quality guest blogging opportunities – in minutes instead of hours.

What the heck is ScrapeBox?

ScrapeBox is a powerful tool that’s popular with affiliate marketers and those who like to push the boundaries of automated blog commenting and trackback posting.

But don’t let that scare you away.

ScrapeBox can be used to speed up regular link building tasks too. I’ve found it particularly handy for uncovering good guest blogging opportunities.

How? ScrapeBox lets you harvest a list of blogs that accept guest posts, then gives you the ability to sort that list by PageRank to identify your strongest targets.

Let’s go through the step-by-step the process I use. This is a real example of how I used ScrapeBox to find guest blogging opportunities for Adwords articles I plan to write.

Find Guest Post Opportunities with ScrapeBox

1. From the main ScrapeBox screen, enter your keyword (adwords in this example) in the first box and “guest post” in the second box. Use quotation marks around guest post to make it an exact match search.

2. Select the search engines you want to scrape. In this example, I’ve used Google.com, but you also scrape Yahoo, Bing and AOL. You can also manually add the Google CCTLD of your choice, to help you focus on your target countries.

3. Click the “Start Harvesting” button and ScrapeBox starts to do its magic. Depending on the speed of your proxies (and you’ll want to use proxies to avoid getting blocked), the scrape can take a few seconds or a few minutes.

4. Now you have a big ole list of URL’s, 991 in this example, but you need to clean it up a bit. So using the Remove/Filter drop down in the Manage Lists options, we’ll remove Duplicate URLs.

5. Get the PageRank of the Domain using the Get Domain PageRank option in the Manage Lists section. I’m interested in the Domain PageRank, as opposed to the URL PageRank, as it’s a better gauge of the link value your site will receive from your guest post.

6. Click the Import/Export URL’s & PR Export drop-down and select CSV. This will export the URL list with PR values into Excel.

7. Open the Excel document. Filter out the N/A PageRank values, and then sort from largest to smallest PageRank. Now you have a list of blogs that accept guest posts (or have run guest posts in the past) that you can target, ranked by their PageRank.

Granted, not every URL will be a good guest posting opportunity. But with a few minutes of refining, you can identify dozens of high quality opportunities. Here’s a sample of the Adwords guest post sources I found:

This is just one example of how you can use ScrapeBox for link building. If you’re not using ScrapeBox now, I’d highly encourage you to try it out. Its $97, but you can easily find coupons for a $40 discount.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Did you know I used to rank #3 for SEO on Google.ca – without being logged in or anything – behind only two Wikipedia results? So de facto, I was the #1 top ranking SEO in the country .

I had taken screenshots at the time which I never got around to posting on the blog, and while visiting my parents (who have the computer I was using then), I found the proof pics and sent them to myself. Here ya go:

Incidentally, I also once dominated all of the top 3 results for link building on Google.ca . I couldn’t find that screenshot, but here’s one of me at #1.

Before somebody asks, no I didn’t edit these photos in Photoshop or the like. If I had, I wouldn’t write this post about it because some Photoshop pros could analyze things and show what a photoshop amateur (and general idiot) I am.

What do I attribute the rankings to? You mean, besides my good lucks, charm and humility?

Mostly efforts at building relationships and sharing attention with others, which they were courteous enough to reflect back on me . My Internal Link Building plugin (currently over 25,000 downloads) was a pretty sweet piece of linkbait, too.

Want to be #1 for your terms? Get my latest posts sent to you free by email or RSS and learn your way to the top.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This guest post is by Ben Jackson, founder of SEO Discovery, an SEO blog with free tutorials, link building strategies, and more.

This is a case study of my broken link building campaign. These are the steps I took, the successes I had, and the mistakes I made.

What is broken link building?

In case you’re not familiar, broken link building is the process of finding an old resource that is now a 404 error page and rebuilding it. You then contact anyone still linking to this page and inform them that they have a broken link on their site and you have a similar, updated version of this resource on your site they can link to instead.

[Editor's note: It's like cloning expired sites for links.]

The Benefits of Broken Link Building

An advantage of broken link building is that the pages you recreate were already great link bait. Tons of people linked to it in the past so they will likely link to you now.

After your broken link building campaign you can also get more current links by sharing it through social media, social news sites, and any other outreach plan you have.

• It’s a great way to get in-content authority links.
An in-content, dofollow link on an authoritative page on an authoritative domain is arguably the best kind of link you can get.
• It bypasses most of the brainstorming involved with linkbait
The 404 page was already link bait, so you KNOW you’re going to get some links and the type of resource you’re going to recreate
• It’s an ever-green source of links
If you feel like you’re starting to run out of link sources, you can always get more links by doing some broken link building

Resources You’ll Need:

Xenu – for finding broken links
SEO Quake – for checking backlinks

There are a lot of ways to go about broken link building. Here’s the path that I took…

I started by finding some SEO and Internet Marketing blogs listed in Dmoz. I purposely selected a few sites that hadn’t been posted on for a year or longer. Current sites also have broken links, but I thought I would have a better picture of the sites of yester-year like this.

Once I gathered a list of about 5 sites, I ran each one through Xenu. Xenu is a site-wide broken link checker. My jaw drops every time I see someone checking for broken links page-by-page. There was just a post in SEO Moz about a plugin that checks one page at a time quickly. YAWN! Turn on Xenu, and walk away.

I had Xenu create a report for each site and then looked through the broken link section for any outgoing links leading to 404 pages.

Tip: You’ll find all kinds of links that won’t help you at all, but you can tell right away by the URL if a page is going to be good to recreate.

When you come across any link that could be a good page to rebuild, visit the page and check the backlinks it has with SEO Quake. If the link profile is good then you have a potential winner, save it in a notepad or other file. If it only has a few links then move on.

Tip: Don’t be discouraged if you go through a couple sites without luck at first. After your first time you can build a network of go-to sites in your niche.

Once you find a few broken URLs that have a good amount of backlinks, visit the Wayback Machine. Put in the URL and go back to when it was still online. This way you can see exactly what the resource was and how you can make the same thing, but much better and more modern.

Now this is a case study, so let me tell you exactly what I did…

One potential page to rebuild I found was a 404 page on a site called Dosh Dosh, you may remember it. The page had a good amount of backlinks, but it was very extensive and about a topic I didn’t feel particularly qualified to write about. What I then realized was that the site was still online, but every single page was a 404 error.

I then Googled “Dosh Dosh” and found a post listing 18 Must Read Posts at Dosh Dosh. I looked through this list and picked out the one I thought I could recreate with the most ease. The page also happened to have 690 backlinks.

Here’s the page I made on my site. I improved the Dosh Dosh version by including a few different metrics and putting the sites in one easy to use table.

While there were 690 links to the page at Dosh Dosh, the majority of them were repeat links from obscure and abandoned sites. However, I did find a good number of links with PR.

A lot of SEOs recommend developing a persona and building a relationship before requesting that the webmaster links to your page. Since I was emailing people mostly in the SEO industry I thought this would be annoying and I cut straight to the chase. I notified them of the broken link and also mentioned my similar and updated resource in my first email.

Who I emailed:

I emailed anyone who had a page with any PR. I also emailed a few who had 0 PR, but had decent Alexa rankings. I did this in hopes that the sites were still well-maintained and could potentially send traffic.

I ignored sites with 0 PR and very high Alexa rankings, and also pages that had tons of links on them.

Tip: Be careful not to email the same webmaster twice – that’s just awkward.

My Results:

I emailed about 40 different webmasters and got these results:

7 emailed me back and linked
3 emailed me back and didn’t link, 2 of them said they would
1 did not email me and linked
1 person emailed me back, linked to me, and wrote a blog post about how I was building links and linked to me again (an authoritative domain as well)

The PR break-down of the links:
PR 3 – 3
PR 1 -1
PR 0 – 5

It might seem like very little for a lot of effort, but there are many more benefits and potential links here.

• I emailed a lot of sites somewhat indiscriminately that haven’t been updated in a while – they might link eventually
• The post was a good addition to my site and easy to share and get traffic to since it was very useful
• Broken link building provides excellent insight for what makes for great link bait
• It can be a good way to make new contacts ie it’s why you’re reading this guest post now

Looking at my broken link page, you can easily discern a few of the keywords I was attempting to rank for. The only keyword that gained immediate traction was “social news sites“. My page is currently jumping between pages 2-3 for the keyword. Not bad for Keyword Difficulty score of “62% Highly Competitive” from SEO Moz.

Besides the links I got from my broken linking, I’ve linked to it once with partial match anchor text from a guest post I did for Business 2 Community, but I expect the ranking to increase relatively quickly once I begin building some exact match links.

What I Did Wrong

• I was not as organized as I should have been.

I didn’t copy down a list of URLs that I tried to get links from. This would have been especially helpful for the sites that I had to use an on-site contact form for. I would advise anyone doing this to copy down the URLs and email addresses of every single webmaster you contact, and what their response was.

• I didn’t have an outreach plan.

I got the links I could from the broken linking, but due to the nature of the page, I could have capitalized on my resource more as link bait. I shared the post on social sites, linked in a guest post, and also had a lot of “recent post” CommentLuv links from blog comments. This was okay, but not enough to get the linkerati on board.

• My page has a lot of outbound links

I could be getting more benefit to my site from the links I got if I didn’t have so many outbound links on the page. It’s a matter of SEO VS User Experience. Having the links clickable is draining the PR, but it also makes it easier for users.

[Editor's note: I think this is a good thing: we know Google rewards good linking out.]

What do you think? Should I un-link the names of all the sites?
For now, I’m just building some exact match links and waiting to hear back from the busy webmasters at Copyblogger for a potential PR 5 link. Wish me luck ?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

The following is a guest post from James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

eCommerce SEO is a unique beast. There are technical issues to consider, scalability challenges to think about and countless other opportunities and drawbacks that need to be taken into account. We work a great deal in the eCommerce space; here are some of the ways I know will take your or your client’s business to the next level.

Put an End to Ranking Cannibalism

The problem

eCommerce websites are notorious for having multiple versions of very similar pages which can cause serious SEO headaches. This is because there might be multiple URLs as a result of sort/search parameters or category labels.

In an ideal world, you will have one page that ‘champions’ each keyword so you can concentrate resources and measure progress.

I’m not talking heavy anchor text linkbuilding here e.g. all links pointing at your page for ‘picnic blankets’ need to be for ‘picnic blankets’. I mean a general awareness across your organisation that you are trying to get ‘yoursite.com/picnic-blankets’ to rank for ‘picnic blankets’.

There’s nothing wrong with getting multiple listings for a term –if you can. But if a client isn’t visible for a term because they have split links and social signals between 2 or even more pages, get a first listing ranking, then you can worry about a second listing.

The solution: How to eliminate page overlap in ecommerce SEO

1. Generate a crawl report using SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool (or comparable software).

2. Run a Google Analytics Top Content report.

3. Go through the sitemap (and the site itself) to identify content that overlaps and go through the crawl report to identify pages with duplicate content.

4. You should now have a list of pages that need some attention from you.

5. Using the data from both the crawl report and the top content report, you can now run through each page and analyse the best resolution – this might be redirecting or canonicalising one page to another, building out the content on a page to make it sufficiently different or useful, or perhaps consolidating content from multiple pages into one hub and redirecting all link juice into one place.

If you are unfamiliar with the term canonicalising, then I am simply referring to the use of the rel=canonical tag. This indicates to Google and other search engines which version of a page you want to rank.

The rel=canonical tag is easily implemented by adding the following tag to the of a page that is not your keyword champion, but has similar content.

< link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example/product12345.html" >

Manual implementation of rel=canonical across a site could take a great deal of time but there are numerous plugins for a variety of platforms which can make the process a lot less painful. Also, many of the leading eCommerce software platforms have started to incorporate automatic rel=canonical tags into their system to make the process very straightforward indeed. Check with your eCommerce provider or web developer to see what the situation is for you.

Caveat: Social shares don’t appear to redirect in the same way link juice does so take this into account when deciding what to do with a page.

If you are an SEO practitioner then I think you will be amazed at the impact you can have on a client site just by doing this kind of housekeeping. As Warren Buffett would say “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

Optimise Detail Pages’ Content with Structured Markup

There’s more to on-page optimization in today’s richer web than titles and keyword use, and with stronger competition, the need to go that extra step is increasingly important to gain an edge.

On-page optimisation for eCommerce websites is an extremely diverse subject but one area I would concentrate on initially would be on-page markup since it is apparent that Google will be focusing more and more on this in future. In particular, I would be looking at adopting the Schema.org principles.

Schema.org is a set of html tags for structured data that is supported by all the leading search engines. It allows you to add rich context to your website’s pages, by telling search engines what parts of the content refer to commonly sought information such as price, average review score, number of reviews, colour etc.

In turn, the search engines use this to make your search listing that extra bit jazzy. They create rich snippets in the search results displaying things like price, rating, availability, brand, condition, model number and much more besides.

The main benefit is an increased clickthrough rate. Over time, it could also actually improve your rankings because Google is working user feedback metrics like clickthrough rate into its algorithm.

Schema-Creator.org is a fantastic free tool which allows you to easily add the required markup to your pages. You can enter all the details about a product for example and it generates the markup code which you can then copy and paste into the page on your site.

Afterwards, you can use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool to make sure you have implemented everything properly.

Scale is currently an issue when it comes to implementing Schema.org but as this area advances, readily available tools to automate and scale this will almost certainly follow. There is already a WordPress plugin (I haven’t tested this yet though).

I would also suggest that many of the leading eCommerce software companies out there will create of add-ons or plugin because the future of SEO is all about a richer web.

If you have an able web developer then chances are they will be able to advise you as to the best way to implement structured markup in your particular situation. Planning a redesign or a restructure – now is the time to look at ways Schema.org can be incorporated into your code.

Finally, also in the context of richer markup, you might also consider implementing rel=author for any content, blog posts or guides you have on your site. Rel=author is an html attribute for the link tag (like the alt attribute for images) indicating who has created the content, and allows authors to carry their authority around the web with them, regardless of what site they write on.

This will ensure you or your client, any authors on the site and the website itself will all start to build a reputation within your chosen industry. At some point in the future when Google really starts to take into account the Google Authorship Markup (rel-author) you will be ahead of the curve and likely gain an edge over the competition.

Don’t Set and Forget Keywords

Very few organisations review their keywords’ performance regularly, if at all. That’s a big mistake.

To many, keyword research, is a set and forget exercise, believing it is possible to make your keyword selections and then just plug away building links and content for months or even years, regardless of whether that particular keyword is still performing well in a business context.

The first step we take with clients is to understand and analyse their keyword portfolio, in particular the performance of individual keywords and categories of keywords.

How you decide to structure your audit depends on the goals of your client, but we mainly analyse looking at metrics like current ranking, current traffic, current conversion rate, revenue contribution, future potential and time to conversion.

Time to conversion is a particularly interesting metric because it helps you to identify what stage in the consumer decision making process a keyword might fit into. This helps you tailor content that targets this keyword to be as relevant as possible to the user.

For example, a keyword might have an average time to conversion of 35 days, a relatively long period of time.

Such a keyword is likely at the problem recognition or information seeking stages of the consumer decision process. You would do well to encourage users who arrive via this keyword to download a product brochure perhaps, get a product tour or even a demo.

In contrast, if you identify a keyword with a short average time to conversion – say a few minutes to a few days – this would suggest the consumer is much further along in the decision making process. So you should be encouraging ‘add to basket’ type actions as visitors are clearly on the verge of handing over their money – offering up a product guide or a product tour is inappropriate this late in the process.

Point #6 in my recent SEOmoz post talked more about performing keyword audits.

Auditing keywords is no easy task. There is quite a bit of data to trawl through but it will be worth it because it can help you to shape an overall SEO strategy that delivers a far higher return on investment, over a strategy that relies upon throwing links at the wall to see what sticks.

• Look specifically for keywords that contribute a high-level of revenue or have a particularly high conversion rate – identify ways you could increase traffic on these keywords. Are you ranking as high as you could be?

• Look for keywords that have strong traffic but a poor conversion rate – this could be an indicator that something is going wrong and is a good place to start when it comes to fixing and optimising the performance of a site.

• Look for ways to branch out around high-conversion keywords. Identify common themes amongst your top performing keywords and see if there are associated terms that you could be targeting.

Essentially a keyword performance audit is about identifying opportunities and looking at ways to capitalise on them.

Build a Community

SEO and social are now inextricably linked – we are hurtling towards life after link trust so your website and your business need to be ready.

Building a community serves multiple purposes both now and later down the line:

• Build a loyal base of customers – brand loyalty, less churn, increased profitability.

• Helps with SEO – user generated content can help scale your SEO.

• Future-proofs your website – if Google switches to more of a social trust algorithm, you’re not going to end up out in the cold.

First and foremost, your community should be respected – don’t be ‘that company’ that fakes a community or sells them out to turn a fast buck. Building a community can be a long term strategy that is beneficial for both business and individual alike.

You can leverage the power of your community in the following ways:

• For content – encourage community members to add comments, submit reviews and generally contribute to your website. All of this is long-tail content that enriches your pages and helps improve visibility AND you haven’t had to write it yourself or pay someone else to.

• For linkbuilding – As Patrick Altoft from Branded3 points out: “Commercial sites struggle to attract natural links.” This is because the person you are requesting the link from knows that in some way you are going to (over time) benefit financially from the link, in the form of direct traffic and increased search engine visibility. Leveraging a community for links can mean running competitions and prize giveaways to generate social shares and actual links. Rewarding users for linking back to you, or even giving them an identity (and a widget/badge) to show their commitment to your community.

• Grow your revenue – encourage advocates/ambassadors by offering rewards and incentives for helping you as a business achieve your goals. Referral bonuses or community points that can be exchanged for goods or cold hard cash are great ways to kickstart a community growth explosion.

Use Punchtab – a great engagement app that helps you easily reward your community when they perform a particular action e.g. like you on Facebook, makes a comment, submits a review and so on.

For further reading, you should try Motivating a Community and Gamify your Community; both provide valuable insights and tactics for encouraging and building a community even in a commercial context.

More posts on ecommerce and ecommerce SEO:

Don’t Leave Shipping Rates To The Cart
5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence
Ecommerce Widgets and more – video
How Inhouse SEOs can Add Value Beyond Search
Google’s Conspiracy To Monopolize Shopping

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Full disclosure: I’m getting a free review copy for this review.

Eric Ward, aka Link Moses, has been at link building since the bad old days when Yahoo Directory actually was a place to start your search (imagine!). More importantly, the man is great at unearthing very high quality link opportunities, often hubs, that would go for $500 – $1000 / pop if you were paying true value for time.

Eric’s subscription newsletter is available very affordably – $8/month!

What’s nice is that the newsletter isn’t rehashing directories everyone knows. For example, were you aware that you can get into Encyclopedia Britannica? Or that there are specialized search engines for boating and biology?

One thing in particular that I’d never considered was how PageRank is partly dependent on how specific a page’s topic is. The wider your appeal, the more links you can gain and thus obtain more PageRank. But the more narrowly and specifically you cover a topic, the fewer the people that might link to you. Conversely, narrower treatments will often answer a searcher’s intent better than general pages. I won’t share Eric’s examples, but he demonstrated his case well with some particular SERPs.

(For people wondering how my book compares to Eric’s newsletter, the purposes and learning are different. While I have a section on link building tactics, my book is on all of advanced SEO, including converting SEO traffic, keyword research and other miscellaneous tasks. Further, I also teach you the creative thinking to invent your own link acquisition tactics. Hence the book being in the $100 price range.)

Finally, Eric discusses free tools like Firefox extensions few people know about… sure to be appreciated by people spending most of their time on the link hunt.

Liked this post? Get a free chapter from my book, on how to massively scale link building without social media!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I’ve been digging into online marketing tools and to my chagrin, most want an annual fee (or one time payment usually roughly equivalent). It’s the rise of SAAS…

Email:

MailerLite: Was on Discount from MightyDeals (found via Yoast) for $49/year!! Up to 10K subs… Love this pricing!
Or MailChimp: Free for up to 2K subs, plus very impressive segment-upon-signup options so you can better tailor content and increase open rates. Starting $49/mo thereafter.

I currently have Aweber which so far has been good, and their support’s generally been good – which is very important. I’m mostly interested in switching due to price (mailerlite) and functionality (chimp). Paying $29/mo for service at my # of subs (over 500, under 2k), for the advanced SEO book.

Contact Management / Social Media Analytics

The first two here are relationship-measuring social analytics tools. The latter is a traffic measuring social analytics tool.

I currently have BuzzStream which is pretty sweet. It automatically finds contact info, can track all email contact and Twitter contact too (going forward, non-historical), plus has various link building metrics and social media functions built in too, though personally my orientation is more the link building side. Starting $19/mo.

ConnectedHQ: Contact Management with full historical data and integrations with various social services. Measure and strengthen your relationships so you get more exposure and traffic. $10/mo

The reason ConnectedHQ also appeals to me is because of more integrations (mostly FB, I’m not big on LinkedIn) and historical data for them. Plus it’s affordable, which is great! Strong contrast to so many tools out there where average monthly price for a non-feature-neutered package is $49…

Awe.sm: Traffic analytics focused on social sharing where links are shared via means besides the browser (outlook, tweetdeck etc) and accurately reporting on where Twitter/FB/LinkedIn traffic really originated from, down to the particular tweet! Valuable for optimizing social media campaigns focused on traffic / conversions. Starting $15/mo

VaultPress: Multiple cloud-based backups + security monitoring for WP, by the creators of WP at Automattic. $40/mo and + for service including security. $15 for cloud backups which is basically not worth paying for since existing WP plugins do that.

Or: CodeGuard: Roughly the same idea but not WP specific. Unclear if they provide human support for cleaning bugs and reinstalling. $15/mo — Update: Got CodeGuard!

VisualWebsiteOptimizer: Tempted by their easy WYSIWYG interface… for better CRO testing. GWO’s horrible, sprawling documentation and disorganized forums are also a massive pain to navigate. $49/mo + for a decent package.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In a thought-provoking article, Russ Virante of Virante SEO asks whether, instead of manually checking through competitors’ backlink profiles, it’s perhaps possible to automate the analysis, at least to dig for paid links. He suggests that by using SEOmoz‘s link index, and comparing the numbers on some backlink profile metrics against those of Wikipedia [which has never manipulated its backlink profile], it’s possible to get an idea o how natural a site’s backlink profile is.

I think the idea is brilliant, but there’s another caveat beyond that listed: not all categories of sites build links in the same way/pattern. Nor do all industries.

In fact, Wikipedia is quite unique in that it’s reasonable to expect that more of its links go to deep pages than the home page.

Conversely, for SMBs (for one example), it’s much likelier that most links will go to the homepage. Think of the basic directories, mentions in local press, BBB etc.

I get that the idea was to find a site that hasn’t manipulated its backlink profile intentionally, but the choice of Wikipedia still has several other difficulties.

The fact remains that this automated analysis of link profiles is a pretty clever notion. Perhaps a better alternative would be to use the tool on competitors in the niche and thus appraise what they’re doing at a glance, in contrast to oneself/one’s agency.

Check out Russ’ tools.

• Link Proximity Analysis Tool
• Source Link Depth Tool
• Multiple Links Analysis Tool

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

It seems whenever BuzzStream send out an email with new product features for their link building CRM software, I’m highly impressed with the value they’ve added to their product. It’s a great competitive differentiation they’re building, and in my eyes, highly worth it for any link builder regularly building links manually.

Some of their latest integration collects all potential contact information, including social media accounts and phone numbers.

They’ve also added automated tracking of relationships with Twitter, and now you can share that between people working on a relationship. It used to be limited to whoever ran the Twitter account in contact with the particular lead.

Over and above that, they’ve automated link prospect queries and scraping the results, including de-duplication and adding in contact info plus other details.

Brilliant time-savers that make link building a lot less tedious for anyone involved, imho. Buzzstream is social media analytics.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I recently came across what is to me a new SEO problem.

A site I consult with has some thin pages with a handful of ads at the top, some relevant local content sourced from a third party beneath that…

and a bunch of inbound links to said pages. Not just any links, but links from powerful news sites. My impression is that said links are paid (sidebar links, anchor text… nice number of footprints.)

Short version: They may be getting juice from these links. A preliminary lookup for one page’s keywords in the title finds it top 100 on Google. I don’t want to lose that juice, but do think the thin pages they link to can incur Panda’s filter. They’ve got the same blurb for lots of [topic x] in [city y], plus the sourced content (not original…).

So I’m thinking about noindexing said pages to avoid Panda filters.

Also, as a future pre-emptive measure, I’m considering figuring out what they did to get these links and aiming to have them removed if they were really paid for. If it was a biz dev deal, I’m open to leaving them up, but that possibility seems unlikely.

What would you do? One of the options I laid out above or something else? Why?

p.s. Good answers get dofollow links .

Add #1:

Stever is a local SEO Consultant
Miguel is a organic SEO Consultant

p.p.s. Related note: I’m looking for intermediate to advanced guest posts for this blog, which has 2000+ RSS subs. Email me at gab@ my site if you’re interested.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

While emailing with Aaron Wheeler about SEOmoz‘s Link Intersect, Aagon gave me the following insight into how they crawl the web and prioritize their choices of links. It’s pretty fascinating from a tech perspective…

Hey Gab!

Thanks for writing in and sorry that you weren’t able to find that directory in the Competitive Link Finder tool. Competitive Link Finder is still in the Labs section of the site, which mean it’s beta, prone to breaking, and we’re either working on tools to use the technology demonstrated in the Labs tool or we don’t plan on working on it any further (but it’s still cool enough to show off!). It really depends. Regardless, we can’t provide too much support for these Labs tools because they’re not on our main road map. Sorry about that!

If you have specific feedback about why you think http://montrealloft.ca/fr/liste_promoteurs.php should have been listed in those results [my initial email asked why it wasn't], let me know and I’ll pass on the feedback. We really appreciate it! It does look like http://montrealloft.ca/fr/liste_promoteurs.php isn’t in our Linkscape Index of the web, so it’s probably not going to show up throughout our site Index-wise.

Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Linkscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for a plethora of reasons, including crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories.

Just so you know, here’s how we do our index: we take the last index, take the 10 billion URLs with the highest mozrank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains), and start crawling from the top-down until we’ve crawled 40,000,000,000 pages (which is about 1/4 of the amount in Google’s index). Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won’t show up in our index

We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we’ve got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here.

Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site’s information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.

If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

I hope this information helps! While the site may not be indexed yet, give it some time – maybe we’ll see it in OSE and Linkscape next month.

Best of luck!
Aaron

I wrote Aaron back:

hey Aaron,

Thanks a lot for the indepth answer – that was really helpful! Can I
actually publish that on my site? I’ll bet other folks would be interested
in the answer.

Re: Link intersect and the presence/absence of particular pages in it, Link
Intersect is one of the key reasons I subscribe, along with Q+A and maybe
keyword difficulty. And I know a lot of other advanced link builders value
it highly, because it answers the “why” question – why are competitors in
the niche being given links – in a way most likely to be imitable. As to
that particular directory, being that it’s on a high quality website, I’d
encourage you guys to look at how to include more like it in your index.
It’ll make Link Intersect and Linkscape/OSE in general a lot more valuable.

And his response:

Hey Gab,

My pleasure! Glad it was helpful. You can most certainly publish it on your site. =)

It’s really good to hear your feedback about your tool usage; it helps us figure out what to prioritize! It would be pretty awesome to include the LI tool in a future iteration of Open Site Explorer, as we’re already making changes to OSE to roll out in a couple months.

Did you know we have a feature request forum? It’s a great place to share your ideas. Other people can vote on them and it will help us determine priorities. You should check it out: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums

Regardless, I’ll pass the message along to our team and we’ll see what we can do to add more functionality to Link Intersect down the line. Thanks again for letting us know! Best of luck with your upcoming book; hope we help you keep your hats in order. =)

Have a great day,
Aaron

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In Adam Audette‘s recent link building column (via Wiep’s link roundup), he claims to have failed at link building (or more accurately, client relations). The client – a major corporation with 10 big websites – wanted results in a short time frame, so instead of going for high quality links that take time to build, Adam went for “freebie” links like profile links in order to boost up particular URLs on client sites.

As a result, though the SEO results were there, Adam’s client saw unimpressive reports about the actual links, so they left.

Adam blames himself for abandoning his normal M.O. and going for the easy links.

Did Adam really make a mistake though?

Some clients have a short-term mindset, and education won’t change a thing for them. If they’re just a run-of-the-mill client, you can pass on them knowing that 10 more are just around the corner.

But there’s a limited supply of big-budget companies. Not as limited as most SEOs think, but still not that common.

So if a company with lots of money to spend on SEO wants to see results in the short term, should you turn the revenue away? Adam thinks the answer is a clear-cut “yes, turn it away.” I’m not sure the issue is so black and white. Consider the pros and cons.

Pros:
1. Big short term revenue/profit boost
2. Relatively easy work, even though they don’t know it
3. The business results as measured in dollars of ROI will be there

Cons:
1. A savvy SEO in their company may criticize your mediocre links and cause the gig to be lost after just a few months
2. You’ve invested time into a project with a short lifespan, when similar time could be better invested elsewhere.

At times, business calls for you to seize the opportunities you get and take the easy money. In this case, Adam didn’t do anything unethical – the work itself was just easy. And depending on how open-minded or close-minded the client was, education may not have persuaded them to take a longer-term approach. So if some company was going to make the money, and no one gets hurt / nothing unethical has to be done, why not be that company? What do you guys think?

If you liked this post, add my RSS feed to your reader for more.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.