MediaWhiz Blog: Archive

LBB Readers, we have launched a new Text Link Ads affiliate program today!  You can place a text ad or graphical banner and you can get paid in two different ways:

1.  You earn $25.00 for each visitor you refer that results in a sale.

2.  You earn $25.00 for each visitor you refer that results in their website getting approved into our Publisher Program.

What is unique about our affiliate program is you earn the $25.00 for referring either buyers or sellers of Text Link Ads and you earn the $25.00 right when a publisher is approved to sell links and not when we actually have sold a link off their site which gets you paid faster.

Please check out the program and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions to make it better.  Thanks Again!  Patrick Gavin

Hot on the tail of Matt Cutts’ post on link baiting, Loren Baker has posted a very cool case study on link baiting. You’ll remember that SEJ hosted some SEM Blog Awards late last year, and it got him a heck of a lot of links (and even kudos from Matt Cutts):

1,960 links to the contest announcement page is pretty good, even if
10% are judged to be quality back links, thatâs still 196 more than I
had beforehand. If $100 per link is the going rate for an organic &
valuable link to a web site, then the four hours I put into this
contest resulted in $196,000 worth of links. Thatâs one valuable idea.

That’s a sick ROI for maybe 10 hours of work total. Loren ends his post with a question: How can you produce a successful linkbaiting campaign for your niche market?

In my opinion it’s pretty hard to give a canned answer, since the key is to be creative, and to whip up something that will work well in your neighborhood of the blogosphere.. But there are definitely types of posts/features that consistently work well as link bait, which you can customize to your particular niche: awards, "top 10" posts, inflammatory posts, etc.

Or you can just hold a link baiting contest, like I did. I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on you

A recent thread (hat tip to Barry) discusses the possible devaluation of site wide links.  A "site wide" link is simply a link that appears on ALL pages of a website.  A couple of years ago the search engines treated site wide links much different than most do today.

In 2003 and 2004 it seemed that a site wide link on a 1000 page site counted for many links and could very quickly bounce you to the top of many keyword searches.  Today is a much different story as many believe site wide links have been reduced to count as "one" link and not as multiple links.  Let’s look at the benefits and drawbacks of site wide links:

Benefits

• Your link on all pages of a website gives you a better chance to draw clicks and traffic to your website.

• Your link on all pages still seems to give you some extra weight in MSN rankings.

• Having site wide links can make it more difficult for competitors to analyze your backlinks as they are mixed into your backlink reports.  (yes there are ways around this ie a yahoo link: search with "-site:sitewidelinkurlhere.com" but many of your competitors don’t know this or won’t go through the trouble).

Drawbacks

• A site wide link seems to be counted as just a single link so why pay for a site wide link when you only get credit for "one link"?

• Site wide links usually happen in commercial settings and not "naturally" (don’t mind me blogrolls) so engines may discount them even further in the future.

• A site wide link stands out like a sore thumb when competitors check your backlinks and could flag your site as having un natural links as single page links seem more natural.

My advice…

Take any "natural" site wides you get and be thankful you have something worth linking to but when it comes to buying links, buy single page links.  They are more under the radar and a safer play for passing on value to your site for the longer term.

A friend asked me for my $.02 on buying a domain name for a new blog he was starting.  He wanted to know if he should buy a domain name with his top keywords in it or not.  I say, heck yeah!

Every seo knows nothing cries spam like the old:

www.buy-cheap-viagra-right-here-at-my-online-pharmacy.biz

but I am not talking about taking it that far.  What no longer works for regular old websites of yesterday seems thriving in today’s blogosphere.  Take our www.linkbuildingblog.com, when the bloggers graciously link to us the anchor text generally used is, "Link Building Blog" see the right margin of Randy’s site and you will see we get a keyword rich anchor text while Todd gets stuck with the anchor text "Stuntdubl".  Who wants to rank for that?

As Andy has noted it has not been all roses for ranking for "link building" for us on Google for our 2005 registered domain.  We have snagged #3 on Yahoo and #14 on MSN which is not a bad start and everyone knows Google is a little behind those guys anyway.

One thing about fellow bloggers is they LOVE to link back out.  Because of this I think it is a great strategy to buy a domain for your blog that subtlety contains your top keywords in it.  Lastly, I guess the kids call what you did "linkbaiting" but move us up or off your list! (oh wait, leave us on, that is another keyword rich link

I’ve posted on the sandbox before, and claimed that I know how to beat it. And I have beaten it before. Really.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t get frustrated and confused and lose a battle now and then, just like everyone else. For instance: How the FRACK is Link Building Blog still sandboxed?

What do I mean by sandboxed? Well, the site doesn’t even rank in the top TWO HUNDRED for a fairly non-competitive term
("link building"), and it’s pretty frackin’ optimized for this term. A few more facts- the site:

• is 7 months old
• has legit deep links from tons of authorities in our niche, including Search Engine Watch, Pandia, Search Engine Blog, Search Engine Roundtable, SEO Book, heck, even the current #1 ranking site for our target term, "link building" (andyhagans.com)
• hasn’t had any active link building done (e.g., directory submissions) that might raise any red flags

And I’ll admit it, all this has me mighty confused. I’ve beaten the sandbox with total crap sites that only had a few trusted links, along with a slew of actively built links from directories, article sites, etc. So how the frack does Link Building Blog get no love from Google?

This post by Aaron Wall made me think about directories and their SEO value going forward (again). The question: what place should directories have in your link building plan? They used to be the bulk of many sites’ link aquisition targets, but going forward, I would advise that you give them a much reduced (but still existing) role. Aaron agrees:

Sure everyone ends up with some spammy links, but I think it is only probably worth getting links from around 10 to 50 directories depending on your niche. Beyond that you want to look for other links that are serious votes of editorial quality.

If your site can’t get those sorts of links then eventually you are going to need to change the site profile if you want to compete in Google in a competitive marketplace.

I recently interviewed Greg from BOTW (a directory owner) and he said he believe for most sites directories should only be a small part of your link profile.

I agree with Aaron’s figure of 10 to 50, but I would lean more towards the 10 number.

Here is the way I see the current Google algorithm: it puts up with a lot of "junk", as long as you make it proportional to the amount of trust you earn. So, for instance, if your site has links from About.com, Engadget, and a few prominent authorities in your niche, it probably won’t hurt you to grab 50 or so directory links (these probably won’t help you a ton, either, but they’ll help you some).

On the other hand, if you have a brand new site with zero links, I think getting in 50 directories quickly would do nothing for Google (and it could possibly hurt).

Bottom line: Google loves seniors, but hates n00bies. Make sure you know where your site fits, and what you can get away with. (And when in doubt, stick with directories that have quality indicators.)