I’ve been so heads down in client audits that I didn’t discover this until, ironically, doing another audit for another client. However, I also don’t recall seeing many blog headlines in my Netvibes, so perhaps this one has rather floated under the radar a bit. Even a quick scan in Google doesn’t turn up much beyond this post, ‘Linkedin adds rel=”Nofollow” to profile links‘ over at Kingpin SEO, which dates this change around early-mid November. Based on my recent audit schedule, would make this about right.

But what about the twist? Well, it appears that the nofollowing isn’t absolute. There are profiles with custom anchor text and default anchor text that have nofollowed links and those that are still followed.

There are basic free profiles and, as far as I can tell, at least some version of paid accounts that are nofollowed. This is probably smart; otherwise, if the paid accounts would earn followed links, they might run risk of scrutiny from Google for essentially creating a system of paid links.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there are profiles both within and outside the “industry” that are nofollowed, so it doesn’t appear to be just targeted at SEOs.

The real twist however is that there are profiles that even have a mix of followed and nofollowed links. It will be interesting to see if nofollows are eventually rolled out to all profiles and all links.

While the true value of these links and the juice they past may have been questionable, it was nice knowing that they did provide an opportunity to try to pass some value back. It also meant that people were more likely to link to their profile pages without nofollowing the links, even when they may have nofollowed every other external link. Perhaps this means that LinkedIn may have also indirectly cut off some of the link juice they received as well if people start nofollowing links back to their profiles.

Regardless, these links are still important and I would still advise clients and individuals to take advantage of them. These links continue to provide an opportunity for discover, if not for bots, for the ultimate audience, the humans who click them.

The good news is, if you now find your links nofollowed, at least you know you are in good company:

Perhaps LinkedIn should offer up an alternative button though for people to place on their websites, one for followed and one for nofollowed

Today, when a new web site is launched, it will take a while before its pages get crawled and indexed in Google. With the increasing strain on hardware and resources due to the rapid growth of new sites, Google has become very strict in its policy of admitting sites and retaining web pages of sites in its index. It is a case of survival of the fittest in cyberspace.

Some of the basic facts to be borne in mind when looking at the issue in its entirety are:

• The Page rank is proportional to the total number of pages in Google’s index
• The page rank gained by a site depends on the number of inbound and outbound links to that site
• To increase its page rank, a site must build more pages and increase its virtual real estate

When a new site is launched, the number of backlinks to that site is negligible unless the business is well known and has a credible following offline and is launching its brand online. The average site owner has to set about building an external link profile by submitting to directories, guest blogging on well established industry relevant blogs, providing a platform for user generated content on her site, promoting site badges etc etc.

All this takes time and effort and it is a slow and steady natural growth. There are several link building software programs that promise instant deliverance by helping you build multitude of links in no time. The problem with this approach is that an average human cannot acquire 100 links in a day (read 8 hours of work time). Google also knows this and it is an easy recipe for raising a red flag.

Coming to the crux of the issue, creating and growing the number of pages on your site is relatively easy as you, the site owner, have full control over it. If you are passionate about your industry with good working knowledge, you can build lots of content over a short span of time. But this alone will not make the cut in today’s circumstances for making it into the Google index and being retained and ranked over time.

The most powerful links that can be obtained today are editorial links. When another site owner regards your site content as one of high quality and decides to link to from her blog or site, it is clearly a double thumbs up for your content and Google will also consider it seriously. A great linkbait program can help your site gain lots of natural inbound links from the linkerati.

If you have votes from other sites in the form of backlinks to the various pages of your site, this is crucial in Google retaining those pages in its index. Again, you cannot produce top quality content across all pages of your site as the subject being discussed can be limited in scope or not very popular in the eyes of users.

I have been noticing of late that even powerful domains with several product pages with wafer thin content and footer heavy links do not pass muster to be admitted/retained in the index. It is becoming increasingly clear that each individual page must attain a certain pagerank threshold to be retained in the index. This clearly proves that things cannot be taken for granted. Also, well established sites cannot afford to rest on their laurels any more.

To achieve a minimum pagerank threshold, internal linking can help to an extent and you as the site owner can do your bit to this end. But it is very vital to get a link from external unbiased sources to derive some link juice that can boost the pagerank of the page in question.

If the momentum on “natural” external link building profile of your website is maintained at a steady level from the inception of your website to its current state, you can expect Google to maintain a decent indexation level of your site and update its index regularly with the fresh content and growing number of pages offered by your site.

Rand in his Whiteboard presentation on Link Growth Patterns explains the relationship between link growth patterns and indexation levels.

Eric Enge in his post on The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links talks about improving the pagerank flow to hitherto areas of the site where there was no link juice flowing before.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo firm offering both search engine optimisation and ppc services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

The entire domain’s authority and trust is reflected by this page rank value. The home page then tends to distribute this page rank to the first level (categories), the second level (sub-categories) and the third level product pages which we often refer to as link juice. In general, the first level pages tend to derive the maximum link juice from the home page. But in a site with excessive number of sub-categories and product pages (money pages), the pagerank distribution is not proportional with some gaining link juice and a large majority not gaining any.

I am not delving into pagerank sculpting which was the rage of the SEO industry not long ago. This method was adopted to make certain areas of a site more powerful by flowing link juice from the home page preferentially to pages of interest (possible commercial intent). The internal linking architecture is altered from its natural form to highlight more important pages than the rest on the site.

In my opinion, internal linking with appropriate anchor text can be used to improve the ranking of pages within a site but this has its limitations. Integrating a blog with the main site so that it forms part of the global site template is vital. The different posts on the site blog can point to different pages of the site to flow some much needed link juice to prop select pages up and assist them in getting indexed by Google and ranked on the SERPs.

Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting has done some research in regards to distribution of domain authority and trust to pages on the lower level pages of a site. Let us assume you have a site selling products. You have the home page, many categories with respective sub-categories and product pages in that order. Let us consider an example where you sell Canon digital cameras as shown below.

The specific product page in question is listed on Page 4. You are not happy as this product page has not recorded any page rank. If it does not have the requisite page rank, there is a possibility that it will not gain entry into the Google index.

In this scenario, it is evident that the site despite a great PR of 6 is not able to flow link juice into this specific product page. Eric has found out in his experiments that an inbbound link to this deep page with appropriate anchor text (in this case EOS D7 Canon Digital Camera Review) from an external site is a huge help to get this product page into the index and help get it ranked. The link may not be of superior quality yet it helps a great deal.

As we all know, every inbound link is a vote to the site and the search engines recognise this as a strong signal. The search engines adjust their algorithm accordingly to flow more internal link juice into the page which has gained inbouind links. The more the merrier seems to be the case.

In our example, the Canon EOS D7 product page ends up gaining link juice thus helping it enter the Google index and get ranked over time. Deep inbound links help a site distribute more authority and trust to pages that receive such inbound links. This is a classic case of an inbound link triggering a tunnel of sorts to flow a site’s internal link juice to select pages at a lower hierarchy level.

In summary, you do not need masses of links to get your third level or product pages indexed and ranked on the SERPs. Just a few inbound links will facilitate better flow of the site’s domain authority and trust (read link juice) to the specific page recipient of the inbound links in question. You can read the post on impact of deep inbound links on a site’s lower level pages on Eric’s site.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company offering both seo and pay per click services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

I will be discussing only the top 4 factors under each section with a mention of the value score allotted by the SEO professionals . This biennial survey by Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz picks the brains of the top 72 SEO professionals from all over the world and their collective wisdom is presented in this post.

I) Link Building Tactics For SEO:

1)Link Bait And Viral Content Creation: 67% Very High Value
Just as all links are not created equal, all content created on the web is certainly not equal. There are certain pieces of content that are so well researched and presented in an interesting fashion that most readers fancy and take a liking to. They end up distributing it across the cybersphere through social media networks and emails.

The virality aspect is in the nature of the content itself, be it a 400 word ingenious piece titled
“10 ways to [solve a specific problem faced by people world over]” or a catchy video that captures the imagination of users. A recent example that comes to mind is the babies skating around in their nappies in an advertisement for a French water brand.

All this results in a massive surge of backlinks to the site which published this piece of content. There is a huge spike in traffic to the original website. The search engines love the natural scheme in which the backlinks are generated. Users follow links to read/watch the content. It is a win-win situation for all.

2) Blogging And Engagement With The Blogosphere: 66% high value
The influence of blogging cannot be stressed enough in the cyberworld. It is an incredible way for a “domain expert” to share knowledge and get valuable feedback from readers in the form of comments. Blogging is a long term process and it takes time and effort for a blogger to establish a good relationship with her readers and fellow bloggers in her chosen niche.

The popularity of a blog can be ascertained from the number of readers subscribed to the RSS feed and the activity taking place on the blog itself by way of exchange of comments between the blogger and readers. Over time, the blogger earns the reputation of a respected authority in her domain and develops a loyal band of committed followers.

The high quality and originality of her blog posts will result in posts getting tweeted over Twitter and passed around other popular social media networks. Each mention of the post on the web is a vote for the source site as far as search engines are concerned. Atleast, a tweet on Twitter ensures that the post is indexed by Google which scours the Twitter landscape actively even if the traditional blog and ping service is not being used.

Being a guest blogger on other popular blogs in the same niche or participating in blog carnivals can bring lot more exposure and hence traffic to a niche blogger’s site.

3) Classic “Create Valuable Content” Strategies: 58% High Value
Content that is original and written in a polished style stands out amongst the fluff that floats around in the cyberworld. Most times, it is borne out of practical knowledge of the author in a particular niche. As the saying goes – “Knowledge borne out of experience is wisdom”, the same goes for content that is written based on experiences gleaned by the domain expert through day to day application of the techniques described therein.

4) Public Relations: 56% High Value
Press Release (PR) is the first thing that comes to mind when public relations is mentioned. This is a powerful tool that can generate great backlinks and mentions if executed correctly. Traditionally, press releases that are interesting and absorbing catch the eye of journalists covering that niche who in turn refer to it in the news column they author. The higher the status enjoyed by the newspaper, the wider the exposure gained by the press release.

Sadly, this powerful tool has not been wielded well as a many press releases end up being pretty much self hype harping on the virtues of the company and the owners rather than dwell on the important part – the uniqueness of the product or service offered.

Beyond press releases, Jessica Bowman states that public relation departments and agencies are not up to speed when it comes to maximising the opportunities for search engine rankings.

II) Factors Affecting Value Of An External Link:

1) Trust Of The Source Domain: 70% Very High Value
The trustrank concept is based on the fact that good and trusted sites are linked together at the core of the web and that spam pervades outside this central area of good neighborhood. It is based on a Stanford University research paper titled Combating Webspam With Trustrank

The search engines caluclate Trustrank as an iterative Pagerank type of metric that flows link juice from a bunch of trusted seed sites to determine if a domain is trustworthy or not.

Another way of looking at it is the number of hops the domain in question is away from the trusted seed site. If it is within a limited number of hops from the seed site, then it can be considered to be high in trust. My earlier post titled Relationship Between Trust and Link Building talks about this aspect at length.

If this cannot be determined algorithmically, there is a possibility that human reviewers could confirm this aspect by looking at the percentage of links to and from a domain that link to good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods.

2) Global Authority/Importance of Source Domain: 68% Very High Value
The authority of the source domain is an important criterion that adds more value to the quality of the link emanating from it. The domain authority is a hybrid combination of the quality of links coming into it, domain trust and age of the domain.

The quality of links is influenced by the links coming into a site from other powerful well trusted domains. The strengthening of the good neighborhood aspect is vital to the good ranking of the site in question on the SERPs.

3) Keyword Anchor Text Of The Link: 67% Very High Value
The words that form part of the clickable link is generally referred to as the anchor text. Typically, the anchor text confirms to the search engines the nature of a page with respect to its content and whether the link that describes the page in question really is representative of it.

Internal linking within a site gives a good idea of the nature of the content to search engines. But it is the anchor text in external links that really reinforces the initial confrimation of the search engines. If you have a great article on blue widgets, then the inbound links from external unbiased sources that have blue widgets as part of their anchor text provides a lot of value to the recipient site and goes a long way to help it get ranked well in the SERPs.

The context in which the link appears on a page is also vital. If it is an editorial link from an external site where the author writes about a certain topic and contextually links to an article on your site, it clearly shows Google that your article is a great benchmark in that particular niche and one that often gets referred to in other posts and articles on the web. Such natural links have the highest value in Google’s eyes and these links are equally hard to obtain.

4) Quantity of Pagerank Passed By The Link: 59% High Value
If a page has a Pagerank of 5 points and if there are 5 links going out from that page, then each link ideally gets 1 pagerank point (Pagerank of a page / number of links on that page), provided none of the links going out of that page are nofollowed.

If your site gets an editorial link on a highly trusted strong domain page with high Pagerank, the amount of link juice passed by that link to your site is quite high and your site gets the ultimate benefit from such a link. Such a high quality link can be considered equivalent to a few hundred links from mediocre sites.

From the observations of many seo gurus in the past, it is ideal to have 100 or less links typically on any given page in order to distribute the pagerank as fairly as possible from the home page to the category and sub-category pages.

Search engines nowadays tend to ignore the navbar and footer links to a large extent. It is clear that the position of the link on a given page is important to be considered in the link graph calculations of the site by the search engines.

Instead of using nofollow links, a site owner can design her site in such a way that the important parts of her site are given prominence in the site architecture hierarchy and page consolidation is done for less important areas of the site.

For a detailed account of all the link factors that influence search engine rankings, Rand’s post titled
Effectiveness of ilink building tactics for SEO is an illuminating read and can whet your appetite for more knowledge on the ubiquitous links that form the basis of the world wide web.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company that provides both seo services and pay per click services to its clients New Zealand and Australia wide.

These tips are easy to implement and will suit a majority of the businesses on the web. With paid traffic getting more expensive with each passing day (and yet providing only 12% of traffic on the web), it is high time all website owners started ramping up their organic seo efforts. These tips will certainly help in improving a site’s natural search visibility which still accounts for 88% of the traffic on the web.

There are a few proprietary tools (created by SEOMoz) that are mentioned in the post. These tools do a great job of automating the mundane tasks thus saving valuable time and giving great results to help you plan your strategy. You have to be a paid PRO member to access these tools.

1) Request for a link in customer communications:
There are many opportunities arising in the course of a site owner communicating with a customer in the entire buying cycle. In your emails, you will be well advised to ask for a link in a courteous manner.

It could read – “If you have a website or blog, we would appreciate if you could link to us by copying this code Anchor text that suits your business.”
NOTE:
a) Vary the anchor text subtly in your emails
b) If possible, get links to your inner money pages

2) Use of Top Pages Tool To Identify Competitor’s Backlinks:
The Top Pages tool is a great way to see your competitor’s backlinks by just plugging in their site URL. The screenshot below helps you get an idea.

You can then create suitable linkbait that can attract links from those sites that are already linking to your competitor. Else, you can email the powerful domain owners and request for a link after you have referenced their site post or article on your own blog or your site. This will help answer the other domain owner’s question – “What is in it for me?” and thus incentivize her to link to your site.

3) Use Adwords Tool To Find Keywords That Have High Search Volume And Low Competition:
Many of us are prone to miss the obvious Adams in many things we do in life. This point is a classic example. In most cases, these money keywords are long tail keywords that can be optimised through on page factors and made to rank well in the major search engines.

A search for pet collar using the Adwords keyword tool results in the following screenshot:

The term

pet collar supplies

has a search volume of 49500 with limited advertiser competition. If your site is in the pet industry business, this will be a good keyword to target.

4) Use of Top Pages Tool To Find Linking Pages To Your Domain That Need A Redirect:
The Top Pages tool mentioned in (2) above is very useful to identify links from external sites to pages on your domain that are currently maybe showing a 404 Error or temporary redirects etc, whatever the case maybe.

You can then use 301 redirects to preserve and forward the inherent link juice on such pages to the latest updated versions on your site. I am reproducing a screenshot of the original post which clearly explains what I have written.

If you are the site owner, then the access to Google Webmaster Central will help you identify the 404 pages. It can be a problem if you are doing research for a potential client.

There is another instance where an entire domain has been 301 redirected to a new domain. If the old domain had pages with 404 errors, then a 301 redirect to them is still going to show up as 404 errors as far as Google is concerned. These are lost pages and will not show up in the Webmaster Tools when the new domain is analyzed.

But Top Pages tool does show up these lost pages. It is invaluable data to rectify the lost pages and gain their link juice by 301 ing them to the appropriate pages on the new domain.

5) Competitive Link Finder Tool To Build Your Site External Profile:
The new Competitive Link Finder tool released by SEOmoz is a powerful aid that helps you identify the linking sites that link to multiple competitors in your industry.

You have to plug in your site URL and atleast three of your competitor sites to get the best results. You can always email such domains that link to your industry competitors and get a link to your site as well.

6) Optimize Your Google Local Listings:
Google local listings are a huge asset for any business to be listed on the first page for the most representative search phrase of their industry. It is helpful if the business is physically located close to the city.

I have found that a good local backlink profile boosts a site on Google local search. This can be achieved by submitting to local directories and other businesses in the same local geographical location in which the business operates.

David Mihm is an authority on local search issues and his points at the SEOMoz Pro Conference are outlined below:
a) Claim your local listing on Google (even if you make a multiple submit). This is given more value by Google than a bulk upload that is susceptible to spam.

b) Use keywords in the business title when submitting a local listing. Avoid keyword stuffing the title.

c) Add custom categories that your business offers. This can be a helpful ranking factor. Use the maximum number of permitted custom categories.

d) Citations are the links of Google Local rankings. Get listed on Localeze, InfoUSA, Openlist.com, etc. Americans should check out this list of places to get citations

Others should check out David’s guides to citations in Canada, UK Citations, Citations in Australia and Continental Europe Citations

You can use the search engines to find even more citation sources:

• yourcity, st blog
• yourcity, st directory
• yourindustry, st blog
• yourindustry, st directory
• yourindustry yourcity, st blog
• yourindustry yourstate directory

7)Buyind paid advertisements on Google Content Network:
There is a tip on buying advertisements on sites listed on the Google Content Network. Sites listed there are maximising their revenue through Adsense and would be more open to paid link advertisements. It is each individual site owner’s call whether to adopt this strategy or not.

8. Increase Link Love By Becoming A Green Business:
If a business goes green online, it is a good way of attracting links from authoritative domains. There are many sites like Ethical Directory, EcoFirms.org, Guide Me Green etc willing to give your site a link provided it is a green one. This also reflects on a business owner’s willingness to be eco friendly. With global warming taking centerstage, this issue is all the more vital.

9) Work on Your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
A good majority amongst us (especially in the SEO industry) are obsessed with rankings and traffic. Conversion of visitors into paid customers often takes a backseat. Ben Jesson’s CRO presentation provided a wealth of information and lot of food for thought.

You could make a good start by learning your customers’ needs once they land on your site. This can be done by implementing tools on your website from which you can learn what your customers are looking for.

Get some unbiased feedback from other folks who are not your friends or relatives. The more the site is torn to shreds, the better it is as an eye opener for you to take instant remedial action. A good list of tools for learning from your customers are:

• GoogleTalk Chatback (I just added this to my site and it is super easy to implement)
• Tell-a-Friend-King
• Kampyle
• iPerceptions 4Q
• Distilled Reputation Monitor
• CrazyEgg (I have used this, and it rocks)
• SurveyMonkey
• Ethnio
• ClickTale
• Google Website Optimizer

You would be well off checking these great Conversion rate optimization articles and sign up for the newsletter on their site.

10) Seth’s Marketing Opportunity Calculator:
To help you in your sales pitch efforts, it is worth your effort in taking a look at Seth’s Marketing Opportunity calulator. You can download his slides and spreadsheets at How to Win SEO Budget and Influence your CMO

Whitespark’s entire post titled 10 Valuable, Actionable, Take-Aways From the SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar is a great read on which this post is based.

My post titled Next Frontier In Search Marketing gives the traffic figures for seo and ppc.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company offering both natural search and Auckland pay per click marketing services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

For this, the content has to be of high quality along the lines of linkbait and capable of going viral. It gets picked up by various social media properties and earns lot of link love. Yet, there are people who complain that they are not having success in using this technique. One of the major reasons for failure is the inability to build relationships.

The most impressive feature of social media is that links obtained are completely organic, very editorial in nature and highly valuable. The more number of social media properties that link to your site, the greater is the domain diversity and so is their domain trust. All these factors definitely boost your site on the SERPs. The success of social media in promoting your site also depends on the service or product you provide.

There are a few steps you can take to improve your external link profile. It is true that visitors from social media sites may not be targeted or suitable for your product/service that you offer on your site. But interested users will certainly provide links to interesting stuff on your site.

1) Indirect Process Of Link Building:
Use of social media for link building, albeit a lengthy process, is extremely rewarding. It is not a hands free process as some would like you to think. The general belief is that you create user accounts on major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Digg and Reddit with your user profile linking back to your site. Other users would follow your profile links and end up on your site. This can happen if you are a celebrity and not otherwise.

The indirect method can be diagrammatically represented as:

The indirect process of link building involves having quality content on your site. You must register (if you already are not part of online communities) for user accounts on the major social media properties.

First and foremost, build relationships amongst the various online communities. Get to know others who share the same interests as yours (and hence your specific industry relevant product/service) and paritcipate in conversations. If it is a discussion, leave a comment that adds value to the conversation and to the topic in whole. Be courteous and polite to everyone. Avoid hype and flame.

You must also realise that promoting a baby nappy product on Digg will never see the light of the day as the Digg community is dominated by tech savvy younger crowd. A more mature gathering can be found at Facebook or Gather where such products can be targeted to the right crowd. Ensure that you put in efforts to gain traction in the right places.

Assuming you are an established user in particular social media sites and you have a good following, a good post with a catchy title linking to great content on your site gets popular and goes viral and gets linked to by other sites, blogs, forums, press releases and rss feeds. Rand at SEOmoz refers to these propagators collectively as Linkerati. It is the links from Linkerati to your site that helps your site climb up the rankings on the SERPs.

2) Update Your Social Media Properties:
If you have an active blog going on your site with regular updates, most social media (SM) sites let you have a feed directly from your blog. This helps in keeping your social media account fresh and regularly updated. Some of the SM sites have their own internal ranking (Squidoo is a good example) and if your post is a featured lens, it gets lots of eyeballs and also gets promoted to the major search engines.

2) Thou Shalt Not Spam:
Everyone hates spam and the social media community is very intolerant of spam. If you try to post links to irrelevant stuff or excessive self promotion using your profile on various sites and you get reported, your account can be terminated. You will be shunned by the rest of the community. It is not easy to change your reputation online because negative comments cannot be edited or removed. It will be an uphill battle to salvage your reputation after the initial damage is done.

3) Engage With Your Community:
Not everyone can produce viral content at will. Linkbait is a double edged sword that has to be used carefully. It can be extremely successful or damage your reputation irreparably if done the wrong way.

Even if you cannot put out great content, you can be an active member and promote other people’s posts and become a popular figure in the community over time. Anything you say or do after attaining that position will give you lot of leverage.

4) Share Selflessly:
If you take an active part in the community and retweet your friends’ tweets on Twitter, share others links on your status update on Facebook, dig colleagues posts on Digg, stumble sites on StumbleUpon etc, you are sure to earn lot of goodwill from the community and others will generously pass their link love to you by promoting your posts and tweets and the like.

Give freely without expectations and the links to your site will follow. Selfless appreciation of everything going on in your community is the secret to getting more inbound links to your site. All this takes time and effort and it is not a fly by night operation. Building relationships is the key to your link building success in the social media sphere.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing consultancy, offering organic seo and pay per click marketing services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Research done by the experts at SEOmoz indicated (above the 95% confidence level) that domain diversity is a key metric that helps a site achieve top rankings. The diversity here refers to the number of links coming from a variety of root domains to the site in question.

The links gained are all the more powerful when the anchor text in the link contains keyword phrases that aptly describe the nature of the page/site gaining the links. It is not easy to control this factor as the site linking in will not always choose anchor text that is appropriate to your site.

The other important factor here is the trust and authority of the domains linking in to your site. When you have a good quality site with lots of valuable content, you will attract links from a variety of domains. A percentage of such inbound links is bound to be spammy. Google looks at the ratio of percentage of such spammy links to the total number of inbound links to your site and has a threshold of acceptance for such aberrations.

The topical focus of the domains linking to your site is a big boost in the entrie scheme of things. Though Google has not professed to being semantically inclined in its algorithms, it is important to have relevant links to your site than totally irrelevant ones.

There are a variety of ways in which links can be built. A good post on gaining inbound links from diverse domains shows exactly that.

Consolidation of Links From Various Domains:
A great video post on microsites by Rand shows that it is better to concentrate your efforts of building content on a single domain on which your site resides rather than increasing the division of labour and hence dilution in focus by creating microsites and blogs.

Rand gives a clear example wherein a site owner has two distinct domains, one for her blog and one her actual site. Pictorially, it can be depicted as:

There are several inbound links coming into the site owner’s blog site. She has done all the hard work in publishing valuable content to attract these links from various domains with relevant anchor text. She now passes a link to her main site with the same anchor text directed at a specific money page on her site. This is deficient in two ways.

Firstly, the accumulated pagerank juice from all the inbound links are not transferred appropriately from the blog site to the parent site by means of a single link even though the anchor text is relevant to the landing page on her main site.

Secondly, Google sees just one domain (the mysiteblog.com) linking to the parent site (mysite.com). The inbound links to the blog site come from different domains. This is not going to help the owner rank well for the specific keyword phrase of her choice. A lot of hard work does not translate into actual results in this case.

An ideal scenario in this case would be to have the blog as part of the main domain. Even if the blog receives multitude of links from various domains, it is still part of the main site and it strengthens the domain diversity of the links now pointing to the site. It can be something like this:

To integrate the blog within the parent domain, all the posts on the blog site domain can be created afresh under a sub-folder called blog on the mysite.com domain under the same URLs and all the posts on the blog site can be permanently redirected to the new blog sub-folder.

The advantages of the new setup is that Google sees mysite.com domain to be the recepient of links from a variety of domains. The owner now needs to publish her content in only one place on her blog and cuts out duplication of work. In cases where site owners make posts on their blog and transfer the same content on to their main site, the problem of duplicate content is also eradicated.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company with a great track record of achieving clear cut results to boost the rankings and ROI of their client sites over the past 10 years using best practices in both organic seo and pay per click marketing. They serve clients in both New Zealand and Australia.

As you may know, Pay-Per-Post involves paying bloggers to write articles endorsing products, services or companies, and in this flavor it also involves using those posts to link back to the company’s site in order to help build PageRank.

The blog post is very thinly disguised payola – as Kohler points out, the blog is purportedly belonging to someone in Arkansas, while this post appears to be all oriented around providing keyworded links involving Pizza in Minneapolis through DexKnows. The blog has a large “payperpost” ad badge on it, too, and if you read through the articles, every single one seems to be engineered to sound like someone writing about random daily life incidents, but always with a couple of injected keyword links.

In context, it’s glaringly obvious that the blog is a paid posting. Kohler posts a comment below it, asking if it’s a paid post for Dex, and the author replies that she doesn’t “know who’s Dex”.

Kohler further pokes fun at Ken Clark, a yellow pages industry advocate, for also linking to that blog post and citing it as a golden example of how valuable the general public finds print yellow pages. Again, Kohler posts a comment below Clark’s blog post, challenging him for linking to it while while calling it an example of a consumer’s “actual experience”.

Clark responds back defensively, saying that there’s no reason to think it’s a pay-per-post piece!

While trying to insist that the original post isn’t payola is pretty laughable, it seems obvious that Clark was just innocently duped by the faux blog. The YP industry has been in a very defensive mode lately due to bad press about print YP viability versus online ad competition, and it’s unfortunate when the legacy industry advocates display this sort of naïveté with new media — it really tends to undermine their case to some degree when they demonstrate a lack of savviness in the new marketplace.

Here are some of the other pages I found linking to DexKnows which also appear dubious:

www.livelaughblogg.com/2008/08/find-dentist-in-minneapolis.html

www.productivus.com/blog/2008/07/phone-directory/

www.joy32-joy.com/2008/08/dexknows-las-vegas.html

www.obstaclesandglories.com/2008/08/dexknows-flagstaff.html

www.langging.com/2008/08/minneapolis-directory.html

Once you visit a few of these, the types of blogs they are posted upon all begin to seem to be faux, and the posts themselves begin to all appear fraudulent.

This whole interchange illustrates what sort of problems there are with pay-for-post done badly, and DexKnows is likely now to reap some considerable Google penalty for getting involved in this sort of thing.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with pay-per-post, so long as it’s clearly labeled as a paid sponsorship message of some sort. When it’s not clearly labeled, it fools people into thinking it’s an objective endorsement.

Google and the other search engines take a dim view of paid links which seek to manipulate natural search rankings. Google penalizes pay-per-post blogs when they detect them for this reason.

In fact, I heard Matt Cutts state at SMX Advanced a few months ago that Google is likely to devalue links obtained through any duplicitous means, including viral link bait (such as shocking ficticious stories engineered for the purpose of rapidly building up PageRank).

Link-building is one common component of search engine optimization, so it’s not all that surprising that R.H. Donnelley would be doing it in some fashion for their DexKnows.com site. However, link-building is also an extremely sensitive area where the search engines are concerned, and using really aggressive tactics like this are very dangerous. Here in this case, some amount of money has been expended to obtain paid blog postings, but now it’s likely that all that money has been wasted as these sites will undoubtedly get any PR yanked, if they had any to begin with.

It’s quite possible that DexKnows.com didn’t know that this sort of thing was being done. They may have provided some link-building budget to an agency or external contractor, and they may not’ve been aware of what was being done in their name. If this is the case, it would likely be worthwhile for them to clean up what was done, discontinue contract with that agency, and send Google an apology note.

There are plenty of ways of doing link development that do not run against the search engines’ guidelines.

I employed a number of best-practice style link-building strategies when I worked at Superpages.com. One of the most basic strategies is to build valuable, useful content which people will want to link to. For instance, links from .EDU sites are some of the most valuable in terms of ranking power, but very hard to achieve since universities and schools are generally not open to being paid to link to commercial interests. So, we built campus yellow pages for hundreds of universities and colleges across the U.S., and this resulted in many of those schools linking back to Superpages.com.

For the same amount of resource time and expense, you can build something that’s bona fide as opposed to something intended to fool the search engines.

Syndicated content can be a nightmare for SEO, for several reasons. First, there are so many different ways to give author attribution. Some may pass link juice to the author, some may not. Many times, it’s the home page of the author’s blog or company site that receives the juice, rather than the source article. Secondly, multiple copies of the same article can result in duplicate content which, in turn, may confuse the spiders and disperse the ability for an author’s article to rank well. In my interview with Matt Cutts, I asked the famed Google engineer and head of the Webspam team at Google whether it is better to have the syndicated copies linked to the original article on the author’s site, or is it just as good if it links to the home page of the author? Matt answers…

I would recommend the linking to the original article on the author’s site. The reason is: imagine if you have written a good article and it is so nice that you have decided to syndicate it out. Well, there is a slight chance that the syndicated article could get a few links as well, and could get some PageRank. And so, whenever Google bot or Google’s crawl and indexing system see two copies of that article, a lot of the times it helps to know which one came first; which one has higher PageRank.

So if the syndicated article has a link to the original source of that article, then it is pretty much guaranteed the original home of that article will always have the higher PageRank, compared to all the syndicated copies. And that just makes it that much easier for us to do duplicate content detection and say: “You know what, this is the original article; this is the good one, so go with that.”

Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? Well, in this case, it’s a little more than that. By intentionally linking to the author’s source article (rather than the generic home page), you are telling the bots that that is the “true” original author of the article. So, like Matt Cutts suggested, if other articles pop up elsewhere, the bots can easily determine what the “authoritative” source is, passing the authority on to the author and helping them get the credit they deserve.

For more great tips from my interview, you can listen to the audio podcast with Matt Cutts. The interview is a little over thirty minutes long.

Happy syndicating!

As you may recall, I’ve previously recommended using Flickr for image search optimization, partly because it was quite beneficial for building some PageRank, and I’ve also delivered a presentation about this same concept at a number of SES conferences during the past couple of years. (As you may know, getting sites with good PageRank to link to your pages helps to grow your own site’s rankings in search results in Google and other search engines. “NOFOLLOW” is a parameter that search engines developed to allow webmasters to specify links which should NOT confer PageRank — they did this as a means of reducing incentives for unethical or over-aggressive people to spam links through blogs, comments and other sites and interfaces.)

It’s important to note that Flickr continues to be beneficial as part of a search marketing program even if they have revoked their “link love”. There’s large amounts of usage inside Flickr, and those users can click through to your site. Also, the photo profile pages are loved by Google and Yahoo, so the pages get indexed and searchers click through from the search engines to your photo pages and then can still click through to your site. Referral traffic from Flickr can be significant, depending on the type of photos you have and how well you’ve optimized the profile pages.

Jeff noted that Flickr has yet to NOFOLLOW links on Set and Collection descriptions. I also notice that links on your user Profile pages still confer PageRank, too. (You can see this on my Flickr profile page.) I don’t believe any of those pages are quite worth as much for PageRank as the profile pages themselves, but this info may be worthwhile in terms of your Flickr strategy, ongoing. I believe that the best strategy is to focus on good quality content and honest tagging and labeling of the photo pages themselves, though — don’t focus on PageRank so much as doing good quality content and deriving clicks over to your main site — an indirect marketing strategy, in effect.

I would expect that Flickr will probably circle around and revoke NOFOLLOW links on these remaining pages which don’t yet sport the protocol.

Also note: Flickr has rules in their terms and conditions against commercial use of their service. This is the most confounding aspect of understanding Flickr for potential marketing benefit. Flickr does not really define out what their acceptable use is, versus what isn’t. In actual practice, there are loads of people who have been using Flickr for advertising their business, and have been doing so for years. I can point to photographers, models, real estate agents, art galleries and many others who flagrantly are using the service to advertise and drive click-throughs to their main ecom sites. I’d previously interpreted that anti-commercial-use clause as intending to keep people from using Flickr as an image hosting platform, and turning around and charging others for hosting their content. However, Flickr does sometimes delete user accounts for just advertising their products. You should take this into account, in my opinion, and try to be very indirect in advertising your items. Photos which look like catalog photos, with backgrounds clipped out in Photoshop, and linked directly to online catalog sales pages may be more prone to getting penalized/deleted. More “natural-looking” photos are less likely to get dinged, and avoid adding commercially-oriented pics to Group photo album sets. I’ll likely write a commentary about Flickr’s inconsistent application of their anti-commercial clause in a future article.