Posts Tagged ‘links’
Changes in Natural Linking - Death, Rebirth, or a Return to the Roots?
When contemplating link-building strategies you need to take the user experience into account. They should look at your citations (links) as references to substantiating or relevant documents. Search engines will use these signals to define your site. Consider the user experience when focusing on building contextually relevant links for your business, and you will be rewarded with higher amounts of relevant direct referrals and relevant search engine placement.
There’s been some excellent articles recently focused on this issue, including changes in natural linking by Eric Enge, Editorial Citation by Rand Fishkin and natural link building strategies by Michael Gray.
Michael’s analysis was interesting in that he took Google’s guidelines at face value, created great content, and spent only 10% of his time building links manually. After six months of blogging, Google represented just over 0.5% of his referral traffic. That’s a pathetic amount, considering how popular the posts were in StumbleUpon, Digg, and other social networks. In fact, when he analyzed his traffic, he discovered that the blog didn’t perform in the top 100 for even the simplest keywords. The exception was one post for which Michael did a little link building. Apart from this limited effort, certain posts which received over 30,000 views from social marketing generated almost no natural inbound links.
Now, Michael isn’t advocating that content doesn’t matter. It does, as it engages readers and entices them to return. His article restates a point everyone in the industry has been making for years: If you build it, they don’t just come, or in this case, the links don’t just happen, and the engines won’t just refer anyone your way. As Ian Lurie wrote: “content alone is not going to boost you into the top 10 for any even remotely relevant phrase”
Of particular interest to me in juxtaposition to the pieces by Ian and Michael were the articles by Eric Enge and Rand Fishkin. Rand hypothesizes that 20% of the web’s links exist to influence the search engines. That’s a lot of noise, but that also means 80% are not there just to influence search engines. Eric makes the point that 80% leaves lots of meat to work with and links are still a big factor, but he also estimates that you need to spend 30% of marketing energy into social media, which is interesting in the context of Michael’s lack of success with organic link building from social networks.
There’s an interesting question in Eric’s article, which every site operator should ask themselves: “If you aren’t good enough to be worth linking to, then what do you have anyway?” The answer is of course, you need to build better content. But, a hint to the broader correct answer can actually be found in the title of Rand’s article: Editorial Citation.
Rand notes this in his reference to three periods of linking: 1) early web; links were editorial like footnotes and citations, helping people navigate the web; 2) The engines incorporate web page links as a value metric in ranking algorithms (Google / Alltheweb/ Teoma); 3) non-webpage citations. Google’s recent patent publication which was reviewed by Eric Ward, supports this last point - see Eric’s point #5.
However, another point in the patent leads us in towards additional context: user interaction with links may determine their value, and may go a long way to resolving the dichotomy between the points these articles circle, but also may point search marketers towards clues around link building strategies going forward.
Links from different areas of the document will have different value, and will pass different amounts of link juice flow. Obviously, a link from one site to the next where the link is located in the main body content and is relevant to both the origin and destination will end up scoring higher than an irrelevant link, or links within footers, template side navs and the like. Which really is the point: links as citations are the oldest form of linking, and still carry the most value.
The Launch of Linker - SEO’s Version of Matchmaking
Ten days ago, after a long period of development followed by extensive testing during our Beta period, Linker has been launched to the public for anyone to sign up.
In the early days of the Internet, before the search engines came along, navigation was driven by links which allowed people to jump from one place (document) to another. People used hyperlinks as authors use footnotes in reference texts. The purpose of the links were to provide citations, and to advise readers of other valuable resources which they ought to consult.
When the Internet began to become popular with the masses, marketers started using links as a means of traffic acquisition. I did this type of link building as far back in the mid 1990’s “Before Google” for my own businesses. This marketing trend was actually followed by, not preceded by the search engines recognizing the value of links, and embedding a weighting value for links into their algorithms. Of course, at first the search engine did things differently, valuing any old link as a positive score. When this link recognition system was discovered as a performance score value in search results, it was unsurprising that some marketers saw the opportunity and took advantage of it. What is surprising is how far away from the fundamental reasons for link building the noise in the marketplace has taken this strategy, especially in light of how strongly the search engines have driven away from volume. Their mantra could be qualified as back to the future in regards to link values.
The reality is high value links matter. Period. A high quality link is one which readers will find of value. Generally, these links are found within the body content of a document and the link points out to content on another page or site which is relevant to your content. Your link is adding perspective for your readers, and also helping build both your sites’ authority in the search results.
Finding great resources to link to is not easy however. There’s so much content, how do you know which are the best resources, and the ones which are the most relevant to you and your readers? Just as importantly, how do you get in contact with representatives of the right sites which are the appropriate matches for yours? This was the challenge I used to face as an online marketer, and the manual process I was explaining internally when we came up with the idea behind Linker.
I’ll be starting a series of posts shortly around the philosophy behind the Linker product, and how it came to be. The reality is, no one likes to get all those spammy “link to me” emails that flood our email inboxes. They really are useless Junk. Links from, or to these low value, low relevance domains won’t add to your site’s user experience, or add any value to your business in terms of visibility in the search engines. That said, everyone with any online marketing knowledge recognizes that link building is a formidable tool in any good marketing campaign. The point everyone needs to focus on is that good quality, relevant link-building improves the user experience of your web site, and at the same time also drives traffic via search engines and direct referrals. Addressing this need is why we built Linker, a context and relevance driven introduction system which people have labeled a dating service for online marketers.
Major Strategic Link Building Advances with Linker
Last night we published a major update to the Beta of our forthcoming Linker product.
The Linker product went into Beta in late March. We want to use this opportunity to offer anyone interested one last window to reap free link-building benefits before we migrate to the commercial release of the product.
Between when the first Beta went live now we’ve made a number of enhancements to the product. Many of these changes were a result of user requests. Our mandate has always been to build products and services which meet your needs. Continually improving the product based on your needs is key to all our success. If you haven’t tried it out yet, I urge you to register and log in today and take advantage of all the opportunities in your account, and process any and all you can! (for free) I’d suggest you also want to sign up any additional sites you can now, the more you take advantage of today, the less you’ll pay for tomorrow…!
If you don’t know what Linker is, you should read all about it, on the Linker Product page. At its most basic, Linker is an opt-in matching service which is focused on contextually relevant link building. It’s like a dating service, not a stalking system which so many other products seem to mimic
So, what’s changed in this release?
- We’ve streamlined and improved the sign-up process, to make it simpler.
- We’ve improved the graphical layout and interface, and workflow within the application.
- There’s a lot more in-application communications to help guide you through the process.
- We’ve limited the number of business categories you can qualify your business as being relevant to. Spammers were attempting to game the system by choosing every possible business category. The reality was, they were undermining themselves by lowering their overall score. You’re now limited to choosing just 20 relevant business categories per profile. In fact, if you’re more selective and just choose 5, you’ll probably end up with even better results. We do recognize some businesses really do transcend more than 20 categories. For example a large directory like Yahoo! would be relevant to almost every area of the Internet. In that circumstance, we suggest you create a site profile per major business unit. Then the link opportunities will be relevant to those units, or pages within your site.
- We’ve dramatically improved the matching algorithms to look at more variables, and take more contextual data points into account when defining relevant match opportunities. The increase on variables is designed to take a larger number of objective datapoints into account, and minimize the risk your business could be introduced to one which is not an optimal, relevant match.
- There’s now a series of friendly reminder emails which go out to advise you that opportunities will expire, and reminding you to process any you’ve got.
- Scoring is tougher. An match quality 8 is harder to achieve, and 2’s are still contextually relevant. It’s more of a bell curve, with low quality matches just getting 0’s, meaning you’ll never see them.
I’m including the screenshot below to provide you a sense of what the new look and feel is like.
The product you will be logging in to today is the almost final version of the service. We’re excited to have evolved this with your assistance and support, and look forward to continuing forward delivering strong value to you and your businesses.
Enquisite Linker is Now Available!
Enquisite is thrilled to release our latest offering, Enquisite Linker into pre-commercial release today. We’ve been preparing the application for a while, and are amazed at how many people have already signed up! In fact, we had a mini pre-launch by invite only. The response was great, and on launch we flicked the switch, and contextually relevant introductions started being sent out. Now, anyone can join.
I’ve spent a lot of time today speaking with people here at SES New York. Lots of great comments and feedback. People absolutely love the fact that this system is not a link exchange, nor a link network, nor a system by which we buy, sell, or broker links. None of that. It’s very simply a transparent introduction service which matches your defined business objectives with the goals of others, and provides introductions based on symmetrical interests.
I wanted to get this post out earlier today, but got so busy, I failed to post this earlier. I’d like to walk you through the steps of Linker, so that you can read more than just buzz.
When you join Enquisite Linker, you register for access to the system, and receive a username and password. Some Linker users are Enquisite Search & Social Analytics clients, but many are not. We don’t treat you differently in either case. However, as a Linker only user, you don’t get access to all the advanced reporting features in the rest of the Enquisite suite. But you don’t need it to leverage the full power of Linker either.
I often describe Linker as a dating service for webmasters and marketers to connect with each other based on contextual relevance. Like a dating service, success is measured by successful introductions.
When you first log in to Linker, you’ll get directed to the Site Profile screen. On subsequent visits, you’ll be directed to the Summary page.
The Site Profile screen is where you define your web site.
On this page, you define what site you are representing, what business categories it belongs to, and where it is geographically located. For a lot of businesses, geography matters. Beyond that, we ask for some keywords which describe your business, and additional classifying information. Once you’ve completed the information, we look up other, objective information such as your PageRank and mozRank. This completes your site profile. Some businesses will have multiple site profiles, because they operate multiple locations which service different geographies. Remember, the system is about driving contextual relevance.
Next, you need to complete the linking criteria page. Dating services feature match criteria about whom you would like to be introduced to. Enquisite Linker does the same, but the criteria defines which sites would be ideal matches for your business objectives. Again, it’s all about contextual relevance.
So here, it’s much like the site profile you completed earlier, except that you’re defining whom you are willing to accept introductions to. If a webmaster represents a site which doesn’t match your needs, you never get introduced.
In addition to the qualifiers you set up on your own site profile, here, you define what the ideal site possesses for PageRank, mozRank, etc. Again, objective, third-party values.
When you complete your profile, the system takes over. Whenever a new site joins the network, we check to see if it’s a match to your defined needs, and if so, whether or not your site matches theirs. If there is a bilateral match, we email you to advise you thereof, and you log-in to Enquisite Linker to review, approve, or reject the introduction. That part of the process happens on the Linker Summary page, which is now your default login page. Across the top, you can review your history-to-date: How many introductions are new, how many have you accepted, and how many have resulted in an introductory email to yourself and a match.
Here, you see a list of all available matches, ranked by overall score. Click a listing, and review the details. Prior to any listing appearing as a potential match, one of our quality control agents will review both sites to ensure suitability and relevance. This will also keep down spam, and help ensure greater relevance:
Once you’ve reviewed the details, you can decide to accept, reject, or think about the introduction. The details page disclose your business categories, geography, and scores. It doesn’t disclose any identifying information to anyone.
If you accept the potential introduction, our system waits for the other party to do the same. Once both accept, the system will email both of you a contact email, so that you can connect, and set a time to meet. At this point, Enquisite Linker has done it’s job, and it’s up to you to discuss the suitability of the link.
It’s pretty simple really. A very complicated piece of software and algorithms, which you really can set up once, and then have it deliver value for years.
I should note that as a business evolves, you can edit, add or remove linking criteria and site profile information on as needed basis. The market evolves, and so do your needs.
Ready to get going: Sign up for Linker today!
Should You Consider “Author Authority”?
August 6th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky
Search marketers are familiar with signals. One of the truisms is the logic: if no one links to your site, it can’t be considered important, therefore why should it appear in the search results? The more quality links referencing your website or web pages, the better.
A lot of signals or factors behind links can affect the quality, relevance, and value of these citations. Perhaps there’s another signal to consider: Author.
If you’re interested in learning more, earlier today Search Engine Watch published an article I submitted on the topic of Author Authority. The idea came to me while reading a recent patent which was issued and assigned to Google. I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback!
Thanks!
Richard / @rzwicky
Tags: authority, authority score, GOOG, Google, linking strategies, links, marketer, Marketing, patent, Search Engines, SEO Link Building, social marketing
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