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.

An infographic that provoked my curiosity, by longtime expert in the linkbait field, Muhammad Saleem:

Research and Design by: Online Colleges Site

While it starts off strong, personally, I would have liked the infographic to go a bit deeper into the consequences and any existing research, similar to what Nick Carr did with his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? and his book, The Shallows.

Perhaps that’ll be a follow up infographic?

Thoughts or comments on your personal experiences with changing memory and learning since the rise of Google?

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.

Try the Internet Archive’s 2M+ ebooks and texts.

Of course, there’s also the Gutenberg project which everyone knows, but it’s only got 36K docs, and anyways I don’t think the IA’s database is as well known.

Liked this tip? Add my rss feed to your reader to get all my latest posts!

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.

At Pubcon, I was lucky enough to meet a person I’d long tweeted with, Melanie Phung. She took notes on a great link panel I wanted to attend but coudn’t.

For some background on Mel, she is a Washington DC SEO with extensive in-house experience.

She currently serves as director of new media at PBS. She’d like to remind fans of public media that they can watch TV online for free on the organization’s video portal or on PBS’ mobile apps.

If you like this post on link building, add my rss feed to your reader or get my latest posts by email!

Part 2

Moderator: Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing

Speakers:

Greg Hartnett, Best of The Web

Dixon Jones, Majestic SEO

Rae Hoffman, Outspoken Media

Aaron Shear, Shopping.com

Aaron Shear of Shopping.com Talks About “Real World Links”

Aaron works with e-commerce clients like Zappos.com, which he calls a phenomenon to watch in terms of link building.

They have pretty much all the links they could ask for and that’s in part because Zappos trusts employees to evangelize on the company’s behalf.

Building links for ecommerce is a challenge, especially if you’re in a saturated market. There aren’t a lot of compelling reasons for sites to link to shopping sites.

It’s easy to think big and try to build links for quantity rather than quality, a strategy that worked 5 years ago. But he wouldn’t recommend buying low quality links to his clients.

Leveraging Affiliate Links
For e-commerce sites, the best way to generate high-quality links is through affiliate networks.

The top affiliate networks offer great service and great support, but won’t pass links, though.

Some of your affiliates may be a good source of links, but with a standard affiliate campaign, search engines won’t pass link credit because the affiliate network runs everything through tracking links.

So what can you do?

The solution is what Aaron calls a “naked link campaign” – a cookie-based affiliate tracking system (i.e., instead of URL-based).

You need someone to build functionality for your program that allows the link to go directly to the merchant site (rather than through an affiliate system), and have the tracking info stored in cookie rather than via sophisticated link-based tracking system.

[Mel: I've worked in e-commerce before and this idea works well in theory for small blog-type affiliates, but you run into all sorts of problems if you happen to run a major white-label solution through the same system.]

If you can get someone to build this functionality for you, this is great way to get links naturally and harness that credit.

[Mel: That's what I thought too, but I could never get anyone to build that functionality for me because they were more concerned about making sure affiliate info didn’t get lost due to cookie issues than they were in harnessing naked links. Damn the affiliate managers prioritizing affiliate payments over SEO.]

Linkbait and Widgets
Another strategy of course is to do link bait, but it’s hard to do e-commerce link bait.

“Products” are not that interesting and for the most part no one is going to care about them. But if you have a feature or service that makes it easy to find something, for example, you can create a widget (the web kind, not “widget” as a stand-in for a product).

Comparison engines are popular and they get to take all the credit. Find anything that’s unique or interesting, do that extra step of drilling down to create a widget, and that will drive a simple system that will easily attract links on its own. People will share that. It’s an effective approach to providing value that can result in links.

Don’t forget to reach out to bloggers to get them to write about you and your widget.

Bloggers can be an influential source for ranking products and category pages. Give them gift card to get them to buy on your site and write about the experience.

Even if it’s a negative experience, you still get the link.

High profile bloggers won’t do it for free and even if you pay them, it’s probably not worth it to them, but a gift card will usually work better than straight-up cash.  [Although I’m sure the FTC has something to say about either method.]

Social Media

Suffice it to say, you have to be social. Social media can be powerful if you manage it. He jokes, do what all the other SEOs are doing.

But then he cautions about doing social media badly though and gives as an example the experience he had with an airline on Twitter.

They tweet but won’t answer complaints. If you tweet at them with an issue, they’ll say, “that’s not handled by my department.”

But there’s no such thing as “my department” in social media, you ARE the company, all of it. If you tweet about your products or services, but customer service sucks, everyone sees that and won’t buy from you. The lesson: Social media is not just a marketing driver, it’s customer service too.

Facebook “Like” is Social That Works

Google does look at social signals. Unfortunately, the Facebook “like” button is slow. It could take a large site down if implemented incorrectly.

Putting “like” on a product could be helpful depending on the product, but a better tactic is to focus on getting users to “like” a buying guide or other similarly sticky content.

Aaron explains that links from social media may not be traditionally “good links” because most sites use “nofollow” but they can make a difference in rankings if combined with other quality signals.

Press Release SEO

Every SEO book out there says to write press releases [with embedded links, like you can do on PR Web].

But he says you have to have something worth writing about; most ecommerce sites have nothing that the press is really interested in unless its dirt on bad product. You’ll piss off press and get them to ignore you. Keep it down to 2-3 releases a month unless you are an Amazon and have exciting announcements.

Don’t forget to archive your old press releases and make sure you add text with deep links to important pages, categories or products on your site.

Also change up the links in boilerplate — don’t just send the same thing out over and over again.

Special Relationships

Next up Aaron runs through ideas to help e-commerce site SEOs to brainstorm on relationships they can leverage for links:

1. Are you selling something exclusive?
2. Some manufacturers have a page with a list of vendors
3. Leverage conversations and actual relationships to turn them into links
4. A deep targeted link would be better than one to homepage, but don’t turn links down. Take what you can.
5. Do you have clients that have a website?
6. Traditional linking methods are not as effective, so put your thinking caps on.
7. Create trusted partner program, certification. Shopping engines get tons of links from these types of programs.

Last but Not Least: Rae Hoffman, Outspoken Media

And finally, the speaker that probably drew the most people to this panel: Rae Hoffman. Rae is CEO of Outspoken Media and a long-time affiliate marketer.

Rae mentions that the #1 retweeted tweet of the day is something about married men at PubCon not wearing wedding rings.  [It’s only because it was one of those really annoying sponsored tweets that got pinned to the top of the search results.] Don’t lose hope, says Rae: I’m marrying a guy I met at PubCon. [Congrats on this week’s nuptials!]

After that bit of happy wedding news, she warns:

“You know how you’re not supposed to just yank your thumbdrive out of the computer, and it always warns you that not ejecting properly will corrupt your files, but no one heeds that warning because it never does? Well, yeah, it will.” Apparently her thumbdrive is toast.

Rae starts giving linkbuilding tips sans PPT or notes. [This is rapid fire and I have no bullet points on a screen to help me fill in what I’m missing as Rae is talking double-time.]

Example: You need links for an app. Submit to mobile apps directories and sites that review apps; most of these sites will link back to main site plus the specific app page.

Facebook “like” button.  Rae likens it to old days of Digg. People misunderstood what they were chasing. The point of getting on Digg was the homepage and getting eyeballs — not just being submitted — and getting people to see you and blog about you.

Getting “liked” is a great discovery mechanism. Every time you can get someone to like something on your page, you may get in front of 300-400 friends because it shows up in that person’s feed.

Focus on getting button on pages that might actually get liked, especially your meaty content.

Blogs:  Get link juice to blog where all the good content is and then push links back to main site.

Twitter: Get the attention of media on twitter. Sites like wefollow.com, journalisttweets.com and muckrack.com have lists of journalists on twitter by beat.  Click on “follow all” button and try to interact with them, create relationships. Use Twitter to push big media pieces.

Another Twitter example: Outspoken Media did a Twitter Bowl. It got lots of horizontal links from Jets sites.

Market your site horizontally. Don’t limit yourself to just your own niche. A guy who sells apples might think to reach out to other fruit blogs but he could also connect with a senior living blog – write an article about 5 Things to Do with Grandchildren, #4 is make apple pie. You just need to come up with four other non-apple related things.

The Lesson:  Don’t be Britney Spears (who has someone tweet for her), be Alyssa Milano – be real.

Another idea: Contests for free stuff.

People do ridiculous things for free stuff.

But keep in mind that you’re not allowed (from Google’s standpoint) to launch a contest that says “enter by linking to us”; instead say “enter by blogging about why you love us”. That’s the difference between a paid link and a social media campaign

When the contest is over, transfer the contest content, including the winner info, to another page and 301 the old page somewhere else. That way you retain the content people might continue to link to, but you pass the bulk of the link juice to a more valuable target page.

Rae didn’t drop the F-bomb once, but she warns her twitter account is not family friendly.

Link Building Q&A

With that, the formal presentations are over and a lively Q&A follows. I don’t usually take notes on the audience follow-up because the questions tend to be so basic, but the presenters share a lot more tidbits during the Q&A that are worth highlighting.

Rae:  If search engines are smart, they’d discount affiliate links so don’t rely to heavily on your affiliate program to do all the heavy lifting in your link building strategy

Dixon: Don’t forget that you can discount specific parameters in Google Webmaster Tools.

Badges: They may be cheesy, but they still work, says Greg. Rae urges people who make badges to give different badge options for those people who want the graphic to Lee cites his own backlinks due to his BIGLIST, many from competitors, not only because his list is link-baity, but because he has badges for sites that made his list. Dixon gives a pro tip: widgetize the badge creation so you can include a text link but vary it so it’s not always the same anchor text.

One audience member asks what’s going on with links losing value – how it is that links can get a page to rank really well for a short period of time but then the page slides off the SERPS again. Rae explains that this has a lot to do with Google getting “fresh” signals for a while; there’s an initial boost in rankings as everyone is visiting. Google is recognizing that there’s buzz. Then you drop back down. Then you need your links to age.  And you move back up (hopefully).

Someone from the audience says that he heard that sending press releases via PR Web doesn’t work anymore. A lively debate ensues, with Aaron warning that you want to only send releases when you have something good to say: Don’t cry wolf constantly – you’ll get put on the “ignore” list by your target journalists.

But Greg says even crappy press releases get good “pickup” from scrapers. Yes, all things being equal, quality is better for “high value” placements but high volume links also cool. Rae quantifies it by saying even crappy press releases probably get 20 scraped links. If you’re brand new site, and all your links are scraped, this won’t help; but a good site, it’s cheap for links with great anchor text

Press release SEO is a hot topic. Another audience member shares a story of how her press release got copied word-for-word but all links got changed to point to their competitor. [Yep, been there too. Really annoying.]

Pretty much all the panelists shrug and say there’s not much to do about it. It’s the web. That stuff happens.

Rae says that if you take the amount of time you stress over competitor’s behavior and channel it toward efforts on your own site, you’ll do much better. Put it behind you, it’s not worth it to your business to spend time getting worked up over stuff like that.  Stress = bad ROI. The time you spend chasing down someone who copied a single one of your press releases could be spent on writing even more and better press releases for your own site.

Dixon says his company has a templated letter to send to the offender’s ISP about IP violations and then he washes his hands of it. He agrees that it’s not worth the effort to do any more than that.

And with that, having run at least 20 minutes into lunch, the session is over.

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.

At Pubcon, I was lucky enough to meet a person I’d long tweeted with, Melanie Phung. She took notes on a great link panel I wanted to attend but coudn’t.

For some background on Mel, she is a Washington DC SEO with extensive in-house experience.

She currently serves as director of new media at PBS. She’d like to remind fans of public media that they can watch TV online for free on the organization’s video portal or on PBS’ mobile apps.

If you like this post on link building, add my rss feed to your reader or get my latest posts by email!

Part 1

Moderator: Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing

Speakers:

Greg Hartnett,  Best of The Web

Dixon Jones,  Majestic SEO

Rae Hoffman, Outspoken Media

Aaron Shear, Shopping.com

It’s no surprise that a session billing itself as a low-risk, high-reward link building session would be packed. Everyone is looking for the Holy Grail.

The four speakers who will try to guide us to the Holy Grail this day are from very distinct corners of the internet: a representative from a paid directory site (Greg Hartnett of Best of the Web), a link tool vendor (Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO), an affiliate marketer (Rae Hoffman, who the moderator warns says f*ck a lot), and an e-commerce SEO  (Aaron Shear of Shopping.com).

First up: Dixon Jones, Marketing Director, Majestic SEO

Dixon Jones opens by saying he avoids saying f*ck at all costs. Oops. He then promises his talk will be the easiest to blog.

His ten tips:

Send samples

He gives an example of a client who ran a campaign to reach out to a small, targeted list of active bloggers who wrote about children’s fashion. But the company in charge of fulfilling the samples accidentally sent all 15 samples to the same blogger at AMothersRamblings.com, instead of 15 different bloggers.

The blogger was so impressed that she wrote up an extensive review with relevant anchor text. She put on a kids fashion show of all the samples and took video. It ended up being great ROI on that campaign.

The lesson: Send samples, but send them to the right people.

Organized Blogger Meetups

This might not be relevant to every site, but a great way to get people to write about you is to organize blogger meetups. If you get a group of bloggers together, they’ll blog about it the next day.

(Obviously you need to do more than just show up at meetups, but actually organize or at least host them, or there’s no reason for bloggers to mention you. No mention, no link.)

Reclaim lost links

Use your log files or MajesticSEO to find links that point to the wrong pages.

You can’t find lost links in Google Analytics, so you’ll need to comb through your log files or a tool like (ahem) Majestic SEO.  Your log files can also tell you when people type the wrong URL when they’re on your domain.

Whenever you find links or typo’d URLs, either redirect them or create a new page in that location if you your content strategy supports it.

Reclaim your competitor’s lost links.

Tip #4 is an extension of the previous tip but takes it up a notch (and requires a tool like Majestic SEO):

Scour your competitor’s linkgraph for 404s; that is to say, find pages on your competitor’s site that have inbound links but which just go to error pages.

Contact the site with that broken link and tell them that their page has a broken link and get them to link to you instead.

Monitor Bankrupt Companies.

Find companies undergoing bankruptcy and try to buy their domain name(s) for a song.

Don’t wait until the domain is available on the drop market [because you may never see it or because by that time the links won't be worth anything to you]. Usually their accountants are trying to recoup any assets possible so you can get a bargain if you approach them.

Alternatively, contact the sites that link to that site and tell them that they’re linking to a company undergoing bankruptcy. No one wants to link to bankrupt companies. Get them to link to you instead.

[I wonder if my friend's dad, a Montreal bankruptcy trustee, might know where to find listings of such companies...

My own efforts via the Canadian government bankruptcy record search tool got very few listings in general for bankruptcies from 2010 or later.

As well, you have to pay to see results each time, even if there are NO results!]

Offer testimonials

An easy source of links is to leverage existing commercial relationships. Work with a vendor? Exchange your testimonial for link. Have clients? Offer a discount on their next invoice for a link.

Run a good cause website

Dixon didn’t spend a lot of time on this slide except to warn that the cause needs to be legit. Especially if you’re a commercial site that has a hard time attracting natural buzz or excitement around your site, creating a site for the promotion of a cause can help you overcome that hurdle.  [This might be low-risk and high-reward, but it also seems like a very high-effort tactic.]

Identify mentions of your brand

An easy win with very low risk is simply identifying brand mentions that don’t include a link.

He says that anyone who mentions your company name basically already has a “relationship” with the brand, and should be more amenable to simply adding a link their existing content.

Use Clique Hunter

Clique Hunter is a Majestic SEO feature that lets you identify domains that link to multiple sites within a vertical (in other words, sites that link to several of your competitors).

Comparing where competitors in verticals are getting multiple links from multiple sites, let’s you identify viable link prospects because if a site is linking to more than one competitor, that ups the odds that they’ll also link to you (whereas a site that only links to one of your competitors likely has a special relationship with your competitor).

Speak at conferences.

Last but not least: make it easy for people to blog and link to you

This one is meant a bit tongue in cheek, but it’s real advice. Much like bloggers who attend a meetup are likely to blog, speaking at the types of conferences that include bloggers in the audience is sure to get you at least a few write-ups from blogs related to your niche.

Next up: Greg Hartnett, President, Best of The Web
Greg Hartnett is up next to talk about link building via directories.

It seems like he’s spent the last few years fielding “aren’t directories dead?” questions because he starts his presentation by teeing up common objections.

Q: With all the cool new ways to get links, why still get directory links?
A: Directories are like ball bearings. Not sexy, but still necessary.

Q: Isn’t a directory listing just a paid link?
A: No. There’s a key differentiator between paid links and pay-for-review sites: You may get rejected, so what you’re paying for is the review. He cites the YouTube video from Matt Cutts on the subject of whether directories like Best of the Web are paid links/useful to users.

Q: Isn’t a directory just a link farm?
A: No. Link farms are just a collection of links – no categorization, no editorial discretion. They are simply created to manipulate search results. [See video referenced above.]

Q: How can you tell a directory from a “directory” (wink wink, nudge nudge)
A: It’s a matter of common sense. Good directories have history. Here Greg pauses to qualify the statement to point out that obviously everyone has to be new at some point, but he warns that he would avoid any brand new ones. If they age well, you’ll see that. He continues: good directories contain great resources — you should see brands you recognize. And most directories that are worth being in are built for users (although he admits most users don’t use directories, just search). You should be able to tell it’s a labor of love.

Q: What about my local business?
Greg recommends finding niche-specific directories as well as local.
Good local resources (directories as well as sites that discuss local) include:
Google Places
Yelp
Yahoo Local – a valuable local citation
Bing – overlooked recently, but really stepping up their offerings
BOTW Local
getlisted.org – recommended tool for submitting local listings to lots of places at once (run by David Mihm and Patrick Sexton -2 guys who know lots about local)
mihmorandum – recommended blog

Q: Can I list my website multiple times?
A: Yes! Most directories will let you if you have unique content for multiple categories. CNN, for example, has 750 local listings in BOTW. WebMD has over a hundred listings in DMOZ.

Q: Does Yahoo Directory still work?
A: Yes, it works. But if you ask “Is it worth it?” – the submission fee is $300 – you need to define “worth”. It depends on your monetization strategy. Yahoo Directory is an aged, trusted domain and it’s a primary hub of Internet mapping. If you look at the link structure of the web, you’ll see Yahoo is a central hub. The citation value remains, but it no longer sends killer traffic.

Q: Which directories are considered most trustworthy?
Yahoo
DMOZ
BOTW
Yelp

IPL2′s directory – very strict. Hard to get into, but worth it if you can.

The slide listed business.com as one of those trusted directories, but Greg heard just that morning that the business.com web directory was going to get shut down. RIP.

Q: How can I ensure my site gets listed if I pay review fee?
A: To increase your chances of having your listing accepted, start by follow the rules. Specifically:
Understand that there is no guarantee of getting listed (in the quality directories)
Read the guidelines
Write a good title and descriptions (especially when it comes to DMOZ. It’s entirely volunteer-based, so make their job as easy as possible. Take out marketing hype. The harder you make their job – by submitting to the wrong category, by writing bad descriptions, by not following the guidelines – the greater the odds they won’t even bother with you. [I was a DMOZ editor for a while, and this is absolutely true.])
Beef up your content.

Q; Where can I submit my blog?
Yahoo and DMOZ have specific blog categories
BOTW blog directory
See: SEJ’s “20 places to submit your blog”
Also: Lee’s Top Rank Blog “RSS and blog submissions” page

The formal part of Greg’s presentation is over and Lee asks Greg:

Q: Does it ever make sense for someone to create their own directories?
A: Absolutely. He encourages people to start directories if they have the perseverance. The #1 reason for his success is he has another business he could rely on for income. You need connections; it’s a long build. Years of slow rise. You need time, patience and deep pockets. “It’s great to start a directory.”

[Is he trying to convince us, or himself? ]

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• 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.

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.

There are a number of services of questionable ethics around, offering students to research and write full term papers for them. This is at the university level. For anyone familiar with the kind of work that goes into this, I would suggest that these sources can also be valuable sources for premium quality content. The type to linkbait professors, and other serious academics and quality sites with… Note that these things cost something like $20-$40 a page for a reason.

Speaking of content, I`ve been blogging little lately because I`m in exams and papers. That`s how I came to the above idea…

Separately, I`ve had some time to finally (I bought it over a year ago) read part of Partnering Profits by Brian Clark and someone else. I should have a review up next week.

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.

Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months…

First, non-cash spending is a slippery beast. My high school economics teacher, Mrs. Guedon, actually taught us this and yet I dismissed her preference for using cash as being silly and old-fashioned when an ATM can easily give you an update on your account balance.

Unfortunately, ATMs are not especially good at keeping your spending in check. Especially when you’re paranoid like me and feel the need to destroy your ATM receipts – your memory of account balances ends up being pretty weak.

In 2009, I’m going to review my monthly cash-flow – in all accounts – much more closely.

Second, StumbleUpon ads have a very variable ROI and pricing. I experimented heavily with StumbleUpon ads over the past year and spent roughly $1400.

From what I’ve seen of other StumbleUpon advertising case studies, this is some of the most extensive advertising anyone will publicly recognize. I’m sure there are bigger spenders, but they don’t want their social media success to look fake.

Personally, I’m in the online marketing business, I know that distribution is key and I’m not embarassed to say I advertise my content. I’m proud of it really, because it shows how much effort and pride I take in my material.

That’s a big digression though. What you need to know about SU Ads is this:

• The bounce rate is about the same as other SU traffic – often around 95%. For you money, that means that you’re really getting 5 cents on the dollar worth of traffic that is going to pay attention to your content. Though SU prices their traffic at 5 cents a visit, you’re really paying $1/visit.
• But wait! StumbleUpon traffic is unique: It generates its’ own follow-up traffic when your paid visitors give you thumbs up and reviews! So you’re not really paying $1 visit.
• It’s hard to quantify precisely how much follow on traffic you get. I tried digging into my analytics to tell you, but it’s reporting fewer visitors than I even paid for. That’s normal, since we’re talking about web analytics that relies on javascript, which many stumblers block. Test SU ads yourself if you must know.
• Complicating things further, when you’re buying large quantities of StumbleUpon traffic as I was, and “friending” the stumblers who give you thumbs up, this leads to more reviews and traffic. So there’s a latent benefit.
• The catch is that those relationships, if not kept up, wither and the latent traffic dissapears. Except for my loyal friend and reader, Ann Smarty (internationally famous link building pro, and noted blogger), I rarely get folks stumbling my content any more *sniffle.
• In fairness, that’s largely my fault since I didn’t know what to do to keep building the relationship, after friending those stumblers. I reviewed some of their blogs when I liked them, but most had no sites…
• On a related note, I think I rarely if ever added StumbleUpon buttons prominently above the fold and throughout my content – this may improve your results.
• The StumbleUpon analytics aren’t that insightful – most posts get ~1-2%  of folks thumbing them up or down. You only get more than that with controversial content. No offense to the StumbleUpon team – but there’s just not much you can do based on that info, imho. At best you can promote content on the same topics that do well…
• StumbleUpon no longer lets you advertise SEO content in their “search” category. Considering SEO industry voices like Search Engine Watch made the category, that’s ass-backwards to say the least. Heck, I stumbled the search category recently and saw a meta search engine displaying an award from SEW!
• For all the talk of quality content gaining links, exposing my content via StumbleUpon attracted hardly any links except for when I released Internal Link Building. FYI: I spent my StumbleUpon budget on original feature length content like disguising text link ads, measuring distribution to project link building success (ironic, I know), domains not being legally equivalent to real estate, how Google would rank for mortgage calculator terms etc.

By comparison, my search engine traffic bounces much less and I suspect is responsible for gaining me various social media links etc.

Third, you really have to know what you’re doing before messing around with buying Facebook ads on their app traffic. And you need a large budget so you have time to optimize. I got myself smoked for hardly any conversions on ~ $300 of testing. Not a big loss, but the ~$30-$40 I made was a punch to the ego. I didn’t have the thousands nor the patience necessary to test that into profitability.

Fourth, launching Internal Link Building was one of the coolest but also most time-consuming projects I handled this year.

1. I had to handle a bunch of bugs at the outset that slipped through my beta testing.
2. I got links.
3. Two more sphinns and it’ll be my first post to make 100! .
4. It taught me to shutup until things are really ready to launch or you piss people off. I announced it before my download counter was working properly, delaying launch by several days and wasting MEGA traffic.
5. There is a HUMONGOUS search marketing community in the former Soviet Block. Besides the Russians, you have Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians and many more who are deeply involved in this business.

Fifth, if you’re not in it consistently, the domain name game isn’t for you. You need to put up or shut up. While it saddens me to an extent, I hereby resolve to liquidate my domain name portfolio this year.

Amongst other gems:

• Motocyclette.ca (Motorcycle.ca in French)
• MontrealHotelReviews.com
• UserGeneratedContent.ca
• PMEs.ca (SMEs.ca in French)
• Gvn.ca, which gets typeins from people presumably looking for the government.
• NorthfaceJacket(s).org – check the search volume kiddies … can you say ecommerce?
• WebmasterWelfare.com (aka Adcents)

I’d prefer a buyer who can pick up the whole portfolio, to be honest. Email gab at this domain if you’re interested and have a budget in the low 5 figures. My finance domains are particularly sweet generics.

The same goes for affiliate marketing. I haven’t figured out my approach towards affiliate marketing for 09, but I suspect it will be a merely residual monetization stream as I work to develop Original Monetization.

At the end of the day, you need to focus on what you do best – for me, that means coming up with new ideas, not domaining or affiliate marketing or stumbling. It sucks to look back and realize that – even though I knew it from my first year in online marketing – you can’t focus on more than one or two fields at a time, and you have to limit your projects too.

Sixth, search marketing shows rock. Go SMX! The great folks at Third Door Media and their mods gave me my break at SMX West last year (thanks Vanessa!), and then again at SMX Advanced (thanks Stephen!), and I’ve been fortunate enough to be accepted back to the podium this year. Let me know if you’re going and we’ll hang out! Also, fyi, you can use “SMXSpeaker” as a discount code to save $100 off the registration for SMX West.

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.

A few of you have been kind enough to report bugs and issues with the internal link building plugin. I’m currently aware of the following issues. They’re on the to-do-list to be fixed and/or improved. I wasn’t sure whether or not to hide these bugs or be upfront about it, but I figure it’s better to fess up and be transparent than whatever might happen in the alternative.

Keep in mind, however, that some problems will be specific to you personally. Try de-activating other plugins before you come to report a problem. If that doesn’t work, then please, I really, really want to hear from you!

Also, if you’re on version 1 of the plugin rather than version 2, get version 2
now as it fixes a common bug (see 2 below) and may address yours. You don’t need to worry about losing saved keywords; they’ll be there when you install the new version. This is per my testing on a 2.5x WP install on this site.

1) Apostrophes are not being accepted as part of a keyword. Problematic for anyone that wants to use a possesive (e.g. mark’s internet marketing) and for many Irish folk.

2) Words that are set as global keywords, when appearing within URLs, get linked. E.g. “cats-and-dogs.com”  appearing as text will have cats link to the page set for ‘cats’ and ‘dogs’ set to the page for dogs. This bug also affects trying to set something like ‘idea‘ to link to seoroi.com/ideas. THIS BUG IS FIXED IN THE LATEST VERSION, courtesy of Chris Balicki of Web Systems SEO / reklama internetowa. Download that and install it if you have any problems.

3) Linking from the destination page to itself. I.e. my seo services page links to itself. While nothing is technically broken, it’s kinda dorky and shabby usability for less-savvy users who won’t look at a link’s destination before clicking.

4) When words appear within blockquotes or lists they’re not getting linked. I checked this myself and there’s no consistency in the plugin; sometimes the links appear, but mostly they don’t.

5) Looks like the randomize functionality duplicates links. Per Chris Cemper: “If we specify 6 links and place 3 per post, we certainly want 3 unique links, not 3 times the same ones… that would look spamy/unnatural.” I personally could not replicate this, so I don’t know what to do about it.

6) On a vanilla WP 2.6 Chris got this problem

—
internal-link-building
Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument 0000001 is not an array in C:\!work\!testbed2\wordpress26\wp-content\plugins\internal-link-building\Internal_Link_Building.php
—

Err, crap. ANyone else get that/know why that’s happening?

7) There’s no facility to do this in bulk. I’m going to speak to my dev about having some CSV import/export functionality so that multiple keywords / links can be done in one go.

Other requests I’ve had:

1) Simple Tags/ other plugin compatibility. If I wanted to make my plugin compatible with every other plugin out there, it would be a money sink. Sorry, but this isn’t happening.

2) No follow functionality (e.g. make a link use nofollow). Not sure why you’d use a link building plugin and want it to do nofollow too. If enough people chime in in the comments, I may have this added. I’m a lot more likely to do this if you offer monetary support through paypal. But I think you guys could stop citing Wikipedia so often (you know who you are) and use the wikipedia-nofollow plugin if that’s the concern.

3) Ability to set multiple keywords to link to a particular page. I’m thinking this will be integrated with the bulk feature above. At first I was reluctant but I just set up about 60 phrases using the tool and it can get tedious if one of your pages targets multiple keywords…

Finally, if you guys would like to help accelerate the development of the plugin and the fixes named above, please leave a comment and what you’re willing to contribute. I’ll email you a money request through Paypal. Supporters will be acknowledged.

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.

Update: Welcome Sphinn, StumbleUpon users . How can you rank for competitive keywords like “Mortgage Calculator”? I don’t know about SEOBook, since he’s always talking about it, but here’s how Google would rank for a bigshot mortgage term like that.

1. Buy a ‘make your free website’ WYSIWIG-and-template based website, a la Geocities. Augment with a whackload of cheap hosting across different C blocks and IP ranges. For domains you can use subdomains or include them free (compare that to the cost of buying a link…).

2. Have a bunch of graphic templates made focused on the real estate sector. Pictures of houses, happy families and dogs, simple layouts, obvious email address/phone number etc.

3. Hire students to cold-call real estate agents and offer them free websites, and some resources on where to promote them (i.e. a basic how to do linkbuilding guide and quality directory list). If they ask what the catch is, be honest and tell them that there are links to your mortgage calculator webpage from their own sites.

Presto, you have:

• Themortgage.com
• TDCanadaTrust.com
• RBCRoyalBank.com

[My SERPs look like this:]

			Sponsored Links
			Free Mortgage Calculators Easy to Use Mortgage Calculators. Check Payments and Mortgage Rates. InternetMortgageCalculators.com

Mortgage Calculator — How Much Can You Afford? | CMHC

RBC Royal Bank – Mortgage Payment Calculator

TD Canada Trust – Products and Services – Mortgages

Mortgage Calculators

In fairness, the last two also carry a pretty big brand imprint which gets lots of free, juicy editorial links. But who the hell has ever head of ‘themortgage.com’ (unless you’re in the market, obviously).

What’s especially sweet about this is that it’s endorsed by Google. Ever seen those ‘Powered by Blogger” badges? On blogspot subdomains… Templated … And links to a mortgage calculator site from a real estate broker – that’s standard in the industry anyways, so it’s not like offtopic links from something else.

If you liked this post on link building, get my rss feed.

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.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch;_ylt=AsF7s1pRZXQjk6M7mHIy99bal8kF?p=http%3A%2F%2Fseoroi.com%2Fspecialty-services%2Fnew-seo-plugin-for-wordpress-internal-link-building%2F

Try and find http://www.pokeraffiliateprograms.com/forums/general-poker-affiliate-discussion/17456-new-plugin-wordpress-internal-link-building.html

(Updated with new link as Yahoo changed its results and included other links I’d gained.)

Hint: It’s not there. My Internal Link Building plugin got a wide collection of juicy links (would appreciate more sphinns so it can go to the biggest hits area, folks, please), most of which are not reflected in YSE. Look at this nice thing Markus did for me, and I don’t even know him!

http://www.netvibes.com/markus941/activities

That’s perhaps more of a crawling issue, though. The first post is indexed at Yahoo, however, which bears the question: why doesn’t YSE show the link?

Long story short, those are two of many links – quality links that have driven traffic – which are not being returned by YSE. At least some of them are indexed. What is going on with everybody’s standard link research tool?

Is YSE going the way of Overture? Accuracy of the functionality slowly dying off until MSN or Google replace it altogether?

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.

Note: If you download this, please link to this page from your blog or Tweet it. Also, you’ll probably like a free chapter from my advanced SEO book.

Update 1 : The plugin has been downloaded 22,000 + times! And many webmasters use it on multiple sites, so it’s probably being used on closer to 25-30,000 sites!

(Click to enlarge)

Update 2 : To download the plugin, you need to add my RSS feed to your reader. The download link is now in my RSS feed’s footer . That is to say you can find a link to download below any post, but only if you read via RSS.

Some folks have complained about the need to subscribe. And I understand where you’re coming from – it feels a little pushy and you probably already have a bunch of subscriptions.

But there are good reasons to subscribe to my rss feed (besides it being free):

1) To hear about updates to the plugin or new plugins and SEO tools I release.

2) To learn new SEO techniques. If you like my plugin, aren’t my other SEO ideas worth your attention?

Key info on Internal Link Building:

Internal Link Building gives you an admin panel to assign keywords to given destination URLs. The point being that your website will link within itself a la Wikipedia – every time a keyword occurs, it links to the page you defined.

So: You can rank like Wikipedia, without being Wikipedia. Ok, that’s exaggeration, but the tool improves your internal navigation / link structure a lot.

I got the idea from Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Ninjas, which includes a similar tool.

Also note: Marios Alexandrou of All Thing SEM updated the plugin for WP 2.9+ and currently handles tech support.

Functionality Specifics:

To use the plugin, the settings page is under the Posts menu -> Keywords in 2.7+. It’s under Manage -> Keywords, in older versions of WP (up to 2.5 or 2.6) .

1. This plugin allows you to mass-upload keywords. So you just need to prepare a CSV file in Excel and then copy-paste it into the mass-upload box in your admin panel and then click upload! This is great for larger sites targeting multiple keywords that want to speed things up.

2. It’s up to you whether you make cAsE ReLeVaNT to your links. Check the “Exact Match” checkbox for it to only match when the case is the same as you typed the word into the admin panel. Leave it unchecked to have all cases link to your selected page.

3. Post-level overrides of globally-assigned keywords. Maki, of Dosh Dosh Internet Marketing, pointed out that similar plugins exist. True, but they don’t allow post-level overriding of a given keyword. This plugin does. So if I can link to my homepage every time the words SEO or internet marketing appear, but then link to, Tad Chef’s SEO 2.0 blog with the word SEO, or Joy’s internet marketing.

4. Link to sources or affiliate links whom you reference a lot. That, for me, would be useful so I could cite Maki, SEOmoz, XMCP, and others more easily.

5. Build internal links automatically to pages you regularly reference. For instance, I can just say add my rss feed to your reader and the phrase gets linked on its own.

6. Make a link nofollow. For example, if you link to particular Wikipedia pages a lot then set the nofollow to be automatic.

Click to expand:

Add multiple keywords to one page, or one keyword to multiple pages, have it nofollow, have it link numerous instances on the page, use exact matching or not etc.

7. Link multiple keywords to a single URL. Target all a page’s keywords at once! Just put a space, a  pipe (eg |) and a space between the multiple keywords. E.g. affiliate | affiliate marketing. More efficiency! More time savings!

8. Link a single keyword to multiple URLs. I’m not quite sure why you’d want to do this, but some people asked for it, so there you go!

9. Pick the number of times a keyword will link to a particular URL. If you only want the words social media to link to your social media category once, you can do that. Notice that social gets linked next, since I also have that keyword assigned to link to the same page.

FAQ:

1. Will this plugin overwrite links in older posts using keywords I set to link to particular pages?

- Where a post already links out using given keywords, the plugin will NOT overwrite it.

2. Can we make this link out in a post only a set number of times?

- Yes, this is possible with the new version of the plugin.

3. Can we make a set of URLs to link to, and have it link at random?

- Yes, this is possible. The plugin has been updated, so if you downloaded it on the first or second day it was live, you might want to get the new one. You just need to separate the URLs with | symbols in the URL field.

4. How is this plugin different from other similar plugins?

- They do not have the post-level override functionality. They also don’t have mass upload through a CSV copy-paste functionality. A third difference is that multiple keywords can link to a given URL, or one keyword can link to multiple URLs (see #6 and #7 for more).

6. Where is the post-level override?

- It’s in a box below the main content area in /wp-admin/post.php (or post-new.php). I.e. When you write/edit individual posts, scroll down and you’ll see it.

7. How do I link multiple keywords to URL, or one keyword to multiple URLs?

- Type the different keywords or URLs out with a pipe symbol ( | ) in between them. It’s found just above the enter key on most qwerty keyboards; you press shift+| to make it appear (without shift you’ll get a backslash: \ ) .

8. How do I install this?

- Download the file. Upload it to the wp-content/plugins/ . Login to WordPress. Activate it within the plugins admin page.

Like this plugin idea? Be the first to hear about future releases: Get my RSS feed.

Plugin Bug Fixes

1) Apostrophes within keywords can now be used. So if your friend O’harra is always getting links from you, just set up O’harra and don’t worry about it.

2) URLs that are just being shown, e.g. http://seoroi.com/seo-consulting-services/ are no longer having keywords within them linking out. E.g. services won’t link to a page you’ve set.

3) Posts and pages that are set as link-love destinations won’t link to themselves. Yay! Better aesthetics .

4) Blockquotes and lists can now feature links within them. So go ahead and cite this:

Internal Link Building is awesome!

5) Simple Tags can now work with ILB, with a little ‘child’s play’ hacking on your part, per my awesome developer Aaron.

7) Image tags with keywords in them (e.g. in the alt or title) are no longer breaking.

8 ) Jeff and John of SEO Design Solutions got the plugin up to date for WP 2.7 and removed the bug on the new post / post editing admin panels.

9) Chris Balicki of Web Systems helped out earlier as did Matt Longley of Site Source 101.

Bonus Advantage of Internal Link Building

This is something I’ve noticed since installing the plugin: My average pageviews seen per visitor has gone up from 1.4-1.5 to 1.9-2.0. Woohoo! Go extra frequency/repetition and brand recall!

Like this plugin idea? Be the first to hear about future releases: Get my RSS feed.

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.

Big ideas and food for thought:

How the social web is helping propagate racism: Online Antisemitism 2.0. “Social Antisemitism” on the “Social Web”

Seth’s Blog: Music lessons

Search geekery:

Adwords Support – Get It!

Note: It won’t be great, but you might still get minimal help. Requires the ability to read between the lines [of bs].

TypoHound – Find eBay Typos and Misspellings

Keywords with two meanings? Inconceivable! | SEO Woman

Project Wombat: the Difficult Reference Question Mailing List

Simple Block segmentation analysis • Tim Nash UK SEO Blog

Hiding the Sphinn Button When a Post Fails to Go Hot

SEOmoz | Does “Query Deserves Diversity” Algorithm Exist at Google?

YOUmoz | Bad Bots Confound Web Analytics By Executing Javascript Tags

Reputation management:

Avante Gardens: You Had Me at Hello – Cameron Olthuis

FTD.com Sucks – Cameron Olthuis

On a related note, I was chatting earlier tonight at Yulbiz with a webmaster called Nicolas who apparently ranked on Google.fr for things like ‘dictionnaire’ ‘synonyme’ and ‘cigarette’ . Anyways, this pro was happy that someone else was ranking for his last name as it drew attention away from him; he’d rather the competition not be able to find out about him. Also why he’s not on Facebook. Interesting approach I thought I’d share.

On being a value added affiliate, see these two (especially for SMX Advanced ):

Webcam Reviews

The Best Rate Guarantee Blog – Best Rate Guarantees, Free Hotel Rooms, and Other Travel Deals: Seattle

I’m working on a meatier post to release later this week or early next week. I’ve taken on Ice.com as a client for SEO work (have a look at their Pearl pendants or Diamond Rings and keep an eye out for an interview either here on in the Domaining press on the true story behind the acquisition of Diamond.com) and between that and current clients, am briefly swamped until I get some things sorted.

That said, I wrote what I think is a kickass post on email marketing for linkbait, and because I wrote yet another crummy title, Sphinn didn’t promote it to the front page (http://sphinn.com/story/47807 ) and for whatever reason Rebecca didn’t feel it was main blog worthy …

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 got this email:

Dear SEO ROI Services author,

Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.2 score out of (10) in the Technology category of Blogged.com.

This is quite an achievement! [If you say so, then it must be!]

http://www.blogged.com/directory/technology

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. [So quality wasn't a criteria? I guess I'm finally getting through to people how little quality content matters!]

After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.2 score.

We’ve also created Blogged.com score badges with your score prominently displayed. Simply visit your website’s summary page on Blogged.com:

[Badge picture was here.]

Click on the “Show this rating on your blog!” link underneath the score and follow the instructions provided.

Please accept my congratulations on a blog well-done!!

Sincerely,

Amy Liu

Marketing

amy@blogged.com

www.blogged.com

Matt Inman’s widgetbait for his new dating site got pre-emptively wrecked recently, in what most SEOs (see the comments on that post) thought was unfair punishment for someone starting out fresh in a legitimate, whitehat way. If we’re going to talk about widgetbait as spam [because it's unsolicited and obviously worthless here], this here is the prototype example, not Matt’s fun quizzes and such.
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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.

Google killed former SEOmoz CTO Matt Inman’s widgetbait because some Guardian reporter didn’t like it and wrote his negative opinion up. Then Aaron Wall was unlucky enough to trust a jerk who asked Matt Cutts about Aaron’s affiliate program based linkbuilding.

The question is: Will Amazon get a beat-down too? For their affiliate program based linkbuilding?

Don’t be silly.

3 Lessons for the Weary:

1) Don’t make Google look stupid. This is the cardinal rule of SEO. Spam isn’t a problem until it makes Google look bad. Sometimes that’s just by ranking. Other times you figure out a way to get lots of whitehat links and then bingo – you’re nailed. Note: I personally find the Widgetbait issue particularly weird, since Google’s saying to webmasters: we’re not holding you responsible for your own content.

2) Avoid getting too specific, particularly about your sites or clients’ sites.

3) Build your brand. Duh.

4) If you find some code that works to build whitehat, links in a scaleable fashion, keep it to yourself and do your best to stay on the downlow/practice reputation management. The Guardian folks wrote the story up a couple of times, and it’s plausible that they’d have wrapped it up after one piece with some reaching out.

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• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
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• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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First, I present to you this amusing little email:

from seo expert <seseoexperts@gmail.com> to seseoexperts@gmail.com, date Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 8:04 AM subject Obligation signed-by gmail.com

hide details 8:04 AM (4 hours ago)

Reply

Hi there,

Thank you for taking time to read this email.

We provide high quality graphic design service like Web design, banner design, logo design and web development at a very low cost.

If you are interested, we are willing to Exchange link with you for our mutual benefit.

Please do not hesitate to contact fastlinkmaster@gmail.com for further inquiries.

Thanks and Best Regards
Link Department

We are not spammers and are against spamming of any kind. We are sending this mail with sole intention of link exchange for mutual benefit. If you are not interested in Link Exchange then you can reply simply “NO”, we will never contact you again.

Second, I’d like to share some genuine link love with people who’ve produced good content or have some points that deserve your attention.

1) Uber Aff has made some great posts, some of which are unfortunately buried in archives. Today’s post on how much to spend is a good place to start, then here’s something for those who are interested in blackhat PPC, how to contact human support at AdWords is another great one, and then this video Q&A just made me burst out laughing.

2) Daniel, a bright and friendly Sitepointer, has this very nice blog on building trust and credibility.

3) Quadszilla has an explanation on how to daisy chain your Diggs and gain more social success.

4) This is a year old, but imho, still very true and still very fresh: Crowd Clout aka collective purchasing power.

5) Besides trolls, there’s a much darker face to Web 2.0 and social media. Read antisemitism in web 2.0 and social media to find out more. On a related note, please do link to Jew Tube and to this Jew. If you’re wondering why I’m doing that, read this: Google’s explanation of why the antisemitic Jew Watch ranks for “Jew”.

6) For those of you interested in outsourcing tech overseas, Israel has some of the best IT labour in the world. Thus have a look at Launchpad Israel’s relaunch. On the more strictly search marketing side of things, that link right there takes you to my friend Omer Shoval’s Israeli search marketing company. If you’re in the job market, you can check out these Israeli SEO Jobs (in Hebrew).

7) This one is new to me, but not new generally: How Google Emulates the Las Vegas Casinos in Trying to Control The Web’s Rules. John Andrews is a bright guy, and that’s a cutting indictment!

I’d like to point out to you that from now on, you can find all my blog posts at SEOROI.com/blog, while the best ones will be reserved for the front page. That was the original intention, but my original developer never got around to doing that (although the other stuff he programmed works pretty well).

p.s. Coming soon: My interview with Barbara Ling, a veteran webmaster, as well as some affiliate marketing posts that compare networks by an objective criteria and help you decide who to sign up with.

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 guest-posted at Dave Harris’ Huomah, sharing some linkbait ideas I had lying around for linkbait pieces which you’re welcome to develop! If you like it, also please do Sphinn the post. It also ties in to guest-writing I did at Pandia on succesful linkbait’s characteristics. And speaking of influencing people to link to you and/or sphinn your stuff, check out my most recent article, On Motivation and Influence. If you like it, a sphinn would also be appreciated. I put about a dozen hours into it and am really proud of that, so it would mean a lot if you could help it go hot.

Besides all that, I’m going to make the traditional invitation for you to Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon

Think you’re going to linkbait people with whitepapers? Maybe get their email or have them register for your webinar? MyVenturePad is bringing the stakes of the game one step higher: They’re giving away Meatball Sundaes! What is a Meatball Sundae?Meatball Sundae is Seth Godin‘s new book. I registered for a webinar given by My Venture Pad(.com) and just got a thankyou present from them: a copy of Meatball Sundae. Brilliant marketing, folks!

(Picture courtesy of … no, not Tamar this time. I took that .

So what is MyVenturePad?

They’re a business community a la Liblogs (run by my friend and all-around cool-guy, Jason Cherniak), for those of you familiar with Canadian politics. That is, the main community element is a blog reader/moblog consisting of feeds fed into the system by the community’s businesses and/or participating bloggers. Here’s how MyVenturePad describes itself:

“This is a moderated online business community for owners and managers of companies with fewer than 500 employees, and the professionals who advise them. Before you can use most of the community features of the site, you will need to sign up (Upper Right Corner).

As a registered member you can create your own profile and view the profiles of others. You can leave comments, rate posts, and directly connect with other members. You can add your existing blog feed to the content flow or blog here ”

Seems to me linkbait in 08 is going to mean free giveaways…

Other related notes: I recently bought “Pourquoi Bloguer dans un Contexte D’Affaire,” or 10 Reasons Why Businesses Should Blog for those of you who only speak English. While I think Seth makes a good argument in Meatball Sundae – Web 2.0 is not the silver bullet – Why Business Should Blog features a pretty good argument for the use of blogs, at least. Speaking personally, I know that blogging has helped me get more business, so there’s certainly some potency there.

10 Reasons to Blog in a Business Context features the writing of 10 well known Quebec business bloggers, including a few I’m proud to claim as friends, or at least friendly acquaintances. Four of them wrote me dedications on the inside cover (ironically, I didn’t know those guys yet from any prior Yulbizes, though I had met – not quite the same as knowing – Martin Lessard at an earlier one).

The shirt is from Africa Is Real’s One Voice Concert to raise money for the fight against genocide (esp. in Darfur), proverty, and AIDs. The dog tag is from Hillel, inscribed with the names of the three Israeli soldiers kidnapped by terrorists last summer.

The dedicators are Tristan Peloquin, Claude Malaison, Mario Asselin and Martin Lessard. The other authors are, in no particular order, Sylvain Carle, Michel Leblanc, Philippe Martin, Martin Ouellette, Marc Snyder and Marie-Chantal Turgeon. I now know all of them except for Martin Ouellette (whose chapter on blogging as a tool for provocation – in the sense of making people think, not provoking a flame war – is quite good) and Marie-Chantal Turgeon. Each of the 10 have an impressive blog and if you can read French, then these are people worth bookmarking at least, and probably RSSing too.

While some of the information in the book on SEO is of debatable accuracy (like links being “votes,” as per Martin Lessard’s otherwise highly intelligent chapter, which I credit along with Shana’s Social Desire for explaining why commenting is worth it and thus making me comment more) , much of it is highly educational and informative. Just like two of the book’s 10 reasons, namely Mario’s “blog to teach” and Tristan’s “blog to inform.” I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I am enjoying it thoroughly, and can assure you that Claude, besides writing a chapter, did a damn good job with the editing.

But I digress: Thanks again to MyVenturePad for giving me Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae as food for thought! This is how you do proactive search engine reputation management.

On a related note, I vote for Gyutae and Winning the Web, in his friendly challenge to Tyler Cruz. He’s ahead of us all and already on the giveaways trend, and after giving away a review by John Chow, he’s now offering free t-shirts for people to vote for his blog. Smart guy, that Gyutae! Did I mention he comments on this blog and has real ice cream under his Sundae’s toppings?)

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 can beat back a horde of 31 five year olds kids in a fight.

31

Find Ultrasound technician training near you

Why am I posting this? Because it’s brilliant linkbait and, per Matt, is part of a strategy that’s brought in about 250 K links for the dating site he works with. Speaking of which, Matt also informs me that oatmeal is made up of ground-up pigeons. So perhaps he’s not that reliable. He’s a premium linkbaiter, in any case. Now excuse me, I think I feel some five year old children’s teeth gnawing at my ankle.

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.